I am not sure why, amid my collection of miscellaneous old magazines, I have a copy of The New Yorker from April 1964, but I do. And on a rainy April 2024 morning, I sat down to read through it, curious to open a time capsule from exactly 60 years ago.
Well, first there are the ads. There are a lot of them, and they are uniformly and snobbily aspirational, with an undertone of anxiety. “Where money is no object, taste sets the criteria,” says an ad for sheets and towels. A tweed suit is “impeccably tailored to our exacting British Sportswear standards.” Even a cheap New York state champagne is bottled “under the artistic management of European wine masters.” The many travel ads appeal to the reader’s wish to be sophisticated (“Don’t bother going to Buenos Aires to keep up with the Joneses. They haven’t been there yet”) while also offering reassurance that the food will not be too spicy and you can still get a good steak. There is a distinct message here that Americans — the white middle-class Americans who read The New Yorker, that is — are on top of the world.
There are no clouds on the horizon. The future is good. The New York World’s Fair is about to open, a two-year extravaganza including exhibits on rockets, computers, and “modern living underground, with pseudo-sunlight.” General Electric will be running demonstrations every six minutes on nuclear fusion. General Motors offers rides to a city of the future. The magazine’s listing of the fair’s attractions includes something for everyone. In the Vatican Pavilion you can see Michelangelo’s Pietà, and in the Wisconsin Pavilion you can see the world’s biggest piece of cheese.
The New Yorker of that era was known for its long pieces of in-depth journalism, and there are several in this issue. One is about Southeast Asia: an analysis by Robert Shaplen of the enigmatic political strategies of Cambodia’s leader, Norodom Sihanouk, who had recently alarmed the United States by renouncing American aid and threatening to ally himself with Communist China. Shaplen explains that Cambodia is caught between volatile competing outside interests: the United States, Russia, China, France, Thailand, and North and South Vietnam. Sihanouk has “a growing conviction that the tide of war in South Vietnam was going against the Vietnamese and their American backers.” He is quoted as saying, “Communism will sooner or later take over all of South Vietnam, and by consequence us also,” but he hopes to preserve Cambodia as a neutral country.
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The other major article in the issue is Christopher Rand’s admiring, curious, New-Yorker-in-Wonderland piece about Cambridge, Massachusetts, focusing mostly on the computer scientists at Harvard and MIT. What are they up to? Where do they think the future is going to take us? Computers are already being used to count the frequency of words in texts, to advise political candidates on whether taking a particular position will gain or lose votes, to help the Indian government manage the agricultural water supply in the Indus River Valley, to teach foreign languages. Will it one day be possible to scan and retrieve all of the written information in libraries? Many experts say this is a pipe dream. But some people at MIT believe that “whole cities, if not whole nations, will eventually be wired up to central computers.”
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Looking at the magazine across a retrospective gulf of six decades, a lot of what you see are the blind spots. Some are cultural: There’s a blithely optimistic article on race in America that does not quote a single Black person. Some are due to the absence of vital pieces of information that were deliberately kept hidden at the time; while Shaplen was talking to his diplomatic sources in Cambodia he could not have known that back in the United States, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was secretly urging President Lyndon Johnson to send vast numbers of troops and bombers to Vietnam — an escalation of war that would eventually pull Cambodia into its own genocidal hell. And some are simply due to an inability to predict the future — to imagine the unimaginable. Back in 1964, not even the most innovative computer scientists were envisioning a world where nearly everyone would walk around with a pocket-sized device that could connect with any other device in a global wireless network of information and disinformation.
It can be tempting to view the blind spots of the past with condescension, to believe that we are so much more knowledgeable and enlightened today — to say, with a kind of ferocious impatient self-righteousness, that our predecessors lived in a bubble.
But isn’t our belief that we have no blind spots the very definition of a blind spot? Looking at a 60-year-old magazine is an exercise not only in history but also in humility. The 1964 New Yorker pieces about Cambodia and computers were as informed and intelligent as any journalism could have been back then. But the future went in other directions, as it will.
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Joan Wickersham is the author of “The Suicide Index” and “The News from Spain.” Her column appears regularly in the Globe.
