Nation

Reagan Sweeps

And many new Republican faces win office too

Landslide. Yes, landslide--stunning, startling, astounding, beyond the wildest dreams and nightmares of the contending camps, beyond the furthest ken of the armies of pollsters, pundits and political professionals. After all the thousands of miles, the millions of words and dollars, the campaign that in newspapers across the land on the very morning of Election Day was still headlined TOO CLOSE TO CALL turned out to be a landslide. Half the election-watching parties in the nation were over before the guests arrived. The ponderous apparatus of the television networks' Election Night coverage had scarcely got on the air before it was over. NBC called the winner at 8:15 p.m. E.S.T., and the loser conceded while Americans were still standing in line at polling booths in much of the country. In a savage repudiation of a sitting President not seen since F.D.R. swept away Herbert Hoover in the midst of the Depression, Americans chose Ronald Wilson Reagan, at 69 the oldest man ever to be elected President, to replace Jimmy Carter.

It was shortly after midnight when Dixville Notch, N.H., became the first community to cast its ballots and set a trend that never varied: 17 to 3 for the challenger. Once the big count began, all the shibboleths of the election--that Americans were confused, apathetic and wished a plague on all the candidates and, above all, that they were closely divided--were swept away by a tide of votes, some hopeful, many angry, that carried Reagan to victory.

Desert Debacle

Carter fails to rescue the hostages in Iran

Two lines of blue lights etched the outlines of the remote landing strip. Suddenly flames illuminated the night sky, then gradually flickered out. On the powdery sands of Dasht-e-Kavir, Iran's Great Salt Desert, lay the burned-out hulk of a lumbering U.S. Air Force C-130 Hercules aircraft. Nearby rested the scorched skeleton of a U.S. Navy RH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter. And in the wreckage were the burned bodies of eight American military air crewmen.

A few hours later, the Iranian air force dispatched American-made F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers to blast the ruins. The fire and the fury represented a new American tragedy--the inability of the U.S. to extricate 53 American hostages held by Iranian militants and the unstable, faction-torn government of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. In a startlingly bold but tragic gamble, President Jimmy Carter had ordered a courageous, specially trained team of American military commandos to try to pluck the hostages out of the heavily guarded U.S. embassy in Tehran. The supersecret operation failed dismally. It ended in the desert staging site, some 250 miles short of its target in the capital city. And for the world's most technologically sophisticated nation, the reason for aborting the rescue effort was particularly painful: three of the eight helicopters assigned to the mission developed electrical or hydraulic malfunctions that rendered them useless.

For Carter in particular, and for the U.S. in general, the desert debacle was a military and political fiasco. A once dominant military machine, first humbled in its agonizing standoff in Viet Nam, now looked incapable of keeping its aircraft aloft even when no enemy knew they were there, and even incapable of keeping them from crashing into each other despite four months of practice for their mission.

The Last Day In the Life

John Lennon is shot to death

Just a voice out of the American night. "Mr. Lennon." He started to turn around. There is no knowing whether John Lennon saw, for what would have been the second time that day, the young man in the black raincoat stepping out of the shadows. The first shot hit him that fast, through the chest. There were at least three others. Not that night, or the next day, but a little later, after the terror ebbed and the grief could be managed, Lennon's wife, Yoko Ono, took their five-year-old son Sean to the spot in the apartment courtyard where she had seen his father murdered. She had already shown Sean a newspaper with his father's picture on the front page. She tried to do what everyone else has done since that Monday night. She tried to explain.

Sean did not really know or understand about the Beatles, or what his father was to the world. But Sean will surely know, soon enough, that his father did not have to die to become part of everything. Given the special burden and grace of his great gift, he already was. Not just for his wife or son but for more people than anyone could ever begin to number, the killing of John Lennon was a death in the family.

"This Is It" Mount St. Helens explodes

"Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it!"

The frantic warning was radioed at precisely 8:31 a.m. on that fateful Sunday by Volcano Expert David Johnston, 30, who had climbed to a monitoring site five miles from Washington State's Mount St. Helens in the snow-capped Cascade Range, 40 miles northeast of Portland, Ore. He wanted to peer through binoculars at an ominous bulge building up below the crater, which had been rumbling and steaming for eight weeks, and report his observations to the U.S. Geological Survey center in Vancouver, Wash.

Seconds after his shouted message, a stupendous explosion of trapped gases, generating about 500 times the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, blew the entire top off Mount St. Helens. In a single burst St. Helens was transformed from a postcard-symmetrical cone 9,677 ft. high to an ugly flattop 1,300 ft. lower. Clouds of hot ash made up of pulverized rock were belched twelve miles into the sky. Giant mud slides, composed of melted snow mixed with ash, rumbled down the slopes and crashed through valleys, leaving millions of trees knocked down in rows, as though a giant had been playing pick-up sticks. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.