Bryce Zabel's FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH

McCain's Brows Are More Than Furrowed

At Least He's Ready For His Close-Up

There's been a lot of talk about how eyebrows were raised over Sarah Palin being plucked from obscurity to serve as VP on the Republican ticket.  Now it appears that her running mate (remember him?  the McCain guy?) is having to play catch-up to compete.  In the issues of Time and Newsweek that just came out (September 8 cover date), there's a fine full-page picture of the Senator inside Newsweek and his mug gets the full cover treatment on Time.  Here they are: take a good look before we continue...

As a producer out here in Hollywood, I've studied my share of head shots while considering actors for parts.  While I was looking at McCain to see if he seemed up for the role, it hit me.  The man had all the grey hairs plucked out of his eyebrows. 

Now we always knew that McCain was a gutsy warrior but we never would have thought to apply the adjective plucky but there it is.  Somehow, John McCain got his picture taken for Newsweek and then must have gone off to Time to be photographed for the cover shot.  Along the way, somebody got rid of all those pesky white hairs because they are gone, baby, gone.  Because of our commitment to investigative journalism here at For What It's Worth, we have gone the extra mile.  Take a look yourself and you tell me if we have a Brow-gate on our hands or not?

Above: Newsweek | Below: Time

Look, I'm all for sartorial striving and all, but there is a little irony here.  Isn't John McCain the guy who "approved" the ads that tried to make Barack Obama seem like a lightweight by branding him with the "celebrity" brush and running pictures of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton next to his?  Then this same candidate runs out and plucks his brows for his big Time cover?

Did one of his consultants tell him that the grey in his eyebrows made him look, well, a little old?  Especially compared to his much younger new running mate?  Did the famously irritable McCain fuss and fume before agreeing?  Did the Secret Service have to inspect the tweezers first?  We just ask the questions, you decide.

Here's the biggest question.  If Barack Obama had done the exact same thing before his recent cover shoot, would any of the Republican speakers last night have missed the opportunity to use that against him in dismissive and contemptuous sound-bites?

Yeah.  Probably not.

Oh, well.  It's just another trivial issue that probably won't even make it past a news cycle.

Hair today, gone tomorrow...

The 1968 Politics of Hope: Bobby Kennedy

Sadly, the news of Senator Ted Kennedy's brain tumor reminds of us all the tragedy visited upon the four Kennedy brothers (Joe, John, Bobby, Teddy).  Now we're also coming up on the anniversary of that time nearly forty years ago when hope (of the kind Barack Obama seems to represent for a lot of people) was crushed by another assassin's bullet. This picture you see is done by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein and originally debuted as the cover of Time magazine the week before Robert Kennedy's untimely death during another hard fought, unpredictable Democratic primary season, 1968 style.

Bobby Kennedy was a pop star as Lichtenstein portrayed him,  but he was more complicated than that, too. As Time noted in that last article before his death -- "The Politics of Restoration" --

"They pronounce his boyish name with fear and derision or else with adoration and awe. To many enemies, he is more his father's son than his brother's brother."

During his lifetime, Robert Kennedy was widely seen as his brother's hatchet man, and the word "ruthless" followed him everywhere. By 1968, when he died, though, he had grown. Pat Moynihan said of him, "Much has been given him and taken from him in life, and somehow he has been enlarged by both experiences."

Although Bobby (RFK) has won the California primary on the day of his death, he had also just concluded a slugfest with Senator Eugene McCarthy for the Democratic presidential nomination where the result had hardly been pre-ordained. Kennedy had had to fight McCarthy across the entire nation. When Kennedy triumphantly claimed victory here in Los Angeles at the Ambassador Hotel, he had settled the issue of who would be the anti-war candidate at the upcoming Democratic convention. Then he was murdered. He was 42 years old, even younger than his brother when he was murdered five years earlier.

I've always loved this Newsweek cover about RFK's death ("Once Again...Once Again," June 17, 1968). The photo, taken by Phil MacMullan, captures not only Bobby Kennedy's more soulful, empathetic side but also how the ghost of his brother and that previous assassination hung over him. If you CLICK on this cover, you can see it in even better detail.

Back then, I was living in Oregon where only the week before Kennedy had lost the Oregon primary to McCarthy. It was the first election any Kennedy had lost since their family got into politics. Kennedy desperately needed a win in California to get the momentum needed to take out Vice-President Hubert Humphrey at the Chicago convention that summer. Our family supported McCarthy, but we liked Kennedy a great deal, too. It was a tough choice. I remember seeing him speak in the auditorium at Hillsboro High School right before the election. He was three hours late but we waited because he was a rock star quality politician.

Anyway, Oregon is in the same time zone as California, so it was just after midnight when my dad came and woke me up. "Kennedy's been shot in California," he said. We went downstairs and watched the TV for news and kept up the vigil until he succumbed to his wounds the next day.

O.J. Flashback: His Arrest in Los Angeles in 1994

It's been over thirteen years now since that slow-speed chase in the white Bronco where we all held our breaths wondering if O.J. was going to blow his own brains out on live TV.  I remember watching it in the Calabasas Sagebrush Cantina -- the Bronco was on one screen, and the Lakers play-off was on the other.  Nobody could take their eyes off either.

The racial controversy over O.J. Simpson began, of course, with the murder of a white woman and white man by a black suspect, but it was seen visually the minute the issues of Time and Newsweek first came out.  It triggered a pull-back of a cover, an unprecedented action in the publishing history of news magazines.  Here's what their initial June 27, 1994 issues first looked like:

Here's where it got interesting.  Almost immediately after hitting the stands, Time was accused of racism by minority groups for its photographic alteration of the famous O.J. arrest photo.  The editors defended their choice by saying that they had taken that creative license to show the shadow that had descended on his reputation that week.  Illustrator Matt Mahurin was the one to altern the image, saying later that he "wanted to make it more artful, more compelling."  Enough readers, however, said that they saw the white man stacking the deck by "demonizing" the black man, that Time did something it had never done before and has never done since.  They issued a second cover and pulled the first one.  Essentially this meant that only mail subscribers ever saw the first cover.  Here they are side-by-side for your own inspection.

Most of us are very familiar with the story of O.J. Simpson -- the famous athlete a criminal jury said didn't do it only to have a civil jury say he did just over a year later.  Like the Los Angeles riots which preceded the arrest of O.J. by two years, this story said as much about the state of race relations in America as they did about the guilt or innocence of the accused.  Before the racial overtone set in, however, coverage in these initial issues had a lot to do with the actual slow-speed chase.  Here's the way Time started in both versions:

When asked how they could have let one of the most famous double-murder suspects in history slip away under their noses, the angry police commander and the tight-faced lawyer and the whole choir of commentators all said the same thing, without a trace of irony:  "We never thought he would run."

Maybe people condense into their essential selves in crisis, and O.J. was one of the best runners in American football.  Here's how Newsweek began their story:

The end, last week, was off-camera.  After the bloody steps, the heart-rending funerals, the surreal chase through the twilight of Los Angeles, O.J. Simpson surrendered himself into the darkness his life has become.  He was in the back seat of his best friend's Bronco, communing quietly with his cellular phone, his blue steel revolver and a picture of his children.  As the police stood back, the shadows lengthened.

Now, of course, there's a new O.J. criminal saga starting in Las Vegas. If you had any questions about why they denied him bail, this is why. More coverage to come, to be sure...

Newsweek #1: When Roosevelt & Hitler Came to Power

I have a strange hobby. Other people collect coins, stamps, comic books, Beanie babies, you name it. I collect classic issues of Time and Newsweek magazines. This is one of the best...

74 years ago when this magazine hit the newstands, it was called Vol. I , No. 1. The exact day of release was February 17, 1933. 

The issue, all 32 pages of it, could be had for a dime, but you could get it discounted for a year's subscription at $4.  You'll also notice it was called "News-Week", not Newsweek as we know it now.

Although both Time and Newsweek have become virtually indistinguishable to the average reader these days, both had a different cover philosophy when they started.  Originally, Time was always that red-border with the famous person inside (at the beginning, always a photo).  Newsweek, in contrast, was about the week in news.  On this first cover, for example, you'll see seven pictures, each one representing a different day of the week.  Monday started off with a speech by Adolf Hitler before 15,000 in Berlin's Sports Palace where he declared "the German nation must be built up from the ground anew."   On Wednesday, for example, Franklin Roosevelt's election in the electoral college was certified by Congress. Clearly, these were monumental times for this new magazine: Hoover was out of office this week, Roosevelt was in -- and across the Atlantic, the Nazis were consolidating their grip.

What you won't find inside is a single word about how this is a new magazine.  It pretty much just hits the ground running.  The so-called "Front Page" -- page one -- has this headline: "Easing Burdens of Debut and Foreclosure."  The first words Newsweek ever wrote are as follows:

The spectre of the auctioneer stalks throughout the land, haunting debtors in city, town and country.  Next to life itself, a home is man's most prized possession.  To save it, rugged individualism has grown gregarious, and harried citizens are banding against foreclosure.  Some are violent, grimly taking the law into their own hands.

The last word in this issue, by the way, was an article about Islam, in Turkey, where Arabic had just been officially banned.

Something I found particularly interesting in this issue, however, was commentary on the subject of democracy -- in Germany where it was under attack by Hitler, and in the United States where it was far less important than surviving the Great Depression.

The article, "A Blank Check for Roosevelt: Congress Proposes, Weighs, Then Delays Grant of Extraordinary Powers to the Next President", actually begins with a quote from Alfred E. Smith, delivered in New York the previous week. It's a whopper:

"In this depression we are in a state of war. The only thing to do now is to lay aside statutes, and do what a Democracy must do when it fights. During the World War we wrapped the Constitution of the United States in a piece of paper, put it on the shelf and left it there until the war was over."

That's quite a statement. The one that followed by James M. Cox a few days later hit the same point.

"We are at war with forces that threaten to destroy our civilization. We are a democracy. While we reflect on its virtues, it has many shortcomings. One is that in time of stress it cannot re-adjust to conditions as rapidly as necessary."

Meanwhile, over in Germany, the newly appointed Chancellor Adolf Hitler was singing a similar tune, showing up for that Sports Arena rally in his brown Nazi uniform, "banked by blazing Nazi banners." He argued for a "break" with a "rotten brand of Democracy" and asked the German nation to "give us four years' time and then pass your judgment." Most people assumed this meant that even if the elections went badly, Hitler and his cabinet would cling to power.

Newsweek chose to print a baby picture of Hitler (it's there on the left) on its photo page which, honestly, is a very strange editorial choice. It also filed a gossipy little piece about "Hitler and Frau Wagner Coupled in Romance."

But anyhow, one of Frau Wagner's relatives says the family wouldn't be surprised to see Adolf and Winifred married "at some later date."

It's an odd read, like "Entertainment Tonight" covering the rise of fascism with bubbly enthusiasm.

Still, there's a lot of content in this magazine, crammed into its slender first volume. As a time capsule into the way we were, it's a great read.

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Bobby: Fact, Fiction and In-Between

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Emilio Estevez's film "Bobby" has gone nationwide, recalling a time nearly forty years ago when hope was crushed by another assassin's bullet. Critics seem divided as to its merits, and one shortcoming seems to be that its characters see Bobby Kennedy only in heroic terms. This picture you see is done by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein and originally debuted as the cover of Time magazine the week before Bobby's death which the film portrays.

Bobby Kennedy was a pop star as Lichtenstein portrayed him,  but he was more complicated than that, too. As Time noted in that last article before his death -- "The Politics of Restoration" --

"They pronounce his boyish name with fear and derision or else with adoration and awe. To many enemies, he is more his father's son than his brother's brother."

I suppose Estevez can be forgiven for not mentioning that other Bobby, but his film would have been even better if it had ackowledged him. Let's face it, during his lifetime, Robert Kennedy was widely seen as his brother's hatchet man, and the word "ruthless" followed him everywhere. By 1968, when he died, though, he had grown. Pat Moynihan said of him, "Much has been given him and taken from him in life, and somehow he has been enlarged by both experiences."

Although Bobby (RFK) has won the California primary on the day of his death, he had also just concluded a slugfest with Senator Eugene McCarthy for the Democratic presidential nomination where the result had hardly been pre-ordained. Kennedy had had to fight McCarthy across the entire nation. That's what's so poignant about Estevez's film. When Kennedy triumphantly claimed victory here in Los Angeles at the Ambassador Hotel, he had settled the issue of who would be the anti-war candidate at the upcoming Democratic convention. Then he was murdered. He was 42 years old, even younger than his brother when he was murdered five years earlier.

I've always loved this Newsweek cover about RFK's death. The photo, taken by Phil MacMullan, captures not only Bobby Kennedy's more soulful, empathetic side but also how the ghost of his brother and that previous assassination hung over him. If you CLICK on this cover, you can see it in even better detail.

Newsweek, "Once Again... Once Again", June 17, 1968

Back then, I was living in Oregon where only the week before Kennedy had lost the Oregon primary to McCarthy. It was the first election any Kennedy had lost since their family got into politics. Kennedy desperately needed a win in California to get the momentum needed to take out Vice-President Hubert Humphrey at the Chicago convention that summer. Our family supported McCarthy, but we liked Kennedy a great deal, too. It was a tough choice. I remember seeing him speak in the auditorium at Hillsboro High School right before the election. He was three hours late but we waited because he was a rock star quality politician.

Anyway, Oregon is in the same time zone as California, so it was just after midnight when my dad came and woke me up. "Kennedy's been shot in California," he said. We went downstairs and watched the TV for news and kept up the vigil until he succumbed to his wounds the next day.

This issue, of course, is dominated by news of the murder. The lead article begins, "Once again, the flags slid down to half-staff." They also noted:

"In the last few years, Bobby had emerged dramatically from the shade of his murdered brother. He became increasingly concerned with the quality of of U.S. life in general, and in particular with the plight of the poor and the downtrodden, black and white alike."

That's probably why he lost Oregon. It was not a hugely diverse state population back then and the simple passion of McCarthy's anti-war crusade played better in a place where there were no huge urban cities.

On the Table of Contents page, they usually would have a short piece of writing setting up the pieces to follow. In this issue, they broke with their form and printed a long excerpt from a speech ("Ripple of Hope") RFK had given on June 6, 1966 in South Africa. That was exactly two years to the day before he was murdered and now, in 2006, we celebrate that speech's 40th anniversary. Here it is, as they presented it:

"Each time a man stands for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, these ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

For the fortunate among us, there is the temptation to follow the easy and familiar paths of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who enjoy the privilege of education. But that is not the road that history has marked out for us. Like it or not, we live in times of danger and uncertainty. But they are more open to the creative energy of men than any other time in history.

The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of new ideas and bold projects. Rather it will belong to those who can blend vision, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideas and great enterprises of American society."

Maybe our politicians today should consider those words and take them to heart. There is an entire web-site devoted to this speech and you can even download it and listen to it. Check it out.

Here is the full speech, by the way, that Robert Kennedy delivered only two months before his own death. It was given the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot.

I loved the complexity that RFK brought to the scene. A decade ago, on the NBC series "Dark Skies", my partner Brent Friedman and I made Bobby a continuing character who had aided our main character John Loengard in getting proof of the Roswell UFO crash to his brother, shortly before his own assassination. In our twisted historical romp, Bobby was running for President in 1968 largely to finish the business of telling the American people about the alien invasion. He was played in four episodes by the wonderful actor James Kelly who had also played him in a TV movie.

I know, I know. Putting Bobby into a sci-fi film is completely insane. The sad part of the story, though, is that we felt like it was okay to play this historical subversion because both JFK and RFK had been gone so long from the scene that they had slid into that zone where they were iconic characters who could be used in literature. Like Lincoln, gone so long that novelists are hardly afraid to use him in their literature.

Which brings me back to Emilio Estevez's "Bobby." His RFK is no more or less a prop in his film than mine was in that TV series. It doesn't make it good or bad. Estevez is simply making a point about 1968 and the dulling of hope it represented and Bobby is his muse.

Robert Kennedy might still be alive today had he not been shot. He would have been 81 years old. My own father lived that long.

{To read more of these posts about journalism as the first draft of history, CLICK HERE to go the "Instant History" blog.}

 

Guilty: Scorn O.J.

As somebody who makes his living in TV, I'm a strong a proponent about letting the market decide when it comes to what people can watch or not. But I have to tell you that I'm happy about Rupert Murdoch's decision to scuttle the O.J. Simpson book and TV specials, "If I Did It, Here's How It Happened."

Just because the First Amendment exists, it doesn't mean that people have a right to be protected from the forces of the marketplace. Anybody has a right to print that ridiculous O.J. book or to interview him about how he "might" have killed his wife and Ron Goldman. Sure. But audiences, readers and citizens have a right to criticize those who would stoop to putting this trash before the public. So, the market rules, and O.J. gets the plug pulled by Rupert. I have no doubt someone else may step forward now to pay for this and that's too bad, but for me this is still a positive outcome.

Thankfully, this episode puts to rest any lingering doubts (were there really ANY?) about O.J.'s guilt or innocence. You may want to read Salon's article by Deborah J. Dickerson, "Memo to O.J. - Kill Yourself."

We all know the simple truth now. O.J. Simpson murdered his wife, Nicole Brown-Simpson, and Ron Goldman. Period. End of story. He's a killer.

I'm sorry that a well-liked African-American turned out to be a maniac like this, but it doesn't make it less true. It's not about race, it probably never was. It's just a tragedy, an injustice, the trial was a farce and what's come after has been rotten. This latest ploy was just disgusting. Come on...

O.J., you murderer, if you won't take Salon's advice, just go freaking-away. Okay? We're done here.

*******

CLICK HERE for the "Instant History" post about O.J.'s arrest.

CLICK HERE for the "Instant History" post about O.J.'s trial verdict.

9/11 Anniversary: Newsweek's Classic Cover, "America Under Attack"

We're coming up on the five-year anniversary of 9/11 and, no doubt, countless thousands of new words will be spilled trying to make sense of that day and where we've come since. Newsweek went strong on pictures in this "EXTRA EDITION" and the picture on the cover was titled, simply, "9:03 A.M. TUESDAY, SEPT. 11, 2001: Hijacked United Airlines Flight 175 explodes into the World Trade Center." Take a moment and look at this cover, CLICK IT if you want to see the full size, you saw it on the newstands, you may even have bought several copies.

Cover Photograph by Kristen Brochmann, New York Times

Try for a few moments not to think about all that has come since and how divided our country has become, again. Remember instead how it actually seemed in the aftermath of 9/11 that we would pull together, as we have done many times before, into a united country.

Nothing like this has ever happened to America before. With chilling skill, terrorists struck at our heart last Tuesday, hijacking commercial jets, then crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon -- cold-blooded murder on a mass scale. The human toll is beyond imagining, the psychic costs difficult to calculate. We always thought we were safe. We were wrong.

The magazine devoted its special coverage into only four sections: IN PICTURES; AN ACT OF WAR; THE AFTERMATH and A DAY OF AGONY. After an extended spread of photographs, the opening article, "A New Day of Infamy," began with the story of Jeremy Glick on the doomed United Airlines Flight 93, a telling that has seen two versions come to film this year, one on TV, the other in theaters. But after the Flight 93 story, the article kicked in:

A victory for courage over cowardice, but forces of terror carried the day on Sept. 11, 2001. The date, like Dec. 7, 1941, will live in infamy. The audacious air assault on the political and financial capitals made a mockery of Fortress America and ended the illusion that its citizens can somehow float above the hatreds of the world. The thick clouds of smoke and dust billowing from the spot where the World Trade Center once stood were eerily reminiscent of the photographs from the Japanese attack on Battleship Row in Pearl Harbor -- only the clouds were engulfing lower Manhattan, where hundreds of thousands of civilians live and work.

The coverage then goes into the differences that sixty years have brought: no enemy army to be declared war on, and a fight that will, at times, resemble one against shadows.

There's so much in this issue to contemplate. Of course it would be easy to go back and point a finger at President George Bush who famously said, "Make no mistake: The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for those cowardly acts." Even Newsweek pointed out then that it was 90% likely to be Osama bin Laden, but that finding him would be no easy task. Five years later, he is still at large, but Sadaam Hussein is in jail. It's funny what lead to what.

Jonathan Alter got to write the article that ended Newsweek's coverage. Always eloquent, he began:

Summer is over in America. Fat and happy is history, a closed chapter in our national experience. By midday Tuesday, with the surreal horror sinking in, the sense spread widely that life in the United States will change as permanently as the skyline of New York City. But change how? Despite the unspeakable carnage, maybe we shouldn't change so much after all... For the past decade, we've lived in a golden age. Peace and prosperity -- as good as it gets. Now that feels like past tense -- as good as it got. But life on a downward slope is a profoundly un-American notion. As we grieve and heal, let's not let a horrible day open a horrible era in the life of this country.

Well, the truth is, even though we said that "everything changed" on 9/11, many things have gotten back to normal. We're still obsessed with vacuous celebrities and reality shows. But the road to retribution took a left turn into Iraq and we have the same old blue/red division we had when Gore and Bush tied on election day 2000.

Maybe everything hasn't changed. I wonder if Alter got it wrong and that maybe everything should have. For what it's worth...

{To read more of these excerpts for classic "Newsweek" and "Time" issues, go to the INSTANT HISTORY blog by CLICKING HERE.}

Newsweek: Anniversary Week

As the over 4-million copies of the Monday issue of Newsweek hits the streets and the mailboxes this week, I bet not even the magazine editors themselves remember to pause and remember. It was this week 73 years ago when Newsweek decided to give Time some competition.

It was called Vol. I , No. 1, and it came out on February 17, 1933.  The issue, all 32 pages of it, could be had for a dime, but you could get it discounted for a year's subscription at $4.  You'll also notice it was called "News-Week", not Newsweek as we know it now. Thomas J.C. Martyn founded the magazine.

News-Week's Debut Issue
February 17, 1933

Although both Time and Newsweek have become virtually indistinguishable to the average reader these days (Newsweek is considered the more liberal), both had a different cover philosophy when they started.  Originally, Time was always that red-border with the famous person inside (at the beginning, always a photo).  Newsweek, in contrast, was about the week in news.  On this first cover, for example, you'll see seven pictures, each one representing a different day of the week.  Monday started off with a speech by Adolf Hitler before 15,000 in Berlin's Sports Palace where he declared "the German nation must be built up from the ground anew."   On Wednesday, for example, Franklin Roosevelt's election in the electoral college was certified by Congress.

On page 5, under an article titled "A Blank Check For Roosevelt: Congress Proposes, Weighs, Then Delays Grant of Extraordinary Powers to the Next President", the magazine started with two quotes about presidential power. They were talking about the depression, but imagine them as being about the war on depression. Here they are:

"In this depression we are in a state of war. The only thing to do now is to lay aside statutes, and do what a Democracy must do when it fights. During the World War we wrapped the Constitution of The United States in a piece of paper, put it on a shelf and left it there until the war was over."
Alfred E. Smith in New York, Feburary 7, 1933.

"We are at war with forces that threaten to destroy our civilization. We are a democracy. While we reflect on its virtues, it has many shortcomings. One is that in time of stress it cannot re-adjust conditions as rapidly as necessary." 
James M. Cox, at Miami, Feburary 11, 1933

What you won't find inside is a single word about how this is a new magazine.  It pretty much just hits the ground running.  The so-called "Front Page" -- page one -- has this headline: "Easing Burdens of Debut and Foreclosure."  The first words Newsweek ever wrote are as follows:

The spectre of the auctioneer stalks throughout the land, haunting debtors in city, town and country.  Next to life itself, a home is man's most prized possession.  To save it, rugged individualism has grown gregarious, and harried citizens are banding against foreclosure.  Some are violent, grimly taking the law into their own hands.

The last word in this issue, by the way, was an article about Islam, in Turkey, where Arabic had just been officially banned in favor of Turkish. These days there are riots in the streets about cartoons published in Denmark. I don't know what that means, except that Islam in the news isn't something that's only been around since 2001.

Finally, one of the most impressive things of note about this magazine is the paper stock it's printed on. This copy I have is 73 years old but the paper is white and sturdy and better made to withstand the ravages of Time (bad pun, sorry) than my issue from last month.

I always liked Newsweek. They were the first news magazine to put the Beatles on their cover. That's gotta tell you something. Happy birthday!

Beatlemania Anniversary!

February 9th marked the 42nd anniversary of the Beatles' arrival in America and the first of those three landmark appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show. We think of this as a seminal event now but for as influential as the Beatles were to pop culture, to music, to people's lives, it's truly amazing how little coverage they got in the nation's newsmagazines. At least Newsweek managed to give this cover to the Beatles during the week that Beatlemania arrived in all its exhuberance less than three months after JFK was killed, setting off a national downer.  Time didn't get around to a cover until three years later when they featured them in their Sgt. Pepper regalia as distorted puppets.

Bugs About Beatles
February 24, 1964

Here's one weird anamoly to start with -- the article inside about the four musicians we know as John, Paul, George and Ringo is called "George, Paul, Ringo and John."  Go figure.  And, boy, did Newsweek just not get it.  They started that article like this:

"Visually they are a nightmare: tight, dandified, Edwardian-Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair.  Musically they are a near-disaster: guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony, and melody.  Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of "yeah, yeah, yeah!") are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments."

It's hard to believe, isn't it?  The Beatles generation became so mainstream that nobody can imagine that people felt that way, but Newsweek wasn't just being stuffy, they were representing the overwhelming feelings of the vast majority of people over, say, twenty.  I remember watching that Ed Sullivan Show where they performed for the first time.  My father, not much of a music fan to begin with, dismissed them by saying he couldn't understand how anybody could stand to listen to "that goddamned caterwalling."  Being part of the status quo, he just didn't get it any more than Newsweek did.  They ended their article with:

"The big question in the music business at the moment is: will the Beatles last?  The odds are that, in the words of another era, they're too hot not to cool down, and a cooled-down Beatle is hard to picture.  It is also hard to imagine any other field in which they could apply their talents, and so the odds are that they will fade away, as most adults confidently predict."

Last November, I went to see McCartney play a sold-out show at Staples Center.  Somebody should have told him.

By the way, one of the greatest nights of my career in television came during the Dark Skies TV series. We wrote an episode, "Dark Days Night", that tied the Beatles appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in with the entire alien invasion of the Hive. Best of all, we re-staged that show in downtown LA with a Beatles tribute band. Not quite the same as being there, but when I closed my eyes...

Bush v. Gore: Five-Year Election Anniversary!

As I write this, it's the day after election day here in California. Voters were in a "no" mood, voting down every single one of the eight statewide ballot measures, including all four that made up the "reform" package of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. But I'm not really thinking about this year's election -- my mind wanders back five years this month when we all began to live through the Great Election Deadlock of 2000.

"The Winner Is..."
Newsweek, November 20, 2000

This cover, by the way, was just voted #31 on a list of the "Best Magazine Covers" of the past 40 years by ASME, or the American Society of Magazine Editors. (John Lennon naked, curled around his wife Yoko Ono, taken on the last day of his life, which appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone was #1.) We digress...

Back to Election Day, Millennium Edition. Remember what it was like back then? Even Bill Clinton got off a great one-liner saying, "The American people have spoken, but it's going to take a little while to determine what they said." Newsweek's cover article this week was called "A Whiff of Victory...But Now It's War." They began with describing one of the most surreal moments in American politics ever.

Bill Daily was in the motorcade, frantically calling Al Gore upfront in the lead car. It was 2a.m., and raining in Nashville, Tenn. The vice president was at the head of what looked like his own political funeral procession. He'd called George W. Bush to concede, and was on his way to a stage outside the War Memorial to thank his soaked supporters. But Daley, his campaign chairman, had just gotten new numbers from Florida -- the state that seemed to have put Bush over the top. Bush's lead was dwindling rapidly there: from 50,000 before the motorcade left the hotel, to a couple of thousand, dropping by the minute. It wasn't over, Daley instantly understood. But he also realized that his suddenly undefeated candidate didn't know it, and might make the wrong move once he got out of the limo. Mobile to mobile, Daley quickly got Gore on the line. "Whatever you do," he shouted into the phone, "do not go out on that stage!"

Daley, by the way, was the son of Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago who many people believe helped put John Kennedy over-the-top in Illinois in 1960 with some questionable votes. He would be asked to perform the family electoral miracle a second time but Florida was not Illinois and in 2000 lawyers from both parties were already on their planes to the next battleground.

We know what happened next. Lawsuits, court challenges, endlessly squinted at ballots, a month and a half of insanity, punctuated and ended by a 5-4 Supreme Court decison to force the counting stop where it stood -- with George Bush ahead. Finally, in December, it was over. But that was a long way off when this magazine was written. Newsweek sussed out the stakes with accuracy:

Both sides claimed a noble objective: to bestow legitimacy on whoever would be judged the ultimate winner. But the candidates' transparent posturing and legal maneuvering reminded voters of just what they disliked about each one: Gore's merciless hunger, Bush's smirking arrogance. And that, in the end, could lower the standing of whichever one lands in the White House. Each would be seen by his foes -- half the country -- in the worst light: Bush, the Accidental President, elevated by the miscast ballots of elderly voters in Palm Beach condos; Gore, the Ruthless Prince, propelled to power by spinners, lawyers, and his own guile.

We know more today than we did then, of course. We know that Bush finally got the office, that Gore gave the best speech of his life when he conceded, and that Bush Jr. was considered an "accidental" president of sorts until the events of September 11, 2001 made all that seem petty and gave him the chance to stand on his own. We also know that Ralph Nader sucked votes aplenty from Al Gore's campaign, and that Pat Buchanan's position on the Florida butterfly ballot sucked possibly crucial votes from Gore as well. But Nader was about ego and the staggered ballot was about stupidity -- and neither one of them is illegal in presidential politics.

As far as the election itself went, we know that in the popular vote Al Gore actually won by some 550,000 votes. We know that in the electoral college that George Bush actually won by a vote of 271 to 266. As for the dispute in Florida, after the Supreme Court ruling, several journalistic organizations went back and re-counted all the Florida ballots in multiple ways -- the way Gore wanted them counted, the way Bush wanted them counted, and a few others variations -- and Bush always won. Not by much, but he won Florida for real (unless we wanted to interrogate senior citizens about who they thought they were voting for). Since our constitution awards the presidency based on what happens in the Electoral College, that's advantage Bush whether you liked it or not. Photo-finish, but a finish, of sorts.

Final thought: Did anybody else notice that when the two men's faces were merged for this Newsweek cover that the result looks a whole lot like a grown up Alfred E. Newman from Mad magazine?