I asked Roy to tell me more about this curious period in history. The book addresses, among other things, how industry collaborated with government to scare the bejessus out of us, and then convince us everything would be just fine-if we protected ourselves with expensive products. Government Misled Itself and Its People Into Believing They Could Survive a Nuclear Attack (Pointed Leaf Press), actually does bring back lots of memories and a certain anger that we were so bamboozled by so many who had something to gain from our primal fears. Susan Roy's recent book Bomboozled: How the U.S. ![]() It is difficult to look back at the duck-and-cover days with any nostalgia, but possible to see it as more than it was made out to be. There were so many bomb-scares and bomb-scareploitation that it is a miracle the youth of the nation did not become one big basket case (or maybe we did). ![]() Even if he didn't really say it, it is indicative of the way young Baby Boomers fantasized and feared the future. It may have been a bad dream, but I vividly recall, as a kid in the late '50s, that I heard the newscaster Jack Lescoulie on The Today Show with Dave Garroway predict on air that by 1960 the United States and Russia would be fighting World War III.
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