Michael Kackman,
Citizen Spy: Television, Espionage, and Cold War Culture
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
ISBN: 0 8166 3829 2
280pp
US$18.95 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press)
By the beginning of the 1950s, Hollywood, anxious to demonstrate its loyalty to the American cause after a spate of liberal wartime movies which had attempted to show American audiences that the Russians were human after all, embarked on a programme of films that demonised the Russians and pointed to the unspeakable terrors of communism. In films like I Married a Communist (US 1949) and Walk East on Beacon!(US 1952), dark, sinister Russians and their misguided American fellow travellers visibly demonstrated that the enemy was already inside the gates and actively working for the destruction of the American way of life. But such fears were not just manifest in Hollywood movies, for as Michael Kackman, the author of this enlightening and entertaining study of television spy shows, points out, “Spies were everywhere in 1950s American media culture. Villains and heroes, they emerged from the shadows just long enough to affirm America’s worst fears of Communist infiltration” (1).
The rapidly expanding television networks quickly bought into this current interest and contributed to the growing public paranoia with a host of what were labelled ‘documentary melodrama’ – series based on the alleged real life exploits of American agents such as Herbert Philbrock’s sensational account of his experiences as an informer for the FBI among Boston’s communists. Screened as I Led Three Lives in 1953, the series was enormously successful and paved the way for a host of similar shows which demonstrated how the authorities were combating the Red Menace.
Many of these shows were made with the active co-operation of federal agencies, although the FBI, despite J. Edgar Hoover’s courtship of the media, felt unable to collaborate with the television networks until 1965 when it reached an agreement with ABC to produce The FBI, based on the work of the agency. The show, starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr, was highly successful and ran until 1974, with Zimbalist becoming a sort of unofficial ambassador for the agency. But, as the author points out, by the time the show was aired, the FBI was focused more on domestic crime than international espionage, and its dour agents were far less colourful than the eccentric heroes of imported British spies who had begun to appear on the networks in shows like The Avengers (1961-1965) or The Saint (1963). But as the grip of Cold War paranoia lessened after 1962, the spy show became less a vehicle for moulding public opinion and more concerned with entertainment.
Nevertheless, The FBI was part of an upsurge in the popularity of espionage dramas, most popularly demonstrated by The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (NBC 1964-1968). Here the suave Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn) and the enigmatic Russian Illya Kuyrakin (David McCallum) constantly thwarted the schemes of the evil organisation T.H.R.U.S.H. in a Bond-like world of international intrigue. The men from U.N.C.L.E. were very different from the earnest but humourless federal agents of 1950s spy shows, smart, witty and demonstrating a healthy cynicism, Solo and Kuyrakin established a new kind of agent in a new kind of show that, as Kackman points out, “eschewed rigid nationalist motives and instead embraced irony, parody and even sharp social satire” (98). A formula that was taken even further in the NBC/CBS series Get Smart (1965-1970), in which the bumbling anti-heroic Maxwell Smart eventually succeeded in outwitting the wicked agents of K.A.O.S. despite his own best efforts. An absurdist spoof which Kackman claims was “one of the first public forums that registered growing public dismay over the interventionist tactics of the CIA” (xxi).
But the spy show also focused on other social and political tensions, particularly the issue of race. The struggle over Civil Rights legislation in 1964 coincided with the production of NBC’s I Spy (1965-1968), the first network drama to star an African-American actor, Bill Cosbie. Cosbie and his partner (Robert Culp) played American agents travelling the world in the guise of tennis professionals and undertaken various missions in exotic locations. I Spy, however, almost marked the end of the agent as human, for the following year Mission Impossible (CBS 1966-1973) began its long and highly-popular run. Here, though, it is a group of virtually anonymous agents who are subservient to sophisticated technology, who save the day.
By the end of the 1960s the spy/espionage drama was on the wane as the reputation of US intelligence agencies plummeted. Revelations over dubious interventions in Vietnam, South America and the Middle East led to a serious loss of faith in the federal government, and one casualty was the television spy show. Now, as the author points out, contemporary shows like the X Files(Fox 1993-2002), for example, are just as likely to expose the morally dubious, often illegal, activities of the security agencies once hailed as the guardians of liberty and the American way.
Michael Kackman has succeeded admirably in producing a thoughtful, highly readable and fascinating study of American television in the period 1950-1960 and its fascination with the world of spies, espionage, and the Cold War.
Michael Paris
University of Central Lancashire, UK.
Created on: Monday, 13 November 2006