Citizen-Spy

Introduction xxvii
acceptance, and an emerging youth culture began to articulate a voice of political
opposition. 17
This is not to say, however, that the American political landscape was shifting
uniformly or linearly. Though they supported domestic social programs,
Presidents Kennedy and Johnson were also adamant Cold Warriors; the lines of
conflict simply shifted. When in 1964 the People’s Republic of China tested its
first nuclear weapon, the “Red menace” was relocated to Asia; the Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution and the escalation of the war in Vietnam only contributed to this
anxiety. And though the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in
1964 and 1965 marked a distinct turning point in American racial politics, these
gains also circumscribed the range of acceptable black political expression, and
were arguably as much a public relations move to demonstrate American progressivism
to the decolonizing Third World as they were an ethical act of civic
conscience. 18 The Cold War was not simply an external conflict that was the
province of official politics; instead, it was a persistent presence that shaped
immediate questions of national identity, civic responsibility, and the limits of
cultural expression.
Still, by the late 1960s the terms of political and cultural debate in America
were clearly changing. In 1966 the magazine Ramparts revealed the CIA’s extensive
use of academic departments at American universities to funnel arms and
money to covert operations around the world. 19 Subsequent revelations exposed
the Agency’s infiltration and surveillance of student organizations and black
activist groups across the country. By 1968—the year of the My Lai massacre
and the Tet Offensive—the U.S. antiwar movement was widespread and vocal,
and even Walter Cronkite, the leading voice of legitimate journalism, had
declared the Vietnam War an unwinnable quagmire. Popular media that had
been so central a component of containment culture began to show signs of
embracing the counterculture; the blacklisted folk singer Pete Seeger appeared
on network television for the first time in over a decade when he sang the thinly
veiled antiwar allegory, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.” While The Smothers
Brothers variety program on which he appeared was scrutinized and eventually
cancelled by CBS, it was nonetheless a point of rupture that, as Aniko Bodroghkozy
writes, showed that “popular culture could have radical implications
at certain historical moments when every institution and facet of the social order