TONIGHT
E-mail a friendFred Kaplan
airdate September 3, 2009
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Fred Kaplan covers international relations and U.S. foreign policy in his Slate "War Stories" column. He's also the author of several books, including The Wizards of Armageddon, an inside history of nuclear strategy, and 1959: The Year Everything Changed. He previously spent 20 years with The Boston Globe, where his assignments included chief of the Moscow and New York bureaus. The Kansas native has a Ph.D. in political science from M.I.T. and also blogs about jazz for Stereophile.
1959 author explains how the birth control pill served as a catalyst for the sexual and feminist revolution. (1:20)
Full interview. (12:42)
Fred Kaplan
Tavis: Fred Kaplan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who currently writes the "War Stories" column for "Slate." His critically acclaimed new book is called "1959: The Year Everything Changed." Fred Kaplan, nice to have you on the program.
Fred Kaplan: Good to be here.
Tavis: That's a lot to put on one year - the year that everything changed?
Kaplan: Well, everything - politics, society, culture, science, sex. What else is there?
Tavis: That's about it. Thank you for watching, God bless you, good night. (Laughter) Let's start with - pick one, politics.
Kaplan: Well, the obvious thing is that's when John Kennedy started to run for president. The fascinating thing about that was he was young. Everybody thought he was too young. He was an outsider - being a Catholic in that time was suicide for politics. And he was too handsome. Does this ring a bell of anything going on now?
But it transformed politics, but more than that he kind of personified this enchantment with the new that was percolating throughout all walks of life at around that time, and the kinds of change that he was talking about in very vague sort of ways - new frontier, passing the torch to a new generation - resonated with things that were going on in the broader society and culture.
Tavis: What was it about the universe, about America, what was in the ether at that time that made all of this possible in '59?
Kaplan: On January 2nd of 1959 the Soviets launched a rocket called the Lunik I. It was the first rocket that broke free of the Earth's gravitational pull, started to revolve around the Sun like a planet. The next week in "Time" magazine, which wrote more hyperbolically than they do now, heralded the achievement as "a turning point in the multibillion year history of the solar system" in that a creature of the Sun's planets had evolved to the point where it could break free of its gravitational field.
That's what was going on that year. All kinds of things breaking free of the hierarchies, smashing through the barriers that had confined life up till then. It starts off the book and I think the space program, rockets were going into space at the start of the year, it was the first nonstop coast-to-coast jet passenger plane. There was this notion that tomorrow was going to be something different from yesterday, and that once the barriers of time and space had been broken, it made people feel that other barriers could be transgressed as well.
Tavis: That's science. We talked about science, we talked about politics, you mentioned sex in '59.
Kaplan: Well, that was the year that G.D. Searle applied for FDA approval of the birth control pill. It actually didn't get finally approved until right after the beginning of 1960, but if you think about it, not only did that unleash the sexual revolution but it unleashed the feminist revolution too.
A couple years later, Gloria Steinem, who later founded the modern feminist movement, wrote her first freelance article in "Esquire" magazine, where she said that the pill will create what she called "autonomous girls" who could take sex, work, education, and even marriage as they chose, just as men did. And it took the spinning out of a decade or more for that to become fully absorbed by society, but I can't - I would say the pill and one other development, the invention of the microchip, probably those two things are the biggest achievements of that year, that everything in this room couldn't exist without the microchip.
So in social relations, in peoples' attitude toward the world around them, how you could master it, whether you can master it, it just gave people a different sense of what one's possibilities were.
Tavis: What did the pill do, beyond obviously giving women choice? Beyond giving them choice, what, politically, socially, did it do in that regard?
Kaplan: Well, without the pill, let's say if you're an intelligent woman who wants to enter the work force and I'm an employer, I might think one night of spontaneous sex with your husband, you're saddled with a kid, that's the end of my investment in you.
Women could control not only their reproductive cycles but through that their entire lives. That's the story of modern feminism, really. It started with that, created the material basis for that.
Tavis: And although it's obvious on some levels, you mentioned it, but let's drill down more on what the microchip in '59 means to us today.
Kaplan: Well, the microchip, it's a fascinating story. This guy Jack Kilby, he got a job with Texas Instruments in the spring. In July, everybody took off for vacation. He hadn't been working there long enough. He stayed and he tried to tackle the next problem in transistors, and he came up with this idea, instead of having resistors and transistors and hand-wiring, which was reaching its natural limit, put everything on one slab, have all the functions there.
And without the transistors - without the microchip, that was the basis for the handheld calculator, for going into outer space, for computer communications. The computer of that day, it was just about as big as this stage.
Tavis: Big mainframe, yeah, exactly.
Kaplan: And yet it could only do maybe 1/1000th of what you can do in a little two-inch slab. So just life as we know it just changed dramatically. We couldn't do 1/10th of the things that we do on a normal basis without the invention of that.
Tavis: We've talked, and we will in a few minutes more, I suspect, about the events that happened in '59 that, as the title suggests, changed everything. Let me step away from the events for a moment and talk about the people. Tell me about the American people as you see them in '59.
Kaplan: Well, what we now understand to be a national culture was just taking place. In the mid-1950s, about half the American households had a TV. By the end of the decade, 75 percent did. By the end of the decade, they started to make these little pocket transistor radios for under $20. In other words, anybody could buy one.
Music was taking on a new edge. Motown was founded in 1959, a more urban, racially mixed, sensuous music. So all these things happening at once - comics being - Lenny Bruce becoming a major figure. There was a trial where "Lady Chatterley's Lover," which had been banned - D.H. Lawrence novel - banned for 40 years, suddenly the ban was lifted.
A sense of free expression, two million people bought that book because it was forbidden fruit. This idea of forbidden fruit falling from the tree, a pent-up hunger for it, all of this taking place in the rise of mass communications, an urban sensibility filtered out throughout the entire country.
In other words, even before there had been this kind of dramatic change, it might not have been transmitted so quickly. This coincided with the development of national, even international, communications. So there was this sense of change and this enchantment with the new wasn't just in cosmopolitan pockets of America, it was transmitted throughout the entire country.
Tavis: You've mentioned a couple of things over the past couple minutes here, Fred, that lead me to ask the question of whether or not the rise of the counter-culture can be pegged at '59, or put another way, America starting down this slippery slope where our culture and -
Kaplan: Yeah, absolutely, and by the way, it's not all roses, as you say. It had its dark side. But absolutely, and in many different ways. I mentioned the "Lady Chatterley" trial, which opened up the flood tides for free expression. There was also the beginning of the Vietnam War - first two Americans killed in Vietnam was in 1959. That was the year that Ho Chi Minh decided to pursue unification of the country through military means. We didn't know it at the time, but that's how it turned out to be.
There was a man named C. Wright Mills, a sociologist who wrote an essay called "Letter to the New Left." There was no new left then, but a guy named Tom Hayden, an undergraduate at the University of Michigan read that, was inspired by it. That became the basis for the Port Huron statement, which was the manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society.
In race, something that has long been forgotten - the first report by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, which catalogued in about 680 pages of details systematic discrimination in schools, voting booths, and housing based on a series of hearings that were conducted all through the South.
Martin Luther King's organization took those hearings, the basis of those hearings, and reoriented the SCLC away from civil disobedience, more to voter registration drives. Medgar Evers did the same throughout not just the South but taking his case to the great cities of the North and the West.
That year, that summer, Mike Wallace, newsman, did a syndicated show called "The Hate That Hate Produced," which was the first profile of the Nation of Islam, profiled Malcolm X. Nobody'd heard of Malcolm X before; suddenly, he became this national figure.
So there were these competing strands of strategies for racial integration, or in Malcolm X's case, segregation, but progression on his own terms. So there was this new kind of racial consciousness that was also emerging. The tinderbox was sort of lit at the end of that year for everything that followed subsequent.
Tavis: Do we thank the creator for the year 1959 or do we curse the year 1959?
Kaplan: I think on balance, it was a very good year. It's like a pivot. Not every - if you were a man of your age in 1959 you wouldn't look around and say, "Wow, everything's changed." You got the sense that something was changing, but it was more a pivot where the country took a turn, and some of the results of this turn weren't realized until later. But that's where the turning point took place.
Now freedom, freedom can also be chaos and anarchy, and some people in various realms, from riots to jazz to pornography took - you could take it into a dark turn as well as a more bright turn.
Tavis: If there is an abiding lesson that we in 2009 can take from 1959 about going boldly, about using this moment, as your title suggests, to change everything from this moment forward, what's the lesson?
Kaplan: Well, I think we're in a similar period. The kinds of changes that were going on then I think we see now also - the shrinking of the world, this breaking down of barriers between public and private, between spectacle and spectator, and I guess one rule, one guideline might be there's still a structure to this, and so keep that in mind and don't let everything get out of hand.
Plus it's scary as well. In 1959 there was not only exciting space but there was also ICBMs and H-bombs, fallout shelters being dug in people's backyards. So I think some of these things sweep us away before we even know that we're being swept away, but there is a bright side to look out on on all these changes.
Tavis: The new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Fred Kaplan is called "1959: The Year Everything Changed." Fred, nice to have you on.
Kaplan: Thanks very much.
Tavis: Thanks for the text.
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