Jon Wiener: Ike's Dream, Obama's Reality!

It's hard, so many decades later, to make my way back to my Cold War youth, that time when history of humanity was, as LIFE magazine so classically put it,"The Epic of Man." But hey, that was the era when we still thought dinosaurs were lumbering beasts, an electric typewriter was the leading edge of high tech, and if, like my wife, you happened to live in El Paso, Texas, in the early 1950's, your TV set had nothing on it, because the signal for the programs had yet to make it over the mountains. It was also, in some ways, the most nightmarish of times. The old school fire drill had, by then, morphed into a "duck and cover" exercise. You dove under your desk in a crouch, covering your head with your hands and arms, while sirens screamed outside. You were, of course, practicing for the end times, the moment when a Soviet nuclear weapon obliterated your city. Under the circumstances, your hands and that none too sturdy desk weren't the most reassuring of safety nets, but like all kids, I didn't really live in the worst or best times, I lived in the only time there was, the only time imaginable, and the only place there could be, which happened, in my case, to be New York City. Still, in a world then brimming with wealth, but also riddled with barely expressed fear, there were some especially grim moments to remember. In October 1962, for instance, John F Kennedy went on TV and the radio to announce the presence of Soviet nuclear arms in Cuba, and say that we risked "the costs of worldwide nuclear war, in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth, but neither will we shrink from the risk at any time it must be faced." Listening, 18 year old Tom Engelhardt feared that nuclear destruction was upon us, that we on the East Coast were toast, and that it had all somehow happened before life had even begun. Later in the 1960's, as the Vietnam War raged, I came to believe that we Americans were barbarians, and wondered whether that war and the world that went with it would ever end. Still, even then, young and old alike lived with a kind of optimism as well, a typically can do American attitude, a sense of lurking hope, undoubtedly based at least in part on the globally dominant position of the country we all inhabited.