What Really Mattered

By Otto Friedrich

Any man who gets to be the managing editor of the New York Times can safely be described as a man blessed with self-confidence. E. Clifton Daniel, now 75, demonstrated that quality anew last week when he ventured to name the ten most important headlines of the 20th century. He took this bold gamble in connection with an international project called Chronicle of the 20th Century, for which Daniel served as an editor and which undertakes to tell the history of the era in headlines and quasi news stories. Daniel's top ten:

1) MAN'S FIRST FLIGHT IN A HEAVIER-THAN-AIR MACHINE (Dec. 17, 1903)

2) THE GREAT POWERS GO TO WAR IN EUROPE (Aug. 1, 1914)

3) THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION IN RUSSIA (Nov. 7, 1917)

4) LINDBERGH FLIES THE ATLANTIC ALONE (May 21, 1927)

5) HITLER BECOMES CHANCELLOR OF GERMANY (Jan. 30, 1933)

6) ROOSEVELT IS INAUGURATED AS PRESIDENT (March 4, 1933)

7) SCIENTISTS SPLIT THE ATOM, RELEASING INCREDIBLE POWER (Jan. 28, 1939)

8) THE NIGHTMARE AGAIN -- WAR IN EUROPE (Sept. 1, 1939)

9) SURPRISE JAPANESE BOMBING OF PEARL HARBOR (Dec. 7, 1941)

10) MEN LAND ON MOON (July 20, 1969)

It is certainly a curious list, as perhaps any such list inevitably would be. Legend has it that a German newspaper of the 1920s attempted to reach a similar goal by different means when it staged a contest for the most implausible headline that could be imagined. The winner: ARCHDUKE FRANZ FERDINAND FOUND ALIVE. WORLD WAR A MISTAKE. A London magazine cited that old joke when it restaged the same contest in the 1950s. The winner: ADENAUER DIES. A moderately funny joke in its time, but also an illustration of how quickly and thoroughly news becomes dated. And not just news itself but the attitudes that underlie the judgments of what news is.

Even on its own terms, Daniel's list provokes challenges. How is it possible in evaluating the political turmoils of this century to omit the Chinese Communist revolution, which is not only the major event in the lives of one-third of the earth's inhabitants but also the first such revolution among the world's nonwhite peoples? And how is it possible to omit the Holocaust, which not only led to the state of Israel and thus to the modern Middle East, which not only changed every Jew's conception of his identity and his place in the world, but which virtually demands a re-evaluation of the nature and destiny of mankind itself? By contrast, how could any list of the century's greatest events include Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic? Heroic though it was, symbolic though it was, the flight was one of those massively hyped events by which the America of the 1920s celebrated its excitement at being itself.

One of the most striking aspects of Daniel's list is that five of his ten choices deal more or less with World War II, which is understandable enough for a man who spent much of his professional life covering that cataclysm and its consequences. Yet there is something relentlessly newspaperish about the implication that the great events of history mostly involve war and politics. World War II inflicted an awful carnage -- at least 35 million dead -- but far more people than that have been kept alive by the invention of penicillin and other antibiotics, not to mention the pesticides that eradicated many epidemic diseases, a scientific revolution that helped double the world's population just since 1950.

Which really has had more of an effect on Americans' lives -- a major military blow like Pearl Harbor or some subtler event like the spread of television? Pearl Harbor or the automobile? Pearl Harbor or the computer? Pearl Harbor or the building of the welfare state? Pearl Harbor or the rise and fall of cheap energy? Pearl Harbor or the birth control pill?

| These are all slow-moving developments, of course, and probably no single headline ever announced any one of them. Indeed, even political news often is hard to judge all at once. On the day after the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace in 1917 -- one of Daniel's top ten events -- that was not the lead story in the New York Times. Instead, the main headline dealt with Tammany Hall's victory in New York elections that week. Journalism, as it has been said, is just the first draft of history. Sometimes, though, historians have similar troubles with the second draft. Writing his authoritative chronicle of Rome in about A.D. 100, Tacitus made only a passing reference to the Christians, minor troublemakers during the reign of Nero.

As time passes, all politicians (and generals) come to seem less important; what lasts is art. "Literature," said Ezra Pound, "is news that stays news." Many Americans can remember that Calvin Coolidge was the inconsequential President when Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, but as we look back, the political powers keep fading. What does anyone know about the petty princelings who ruled Germany in the time of Bach except that they were not very kind to Bach? What does anyone know about the Pope who built the Sistine Chapel except that he hired Michelangelo to paint the ceiling? What does anyone know about who was king of anywhere when the Book of Genesis was written, or the pillars of Stonehenge erected? As Gore Vidal once tartly summed up the role of the artist in society, "I'm the one who's keeping score."

But in cultural history, just as in political history, we may know very little of what will eventually turn out to be important. The very first issue of this magazine, in 1923, devoted a book review to two new works, Ulysses and The Waste Land, and complained of them both: "There is a new kind of literature abroad in the land, whose only obvious fault is that no one can understand it." Franz Kafka left his unpublished masterpieces to be burned by a friend, and most of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical works appeared only posthumously. For all we know, the most important writers and artists of this century, perhaps the greatest thinkers too, remain almost completely unknown, maybe living in poverty and obscurity like Bela Bartok and Vladimir Nabokov in the 1940s, or maybe already long dead.

It is interesting that Daniel's list includes only one event of the past 42 years, a period in which much has happened but much remains mysterious. | Journalism (and history too) is what lives in that all too brief gap between the not yet known and the already forgotten.