Revolution

OF SIT-INS AND SOUL SEARCHING

The jetliner left Atlanta and raced through the night toward Los Angeles. From his window seat, the black man gazed down at the shadowed outlines of the Appalachians, then leaned back against a pillow. In the dimmed cabin light, his dark, impassive face seemed enlivened only by his big, shiny, compelling eyes. Suddenly, the plane shuddered in a pocket of severe turbulence. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. turned a wisp of a smile to his companion and said: "I guess that's Birmingham down below."

It was, and the reminder of Vulcan's city set King to talking quietly of the events of 1963. "In 1963," he said, "there arose a great Negro disappointment and disillusionment and discontent. It was the year of Birmingham, when the civil rights issue was impressed on the nation in a way that nothing else before had been able to do. It was the most decisive year in the Negro's fight for equality. Never before had there been such a coalition of conscience on this issue."

In 1963, the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that coalition of conscience ineradicably changed the course of U.S. life. Nineteen million Negro citizens forced the nation to take stock of itself--in the Congress as in the corporation, in factory and field and pulpit and playground, in kitchen and classroom. The U.S. Negro, shedding the thousand fears that have encumbered his generations, made 1963 the year of his outcry for equality, of massive demonstrations, of sit-ins and speeches and street fighting, of soul searching in the suburbs and psalm singing in the jail cells.

Jan. 3, 1964

THE PRESIDENCY The Government Still Lives

Over Nob Hill and the Harvard Yard, across Washington's broad avenues and Pittsburgh's thrusting chimneys, in a thousand towns and villages, the bells began to toll. In Caracas, Venezuela, a lone Marine sergeant strode across the lawn of the U.S. embassy while a soft rain fell, saluted the flag, then lowered it to half-mast. At U.S. bases from Korea to Germany, artillery pieces boomed out every half hour from dawn to dusk in a stately, protracted tattoo of grief.

It was the kind of feeling that words could hardly frame. At Boston's Symphony Hall, Conductor Erich Leinsdorf laid down his baton, raised it again for the funeral march from the Eroica. On a Washington street corner, a blind Negro woman plucked at the strings of her guitar, half-singing, half-weeping a dirge: "He promised never to leave me." And on Commerce Street in Dallas, in an incident little noted at the time but to assume later significance, Jack Ruby silently closed down his strip-tease joint, the Carousel.

Later the words came, torrents of them. But only two were really needed. A Roman Catholic priest said them with irrevocable finality outside the Dallas hospital where he had just administered the last rites to John Fitzgerald Kennedy: "He's dead."

In such circumstances the change of power is cruel but necessary. Ninety-eight minutes after Kennedy was pronounced dead, Lyndon Baines Johnson, 55, was sworn in as 36th President of the United States. And even as the Presidential jet, Air Force One, winged over the sere plains of Texas and the jagged peaks of the Ozarks, over the Mississippi and the Alleghenies, the machinery of government was still working.

Nov. 29, 1963

CITIES The Fire This Time

At midnight, Hubert G. Locke, a Negro who is administrative assistant to the police commissioner, left his desk at headquarters and climbed to the roof for a look at Detroit. When he saw it, he wept. Beneath him, whole sections of the nation's fifth-largest city lay in charred, smoking ruins. From Grand River Avenue to Gratiot Avenue six miles to the east, tongues of flame licked at the night sky, illuminating the angular skeletons of gutted homes, shops, supermarkets. Looters and arsonists danced in the eerie shadows, stripping a store clean, then setting it to the torch. Mourned Mayor Jerome Cavanagh: "It looks like Berlin in 1945."

In the violent summer of 1967, Detroit became the scene of the bloodiest uprising in half a century and the costliest in terms of property damage in U.S. history. At week's end, there were 41 known dead, 347 injured, 3,800 arrested. Some 5,000 people were homeless (the vast majority Negro), while 1,300 buildings had been reduced to mounds of ashes and bricks and 2,700 businesses sacked. Damage estimates reached $500 million. The grim accounting surpassed that of the Watts riot in Los Angeles, where 34 died two years ago and property losses ran to $40 million. More noteworthy, the riot surpassed those that had preceded it in the summers of 1964 and 1965 and 1966 in a more fundamental way. For here was the most sensational expression of an ugly mood of nihilism and anarchy that has ever gripped a small but significant segment of America's Negro minority.

Aug. 4, 1967

THE MOON "A Giant Leap for Mankind"

The ghostly, white-clad figure slowly descended the ladder. Having reached the bottom rung, he lowered himself into the bowl-shaped footpad of Eagle, the spindly lunar module of Apollo 11. Then he extended his left foot cautiously, tentatively, as if testing water in a pool--and, in fact, testing a wholly new environment for man. That groping foot, encased in a heavy multilayered boot (size 9 1/2 B), would remain indelible in the minds of millions who watched it on TV, and a symbol of man's determination to step toward the unknown.

After a few short but interminable seconds, U.S. Astronaut Neil Armstrong placed his foot firmly on the fine-grained surface of the moon. The time was 10:56 p.m. (E.D.T.), July 20, 1969. Pausing briefly, the first man on the moon spoke the first words on lunar soil:

"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

July 25, 1969

FOREIGN RELATIONS The Backdown

Generations to come may well count John Kennedy's resolve as one of the decisive moments of the 20th century. To Kennedy, the time of truth arrived when he received sheaves of photographs taken during the preceding few days by U.S. reconnaissance planes over Cuba. They furnished staggering proof of a massive, breakneck buildup of Soviet missile power on Castro's island. Already poised were missiles capable of hurling a megaton each--or roughly 50 times the destructive power of the Hiroshima atomic bomb--at the U.S. Under construction were sites for launching five-megaton missiles.

If the plan had worked--and it came fearfully close--Nikita Khrushchev, the bellicose Premier of the Soviet Union, would in one mighty stroke have changed the power balance of the Cold War. Once again, a foreign dictator had seemingly misread the character of the U.S. and of a U.S. President. At Vienna and later, Khrushchev had sized up Kennedy as a weakling, given to strong talk and timorous action. The U.S. itself, he told Poet Robert Frost, was "too liberal to fight." Now, in the Caribbean, he intended to prove his point. And Berlin would surely come next.

Kennedy shattered those illusions. He did it with a series of dramatic decisions that swiftly brought the U.S. to a showdown not with Fidel Castro but with Khrushchev's own Soviet Union.

Nov. 2, 1962

THE PRESIDENCY Bowing Out

"I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party." Thus on nationwide television this week, almost as a throwaway line, in one of the most painful speeches that he has ever delivered to the American people, did the 36th President of the U.S. declare his intention to bow out of the 1968 Presidential race. Lyndon Johnson's decision to retire from office, coming as a surprise climax to a surprise speech on Vietnam, gave the President's newly stated conditions for ending the war the kind of impact that his own intended departure from the White House had. In a dramatic and unexpected turnabout, he announced what he called "a unilateral step toward deescalation."

April 5, 1968

Death a Second Time

Once again the crackle of gunfire. Once again the long journey home, the hushed procession, the lowered flags and harrowed faces of a nation in grief. Once again the simple question: Why?

The second Kennedy assassination--almost two months to the day after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.--immediately prompted, at home and abroad, deep doubts about the stability of America. For the young people, in particular, who had been persuaded by the new politics of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy to recommit themselves to the American electoral system, the assassination seemed to confirm all their lingering suspicions that society could not be reformed by democratic means.

June 14, 1968

ENVIRONMENT Fighting to Save the Earth from Man

The U.S. environment is seriously threatened by the prodigal garbage of the world's richest economy. In the President's own boyhood town of Whittier, a part of metropolitan Los Angeles, the once sweet air is befouled with carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, lead compounds, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, fly ash, asbestos particulates and countless other noxious substances. The Apollo 10 astronauts could see Los Angeles as a cancerous smudge from 25,000 miles in outer space. Airline pilots say that whisky-brown miasmas, visible from 70 miles, shroud almost every U.S. city, including remote towns like Missoula in Montana's "big sky" country. The environment may well be the gut issue that can unify a polarized nation in the 1970s. It may also divide people who are appalled by the mess from those who have adapted to it. Basic to all solutions is the need for a new way of thinking. Americans must view the world in terms of unities rather than units. In nature, many citizens may find the model they need to cherish. The question is: How many?

Feb. 2, 1970

THE WAR Malign Monkey

Though ominous harbingers of trouble had been in the air for days, most of South Viet Nam lazed in uneasy truce, savoring the happiest and holiest holiday of the Vietnamese year. All but a few Americans retired to their compounds to leave the feast of Tet to the Vietnamese celebrators filling the streets. The Year of the Monkey had begun, and every Vietnamese knew that it was wise to make merry while there was yet time; in the twelve-year Buddhist lunar cycle, 1968 is a grimly inauspicious year.

Through the streets of Saigon, and in the dark approaches to dozens of towns and military installations throughout South Viet Nam, other Vietnamese made their furtive way, intent on celebrating only death--and on launching the Year of the Monkey on its malign way before it was many hours old. After the merrymakers had retired and the last firecrackers had sputtered out on the ground, they struck with a fierceness and bloody destructiveness that Viet Nam has not seen even in three decades of nearly continuous warfare. Up and down the narrow length of South Viet Nam, more than 36,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers joined in a widespread, general offensive against airfields and military bases, population centers and just plain civilians. No target was too big or too impossible, including Saigon itself and General William Westmoreland's MACV headquarters.

Feb. 9, 1968

The My Lai Massacre

It passed without notice when it occurred in mid-March 1968, at a time when the war news was still dominated by the siege of Khe Sanh. Yet the brief action at My Lai, a hamlet in Viet Cong-infested territory 335 miles northeast of Saigon, may yet have an impact on the war. According to accounts that suddenly appeared on TV and in the world press last week, a company of 60 or 70 U.S. infantrymen had entered My Lai early one morning and destroyed houses, livestock and all the inhabitants that they could find in a brutal operation that took less than 20 minutes. When it was over, the Vietnamese dead totaled at least 100 men, women and children, and perhaps many more. Only 25 or so escaped, because they lay hidden under the fallen bodies of their relatives and neighbors. Military men concede that stories of what happened at My Lai are essentially correct. If so, the incident ranks as the most serious atrocity yet attributed to American troops.

Nov. 28, 1969

BERLIN The Wall

First came the motorcycle outriders, then jeeps, trucks and buses crammed with grim, steel-helmeted East German troops. Rattling in their wake were the tanks--squat Russian-built T-34s and T-54s. At each major intersection, a platoon peeled off and ground to a halt, guns at the ready. The rest headed on for the sector border, the 25-mile frontier that cuts through the heart of Berlin like a jagged piece of glass. As the troops arrived at scores of border points, cargo trucks were already unloading rolls of barbed wire, concrete posts, wooden horses, stone blocks, picks and shovels. When dawn came four hours later, a wall divided East Berlin from West for the first time in years.

Aug. 25, 1961

MIDDLE EAST The Quickest War

This was no drill. In stunning predawn air strikes across the face of the Arab world, Israeli jets all but eliminated Arab airpower--and with it any chance of an Arab victory. Without air cover, tanks and infantry under the clear skies of the desert offered little more than target practice. In a few astonishing hours of incredibly accurate bombing and strafing, Israel erased an expensive decade of Russian military aid to the Arab world.

June 16, 1967

CZECHOSLOVAKIA A Savage Challenge to Detente

A few hours after it happened, the Czechoslovaks staged a haunting protest. They froze. Wherever they were, at work or in the streets, they stood still for a minute, in a silent outcry against the invaders. When news spread of what the Russians had done, the world, too, froze for an instant.

From the international point of view, perhaps the chief fact about the invasion is that, far from strengthening Soviet-style Communism, Moscow has further crippled it. Acting on the flimsiest and most cynical of pretexts, Warsaw Pact troops throttled the infant independence of a state that had reiterated its fidelity to Moscow and Communism. To retain its grip on Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union had sacrificed much of its influence among Communist parties elsewhere. Not since the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 had the Kremlin acted so palpably from fear and weakness.

Aug. 30, 1968

DIPLOMACY Richard Nixon's Long March

What, if anything, did Richard Nixon bring back from Peking? Above all, the event itself, the fact that it took place. Rarely had a U.S. President spent so long a time--a full week--in a foreign land. The visit, moreover, was to a country with which the U.S. did not even have diplomatic relations and which for two decades had been a virtual enemy.

Nixon, comporting himself with dignity but with an enthusiasm that sometimes made him seem overeager, said nothing of importance in public during the entire trip. His ingratiating small talk was more pedestrian than usual; his toasts were ringing evocations of a world without walls. He even quoted Mao Tse-tung: "So many deeds cry out to be done...Seize the day. Seize the hour."

All this was elaborate scrollwork, hiding content. The substance of the week's talks was finally revealed in a 1,500-word joint communique released just before the President left Shanghai to return to the U.S. It contained no great surprises, no great letdowns. It might have said a little more; it largely dwelled on the need for friendship without getting down to many specifics. In the long run, one of the most important questions about the U.S. and China will be just how much the two countries may learn from each other.

March 6, 1972

SPORT

PRIZEFIGHTING Theater of the Absurd

Last week in Lewiston, Me., Cassius Marcellus Clay, 23, fought a fight that did not seem to be a fight, threw a punch that did not look like a punch, scored a knockout that the referee did not realize was a knockout, and set a record that turned out to be no record. In the process, Cassius clearly established himself as the heavyweight champion of the world and a consummate actor--in the theater of the absurd.

The prop for the farce, of course, was an overrated bum named Sonny Liston. Somehow he had persuaded quite a few people that he would button the lip of the twinkle-toed loudmouth who took his title away in Miami last year.

June 4, 1965

TIME ESSAY History's Biggest Happening

The baffling history of mankind is full of obvious turning points and significant events: battles won, treaties signed, rulers elected or deposed, and now, seemingly, planets conquered. Equally important are the great groundswells of popular movements that affect the minds and values of a generation or more, not all of which can be neatly tied to a time and place. Looking back upon the America of the '60s, future historians may well search for the meaning of one such movement. It drew the public's notice on the days and nights of Aug. 15 through 17, 1969, on the 600-acre farm of Max Yasgur in Bethel, N.Y.

What took place at Bethel, ostensibly, was the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, which was billed by its youthful Manhattan promoters as "An Aquarian Exposition" of music and peace. The festival turned out to be history's largest happening. As the moment when the special culture of U.S. youth of the '60s openly displayed its strength, appeal and power, it may well rank as one of the significant political and sociological events of the age.

Aug. 29, 1969

PEOPLE

After this week, Jacqueline Kennedy will be First Lady of the Land. She will live as a cynosure. Her every public act will cause comment, her chance remarks will raise controversy, and the way she raises her children will bring criticism. Whether she wants to or not, she will influence taste and style. Hers will be a difficult, demanding and often thankless role, and no one knows it better than Jackie. "I feel as though I had just turned into a piece of public property," she said recently. "It's really frightening to lose your anonymity at 31." Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy's struggle to maintain her own separate and private identity has been lifelong. It is the key to her past--and to her future.

Jan. 20, 1961

At 1:20 p.m. the jetliner touched down at New York's Kennedy International Airport, and the whole place went up for grabs. Some 2,000 hooky-playing, caterwauling teenagers stomped, whistled, screamed, sang or just plain fainted while the plane slowly disgorged 105 passengers, 11 crew members and four British Beetles. Oops, Beatles. On their first U.S. tour, the mop-topped, top pop wailers, John Lennon, 23, George Harrison, 21, Paul McCartney, 21, and Ringo Starr, 23, grinned amiably at the whole mad display. What was their secret? "A good press agent," chirped Ringo. (They have 17.)

Feb. 14, 1964 Stockholm's classy Moderna Museet knocked itself blue putting on a giant show celebrating American Popinjay Andy Warhol, 36. This earned the supreme tribute--an appearance by the artist himself, with his clownish protegee, Viva, in tow. "I was going to send someone that looked like me," said Warhol. "It worked once before."

March 1, 1968

CINEMA

Space Odyssey 1969

The two men straddle motorcycles instead of horses, and they smoke marijuana instead of tobacco. But the central characters in Easy Rider are as remote as the freedom they are seeking. Wyatt (Peter Fonda) is a vague, unshaven pothead who likes to refer to himself as "Captain America." His manic sidekick Billy (Dennis Hopper) has a droopy Stephen Crane mustache and shiny eyes fixed on some wild interior vision. Flush from the profits of dope selling, the cyclists symbolically cast off their wristwatches and head for that persistent American symbol of adventure, the Road. In his first major role, Jack Nicholson proves that he knows far more about acting than either of his co-stars. His marijuana-flavored description of a UFO takeover of the U.S. is a perfect comedy within a flawed tragedy.

July 25, 1969

MUSIC

They Hear America Singing

Pete Seeger, Theodore Bikel and Bob Dylan are three of the most sought-after folk singers in the business. But last week they were doing the seeking. At a voter-registration rally two miles out of Greenwood, Miss., all three stood on a flatbed truck parked on a dusty field beside Highway 82 and sang the gospel-like We Shall Overcome.

All over the U.S., folk singers are doing what folk singers are classically supposed to do--singing about current crises. Not since the Civil War era have they done so in such numbers or with such intensity. Sometimes they use serviceable old tunes, but just as often they are writing new ones about fresh heroes and villains, from Martin Luther King to Bull Connor.

July 19, 1963

Blues for Janis

Janis Joplin knew that the aura of self-destruction was part of her appeal. She also knew that to her contemporaries she was much more than a rock singer. She was a tragic heroine whose character summed up all the contradictions, frustrations and despairs of life under 30. Last week, on a day that at least superficially seemed to be less lonely than most, she died on the lowest and saddest of notes. Returning to her Hollywood motel room after a late-night recording session and some hard drinking with friends at a nearby bar, she apparently filled a hypodermic needle with heroin and shot it into her left arm. The injection killed her.

Oct. 19, 1970

TELEVISION

Who's Afraid of Big, Bad TV?

Childhood is the only time and place that grows larger as it is left behind. Two weeks at the seashore appear, in memory, as a floodlit Oz. The first airplane ride might have been to Venus. The early hours spent with radio, TV and films are the foundation of adult imagination. Yet when children grow up, they suffer some sad amnesia of taste. How else could former kids provide television programs designed to do nothing with time but kill it--as if, in Thoreau's phrase, it were possible to kill time without injuring eternity? From the moment it was old enough to earn money, U.S. television has been squandering the country's greatest natural resource: the young audience.

Until last year. Abruptly, the electronic babysitter moved onto a street called Sesame. It was a combination of the circus, a classroom and the Brothers Grimm. In its new series, just begun, the program proves that it is not only the best children's show in TV history but one of the best parents' shows as well.

Nov. 23, 1970