Professor of History Maurice Isserman presented a paper titled "Cold War in a Cold Place: The 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition" at a conference held at Moscow State University in Moscow, Russia. The conference featured both American and Russian historians and was organized to mark the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the Fulbright Program's Distinguished Chair in American History at Moscow State University. A dozen American historians who have held the chair over the past three decades, including Isserman who was the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in 1997, were in attendance at the two-day conference.
Isserman said the 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition, like the Kennedy administration, served as inspiration for and harbinger of changes unsought and even undreamed of by its principal organizer. In his study Isserman writes, "Norman Dyhrenfurth would later rage against the hippies trekking to Thangboche Monastery seeking enlightenment, but he had no one but himself and his fellow mountaineers to blame. With the mass influx of climbing's new baby boom contingent after 1963, the spirit of mountaineering became ever more individualistic, more anarchic, more expressive of an ethic of self-discovery and self-fulfillment than nationalistic self-sacrifice."
Isserman claims that veteran and novice climbers, inspired by Tom Hornbein's and Willi Unsoeld's unorthodox attack on Everest's unclimbed West Ridge, "became more daring in technique, more ambitious in tackling new routes, more willing to take risks, and less willing to defer to the hierarchy of the climbing establishment." Climbers became "shaggier in appearance" and shared many beliefs with "the youthful ragamuffins founding rural communes and underground newspapers in the later 1960s."
Isserman also argues that changes in climbers' philosophies were evident in their valuation of Sherpas, who were originally thought of as cheerful and loyal subordinates. After the 1963 expedition, they came to be seen as "embodying a superior wisdom and morality, rooted in a respect for the natural world that clashed with the long tradition of speaking of climbing as a form of conquest and control." Isserman notes that although Everest kept the name bestowed by British imperial surveyors, it was thought of within the climbing community by its Tibetan name, "Chomolungma," the "mother goddess of the world."
