In case you weren't feeling old enough already.......
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vH0YfZKNW54
How coo is this?
GM concept car "The Roundabout" 1964. The three-wheeled car was on display at the 1964 New York World's Fair and had a shopping cart which was detached directly from the rear of the car.
STAR TREK BLOOPERS 1960`s
We didn't have anything to put with this really cool picture so we're giving you bloopers and outtakes from StartrekSTAR TREK BLOOPERS 1960`s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZAkGfJY05k
Baroness von Trapp
"Vincent J. Donehue was a former actor and Tony award-winning stage director who had gone to work at Paramount late in 1956. One day he was asked to look at a German film called The Trapp Family Singers which had been a big success in Europe and South America, with a view to his directing a movie in English based upon it and starring Audrey Hepburn. The German film told the life story of Maria, Baroness von Trapp, and her beginnings as a postulant nun in Austria who was sent to be governess to the seven children of the widowed Georg von Trapp.
They were later married and escaped from Austria just before the Anschluss, finding their way across the Alps into Switzerland and from there to the United States, where they became famous as the singing Trapps." 'It was in many ways amateurish,' Donehue said of the film, 'but I was terribly moved by the whole idea of it, almost sobbing.'
He saw it immediately as a perfect vehicle for Mary Martin, whose husband, Richard Halliday, was one of his closest friends. When Audrey Hepburn's interest in the project faded, Paramount lost its enthusiasm and let its option lapse. Donehue sent the German film to Richard Halliday. Both he and Mary Martin loved the film. '
The idea was just irresistible,' Mary said, 'a semi-Cinderella story, but true.'"Actually, it wasn't true at all. The real-life Maria Rainer had had a loveless childhood as the ward of a provincial judge and joined a monastery where, far from being a ray of sunshine, she became so ill she was sent 'outside' to be a governess to one of Georg von Trapp's daughters, who was bedridden. Unlike the music-hating martinet portrayed in the [Broadway] version, von Trapp was a loving parent who encouraged his children to play instruments and sing. Nor did they escape over the Alps pursued by the Nazis; they took a train to Italy and reached America by way of England."Nevertheless, there was not the slightest doubt in Halliday's or Mary Martin's minds that it would make a great musical, and both agreed from the outset that they wanted Rodgers and Hammerstein to produce it. But there were all sorts of obstacles to be overcome before anything like a Broadway show could be mounted. First, Halliday had to try to locate Maria von Trapp and her children, all of whose permissions would be required if they were to be portrayed live on stage. The Baroness, however, was hard to find. She was on a world tour, establishing missions in the South Seas. Letters addressed to her in Australia, Tahiti, Samoa, and other locations failed to reach her. In addition, the seven von Trapp children were scattered in various places around the world and were proving just as elusive. "
At this point, Halliday's lawyer Bill Fitelson brought in producer Leland Hayward, and Hayward became as enthusiastic as everyone else about the possibilities of the story. Together, Hayward and Fitelson chased all over Europe picking up hints and clues as to the whereabouts of the Trapp children. By the autumn of 1957, they had all the necessary permissions sewn together. The seven von Trapp children had been traced and had signed on the dotted line. The contract with Baroness von Trapp was finalized in a hospital ward in Innsbruck, where she was recuperating from malaria contracted in New Guinea. Leland Hayward, who spoke no German, concluded his negotiations with the representative of the German film company, who spoke no English, in Yiddish!"
Frederick Nolan, The Sound of Their Music, Applause Books, Copyright 2002 by Frederick Nolan, pp. 244-246
South Vietnamese government
"Rebel troops overthrew the South Vietnamese government in Saigon that same November 1, assassinating President Diem ... The bloody coup shocked many Americans into an unsettling first awareness of the Vietnam War, as news accounts speculated delicately but persistently about clandestine U.S. support for the revolt. ...
Vietnamese soldiers had killed monks and civilians in Hue to enforce a government order prohibiting the display of Buddhist colors on Buddha's birthday. Buddhist protests had seized world attention a month later ... when a monk named Trich Quan Duc publicly immolated himself in downtown Saigon.
Vietnam's Catholic rulers contemptuously dismissed a string of later suicides as 'Buddhist barbecues' inspired by the communist enemy."Americans awakening to the Vietnam crisis puzzled over the conduct on both sides. Given the overwhelmingly Buddhist population, it was as though a Jewish U.S. president had forcibly suppressed Christmas as a Communist conspiracy. ... Kennedy Administration officials ... 'decided long ago,' wrote Max Frankel in the Times, 'to discuss it as little as possible.'
Privately, however, they split over the most divisive internal question of the entire Administration: whether it was moral, democratic, or necessary to overthrow Diem in order to preserve a war against tyranny in Vietnam. 'My government's coming apart!' President Kennedy had exclaimed on the day before the [Martin Luther King] March on Washington.
Two days later, his ambassador in Saigon cabled that the course was set toward a coup: 'There is no turning back.' All through September and October, the secret cable traffic had flopped erratically between excited hopes of imminent success and bouts of bloody remorse, like speeches from MacBeth. When it was over, U.S. officials tried to make the best of a fresh start with a new Vietnamese regime of French-educated, Catholic generals."
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters, Simon & Schuster, 1988. p. 914.
Robert Clary
"In the 1960s, between my long tenures with [Dick] Van Dyke and All in the Family ... even after I had been working in television for well over a decade, at times I still came across things that surprised or even shocked me. That occurred once during a lunch break on the set of Hogan's Heroes. I had directed several episodes of that series, even though I always had a bit of trouble with its trivialization of a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. ... This feeling was magnified one day when I sat next to Robert Clary, who portrayed a young French prisoner in Colonel Hogan's barracks. Lunch was served outdoors, and since it was a hot day, Robert was wearing a sleeveless shirt. "As I reached for something on the table, I noticed a numbered tattoo on Clary's arm. I was astonished. 'Forgive me for asking,' I said to him, 'but do those numbers mean what I think they do?'"Clary responded without hesitation. 'Yes, I was a prisoner in Auschwitz.' "A chilling thought came into my mind. 'How can you play an inmate ...,' I asked, 'and face those horrible symbols of Nazi authority? How do you interact with swastikas and all other paraphernalia of a system that condemned you to an extermination camp?'" 'It's a job,' Clary said with a shrug, 'you get over it.' "Years later ... he admitted that it had been more than a little difficult."John Rich, Warm Up the Snake, University of Michigan Press, 2006, pp. 111.
Malcolm X
"For Earl Broady, the Malcolm X who appeared unannounced at his office seemed quite different from the daredevil Black Muslim in the news. He spoke with evenhanded precision to reconstruct the chaos and asked for Broady's representation in the criminal trials he felt were sure to come, calculating that the state must prosecute the Muslims in order to ward off civil damage suits. Broady turned Malcolm away more than once, saying he was too busy and too close to Chief Parker.
As a policeman himself from 1929 to 1946 before entering the law, Broady saw Parker as a reform autocrat in the style of J. Edgar Hoover and gave him credit for modest improvements over the frontier corruptions of the old Raymond Chandler-era LAPD. Broady's wife, a devout Methodist, objected vehemently to the case on the grounds that the Muslims were openly anti-Christian, unlike the worst of his ordinary criminal clients, and Broady himself resented the Nation of Islam, drawn largely from stereotypical lowlifes, as an embarrassment to the hard-earned respectability of middle-class Negroes.
The Broadys recently had acquired an imposing white colonnade home in Beverly Hills, where Malcolm X visited when he could not find Broady at the office--calling day after day, always alone with a briefcase, playing on Broady's personal knowledge of the harsh, segregated inner world of the LAPD precincts. His patient appeals, plus the largest retainer offer in Broady's career, finally induced the lawyer to take the case. ..."[This] case marked a turning point in the hidden odyssey that surfaced Malcolm X as an enduring phenomenon of race. He saw the shootings as a fundamental crisis in several respects--first as a test of Muhammad's teachings on manhood and truth.
Ever since the Montgomery bus boycotts of 1955-56, Malcolm had criticized Martin Luther King as a 'traitor to the Negro people,' disparaging his non-violence as 'this little passive resistance or wait-until-you-change-your-mind-and-then-let-me-up philosophy,' and he did not hesitate to ridicule a national movement built on sit-ins and Freedom Rides. 'Anybody can sit,' said Malcolm. '
An old woman can sit. A coward can sit. ... It takes a man to stand.' Always there was an element of swagger in Malcolm's appeal, and at times a bristling, military posture: 'You might see these Negroes who believe in nonviolence and mistake us for one of them and put your hands on us thinking that we're going to turn the other cheek--and we'll put you to death just like that.' Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire, Simon and Schuster, 1998, pp. 10-13.
Exuberant spring
"During the first exuberant spring since the brush with Armageddon in Cuba, established organs of mass culture promoted almost anything that was optimistic. Life magazine celebrated the government's plans for using hydrogen bombs to blast out new harbors and a copy of the Panama Canal, and predicted that LSD, peyote, and other hallucinogens soon would be harnessed to make people 'more productive and generally effective.' There was infectious awe over miracles--both profound ones such as the discovery of the DNA molecule, the 'key to life itself,' and prosaic ones such as the invention of the pop-top beer can." Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters, Simon & Schuster, 1988, p. 71
Tom and Dick Smothers
"Tom and Dick Smothers were the perky shills for the subversive satire that, between 1967 and 1969, turned their jaunty variety show into a comedy terrorist cell. The Smotherses were our jolly hosts, but also the secret instigators ... of songs and sketches that aggressively took on Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, and racism while singing the praises of drugs, sex, the counterculture, and everything else that wasn't nailed down. Looking at the shows now, which give off the happy-go-lucky, devilish air of its chummy hosts, they seem as innocent as old newsreels of the naughty Jazz Age."
A TV executive once instructed them, 'We want you to be controversial but at the same time we want everyone to agree with you.' A station owner once told Tom that he was 'incompetent to make social comments.' One CBS memo said it was fine 'to satirize the president, so long as you do it with respect.'"
It all ended noisily in '69 when CBS stepped in and deleted a David Steinberg monologue, a 'sermonette' about Solomon and Jonah that was to have run not only on Easter Sunday but the week of President Eisenhower's funeral. ... CBS could hide behind religion, not politics, by blaming the allegedly sacrilegious sketch by Steinberg. A single Steinberg line...caused CBS brass to explode: 'The gentiles, as is their wont from time to time, threw a Jew overboard, and Jonah was swallowed by a giant guppy.' The next line went, 'The New Testament Scholars literally grab the Jews by the Old Testament.' "
Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny, Back Stage Books, 2004, pp. 446-452.
A TV executive once instructed them, 'We want you to be controversial but at the same time we want everyone to agree with you.' A station owner once told Tom that he was 'incompetent to make social comments.' One CBS memo said it was fine 'to satirize the president, so long as you do it with respect.'"
It all ended noisily in '69 when CBS stepped in and deleted a David Steinberg monologue, a 'sermonette' about Solomon and Jonah that was to have run not only on Easter Sunday but the week of President Eisenhower's funeral. ... CBS could hide behind religion, not politics, by blaming the allegedly sacrilegious sketch by Steinberg. A single Steinberg line...caused CBS brass to explode: 'The gentiles, as is their wont from time to time, threw a Jew overboard, and Jonah was swallowed by a giant guppy.' The next line went, 'The New Testament Scholars literally grab the Jews by the Old Testament.' "
Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny, Back Stage Books, 2004, pp. 446-452.
LBJ
"While Lyndon Johnson was not, as his two assistants knew, a reader of books, he was, they knew, a reader of men--a great reader of men. He had a genius for studying a man and learning his strengths and weaknesses and hopes and fears, his deepest strengths and weaknesses: what it was that the man wanted--not what he said he wanted but what he really wanted--and what it was that the man feared, really feared."
He tried to teach his young assistants to read men--'Watch their hands, watch their eyes' he told them. 'Read eyes. No matter what a man is saying to you, it's not as important as what you can read in his eyes'--and to read between the lines: he was more interested in men's weaknesses than in their strengths because it was weakness that could be exploited, he tried to teach his assistants how to learn a man's weakness. 'The most important thing a man has to tell you is what he isn't telling you,' he said. 'The most important thing a man has to say is what he's trying not to say.'
For that reason, he told them, it was important to keep the man talking; the longer he talked, the more likely he was to let slip a hint of that vulnerability he was so anxious to conceal. 'That's why he wouldn't let a conversation end.' Busby explains. 'If he saw the other fellow was trying not to say something, he wouldn't let it (the conversation) end until he got it out of him.' And Lyndon Johnson himself read with a genius that couldn't be taught, with a gift that was so instinctive that a close observer of his reading habits, Robert G. (Bobby) Baker, calls it a 'sense;'
'He seemed to sense each man's individual price and the commodity he preferred as coin.' He read with a novelist's sensitivity, with an insight that was unerring, with an ability, shocking in the depth of its penetration and perception, to look into a man's heart and know his innermost worries and desires.'
Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate, Alfred A. Knopf, 2002, p. 136.
Barbie
"In 1959, wearing a zebra-striped swimsuit and tall stiletto heels, Barbie made her debut at the American Toy Fair in New York. Created by Ruth Handler, the youngest of ten children of Polish immigrants, Barbie became an instant icon of popular culture and one of the world's best-selling toys.
Ruth Handler had founded Mattel in 1945 with her husband, Oscar, a specialist in plastic design. Inspired by her own daughter's fascination with paper dolls, the Handlers wanted to produce a doll that looked more like a real teenager. The doll Ruth Handler created was actually modeled on a German sex toy called Lilli, which Handler had seen on a European trip.
Barbie was named after the Handler's daughter, and her later male counterpart, Ken, was named after their son."Needless to say, there aren't many teenagers who look like Barbie. In fact, it was later determined that if Barbie were 5 feet 6, her measurements would be 39-21-33. But that did not matter.
After battling prudish male executives at Mattel, Handler launched the doll into history. At the time, the doll business was dominated by baby dolls from a far more innocent time. Barbie flew off the shelf in the postwar baby boom years. In a 1977 interview, Ruth Handler told the New York Times, 'Every little girl needed a doll through which to project herself into her dreams of the future. If she was going to do role playing of what she would be like when she was 16 or 17, it was a little stupid to play with a doll that had a flat chest. So I gave it beautiful breasts."
Although feminists would later object that Barbie gave young girls an unrealistic body image and others would criticize Barbie as overtly sexual, that didn't stop Barbie from becoming a phenomenon. A half billion Barbies later--more than one billion counting sales of her sidekick dolls--and the statuesque young girl with platinum hair and blue eyes was still going strong by 2002."
Kenneth C. Davis, Don't Know Much About History, Perennial, Copyright 2003 by Kenneth C. Davis, pp. 434-435.
Melvin R. Laird
"In Iraq, the United States should not let too many more weeks pass before it shows its confidence in the training of the Iraqi armed forces by withdrawing a few thousand U.S. troops from the country. We owe it to the restive people back home to let them know there is an exit strategy, and, more importantly, we owe it to the Iraqi people. The readiness of the Iraqi forces need not be 100%, nor must the new democracy be perfect before we begin our withdrawal. The immediate need is to show
our confidence that the Iraqis can take care of Iraq on their own terms.
our confidence that the Iraqis can take care of Iraq on their own terms. Our presence is what feeds the insurgency, and our gradual withdrawal would feed the confidence and the ability of average Iraqis to stand up to the insurgency. ..."For each round of troop withdrawals from Vietnam, the Joint Chiefs suggested a miserly number based on what they thought they still needed to win the war.
I bumped those numbers up, always in counsel with General Creighton Abrams, then the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam. Even Nixon, who had promised to end the war, accepted each troop withdrawal request from me grudgingly. ... I never once publicly promised a troop number that I couldn't deliver. President Bush should move ahead with the same certainty."
Melvin R. Laird, "Iraq: Learning the Lessons of Vietnam", Foreign Affairs, November/December 2005, pp. 29-30
John and Paul
"My mum dying when I was fourteen was the big shock in my teenage years. She died of cancer, I learnt later. I didn't know then why she had died. ... My mother's death broke my dad up. That was the worst thing for me, hearing my dad cry. I'd never heard him cry before. "That became a very big bond between John and me, because he lost his mum early on, too. We both had this emotional turmoil which we had to deal with and, being teenagers, we had to deal with it very quickly. We both understood that something had happened that you couldn't talk about--but we could laugh about it, because each of us had gone through it. It was OK for him to laugh at it and OK for me to laugh at it. It wasn't OK for anyone else. ... John went through hell, but young people don't show grief--they'd rather not. "John was the local Ted [tough guy]. You saw him rather than met him. ...
[A]s I got older, I realised it was his childhood that made John what he was. His father left home when he was four. I don't think John ever got over that. ... He would wonder, 'Could he have left because of me?' ... Instead of living with his mother, he went to live with his Aunt Mimi and Uncle George.
Then Uncle George died and John began to think that there was a jinx on the male side: father left home, uncle dead. He loved his Uncle George; he was always quite open about loving people. All those losses would really have got to him.
His mother lived in what was called 'sin'--just living with a guy by whom she had a couple of daughters. ... John really loved his mother, idol-worshipped her. I loved her, too. She was great: gorgeous and funny, with beautiful long red hair. She was killed, so John's life was tragedy after tragedy."The Beatles, The Beatles Anthology, Chronicle Books, 2000, pp. 19-20.
Cassius Clay
"The policeman's fighters also noticed that no one taught Clay anything. He just did what he wanted to do. ... [Policeman and trainer Joe] Martin believed there was one way to box, and one way only. He tried to convince Clay to box flat-footed, to slide his left foot forward as he jabbed and return the left arm to where it had begun--elbow tucked firmly to the side, fist next to the chin. It was the way ordinary men learned to fight. But Clay was not ordinary, even at 12 years old, and he knew it. ...
"That first year, as a novice flyweight, Clay lost seven fights. But in those defeats Joe Martin saw characteristics more important than skill. He saw how badly Clay wanted to be good; he was the hardest worker ever in Martin's gym. While the policeman recognized fear in Clay's eyes, he also saw how Clay reacted to it. 'All that talkin' he does,' Martin said, 'that's nothing but whistlin' past the graveyard. ... But he never quit in the ring. Takes guts to face what you're scared of. Clay's got guts.'"The gym may also have been a safe place away from home. His daddy's whiskey nights scared him. The old man would take a swing at anyone in his way. When Odessa Clay could not handle it, she called the police. Cassius Sr. was arrested nine times for reckless driving, disorderly conduct, and assault and battery. ... He never did jail time, largely because the attorney Henry Sadlo, the state's boxing commissioner, had such affection for Cassius Jr. that he hauled himself out of bed at all hours to tell a judge that old Cash just needed to sleep it off."
For three or four days in the summer of 1957, Cassius Jr. did not show up at Columbia Gym. That was strange because Clay was usually first to arrive and last to leave.
When he appeared with a bandage on his thigh, he told Martin he had cut his leg on a milk bottle. Martin later heard another story. A policeman had been called to the Clays' home by Mrs. Clay after a domestic quarrel, 'either a cutting or a fight or something like that.' ... He told Mrs. Clay, 'Now, look, take him to your own doctor or take him to the hospital, and if you want to, go up and take out a malicious cutting warrant.' Louisville's police files held a cursory summary: "August 8, 1957-10:32 p.m., Mrs. Clay, cutting INV. [investigation] 3307 Grand. NA [no arrest]." Later that year, Cassius told Martin that he had been cut when he stepped between his daddy's knife and his mother."Dave Kindred, Sound and Fury, Free Press, Copyright 2006 by Dave Kindred, pp. 35- 36
Mike Nichols
"Nichols and [producer Lawrence] Turman knew the casting of Benjamin was crucial. ... 'I interviewed hundreds, maybe thousands of men,' Nichols said. ... He even discussed the role with his friend Robert Redford, who was eager for the part. 'I said, 'You can't play a loser.' And Redford said, 'What do you mean? Of course I can play a loser.' And I said, 'O.K., have you ever struck out with a girl? and he said, 'What do you mean?'
And he wasn't joking.' ..."After 10 years as a struggling actor in New York, Dustin Hoffman had won an Obie Award in 1966 for best Off Broadway actor, in Ronald Ribman's The Journey of the Fifth Horse. He'd been supporting himself with a series of odd jobs--selling toys at Macy's, working as an attendant at the New York Psychiatric Institute, on West 168th Street, waiting tables at the Village Gate--and sharing an apartment with Gene Hackman and his wife. After he won his Obie, his performance ... in an Off Broadway British farce called Eh?, landed him on the cover of the Arts and Leisure section of The New York Times. ...
" 'I was riding high, so I felt I was going to have a career in the theater, which is what I wanted. So when the part came along, I read the book, I talked to Mike Nichols on the phone, and I said, 'I'm not right for this part, sir. This is a Gentile. This is a Wasp. This is Robert Redford.' ... Nichols replied, 'You mean he's not Jewish?' '
Yes, this guy is a super-Wasp. Boston Brahmin.' And Mike said, 'Maybe he's Jewish inside. Why don't you come out and audition for us?' ' ..."
[After the audition] he knew he'd blown it. ... The final humiliation occurred when, saying good-bye to the crew, he pulled his hand out of his pocket and a fistful of subway tokens spilled to the floor.
The prop-man picked them up and handed them back, saying, 'Here, kid. You're going to need these.'"Back in New York, Hoffman got word from his agent to call Nichols. He reached Nichols on the phone, afraid he had woken him up. After a long pause, the director uttered the most beautiful words an actor can hear: 'Well, you got it.' Those four words changed Dustin Hoffman's life."Sam Kashner, "Here's to You, Mr. Nichols," Vanity Fair, March 2008, pp. 423-426.
Dangerfield
"Ruling the roost [at the New York Improv Club in 1966] was a former aluminum siding salesman who had started out doing stand-up under the name Jack Roy, left the business to raise a family, and was making an unlikely comeback calling himself Rodney Dangerfield. When Dangerfield first walked into the club, after a well-reviewed engagement at the Living Room, [club owner Budd] Friedman says he 'expected to see a guy right out of Princeton, and this middle-aged drunk showed up.
He didn't want to get up onstage. I told him, I'll buy you a bottle of wine. He always told the story that I bought him for a bottle of wine.' Dangerfield soon became the club's regular emcee. "Dangerfield was a larger-than-life character, a man of manic energy, dark depressions, and consuming appetites. Friedman recalls a Thanksgiving dinner at Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara's house when Dangerfield had too many martinis and fell asleep over the turkey. After dinner he woke up, went into the kitchen, and began attacking the carcass so ravenously that the caterer ran out to complain.
Dangerfield drank lavishly, drove a car like a maniac, and smoked pot before most of the pot generation was born. But when it came to comedy, he was a disciplined pro. Weeks before he had a guest spot on The Ed Sullivan Show or The Tonight Show, he would gather new jokes--jotting them down on the shirt cardboard from his dry cleaner, testing them onstage night after night, crafting a surefire five minutes. And though he was a classic 'necklace' comic--stringing disconnected one-liners together--he was hip to the new wave too."
Richard Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge, Bloomsbury, Copyright 2008 by Richard Zoglin, pp. 75.
Chicago Riots
"The protestors of the early 1960s, admirers of Martin Luther King and Gandhi, had believed almost religiously in non-violence. ... By the mid-1960s, however, that tactic was reaching the end of its shelf life. It had not ended the war in Vietnam, nor had it liberated blacks, nor had it won many victories on campus. ..."
By 1968, hardcore activists, tired of talk and bored with marching, put their faith in violence. The ringleaders of the 1968 riots at Columbia University called themselves the Action Faction, and styled themselves on the East Village Motherf**kers, a nihilistic group who asserted their intention to 'defy law and order with ... bricks, bottles, garbage, long hair, filth, obscenity, drugs, games, guns, bikes, fire, fun, and f**king.' ... "The 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago provided radicals with the perfect sequel to Columbia. Leading the chaos this time were the Yippies (so-called after the Youth International Party they had founded the year before), Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman.
Their plans called for a continuous street party--more circus than demonstration. The main goal was to create a spectacle. 'Like typical Americans,' one organizer proclaimed, 'we got our biggest kicks from contemplating our image in the media.' In the week before the convention, Yippies boasted to local newsmen that they would put LSD in the Chicago water supply, rape the wives of convention delegates, and have a mass copulation in Lincoln Park. Rubin told his admirers: 'Thousands of us will burn draft cards at the same time ... and the paranoia and guilt of the government will force them to bring thousands of troops ... Our long hair alone will freak them out ... and remember--the more troops, the better the theater.' ..."
The few earnest protesters who did go to the Convention to make a point about the war or civil rights were disappointed at the way violence had hijacked politics, depriving it of meaning. ... The Yippies should have been nothing more than mere nuisance. But television has a way of magnifying images. On successive nights in Lincoln Park thousands of police, backed by the National Guard, did battle with the miniscule army of Yippies while the whole world watched. The apocalyptic fantasies of Rubin and Hoffman combined with the paranoia of Mayor Richard Daley to create one of the most shameful episodes in American political history. 'We wanted to f**k up their image on TV,' Hoffman later explained. ... In that sense, at least, they succeeded."
Gerard DeGroot, "Street Fighting Men," History Today, May 2008, 28-31.
Batista
"Fulgencio Batista grew up in the shadow of the United Fruit Company. ... The [company town of Banes] was divided into several neighborhoods based on the social status of the residents. North American employees--identified in the company literature as 'first-class Anglo-Saxon employees'--were provided free housing and maid services.
There was a less prestigious neighborhood for lower-ranking Cuban managers and technicians, and an even worse neighborhood for workers. It was here that Batista was born of mixed-race (mestizo) parents and raised around the corner from a street called simply Callejon del Negro (the Black Man's Street).
"Batista's father worked for the United Fruit Company cutting sugarcane. It was backbreaking work. ... Batista's father was not employed directly by United Fruit but rather by a contractor hired by the company to organize and pay the work crews.
The contractors were often free to exploit the workers by cheating them out of wages. ... By the age of eight, young Fulgencio was forced to abandon his primary-school education and join his father as a cane cutter. ... "Batista was a beautiful creation. In one of his early forms of employment as a railroad brakeman for the United Fruit Company railway line, he earned the nickname 'El Mulato Lindo'--the pretty mulatto--from his fellow employees. ...
Although he took pains to present to the public a masculine image, his looks suggested a Cuban Adonis, with a type of [androgynous] handsomeness that was the envy of both men and women. ... "Castro cut a dashing figure, tall and strapping, with curly black hair and a traditional, finely manicured Cuban mustache. He had been an exemplary student athlete and had a self-confidence that was attractive to women.
He came from a prosperous family (the father owned land in Oriente Province) and married a young woman from a politically connected family. He borrowed money from his father so that he and his wife could honeymoon in New York City.
They stayed at least one night at the Waldorf-Astoria...."[In 1948], although not yet famous across the island, Fidel was well-known at the University of Havana. Since the uprising against the presidency of Gerardo Machado in the early 1930s, the university had been a major source of political agitation and organized dissent. Castro had proved himself a dynamic orator and a future leader to be reckoned with, but he was also, according to some, overly enamored with the trappings of gangsterismo."
T.J. English, Havana Nocturne, Morrow, Copyright 2007, 2008 by T.J. English, pp. 59-61, 69-70.
Stokely Carmichael
"Rejection of nonviolence tended to come of an organic process: heartening civil rights gains would be followed by corrosive disappointment; disillusionment set in, calling for increasingly spectacular acts of militancy. ...
Few had lived the process more intimately than ... twenty-four year old Stokely Carmichael. Stokely had grown up watching white people humiliate his idealistic Trinidadian father--and seeing his father, the more he was humiliated, profess ever more faith in the American dream. "In 1960, Stokely headed South after reading about the Woolworth lunch-counter sit-ins. The next year on the Freedom Rides he was beaten and went to jail for the first of twenty-six times. In 1964, after Lyndon Johnson seated the 'regular' white Mississippi delegation at the Democratic convention instead of the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Stokely's commitment to ordinary politics ended for good. 'This proves,' he cried, the liberal Democrats are just as racist as Goldwater.' The next year he watched police beat demonstrators outside his Selma hotel-room window. He started screaming. He couldn't stop. He had a nervous breakdown that lasted two days. ...
"The SNCC militants had been testing out a phrase among one another. Americans of African descent were known as 'Negroes.' SNCC militants had begun to call one another 'black,' the word Malcolm X had used: its starkness carried a militant charge. ... They also began telling one another that to call theirs a 'freedom' movement was wishy-washy; what they really needed was power.
"Thus the phrase Stokely Carmichael now debuted--the phrase that signified a civil war within the civil rights movement. " 'We want black power!'"Some in the crowd: 'That's right!'" 'We want black power, and we don't want to be ashamed of it. We have stayed here, and we have begged the president. We have begged the federal government. That's all we been doin'--beggin', beggin'. It's time we stand up and take over. Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned down tomorrow to get rid of the dirt in there!' "Rick Perlstein, Nixonland, Scribner, Copyright 2008 by Rick Perlstein, pp. 96-99.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)