Melvin E. Matthews Jr. is a freelance writer who has been studying American cultural trends of the 1950s for forty years. The eerie fact is that a complacent population was addictively drawn to fantasies and improbable scenarios on the screen - with the "willing suspension of disbelief" - while just such implausible stories in the news were swallowed just the same, without batting an eye or raising one question. Is there a circular cause-and-effect cycle here, so that the gullible become more and more accustomed to believing whatever they are told?

When the War ended, the United States still had its economy, infrastructure and industry intact. Taking up where the British Empire left off, the powerful new America expanded its influence around the globe. Suddenly light years ahead of any...

When the War ended, the United States still had its economy, infrastructure and industry intact. Taking up where the British Empire left off, the powerful new America expanded its influence around the globe. Suddenly light years ahead of any competitor, Americans abandoned themselves to a haze of consumerism and entertainment, trusting that they were safe and could not be harmed. Then they discovered that the contestants on the big-money quiz shows, a wildly successful format of Ã?¢'¬Ã??50s television, turned out to be fakes. Matthews reveals how shocked they were to be woken from this stupor by the news that some of their TV idols, as well as the respected executives who ran the TV programs, had been systematically lying and cheating. It was like learning that Santa Claus was a fraud, all over again. Not only had these popular folk heroes been given the answers to the questions they were asked on-air, they had been coached as to how they were to conduct themselves during their broadcast appearances. Far worse was yet to come. Shortly after the Quiz Show scandal, the United States government was caught in a lie regarding the activities of the CIA's U-2 reconnaissance planes overflying the Soviet Union on intelligence-gathering missions. On the eve of a crucial summit meeting in 1960, the USSR knocked a US spy plane out of the sky and recovered the pilot, Gary Powers - as well as plenty of incriminating hardware and data. Moscow delayed revealing what it knew, and Washington spent ten days denying it was a spy plane, then denying that President Eisenhower was aware of it. Soon, American schoolchildren were being taught to duck under their desks if a bomb should strike. Fear began to percolate into the heart of the nation.