Subverting the Cold War in the 1960s: "Dr. Strangelove," "The Manchurian Candidate," and "The Planet of the Apes"

Jonathan KirshnerCornell University

The election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 was, in retrospect, a crucial inflection point in the trajectory of the Cold War. Certainly the ideology of anti-communism pervaded American life in the 1950s. But after the hysteria of its first half-decade, the practical conduct of the superpower conflict became routinized during the cautious and conservative Eisenhower administration. Kennedy, however, had campaigned against American complacency, and even weakness in the shadow of the Soviet threat. Additionally, as difficult as it is to conceptualize today, the Soviet Union was at this time viewed as an economic success story, with international assertiveness to come on the heels of its material achievements.

The first two years of the Kennedy Administration were characterized by ubiquitous superpower confrontation, culminating in the Cuban

the manchurian candidate (the manchurian candidate). courtesy of the film archive.Missile Crisis of October 1962, at which time Kennedy estimated that the chance of nuclear war was better than one in three.¹The second half of the decade witnessed the Vietnam War, an instrumental and perhaps inevitable outgrowth of the Cold War. The war not only became the principal outlet of the larger conflict, but also over time reshaped the nature of Cold War scholarship. In the 1950s, the Cold War was unquestionably attributed to the Soviet Union and its communist ideology. By the early 1970s, a thriving ''revisionist'' school now blamed the United States and the imperative of capitalist expansion.

In the midst of all this, three remarkable films, The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Dr. Strangelove (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) (1964), and Planet of the Apes (1968), subverted the Cold War. They ''subverted'' the war in two ways. First they challenged the fundamental ideological tenets upon which U.S. policy was based. This was quite daring, especially for the first two films, made at a time when anti-communism pervaded American society, and people could still get in trouble by saying the wrong thing.²But more profoundly, these films subverted the very idea of the Cold War itself. Rather than switching, as much scholarship did, from an ideological position that blamed the USSR to one that accused the US, these politically...