Tomorrow-Land

  TOMORROW-LAND

  THE 1964–65 WORLD’S FAIR AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICA

  JOSEPH TIRELLA

  For Kelly, Leo & Zoë

  Copyright © 2014 by Joseph Tirella

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, PO Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

  Lyons Press is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.

  Project editors: Meredith Dias and Lauren Brancato

  Layout artist: Sue Murray

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN 978-1-4930-0332-7

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part One: The Greatest Single Event in History

  Part Two: Something New

  Part Three: Bringing It All Back Home

  Epilogue: Tomorrow Never Knows

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Sources

  Index

  About the Author

  Photographs

  Part One

  The Greatest Single Event in History

  1.

  The basic purpose of the Fair is to help achieve “Peace Through Understanding,” that is, to assist in educating the peoples of the world as to the interdependence of nations and the need for universal and lasting peace.

  —New York World’s Fair 1964–65 Progress Report from Robert Moses, January 16, 1961

  It is insane that two men, sitting on opposite sides of the world, should be able to decide to bring an end to civilization.

  —President John F. Kennedy, October 1962

  Standing outside the World’s Fair Administration Building in Flushing Meadow Park in the late morning cold of December 14, 1962, Robert Moses knew that nearly three years of work were about to pay off. Since May 1960, when he assumed the presidency of the World’s Fair Corporation in a sleight-of-hand coup d’état, he had taken charge of every aspect of the upcoming 1964–65 World’s Fair; no detail was too insignificant for his attention. Now, after much political intrigue and maneuvering, the most powerful man in the free world, President John F. Kennedy, was coming to Queens to bestow his personal blessing on Moses’ Fair by participating in the ground-breaking ceremony for the $17 million United States Federal Pavilion.

  New York City’s Master Builder had worked tirelessly to enact his grand schemes for what he called “the Olympics of Progress.” Moses knew that World’s Fairs were historic opportunities for cities and nations to enhance their images on a global stage. London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 showcased the famed Crystal Palace—an immense structure of metal and glass that illustrated Victorian England’s industrial might—and was opened by the Queen herself; Paris’s Exposition Universelle of 1889 gave the world the Eiffel Tower; and in 1893 the United States hosted its second World’s Fair in Chicago (Philadelphia had hosted a smaller fair in 1876), one that demonstrated America’s maturity as a nation. The Fair’s planners transformed part of Chicago into the neoclassical White City (and introduced a ride that would become a staple of fairs the world over: the Ferris wheel). In 1904 St. Louis hosted a World’s Fair that marked the debut of a new form of communication, the first wireless telegraph machine, and more prosaically, introduced a new way of eating ice cream—the ice-cream cone.

  However, it was New York’s 1939–40 World’s Fair, which a younger Moses had worked on, with its dramatic, geometric-shaped sculptures—the Trylon and the Perisphere—that offered Depression-era America a glimpse of “the World of Tomorrow,” a futuristic fantasy world of skyscrapers, superhighways, and televisions that, like economic prosperity, was just around the corner.

  Now, in the beginning of the 1960s, Moses and his team had spent years negotiating with Washington, DC, politicos for federal funding (often arousing more ill will than good) while playing diplomatic chess matches with foreign bureaucrats. He also initiated colossal plans for the reconstruction of major New York City thoroughfares such as the Van Wyck Expressway and the Grand Central Parkway, both of which would lead millions of Fairgoers to his exhibition. As usual, Moses, the holder of a dozen unelected positions, including New York City Parks Commissioner, chairman of the City Planning Commission, and chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, disrupted the streets of New York as he saw fit, with little regard for the impact his plans had on the lives of its citizens. “You have to break eggs to make an omelet” was his standard reply to his increasingly vocal critics. As was his style, when either obstacles or opponents got in his way, he outmaneuvered or, if necessary, ran roughshod over them.

  Moses had spent much of the previous forty years molding and transforming New York to fit his own personal vision of a modern metropolis. He built a vast network of highways, bridges, parkways, public pools, playgrounds, beaches, and state power projects while clearing huge tracts of land with federal funds—sometimes destroying neighborhoods in the process. Casting a shadow over his beloved New York at least as large as the Manhattan skyline, Moses served as an unelected government employee under seven governors and six mayors, and for nearly half a century was an inevitable fact of life in Gotham, as much as death, taxes, and rush hour traffic.

  After Kennedy’s motorcade pulled up to the building, the president stepped out of his limousine and greeted Moses, with whom he had maintained a cordial connection since his days as a Massachusetts senator. The youthful Kennedy, who had removed his heavy overcoat despite the frosty chill, was a striking contrast to the graying bureaucrats who had gathered to meet him, like the Fair’s US commissioner, Norman K. Winston, a real estate developer and close ally of Moses, or the dour mayor of New York, Robert F. Wagner Jr. described by Norman Mailer as “plump, groomed, blank” in the pages of Esquire.

  Regardless of his host’s combative and autocratic style, Kennedy knew that Moses got things done. Certainly Kennedy, ever the political pragmatist, admired Moses’ ability to survive—and dominate—New York’s cutthroat political system. Side by side on the stage set up for the ground-breaking, surrounded by the four-and-a-half-acre construction site of the US Federal Pavilion, they now sat: On the left was Kennedy, the only man on the stage not wearing a fedora or an overcoat, or apparently under the age of fifty; his youthful image and forward-looking New Frontier policies seemed to embody the hopeful idealism that was still at the heart of American life. Beside him, the elderly Moses personified bare-knuckled power as New York’s Machiavellian Master Builder.

  When it was Kennedy’s turn to speak, he rose to a podium bearing the presidential seal and delivered a short speech that was a peaceful call to arms. As his words turned to frosty breaths in the cold December air, the president reminded the crowd that the upcoming World’s Fair represented “a chance for us in 1964 to show seventy-five million people . . . from all over the world, what kind of a people we are and what kind of a country we are . . . and what is coming in the future. That is what a World’s Fair should be about and the theme of this World’s Fair—Peace Through Understanding—is most appropriate in these years of the Sixties. I want the people of the world to visit this Fair and all the various exhibits of our American industrial companies and the foreign companies, who are most welcome, and to come to the American exhibit—the exhibit of the United States—and see what we have accomplished through a system of freedom.”

  Kenne
dy’s trip to the Fairgrounds was a welcome respite. The Fair’s “Peace Through Understanding” theme was more than just an idealistic slogan to the young president. Two months earlier, the Cold War had almost exploded into an atomic showdown after the Soviet Union installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, only ninety miles off American shores. It was a terrible gamble for Nikita Khrushchev, the unpredictable Soviet premier, who had the missiles sent to Cuba after asking his advisors, “Why not throw a hedgehog into the United States pants?”

  For nearly two weeks in October, President Kennedy secretly met with a group of senior advisors and top military brass, poring over the photographic evidence courtesy of U-2 spy planes. The president and his men explored every option, including a preemptive military strike against Fidel Castro’s Communist regime. Ultimately, Kennedy dismissed the war cry of his trigger-happy generals and Southern Democrats like senators Richard B. Russell of Georgia and J. William Fulbright of Arkansas. Instead, he opted for a naval blockade of Cuban waters—preferring to call it a “quarantine” to strike a less confrontational tone—to prevent more nuclear warheads from arriving on the island. At the same time, he amassed more than a hundred thousand troops in Florida—the largest invasion force since the Second World War. Just in case.

  When the crisis ended in late October, the world drew a collective sigh of relief. Kennedy had steered the country away from nuclear war by heeding his most pragmatic and least militant advisors, and in the process gave Khrushchev what he needed most: time. Time to rethink his gamble of putting missiles so close to the United States, time to silence the hardliners of the Kremlin—just as Kennedy needed to silence his own Washington warmongers—and more importantly, time to save face. As leader of the world’s other superpower, Kennedy understood Khrushchev’s position only too well. “If we had invaded Cuba . . . I am sure the Soviets would have acted,” he said afterward. “They would have to, just as we would have to. I think there are certain compulsions on any major power.”

  Further emboldened by his administration’s performance in the 1962 midterm elections the month before these ground-breaking ceremonies—the Democrats picked up four seats in the Senate (including Massachusetts’s new junior senator, Edward M. Kennedy) and lost only two seats in the House—the president began exploring other, more subtle ways to exhibit American power. The New York World’s Fair—especially with its universal peaceful themes—would provide the perfect forum. Kennedy knew such an exhibition could be an important front in the Cold War, one that the United States could win without firing a single bullet.

  Despite those peaceful ideas, the World’s Fair had started a major fight in Washington, DC. Kennedy’s predecessor, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, had picked New York over the nation’s capital to host an American exhibition. But to secure the approval of Congress—and to soothe the bruised ego of DC insiders who were lobbying against New York—the Empire State’s congressional delegation, led by liberal Republican senator Jacob K. Javitz, and Moses had to promise that the New York Fair wouldn’t cost the federal government anything.

  By September 1961, however, they had changed their minds. Javitz and Moses now sought $300,000 in funding for a study on the feasibility of building a US Federal Pavilion. This request outraged Ohio’s Democratic senator Frank J. Lausche, who along with Senator Fulbright, blocked the appropriations bill from being voted on by the full Senate, essentially killing the funding days before Congress’s session ended. As was the case with much of Kennedy’s political agenda—whether it was diplomacy with the Soviets, civil rights, or the World’s Fair—it was often his own party who fought him the hardest.

  Moses was livid. He told the New York Times that the failure of Congress to invest in his exhibition would cause “irreparable damage” to the Fair’s prestige. He chided the senators for not allowing the bill to reach the chamber floor (it had already passed the House of Representatives), where there was “no question” the bill would pass. He also reminded them “that under identical circumstances the Federal Government has made a large appropriation” to the upcoming 1962 Seattle Century 21 Exposition.

  Frustrated with Congress, Moses appealed to Kennedy directly, and after talking with the commander in chief for a half hour, secured his support. The Master Builder probably didn’t need to make a hard sell: Kennedy had backed the Fair from the early days of his presidency. He recognized that such an exhibition could be a two-year advertisement for the American way of life. The Senate, however, would still need some convincing.

  In March 1962, Moses made his move. Speaking at a luncheon at Manhattan’s University Club, he played the Cold War trump card, warning that “time was running out” for Congress to act. The Soviet Union, he noted, had announced its intentions, along with the entire Eastern Bloc, to build a pavilion—and at 78,000 square feet, it was the largest of the entire Fair to date. Moses didn’t need to ask the obvious question: Were the two Democratic senators, both members of the Foreign Relations Committee and avowed Cold Warriors, really going to allow America’s Communist nemesis to exhibit its cultural, industrial, and scientific wares for the world to see—on American soil, no less—without a world-class US Federal Pavilion at a World’s Fair in New York?

  Aides to Kennedy had been asking the same question. A November 1961 memo warned the president that the United States risked being embarrassed by the Soviets on their own turf. “Delay at this stage could result in a second class exhibit . . . the Soviets and others are already much further along on their exhibit preliminaries than is the US.” Only five years earlier, the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik, kick-starting the Space War in the process. President Kennedy had a vested interest in making sure the 1964–65 World’s Fair was a success.

  A few days after Moses’ University Club speech, Kennedy asked Congress for $25 million to fully fund a Federal Pavilion, declaring that it was in American interests to “present to the world not a boastful picture of our unparalleled progress but a picture of democracy—its opportunities, its problems, its inspirations, and its freedoms.” A New York Times editorial urged Congress to fund the “construction of a showcase that will document before the world our way of life.”

  In April 1962, Congress begrudgingly handed over $17 million for a US Federal Pavilion to be administered by the Commerce Department. Moses had won—but not before adding a few more names to his enemies list. Senator Paul Douglas, Democrat of Illinois, a brainy, bowtie-wearing ex-Marine and former economics professor at the University of Chicago, called Moses “one of the most competent and irritating men in the history of the United States . . . an amazingly efficient man, the most egotistical, the most intolerant, the most hot-tempered public servant I have ever known.”

  Douglas wasn’t alone in his feelings. Less than two weeks before the December ground-breaking ceremony, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy passed to his older brother an internal report about a recent meeting between Fair executives and Commerce Department officials, along with a handwritten note: “Thought you might want to see this . . . it’s a rather unsatisfactory situation.” At the meeting, Moses had complained that Herb Klotz, the coordinator for the US Federal Pavilion, was “arrogant, unimaginative and very difficult to work with.” (He also grumbled that Klotz was “Prussian and unapproachable” and that his ideas for the pavilion were “hogwash.”) Nor did Moses care for Los Angeles–based Charles Luckman, the pavilion’s architect, or its Phoenix-based construction firm, Dell Webb; at least one, if not both, he noted, should be New Yorkers.

  Whatever the president thought of Moses’ management style, he didn’t show it that day in Flushing Meadow Park. Kennedy was in full campaign mode, working the crowd of VIPs, Fair officials, and hard-hat construction workers alike. While Moses’ handlers had arranged the de rigueur “shovel shot” for the photographers covering the ground-­breaking ceremony, the president decided to improvise. Spotting a construction worker behind the wheel of a large bulldozer, Kennedy bounded off the stage
and shook the driver’s hand.

  “You want to try it?” the blue-collar worker asked the wealthy president, motioning toward the truck’s controls.

  To the delight of those present, Kennedy climbed into the driver’s seat and began moving the snow-covered soil of Flushing Meadow with the bulldozer’s large blade. The president flashed “a boyish smile full of glee,” said one onlooker. “He waved a hand and his eyes seemed to say, ‘Damn, but this is fun!’ ”

  The president launched the World’s Fair’s final phase in another ceremony on April 22, 1963—exactly one year before the Fair’s opening day. Kennedy, this time from his desk in the Oval Office, dialed 1-9-6-4 into a new RCA Touch-Tone phone (which would be on display at the Fair). That day, the president promised to attend the opening festivities in New York and gave his assurance to the millions of future Fairgoers that it would “compare with the greatest shows on earth . . . and [people would] come away with the true impression of what can be accomplished when the people of the world are given the chance to work in an era of peace and understanding.”

  The future and the Fair, however, would arrive without Kennedy. Just seven months later, while on a campaign trip to Dallas, accompanied by his beautiful and elegant wife, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, America’s young, charismatic president was assassinated. In the span of a few seconds, shots rang out and the nation’s history was irrevocably altered. As the country meandered through the coming months of shock and gloom, it seemed the Fair’s promised era of “Peace Through Understanding” would never arrive.