Criticism, of course, cannot prevent lies from being told. But it does make it its business to see that they do not establish themselves as truth.
—George Watson, The Literary Critics

It is a melancholy task to return to the subject of David Halberstam’s book on The Fifties,¹ first published to much misguided acclaim nearly five years ago and lately turned into a lengthy television series on the so-called History Channel that is an even worse travesty of the period than the author’s original text. The book itself, running to some eight hundred pages of recycled myths, clichés, and caricatures drawn from the received wisdom of the Left-liberal media, is a monstrous compendium of misinformation about one of the most admirable epochs in American history. In the History Channel series this compendium of misinformation is, with a single exception—the segment on the Civil Rights movement in the South—translated into what is little more than a sequence of stupefying historical cartoons.² The result certainly isn’t history, and it isn’t exactly journalism, either. It looks more like an extended political campaign commercial in which the ideological battles of the 1960s and 1990s are being reenacted in the costumes and vocabularies of a mythical 1950s.

Regarding every improvement in American life in the 1950s, this version of The Fifties is utterly indifferent when not openly hostile.

Regarding every improvement in American life in the 1950s, this version of The Fiftiesis utterly indifferent when not openly