What was it like growing up in the Cold War?

In 1947, I entered the first grade. I do not recall any “drills” related to the potential of a nuclear bomb exploding. Indeed, I was too young to understand conversations about the bombs dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki although I am confident they were discussed at length by the adults in my family.

          The first “atomic bomb” drill that I recall was in 1950. I was in fourth grade when our school began to educate us about radioactive fallout from atom bombs and have an occasional drill where the school’s special alarm for atom bomb attacks sounded and all of us immediately hid under the writing portion of our desks. There was a different alarm that sounded for our atom bomb drill when we supposedly had more time and could all file into the basement of the building – which until we did the first such drill, I had not noticed existed. We were told this was necessary because there was a “Cold War” going on between Russia and the United States

          I suspect our town was more strident in its preparation for Russia dropping the atomic bomb because we were four miles from Oak Ridge where the United States had carried out much of the engineering and chemical research that was being tested in Los Alamos, New Mexico leading to Hiroshima. Until the early fifties you could not enter Oak Ridge without passing through a guard gate. I assumed it was because the federal government maintained a nuclear research facility there.

         I probably was more aware of the fact of something called nuclear research because the parents of one of my closest friends from first grade through graduation from high school – when he left for Yale and I left for Harvard – were scientists working at the nuclear facility. They were both clearly geniuses, but his mother’s psychological state was always fragile.  In any event, the discussion among my friends growing up through elementary school was more informed because Bobby would impart knowledge that he overheard from his parents. Accordingly, there was a consensus in our small group of four that nuclear bombs would not ever be dropped on humans again – the destruction such bombs wrought made it unthinkable that any leader would risk disrupting what we heard was called “mutually assured destruction.”

           These drills continued through elementary school until our town faced a bigger and more immediate issue – integration of our high school. This happened in my freshman year when, at thirteen, I watched the band-aid ripped off the warts in our small town. I had, since I was nine, been aware of segregation when the black boys with whom I had played baseball during the summer at the only field available were not allowed to try out for the new “Little League”. For me that moment had revealed all I needed to know about my town where everyone went to church on Sundays and apparently the white folks thought Jesus and God did not like black or brown people as much as white people. The ensuing four years of anger at the hypocrisy of the white people in town led to research into religions and theocracy (where I found Paul Tillich, who would later be one of my teachers) had already prepared me for the reaction to integration – which turned out to be not that bad in our town, but because of that fact quickly brought racists from all over the country to make trouble where there was none.

         As one Judge put it, “An entertaining start to a detour Mr. Davis, but would you please get back to the issue before the Court.”

          The Cold War was portrayed to us as we matriculated through elementary school as the power of the United States (exhibited in World War II) being required to protect the world from the greedy expansion of communism at the hands of the Soviet Union ruled by a tyrant dictator. Depending on which history teacher to whom you listened the Russian people were either sheep ruled over by 10% of the population or were themselves avaricious and cruel. In any event, the propaganda was that Russia’s government was seeking to expand communism to all countries. The United States needed to stand strong as a beacon of free people capable of militarily crushing Russia to protect the world from communism.

          By the time I was fourteen and a sophomore in high school, I had a problem accepting that propaganda. By then, I had read extensively about each of the world’s major religions and some with a somewhat lesser following (like Lao Tzu). My reading was not limited to religious works. As I studied a religion, I read portions of Will and Ariel Durant’s History of Civilization that dealt with the areas of the world where these religions had begun and/or had their largest followers. I had formed the belief that people everywhere were similar. Whether they be in jungles, or deserts, or frozen tundra, or lush farmland, or beaches in the southern hemisphere, average people cared about feeding themselves and their families, the people in their villages or neighborhoods or churches or temples or country clubs and wanted to be left alone by governments to pursue the activities that allowed them to accomplish and enjoy the foregoing.

        Accordingly, when everyone else was making Nixon into a hero for rudely insulting Khrushchev leading to the Russian pounding some appliance with his shoes, I found Nixon’s behavior rude and unacceptable. You may be enemies on the world stage, but that does not permit public political temper tantrums at their expense. That incident was the onset of my animus toward Nixon. I was too young to vote in 1960, but I took the opportunity later in 1968 and 1972 to vote for two Democrats (whose political philosophies I strongly disagreed with) as votes against Nixon.

         While I did not discuss any of my political views outside the classrooms at Harvard. I had been taught that you entered dangerous territory when you discussed politics or religion with anyone other than your family and closest friends. I had come to the view that if the leaders of countries and religions would leave their people to decide on their own whether some group was a sufficient enemy that they should be attacked, very few people would see any reason to fight. Did the average bloke in England really believe that Islam in the Middle East was such a danger to the world that we needed the Crusades? I doubt it. Indeed, I doubt that most of the people forced to go fight had even heard of Islam at the time.

         Accordingly, the Cold War – which continued until Reagan’s service as President – was never much of a concern for me. However, there were numerous people that I met whose daily lives were affected by their fear. I met several people who claimed to be leaving the country because of their fear that Goldwater would be elected in 1964, drop nukes on Russia in 1965, and laugh as the Russian missiles rained down on American cities. Even Canada was too close to the United States. They were heading for Europe. Goldwater lost in a landslide.

         I was directly affected once by the Cold War – the so-called “Cuban Missile Crisis.” In 1962 the day after Kennedy famously confronted Russia by announcing the United States would blockade Cuba from any shipments from Russia, I was called to report to a holding area for immediate assignment  by the Navy to duties other than school. There was a nervous three-days while we awaited a potential nuclear attack before Khrushchev finally announced that Russia would stop providing Cuba with missiles and would withdraw its technical advisors supporting the missile program in Cuba. Throughout the period, I thought Khrushchev might be ruthless in dealing with people within the Soviet realm, but he also was a grandfather who would never take an action that he believed endangered the safety of those grandchildren. I think Kennedy read him the same way when he chose to risk war by confronting him.

        I believe the public outcry in the late-sixties-early-seventies was the blossoming of the seeds planted by the Cold War within the youth of the United States in the fifties and early sixties. Our generation did not think the spread of communism in Vietnam was a threat to the United States in any way. Russia had blinked in the Cuban Missile Crisis and China was still a dirt-poor agrarian society without the means to provide support for other small countries. In other words, Russia and China were spending so much on their military that they were barely able to take care of their own people. We were tired of the fixation on the threat of communism.

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