This research examines Cold War culture, in which the issue of public image, or perception, of geopolitical rivals and allies and their adherents surfaced as a recurring theme throughout the last half of the 20th century. The research will consider ways in which commentators and artists, via public statements, the public discourse, and such media as television and film, treated the question of image in that period, with a view toward identifying reasons that perception was so important to so many as well as evaluating the weight that Cold War-context presentation carried in shaping the culture of the time.
The generation that witnessed and participated in World War II was shocked to learn afterward that some 12 million people--6 million of them Jews--had been murdered, not collaterally but before and in parallel with the shooting war in Europe, as a matter of public policy and with full commitment of the apparatus of state (Dawidowicz, 1975). In consequence, there arose "a temper of absolute despair . . . because man has used his most precious knowledge, his reason, science, and technology, the achievements of the scientific spirit, for genocide, for mass murder" (Bemporad, 1968, p. 478).
Another decisive feature of World War II was US use of the atomic bomb in Japan in 1945, which as President Truman said in announcing the event, had "harness[ed] the basic power of the universe" (Goldman, 1960, p. 4). In 1949, the Soviet Union announced that it had successfully tested its own atomic bomb. American Nobel Prize physicist Harold C. Urey "managed to phrase what so many Americans were feeling" at the news when he commented at the time: "There is only one thing worse than one nation having the atomic bomb--that's two nations having it" (Goldman, 1960, p. 100).
Urey might have added--though he hardly needed to--that what made the situation so bad was that the two nations in question, erstwhile allies against the Nazis, had since 194...