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 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 • Volume 48, Number 9
Contents

IN THIS ISSUE Innovation. Rebellion. Crisis.

Tragedy. It was a year unlike any other in
America, and it continues to shape our lives

In Search of Vietnam Reliving the Tet Offensive and

26 its horrors, which the nation refuses to acknowledge
PHOTOGRAPHS BY BINH DANG, TEXT BY NGUYEN QUI DUC

The Road to Bliss The Beach Boys’ frontman

42 recalls a magical mystery tour with the Beatles in India
PHOTOGRAPHS BY BHARAT SIKKA, TEXT BY MIKE LOVE

A Seismic Year Events that shook the world, from the

52 Prague Spring to the presidential election surprise
BY MATTHEW TWOMBLY

Fallen Angel Teen sensation Frankie Lymon soared to

56 fame, the face of a new kind of music. His dramatic fall in
1968 was just as symbolic BY JEFF MACGREGOR

The Ghosts of My Lai A half century after the

60 massacre, survivors are still waiting for Lt. William Calley
to come back to Vietnam BY SHAUN RAVIV

I Am a Man Martin Luther King Jr. went to Memphis to

74 show solidarity with the city’s striking sanitation workers.
It was the last thing he did BY TED CONOVER

Back When the End Was Near Paul Ehrlich’s alarming

86 book The Population Bomb remains influential, despite
being largely wrong BY CHARLES C. MANN

Bobby’s Kids At an L.A. school built where RFK was

90 assassinated, students live up to his generous spirit
PHOTOGRAPHS BY GREGG SEGAL, TEXT BY JESSE KATZ
AARON JOEL SANTOS; HAR RY CAMPBELL (DE TAIL)

Rage Against the Machine The author witnessed the

100 chaos at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in
Chicago. Here’s what it felt like BY TODD GITLIN
Discussion 3
Contributors 6 Dethroning Miss America A protest by women at
Prologue
American Icon: A Wrinkle in Time
9 104 the glitzy beauty pageant in Atlantic City touched off a
revolution that still echoes today BY ROXANE GAY
COVER:
Design by Heroines: Rebels With a Cause
Gail Anderson The Man Who Invented the Future A now-forgotten
and Joe Newton
Art: Mickalene Thomas
Antiquity: Hidden Texts 108 scientist unveiled the personal computer and the internet
decades before they came to be BY VALERIE LANDAU
THIS PAGE: Bibliography: Greatest Lost Stories
Nguyen Thi Lien, National Treasure: Impeachment
a survivor of the Houston, We Have a Photo Our writer solves the
My Lai massacre
of March 16, 1968.
Small Talk: Daniel Stone
Ask Smithsonian 132
112 mystery behind one of the world’s most famous images,
“Earthrise,” taken aboard Apollo 8 BY ANDREW CHAIKIN

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 1

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2 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

 Ava DuVernay is a true
motivator for human
kindness, understanding,
acceptance, change and
self-challenge. A large
Discussion statue of her belongs in
the Smithsonian.
@LillianQuinata ON TWITTER

FROM THE EDITORS Readers cheered the Icy Sacrifice Dustin Hoffman was only cast as Ben-
winners of our sixth annual American In- Ever the cheerleader for science, Kim jamin after Charles Grodin turned
genuity Awards, featured in the Decem- Stanley Robinson states in his excel- down the role, and other initial
ber issue. The musician-actor-producer lent article (“Nightmare On the Ice”) choices, including Burt Ward (Robin
John Legend “is indeed one of the greats,” that “the penguin’s egg [Cherry-Gar- from the “Batman” television series),
Libby Simms Rudolph agreed. “I look for- rard] referred to is science, and the cu- were unavailable. Anne Bancroft (who
ward to his future creations, both music riosity that fuels science.” Ironically, was only six years older than Hoff-
and films.” Our recognition the penguin eggs that man) was cast after producer Larry
of the neurosurgeon Gary Cherry-Garrard deliv- Truman failed to convince French
Steinberg was personal to ered back to England actress Jeanne Moreau to sign on and
Kit Carson: “I can think of were useless scientifi- conversations with other actresses,
no one more deserving of cally, since the assump- including Ava Gardner, Joan Craw-
a Smithsonian American tions about Emperor ford and Angela Lansbury, were un-
Ingenuity Award. I am penguin embryos that satisfactory.
incredibly proud to be a inspired the “worst Phil Hall, film historian
patient of his!” One com- journey” turned out FAIRFIELD, CONNECTICUT
mentator, though, sounded to be wrong. The sci-
a note of caution: “I really entific establishment Corrections
hate the word ‘miracle’ so was indifferent to the In “The Strange Beauty of the Epic
hopefully this research by Dr. Steinberg heroic effort and suffering that went Fail,” we had a misstep of our own: The
opens dialogue on how we as a nation into acquiring them. Vasa frigate is 38.5 feet wide, not 398.
deal with brain injuries and strokes in Carl Grundberg In “Bear Essential” (November), we
a reasonable, science-based manner.” BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA mischaracterized the legality of hunt-
ing grizzlies in Idaho, Montana and
Muppet Mania A Realistic Robot Wyoming. As we reported, there is no
TV is such a great avenue to reach chil- In the final paragraph of “Robot Love,” longer a federal ban on the practice
dren. With the addition of Julia (“The Jeff MacGregor wrote, “One day not in the areas surrounding Yellowstone
Champion: Sesame Street & Julia”), too far, far away . . . C-3PO will be National Park. But the practice re-
hopefully children will have a better rendered by a computer.” Technically, mains against the law in those states,
fundamental understanding of autism he already has been, in the animated which are said to be planning to rule
that may later translate into kindness “Clone Wars” and “Rebels” series. But on whether to approve grizzly hunting
and patience during interactions in Anthony Daniels’ performance is so in the future.
the real world. essential to the role that he’s one of the
April McCarthy very few actors who voiced the same CONTACT US
FACEBOOK character for those spinoffs. Send letters to [email protected] or to
Letters, Smithsonian, MRC 513, P.O. Box
Tim Emrick 37012, Washington, D.C. 20013. Include a
Out of this World LEXINGTON, KENTUCKY telephone number and address. Letters
Inspiring story (“The Explorer: Na- may be edited for clarity or space.
Because of the high volume of mail we
talie Batalha”)! Just as new biologi- From Graduate to Grown-Up receive, we cannot respond to all letters.
cal species are often named for their I would like to offer more context for Send queries about the Smithsonian
discoveries, there should be a newly your tribute to the 1967 film The Gradu- Institution to [email protected] or to OVS,
Public Inquiry Mail Service, P.O. Box
discovered planet Batalha. However, ate (“Here’s to You”). Financier Joseph 37012, Washington, D.C. 20013.
which one of the many? E. Levine was hardly a “schlockmeis-
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January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 3

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Contributors
Ted Conover Gail Anderson
“Trying to make memories that are 50 years and Joe Newton
old vivid” was the trickiest part of reporting The artists, who designed
on the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike this issue’s cover, first
(p. 74), Conover says. But amid the current met when Anderson was
crisis of police shootings, he thought of the Rolling Stone’s senior art
workers’ slogan, “I am a man,” and its reso- director and Newton was
nance today: “It’s the same issue, a certain an aspiring illustrator. The
class of Americans being treated worse than two had the same taste in
everyone else. In some ways the slogan seems music, and stayed in touch
antique; in others, it seems absolutely rel- by mailing each other mix
evant.” Director of NYU’s Arthur L. Carter tapes. Today, they run the
Journalism Institute, Conover has written Anderson Newton Design
several books, including Newjack: Guarding studio in Manhattan and
Sing Sing, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. teach at the School of
Visual Arts. Newton also
ILLUSTRATIONS BY Zina Saunders Nguyen Qui Duc Mike Love illustrates the syndicated
After leaving his The singer and co- “Savage Love” column and
native Vietnam in founder of the Beach Anderson writes about de-
1975, the journalist Boys was performing sign and pop culture.
returned in 2006 on stage the first time
and opened a bar in he saw the Maharishi
Hanoi. The author (p. 42), who was
of Where the Ashes seated between John
Bharat Sikka Charles C. Mann Are: The Odyssey Lennon and George
While photograph- Years after The of a Vietnamese Harrison. “That was a
ing the Beatles’ Population Bomb Family says the Tet heck of a front row!”
ashram (p. 42), “scared the heck” out of Offensive (p. 26) recalls Love, a Rock
Sikka listened to Mann, he interviews au- “left a profound & Roll Hall of Fame in-
The White Album: thor Paul Ehrlich (p. 86). scar,” one he is “still ductee. His new album,
“It was about Mann’s new book, The afraid to dig too Unleash the Love, is Shaun Raviv
evoking some kind Wizard and the Prophet, deeply into.” out now from BMG. After researching the
of emotion of the about clashing scientific 1968 My Lai massacre,
band’s presence visions of the future, Annette Raviv says it was
there, though it was is being published by Gordon-Reed “incredible to go to
many years ago.” Knopf in January. In “Hot Ticket” (p. the site and see it with
22), the Harvard my own eyes.” During
Roxane Gay Aaron Joel professor of law his reporting trip, he
The author of Santos and history and was surprised to find
Bad Feminist With his stunning biographer of himself overcome
examines what has portraits from Andrew Johnson, with emotions while
changed—and what Vietnam (p. 60), reminds us talking with survivors
hasn’t—since 1968’s the Bangkok-based “that history does not have to unfold in a (“The Ghosts of My
Miss America protest photographer aimed particular way. It’s the result of choices Lai,” p. 60). Decades
(p. 104). In 2017, Gay to convey “the people made, and they could have made later, says Raviv, “the
published Hunger, a strength and forti- different ones.” A MacArthur Fellow, experience of the
memoir, and Difficult tude of the survivors Gordon-Reed received the Pulitzer Prize and massacre hasn’t been
Women, a collection we met during our National Book Award for The Hemingses of completely understood
of short stories. travels there.” Monticello: An American Family. by Americans.”

6 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

1965 2018

Walk in the footsteps of giants.

Voting-rights activists John Lewis and Hosea Williams led 600 peaceful marchers
across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, only to be viciously attacked by state
and local lawmen on what became known as Bloody Sunday. Today, you
can walk across the historic Selma, Alabama, bridge, just one of dozens
of inspiring landmarks on the U.S. Civil Rights Trail. To learn more
about heroes as diverse as Georgia’s Martin Luther King Jr. and
Virginia’s 16-year-old Barbara Johns, go to civilrightstrail.com.
What happened here changed the world.
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 prologue
T H E PA S T I S

A M ER I CA N I C ON
By Illustration by
Natalie Escobar Sandra Dionisi

Girl
Power
How A Wrinkle in
Time liberated young
adult literature

The immortal characters Mrs Which, Mrs Whatsit and Mrs Who serve as Meg Murry’s guides throughout time and space.

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 9

prologue

Then came L’Engle, a 41-year-old writer who

spent three months in 1959 writing the hard-to-cat-
egorize story that would become A Wrinkle in Time.
While Meg Murry and her companions traveled
through time and space to save her father, a scientist
trapped by evil forces on a distant planet, readers had
to wrap their minds around the fifth dimension, the

W
horrors of conformity and the power of love. L’Engle
believed that literature should show youngsters they
were capable of taking on the forces of evil in the
universe, not just the everyday pains of growing up.
“If it’s not good enough for adults,” she once wrote,
“it’s not good enough for children.”
Publishers hated it. Every firm her agent turned to
rejected the manuscript. One advised to “do a cutting
job on it—by half.” Another complained “it’s some-
thing between an adult and juvenile novel.” Finally,
a friend advised L’Engle to send it to one of the most Ellen Raskin
prestigious houses of all, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. designed the
first-edition
John Farrar liked the manuscript. A test reader he book cover; she
gave it to, though, was unimpressed: “I think this is later wrote The
Westing Game,
HEN LÉNA ROY was 7 years old, her teacher read the worst book I have ever read, it reminds me of The which won its
the first chapter of A Wrinkle in Time aloud to her Wizard of Oz.” Yet FSG acquired it, and Hal Vursell, own Newbery.
second-grade class. After school, Léna ran to her
grandmother’s house, which was around the corner
from her school on the Upper West Side of Manhat-
tan, to finish the book on her own. She curled up in
bed and devoured it. She felt just like the hotheaded, H e ro i n e s
stubborn heroine Meg Murry, and took comfort in
the fact that a flawed adolescent girl could save the
world. “It was almost like your permission to be a Rebels With UR
A INGAL Ramona
series (1955)
LA

real person,” Roy says. “You don’t have to be perfect.” a Cause LS

Her sister Beatrice
calls her a pest, but
Millions of other adolescent girls (and boys) have bright-eyed Ramona
made the same liberating discovery while reading A The bravest and is mostly curious
(and worried) about
Wrinkle in Time. What’s different about Roy is that brainiest girls in growing up.
her grandmother happened to be Madeleine L’Engle, literature have been Little House ONA QUIM
the book’s author, who revolutionized serious young breaking the rules on the Prairie M
RA

BY
(1932)
adult fiction with her clever mash-up of big ideas, for 150 years Impetuous Laura
science fantasy and adventure—and a geeky girl ac- By Natalie Escobar embodies frontier
spirit, standing up to
tion hero way ahead of her time. hardship (and a bear)
Since its 1962 publication, Wrinkle has sold more to become a teacher.
than ten million copies and been turned into a graphic
novel, an opera and two films, including an ambitious
adaptation from the director Ava DuVernay due out
in March. The book also kicked open the door for
M AR CH Anne of Green CY DRE To Kill a
other bright young heroines and the amazingly lu- JO Gables (1908) AN Mockingbird
W
N

crative franchises they appear in, from whip-smart The red-haired (1960)
orphan’s bold Growing up in
Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter books to le- personality stuns Alabama, spunky
thal Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games. Leonard villagers and Scout puts herself
brightens the lives of in others’ shoes to
Marcus, author of the L’Engle biography Listening her adoptive parents. grasp a painful truth.
for Madeleine, says Wrinkle “set the stage for the re- UT FINC
Little Women E SHIRLE Nancy Drew
ception of Harry Potter in this country.” Previously, (1868) NN books CO
H
S
A

Tomboyish Jo (1930)
he says, science fiction and fantasy were suitable for
refuses to let Smartly dressed
high-end British authors like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. household duties amateur sleuth
Tolkien in Britain but in the States were relegated to get in the way of inspires countless
what she loves readers, e.g.,
pulp magazines and drugstore paperbacks. most—writing. Hillary Rodham.

10 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

 A M ER I CA N I C ON

the book’s editor, talked it up in letters he sent to

reviewers: “It’s distinctly odd, extremely well writ-
ten,” he wrote to one, “and is going to make greater
intellectual and emotional demands on 12 to 16 year
olds than most formula fiction for this age group.”
When it debuted, not only was Wrinkle widely
praised—“wholly absorbing,” said the New York
Times Book Review—but it won the Newbery Medal,
the most important award in children’s lit. “The
almost universal reaction of children to this year’s
winning book, by wanting to talk about it to each
other and to elders, shows the deep desire to under-
stand as well as to enjoy,” said Newbery committee
member Ruth Gagliardo. American publishers, ini-
tially resistant to genre bending, soon were produc-
ing their own teen epics, including Lloyd Alexander’s
Newbery-winning Chronicles of Prydain books and
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series.
L’Engle went on to write more than 40 books, in-
cluding works of nonfiction and poetry, though none
was as acclaimed as Wrinkle. None was as controver-
sial, either. Libraries and schools frequently banned
the novel because of its entanglements with re-

MURR The Mixed-Up Files IE LOGA The Baby-Sitters IAH GRE The Book Thief HÀ
EG Y S
SW
M of Mrs. Basil E. AS Club (1986) (2005)
TO

EN
N
C

Frankweiler (1967) Claudia calmly defies The foster child in

Savvy Claudia and her parents and Nazi Germany loves
her brother hide at the Asian-American books, rescuing them
Metropolitan Museum stereotypes, making from bonfires and
and solve a great art and wearing stealing them from
art mystery. funky clothes. the mayor’s wife.
A Wrinkle in D IA KINC Roll of Thunder, UDIA KIS Hush (2000) L MEMING Inside Out
Time (1962) AU Hear My Cry LA She overcomes SE and Back Again
HI
AI

LIE
CL

ER

(1976) (2011)
D

A stubborn heartbreak when

14-year-old with As an African- her family enters A Vietnamese
a love of math, American in southern witness protection War refugee in the
Meg journeys to Mississippi, Cassie after her father, a States, Hà copes with
another planet to fights back against cop, testifies against culture shock—and
save her father. her racist neighbors. corrupt police. stands up to bullies.

The Hunger
M. WELSC Are You There C OR D E Harry Potter ZA ORTE AR
R CART
T God? It’s Me, ZA R series (1997) AN Games series E
ST
GA
ESPERAN
E

(2008)
R
ESPER

Margaret. (1970)
HARRI

The brilliant witch

Irreverent Margaret, Hermione uses her Katniss becomes
11, flouts convention quick wit and vast a warrior and
by talking candidly knowledge to revolutionary when she
with God about her help Harry and risks her life to spare
personal anxieties. Ron fight evil. her young sister’s.

Harriet the RET SIMO The House on GRAN G Esperanza EVE R D E E The Hate
Spy (1964) GA Mango Street NE E Rising (2002) SS U Give (2017)
O

N
N

KATN
MA R

(1984)
HERMI

The misfit’s caustic Resourceful 16-year-old Starr’s

observations turn Harassed by men Esperanza flees fierce sense of justice
friends into foes; and frustrated by Mexico with family leads her to testify
she prevails when poverty, plucky and adapts to life in a heated trial after
she takes over the Esperanza sets out to in California during her childhood friend is
school paper. find a place of her own. the Depression. killed by a policeman.

M AC M I L L I A N ; I N C H R O N O LO G I C A L O R D E R : A L A M Y ( 4 ) ; H A R P E R COL L I N S ; A L A M Y; M AC M I L L I A N ; © PA R A M O U N T / E V E R E T T CO L L E C T I O N ; E V E R E T T CO L L E C T I O N ;
PE NGUIN RAND OM H OU S E ( 3 ) ; AL AM Y( 2) ; P E N GUIN RA N D O M H O US E ; S C H O L A S T IC ; A L A M Y; E V E R ETT CO LLECTIO N ; H A R PER CO LLIN S (2 )
prologue
AME RICAN ICO N
By
Tiffany Y. Ates

ligion. In one passage, Jesus Christ is

compared to Shakespeare, Einstein and
the Buddha—a heretical notion to some
authorities. On the American Library As-
sociation’s list of most “frequently chal-
lenged” for the 1990s, Wrinkle was No. 23.
Among the countless girls changed
forever by L’Engle’s book was Diane
Duane, who first read it as a 10-year-old
in 1962. She’d consumed all the science
fiction and fantasy at her local library but
had never encountered anyone like Meg.
“Finally,” Duane recalls, “here was a girl
character being treated as if her take on
what was going on around her, her anal-
ysis and her emotional reactions to the
things that were happening around her,
were real and were worth paying atten-
tion to.” Today Duane is hailed as the
best-selling author of So You Want to Be
a Wizard and other titles in her Young
Wizards fantasy series, which features a
young female protagonist, Nita. “All the
time L’Engle’s shadow—and a very bright
shadow, it has to be said—was lying over
that work for me,” she says. “It would
have been very difficult for me to do that
writing without thinking about her a lot.”
Léna Roy, who is a writing teacher in
New York and the co-author of an up-
coming biography of her grandmother,
Becoming Madeleine, doesn’t remem-
ber L’Engle ever calling herself a fem-
inist, though she was proud of being
what Roy calls a “trailblazing woman.”
L’Engle had spent her years at Smith MUSES OF MODERN ART
College editing the campus literary
magazine alongside Betty Friedan, who How a celebrated portraitist’s
later penned The Feminine Mystique.
L’Engle herself suggested it was easy to
glittering image of black women
make her protagonist a strong girl. “I’m upends tradition
a female,” she once said. “Why would I
give all the best ideas to a male?”
Now the movie adaptation of Wrinkle HAT DOES IT MEAN to redefine art
is poised to make L’Engle’s creation even
more groundbreaking. DuVernay, the
first woman of color to direct a live-ac-
tion film with a production budget over
$100 million, intentionally cast non-
W history? For Mickalene Thomas, a lu-
minary of the contemporary art world
who specializes in dazzling collage por-
traits, it means “reclaiming canonized
images of beauty and reinterpreting
white actors in lead roles. (Storm Reid them.” Her take on Édouard Manet’s celebrated
will play Meg, and Deric McCabe will 1863 canvas Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon
play her younger brother Charles.) In on the Grass), in which two formally dressed men
1962, it was radical to see a young girl in lounge in a wooded scene with a nude woman, is
charge. Now a new generation of black the bold image above, which she titles Le déjeuner
girls (and boys) can see themselves on- sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires (The Three
screen and dream of saving the world. Black Women). This 10- by 24-foot collage, part of

12 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

 ART

a new group exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum, fabrics, unapologetic bold prints and sometimes

COURTE SY TH E ARTI ST AND LE HMANN MAUPI N, NEW YO RK AND HONG KONG

In a survey of art
depicts the subjects in a mosaic of vibrant colors, experts, Thomas’ nude, mirror Pam Grier-esque heroines while also
fragmented shapes, rhinestones and glittered Afros. 2010 collage was subverting the motif of the odalisque, or courtesan.
named one of the
©MI CKALENE THOMA S / A RTI ST RI GHTS SOC IETY (ARS), NEW YORK.
“These women are so grounded and perfectly com- most significant “By portraying real women with their own unique
fortable in their own space,” says Catharina Man- artworks of the history, beauty and background, I’m working to di-
21st century.
chanda, a curator at the museum. “While we might versify the representations of black women in art,”
be looking at them, they are also sizing us up.” Thomas tells Smithsonian.
For the past decade, Thomas, an African-Ameri- Outside of academic art circles and the gallery
can Yale-trained artist in her 40s who lives in New scene, Thomas is a kind of Renaissance rock star in
York City, has concentrated on creating portraits, her own right. She has created a commissioned por-
in various formats, of black women—her muses, trait for the R&B artist Solange Knowles, directed an
she calls them. This gesture in itself challenges introspective HBO documentary, Happy Birthday to
conventional notions of femininity, sexuality and a Beautiful Woman, and was herself the subject of a
blackness in art history, especially given the com- portrait by the famed painter Kehinde Wiley.
plicated role of black bodies in 19th-century paint- Thomas’ artwork, which critics have called post-
ings. Often working from her own studio photo- black and post-feminist because of its nuanced re-
graphs of models, Thomas has a singular aesthetic belliousness, is helping to generate American art’s
combining memories of her ’70s childhood, pop next wave, which will be more culturally diverse.
culture and classical art in large-scale works that “What’s happening in art and history right now is
often seem to draw on chic blaxploitation films like the validation and agency of the black female body,”
Gordon Parks’ Shaft. Her muses, adorned in lush she says. “We do not need permission to be present.”

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 13

prologue
A N TI QU I TY
By
Jo Marchant

Books of A new project to scan manuscripts

Revelation at the world’s oldest monastery is
exposing amazing ancient texts

L An illustrated Greek medical text was found beneath the oldest Arabic translation of the Gospels.

AST SUMMER, Giulia Rossetto, a

specialist in ancient texts at the
University of Vienna, was on a
train home to Pordenone, in north-
ern Italy, when she switched on her
laptop and opened a series of pho-
tographs of a manuscript known as
“Arabic New Finds 66.”
It is no ordinary manuscript. In antiquity, it was
common practice when parchment supplies were
limited to scrape the ink from old manuscripts,
with chemicals or pumice stones, and reuse them.
The resulting double-text is called a palimpsest, and
the manuscript Rossetto was studying contained
several pages whose Christian text, a collection of
saints’ lives written in tenth-century Arabic, hid a
much older text beneath, in faintest Greek. Nothing
was known about what this “undertext” contained.
Rossetto, a PhD student, was given the images as an
afterthought, when an older scholar complained that
reading them was beyond his failing eyesight.
But these were no ordinary photographs, either.
They were taken using a state-of-the-art technique
known as multispectral imaging, or MSI, in which
each page of a text is photographed many times
while illuminated by different colors and wave-
COURTE SY OF S T. CATH ERI NE ’S MONASTE RY OF THE SINAI, EG YPT

14 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

prologue
ANTIQUIT Y

lengths of light, and then analyzed using computer mulated over the centuries and remarkably well pre-
algorithms to find a combination that most clearly served by the dry and stable climate. The monks at St.
distinguishes the two layers of text. As Rossetto’s Catherine’s were particularly fond of reusing older
train sped through the Austrian Alps, she flipped be- parchment for their religious texts. Today the library
tween the images, adjusting the contrast, brightness holds at least 160 palimpsests—likely the largest col-
and hue to minimize the appearance of the Arabic lection in the world. But the ancient scribes did their
overtext while picking out tiny Greek letters, each job frustratingly well. In most cases, the texts under-
around three millimeters tall. neath were hidden and, until now, thought lost.
The style of the script suggested that it was proba-
bly written in Egypt in the fifth or sixth century, and St. Catherine’s, a community of 25 or so Greek Or-
Rossetto expected another Christian text. Instead, thodox monks at the foot of Mount Sinai, transcends
history, in that ancient traditions live on into the
present day. The first mention of its written collec-
tion comes from an account by a fourth-century pil-
I WAS SO EAGER TO GO IN AND SEE EVERYTHING grim named Egeria, who described how the monks
ELSE, AND I COULDN’T.” THEN, ABOUT TEN YEARS read biblical passages to her when she visited a
chapel built to commemorate Moses’ burning bush.
AGO, “THEY MADE ME THE LIBRARIAN. In the sixth century, the Byzantine emperor Justin-
ian protected that chapel with hefty granite walls.
Fifteen hundred years later, they stand intact.
As you approach it, the sand-colored monastery,
she began to see names from mythology: Persephone, nestled low on the mountain, looks humble and time-
Zeus, Dionysus. The lost writing was classical Greek. less, like something made of the desert. Inside is a war-
There was no internet connection on the train. ren of stone steps, arches and alleyways; a square bell
But as soon as she got home, Rossetto rushed to her tower draws the eye upward toward the jagged moun-
computer to check her transcription against known tain peaks above. Despite the rise and fall of surround-
classical texts. “I tried different combinations, and ing civilizations, life here has changed remarkably lit-
there was nothing,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘Wow, tle. The monks’ first daily worship still begins at 4 a.m.
this is something new.’ ” Central to St. Catherine’s, now as in Egeria’s time,
In his poem “Endymion,” based on a Greek myth is the library, and the person in charge of it is the Rev.
about a shepherd beloved by the moon goddess Se- Justin Sinaites, who wears a long, gray beard and the
lene, John Keats paid tribute to the enduring power black robes traditional to his faith. Born in Texas and
of superior works of art. “A thing of beauty is a joy brought up Protestant, Father Justin, as he prefers to
for ever,” he wrote. “Its loveliness increases; it will be known, discovered Greek Orthodoxy while study-
never / Pass into nothingness.” Surely to uncover ing Byzantine history at the University of Texas at
lost poetry from an ancient civilization from which Austin. After converting to the faith, he spent more
we draw so many of our literary traditions is as excit- than 20 years living at a monastery in Massachu-
ing as unearthing any material treasure. setts, where, as head of the monastery’s publications,
And this promise reaches beyond aesthetics. When he became adept at using computer and desktop pub-
classical Greek literature was rediscovered during lishing technology. In 1996, Father Justin moved to
the European Renaissance, it remade Western civ- St. Catherine’s, and when the monastery’s abbot de-
ilization, and planted seeds that still shape our lives cided to digitize the library’s manuscript collection
today: Thomas Jefferson’s ideas about the pursuit of to make it available to scholars around the world,
happiness were sparked by the Greek philosophers; Father Justin was asked to lead the effort.
suffragists were inspired by Euripides’ heroine Me- When I reached Father Justin in Egypt by tele-
dea. Like finding an old photograph of a long-dead phone last fall, he was thoughtful and articulate,
relative, discovering a lost piece of text can help us and gave the impression, like the monastery itself,
glimpse ourselves in the people who came before us. of existing on a plane outside of worldly limitations.
Rossetto’s text is just one of hundreds whose re- Asked to describe the physical size of the library, he
covery was recently announced by researchers par- at first seemed baffled. “I don’t think in those terms,”
ticipating in a project to decipher the secrets of a he said. During our conversation, he routinely an-
unique treasury. In the Sinai Desert, in Egypt, a mon- swered my questions with stories rooted hundreds
astery called St. Catherine’s hosts the world’s oldest of years in the past. Because the librarian alone was
continually operating library, used by monks since allowed to access the library vaults, the manuscripts
the fourth century. In addition to printed books, the were always brought to him one by one, their dark-
library contains more than 3,000 manuscripts, accu- ened edges and drops of candle wax testament to

16 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

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 prologue
ANTIQUIT Y

centuries of wear and use. “I was so eager to go in and accessible for study. Beginning in 2011, Phelps and
see everything else, and I couldn’t,” he says. Then, other members of the project made 15 visits to the
about ten years ago, “they made me the librarian.” monastery over five years, each time driving for
Finally he could explore the full collection, in- hours through the Sinai Desert, the site of ongoing
cluding the palimpsests. The problem was that there conflict between Egyptian security forces and Is-
didn’t seem much hope of reading them. But in 2008, lamic militants. Many of the palimpsests come from
researchers in the United States announced the a cache of about 1,100 manuscripts found in a tower
completion of a ten-year project to use multispectral of the monastery’s north wall in 1975, and consist
imaging to read lost works by the Greek mathema- of damaged leaves left behind when the library was
tician Archimedes hidden beneath the liturgy of a moved in the 18th century, then hidden for protec-
13th-century Byzantine prayer book. Father Justin, tion after an earthquake. They are tinder dry, falling
who already knew members of the group, asked if to pieces and often nibbled by rats.
they would come to St. Catherine’s. Father Justin brought each palimpsest out in
The resulting collaboration, known as the Sinai turn to be photographed by the project’s chief
Palimpsests Project, is directed by Michael Phelps of camera operator, Damianos Kasotakis, who used a
the California-based Early Manuscripts Electronic 50-megapixel camera custom-built in California.
Library, a nonprofit research group that works with Photographing each page took about seven minutes,
universities such as UCLA and other institutions to the shutter clicking repeatedly while the page was
digitize historical source materials and make them illuminated by infrared, visible and ultraviolet lights

B i b l i o g ra p hy

Disappearing Ink
From Rome’s holiest texts to a Chinese manuscript that wouldn’t
have fit inside a shipping container, here’s our Top 10 list of the
most important ancient documents that no longer exist

SIBYLLINE BOOKS MAYAN CODICES

Roman leaders consulted these Out of perhaps thousands of bark-
oracular sayings during political crises cloth books recording Mayan history,
for perhaps 900 years. The originals culture and religion—written in hiero-
burned in 83 B.C. Their replacements glyphics as early as the 9th century—
were allegedly destroyed by a 5th-cen- fewer than five texts survive. The rest
tury Roman general who feared that were burned by conquistadors and
invading Visigoths would use them. Catholic monks in the 16th century.

SAPPHO’S POEMS PANCHATANTRA YONGLE ENCYCLOPEDIA

In the 6th century B.C. she composed This collection of beloved Indian ani- More than 2,000 scholars contributed
10,000 lines of poetry, filling nine vol- mal fables, written as early as 100 B.C., to this 11,000-volume Ming dynasty
umes. Fewer than 70 complete lines is known to us from early translations in text on subjects ranging from agricul-
exist. But those have made Lesbos’ Pahlavi (now lost), Syriac and Arabic— ture to art, theology and natural sci-
most famous daughter (as classicist the original Sanskrit source vanished. ences. Half of 800 remaining volumes
Daniel Mendelsohn has called her) A Hebrew translation was the basis for burned in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900;
a revered lyric poet of erotic love. a popular version in medieval Europe. 3 percent of the original text survives.

AESCHYLUS’ ACHILLEIS ZOROASTRIAN AVESTA IBN AL-HAYTHAM’S TREATISES

The famed Greek dramatist’s (c. The holy book of ancient Persia’s The Iraq-born medieval mathemati-
525-456 B.C.) tragic trilogy is thought quasi-monotheistic creed survives as a cian, astronomer and physicist, whose
to have reframed the Trojan War as a sprawling collection of fragments—an work on optics (in a Latin translation
reckoning with contemporary Athe- estimated one-quarter of the original of the Arabic) and the scientific
nian democracy. An estimated total of text. The last complete manuscripts method influenced thinkers in Europe,
more than 80 of his works are lost to may have burned when Alexander the wrote more than 200 works. Only 55
history. Seven plays survive. Great conquered Persepolis in 330 B.C. survive in any language.

CONFUCIUS’ SIXTH CLASSIC BOOK OF THE CHRONICLES

We still have the “Five Classics” OF THE KINGS OF ISRAEL
traditionally ascribed to the Chinese The Hebrew Bible refers to some
philosopher, covering poetry, rhetoric, 20 works that no longer exist. The Research by
ancient rites, history and divination. frequently cited “Chronicles” was a Duncan Barile
The sixth, on music, may have disap- detailed early Iron Age history from
peared in the 3rd-century-B.C. “Burn- which numerous other biblical narra- Illustration by
ing of Books and Burying of Scholars.” tives may have been drawn. Harry Campbell

18 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

that ran across the color spectrum. The research- medicine, which are four centuries older than any
ers toyed with different filters, lighting from strange copies previously known. Other fragments include
angles, anything they could think of that might help bits as unexpected as a version of an ancient Greek
pick out details from a page’s surface. Then a group adventure story called Apollonius of Tyre, which is
of imaging specialists based in the United States now the oldest known Latin translation and the ear-
“stacked” the images for each page to create a “digital liest with illustrations by 500 years.
cube,” and designed algorithms, some based on satel- Guilia Rossetto, who discovered her own celebrity
lite imaging technology, that would most clearly rec- manuscript aboard a train ride home to Italy, is still
ognize and enhance the letters beneath the overtext. piecing together the implications of her find. So far
“You just throw everything you can think of at it,” she has deciphered 89 lines of text (many of them
Kasotakis says, “and pray for the best.” incomplete) and learned that they belong to a previ-

Perhaps someone was listening. Late last year, the

monastery and the Early Manuscripts Electronic Li-
brary announced at a conference in Athens that over THERE’S AN EVEN BIGGER DISCOVERY
the five-year period they had imaged 6,800 pages
from 74 palimpsests, which will be made accessi-
EMERGING FROM THIS PROJECT: THE SURPRISING
ble online by UCLA sometime in early 2018. So far, HISTORY OF ST. CATHERINE’S ITSELF.
their work has revealed more than 284 erased texts
in ten languages, including classical, Christian and
Jewish texts dating from the fifth century until the
12th century. The collection is being compared to ously unknown poem written in Greek hexameter—
the greatest manuscript discoveries of the 20th cen- the same scheme used for Homer’s epics. They tell of
tury, including the Nag Hammadi codices of Egypt a myth in which Dionysus, the young son of Zeus and
and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Persephone, sits on a throne as a group of murder-
Already, as a part of the Sinai Palimpsests Proj- ous Titans tries to win his confidence. Rossetto also
ect, some two dozen scholars from across Europe, found the number 23 in the text, which she believes
the United States and the Middle East are poring denotes a book number, hinting, she says, that the
over these texts. One of the most exciting finds is a lines might come from the Rhapsodies, attributed by
palimpsest made up of scraps from at least ten older the ancients to the mythical poet Orpheus and col-
books. The manuscript is a significant text in its own lected in 24 books, like Homer’s poems. The Rhapso-
right: the earliest known version of the Christian dies were widely studied until at least the sixth cen-
Gospels in Arabic, dating from the eighth or ninth tury, but are today known only through fragmentary
century. But what’s underneath, Phelps predicts, will quotations by later philosophers.
make it a “celebrity manuscript”—several previously Now Rossetto has found what may be lines from
unknown medical texts, dating to the fifth or sixth the Rhapsodies themselves. The discovery, says
century, including drug recipes, instructions for sur- Claudia Rapp, a professor of Byzantine studies at
gical procedures (including how to remove a tumor), the University of Vienna and Rossetto’s supervisor,
and references to other tracts that may provide clues is the kind of thing that appears perhaps once in a
about the foundations of ancient medicine. generation. “The dream of everybody working with
Another fragment of this palimpsest contains a palimpsest material is to find previously unknown
beautiful two-page illustration of a flowering plant— bits of classical texts from pagan antiquity.”
from an “herbal,” or guide to medicinal plants, which
Nigel Wilson, a classicist at Oxford who is studying The secrets of each individual manuscript will keep
the text, believes may be a work by Crateuas, physi- scholars busy for years to come. Yet there’s an even
cian to the poison-obsessed Anatolian king Mithra- bigger discovery emerging from this project, beyond
dates in the first century B.C. Copies of his drawings the many textual revelations: the surprising history
made as late as 600 years after his death survive, but of St. Catherine’s itself.
until now we only knew his writings through quo- Rapp, who also serves as the Sinai project’s scholar-
tations by the first-century physician Dioscorides. ly director, has been especially intrigued to learn what
“This is the first scrap we’ve got of an actual manu- the palimpsests reveal about the process by which
script of his work,” says Wilson. parchments were reused. In none of them is there an
From the same palimpsest Agamemnon Tselikas, apparent relationship between the overtext and un-
director of the Center for History and Palaeography dertext, she says. Indeed, scattered pages from mul-
in Athens, recovered the earliest known versions of tiple older manuscripts, in different languages, were
classic texts by Hippocrates, the father of Western often brought together to make a new book. Rather

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 19

prologue
ANTIQUITY

than individual scribes selecting

manuscripts to scrape clean for
personal use, this suggests an or-
ganized production, perhaps even
commercial circulation, of recy-
cled parchment sheets.
And the sheer variety of lan-
guages uncovered was entirely
unexpected. Some of the texts are
even helping to reconstruct lost
languages, including Caucasian
Albanian, spoken in an ancient
kingdom in present-day Azerbai-
jan, and Christian Palestinian Ara-
maic, used by Christians in Pales-
tine until the 13th century.
Researchers also discovered
several Greek texts translated
into Syriac, which was first spo-
ken by Syrian Christians before
becoming a major literary lan-
guage throughout the Middle
East. We already know that in
the eighth and ninth centuries,
the Islamic caliphate, then based
in Baghdad, sponsored a huge program to translate hunch. It’s exceedingly unlikely that the pages were
Greek classical knowledge through Syriac into Ar- St. Catherine’s carried from Sinai to Rome, to Britain, and then back
sixth-century
abic (a project that helped save much of classical walls rise as high again. Instead, she says, monks from these distinct
Western knowledge during the Dark Ages). These as 65 feet and Western communities must have been working at
protect sites
Syriac undertexts show that Christian scholars at St. including a fourth- St. Catherine’s over the centuries.
Catherine’s were a part of this effort. “We can see this century chapel. Put all of that together, and our view of this humble
great translation movement in process,” Phelps says. outpost is transformed. We might think of the Sinai
Each surprise adds a piece to the puzzle. The dis- Desert merely as a remote wilderness where the Jews
covery of two unknown Christian texts in the ancient wandered for decades after their escape from Egyp-
language of Ge’ez suggests that Ethiopian monks, who tian slavery. But the diverse findings of the palimp-
were not thought to have had much contact with Sinai sests project offer stunning testimony to St. Cather-
in antiquity, may once have practiced at the monas- ine’s role as a vibrant cosmopolitan center and a key
tery. And one palimpsest, which Michelle Brown, a player in the cultural history of East and West, where
former curator at the British Library in London, de- people of different languages and communities met
scribes as a “Sinai sandwich,” is remarkable for the re- and exchanged practices and intellectual traditions.
lationship it suggests between four different layers of “It is a place where people made the effort to travel to,”
text. Its oldest layer was written in Greek, at St. Cath- says Rapp. “And they came from all over the world.”
erine’s. Next is an undertext in a Latin script used
in Italy at the turn of the seventh century, then an For Father Justin, the project represents a remark-
eighth-century Latin insular script, a style of writing able opportunity to extend what he calls a “living tra-
pioneered by monks in Ireland that flourished in the dition” at St. Catherine’s, in which each manuscript
British Isles. The top layer is an Arabic script written is not only a holy object but a tangible witness to vis-
at St. Catherine’s around the turn of the tenth century. itors from the remote past. For centuries, the mon-
This is a real breakthrough—a “smoking gun,” astery’s walls protected these manuscripts, but the
Brown says. Scholars have assumed that there was political situation outside remains turbulent; last
little contact between the Middle East and the West spring, militants allied with ISIS killed a policeman
in the Middle Ages, before the Crusades, but Brown a few hundred yards from its gates. Although Father
GETTY I MAGE S

suspected from what she could already make out of Justin insists this danger isn’t representative, he
the palimpsest and other fragments at St. Cather- hopes the imaging project will help to protect the
ine’s that this view was wrong. The layering of these manuscripts’ treasures for centuries to come: “That
scripts revealed by the new imaging supports her is our obligation and our challenge today.”

20 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

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prologue
NATIONAL TRE ASU RE

Hot
Ticket
The biggest show in Washington 150
years ago was President Andrew
Johnson’s impeachment hearings
I T PROMISED TO BE a spectacle in a pe-
riod that had seen its share of them. Three
years after the end of a bloody civil war
that had sundered the Union, and nearly
three years after the assassination of
Abraham Lincoln, the government of the
United States had triggered the most se-
rious process in the constitutional mech-
anism: the power of impeachment.
On February 24, 1868, the House of Representa-
tives voted along party lines, 126 to 47, to impeach
President Andrew Johnson for having commit-
 By Photograph by
Annette Gordon-Reed Wendel A. White

THE NEWSPAPERS REPORTED EVERY

INCIDENT WITH RELISH AND HUGE CROWDS
SOUGHT ADMISSION TO THE SENATE.

ted “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Days later, a angered members of Congress and many Northern-
House committee drew up nine articles of impeach- Tickets were ers as well. His decision to fire the secretary of war,
color-coded
ment against the 17th president. They would later to indicate dates Edwin M. Stanton, with whom he had political dis-
add two more. The vast majority of the articles were for the proceed- agreements, was simply the last of what Congress
ings, which
related to the main charge against Johnson: that he lasted more than considered to be Johnson’s long train of abuses.
had violated the Tenure of Office Act, which prohib- two months. After the House vote, the action moved to the Sen-
ited the president from removing, without Senate ate, to fulfill its duty to conduct a trial and determine
approval, any official who had been appointed to whether Johnson would remain in office. Trials have
office “with the advice and consent of the Senate.” always been a spectator sport. For centuries, the pub-
Congress had enacted the law to check John- lic has followed them in newspapers and by attending
son’s behavior. The Tennessean, who had remained the proceedings. The trial of Andrew Johnson was no
loyal to the Union, called Southerners who rebelled different. It began on March 5, 1868, and the country
“traitors” and said forcefully that “treason must be was riveted. “The newspapers,” according to histo-
punished,” changed his harsh tune once he became rian Hans L. Trefousse, “reported every incident with
president after Lincoln’s death. He embarked upon relish and huge crowds sought admission to the Sen-
a program of conciliation toward the white South, ate.” Access to the Senate trial was limited to ticket
emboldening the former Confederates in ways that holders, and a fortunate few members of the public

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 23

prologue
S M A L L TAL K

crowded into the gallery to hear the sena-

tors make their cases. (The ticket shown
here is in the collections of the Smith-
sonian National Museum of American
History.) Some legislators had developed
reputations as great performers in a
courtroom setting, and could be counted
on to entertain the rapt audience.
Obviously, this was about much more
than an entertaining trial. The confronta-
tion between Johnson and the men who
wanted to remove him from office, the so-
called Radical Republicans, was a fight
over the future direction of the United
States; a fight with implications that
reverberate to this day. Johnson’s real
crime in the eyes of opponents was that
he had used the power of the presidency
to prevent Congress from giving aid to
the four million African-Americans freed
after the Civil War. Johnson’s deep antip-
athy toward black people, not his view of
the Constitution, guided his actions.
What did it mean for the country’s
future that the man at the head of the
government—at a moment when black
people’s fortunes were being decided— The Forgotten Story of the
hated blacks? Johnson had opposed
slavery because he thought it hurt the
Man Who Gave Us Kale
class of poor whites from which he had America’s first adventurer-botanist and “food
come. Blacks were to be freed but left spy” was David Fairchild, who traveled the
to the mercy of white Southerners. His world over a century ago in search of exotic
plan of action—to put whites back in crops. Daniel Stone serves up the history
charge in the South—set him on a col- in a new book, The Food Explorer
lision course with the Radical Republi- By Anna Diamond
cans, who believed that the South must
be transformed to incorporate blacks
into American society as equals. What did Fairchild do as a “food spy”? one who’s eaten an avocado from Central
His role, sanctioned by the president and America or citrus from Asia can trace those
Johnson opposed congressional the secretary of agriculture, was to find ex- foods back to his efforts. Those fruits hadn’t
measures adopted to try to help Afri- otic crops and bring them back. Sometimes permeated American agriculture until
can-Americans become productive it was diplomatic. And sometimes he would Fairchild and the USDA created a system
members of society with the dignity steal things. He went to Bavaria to acquire to distribute seeds, cuttings and growing
better hops. German growers had the tips. Fairchild went to great lengths, at times
accorded to whites. He opposed black world’s best hops and didn’t want anyone to risking his life, to find truly novel crops, like
suffrage, land reform and efforts to pro- get them, so they hired young men to guard dates from Iraq and Egyptian cotton.
tect blacks against the violence that the fields at night. Fairchild befriended Fairchild helped plant D.C.’s Japanese
Southern whites unleashed upon them these growers. It was covert work, and he cherry trees. He was in Japan around
after the war’s end. Because he had no didn’t outright steal the hops, but he did the turn of the 20th century when he saw
eventually acquire them and brought them the flowering cherry trees. He arranged a
vice president, if Johnson had been re- back to the U.S. That really helped balloon shipment for his house in Maryland, where
moved from office—he was impeached, America’s hops-growing industry. people would come see them, and even-
but not convicted and removed from of- What effect did his missions have? If Fair- tually for the Tidal Basin in D.C. They were
fice—Benjamin Wade, the president pro child hadn’t traveled to expand the Ameri- planted on the National Mall in 1912.
tempore, would have taken his place. A can diet, our supermarkets would look a lot What was Fairchild’s favorite food discov-
JARED SOARES

President Wade—Radical Republican different. You certainly wouldn’t have kale, ery? The mangosteen (unrelated to the man-
which he picked up in Austria-Hungary, to go). He thought that Americans would love
and champion of black rights—might the extent that you do today. Or food like it and tried repeatedly to introduce it, but it
have altered the course of American quinoa from Peru, which was introduced only grows in tropical climates, and doesn’t
history, perhaps for the better. back then, but took off a century later. Any- grow much fruit, so it never really caught on.

24 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

It can take up to 1,000 years for Mother Nature to make one inch of topsoil.
Researchers are evolving digital tools that can help farmers measure,
track and protect this vital resource 24/7. Learn how big ideas help us have
a smaller impact at ModernAg.org
In Search
of Vietnam The battles
of 1968 are
long over. But
the struggle
to confront
the truth
photographs by Binh Dang goes on
essay by Nguyen Qui Duc

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 27

 A few years ago, a French-German TV crew
visited my home in Hanoi for an interview on
how Vietnam had changed since the end of the
war with America. We talked of postwar prob-
lems, the people’s achievements, the old and new
generations of leaders, and the country’s aspira-
tions. We also talked of history, of course.
At one point, our conversation veered toward the
events surrounding the Tet Offensive, in January
1968. It took but a few seconds for the government
media minder, an official of the foreign ministry, to
stop us. Agitated, she told me to stay inside while
she took the producer and reporter out to my gar-
den, where she threatened to shut down the pro-
duction if the subject was broached again, or even
if we returned to the general topic of 1968.
Later, I told her about all the information on
the war that was freely available: books, docu-
COURTESY NG UY EN QUI DUC

mentary films, television shows, photographs, ar-

ticles, essays. I showed her Google listings. I tried
to point out that the more she tried to suppress
the information, the more that journalists would
dig deeper. I could barely hide my anger.
“You will not talk about that,” she kept saying.
“You will not.”

28 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

PREVIOUS SPREAD: A new dragon statue guards the
Citadel in Hue, seized by northern forces during the
1968 Tet Offensive but then recaptured in some of
the fiercest combat of the Vietnam War.
THIS SPREAD: The author (opposite) as a boy. Viet-
cong guerrillas occupied Hue’s Vy Da section (be-
low) and targeted civilians for prison or execution.

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 29

 of Hue civilians? Not a word.
Shortly after the commu-
nists were driven out, people
in Hue began to discover
mass graves. South Vietnam-
ese government television
channels showed horrifying
scenes of grieving families
and unidentified corpses
that had been hastily buried.
Some were presumed to be
the intellectuals and teach-
ers, government cadres, civil
servants and administrators
who had gone missing during
the communist occupation.
Physical evidence showed
that many of them had been
tied, blindfolded and shot
Fifty years after the fact, the Tet Offensive is rec- point-blank, or buried alive.
ognized as the pivotal event in the pivotal year of No one knows exactly how
the war—a military loss for North Vietnam but a many people were killed;
political victory, as the shock of the attack began to several accounts put it at
turn American public opinion against the conflict. more than 3,000, most of
Breaking a truce that was supposed to allow the them civilians. They died in
warring sides to celebrate Tet, or the Lunar New a deliberate campaign by the
Year, communist leaders sent tens of thousands communist forces to destroy
of soldiers and Vietcong guerrillas into cities and Hue’s government. This
military bases all over South Vietnam, including massacre is deeply embedded
Saigon, home of the U.S. Embassy. They believed in Western accounts of the
they could take the Army of the Republic of Viet- battle for Hue but little-dis-
nam and its U.S. allies by surprise, and inspire a cussed in Vietnam. And yet,
general uprising that would overthrow the gov- in what was, for the Viet-
ernment of the south. They succeeded in the first namese people, a civil war,
mission but failed in the second. They sustained the fratricidal nature of this
heart-stopping losses—the U.S. reported 40,000 event could not have been
enemy casualties—and quickly ceded whatever more stark.
ground they’d taken. This is what I had be-
But not in Hue, the former gun to tell the journalists
imperial capital, in cen- about when the government
tral Vietnam. The battle minder cut us off.
Hanoi
for Hue ground on for 26 running back and forth in the
days, and proved to be one In January 1968, my family corridors, on the terrace or in
of the bloodiest of the war. The was living in Da Nang, but to the many gardens.
dead among northern forces celebrate Tet we made the On the first night of the
numbered 5,000 or more; the hour’s drive to my paternal Lunar New Year, Janu-
Khe Sanh
Americans and South Viet- Hue grandparents’ house in Hue. ary 30, we heard what we
Da
namese suffered more than 600 Kham Duc Nang My father was the region’s thought were firecrackers.
dead and almost 3,200 wounded. civilian governor, and The sound was actually gun-
In Vietnam today, this event is de- whenever we went to Hue fire. Bullets were flying in
scribed in heroic terms, and the we stayed in a gorgeous every direction. Flares oc-
state propaganda machine still government guesthouse— casionally lit the sky, but the
Ho Chi Minh City
goes into overdrive to celebrate Saigon a mansion, really, immac- grounds around our house
Mekong Ben Tre
it every few years. Delta Tra Vinh ulately kept, with Art Deco were dark. We had no way
But of a massacre of thousands arches and curves. I loved of seeing that communist

30 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

troops had surrounded us. A communist soldier gave a THIS SPREAD: At Khe Sanh (above), Marines held off
At two o’clock on the morn- lecture about coming as our the enemy for 77 days—and were then ordered to
abandon their base in July 1968. A statue (left) now
ing of January 31, they came “liberators,” “securing our celebrates the siege as a North Vietnamese victory.
into the house and took my city” and “driving out impe-
NEXT SPREAD: U.S. military hardware, including a
father upstairs, along with rialist invading forces.” I was tank and armored personnel carrier, still litters the
other men they’d rounded up 9 years old; I could barely Khe Sanh battlefield, which is now a tourist site.
in the neighborhood. understand anything he said
They herded about a hun- in his northern accent, but
dred of us, mostly women he seemed menacing. Until were allowed to go back into the guesthouse. Mat-
and children, into a neigh- that night, the war had been tresses and clothes littered the rooms, and the
boring basement. In the dark, something that happened in furniture had been thrown all over. Upstairs, my
my mother tried to keep my the forests and mountains or father was sitting on the floor with a number of
two sisters and me quiet. in villages far away. other men. We huddled next to him, but we were
We were dazed and afraid. It was two days before we so afraid we were unable to speak.

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 31

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 33
January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 35
 After just a few minutes, soldiers told us to that a communist victory
leave. On the way out, we stole a look into my anywhere in the south would
parents’ room. My father’s treasured books were mean more massacres, more
on the floor, and the suitcases had been rifled people buried alive. It would
through. Someone had cut a hole through my be even worse than Tet ’68.
mother’s traveling jewelry box. We left emp-
ty-handed and returned to our basement prison That fear shaped my fate:
with no idea of what was in store. As communist forces closed
Two nights later, my mother motioned me toward in on Saigon in 1975, my un-
the one tiny window in the basement. I climbed on cles arranged for me to go to
the bed and strained to look out. The soldiers had the United States. Like my
lined up a row of men and tied their elbows behind sister Dieu-Ha before me,
their backs. After a while, they marched the men I became one of millions of
away. I saw my father among them. Viet Kieu—“overseas Viet-
namese”—but my mother
A week later, the communist soldiers withdrew remained in Vietnam, stuck
from the government house. South Vietnamese in the chaos that followed
and American troops freed us and moved us to Hue the communist victory
University, by the bank of the Perfume River. The that April.
campus had been turned into a refugee center and While I spent my adoles-
makeshift hospital. From the sixth floor, I could see cence coming to grips with
the fighting across the river. I also saw people with America’s abundance and
horrendous wounds brought into the various floors frenetic energy, she was
below. Most days we sat dazed on a straw mat while stripped of her job as the
the adults gathered in corners for whispered con- principal of a school and
versations. After weeks of house-to-house fighting, reduced to poverty. After
the soldiers recaptured the Citadel, the heart of the moving into her sister’s
old imperial city, on February 24. house, in what had been re-
When we managed to get back to Da Nang, our named Ho Chi Minh City, she
house was full of relatives who had also fled from sometimes sold soup on the
Hue. We had no news about my father, and no way streets to support herself and
of finding any. my sister Dieu-Quynh, who
For the first year, we did not tell my grandfather proved to be mentally ill and
that my father had been taken—we were afraid he would die too young.
would die of a heart attack. My mother went to the In 1973, the leaders of the
neighbors’ houses to cry so he wouldn’t find out. north and south signed the
Months later, news came about the mass graves. agreement that led to Ameri-
My mother went to Hue to look for my father, but ca’s exit from the war and be-
the sight of the decaying and maimed corpses hor- gan a prisoner exchange. One
rified her. She never went back. of those exchanged prisoners
I grew up not quite an orphan: While other managed to smuggle out a
families buried their dead, set up an altar and had letter to my mother. “I am ered that he had been reduced
some kind of closure, ours had this open secret. lucky to be alive,” my father to a thin old man. But his spir-
Schoolmates didn’t quite know what to do with wrote. It was the first time in its seemed high.
me, and for years I was ostracized. I grew into a five years we’d had any word He was released in 1980, af-
morose adolescent, but I found consolation in the either from or about him. “I ter 12 years’ captivity without
antiwar songs of Trinh Cong Son, who lamented hope that you are able to take a trial. Four years later, the
the bodies “floating in the river, drying out in rice care of the children, a task communist government al-
fields, lying on city roofs, under the temple eaves, that I am anxious to share lowed him and my mother to
under cold rainy days, bodies of the aged next with you.” It took four more emigrate to the United States.
to the innocent. . . . ” Although the government years of searching for her to I hadn’t seen him for 16 years,
banned his music, it seemed that all of South Viet- find out that he was being during which I had come of
nam listened to it. held in a remote area near age, gotten a fitful education
In the months and then the years following the the Chinese border. She set and set out on a haphazard
Tet Offensive, we were terrorized by the thought out to visit him, and discov- path that would lead to a

36 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

career as a radio journalist. he had composed in captiv- PREVIOUS SPREAD: In Ho Chi Minh City, traffic now
When I met my parents at the ity—and kept in his memory crowds the site where, in February 1968, a captured
Vietcong guerrilla was summarily shot. A famous
airport in San Francisco, he until he left the country. He photograph of the event led to an outcry in the U.S.
was astonishingly healthy and used one phrase as a preface:
THIS SPREAD: A cow pasture in Kham Duc was, in
sane. She was less sure of her- I suffer, therefore I am. He May 1968, an airstrip for the emergency evacuation
self than I had remembered. read the books and saw the of a Special Forces camp under enemy attack.
We spent many months documentaries about the Tet
rediscovering each other, but Offensive, but he said no more
we moved backward in time, about it until he died, in 2000. sense of place. I finally moved in 2006—to the city
taking the most recent years Despite all that history, I be- where my fathers’ captors had directed the war.
first. We never talked of 1968; gan to consider moving back to
it was too overwhelming. He Vietnam. It was still my coun- I’ve made many new friends in Hanoi, young
wrote about his prison years try, after all, and Vietnamese and old, but their curiosity about a Viet Kieu
and published a book of poems traditionally have a strong who came back from the United States has not

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 37

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 39
extended to the details of my experience of the
war. Some of them have lived and heard enough of
it, and many had an equally traumatic time of it.
Plus, Vietnam is a youthful country—the median
age is 30 years. The majority of the people were
born after the war, and long after 1968. So they are
forward-looking; “integrating with the globalized
world” is a national mantra.
In nightclubs and cafés, the music of Trinh Cong
Son is still popular—the love songs, not the ones
about the destruction of war. Those are, once again,
banned. My friend Tran Anh Quan, an artist in his
40s who is rather critical of the government, often
tells me I am obsessed with the past. “You don’t
know what else the authorities hide,” Quan tells
me. “We don’t even know the truth about what’s
happening in our society today. Forget the past.”
Occasionally, I can. Then comes a moment
like the time a real estate developer approached
me with his business plan for Hue. “I want to
redevelop the whole attitude there and change
the tourist industry,” he told me. Hue certainly
attracts a lot of tourists. Many come for a past
far removed: They visit ancient royal tombs, the
refurbished Citadel and the temples from the
Nguyen dynasty, which lasted from 1802 to 1945.
The tour guides tell all about that past, but they He had no idea what I was still burns. Ultimately, she
ignore the bullet holes pocking the walls of the talking about. relented and allowed me to
buildings within the Citadel and elsewhere. No After 50 years, I know my resume my conversation with
tourists are taken to the massacre grave sites, the memories from that era will the French-German team
way tourists are taken to the Khmer Rouge’s infa- last my lifetime, but I wonder on camera. But I can find no
mous “killing fields” in Cambodia. whether the national silence record that the interview ever
I asked the developer about the ghosts in Hue— about 1968 will ever be lifted, aired in Vietnam.
about the feelings among the people there who are and the anger I felt when Recently an acquaintance
living with the memories of the dead from 1968, I was negotiating with the of mine, the writer Bao Ninh,
about their feelings toward northerners like him. government’s media minder famed for his novel The Sor-

40 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

row of War, pointed a finger at minder: “You will not.” And I PREVIOUS SPREAD: In Tra Vinh province, young
monks from Vietnam’s Khmer Krom ethnic minority
me and said: “You will. Write think of Bao Ninh: “You will.” perform their daily ablutions. Some Khmer Krom
about it. You and me. We sur- One wanted me to honor a aided U.S. troops during the war; now, they fight
vived that Tet.” Sure, it was the version of history written by what they see as persecution by the government.
American war, as Vietnamese the living, the winners. The THIS SPREAD: A bridge (above) over the Ham Luong
remember it, and the Cold War other wishes me to honor the River connects Tra Vinh and Ben Tre, Vietnam’s
coconut capital (left). It was opened in 2010 to aid
was a big part of it. But the Tet dead and their memories. development in the impoverished Mekong Delta.
Offensive and 1968 was us: We 1968: A war, a year, a mem-
Vietnamese killed one another. ory forever being buried and
So now I think of the media resurrected.

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 41

 photographs
by Bharat Sikka
text by Mike Love

Artists decorated
the ashram in 2016,
drawing inspiration
from the Beatles
and local yogis.

42 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

The Road to Bliss
The ashram in India
where the Beatles sought
enlightenment remains a
pilgrimage site for fans of
music and meditation
 Left: John Lennon
chats with Mike Love
(far right, in dark
blue) as the Beatles
In January 1968, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi invited me to a Transcendental sit for a photo with
Meditation course in Rishikesh, a city in the foothills of the Himalayas in Maharishi and other
course participants.
Northern India. Back then, a lot of Americans still thought meditation was Right: A view of the
pretty far out. But in California, where I came from, it wasn’t such a stretch, Ganges, seen from
particularly among musicians. a window in the
lecture hall.
Maharishi had taught me how to meditate in Paris, after my band, the Beach
Boys, performed in a Unicef benefit show there. My cousins Dennis and Carl
Wilson and our bandmate Al Jardine all learned together, along with our
HULTON ARCH IVES / G ETTY IM AG ES

wives. That first meditation was the most powerful thing I’d ever experienced.
I used the mantra Maharishi had given me, and my mind immediately settled
down into a silent, expanded state. I was more deeply relaxed than I’d ever
been in my whole life. I said to myself, “Wow, this is so simple that anyone
could do it. And if everyone did, it would be an entirely different world!”
So when Maharishi invited me to Rishikesh a few weeks later, I canceled
everything on my calendar for the next couple of months. I had some really
nice shirts and pants made in Beverly Hills. I figured if I was going to In-
dia, I should have some silk. Then I packed up a suitcase and flew on Pan

44 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 45
46 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018
 Left: The remnants
of the lecture hall,
now decorated with
artwork and song
lyrics. Above: Small
meditation cells, ad-
jacent to the lecture
hall, which were oc-
cupied by local yogis
in the years after
the 1968 course.

Am—from Los Angeles to Hawaii, Hawaii

to Japan, Japan to Bangkok, and Bangkok to
Delhi. When I walked off the plane in Delhi,
the sun was just rising and it was a beauti-
ful, mystical morning.
On the road to Rishikesh, I was prepared
to see cows and elephants. When a camel
crossed in front of my taxi, that really sur-
prised me. On the banks of the Ganges,
someone showed up in a little scow, not even
really a boat, and loaded me up with my lug-
gage. Then I arrived at the ashram—or the
International Academy of Meditation, as
Maharishi called it.
Of course, once I got there and saw the Beat-
les, Donovan, Mia Farrow and the others, none
of them were wearing silk outfits. They were
all wearing plain little cotton pajama-type
clothes they’d had made by the local tailors. So
I had some of those simpler clothes made, too.

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 47

 Clockwise from bottom left:
Stairs lead to a small room inside an
igloo-shaped cottage; flowers grow
in the ashram gardens; a hall, dec-
orated by fans, is now known as the
Beatles Cathedral; remnants of
glass cling to a lecture hall window;
song lyrics are etched into peeling
paint; a gate stands at one of the
ashram’s two entrances.

The area around us was called the Valley

of the Saints, with the Himalayas rising up
around it. In the epic The Ramayana, Lord
Rama went there to do penance for kill-
ing the demon Ravana. Adi Shankara, the
founder of the philosophy of non-dualism
called Advaita Vedanta, built temples there
in the eighth century. You could feel that this
was a place where people had been coming
to meditate since ancient times. When we
went down to the Ganges before dawn, we
saw yogis. It was February, and there were
ice floes coming down the river. These yogis
were doing their ablutions in the freezing
cold water. That was truly impressive.
Our campus was made up of low buildings
and some little pointed cottages. I had a
room in the same section as Paul McCart-
ney. Mia’s sister, Prudence Farrow, was in
between us. We meditated all morning and
went to hear Maharishi talk about Vedic
philosophy every afternoon and evening. In
the lecture hall, he’d ask us, “How many peo-
ple meditated for an hour? How many for
two hours? How many for three hours?” The
longest I ever meditated was about eight
hours in a row. In Prudence’s case, it was
several days. John Lennon wrote that song
and sang it for her there: “Dear Prudence,
won’t you come out to play?”
We ate breakfast outside, with lots of
crows vying for our food. I was sitting there
one day when Paul came to the table with his
acoustic guitar, saying, “Hey, listen to this,
Mike: ‘Flew in from Miami Beach B.O.A.C.,
didn’t get to bed last night . . . ’ ” He was writ-
ing “Back in the U.S.S.R.” I told him, “You
should sing about all the girls around the
Soviet Union: the Ukraine girls, the Moscow
girls, Georgia on my mind.”
We all had so much fun playing music
for each other. For my birthday, the Beatles

48 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 49
50 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018
 The outside of
Maharishi’s res-
idence. On their
birthdays, course
participants were
invited to join the
guru here for private
pujas, or ceremonies,
in a space beneath
the house known
as “the cave.”

wrote a song called “Spiritual Regeneration”

that ended with “Happy birthday, Michael
Love.” It sounded just like the Beach Boys,
the same rhythms, the same harmonies.
I had some amazing experiences in med-
itation during that course. The King James
Bible says the kingdom of God is within
you. The Bhagavad Gita says to experience
inner silence and then plunge into activity.
It’s really the same thing. In Rishikesh, I
had a technique for seeking the kingdom of
heaven inside myself.
There’s one meditation I especially re-
member, sitting one morning on the river-
bank. I felt that I was looking down on the
earth, and that it was a minuscule thing
I happened to be sitting on. My lens was
totally expanded. I wrote a poem about the
experience that began like this:

In the air above the Ganges

A hundred fifty down miles from the source
of the Holy Mother River
Indian spiritual water
ripples seen 100 feet below
are shining in the sun
reflecting through the eyes of one
who feels as though
he’d been there, or nearly so
a long, long time ago

It’s been 50 years since that course, and

meditation and yoga are more popular than
they’ve ever been. I recently saw Hillary
Clinton on TV doing pranayama—or “alter-
nate nostril breathing,” as she called it. Med-
itation has become much more mainstream
now. But if it’s helping people find out who
they really are, I’m all for it. I feel blessed
to have been there with Maharishi and the
Beatles when it all began.

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 51

 A Seismic Year
Movements that had been building along the
primary fault lines of the 1960s—the Vietnam
War, the Cold War, civil rights, human rights,
youth culture—exploded with force in 1968.
The aftershocks registered both in America
and abroad for decades afterward.
Timeline by Matthew Twombly • Research by Kendrick McDonald

February 8 March 5
Orangeburg Massacre The government of
At the South Carolina State campus, police open fire Czechoslovakia abolishes
on students protesting segregation at Orangeburg’s censorship, underscoring
only bowling alley. Three protesters die and 27 more the expansion of freedom
are wounded. Nine officers are tried and acquitted during the “Prague
of charges related to the use of force. A protest Spring” and angering its
coordinator is convicted of inciting to riot, serves seven Communist overlords in
months in prison—and is pardoned 25 years later. the Soviet Union.
January 15
Jeannette Rankin Brigade February 7 March 1-8 March 12
At age 87, Jeannette Rankin, who as a congresswoman After a battle for Some 15,000 Latino Nixon wins 78 percent
from Montana voted against U.S. participation in both the Vietnamese high school students of the vote in New
world wars, leads some 5,000 women on a march in village of Ben Tre, an in Los Angeles walk Hampshire’s GOP
Washington, D.C. to protest the Vietnam War. American officer tells out of classes to press primary. Eugene
The event highlights generational, political and class Associated Press their demand for a McCarthy, Minnesota’s
differences among the marchers but gives the growing reporter Peter Arnett, better education. antiwar senator, takes a
women’s movement a motto: “Sisterhood Is Powerful.” shocking 42 percent of
“ the Democratic vote.

January 20 February 27 March 6 March 13

Game of the Century! Top-ranked UCLA,
led by the future Kareem Abdul-Jabbar,
” Walter Cronkite, in
a CBS-TV special
Some 500 New York
University students
Atlantic Richfield
and Humble Oil (now
faces second-ranked University of Houston, The quotation, on his recent tour picket a university- ExxonMobil) announce
led by Elvin Hayes, at the Astrodome. printed in newspapers of Vietnam, says sponsored recruiting the discovery of an oil field
Houston snaps UCLA’s 47-game winning nationwide, becomes the U.S. war effort is event for the Dow beneath Prudhoe Bay,
streak, 71-69, in the first NCAA basketball a catchphrase for “mired in stalemate” Chemical Company, the Alaska, the largest oil and
game to be nationally televised in prime opponents of the and amplifies public principal manufacturer natural-gas discovery in
time—the granddaddy of March Madness. Vietnam War. skepticism of the war. of napalm. North American history.

JANUARY FEBRUARY MARCH

January 22 January 23 February 1 March 16 March 19
“Rowan & Martin’s Laugh- North Korea seizes the Memphis Sanitation Strike New York Senator Hundreds of students
In” debuts as an NBC-TV USS Pueblo, claiming the Memphis sanitation workers Robert F. Kennedy take over the
series and, over six surveillance ship strayed Echol Cole and Robert Walker enters the race for the administration building
seasons, sets a standard into its waters. One U.S. are crushed to death by a Democratic presidential at Howard University
for sketch comedy crewman is killed and 82 malfunctioning garbage truck. nomination, saying in Washington, D.C.,
unmatched until NBC’s others are imprisoned; Their deaths lead to a strike McCarthy’s showing seeking a greater voice
“Saturday Night Live” an 11-month standoff with that becomes a civil rights in New Hampshire in student discipline and
launches in 1975. the United States follows. movement (see page 74). the curriculum.
“has proven how
deep are the present
divisions within our
party and country.” It
“is now unmistakably
clear that we can
change these
disastrous, divisive
policies only by
changing the men
who make them.”

February 29
The report of the Kerner
Commission, appointed
“ moving toward two societies,
one black, one white—
March 31
As war pressures mount,
President Lyndon B.
by President Lyndon Johnson—who in 1964
January 30 B. Johnson to examine separate and won 61 percent of the

unequal.”
North Vietnamese communists launch the Tet Offensive the causes of race riots popular vote, to Barry
(see page 26). The assault contradicts the Johnson in American cities in Goldwater’s 39—
administration’s claims that the communist forces are previous years, declares announces he is not
weak and the U.S.-backed south is winning the war. the nation is . . . running for re-election.

52 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

 1968 Defining Forces
Civil rights
Gender equality
Vietnam War
Student movements

May 10
The United States and
North Vietnam begin
peace talks in Paris.

June 4
Robert F. Kennedy, gaining momentum in his
presidential campaign, wins the California
primary—and is assassinated at the
Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles (see page
90). Gunman Sirhan Sirhan, a Jordanian citizen
of Palestinian descent, is captured at the
scene. Now 73, he is serving life in prison.

April 4 May 6 June 3

Assassination A riot breaks out between Andy Warhol is shot and
Martin Luther King Jr., in Memphis for the sanitation workers’ strike, is fatally police and more than critically wounded in his
shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Gunman James Earl Ray, a white 5,000 university students New York City loft by Valerie
supremacist, flees the country. Over the next week, riots in more than 100 cities in Paris. Within a week Solanas, apparently for
nationwide leave 39 people dead, more than 2,600 injured and 21,000 arrested. workers throughout losing a copy of a play she’d
France are staging written. She pleads guilty to
sympathy strikes, assault and spends three
threatening the economy. years in prison.

APRIL MAY JUNE

April 3 April 6
Some 1,000 men After a 90-minute
return their draft cards shootout between Black
to government offices Panthers and police
all over the country. in Oakland, California,
police shoot Bobby
Hutton, 17, as he tries to
surrender.

April 11 April 29 May 17 June 19

Johnson signs the Fair Hair opens on Catonsville Nine The efforts of the Poor People’s Campaign climaxes in
Housing Act, banning Broadway and runs Nine antiwar activists enter a Selective Service office the Solidarity Day Rally for Jobs, Peace, and Freedom
discrimination in housing for more than 1,700 in Catonsville, Maryland, remove nearly 400 files and in Washington, D.C. Fifty thousand people join the 3,000
on the basis of race, performances, burn them in the parking lot with homemade napalm. participants living at Resurrection City on the National
color, religion or national introducing mainstream The example of the Catonsville Nine (later convicted of Mall to rally around the demands of the Poor People’s
origin. It is the last of theatergoers to sex, destruction of government property and sentenced to Campaign on Solidarity Day.
the landmark civil drugs, rock ’n’ roll and jail terms between 24 and 42 months) spurs some 300
rights laws he signed. draft resistance. similar raids on draft boards over the next four years.

April 23 May 27 June 8

Students take over five buildings on Columbia The Supreme Court James Earl Ray is arrested
University’s campus and briefly hold a dean rules 7-1 that burning in London. Extradited to the
hostage, calling for the university to cut its ties a draft card is not an United States, he pleads
to military research. Before dawn on April 30 act of free speech guilty to murdering King
administrators call in the police, who respond protected by the First but later recants, saying he
with about 1,000 officers. More than 700 Amendment. was an unwitting pawn in a
people are arrested, and 132 students, four conspiracy. He dies in prison
faculty and 12 officers are injured. of liver failure in 1998, age 70.

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 53

A Seismic Year

August 5–8 August 21

The Republican Pvt. First Class James
National Convention Anderson Jr., who died
formally nominates covering an enemy
Nixon for president. grenade to protect fellow
Marines during a firefight
in Vietnam, becomes the
first black recipient of the
Medal of Honor.

July 1 August 20 September 7

Johnson signs the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation The Soviet Union invades Femininity and Feminism
of Nuclear Weapons, which remains the world’s Czechoslovakia, halting Feminists protest the Miss America Pageant in
primary means of preventing the spread of nuclear the Prague Spring. Atlantic City, New Jersey (see page 104).
weapons to non-nuclear states and reducing
nuclear weapons in the world.

July 18 July 20 August 26 September 9

Gordon Moore and The first Special “Hey Jude,” the first Arthur Ashe wins the U.S.
Robert Noyce incorporate Olympics opens at Beatles single issued Open, becoming the first
their microprocessor Chicago’s Soldier on their Apple label, is black man to win a Grand
manufacturing firm. Field, with more than released in the U.S. At Slam tennis tournament.
After rejecting the name a thousand athletes more than seven minutes,
“Moore Noyce” as too with intellectual it becomes the longest
close to “more noise,” they disabilities competing song to hit Number 1 on
eventually settle on Intel. in 200 events. Billboard’s Hot 100.

JULY AUGUST SEPTEMBER

August 28 September 16
Mayhem at the DNC Nixon, seeking to dispel his
At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, sourpuss image, appears on
police and Illinois National Guardsmen go on a Laugh-In just long enough
rampage, clubbing and tear-gassing hundreds of to proclaim, “Sock it to
antiwar demonstrators, news reporters and bystanders, me” on-camera. It is a rare
with much of the violence broadcast on national TV intersection of politics and
(see page 100). The next day, Vice President Hubert entertainment—Humphrey
Humphrey, perceived as the heir of Johnson’s war declines a similar invitation.
policies, wins the Democratic nomination, mostly
through delegates controlled by party bosses.
July 23 September 24
Bullets over Cleveland CBS-TV’s “60 Minutes”
In Cleveland, the Glenville Shootout, between police debuts. It is now the
and black militants, leaves three dead on each side, longest continuously
plus one bystander. Riots rock the city for five days. running prime-time
Mayor Carl Stokes, seven months into his term as program in history.
the first black official to lead a major U.S. city, later
writes, “That night was to haunt and color every
aspect of my administration.”

July 25 September 30
Pope Paul VI issues Boeing rolls out the
Humanae Vitae, reaffirming 747 Jumbo Jet, the
the Roman Catholic biggest passenger plane
Church’s opposition to the world has seen to
artificial contraception date—231 feet long,
and rejecting wings spanning 196 feet
recommendations made and seats for 490.
under his predecessor,
Pope John XXIII.

54 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

 1968 Defining Forces
Civil rights
Gender equality
Vietnam War
Student movements

November 5 December 3
Shirley Chisholm of New Elvis Presley begins a
York becomes the first comeback from years
black woman elected of torpor and schlock
to the U.S. House of with a one-hour special
Representatives. on NBC-TV.

November 5
Nixon wins the
presidency, beating
Humphrey by just 0.7
percent of the popular
vote. Segregationist
candidate George
Wallace carries five
Southern states.

October 16 November 12 November 20 December 21-27

Black Power Salute The Supreme Court Consolidation Coal’s No. Apollo 8 becomes the first manned spacecraft to orbit
At the Olympic Games in Mexico City, Americans unanimously rules that an 9 mine in Farmington, the Moon and return safely to Earth. During the mission
Tommie Smith and John Carlos receive the gold and Arkansas law prohibiting West Virginia, explodes, the “Earthrise” photograph (see page 112) is taken.
bronze medals in the 200-meter dash, then raise the teaching of evolution killing 78 miners and
gloved fists during the national anthem to protest in public schools violates becoming a catalyst for
violence toward and poverty among African- the First Amendment. new mine-safety laws.
Americans. The next day, the International Olympic
Committee strips their medals and sends them home.

OCTOBER NOVEMBER DECEMBER

November 9 December 9
Yale University, after 267 years, decides to admit Douglas C. Engelbart’s
female undergraduates, beginning in 1969. 90-minute demonstration
at the Fall Joint
Computer Conference
in San Francisco includes
the world’s first mouse
and word processor
(see page 108).

October 2
In Mexico City, police and troops fire on a student-
led protest, killing or wounding thousands. The
precise number is still unknown.

October 11-22 October 31 November 26 December 23

The Apollo 7 mission, Citing progress in the O.J. Simpson of USC North Korea releases the Pueblo crew but keeps the
which spends more time Paris peace talks, wins the Heisman ship. It is now an exhibit in the Victorious Fatherland
in space than all the Johnson orders a halt to Trophy. (In 1999, it is Liberation War Museum in Pyongyang.
Soviet flights to that time “all air, naval and artillery auctioned for $255,500,
combined, makes the bombardment of North which goes toward
first live TV broadcast Vietnam,” effective the the $33.5 million civil
from up there. next day. judgment against him in
the killing of his ex-wife
and a friend of hers.)

PP. 52-55: IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER: AP (2); GETTY IMAGES; LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY; GETTY IMAGES (2); AP; GETTY IMAGES (3); GETTY
IMAGES; THE CLEVELAND PRESS COLLECTION; GETTY IMAGES (2); AP; WIKI COMMONS; GETTY IMAGES; AP (3); ALAMY; NASA; GETTY IMAGES
 Teen idol Frankie Lymon
Fallen Angel
soared to stardom in the
1950s. But in 1968 he
came crashing down

by Jeff MacGregor
illustration by
Arthur E. Giron

That voice! Those apple cheeks! Arms wide, head later their first record, “Why
back, he radiates joy, even in antique black and Do Fools Fall in Love?” made it
white. That beautiful soprano flying high, talent to the top of the national charts.
and presence and just enough ham to sell it all. And It was 1956. Overnight, Frankie
it was a great story, too: Up from nothing! A shoot- Lymon was the hottest singer
ing star! So when they found Frankie Lymon dead in America, off on a world tour.
at the age of 25 one February morning in 1968, in He was 13 years old.
the same apartment building where he’d grown up, That made him the first black
it was the end of something and the beginning of teenage pop star, a gap-toothed,
something, but no one was quite sure what. baby-faced, angel-voiced para-
Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers were five kids gon of show business ambition,
from Washington Heights, just north of Harlem. They and a camera-ready avatar of
sang doo-wop under the streetlight on the corner of America’s new postwar youth
165th and Amsterdam. They were discovered by the movement. He was a found-
Valentines’ lead singer Richie Barrett while the kids ing father of rock ’n’ roll even
were rehearsing in an apartment house. A few months before his voice had changed.

56 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

 That voice and that style influenced two My father was a truck driver and my Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis and
generations of rock, soul and R&B giants. mother worked as a domestic in white Jerry Lee Lewis all fell from the sky at
You heard his echoes everywhere. The folks’ homes. While kids my age were once. Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers,
high, clear countertenor, like something playing stickball and marbles, I was with their tight, upbeat harmony, were
out of Renaissance church music, found working in the corner grocery store an important part of it, too. You can
its way from the Temptations to the carrying orders to help pay the rent.” trace doo-wop back to the Psalms, hear
Beach Boys to Earth, Wind & Fire. Even A few days before Frankie and his it bubble up in the a cappella harmonies
Diana Ross charted a cover of “Why Do friends from the corner recorded the of Gregorian chant, or, by way of Africa
Fools Fall in Love?” 25 years after its re- song that made them famous, Rosa and the Caribbean, from gospel quartets.
lease. Berry Gordy may not have mod- Parks was pulled off a bus in Mont- In America, beginning in the 1930s,
eled the Jackson 5 on Frankie Lymon gomery, Alabama. Less than two years the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots
and the Teenagers, as is often said, but it later, Frankie danced with a white girl were the popularizers of those intri-
sure sounded as if he had. on a national television show, and the cate harmonies we recognize today as
That’s the legend, anyway. Truth show was swiftly canceled. Another proto-rock ’n’ roll. Doo-wop was among
is, Frankie Lymon grew up too fast in part of the legend. the inheritors, a thousand street-cor-
every way imaginable. “I never was a Race integration in pop music was ner groups and a thousand one-hit won-
child, although I was billed in every the- never going to be simple. ders. The Spaniels and the Five Satins
ate aand
ater d aud to u w
auditorium e e I appea
where ed
appeared
as a child star,” Lymon told Art Peters, America in the 1950s: postwar econ-
a reporter for Ebony magazine, in 1967. omy roaring, a chicken in every pot and
“I was a man when I was 11 years old, two cars in every garage of the split-
doing everything that most men do. level house in Levittown, every cliché
In the neighborhood where I lived, of union-made American middle-class
there was no time to be a child. There prosperity held to be self-evident.
were five children in my family and my And music was a big part of that. Rau-
folks had to scuffle to make ends meet. cous and brawny, electrified, it felt like

In December 1957, Lymon appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” to sing “Goody

Goody,” nearly two years after “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” was a hit debut single.
MICHA EL OCHS ARCHI VES / GE TTY IMAGE S; TOM SCHI ERLITZ

58 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

and the Vocaleers, the Drifters and great-granddaddy of American rock the age before earbuds and head-
the Fleetwoods and the Moonglows, critics and historians, will tell you. “He phones it was surely louder. You heard
the Coasters and the Platters and on was the star.” music in the streets.
to Frankie Valli and modernity. In the Frankie and his record producers and Outside Frankie’s old address, on
1950s, every high school stairwell in managers soon agreed he’d be a more West 165th, there’s a “Wet Paint” sign
this country was loud with four-part profitable solo act, so off he went, leav- on the door this bright autumn morning,
singing. Even today the “Pitch Perfect” ing behind the Teenagers, and with them and one building over a crew is paint-
movie franchise owes its popularity to friendship and loyalty. He had another, ing the ancient fire escapes. The whole
an a cappella tradition stretching back lesser, hit—a recording of “Goody Goody,” block smells of solvent, sharp and clean.
into pre-electric history. sung by Bob Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald It’s a well-kept street of five- and six-
“We harmonized every night on the before him—before things cooled. story apartment houses in a tidy neigh-
street corner until the neighbors would Then came the long, slow slide. borhood of working-class folks who
call the cops to run us away,” Lymon Ask any junkie and they’ll tell what greet each other on the sidewalk, black
told Ebony. But Frankie wasn’t doo- they’re chasing is the feeling they got and white and brown, Latin American
wop, not really. Doo-wop was group the first time they got high. But that and Caribbean immigrants and Great
music. “Frankie Lymon was always first-time rush can never be recaptured, Migration African-Americans and, like
different than that,” Robert Christgau, whether you’re talking about heroin or the rest of New York, folks from all over.
c ga ettes o
cigarettes or hitt records.
eco d Lymon spent years shuttling from
her
Frankie was a heroin addict at 15 house to house and couch to couch.
years old. He tried to kick, tried again By the mid-1960s, he’d been in and out
stra
and again and got straight for a while. of rehab, and tried a couple of come-
Then his mother died, and he fell hard. backs, but he was trapped in his own
He wasn’t alone. Heroin was ev- shadow, lip-syncing at age 23 songs
erywhere in New Yo York by then, and he’d recorded ten years before. His last
methadone clinics run r by the city TV appearance was on “Hollywood a
were springing up in neighborhoods Go Go,” in 1965. Then he was drafted
all over town. The failure rate was and sent south, and was dishonorably
heartbreaking. discharged for being constantly AWOL.
“I looked tw twice my age,” Ly- Young as he was, Lymon had three
mon told Ebony.
Ebo “I was thin as wives. He married them in quick suc-
a shadow aand I didn’t give a cession, and there was plenty of con-
damn. My only concern was fusion about the paperwork. He may
in getting relief. You know, have been married to more than one at
addic is the most pa-
an addict a time, or not entirely married to one of
cr
thetic creature on earth. the three at all. One of them may have
know that every time
He knows still been married to someone else. De-
stick a needle in his
he sticks pends whom you ask. (In the 1980s, they
arm, hehe’s gambling with all met in court, to settle Lymon’s estate,
an yet, he’s got to
death and, such as it was, to find out who was enti-
have it. It’s like playing tled to songwriting royalties from best
Russian Roulette with a sellers like “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”
Th
spike. There’s always the None got much, but the third wife,
th some peddler
danger that Emira Eagle, received an undisclosed
will sell h him a poisoned settlement from record producers.)
batch—some garbage.” Here In 1966, there was a brief glimmer
young Frankie
Fran knocks on of hope. Fresh out of rehab at Man-
wood. “I was llucky. God must hattan General Hospital, Lymon ap-
have been watch
watching over me.” peared at a block party organized by a
Even now you want wa to believe him. group of nuns at a Catholic settlement
house in the Bronx. He told an audi-
neighborhood, just up
Frankie’s neighbor ence of 2,000 teenagers, “I have been
the bluffs from the long-gone Polo born again. I’m not ashamed to let the
Grounds, feels mostly unchanged even public know I took the cure. Maybe my
50 years later. It was p
poorer then, sure, story will keep some other kid from
Y
like the rest of New York City, and in going wrong.” CONTINUED ON PAGE 116

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 59

 The Ghosts of My Lai
by Shaun Raviv
photo collages by Binh Dang
photographs by Aaron Joel Santos
In the hamlet where U.S.
troops killed hundreds of
men, women and children,
survivors are ready to
forgive the most infamous
American soldier of the war

60 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 61
William Laws Calley Jr. was never really 200 soldiers who were dropped into the
village that day, 24 were later charged
meant to be an officer in the U.S. Army. After get-
with criminal offenses, and only one
ting low grades and dropping out of Palm Beach was convicted, Calley. He was set free
Junior College, he tried to enlist in 1964, but was after serving less than four years.
rejected because of a hearing defect. Two years Since that time, Calley has almost
entirely avoided the press. Now 74
later, with the escalation in Vietnam, stan- years old, he declined to be interviewed
dards for enrollees changed and Calley—neither for this story. But I was able to piece
a valedictorian nor a troublemaker, just a together a picture of his life and legacy
fairly typical American young man trying to fig- by reviewing court records and inter-
viewing his fellow soldiers and close
ure out what to do with his life—was called up. friends. I traveled to Son My, where
Before the decade was over Second Lieutenant survivors are still waiting for him to
Calley would become one of the most contro- come back and make amends. And I
visited Columbus, Georgia, where Cal-

/ THE LIFE I MAGE S CO LLECT ION / GETTY IMAGES; BINH DANG.

versial figures in the country, if not the world. ley lived for nearly 30 years. I wanted
On March 16, 1968, during a roughly four-hour to know whether Calley, a convicted
operation in the Vietnamese village of Son My, mass murderer and one of the most
American soldiers killed approximately 504 notorious figures in 20th-century his-
tory, had ever expressed true contri-
civilians, including pregnant women and in- tion or lived a normal life.
fants, gang-raped women and burned a village
to ashes. Calley, though a low-ranking officer The landscape surrounding Son My
is still covered with rice paddies, as it
in Charlie Company, stood out because of the was 50 years ago. There are still water
sheer number of civilians he was accused of kill- buffalo fertilizing the fields and chick-
ing and ordering killed. ens roaming. Most of the roads are still
dirt. On a recent Wednesday afternoon,
The red-haired Miami native known to friends
ten young men were drinking beer and
as Rusty became the face of the massacre, which smoking cigarettes at the side of one of
PP. 60-61: SOURCES: RONALD S. HAEBE RLE

was named after one of the sub-hamlets where those roads. A karaoke machine was set
the killings took place, My Lai 4. His story dom- up on a motorbike, and the loudspeak-
ers were placed next to a blink-and-you-
inated headlines, along with the Apollo 12 moon miss-it plaque with an arrow pointing
landing and the trial of Charles Manson. His case to a “Mass Grave of 75 Victims.”
became a kind of litmus test for American values, Tran Nam was 6 years old when he
heard gunshots from inside his mud
a question not only of who was to blame for My and straw home in Son My. It was early
Lai, but how America should conduct war and morning and he was having breakfast
what constitutes a war crime. Out of the roughly with his extended family, 14 people

62 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

 “My troops were getting
massacred and mauled by an
enemy I couldn’t see, I couldn’t
feel and I couldn’t touch .”
PREVIOUS SPREAD: A present-day photo of the fields and water buffalo
surrounding My Lai, collaged with a photo of a U.S. soldier firing an
M-16 during the 1968 massacre.

in all. The U.S. Army had come to the Soldiers gathered together villagers along a trail going through the village and
village a couple of times previously also along an irrigation ditch to the east. Calley and 21-year-old Pvt. First Class
during the war. Nam’s family thought Paul Meadlo mowed the people down with M-16s, burning through several clips
it would be like before; they’d be gath- in the process. The soldiers killed as many as 200 people in those two areas of
ered and interviewed and then let go. Son My, including 79 children. Witnesses said Calley also shot a praying Bud-
So the family kept on eating. “Then a dhist monk and a young Vietnamese woman with her hands up. When he saw a
U.S. soldier stepped in,” Nam told me. 2-year-old boy who had crawled out of the ditch, Calley threw the child back in
“And he aimed into our meal and shot. and shot him.
People collapsed one by one.” Truong Thi Le, then a rice farmer, told me she was hiding in her home with
Nam saw the bullet-ridden bodies of her 6-year-old son and 17-year-old daughter when the Americans found them
his family falling—his grandfather, his and dragged them out. When the soldiers fired an M-16 into their group, most
parents, his older brother, his younger died then and there. Le fell on top of her son and two bodies fell on top of her.
brother, his aunt and cousins. He ran Hours later, they emerged from the pile alive. “When I noticed that it was quiet,
into a dimly lit bedroom and hid under I pushed the dead bodies above me aside,” she told me. “Blood was all over my
the bed. He heard more soldiers enter head, my clothes.” She dragged her son to the edge of a field and covered him with
the house, and then more gunshots. rice and cloth. “I told him not to cry or they would come to kill us.”
He stayed under the bed as long as he When I asked about her daughter, Le, who had
could, but that wasn’t long because maintained her composure up till that point, cov-
the Americans set the house on fire. ered her face with her hands and broke down in CHINA
When the heat grew unbearable, Nam tears. She told me that Thu was killed along with
ran out the door and hid in a ditch as 104 people at the trail but didn’t die right away. Hanoi
his village burned. Of the 14 people at When it was safe to move, Le found Thu sitting LAOS
breakfast that morning, 13 were shot and holding her grandmother, who was already VIETNAM
and 11 killed. Only Nam made it out dead. “Mom, I’m bleeding a lot,” Le remembers
South China
physically unscathed. her daughter saying. “I have to leave you.” Sea
Hue
The six U.S. Army platoons that Nguyen Hong Man, 13 at the time of the massa-
THAILAND
swept through Son My that day in- cre, told me he went into an underground tunnel Tinh Khe
cluded 100 men from Charlie Com- with his 5-year-old niece to hide, only to watch her (MY LAI
MASSACRE
pany and 100 from Bravo Company. get shot right in front of him. “I lay there, horrified,” CAMBODIA SITE)
They killed some civilians straight he said. “Blood from the nearby bodies splashed
off—shooting them point blank or onto my body. People who were covered with a lot
Ho Chi Minh City
tossing grenades into their homes. In of blood and stayed still got the chance to survive,
the words of Varnado Simpson, a mem- while kids did not. Many of them died as they cried Gulf of
Thailand 100 MI.
ber of Second Platoon who was inter- for their parents in terror.”
viewed for the book Four Hours in My Initially, the U.S. Army portrayed the massacre
Lai, “I cut their throats, cut off their as a great victory over Viet Cong forces, and that
MAP: GUI LBER T GATES

hands, cut out their tongue, their hair, story might never have been challenged had it not been for a helicopter gunner
scalped them. I did it. A lot of people named Ronald Ridenhour. He wasn’t there himself, but a few weeks after the opera-
were doing it, and I just followed. I lost tion, his friends from Charlie Company told him about the mass killing of civilians.
all sense of direction.” Simpson went He did some investigating on his own and then waited until he finished his service.
on to commit suicide. Just over a year after the massacre, Ridenhour sent a letter to about two dozen mem-

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 63

bers of Congress, the secretaries of state
and defense, the secretary of the Army,
and the chairman of the Joints Chiefs
of Staff, telling them about a “2nd Lieu-
tenant Kally” who had machine-gunned
groups of unarmed civilians.
Ridenhour’s letter spurred the in-
spector general of the Army, Gen. Wil-
liam Enemark, to launch a fact-finding
mission, led by Col. William Wilson. At
a hotel in Terre Haute, Indiana, Wilson
spoke to Meadlo, the soldier who with
Calley had gunned down the rows of
villagers. Meadlo had been discharged
from the Army because of a severe in-
jury; like many others who’d been at
Son My, he was essentially granted im-
munity when the investigation began.
As he described what he’d done and
witnessed, he looked at the ceiling and
wept. “We just started wiping out the
whole village,” he told Wilson.
A subsequent inquiry by the Army’s
Criminal Investigation Command dis-
covered that military photographer Ron-
ald Haeberle had taken photos during
the operation. In a hotel room in Ohio,
before a stunned investigator, Haeberle
projected on a hung-up bedsheet hor-
rifying images of piled dead bodies and
frightened Vietnamese villagers.
Armed with Haeberle’s photos and
1,000 pages of testimony from 36 wit-
nesses, the Army officially charged
Calley with premeditated murder—
just one day before he was scheduled Despite the overwhelming evidence defense counsel, Maj. Kenneth Raby,
to be discharged. Eighteen months that Calley had personally killed nu- who spent 19 months working on the
later, in March 1971, a court-mar- merous civilians, a survey found that court-martial, told me Calley received
tial with a jury of six fellow officers, nearly four out of five Americans so much mail that he had to be moved
including five who had served in disagreed with his guilty verdict. His to a ground-floor apartment at Fort
Vietnam, found Calley guilty of mur- name became a rallying cry on both the Benning where the deliveries didn’t
dering at least 22 civilians and sen- right and the left. Hawks said Calley have to be carried up the stairs.
tenced him to life in prison. had been simply doing his job. Doves Some of Calley’s supporters went
The day the verdict came down, Cal- said Calley had taken the fall for the to great lengths. Two musicians from
ley defended his actions in a statement generals and politicians who’d dragged Muscle Shoals, Alabama, released a
to the court: “My troops were getting America into a disastrous and immoral recording called “The Battle Hymn of
massacred and mauled by an enemy I conflict. In newspaper articles around Lt. Calley,” which included the line,
couldn’t see, I couldn’t feel and I couldn’t the world, one word became entwined “There’s no other way to wage a war.”
touch—that nobody in the military sys- with Calley’s name: scapegoat. It sold more than a million copies. Dig-
tem ever described them as anything Within three months of the verdict, ger O’Dell, a professional showman
other than Communism. They didn’t the White House received more than based in Columbus, Georgia, buried
give it a race, they didn’t give it a sex, they 300,000 letters and telegrams, almost himself alive for 79 days in a used-car
didn’t give it an age. They never let me all in support of the convicted soldier. lot. Passersby could drop a coin into a
believe it was just a philosophy in a man’s Calley himself received 10,000 let- tube that led down to O’Dell’s “grave,”
mind. That was my enemy out there.” ters and packages a day. His military with the proceeds going toward a fund

64 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

 Within three months of the
trial, the White House received
more than 300,000 letters,
mostly in Calley’s defense.
Two faces of William Calley: (far left) at the Kiwanis Club in Columbus,
Georgia, in 2009, where he spoke publicly about My Lai for the first
time; (left) at a pretrial hearing at Fort Benning in 1970.

his girlfriend. After a series of appeals, Calley’s sentence was cut from life to 20
years, then in half to ten years. He was set free in November 1974 after serving
three and a half years, most of it at his apartment. In the months after his release,
Calley made a few public appearances, and then moved a 20-minute drive down
the road to Columbus, Georgia, where he disappeared into private life.

Situated along the Chattahoochee River, Columbus is first and foremost a mil-
itary town. Its residents’ lives are linked to Fort Benning, which has served as
the home of the U.S. Infantry School since 1918 and today supports more than
100,000 civilian and military personnel. “The Army is just a part of day-to-day
life here,” the longtime Columbus journalist Richard Hyatt told me. “And back in
the day, William Calley was part of that life.”
Bob Poydasheff, the former mayor of Columbus, says there was controversy
when Calley moved to town. “There were many of us who were just horrified,”
he told me, raising his voice until he was almost shouting. “It’s just not done! You
don’t go and kill unarmed civilians!”
Still, Calley became a familiar face around Columbus. In 1976, he married
Penny Vick, whose family owned a jewelry shop frequented by members of Co-
lumbus’ elite. One of their wedding guests was U.S. District Judge J. Robert
Elliott, who had tried to get Calley’s conviction overturned two years earlier.
After the wedding, Calley began working at the jewelry shop. He took classes to
for Calley. He later welded shut the improve his knowledge of gemstones and got trained to make appraisals to increase
doors of his car, refusing to come out the store’s business. In the 1980s, he applied for a real estate license and was initially
SOUR CES: BETTMAN / G ETTY I MAG ES; AP PH OTO / THE LE DG ER-ENQUIRER.

until Calley was set free. denied because of his criminal record. He asked Reid Kennedy, the judge who had
Politicians, noting the anger of their presided over his court-martial, if he’d write him a letter. He did so, and Calley got the
constituents, made gestures of their license while continuing to work at the shop. “It’s funny isn’t it, that a man who breaks
own. Indiana Gov. Edgar Whitcomb or- into your house and steals your TV will never get a license, but a man who’s convicted
dered the state’s flags to fly at half-staff. of killing 22 people can get one,” Kennedy told the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer in 1988.
Gov. John Bell Williams of Mississippi Al Fleming, a former local TV news anchor, described Calley as a soft-spoken
said his state was “about ready to secede man. When I met Fleming in Columbus over a steak dinner, one of the first things
from the Union” over the Calley verdict. he told me was, “I’m not going to say anything bad about Rusty Calley. . . . He
Gov. Jimmy Carter, the future president, and I were the best of friends for a long time. We still are, as far as I’m concerned.”
urged his fellow Georgians to “honor the (Calley left town some years back and now lives in Gainesville, Florida.) Fleming
flag as Rusty had done.” Local leaders described how Calley used to sit with him at the restaurant he owned, Fleming’s
across the country demanded that Pres- Prime Time Grill, and talk late into the night about Vietnam. He told Fleming that
ident Nixon pardon Calley. Charlie Company had been sent to My Lai to “scorch the earth,” and that even years
Nixon fell short of a pardon, but after his conviction, he still felt he’d done what he’d been ordered to do.
he ordered that Calley remain under After our dinner, Fleming gave me a tour in his tiny red Fiat, pausing to point out
house arrest in his apartment at Fort the house where Calley lived for nearly 30 years. He also pointed out an estate nearby
Benning, where he could play badmin- that had appeared in The Green Berets, a pro-war 1968 film starring John Wayne.
ton in the backyard and hang out with The Army had participated heavily in the production, providing uniforms, heli-

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 65

copters and other equipment. The bat- niversary of the massacre, to try to ing that wasn’t done by the maid, and
tle scenes were filmed at Fort Benning, get an interview with Calley, but was that he was their son’s primary care-
and a house in Columbus was used as a always politely denied.) Calley and taker. The jewelry store, according to
stand-in for a Viet Cong general’s villa. Penny had one son, William Laws Cal- the document, “was his life and, except
In the 1980s, the Green Beret house ley III, known as Laws, who went on to for his son, was where he derived his
caught fire. When the neighbors rushed get a PhD in electrical engineering at self-worth. . . . He even worked hard to
out to form a bucket brigade, Calley was Georgia Tech. But divorce documents try to infuse new ideas into the store to
right there with everyone else, trying to I found at the Muscogee County clerk’s help it grow and be more profitable, all
put out the flames. office present a dismal picture. of which were rejected by Mrs. Calley.”
During his time in Columbus, Calley According to a legal brief filed by Cal- In 2004, his wife, who inherited the
mostly succeeded in keeping himself ley’s attorney in 2008, he spent most of store from her parents, stopped paying
out of the national spotlight. (Hyatt, his adult years feeling powerless both at him a salary. He fell into a depression
the journalist, used to go to V.V. Vick work and at home. It states that Calley and moved to Atlanta to stay with Laws,
Jewelers every few years, on the an- did all the cooking, and all the clean- living off his savings until it was gone.

66 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

Calley and his son remain close. Left: A small statue at the Son My Vestige Site commemorates the
The divorce documents provided lit- massacre. Right: Villager Truong Thi Le survived the massacre with
her son but watched her daughter bleed to death.
tle information about Penny Vick’s side
of the story apart from two ambiguous
details. (Vick and Laws also declined to
be interviewed for this story.) His lawyer
disputed one assertion—that Calley “had
been backing away from his marital rela- the divorce, was a former Army captain who had served as an assistant prosecutor
tionship” prior to separation—but con- in Calley’s court-martial. “I’m proud of what we did,” Partin told me, referring to the
firmed the other assertion—that Calley nearly two years he spent trying to put Calley in prison. He and his co-counsel called
“consumed alcoholic beverages in his about 100 witnesses to testify against Calley. When Nixon intervened to keep Calley
own area of the home on a daily basis.” out of jail, Partin wrote a letter to the White House saying that the special treatment ac-
In a strange twist, John Partin, the corded a convicted murderer had “defiled” and “degraded” the military justice system.
lawyer who represented Calley’s wife in By the time the divorce was settled, according to the court documents, Calley

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 67

A footbridge near the massacre site. The surrounding province,
Quang Ngai, was seen as a Viet Cong stronghold during the war.
 the Descent into Darkness, read Cal-
ley’s words in news reports but didn’t
believe they showed true contrition.
“There just was no inner change of
heart,” Jones told me. “I mean it just
wasn’t there. No matter how people
tried to paint it.” Jones especially took
issue with the fact that Calley insisted
in the Kiwanis speech that he’d only
been following orders.
It’s still unclear exactly what Capt.
Ernest L. Medina told the men of
Charlie Company the night before they
were helicoptered into Son My. (He
did not respond to interview requests
for this story.) The captain reportedly
told his soldiers that they were finally
going to meet the Viet Cong’s 48th Lo-
cal Force Battalion, a well-armed di-
vision of at least 250 soldiers, which
for months had tormented them. Me-
dina later claimed that he’d never told
his men to kill innocent civilians. He
testified at Calley’s court-martial that
Calley had “hemmed and hawed” be-
fore admitting the extent of the slaugh-
ter. He said Calley told him, two days
after the massacre, “I can still hear
them screaming.” Medina himself was
charged, tried and found innocent.
I wanted to get firsthand reports
from other Charlie Company men who
were at Son My, so I started making
calls and writing letters. I eventually
reached five former soldiers willing to
speak on the record. Dennis Bunning,
a former private first class in Second
Platoon who now lives in California, re-
membered Medina’s pep talk this way:
“We’re going to get even with them for
all the losses we’ve had. We’re going in
was suffering from prostate cancer and Columbus. Fleming set up the talk, on there, we’re killing everything that’s
gastrointestinal problems. His lawyer a Wednesday afternoon. No reporters alive. We’re throwing the bodies down
described his earning capacity as “zero were invited, but a retired local news- the wells, we’re burning the villages,
based upon his age and health.” He man surreptitiously blogged about it and we’re wiping them off of the map.”
asked Penny for a lump alimony sum of online and the local paper picked up the It would have been a compelling
$200,000, half of their home equity, half story. “There is not a day that goes by that message for young men who had spent
of the individual retirement account in I do not feel remorse for what happened the previous months getting attacked
Penny’s name, two baker’s shelves and a that day in My Lai,” Calley told the 50 or by invisible forces. They had lost
cracked porcelain bird that apparently so Kiwanis members. “I feel remorse for friends to booby traps, land mines and
held emotional significance. the Vietnamese who were killed, for their sniper fire. By March 16, Charlie Com-
families, for the American soldiers in- pany alone had suffered 28 casualties,
The closest Calley ever came to publicly volved and their families. I am very sorry.” five dead and many others perma-
apologizing for My Lai was at a 2009 The historian Howard Jones, au- nently maimed, without once engaging
meeting of the Kiwanis Club of Greater thor of My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and directly with an enemy combatant.

70 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

 “Most of everything that was going on
was insanity in my view. It was trying
to survive,” said Lawrence La Croix of
Utah, who was only 18 when he went
into Son My as a Second Platoon squad
leader. “The problem is, when you step
on a mine or a booby trap there’s nothing
to take your anger out on. It’s not like a
firefight where you get to shoot back. You
can’t shoot a mine. It doesn’t really care.”
“All your friends are getting killed and
there is nobody to fight,” echoed John
Smail, Third Platoon squad leader, now
living in Washington State. “So when
we thought we had a chance to meet
them head-on, we were pumped.”
Kenneth Hodges, a former sergeant,
who is now living in rural Georgia, told
me he was devastated when he heard
of Calley’s partial apology at the Co-
lumbus Kiwanis Club. “I felt like cry-
ing, really, because he had nothing to
apologize for,” said Hodges. “I know
today I don’t have anything to apolo-
gize for. I went to Vietnam and I served
two tours and I served honorably. On
that particular operation, I carried
out the order as it was issued. A good
soldier receives, obeys and carries out
the orders that he is issued, and he re-
ports back. That’s the way it was in ’68.
That’s the way I was trained.”
In contrast, Meadlo expressed in-
tense remorse. He is living in Indiana,
and he says that as he gets older the
memories of My Lai come back more
frequently, not less. “When I’m sleeping,
I can actually see the faces, and that’s
the honest-to-God truth,” he told me. “I
can actually see the faces and the terror
and all those people’s eyes. And I wake
up and I’m just shaking and I just can’t Opposite page: Palm trees reflected in a ditch where hundreds of Viet-
hardly cope with it. The nightmares and namese villagers died during the massacre. Above: Nguyen Hong Man,
a villager who hid in a tunnel during the massacre at the age of 13.
everything will never go away. I’m sure
of that. But I have to live with it.”
Meadlo stood 10 to 15 feet away from
a group of villagers and went through
at least four clips of 17 bullets each.
He almost certainly killed relatives of foot was blown off. As he was whisked away on a helicopter, Meadlo reportedly
the people I spoke with in Vietnam. It shouted, “Why did you do it? This is God’s punishment to me, Calley, but you’ll
might have been Meadlo’s bullets that get yours! God will punish you, Calley!”
struck Truong Thi Le’s daughter or his Meadlo is still angry at the U.S. government for sending him to Vietnam in the
Zippo that burned Tran Nam’s home. first place, but he says he no longer holds a grudge against Calley. “I think he believed
The day after the massacre, Meadlo that he was doing his duty and doing his job when he was over there,” he told me.
stepped on a land mine and his right “He might have got sidetracked.”

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 71

Tran Nam, the Son My villager who hid glass cases: the rosary beads and Bud- black marble plaque that bears the names
under a bed as a 6-year-old while his dhist prayer book of the 65-year-old and ages of every person killed in Son My
family fell around him, is now 56 years monk Do Ngo, the round-bellied fish on March 16, 1968. The list includes 17
old. He works as a gardener at the Son sauce pot of 40-year-old Nguyen Thi pregnant women and 210 children under
My Vestige Site, a small museum dedi- Chac, the iron sickle of 29-year-old the age of 13. Turn left and there is a di-
cated to the memory of all those killed Phung Thi Muong, a single slipper of orama of how the village looked before
in 1968. The garden contains the brick 6-year-old Truong Thi Khai and the every dwelling was burned down. The
bases of 18 out of the 247 homes that stone marbles of two young broth- walls are lined with Ronald Haeberle’s
were otherwise destroyed that day. In ers. One case displays a hairpin that graphic photos, as well as pictures of
front of each is a plaque with the name of belonged to 15-year-old Nguyen Thi Calley and other soldiers known to have
the family that lived there and a list of the Huynh; her boyfriend held onto it for committed atrocities, including Meadlo
members of that family who were killed. eight years after the massacre before and Hodges. American heroes are cele-
Inside the museum, items that once donating it to the museum. brated, like Ronald Ridenhour, the ex-G.I.
belonged to the people of Son My sit in At the museum’s entrance is a large who first exposed the killings (he died in

72 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

1998), and Hugh Thompson, a pilot, and Left: A mass grave containing the bodies of slaughtered Son My villag-
Lawrence Colburn, a gunner, who saved ers. Right: Pham Thanh Cong, the director of the Son My Vestige Site,
still bears a shrapnel scar from the massacre next to his eye.
nine or ten civilians the day of the mas-
sacre by airlifting them on their helicop-
ter (both Thompson and Colburn later
died of cancer). There are also photos of
former U.S. soldiers who have visited the
museum, including a Vietnam veteran was 11 years old when he and his family heard the Americans shooting and hid in
named Billy Kelly who has 504 roses a tunnel underneath their home. As the soldiers approached, Cong’s mother told
delivered to the museum on the an- him and his four siblings to move deeper inside. A member of the U.S. Army then
niversary of the massacre every year. threw a grenade into the tunnel, killing everyone except Cong, who was injured
Sometimes he brings them personally. by the shrapnel and still bears a scar next to his left eye.
The director of the museum, Pham When we sat down, Cong thanked me for coming to the museum, for “sharing the
Thanh Cong, is a survivor himself. He pain of our people.” He told me it had been a complete CONTINUED ON PAGE 130

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 73

 I Am
In his final days, Martin
Luther King Jr. stood by
striking Memphis sanitation
A Man
by Ted Conover
workers. We returned to photographs by Joshua Rashaad McFadden
the city to see what has Additional reporting by Aaron Coleman
changed—and what hasn’t

July in Memphis: You need a way to keep cool. At 10:30 a.m.

it’s 88 degrees but feels hotter; by 4 p.m., when the crew is done,
it will be 94 degrees. Mike Griffin wears a long-sleeved T-shirt
under his fluorescent green vest and, under that, a wet towel
around his neck that he recharges periodically with water from
a bottle in a cooler. His partner, Mike Holloway, doesn’t be-
lieve in the neck towel. He likes a straw hat, and keeps
bottles of water in his trouser pockets as he hangs
onto the back of the garbage truck.
This route, which the men call Alcy after its main
KEN ROSS / UNIVERSI TY OF ME MP HIS (DETAIL)

road, is humble single-family homes where most

residents are African-American. Small churches are
seemingly everywhere: Dixie Heights Congregation,
New Harvest Baptist Church, Christ Covenant Church
International. Griffin drives fast between stops, and sets
the brake and jumps out to help Holloway at most of them—the
faster they work, the sooner they’ll be done. The streets are lined
with trash cans that people have rolled out for this once-a-week
Elmore Nickelberry, who still works a Memphis sanitation route,
was married with three children at the time of the strike. “But it got
to the point,” he recalls, “where we didn’t have any choice.”

74 SMITHSONIAN.COM
pickup. But at one house, there are no it to pick up this other stuff, which of- itation. After the strike, most decided
cans; the two men walk up the driveway, ten stinks in its own way. to abandon the city’s pension plan and
disappear behind the house, and reap- I chat with Mike Griffin between trust in Social Security; the decision
pear dragging plastic bags filled with stops. He has been on the job nearly turned out to be a mistake. Still, it was
garbage, and some tied-up yard waste. 30 years. It’s better than it used to be, something of a surprise last summer
In Memphis, Griffin explains, senior he says, but it’s still hard work. when the city announced it would make
citizens who register with Solid Waste The way it used to be is now legend- cash payments of $50,000, tax-free, to
get special service. (In the old days, he ary: Sanitation workers, treated like each sanitation worker who had been
later adds, sanitation workers had to casual laborers, who had to show up on the job at the end of 1968 and had re-
trek behind everybody’s house.) whether there was work or not, dragged tired without a pension. (The city coun-
It smells bad in the front of the truck 55-gallon drums or carried open tubs of cil increased the amount to $70,000.)
(I’m mostly in the passenger seat). And garbage to the truck. The Number 3 tubs Mike Griffin isn’t old enough to
it smells bad behind the truck, where would often leak onto their shoulders; benefit but he approves: “I think it’s

Holloway hangs on. Occasionally the people didn’t use plastic bags in those beautiful. They worked hard and they
breeze might blow it away, but just for a days. The workers had no uniforms and deserve it.” His brother-in-law, who
moment. To work on a garbage truck is no place to wash up after work. retired from sanitation last year and is
to spend the day in a miasma of stench. “They were the lowest of the low- sick, will qualify, he thinks: “It’s gonna
Every block seems to have piles of est in the pecking order,” Fred Davis, a help him out a lot.”
old tree branches waiting at the road- former city council member, told me. I ask Griffin about a doubt I’ve heard
side: Memphis suffered through a “When a kid wanted to put somebody others express—whether, after almost
BETTMMAN COLLE CTI ON / G ETTY IM AG ES

terrific storm about six weeks earlier. down, they’d refer to their daddy being 50 years, $70,000 is actually enough.
Griffin and Holloway steer around a sanitation worker.” Workers made He pauses to think about it. “Well,
most of the piles; a different crew will about a dollar an hour. Things were maybe it should be more,” he answers.
collect those. Three times, homeown- so bad in 1968 that, after two workers
ers approach the men and ask if they seeking shelter from rain were acci- The Memphis sanitation workers’
can please take the branches. Usu- dentally crushed to death inside a strike is remembered as an example of
ally they won’t because the limbs are truck with a faulty switch, the sanita- powerless African-Americans stand-
too large. But they do stop at piles of tion workers organized a strike. ing up for themselves. It is also remem-
smaller debris. Each then takes a pitch- A few of those workers are still alive, bered as the prelude to the assassina-
fork from the side of the truck and uses and a handful actually still work in san- tion of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

76 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

 The workers had made a few at-
tempts to strike, several years earlier,
“When I lived there in ’76, the
but their efforts had failed to attract city wanted to tear down the
the support of the clergy or the mid- Lorraine Hotel—they wanted to
dle class. By February 1968, though,
things had changed. Memphis’ mayor,
forget this ever happened.”
Henry Loeb, refused to negotiate with
worker representatives and rejected National Guard troops lined Beale Street during a protest on March
29 , 1968 (opposite). “I was in every march, all of ’em, with that sign:
a pay raise for workers that the city I AM A MAN,” recalls former sanitation worker Ozell Ueal.
council had approved. Some of them
began holding nonviolent marches; the
use of mace and tear gas against dem-
onstrators galvanized support for the
strike. One hundred-fifty local minis-
ters, led by the Rev. James Lawson, a King and his entourage, including the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Ralph Abernathy
friend of King’s, organized to support of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, were staying in a black-owned
the workers. King came to town and on motel, the Lorraine. As King stood on the balcony outside his second-floor room
March 18 delivered a speech to a crowd the next evening, April 4, a white supremacist sniper, James Earl Ray, who had
of around 15,000 people. He returned been stalking King for weeks, shot and killed him with a high-powered rifle from
ten days later to lead a march. Though the window of a rooming house across the street.
King’s hallmark was nonviolent pro- America convulsed; riots broke out across the country. I was 10 years old at the time.
test, the demonstration turned violent, A friend of mine who was 20 remembers the assassination as “the day hope died.”
with stores being looted and the po- The sanitation strike was eventually settled, with the city agreeing to a higher
lice shooting and killing a 16-year-old. wage and other changes including recognition of the union, the American Feder-
Police followed retreating demonstra- ation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).
tors to a landmark church, the Clay-
born Temple, entered the sanctuary, Memphis had a long decline after King’s assassination. The Lorraine Motel
released tear gas and, per one authori- declined as well, and was frequented by drug users and sex workers. In 1982, the
tative account, “clubbed people as they owner—who it is said never again rented out King’s room, 306—declared bank-
lay on the floor to get fresh air.” ruptcy. A “Save the Lorraine” group, financed by the union and the state, bought
Some blamed the violence on a local the motel at the last minute, hoping to turn it into a museum. The plan took nearly
Black Power group called the Invad- ten years; the National Civil Rights Museum opened to the public on September
ers. King resolved to work with them 28, 1991, completing the Lorraine’s transformation from killing floor to brothel
and gain their cooperation for another to shrine. (The Lorraine’s name was changed from hotel to motel when it was
march, to be held April 5. He arrived on enlarged post-World War II.)
April 3 and, as rain poured outside that The front of the museum is the motel, with an original illuminated sign and vin-
night, he delivered his famous “I’ve tage cars parked outside. (Across the street, two other old buildings have become
Been to the Mountaintop” speech to a part of the museum, including the rooming house where James Earl Ray stayed.)
group of sanitation workers. Behind the motel’s facade, the building was greatly expanded and completely
“We’ve got some difficult days transformed, with a movie theater, bookstore and a sequence of exhibits that
ahead. But it really doesn’t matter take the visitor from slavery to, at the very end, a perfectly preserved Room 306.
with me now, because I’ve been to the Last July, in a meeting room on the museum’s second floor, the city held a spe-
mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like cial breakfast before the press conference that would announce the payments to
anybody, I would like to live—a long the surviving sanitation workers. Present were city employees including Mayor
life; longevity has its place. But I’m Jim Strickland and the head of the public works department; a few members of
not concerned about that now. I just the press; one or two representatives of AFSCME; and most of the 14 original
want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed workers identified at that point by the city, many accompanied by family mem-
me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve bers. (The number of workers receiving the payment would eventually grow to
looked over. And I’ve seen the Prom- 26, and others have applied.)
ised Land. I may not get there with you. “Today is to thank and recognize the sanitation workers from 1968, who mean
But I want you to know tonight, that so much to the history of the city of Memphis and to the entire United States of
we, as a people, will get to the Prom- America civil rights movement. We know that we can’t make everything right . . .
ised Land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m but we can take a giant step in that direction,” said Strickland, who had orches-
not worried about anything. I’m not trated the plan, expected to cost nearly $1 million. “Because of the risks you took,
fearing any man.” the city of Memphis today is better than it was.”

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 77

 His public works director, Robert
Knecht, praised them as well, “not only
Could a line be drawn from
for enduring so many hardships and tri- Selma in 1965 and the sanitation
als during the 1968 strike, but for your workers’ strike in 1968 to the
courage and willingness to stand tall
and say yes, I am a man, to say we de-
activism of today?
serve to be treated equally and receive
fair wages for our work, to be afforded James Riley, who today resides in Chicago, recalls the crushing
physical demands that went with the job. “We worked like hell,”
the opportunity to organize.” Four of he remembers, “lifting those 55-gallon drums and the No. 3 tubs.”
the original workers, he noted, were still
city employees, including Elmore Nick-
elberry, 85, who had been hired in 1954.
He gestured at Nickelberry, who was
seated at a table wearing a coat and tie,
and recounted how he called him to ask and culture, such as Stax Records, barbecue restaurants (Rendezvous Ribs is
if he could attend the breakfast. Nickel- perhaps the most famous, but everyone in Memphis has their favorite), and the
berry’s reply: “OK, but I don’t want to be honky-tonk night scene on historic Beale Street.
late for work.” Sometime after the press conference, I asked the mayor in his office: Why did
the city come up with these payments when nobody was demanding them?
How many city officials, in America or He said it was just a question of doing the right thing. After all these years, san-
the world, have ever offered such en- itation workers were still being disadvantaged by their decision to leave the city
comiums to municipal workers who pension system in 1968; they had gotten bad advice. The cash payments piece was
went on strike—in this case, for more the brainchild of L. LaSimba Gray Jr., pastor of New Sardis Baptist Church, one of
than two months? his advisers. “We also knew that the 50th anniversary of the strike and assassina-
The historian Michael K. Honey, au- tion was coming up,” and felt the timing would be right for some kind of gesture.
thor of Going Down Jericho Road: The Would it be right to call the grants reparations, I asked? The term is part of a na-
Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s tional conversation about compensating the descendants of slaves. Strickland (who
Last Campaign, told me that over the is Memphis’ first white mayor in 24 years) replied that the word had never come up,
years, Memphians went from shock and and that he didn’t think so. “It’s certainly not reparations for slavery, [and] though
shame over their town’s being the place I’m not an expert, the argument has always been based on slavery. I don’t think you
of King’s murder to commemorating it could even say it’s reparations for abuse or Jim Crow laws or anything [like that].”
as part of the legacy of the civil rights But Memphis is a majority-black city with deep divisions on matters of race,
movement. “When I lived there in ’76, and plenty feel there’s an argument for reparations based on abuse that falls short
the city wanted to tear down the Lor- of slavery. King himself toward the end of his life had begun to focus on economic
raine Hotel—they wanted to forget this justice; in speeches across the Bible Belt earlier in 1968 that promoted his Poor
ever happened,” he said. “Supporting the People’s Campaign, he noted that most freed slaves had never received their “40
effort to convert it to a museum is one of acres and a mule,” and said that the nation had left blacks “penniless and illiterate
the best things Memphis ever did.” after 244 years of slavery.” Calculating that $20 a week for the four million slaves
Without question, civil rights tour- would have added up to $800 billion, he concluded, “They owe us a lot of money.”
ism matters to Memphis. The museum A local journalist, Wendi C. Thomas, wrote that if the city had instead given the
these days almost always has a line of workers $1,000 a year from 1968 to the present, with 5 percent compound interest
people waiting to get in, many or most it would today be worth $231,282.80.
of them African-American. An entire Various activist groups in Memphis even now trace their concerns to those of
room, complete with an actual, old-style King and of the sanitation workers. There are many, including the Mid-South
garbage truck of the kind that killed the Peace and Justice Center, the Memphis Coalition of Concerned Citizens, One
two workers in 1968, is devoted to the Memphis One Vision, the Fight for $15 campaign (for a higher minimum wage),
sanitation workers’ strike. Others are a drive to organize university workers, and two competing Black Lives Matters
dedicated to the Montgomery bus strike groups. Members of all of them, and many other people besides, came together
(there’s a bus), discrimination at Wool- dramatically on July 10, 2016. They were angry over recent police shootings such
worth’s (there’s a lunch counter), the as those of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Philando Castile in Minnesota, and a
desegregation of the University of Mis- local man named Darrius Stewart. A group of some 200 marchers, led by an ac-
sissippi, King’s “I Have a Dream” speech tivist named Frank Gottie, were walking from the National Civil Rights Museum
and more. The commemoration of civil toward the Criminal Justice Center downtown when they crossed paths with
rights in Memphis is of a piece with tour- Michael Rallings, the recently named interim director of the Memphis Police
ist attractions that celebrate black music Department, near the FedExForum arena. Rallings, who had been en route to an

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 79

interview at WLOK-AM, a venerable often getting yelled at but trying to leading the march. Me and some other
gospel music radio station, stopped to start a conversation. officers ended up in locked arms with
speak with them. “I just kept thinking about King and several, and we walked off the bridge.
Rallings, who today is the police Selma, Alabama, and how a negative A lot of folks in front of us, they saw
chief, told me that Gottie “had a mega- incident [here in Memphis] could have the movement and moved in front of
phone and asked me if I wanted to made Selma look small.” (Civil rights us. On the way down they discussed
say anything. I said I recognize this is demonstrators heading to the Edmund having a follow-up meeting. The time
your protest, I just want everybody to Pettus Bridge, in south Selma, were at- and location was all negotiated as we
be peaceful.” When they turned away tacked by police in 1965, with scores in- walked on the bridge. That was almost
from the Criminal Justice Center and jured.) Rallings, who was born in 1966 a two-mile walk, and we were all tired,
toward the bridge that carries Inter- and grew up in Memphis, said, “Being and so my officers brought water to the
state 40 across the Mississippi River to an African-American male, my parents protesters. We just wanted a peaceful
Arkansas, Rallings sped there in his car. and grandparents obviously shared sto- resolution to a tense situation.”
They had blocked traffic by the time ries of everything that surrounded the Up to 2,000 people took part in the pro-
he arrived, and he waded into the crowd civil rights movement, so I was very fa- test, according to the police—the biggest
with two other officers, also African- miliar with the possibilities of how bad demonstration in Memphis since the
American. Rallings told me that he things could actually become. I didn’t sanitation workers struck in 1968.
associates the bridge with “jumpers” want that to happen ever again in my
who are sometimes successful in killing city, and definitely not on my watch.” Could a line be drawn from Selma in
themselves by plunging into the Missis- To the demonstrators who wanted 1965 and the sanitation workers’ strike
sippi, and was worried that if pushing a dialogue, Rallings said, “We can’t in 1968 to the activism of today? Sha-
or shoving erupted, people could fall. talk on the bridge, we gonna have to hida Jones, an organizer of Black Lives
Rallings walked through the crowd, get off the bridge. . . . We ended up Matter in Memphis, was quite sure it

80 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

 could. The fight is still for black lib-
eration, she said—“all the ways we’re
Memphis post-assassination
marginalized and all the ways we’re “became a place of diminished
trying to get free.” Specifically, the esteem . . . for people whose
group is focused on abolishing money
bail, on what she called transformative
esteem was already suffering....”
justice in the school system (“ways [to]
address performance and behavioral After King (below) led a protest where violence broke out, he
insisted: “We must not overlook the conditions that led up to yes-
issues in school systems that don’t re- terday.” Days later, he returned to the Lorraine Motel (opposite).
sult in suspension or jail”), and on the
decriminalization of marijuana. Mem-
phis has too many low-paying jobs with
few or no benefits, she said. It is still
a city with widespread black poverty;
those with money, racially speaking,
have hardly changed at all. True, to-
day’s solid waste workers make $17 to
$19 an hour, a big improvement. But the
city’s marked income inequality—the
particular concern of King at the end
of his life, the problem that brought him
to Memphis—remains strikingly intact.
Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge was
named for a Confederate general who
had also been a Grand Dragon of the
Alabama Ku Klux Klan. A monument
near downtown Memphis features a
statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, also
a Confederate general who had been
the Grand Wizard, or national chair, of
the Ku Klux Klan—and a slave trader,
to boot.
One morning last fall Charlie New- services. A well-known photograph shows five men heading to court on April 4:
man, a lawyer and longtime civic fig- King advisers James Lawson and Andrew Young, the firm’s Lucius Burch—and
ure who has played a role in numerous Charlie Newman and another young associate.
good causes over the years, drove by Over lunch at the Little Tea Shop, an unprepossessing restaurant a few blocks
the monument on his way to work. He from his law offices, Newman talked about the incident. He had gone to the Lor-
reported to me that three police cruis- raine Motel to speak to King on April 3, the day before the court date, said New-
ers were stationed there, evidently to man, and had sat on the edge of the same bed visitors now look at behind glass at
dissuade anyone who might want to do the National Civil Rights Museum. “I’d seen him once before, in college. He had
the statue harm. Though Newman is an almost visible aura about him, an energy I’ve never seen before or since. He
best known for his work on projects was one of the few indispensable men or women. If we hadn’t had him, I’m not
that preserved green space and created sure we would have made it through that period.”
trails around the city, before then he That night, King delivered his last speech. In court the next day, Newman and
played a role in a national civil rights company prevailed—the city would have to allow the march. But the victory was
drama with Memphis at the center. short-lived. As the team was walking back from court to the office, Newman heard
After violence broke out during sirens, he said, and then the news: King had been shot.
King’s first march to support strik- Newman graduated from Memphis High School before heading to Yale for
JACK THORNELL / AP IMAG ES

ing sanitation workers, on March 18, both his bachelor’s and law degrees, but he was born in Mississippi. Such is life
he planned a second one for April 4, in these parts that the middle name of this progressive activist is Forrest, after
1968. But the city got a federal court the Confederate general Charlie Forrest Newman. “My great-grandfather was
to issue an injunction against it. King in the Battle of Antietam at 19 to 20 years old, and he named his first child, my
needed help lifting the injunction and grandfather, Charles Forrest—Forrest’s reputation was in its ascendancy. So my
the law firm Burch Porter & Johnson, parents named me for my grandfather.”
where Newman worked, offered its But today, Newman says he wouldn’t mind if the Forrest statue were removed.

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 81

When union organizers passed der and put it on you it would leak on
you and you’d smell like garbage.”
the hat that night, “they took up The year after the strike, he quit and
so much money, they filled ten again moved north . . . and so he was
garbage cans full of money.” not included in the city’s payments to
the original strikers.
But H.B. Crockett, 76, was. The
Baxter Leach (opposite, below) is retired, as is H.B. Crockett Memphis resident retired only three
(opposite, top), who put in 53 years as a sanitation worker. Crock-
ett signed on, he says, “because I didn’t want to be pickin’ cotton.” years ago. He too emigrated from Mis-
sissippi and left home at age 18. That
wasn’t old enough to work for the city,
so “I had to put my age up, to 21—I got
away with it.”
One of Crockett’s most vivid mem-
Across town, the lunch crowd had packed the Miss Girlee Soul Food Restaurant, ories of the strike is the night he heard
owned and run by the family of retired sanitation worker Baxter Leach. I’d met Martin Luther King’s last speech. “Ev-
Leach at the mayor’s announcement breakfast, and he has often been the public erybody listened to him—white and
face of the surviving striking workers. He spoke at the national Teamsters meet- black listened to him. I believe it was
ing in Las Vegas in 2016, and in 2013 addressed fast-food workers in New York more black than white that night. It was
City who were considering joining a union. On the wall at Miss Girlee are photos just packed. He said, I have a dream, I
of him and other workers with President Obama in 2011, and with Stevie Wonder; have a dream, I been to the mountain-
he once spent a week with Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition. Behind the top, he allowed me to go up there, and
counter stood his wife and his oldest son; his vivacious granddaughter, Ebony, I seen the promised land. [When union
brought us plates of chicken, greens and corn bread. I asked Leach, who was at organizers passed the hat that night,]
the next table with others, if he supervises the employees. they took up so much money, they filled
“I don’t do nothin’!” he said. “I talk with my friends.” ten garbage cans full of money.”
Later he spoke about how it used to be. The trucks had crews of four or five; I had hoped to visit another former
the only white employees were drivers, who didn’t have to do the hard work of striker at home in Memphis, but his
fetching buckets of garbage from behind people’s houses. One of his crewmates daughter, Beverly Moore, explained
had lost a leg when a car crashed into the back of the truck. Another lost two toes that Alvin Turner, 82, was too sick
in a different incident. After a shift, white workers were the only ones allowed to with cancer to see anybody. She asked
shower at the depot; everybody else had to ride the bus home stinking. me to call instead. He had trouble
As for the strike, it had been a huge trauma. After violence broke out, some speaking, and so Moore took the phone
4,000 National Guardsmen had flooded the city. They lined the streets at subse- and translated. Though her father had
quent marches, their rifles fitted with bayonets pointed at demonstrators. Scabs worked in sanitation for 25 years, she
had been brought in to pick up trash; some of the strikers fought with them. The said, the city had informed him that he
strikers knew there were spies among them, reporting to the police and the FBI; wasn’t going to be eligible for the pay-
they also knew that not all the workers were supporting the marches. (Leach, Al- ment, because he was one of the few
vin Turner and others I spoke to assert that not all the old-timers singled out for that had stuck with the old pension
recognition recently had actually joined the strike.) But Leach said he never re- plan. Though he was disappointed, she
gretted the strike for a second: “Things was just so bad. Something had to change.” said he wasn’t as bad off as many.
“I tell people all the time my daddy
A month or so after that day in his restaurant, Leach called his old friend James was a garbage man, but he had a busi-
Riley, 75, in Chicago. Leach urged him to drive down from Chicago to join a photo nessman’s mentality.” Turner had
shoot for this article. Riley, 75, is pictured in a gathering of strikers holding signs started some businesses on the side,
with the famous slogan from the strike, “I Am a Man.” The iconic photo is on dis- and made money. Two of Moore’s sis-
play in the National Civil Rights Museum. Riley’s proud of that image and so is ters received PhDs (one was a vice
Christopher, his son, who is in the clothing business: He had T-shirts made with president of Spelman College), and
the image emblazoned on the front. James and Christopher Riley arrived to have her brother was a successful real es-
their photos taken at the Memphis AFSCME hall. tate investor. She herself had recently
Like Leach and many other sanitation workers from the time, Riley grew up in retired from the U.S. Navy, as a petty
Mississippi, the son of sharecroppers. There he made about $3 for ten hours of officer first class.
work; sanitation in Memphis paid $1 to $1.35 per hour and so, at age 23, he moved She said her father’s proudest mo-
north. But he grew disillusioned with the job. “Most of them tubs leaked like hell. ment was when he and some other
They had an odor, and when it started leaking, and you put that tub on your shoul- original strikers visited President

82 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

Obama at the White House, “and he said he might not
have been president had they not taken their stand.”
I called Turner and Moore again a few weeks later to
check in, but I was too late: Alvin Turner passed away
last September 18, at age 83.

For my Memphis visit, I rented a house on Mulberry

Street through Airbnb. Mulberry Street is short, and
the house was just a block from the National Civil
Rights Museum. When I stepped out the front door, I
could see the neon Lorraine sign on the corner of the
building. I wanted to get as close to the history as I
could, and that seemed like one way. Talking to Charlie
Newman seemed like another. When I met Henry Nel-
son, I found a third.
Nelson, 63, had a long career in Memphis radio. He
had been on-air at WLYX, a progressive rock station, on
the campus of Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes
College) and for WMC’s FM-100 (“the best mix of the
’70s, ’80s, and ’90s”), and he helped start WHRK-97, a
hip-hop and R&B station. But when I met him in his
large office at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library,
where he is a community outreach and projects spe-
cialist for the public library system, he said his main
job in life had always been connecting people, finding
what they had in common.
Nelson, whose graying hair falls over his shoulder
in dreadlocks, is handsome and animated. His office
computer was softly playing Tibetan chants.
We talked about his growing up in Memphis. “I come
from a family of help,” he said. “My mom was a maid.”
His brother Ed was for a while an activist who joined
the local Black Power group, the Invaders. “I’m the good
son, he’s a son of the streets,” said Nelson. He talked
about his history in radio, about the central importance
of blues music and Stax Records and Art Gilliam’s
WLOK-AM radio near the Lorraine, “the station that
was right in the courtyard of the assassination . . . that
became the voice of widening the community.” Stax,
he said, “closed down in the early ’70s because of King,
because of what happened in the city.” Not long after,
“the downtown area was hollowed out . . . and really it’s
still that way.” Memphis post-assassination “became
a place of diminished esteem . . . for people whose es-
teem was already suffering. Victimization, poverty, lack
of hope . . . it all got worse.”
Nelson is also a writer, and in April he published
an essay in Memphis Magazine about his older sister,
Mary Ellen. She worked at the Lorraine Motel and was
there the day King was shot and killed. In fact, she ap-
pears in a famous photo. On the second-floor balcony,
next to the fallen civil rights leader, several members
of King’s entourage point at the rooming house where
the shot came from; below, on ground level, amid other
employees, the motel’s owners, Walter and Loree Cath-

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 83

erine Bailey, and police, a woman holds
her hand over her mouth. It is Mary
We took a walk to the vacant lot
Ellen. In addition to working on the across the street, which I knew
motel switchboard and in its kitchen, the city plans to turn into the I
she cleaned rooms. In fact, she told her
brother, the housekeeping cart outside
Am a Man memorial park.
King’s room in the photo was hers.
Mary Ellen soon relocated to Lan- Ozell Ueal, retired and living in Memphis, witnessed King’s final
speech. “I was there the night before Dr. King got killed. It stormed
sing, Michigan, where she lives today, that night. It felt like something was going to happen to him.”
a retired school bus driver and mother
of four. Nelson notes that she never
liked talking about what happened.
Raka Nandi, collections manager
and registrar at the National Civil
Rights Museum, commented to Nel- Studio, on Union Avenue—where Elvis was discovered. Like Mike Griffin’s rig,
son that while “many people want it had hydraulic lifts on the back that raised the city-supplied garbage bins and
to insert their story into the lives of tipped them into the hopper at the rear. Sometimes Nickelberry waited in the cab
historical figures or celebrities . . . while Hayes brought the bins to the truck, tipped them in, then returned them to
Mary Ellen did not want to cheapen the curb, but often he got out to help. We headed down Monroe then crossed over
her memory of this moment by being Danny Thomas Boulevard, toward AutoZone Park stadium, where the Memphis
perceived in this way.” Though Nelson Redbirds play baseball, and the tall buildings of downtown. We stopped outside a
thought Mary Ellen was finally ready fire station; Hayes and Nickelberry went in for a while to chat with the guys. I was
to speak about that day and gave me getting the feeling this might not be the hardest route in Memphis Solid Waste.
her number, the half-dozen texts and Nickelberry stayed chatty when he got back in the truck. Like Griffin, he wanted
voicemails I left went unanswered. to tell me about the bad stuff that sometimes happened when the bins got tipped
into the truck and then compressed. Bottles of paint thinner would explode and
Elmore Nickelberry, 85, is referred to spray. Kitty litter that wasn’t tied up in a plastic bag would cover the workers
without exception in Memphis as “Mr. with foul dust, causing them to break out in hives. “You never know what’s inside
Nickelberry.” As one of the last sanita- those cans until you dump ’em,” he said. We headed south, toward the civil rights
tion workers who experienced the strike, museum, and when we were near I asked Nickelberry where Clayborn Temple
he is the city’s go-to man when some- was— I had yet to pay a visit. “I’ll show you on the way back,” he said. An hour later,
body like me asks to interview an orig- he diverged from his route, traveled across a few blocks where buildings had been
inal worker. My turn came one evening razed and not yet replaced, and then parked the garbage truck across from a beau-
last July. Terence Nickelberry, his son, tiful big church. He put the truck in park, climbed down, and told me to follow.
oversees the north solid waste depot, “I want you to take pictures of that,” said Nickelberry, indicating the main door
and we sat in his office while we waited of the Romanesque Revival building. (I’d been shooting photos with my camera
for his father to get his truck. About his as we went.) “We ran in there when the police chased us” during the march. “And
workers, Terence said, “If you haven’t take a picture of that”—he pointed at a window that had been broken, he thought,
got sprayed with urine [shot out from a when the police shot tear gas into the sanctuary, flushing everybody out. “The
bottle under pressure], smacked with a police hit me on the arm and ran me down to the river,” he said.
limb or smeared with feces, you haven’t We took a short walk to the vacant lot across the street, which I knew the city
been doing your job.” plans to turn into the I Am a Man memorial park. (Recently the city added post-
His father, when I met him, was a ers to the side of garbage trucks that read, I AM MEMPHIS.) Nickelberry hadn’t
dignified, lean man who shook my heard about the park, but he liked the idea. He also approved of the way Clayborn
hand and introduced me to his work Temple was being renovated. Originally a segregated Presbyterian church, it
partner, Sean Hayes, 45—who also belonged to the A.M.E. Church (which named the building after its bishop) by
called him Mr. Nickelberry. The three 1968. The protest march led by King had started from there on March 28, as had
of us climbed into the front of Nick- numerous marches earlier in the strike.
elberry’s truck and headed toward It was late when we headed back to the depot. Nickelberry told me that once
downtown. I was surprised by the cool he received his payment from the city, he actually might retire. That’s when it
air emanating from the dashboard. occurred to me that the reason he was still working was possibly that without a
“You have AC?” I asked. pension, he had to. I asked him, but he didn’t want to comment. Was the $70,000
“For some reason it’s working,” re- from the city enough, I asked?
plied Nickelberry wryly. The truck “I don’t think it’s enough,” said Mr. Nickelberry. “But anything’s better than
started picking up garbage nearby Sun nothing.”

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 85

 Back
When
the End
Was Near
The year’s most important
book, The Population Bomb,
made dire predictions—
and triggered a wave of
repression around the world

by Charles C. Mann
photo illustration by Donny Bajohr

As 1968 began, Paul Ehrlich was an entomologist at alarming events had a single, underly-
Stanford University, known to his peers for his groundbreak- ing cause: Too many people, packed into
ing studies of the co-evolution of flowering plants and but- too-tight spaces, taking too much from
terflies but almost unknown to the average person. That was the earth. Unless humanity cut down
about to change. In May, Ehrlich released a quickly written, its numbers—soon—all of us would face
cheaply bound paperback, The Population Bomb. Initially “mass starvation” on “a dying planet.”
it was ignored. But over time Ehrlich’s tract would sell mil- Ehrlich, now 85, told me recently
lions of copies and turn its author into a celebrity. It would that the book’s main contribution was
become one of the most influential books of the 20th cen- to make population control “accept-
tury—and one of the most heatedly attacked. able” as “a topic to debate.” But the
The first sentence set the tone: “The battle to feed all of book did far more than that. It gave a
humanity is over.” And humanity had lost. In the 1970s, the huge jolt to the nascent environmental
book promised, “hundreds of millions of people are going movement and fueled an anti-popula-
to starve to death.” No matter what people do, “nothing can tion-growth crusade that led to human
prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” rights abuses around the world.
Published at a time of tremendous conflict and social up- Born in 1932, Ehrlich was raised in a
heaval, Ehrlich’s book argued that many of the day’s most leafy New Jersey town. His childhood

86 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

 and Higher Classification of the But-
terflies.” Soon he was hired by Stanford
University’s biology department, and
in his classes he presented his ideas
about population and the environment.
Students, attracted by his charisma,
mentioned Ehrlich to their parents. He
was invited to speak to alumni groups,
which put him in front of larger audi-
ences, and then on local radio shows.
David Brower, executive director of
the Sierra Club, asked him to write a
book in a hurry, hoping—“naively,”
Ehrlich says—to influence the 1968
presidential election. Ehrlich and his
wife, Anne, who would co-write many
of his 40-plus books, produced the first
draft of The Population Bomb in about
three weeks, basing it on his lecture
notes. Only his name was on the cover,
Ehrlich told me, because his publisher
said “single-authored books gets much
more attention than dual-authored
books . . . and I was at the time stupid
enough to go along with it.”
Though Brower thought the book
was “a first-rate battle tract,” no ma-
jor newspaper reviewed it for four
months. The New York Times gave it a
one-paragraph notice almost a year af-
ter its release. Yet Ehrlich promoted it
relentlessly, promulgating his message
at scores or even hundreds of events.
In February 1970, Ehrlich’s work
finally paid off: He was invited onto
The book was published so hastily the fuse bomb pictured on the cover was “ticking.” NBC’s “Tonight Show.” Johnny Car-
son, the comedian-host, was leery of
serious guests like university profes-
love of nature morphed into a fascina- nity—another university custom—Ehr- sors because he feared they would be
tion for collecting insects, especially lich rented a house with his friends. pompous, dull and opaque. Ehrlich
butterflies. Something of a loner, as They passed around books of interest, proved to be affable, witty and blunt.
precocious as he was assertive, Ehrlich including Road to Survival, by William Thousands of letters poured in after his
was publishing articles in local ento- Vogt. Published in 1948, it was an early appearance, astonishing the network.
mological journals in his teens. Even warning of the dangers of overpopula- The Population Bomb shot up the best-
then he was dismayed by environmen- tion. We are subject to the same bio- seller lists. Carson invited Ehrlich back
tal degradation. The insecticide DDT logical laws as any species, Vogt said. in April, just before the first Earth Day.
was killing his beloved butterflies, and If a species exhausts its resources, it For more than an hour he spoke about
rapid suburban development was de- crashes. Homo sapiens is a species population and ecology, about birth
stroying their habitat. rapidly approaching that terrible fate. control and sterilization, to an audi-
When Ehrlich entered the Univer- Together with his own observations, ence of tens of millions. After that, Ehr-
sity of Pennsylvania he befriended Vogt’s book shaped Ehrlich’s ideas lich returned to the show many times.
some upperclassmen who were im- about ecology and population studies. Ehrlich said that he and Anne had
pressed by his refusal to wear the Ehrlich got his PhD at the University “wanted to call the book Population,
freshman beanie, then a demeaning of Kansas in 1957, writing his disserta- Resources, and Environment, because
tradition. Not wanting to join a frater- tion on “The Morphology, Phylogeny it’s not just population.” But their pub-

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 87

lisher and Brower thought this was too ponderous, and asked Hugh Moore, a Such statements contributed to a
businessman-activist who had written a pamphlet called “The Population Bomb,” wave of population alarm then sweep-
if they could borrow his title. Ehrlich reluctantly agreed. “We hated the title,” he ing the world. The International
says now. It “hung me with being the population bomber.” Still, he acknowledges Planned Parenthood Federation, the
the title “worked,” in that it attracted attention. Population Council, the World Bank,
The book received furious denunciations, many focused on Ehrlich’s seeming the United Nations Population Fund,
decision—emphasized by the title—to focus on human numbers as the cause of the Hugh Moore-backed Association
environmental problems, rather than total consumption. The sheer count of for Voluntary Sterilization and other
people, the critics said, matters much less than what people do. Population per organizations promoted and funded
se is not at the root of the world’s problems. The reason, Ehrlich’s detractors said, programs to reduce fertility in poor
is that people are not fungible—the impact of one living one kind of life is com- places. “The results were horrific,” says
pletely different from that of another person living another kind of life. Betsy Hartmann, author of Reproduc-
Consider the opening scene of The Population Bomb. It describes a cab ride tive Rights and Wrongs, a classic 1987
that Ehrlich and his family experienced in Delhi. In the “ancient taxi,” its seats exposé of the anti-population crusade.
“hopping with fleas,” the Ehrlichs entered “a crowded slum area.” Some population-control programs
pressured women to use only certain
The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, peo-
officially mandated contraceptives. In
ple sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrust their
Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Korea
hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating.
and Taiwan, health workers’ salaries
People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people,
were, in a system that invited abuse,
people. . . . [S]ince that night, I’ve known the feel of overpopulation.
dictated by the number of IUDs they
The Ehrlichs took the cab ride in 1966. How many people lived in Delhi then? inserted into women. In the Philip-
A bit more than 2.8 million, according to the United Nations. By comparison, the pines, birth-control pills were literally
1966 population of Paris was about 8 million. No matter how carefully
one searches through archives, it is not easy to find expressions of alarm
about how the Champs-Élysées was “alive with people.” Instead, Paris in Population will
1966 was an emblem of elegance and sophistication. fall, Ehrlich says
Delhi was overcrowded, and would continue to grow. By 1975, the city now, either when
had 4.4 million people—a 50 percent gain in a decade. Why? “Not births,” people dramatically
says Sunita Narain, head of the Centre for Science and Environment, a reduce birthrates
think tank in Delhi. Instead, she says, the overwhelming majority of the or when there is
new people in Delhi then were migrants drawn from other parts of India a massive die-off
by the promise of employment. The government was deliberately trying because the earth’s
to shift people away from small farms into industry. Many of the new ecosystems can
factories were located around Delhi. Because there were more migrants no longer
than jobs, parts of Delhi had become jam-packed and unpleasant, exactly support us.
as Ehrlich wrote. But the crowding that gave him “the feel of overpop-
ulation” had little to do with an overall population increase—with a
sheer rise in births—and everything to do with institutions and govern-
ment planning. “If you want to understand Delhi’s growth,” Narain argues, “you pitched out of helicopters hovering
should study economics and sociology, not ecology and population biology.” over remote villages. Millions of people
Driving the criticism of The Population Bomb were its arresting, graphic de- were sterilized, often coercively, some-
scriptions of the potential consequences of overpopulation: famine, pollution, times illegally, frequently in unsafe
social and ecological collapse. Ehrlich says he saw these as “scenarios,” illustra- conditions, in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru,
tions of possible outcomes, and he expresses frustration that they are instead Indonesia and Bangladesh.
“continually quoted as predictions”—as stark inevitabilities. If he had the ability In the 1970s and ’80s, India, led by
to go back in time, he said, he would not put them in the book. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her
It is true that in the book Ehrlich exhorted readers to remember that his sce- son Sanjay, embraced policies that in
narios “are just possibilities, not predictions.” But it is also true that he slipped many states required sterilization
into the language of prediction occasionally in the book, and more often in other for men and women to obtain water,
settings. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in electricity, ration cards, medical care
the history of man have already been born,” he promised in a 1969 magazine and pay raises. Teachers could expel
article. “Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,” Ehrlich told CBS students from school if their parents
News a year later. “And by ‘the end’ I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity weren’t sterilized. More than eight mil-
of the planet to support humanity.” lion men and women were sterilized in

88 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

 Feeding a hungry planet
Contrary to Ehrlich’s warning, famine deaths fell dramatically even as world population doubled

DEATH TOLL FOR GREAT FAMINES WORLD POPULATION

30 millions billions 8

25
6

5
20

15
3

2
10

0 0
0
1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000
000 2010
5W I NFOGRA PHI CS ; SOURCES: WORLD PE ACE FOUNDATION, TUFTS; FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION, U.N.

1975 alone. (“At long last,” World Bank Africa—all were wracked, horribly, by tensity fertilizers, drip irrigation.
head Robert McNamara remarked, hunger in that decade. Nonetheless, To Ehrlich, today’s reduction in hun-
“India is moving to effectively address there was no “great increase in the ger is but a temporary reprieve—a lucky,
its population problem.”) For its part, death rate” around the world. Accord- generation-long break, but no indication
China adopted a “one-child” policy ing to a widely accepted count by the of a better future. Population will fall, he
that led to huge numbers—possibly 100 British economist Stephen Devereux, says now, either when people choose to
million—of coerced abortions, often in starvation claimed four to five million dramatically reduce birthrates or when
poor conditions contributing to infec- lives during that decade—with most of there is a massive die-off because eco-
tion, sterility and even death. Millions the deaths due to warfare, rather than systems can no longer support us. “The
of forced sterilizations occurred. environmental exhaustion from over- much more likely [outcome] is an in-
Ehrlich does not see himself as re- population. crease in the death rate, I’m afraid.”
sponsible for such abuses. He strongly In fact, famine has not been increas- His viewpoint, once common, is now
supported population-control mea- ing but has become rarer. When The more of an outlier. In 20 years of re-
sures like sterilization, and argued Population Bomb appeared, according porting on agriculture, I’ve met many
that the United States should pres- to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Orga- researchers who share Ehrlich’s worry
sure other governments to launch nization, something like one out of four about feeding the world without in-
vasectomy campaigns, but he did not people in the world was hungry. Today flicting massive environmental dam-
advocate for the programs’ brutality the proportion of hungry is about one age. But I can’t recall one who thinks
and discrimination. out of ten. Meanwhile, the world’s pop- failure is guaranteed or even probable.
Equally strongly, he disputes the ulation has more than doubled. People “The battle to feed all of humanity is
criticism that none of his scenarios are surviving because they learned over,” Ehrlich warned. The research-
came true. Famines did occur in the how to do things differently. They de- ers I’ve encountered believe the bat-
1970s, as Ehrlich had warned. India, veloped and adopted new agricultural tle continues. And nothing, they say,
Bangladesh, Cambodia, West and East techniques—improved seeds, high-in- proves that humanity couldn’t win.

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 89

 Bobby’s
Kids
photographs
by Gregg Segal
text by Jesse Katz

At the site where

Robert Kennedy
was killed,
students at a Los
Angeles public
school keep his
spirit alive

His fight may have been cut short

before they were born, but he
would have recognized the strug-
gles they face: the children of jan-
itors and gardeners, dishwashers
and security guards, Mexican,
Salvadoran, Korean, Filipino,
their adolescent yearnings and
hardships percolating through the
most densely populated corner of
Los Angeles. Shortly after mid-
night on June 5, 1968, when Sen-
ator Robert F. Kennedy delivered
For Jocelyn Huem-
his final address, he was standing bes (above) and
in their library—then the Embassy Joshua Valdivieso
Ballroom of the Ambassador (right) the RFK
school shapes their
Hotel—celebrating his victory in vision of the future.
California’s Democratic primary “Today I would de-
and deploring “the division, the scribe myself as a
leader—outspoken,
violence, the disenchantment socially aware—and
with our society.” Moments later, before I was not,”
exiting through the hotel pantry, says Joshua.
Kennedy was assassinated by gun-
man Sirhan Sirhan.
Today more than 4,000 students
inhabit those grounds, a campus of
six learning centers, kindergarten
through 12th grade, that operate as the

90 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

 The power of the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools.
arts is visible ev- In this era of historical reassess-
erywhere on the
campus, from a ment, of re-examining the figures
mural by artist Risk worthy of a pedestal, RFK seems an
(opposite) to theater enduringly relevant namesake for a
doors. “This is such
a historical place,” school serving the sons and daughters
says student Sally of Los Angeles’ foreign-born working
Melchor of the night- poor. A 40-foot-tall portrait of the
club (its replicated
doors below). slain presidential candidate—painted
by Shepard Fairey—looms over a
central courtyard. Other murals,
plaques and framed black-and-white
photographs documenting the life
and times of Robert Kennedy crowd
the interior walls. A display case of
campaign buttons (bearing the slo-
gans “Viva Kennedy” and “Kennedy
is the remedy”) graces the foyer of the
school’s auditorium—once the site of
the Ambassador Hotel’s storied night-
club and celebrity watering hole, the
Cocoanut Grove. Even the campus
mascot, the Bobcats, is a nod to the
liberal folk hero.
“I was reading up about him a few
weeks ago,” says 16-year-old Jocelyn
Huembes, a junior at RFK’s Ambas-
sador School of Global Leadership.
“I read that he was a really social jus-
tice-y type of person. And that’s kind
of what I believe in.”
Although the tumult of the 1968
presidential race—and the anguish of
a second Kennedy assassination—can
seem impossibly distant to a teenager
in 2018, the thread running from
RFK’s agenda to Jocelyn’s hopes and
challenges is not hard to untangle.
Her mother, who is from El Salvador,
works as an in-home caregiver for the
elderly; her father, a carpet installer
from Nicaragua, was deported when
she was a child. Two older brothers,
caught up in gangs, have urged her not
to repeat their mistakes. Jocelyn takes
four AP classes—U.S. history, English,
Spanish, environmental science—yet
because she and her mom share a
studio apartment with another family,
she does not have a bedroom or a desk
or even a lamp to herself.
“Sometimes I have to turn the lights
out because they want to go to sleep,”
says Jocelyn, who dreams of becom-
ing a pediatrician. “So if I have a lot of

92 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

 On the school’s
23.5-acre site, an
emphasis on shared
outdoor space re-
inforces the school’s
cohesive fabric. De-
sign elements of the
playing field include
a winding tricycle
path for younger
students and a four-
square court.

94 SMITHSONIAN.COM
96 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018
 homework that’s really important, I go
to the bathroom. I turn on the lights,
close the door and sit on the toilet.”

Once a playground for Hollywood

royalty, as well as actual kings and
queens and sultans from around the
globe, the Ambassador, then owned
by the J. Myer Schine family, fell on
hard times after RFK’s murder, and
in 1989 it closed, ending 68 years of
pomp and high jinks. The Los Angeles
Unified School District, in the grip
of an overcrowding crisis, pondered
buying the 23.5-acre site. But before
the district could act, a developer
from New York, Donald Trump, and
his business partners purchased the
land. “L.A. is going to be very hot,” he
said in 1990, unveiling plans to build
what would have been the nation’s
tallest skyscraper, a 125-story tower,
where the hotel once stood.
Thus began a decade-long legal
and public relations brawl: L.A.
educators going up against the
formidable American enthusiasm
for real estate development, while a
generation of neighborhood kids who
had to slog across town to attend
school waited on the sidelines.
Seizing the property initially by
eminent domain, the school district
ultimately prevailed. Trump
complained in a deposition that the
LAUSD had grabbed the land “as
viciously as in Nazi Germany.”
There would be more litigation,
brought by preservationists seeking to
combat the city’s disposable approach
to architecture and even by the attor-
ney for Sirhan Sirhan, long after his
conviction, who wanted to perform
More than 20 artists acoustical tests on the spot where his
produced murals
at RFK (art by Greg client ambushed the senator. But the
Mike in an elementary school district, which did not want a
school lunchroom, crime scene as the centerpiece of its
opposite, and RFK por-
trait by Shepard Fairey, new campus, razed much of the prop-
left). The focus on erty, including that infamous pantry.
achievement and social “There could be no better memorial
justice is transforma-
tive, says Sumaiya to my father than a living memorial
Sabnam (above), at that educates the children of this
work on equations. “I city,” Max Kennedy said at the 2006
call myself a student
activist,” she says. groundbreaking for what would be-
come a $579 million project.

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 97

So tightly packed are the surround-
ing neighborhoods of Koreatown and
Pico-Union that the student body, 94
percent Latino and Asian, is drawn
from just 1.5 square miles. Some are
English learners. Most qualify for free
lunch. Nearly all who attend college
will be the first in their family to do so.
Sumaiya Sabnam, an 11th grader
whose mathematical ability and civic
activism have already earned her a
$20,000 college scholarship, walks to
school wearing a hijab, doing her best
to tune out the taunts occasionally
hurled her way on the street. “Math
makes me feel calm, like, ‘OK, there’s an
answer to something,’” says Sumaiya,
whose father served as a top official for
a national political party in their native
Bangladesh but here drives a taxi.
Samantha Galindo’s trip home of-
ten involves a detour through Beverly
Hills, where her Mexican-born father
works nights as a janitor—his third
job of the day. “Part of the reason I
do good in school is that I want to
get him out of that life, where he has
to work multiple jobs, because it’s
starting to take a toll on him,” says Sa-
mantha, who does her homework on a
jolting Metro bus, then cleans offices
alongside her dad until 10 p.m.
Every six months, Aaron Rodriguez
shows up at school not knowing
whether his mother will make it home
from her check-ins with Immigration
and Customs Enforcement officials or
be deported to Guatemala. “She’ll tell
me, ‘Oh, I have court today: If anything Raissa Ngoma (opposite),
happens, I love you,’ ” says Aaron, from the Democratic
a 17-year-old artist and animator, Republic of Congo (at a
mural by Woes Martin),
who once poured his feelings into a Samantha Galindo (top)
colored-pencil sketch of a blazing and Aaron Rodriguez
sun trapped behind a barred window. (above), who are Hispanic,
reflect the school’s
Aaron finds special meaning in diversity. At RFK, says
another RFK mural, completed by Samantha, “In the back
the artist Judy Baca in 2010, that of your brain you’re
always saying: ‘You have
runs 55 feet across the library wall, to push yourself.’”
just above the spot where Kennedy
delivered that last victory speech.
The image that stays with him, says
Aaron, is that of RFK “standing over a
crowd of people—and all of them are
reaching out toward him and they’re
all different skin tones.”

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 99

 Rage
Against
A witness to the riots at the Democratic
the Machine
National Convention in Chicago
revisits the chaos that shocked the world

by Todd Gitlin
illustrations by
Shane L. Johnson

When Todd Gitlin went to Chicago at the end of August 1968 activists with their billy clubs. The ri-
to join the protests outside the Democratic National Convention, he ots were broadcast around the world,
told friends he was going “with the instinct of the moth for the flame.” along with the protesters’ chant: “The
Political activism was nothing new for Gitlin, a 1959 graduate of the whole world is watching.”
Bronx High School of Science who had been part of the New Left since The demonstrators might have ap-
his sophomore year at Harvard. In 1963, he’d been elected president of peared to be unified, but they weren’t.
Students for a Democratic Society, a national campus organization While some members of the New Left
that stood against the Cold War and for civil rights and participa- movement had thrown themselves behind
tory democracy. Now he was a writer for the San Francisco Express candidate Eugene McCarthy, others were
Times, a counterculture tabloid that covered radical politics. doing their best to sabotage the entire
But Gitlin looked toward Chicago with a sense of foreboding. The proceedings. Many in the New Left were
assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had appalled by the empty theatrics of the
unleashed a new rage in young activists, and Chicago’s mayor Rich- Youth International Party. “The Yippies
ard J. Daley was determined to curb them. Crowds of up to 10,000 announced their existence at a stoned
protesters gathered, with some taunting police and hurling rocks and New Year’s Eve party at the dawn of 1968,
concrete, and 23,000 police and National Guard soldiers descended, and it became a major media event,” re-
spraying mace, blasting the streets with tear gas, and chasing young calls Gitlin, “even though there were only

100 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

CREDI T TK HE RE
a handful of people at the party.” The to protesters, went on to write 16 nonfic- with the blood of saints and prophets,
Yippie leaders’ outlandish threats had tion books, including The Sixties: Years and all the nations that drink of “the
dominated news coverage. “When Abbie of Hope, Days of Rage. He also became wine of the wrath of her fornication,”
Hoffman and Jerry Rubin declared that a professor of journalism and sociology and finally, in deliverance, the Word
they were going to drop LSD into the Chi- and chair of the PhD program in commu- of God, the King of Kings, Lord of
cago reservoir and send women to Chi- nications at Columbia University, where Lords, astride a white horse, bringing
cago to seduce delegates, Mayor Daley’s he also teaches a class on the 1960s. Re- a new heaven and a new earth, and the
administration took this stuff seriously. cently, he’s been working on a novel about end of all night.
It became front-page news.” the era, called The Opposition, in an ef- Flares streak through a pres-
After the convention, public opinion fort to convey some of the ineffable “cur- sure-cooker night as Chicago’s fes-
polls confirmed that most Americans rents of feeling, of sensibility, even of col- tival of misrule and chaos churns
had sided with the Chicago establish- lective unconscious that you can’t write through the park and into the streets.
ment. The mayor claimed he’d received about while confining yourself to estab- One cascade of adrenaline smashes
135,000 letters of support and only lished fact.” Below is an excerpt in which into another. The joy of order collides
5,000 letters opposing his forceful tac- a character called Matt Stackhouse, who with the joy of chaos. Complexities are
tics. Two months later, Richard Nixon is the son of a Chicago minister and has stripped down to simplicities. From
was elected president. been part of the New Left since the early all the mad spirits loosed in America,
Gitlin, who spent the convention 1960s, experiences the full force of the the essences distilled from hot vapors
writing a daily wall paper distributed convention’s chaos. plunged into the cold and from all the
dinner-table showdowns and this-far-
and-no-farther battle cries, Chicago is
the bleeding incarnation.

When the Democrats had last held

Matt Stackhouse strolls into Lincoln Park, where several a convention, in 1964, it was Lyndon
hundred people have gathered for a concert, but the cops are not in a festive Johnson’s convention. Matt and the
mood. They start cruising back and forth in their three-wheeled motorcycles, rest of the outsiders, watching on
scowling. A kid standing nearby, long brown hair tucked under a headband, TV, had been revolted by the party
yells, “Fascist pig!” and a cop swipes at the kid with his nightstick, while the honchos patronizing the Mississippi
kid shouts, “Far out, far out,” to no one in particular, and then “You see that?” Freedom Democrats, the mostly black
and then “You believe this? Wait till your kid finds out what you do for a living!” opposition who were palmed off with
The cop smirks, flashes a “V” sign, then folds his index finger down, leaving his a so-called “compromise,” which gave
middle finger raised. them two honorific at-large seats in-
Matt has seen enough to confirm his sense of what’s building up. He’s not in the stead of being welcomed as the legiti-
mood for whole-hog confrontation, at least not yet. He’d rather pretend that this mate Democrats they truly were.
is a quiet summer afternoon and he’s out on his own, so that, as twilight arrives, The Democratic Party murdered
shaping up luminous, he strolls westward out of the park into Old Town. ideals, and it was the outsiders who
In this mood of ease and reprieve, Matt makes his way to a fourth-floor commanded hope. Watching John-
walk-up where he has been assigned a bed. Two handsome young McCarthy son interrupt a live TV broadcast to
supporters greet him with a cheery “Good timing!” They are just on their way make a trivial announcement just to
out, wearing white armbands with red crosses, medical students about to get rip the spotlight away from a heroic,
organized as medics, and point out a serviceable futon on the floor, and towels, beatific sharecropper named Fannie
and urge him to make use of an electric coffee pot and refrigerator, which, on Lou Hamer, who at that moment was
inspection, is bare of everything but ice cream, strawberry jam, a bag of bagels giving the Democrats’ credentials
and bunches of carrots. committee the plainest and most
Matt makes do with the carrots. When he takes off his jeans before lying vivid testimony about Mississippi
down, he notices the pamphlet in his back pocket. A rail-thin black man in a brutality—this was one of those reve-
three-piece suit had handed it to him near Lincoln Park, and now he sees that latory moments when the sharpest of
it’s the Book of Revelation (with Tyrannosaurus rex on the cover cast as the lines were drawn.
Beast of 666), which, come to think of it, he doesn’t remember having ever read During the crazed, hopeful-desper-
cover to cover. So he leafs through it now, in wonderment that John of Patmos, ate, manic-depressive spring of 1968, a
or anyone, ever was so whacked out as to write such a gush of monstrosities, whole haywire history took over, swal-
about the throne of God, the great thunders, the earthquake, the angels bearing lowing everyone alive, and whether
sickles and the angels bearing plagues, the trumpets that herald the end of time, something decent might come out of
the sea of glass and the sea of fire, the whore of Babylon rewarding accomplices all this pain, no one knew, though there

102 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

were times when it seemed barely pos- ness you were hurled to the bottom, gasping for breath, unsure which way was
sible. When Johnson announced at the up, and then out to sea.
end of March that he wasn’t going to
run for a second term, there was danc- Matt, in a sweated-up white shirt, tries to keep his head, his vision blurring,
ing in the streets, party time, even in throat raw and tormented as if he has swallowed razor wire. He stops to dampen
deadening Washington, and exhilara- his handkerchief at a water fountain and is just rolling it up to hold over his nostrils.
tion flared up, McCarthy’s people were Crossing the clotted street toward the Hilton, where the gas is thinning but
delirious, little had they suspected that the bodies closely packed make the atmosphere viscous, it takes a while to re-
they might actually bring down the ty- alize that they’re surrounded by cops, hundreds of cops, pressing in from three
rant. Then, four days later—when did sides, no exit. A few yards behind them, a forest of billy clubs is flailing. One
you get to breathe?—King was dead and cop winds up like a pitcher on the mound before smashing downward. Matt
the cities were burning down. After all scrambles not to lose his footing as he’s pressed steadily forward by the great
the killings and all the marches, all the crowd beast, inch by inch toward the big window of the Haymarket Lounge in
desegregation victories, and Selma, the Hilton, waits for something to happen to avert the inevitable crush—will he
and voting rights, and yet more kill- be trampled?—hears the loud crack of glass smashed, as if in slow motion, sees
ing, came the greatest of martyrdoms, a young man in a cowboy hat pushing his way inside, or being pushed, it’s hard
which ripped out their collective guts to tell, and now cops like mad bulls are charging into the Haymarket Lounge, so
and broke their minds, for it was the that he has no choice but to let himself get shoved inside, too, taking a glancing
martyrdom of everything blessed and blow on his shoulder from a club. Inside, people lie on the floor bleeding from
decent and smart that King stood for. head wounds, whether from broken glass or billy clubs is not clear, and shrieks
And then Johnson was starting peace ricochet as if they are ripples in one unrelenting scream, so as time resumes,
talks in Paris, to give Hubert Humphrey goes regular again, he clambers out of the lounge and through a thinning crowd

some cover, and then the night of June of demonstrators mixing with delegates and delegates’ wives and tourists and
5, when Sirhan Sirhan fired a bullet into God knows who else, into the lobby, where thinning wafts of tear gas are joined
Bobby Kennedy’s brain. by something more putrid—stink bombs set off by the radicals, he will later
And still, interminably, there re- learn. Everyone looks bewildered and panicky, no one more than the well-
mained the war, and unhinged Amer- dressed Democrats.
ica. Out of a great convulsive sea came He scrambles back out onto Michigan Avenue and flees to the left, northward. The
the wave of history—everyone was en- air is less viscous here, more like oxygen, easier to breathe, but Matt has to blink a
gulfed—there was no free ride. Thun- lot, trying to see straight. The window of the Haymarket Lounge is completely shat-
derous waves—anguish—thrills— tered, people are writhing inside, there are occasional screams. He keeps running.
shattering worlds—shattering you.
As it rumbled toward shore, you were That night, a mile to the north, one flare, then another, then a third flare
lifted, and after a few seconds of light- and a fourth, rocket into the blackened sky over Lincoln CONTINUED ON PAGE 120

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 103

 Dethroning
Miss
by Roxane Gay
illustration by
Johanna Goodman
The Miss America pageant has never
been a progressive event, but in 1968,
America
it sparked a feminist revolution. As
women organized the first protest
against Miss America, they were re-
sponding not only to the pageant and The star-spangled pageant
its antiquated, misogynistic attitudes became a surprise battleground
toward women and beauty, but also in the fight for women’s rights
to how the United States, as a whole, and racial equality
treated women.
The 1968 uprising was conceived by a
radical feminist named Carol Hanisch, contests judging photographs of young women, and the winners came to Atlantic
who popularized the phrase, “The per- City for a competition where they were evaluated on “personality and social graces.”
sonal is political.” Disrupting the beauty There was no equivocating. Women’s beauty—white women’s beauty—was a tool.
contest, she thought, in the summer Since its inception, the pageant has evolved in some ways and not so much in
of that year, “just might be the way to others. The talent competition was introduced in 1938 so that perhaps the young
bring the fledgling Women’s Liberation women could be judged on more than just their appearance, but with that small
Movement into the public arena.” bit of progress came regression. That same year, the pageant chose to limit eli-
Like so many things, the Miss Amer- gibility to single, never-married women between the ages of 18 and 28. The kind
ica pageant began as a marketing of beauty the pageant wanted to reward was very specific and very narrow—that
scheme. Held in Atlantic City just after of the demure, slender-but-not-too-thin woman, the girl next door with a bright
Labor Day, it started in 1921 as a way white smile, a flirtatious but not overly coquettish manner, smart but not too
for newspapers to increase their circu- smart, certainly heterosexual. There was even a “Rule 7,” abandoned in 1940, that
lation and for the resort’s businesses to stated that Miss America contestants had to be “of good health and of the white
extend their profitable summer season. race.” The winner spent the year doing community service, but also peddling
Newspapers across the country held sponsors’ products and, later, entertaining U.S. troops.

104 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

 Protesters discarded bras and
other items of “oppression”;
a flier advertised the agenda
(but listed the wrong date).

To Hanisch and the other protest organizers, the pageant was an obvious tar- an’s worth. They lamented that with the
get. On August 22, the New York Radical Women issued a press release inviting crowning of every new Miss America,
“women of every political persuasion” to the Atlantic City boardwalk on Sep- the previous winner was forced into pop
tember 7, the day of the contest. They would “protest the image of Miss America, culture obsolescence. They rejected the
an image that oppresses women in every area in which it purports to represent double standard that contestants were
us.” The protest would feature a “freedom trash can” into which women could forced to be “both sexy and wholesome,
throw away all the physical manifestations of women’s oppression, such as delicate but able to cope, demure yet
“bras, girdles, curlers, false eyelashes, wigs, and representative issues of Cosmo- titillatingly bitchy.” The pageant rep-
politan, Ladies’ Home Journal, Family Circle, etc.” The organizers also proposed resented the elevation of mediocrity—
a concurrent boycott of companies whose products were used in or sponsored American women were encouraged to
the pageant. Male reporters would not be allowed to interview protesters, which be “unoffensive, bland, apolitical”—and
remains one of the loveliest details of the protest. instilled this impoverished ambition in
The organizers also issued a document offering ten reasons why they were pro- young girls. “NO MORE MISS AMER-
testing, with detailed explanations—a womanifesto, if you will. One contention was ICA,” the womanifesto proclaimed.
“the degrading Mindless-Boob-Girlie Symbol.” Another was racism, since a woman The organizers obtained a permit,
of color had never won—and there had never been a black contestant. “Nor has detailing their plans for the protest, in-
there ever been a true Miss America—an American Indian,” they wrote. They also cluding barring men from participating,
protested the military-industrial complex and the role of Miss America as a “death and on the afternoon of September 7, a
mascot” in entertaining the troops. They pointed to the consumeristic nature of cor- few hundred women marched on the
porate sponsorship of the pageant and the valuing of beauty as a measure of a wom- Atlantic City boardwalk, just outside

P. 105: SOURCES: AP IMAGES; GETTY IMAGES; ROBIN MORGAN PAPERS / RUBENSTEIN RARE BOOK & MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, DUKE UNIVERSITY; ALIX KATES SCHULMAN PAPERS / RUBENSTEIN RARE BOOK & MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY,
DUKE UNIVERSITY; THIS PAGE: ROBIN MORGAN PAPERS / RUBENSTEIN RARE BOOK & MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, DUKE UNIVERSITY; ALIX KATES SCHULMAN PAPERS / RUBENSTEIN RARE BOOK & MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, DUKE UNIVERSITY
the convention center where the pag- to revel in his misogyny, writing, “If the average American female gave up all her
eant took place. Protesters held signs beauty products she would look like Tiny Tim and there would be no reason for
with such statements as “All Women the American male to have anything to do with her at all.” In a handful of sen-
Are Beautiful,” “Cattle parades are de- tences, Buchwald neatly illustrated the urgent need for the protest.
meaning to human beings,” “Don’t be a During the actual pageant that evening, some of the protesters, including Carol
play boy accessory,” “Can make-up hide Hanisch, sneaked into Boardwalk Hall and unfurled a banner reading, “Wom-
the wounds of our oppression?” en’s Liberation,” while shouting, “Women’s Liberation!” and “No More Miss
The protesters adopted guerrilla America!” Their action gave the burgeoning movement an invaluable amount of
theater tactics, too. One woman per- exposure during the live broadcast.
formed a skit, holding her child and At midnight on September 8, a few blocks away at the Atlantic City Ritz-Carl-
pots and pans, mopping the boardwalk ton, the inaugural Miss Black America competition was held. If the Miss Amer-
to exemplify how a woman’s work is ica pageant wouldn’t accommodate black women and black beauty, black folk
never done. A prominent black femi- decided they would create their own pageant. After his daughters expressed
nist activist and lawyer, Florynce Ken- their desire to become Miss America, the Philadelphia entrepreneur J. Morris
nedy, who went by Flo, chained herself Anderson created Miss Black America so his children’s ambitions would not be
to a puppet of Miss America “to high- thwarted by American racism. The 1968 winner, Saundra Williams, reveled in
light the ways women were enslaved her win. “Miss America does not represent us because there has never been a
by beauty standards.” Robin Morgan, black girl in the pageant,” she said afterward. “With my title, I can show black
also a protest organizer, later quoted women that they too are beautiful.” In 1971, Oprah Winfrey participated in Miss
Kennedy as comparing that summer’s Black America as Miss Tennessee. The pageant, which continues today, is the
violent protests at the Democratic Na- oldest pageant in the country for women of color.
tional Convention to throwing a brick While the 1968 protests may not have done much to change the nature of
through a window. “The Atlantic the Miss America pageant, they did
City action,” Kennedy continued, “is introduce feminism into the main-
comparable to peeing on an expen- stream consciousness and expand
sive rug at a polite cocktail party. The Many historians the national conversation about the
Man never expects the second kind of now credit rights and liberation of women. The
protest, and very often that’s the one
that really gets him uptight.”
the ’68 protest first wave of feminism, which fo-
cused on suffrage, began in the late
The freedom trash can was a prom- as the beginning 19th century. Many historians now
inent feature, and the commentary of feminism’s credit the ’68 protest as the beginning
about its role in the protest gave rise broader of feminism’s broader second wave.
to one of the great misrepresentations
of women’s liberation—the myth
second wave. As feminists are wont to do, the
organizers were later relentless in
of ceremonial bra-burning. It was critiquing their own efforts. In No-
a compelling image: angry, unshaven vember 1968, Carol Hanisch wrote that “one of the biggest mistakes of the whole
feminists, their breasts free from con- pageant was our anti-womanism . . . Miss America and all beautiful women came
straint, setting fire to their bras as they off as our enemy instead of our sisters who suffer with us.”
dared to demand their own liberation. History is cyclical. Women are still held to restrictive beauty standards. Cer-
But it never actually happened. In tainly, the cultural definition of beauty has expanded over the years, but it has not
fact, officials asked the women not to been blown wide open. White women are still upheld as an ideal of beauty. In the
set the can on fire because the wooden Miss America competition, women are still forced to parade around in swimsuits
boardwalk was quite flammable. The and high heels. “The swimsuit competition is probably the most honest part of
myth can be traced back to the New the competition because it really is about bodies; it is about looking at women as
York Post reporter Lindsy Van Gelder, objects,” Gloria Steinem said in the 2002 film Miss America.
who, in a piece before the protest, sug- History is cyclical. As we look back on these 1968 protests, we are in the midst
gested protesters would burn bras, a of another significant cultural moment led by women. After the election and
nod to the burning of draft cards. After inauguration of President Trump, millions of women and their allies marched
other Post writers reported the idea in the nation’s capital and in cities around the world to reaffirm women’s rights,
as fact, syndicated humor columnist and the rights of all marginalized people, as human rights. They marched for
Art Buchwald spread the myth nation- many of the same rights the 1968 protesters were seeking. A year later, we are in
wide. “The final and most tragic part the midst of a further reckoning, as women come forward to share their stories
of the protest,” he wrote, “took place of workplace sexual harassment and sexual violence. And, for the first time, men
when several of the women publicly are facing real consequences for their predation. The connective tissue between
burned their brassieres.” He continued 1968 and now is stronger than ever, vibrantly alive.

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 107

 The Man
Two decades before the
Who Invented
personal computer, a shy
engineer unveiled the
tools that would drive
the tech revolution.
the Future
A close colleague looks
back on his vision
by Valerie Landau
illustration by Yann Kebbi

Engelbart On December 8, 1968, Douglas Engelbart sat

designed the in front of a crowd of 1,000 in San Francisco, ready to
mouse to re- introduce networked computing to the world. Engel-
place the light
pen as a point- bart was no Steve Jobs. He was a shy engineer with no
ing device. marketing background. His goal was to speak directly to
other engineers, showing them that they could use com-
puters in new ways to solve complex human problems.
COMPUTE R H ISTORY MUSEUM / MARK RICH AR DS (DETAIL)
That message was radical enough in 1968. Most
programmers of the day used punch cards to carry out
quantitative tasks like tabulating census data, writing
banking code or calculating a missile’s trajectory. Even
in the futuristic 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came
out in April 1968, the HAL 9000 was an enhanced ver-
sion of the same thing. It could play chess and make
small talk with crew members (and ultimately sabo-
tage the whole mission), but its job was still to compute
numbers and run systems. HAL didn’t give its users a
way to write, design or collaborate on documents.
Engelbart didn’t just come up with the notion of
using computers to solve the urgent and multifaceted
problems facing humanity. He also gave the first-ever

108 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

 ple File.” He showed that he could copy
the text—and paste it again and again.
Next, Engelbart pulled up a shopping
list onto the screen: apples, bananas,
soup, beans. He moved the items up and
down the list with simple clicks, organiz-
ing produce with produce, canned goods
with canned goods, dairy with dairy.
“But there’s another thing I can do,”
he declared. He pulled up a map of his
route home, with stops along the way.
“Library. What am I supposed to do
there?” he asked. A click on the word
Library pulled up another list. “Oh, I
see. Overdue books.” He went back to
the map and clicked on the word Drug-
store. Another list popped up, showing
items like aspirin and Chapstick.
It wasn’t just the software that was
revolutionary. Engelbart had also in-
vented a new tracking device with the
help of Bill English, an engineer on his
team. As the small device rolled, a dot
on the screen rolled along with it. “I
don’t know why we call it a mouse,”
Engelbart remarked. “Sometimes I
apologize. It started that way and we
never did change it.”
Engelbart called his program the
oN-Line System, or NLS. His larger goal,
beyond any of the specific functions he’d
introduced, was for people to collabo-
rate. Toward the end of his presentation,
he alluded to an “experimental network”
that would allow different users to col-
laborate from as far away as Harvard
and Stanford. He was describing the AR-
PANET, a program that was just starting
live demonstration of networked per- tive question: “If in your office, you, as to burgeon at the Advanced Research
sonal computing. Today, it’s known as an intellectual worker, were supplied Projects Agency Network (ARPA) under
“the mother of all demos,” a precursor with a computer display backed up the U.S. Department of Defense.
to every technology presentation that’s by a computer that was alive for you Engelbart expected his presentation
happened since—and arguably more all day, and was instantly responsive to attract hundreds of engineers eager
ambitious than any of them. to every action you have—how much to join him in this new wave of com-
When Engelbart walked onstage, value could you derive from that?” puting. He had, after all, introduced
he was wearing a headset with a mi- Then he began to type, using a key- word processing, document sharing,
crophone so he could talk to other board with numbers and letters instead version control and hyperlinks, and
members of his team at the Stanford of inputting information with a punch he’d integrated text, graphics and video
Research Institute in Menlo Park. En- card. Text appeared on the screen: Word conferencing. He’d even foreshadowed
gelbart’s team ran 30 miles of cables word word word. “If I make some mis- the internet. He thought the audience
APIC / GE TTY IMAG ES

over the highways and to San Fran- takes, I can back up a little bit,” he noted, members would line up afterwards to
cisco. In order to project the demo onto proudly showing off his new delete ask how they could join his network
a 22-foot by 18-foot screen, they’d bor- function. He announced that he was go- and help develop his ideas.
rowed a projector from NASA. ing to save the document. “Oh, I need a Instead, they gave him a standing ova-
Engelbart started with a provoca- name,” he explained, and titled it “Sam- tion and then filed out of the auditorium.

110 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

 way humans could handle
His 1968 demo didn’t just present a complexity and urgency, that
rudimentary version of the programs we would be universally helpful.”
use today. They were arguably superior to He had a vision of people sit-
applications like Microsoft Word. ting in front of computer mon-
itors, using words and symbols
Opposite: Engelbart in 1963; above left: his “chorded keyset,” which used chord-like to develop their ideas, and
key combinations to send commands; above right: the author, Valerie Landau.
then collaborate. “If a com-
puter could punch cards or
I found out about Engelbart almost by technology, and we worked closely to- print on paper,” he said, “I just knew it
accident, in 1986, when I was working gether until his death in 2013. could draw or write on a screen, so we
on a TV show about Silicon Valley for Engelbart’s entire career was based could be interacting with the computer
the PBS station in San Jose. I was look- on an epiphany he had in the spring of and actually do interactive work.”
ing for B-roll footage in the Stanford 1951. He had just gotten engaged and At that time, there were relatively
library when Henry Lowood, a librar- was working at NACA, the precursor few computers in the world. The Uni-
ian, mentioned a film reel he had from to NASA, in Mountain View, Califor- versity of California at Berkeley was
a computer demonstration in 1968. I nia. He’d come a long way from his De- building one, so he went there for his
was riveted. pression-era childhood in rural Oregon, PhD. He earned several patents and in
After our program aired, Engelbart where he’d spend his days roaming the 1962, while working at the Stanford
asked us to produce a video about his woods and tinkering in the barn. He re- Research Institute, he published a
CHRI STIE HEMM KLOK (2)

ideas. We never did make the video, alized he had achieved both of his major paper titled “Augmenting the Human
but as I sat down to talk to him, I real- life goals: a good job and a good wife. He Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.”
ized that what he was describing could pondered what he should aim for next. At its core was the idea that computers
actually change the world. It certainly Then it hit him. “It just went ‘click,’” could augment human intelligence. He
changed me. I went to graduate school he told me later. “If in some way, you outlined innovative ways of manipulat-
at Harvard and studied educational could contribute significantly to the ing and viewing CONTINUED ON PAGE 124

January • February 2018| SMITHSONIAN.COM 111

 Houston,
We Have
A Photo
Apollo 8 returned to Earth
with one of the most
famous images in history
by Andrew Chaikin

It’s arguably the most iconic photograph of the 20th

century: the Earth rising above the Moon’s bleached
and desolate horizon, a breathtaking jewel of color
and life more than 230,000 miles away. In Decem-
ber 1968, Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim
Lovell and Bill Anders returned from history’s first
voyage around the Moon with this stunning image.
In the following weeks, on newspaper front pages and
magazine covers around the world, we suddenly saw
ourselves as inhabitants of a lovely and seemingly
tranquil planet afloat in the endless void of space.
In today’s visually bombarded world it’s hard to
imagine the immediate, global impact of that single
image. The picture that came to be known as “Earth-
rise” offered a precious moment of transcendence
after a year of violence and turmoil. The following
year it was made into a U.S. postage stamp, and it
adorned the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog. Walter Cronkite used it as a back-
drop on the “CBS Evening News.” Wilderness photographer Galen Rowell called
it “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken,” and it’s no accident
that 16 months after we saw ourselves from the Moon, the first Earth Day took place.
NASA (3)

But one question about the Earthrise photo has dogged historians for al-
most half a century: Who took it?

112 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

 I can’t help but take that question personally. I
discovered the answer 30 years ago when I was re-
searching my book about the Apollo astronauts, A
Man on the Moon. I found myself challenging NASA’s
official version of the event, and landing in the middle
of a dispute between the astronauts themselves. Even
after my book was published, the controversy contin-
ued for another two decades, until a NASA computer
wizard confirmed my conclusion beyond all doubt.
With the 50th anniversary of Apollo 8 approaching,
I can’t think of a better time to share the whole story,
which is told on these pages for the first time.

On December 24, 1968, I was a 12-year-old space

fanatic, glued to the television as Borman, Lovell and
Anders sent back live TV pictures from lunar orbit. I
had my own “mission control” in the den, with mod-
els of the spacecraft, maps of the Moon and articles
about the flight from Time and Newsweek. I did ev-
erything I could to feel like I was part of this amaz-
ing science-fiction dream coming true. Almost two
decades later I was sitting down with my childhood
heroes, the men who went to the Moon, to hear their
lunar experiences firsthand. In the summer of 1987,
preparing for my interviews with the Apollo 8 crew, I
pored over stacks of NASA documents, including the
recently declassified official transcript of the astro-
nauts’ private conversations captured by the onboard
voice recorder. I could never have imagined what I
saw on those pages—not only the cool profession-
alism I was expecting but moments of awe, tension,
gallows humor, and, at one point, what sounded like
an exasperated father ordering his kids to bed. These
were the words of three men out on a very long limb.
I was fascinated to see three distinct personalities
emerge from those pages. Borman was the no-non-
sense and sometimes gruff mission commander,
whose overriding concern was making sure that
when it came time for the life-or-death rocket firing
to send them back to Earth, his crew would be rested
and ready. Jim Lovell, the flight’s navigator, struck
me as a kind of everyman; as he sighted on lunar
landmarks he voiced amazement at the experience
BLUE PLANET of being one of the first humans to see the Moon’s far side with his own
Hours after wit- eyes. And finally there was Bill Anders, the flight’s serious, detail-oriented
nessing the first
Earthrise (in three rookie, focused on his extensive program of photographing lunar features.
views here), Jim The onboard voice recorder wasn’t always turned on, but as luck
Lovell told mis- would have it, NASA’s transcript included the moment when the as-
sion control: “The
Earth from here tronauts first saw the Earthrise:
is a grand oasis in Borman: Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there!
the big vastness Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!
of space.”
Anders: Hey, don’t take that, it’s not scheduled.
These lines seemed to clearly confirm the story Borman first told on
the pages of Life magazine in early 1969: His rookie crewman Anders
had been so concerned with sticking to his program of lunar photog-

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 113

raphy, wrote Borman, “that when I wanted to take a picture of the Earth as it “Why don’t you tell it?” I replied.
came over the horizon he objected. ‘Gee Frank,’ he said, ‘that’s not on our photo “That son of a bitch, he wasn’t going to
plan.’ Eventually, I was able to talk him into giving me the camera so I could take take the picture!” Borman began, clearly
pictures of the Earth over the lunar landscape.” relishing another chance to tell the story
But when I interviewed Bill Anders during the summer and fall of 1987, I heard for the record. “I’m looking over the lu-
a different story. The far side of the Moon turned out to be less dramatic than he nar horizon, and there’s the Earth com-
expected, but when he described the Earthrise, Anders tapped into an awe that ing up. And I’m saying, ‘Bill, take that
was undiminished by the passage of nearly two decades. picture! Get that one!’ He says, ‘I can’t.’
“That was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen,” said Anders. “Totally unanticipated. ‘Why not?’ ‘I don’t have enough film. All
Because we were being trained to go to the Moon. . . . It wasn’t ‘going to the Moon and my film’s allocated for scientific’—‘I said,
looking back at the Earth.’ I never even thought about that!” Seeing the Earthrise, Anders Bill, you’re full of baloney; that is the only
told me, changed his view of the mission in real time. “In lunar orbit, it occurred to me picture that anybody will remember from
that, here we are, all the way up there at the Moon, and we’re studying this thing, and it’s this goddamned flight! None of your vol-
really the Earth as seen from the Moon that’s the most interesting aspect of this flight.” canoes and craters—Take that picture!’
The famous Earthrise photo, however, was the source of a lingering frustration He said, ‘No.’ So I took the camera and
for Anders: He was all but certain he’d taken it, but Borman’s story about grabbing took the goddamned picture. That’s the
the camera away from him was the accepted one. Borman had even been named truth of the story. And it’s probably on the
as the photographer in National Geographic. And Jim Lovell had started
saying he took the picture, as a joke. It so irritated Anders that he wrote to
NASA’s astronaut photography expert, Dick Underwood, for confirmation. Wright got an email
Underwood’s reply, as Anders recalled it: “I think you took it.” from an official
After interviewing Anders, I wondered if the Earthrise dialogue in NASA’s at NASA saying,
transcript had been attributed to the wrong astronaut. There was only one “before you call
way to find out, and by the fall of 1987 I had obtained copies of the original Frank Borman
onboard tapes from NASA. When I got to the tape of the Earthrise, I had a liar (which is
absolutely no trouble recognizing the voices. I could clearly hear that it was exactly what you will
Anders who first saw the Earth coming up, not Borman. It was Borman who be doing) I hope that
said, “Don’t take that, it’s not scheduled,” and I realized he was teasing An- you would have iron-
ders about his strict adherence to the photo plan (because, as the tapes also clad evidence to
revealed, when Borman wanted to take a “tourist photo” of a crater hours prove your point.”
earlier, Anders told him not to). I listened as Anders urgently asked Lovell
for a roll of color film. Then Lovell was at his own window and the two men
argued about who had the better view. Lovell demanded Anders hand over the
camera; Anders told Lovell to calm down. Finally, Anders snapped two color pic- transcripts too. Did you read it?”
tures. Hearing this historic moment unfold I felt like a stowaway aboard Apollo 8. The moment had arrived. I told Bor-
When I delved deeper into the photo archives from Apollo 8, one added wrinkle man the tapes showed that, for all these
awaited me: The iconic color image wasn’t the first Earthrise photo, as most people years, he’d misremembered the event,
assumed. Just before he saw the Earth coming up, Anders had been photographing the confusing it with his run-in with Anders
Moon with black-and-white film, zooming in on the craters below with a 250-millime- over his “tourist shot” of a crater hours
ter telephoto lens. Seeing the Earthrise, he fired off a black-and-white picture before earlier. (Also, I’d found evidence that Bor-
asking Lovell for a color film magazine. All three Earthrise pictures—the black-and- man had taken several Earthrise pictures
white and the two color—had been taken with the same 250-millimeter lens. In our later in the flight, with a wider lens.) “You
interviews, Anders said Borman had disliked the 250-millimeter lens and had opposed have an apology to make,” said Susan,
including it on the mission—a detail that was consistent, he said, with his memory that but Borman insisted he wasn’t going to
he, not Borman, had taken the iconic photo. Now I was able to tell him that the tapes change his story, because it illustrated
proved him right. Anders’ rigid devotion to his photo plan.
I was proud of my discovery. I’d been able to get inside one of the most compelling The conversation ended in laughter. I was
moments in space exploration and present it with new clarity, something a historian relieved Borman was taking it so well.
lives for. There was just one more person I had to tell: Frank Borman. That October I caught up with Bor-
As I prepared to interview Borman in March 1988, I didn’t know what to expect. man again, as he was promoting his
Would he turn out to be as gruff as he had sometimes seemed aboard Apollo 8? I newly released autobiography. He told
was happily surprised to find Borman anything but difficult. He laughed easily. He me he’d tried to have the wording about
answered my questions about Apollo 8 and about his crewmates with complete the Earthrise picture changed before
candor. Over dinner with his wife, Susan, Borman brought up the subject I’d been the book came out, but hadn’t been able
avoiding. “Did Anders ever tell you how we got the picture that became the stamp?” to. But a month later, when the Apollo

114 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

 8 crew gathered in San Diego for their About a week after the video’s release Bill Anders came to Goddard at the invita-
20-year reunion, Borman publicly ad- tion of LRO scientist Jim Rice. Wright had already heard that Anders was skeptical
mitted he’d been wrong about who took he could accurately recreate the Earthrise, but at his computer, Wright showed
the picture, that it had been Anders. Anders how he could move a virtual camera along Apollo 8’s orbit and see the Earth
The issue was settled—or so I thought. rising. The LRO data made Wright’s re-creation of the lunar terrain so accurate that
Over the next 20 years, the contro- you could superimpose the real Earthrise photo over the simulation and hardly see
versy resurfaced. I was irritated to see any difference. Anders turned to Wright and said, “Your picture is better than mine.”
books come out with the old version of After Anders’ visit Wright felt compelled to take his Earthrise reconstruction
the story—or, in one case, a new version to the next level. “Now I was holding some tiny piece of Bill Anders’ legacy in my
that had Anders taking the two color hand too,” he recalls. He decided to do a full re-creation, one that would show not
photos of the Earthrise, but Borman only Apollo 8’s flight path but also which of the craft’s five windows was turned
snapping the first, black-and-white shot toward the rising Earth, and as a consequence, who took the pictures.
(because, the author argued, Borman
wouldn’t lie about having taken a picture Even before I first met Wright in May 2012, he had been coming around to my point
of the first Earthrise). I was even more of view. He’d listened to a digitally cleaned-up copy of the onboard voice tape, and he’d
aggravated to see Anders, in interviews, actually heard the sounds of the Hasselblad camera snapping each of the three Earth-
going along with that version. I began rise pictures—at just the times that would have fit if Anders had been the photogra-
pher on all three images. “After listening to this,”
Bill Anders (hold- Wright wrote to Jim Rice, “I’m leaning toward
ing a Hasselblad) Chaikin’s interpretation, which is that Bill took
recalls of Earth: all three photos.” Meeting him, I also noted that
“God, that blue
looked pretty.” less than a minute before the Earth appeared on
the horizon, Frank Borman had been occupied
with steering the spacecraft through a 180-degree spin.
A year went by with little progress, but in May 2013 Wright emailed
me, “I think I have new evidence that Bill Anders took all three Earth-
rise photos.” On a website called the Apollo Flight Journal, created by
historians David Woods and Frank O’Brien, he’d found a set of pic-
tures taken by another camera, operating on a timer, during the first
Earthrise. When Wright used his animation software to match Apollo
8’s orientation to each photo, he realized something remarkable: The
spacecraft was pointed nose-down at the Moon and was still rotating
under Borman’s command when the Earth appeared. At any given
wondering if there might be a way to get moment, only one side of the turning spacecraft was facing the Earth.
definitive confirmation of my discovery. But which side? Wright calculated camera angles and window fields-of-view,
In 2012 I met the man who would do that. then simulated the view through each window of the turning spacecraft as it
moved in its orbit. Suddenly, he had the clincher: When it first came up, the Earth
At NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center was visible only through Anders’ side window—and you had to have your nose
in Greenbelt, Maryland, Ernie Wright, almost up to the glass to see it.
one of the wizards at the Scientific Vi- By the fall of 2013 Wright and colleague Dan Gallagher had produced a new
sualization Studio, had been produc- video, synchronized with the onboard voice tape. It reconstructed the historic
ing computer animations using new, moment in a way no one except the astronauts had previously experienced. But
high-resolution images and topographic Wright got an email from an official at NASA headquarters saying, “before you
data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Or- call Frank Borman a liar (which is exactly what you will be doing) I hope that you
biter, or LRO, which had been circling would have iron-clad evidence to prove your point.” Wright responded with a full
the Moon since 2009. In early 2012, us- accounting of his findings and what they meant. “I don’t think the astronauts lied,”
ing NASA’s original data on Apollo 8’s or- he wrote. “I think they were three overworked, sleep-deprived guys on a dangerous
bit, Wright was able to reconstruct the and entirely unprecedented journey. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that they might
astronauts’ path over the Moon when misremember details about things that weren’t vital to the mission.”
they first saw the Earthrise, even pin- When the new video was posted in time for the 45th anniversary of the Earthrise
pointing the locations where the three in December 2013, with my narration, I felt a sense of completion, and admiration
Earthrise pictures had been taken. for the work that Wright had done. I’ve been glad to hear the astronauts like it too,
When he showed it to LRO scientist and but I must disclose that the joke is alive and well. A few months ago, when my wife
Apollo geek Noah Petro, they decided to emailed Borman a photo I’d taken of last summer’s total solar eclipse, Borman wrote
NASA

release the video in time for Earth Day. back, “Great picture, but Anders just called and said he took it!”

January • February 2018 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 115

 A decade removed from fame and recently out of rehab, a 24-year-old Lymon shows off dance moves to a cheering
crowd from his old New York neighborhood. Right: Lymon shopping for music for his comeback act.

Frankie Lymon money for a memorial, but it never

made it to the cemetery. The head-
now think of as the anodyne, antiseptic
1950s America is revealed as an illusion.
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 59
stone gathered dust in the record shop, June Cleaver vacuuming in an organdy
On February 27, 1968, he was booked then moved at last to the backyard of a cocktail dress and pearls is a television
for a recording session to mark the friend of the owner. mirage, a national hallucination. We
start of a comeback. Instead, he was Emira Eagle had the current head- had the postwar world economy to our-
found dead that morning on his grand- stone installed sometime in the late selves because so many other industrial
mother’s bathroom floor. 1990s. nations had been bombed flat. And for
every Pat Boone there was a “Howl,” an
In Loving Memory
Frankie Lymon was buried in the Bronx, Allen Ginsberg, a Kerouac, a Coltrane,
Of My Husband
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the left his stone is packed tight with the what could anyone say? That the 1950s mythology: to preserve his image as
others. On the right there’s a gap like a were long over? That innocence was a clean-cut teenager, Frankie Lymon
missing tooth. You can see the towers of dead? That by 1968 one America had would pass off the women he dated in
two bridges from here, the Bronx-White- vanished entirely, and another had different cities as his mother. It gets
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traffic rush past on the Cross Bronx Ex- Or maybe that Frankie Lymon’s Amer- it himself—that he once got caught by a
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Convention Park. A helicopter smacks the air over their heads
and launches a beam to illuminate the grouplets
who gleefully rush onto the pavement
to poke the ends of their clubs into the
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 103
fleeing the National Guardsmen incoming to drive guts and groins of anyone fleeing too
them out of the park. Pools of light from the headlights, a war-of-the-worlds look, slowly or screaming too loud.
gas grenades flying, the gas making halos around strobe-lit figures of coughing, Matt catches the fright in the eyes
earthbound angels. A longhair goes down from a nightstick in the head, and starts of a boy caught in the beam of a police
crawling, senselessly, and when he sees a flash camera shooting him, makes headlight that suddenly flashes on, but,
sure to raise his fingers in a V and grin, whereupon the cop turns on the camera- transfixed by this scene, Matt doesn’t
man, smashes him, and leaves him flailing around on the ground, and then turns see what Valerie sees, namely, another
around to see who’s watching, catches sight of Matt and barrels toward him, cop bearing down on him from behind,
jabbing his nightstick toward his midsection. That’s when Matt spots a familiar and then suddenly blood is streaming
face in the crowd—freckles, green eyes and all—looking aghast. down Matt’s sweaty face from a cut
He hasn’t seen Valerie Parr since college and he’s forgotten how lovely she opened up in his scalp, and he thinks,
is, but she also looks more fragile. After a kiss as warm as the moment permits, this is too much. He is frozen in a tab-
they speed-walk out of the park, holding hands tightly. Looking back, they see leau of immobilized rage until Valerie
silhouettes against the lit-up gas fumes and cannot tell whether those are demon- grabs his hand and pulls him to the
strators or cops. Matt is aware that he stinks. Sweat saturates his skin. The white sidewalk. They walk haltingly in the
shirt he thought might win him protection is starched to his body. direction of the apartment.
Now, some demonstrators slow down but most of the panicky crowd are closer to “Hold on,” Matt says, pulling at her.
running than walking, running in bursts, slowing to catch their breath or tie hand- “I don’t feel so good.”

kerchiefs around their noses, look around and check that this is really happening, “What?”
then start running again. Spears of light ignite the McCarthy and Czechago buttons “Woozy.”
and the disbelieving eyes. Matt reaches for his crumpled handkerchief and, cross- “Do you want to sit down?”
ing the street, coughing, gagging, presses it over his nose, as park people, looming He leans against a wall. “No. Just
up out of the gas, drift past him like ectoplasmic emanations. woozy. Is this what a concussion
The helicopter flaps overhead again like an angry pterodactyl, and from farther feels like?”
down the street come other mayhem noises: glass shattering, glass crunched un- “Let’s go back to the apartment,” she
der tires, nightsticks against steel, nightsticks against skulls, car horns, distant says. “Slowly.”
sirens, sirens close-up, whoops, screams, ululations straight out of the movie The In the apartment, Valerie takes a
Battle of Algiers. A teenager in a headband trips and falls directly in front of Matt, washcloth, drenches it, soaps it, parts
who stops and helps him to his feet. “Thank you, man,” the kid says, and runs on. his hair, mops off the rivulets of blood,
On the other side of the street, a bus full of cops, lights extinguished, gets its tail- cleans off his cut.
light smashed in by a thrown rock. The bus turns a corner, speeds up, stops short “Your hair took most of the blow.”
next to a knot of young people and disgorges a dozen or more helmeted officers, She pauses. “Your beautiful hair. I

120 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

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 inspire people. The laboratory chief was great proponent of collaboration was,
Engelbart Engelbart’s former funder from ARPA, ironically, unable to collaborate.
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 111
Robert Taylor. For Engelbart, networks I myself was at the receiving end of
information, and then sharing it over a had always been an inextricable part of Engelbart’s insults on several occa-
network so people could work together. his vision. But under Kay’s direction, sions. But no matter how irritably he
When he demonstrated this revolu- the engineers created a personal com- behaved as a colleague, I knew he had
tionary idea in 1968, why didn’t he get puter, geared toward individual produc- great love for me as a person. And I
the response he’d been hoping for? I tivity rather than collaboration. Their understood why he so often felt frus-
got some insight into this when I inter- software included more user-friendly trated. As I saw it, his ideas were so
viewed some of the engineers who’d at- versions of a few of Engelbart’s original ahead of their time that there was often
tended his demo. They told me they’d ideas, including multiple windows, text no language to describe them. When
been awestruck, but that nothing he’d with integrated graphics, and the mouse. I asked him in 2006 how much of his
described had any relation to their A cruel joke of the time was that Engel- vision had been achieved, Engelbart
jobs. He was asking them to take too bart’s Augmentation Research Center answered, “About 2.8 percent.”
big a leap, from doing calculations on had been a training program for PARC. Because his system was designed to
punch cards to creating a new infor- In 1979, Xerox allowed Steve Jobs present the same information from dif-
mation superhighway. and other Apple executives to tour its ferent angles, it was more than a rudi-
In the mid-1970s, Engelbart’s lab, labs twice, in exchange for the right mentary version of the software we use
which he called the Augmentation Re- to buy 100,000 shares of Apple stock. today. I believe it was better equipped
search Center, used government fund- Once Jobs began working on these than Apple’s or Microsoft’s programs
ing to support the quickly growing AR- ideas, they became even more stream- to solving problems like peace, income
PANET. In a highly unorthodox move, lined. Engelbart’s mouse had three but- inequality, sustainable development
he hired young women who’d graduated tons, which he used in different com- and climate change. He designed it
from Stanford with degrees in fields like binations to perform a range of tasks. for sophisticated knowledge work-
anthropology and sociology. Engelbart, After licensing this invention from the ers—writers, designers, data analysts,
who had three daughters Stanford Research Insti- economists. Even Google’s collabora-
himself, believed that women tute, Apple decided it would tive apps are less ideally suited to do
were ideally suited to build- be simpler to give it just one serious work that integrates libraries
ing new cultures. He sent his button. Engelbart lamented of data, documents, graphics, text and
new hires out to other insti- that the mouse’s capability information maps. Engelbart’s system
tutions to build “networked had been dumbed down to came with a learning curve, but he be-
improvement communities.” make it “easy to use.” lieved the result was worth it. When
This got him in a lot of Ironically, the mouse was people praised other software for being
trouble. The ARPANET’s the one invention that earned more intuitive, he asked them whether
funders couldn’t see why Engelbart widespread rec- they’d rather ride a tricycle or a bicycle.
real people needed to sup- ognition, though it never Although he earned over 40 awards—
port users. They saw his hires as a sign earned him more than an initial lump including the National Medal of Tech-
of failure—his systems weren’t easy sum of $10,000 from the Stanford Re- nology & Innovation, the $500,000
enough to use on their own. What En- search Institute. He was bewildered Lemelson-MIT Prize and several hon-
gelbart failed to communicate was that that the simplest artifact from his orary doctorates—Engelbart often felt
these women weren’t just teaching grand vision had been the most widely demoralized. He died in 2013, after suf-
people which keys to press. He wanted embraced. After all, he’d foreshadowed fering from kidney failure. But many of
them to bring together thinkers who just about everything Apple and Micro- us are still inspired by his dream. As a
could, collectively, change the way soft went on to create—at a time when professor, I’ve brought his ideas to the
the networks collected and analyzed Jobs and Bill Gates were just 13 years classroom and seen them change the
information. Before long, the govern- old. Alan Kay himself once remarked, “I way my students think. As one of them
ment reduced his funding, foreshad- don’t know what Silicon Valley will do wrote in a letter to our university pres-
owing the end of his Augmentation when it runs out of Doug’s ideas.” ident, “Team members are thinking to-
Research Center. Engelbart’s refusal to compromise gether and tapping into the collective
Later in the 1970s, Engelbart lost his was one of the main reasons he had a IQ to augment individual performance,
YANN KEBB I (D ETAIL)

key engineers to Xerox PARC lab, a lav- hard time gathering momentum. He and the whole of our group is much
ish and well-funded research center a often ended discussions by declaring, greater than the sum of its parts. It is
few miles away. At the head was Alan “You just don’t get it.” That catch- an exhilarating and rewarding experi-
Kay, 15 years Engelbart’s junior—an phrase cost Engelbart dearly. His de- ence.” Even in this interconnected age,
upbeat, brilliant guy who knew how to tractors snidely remarked that the the world could use more of that.

124 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

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 My Lai
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 73

surprise when the troops entered the

Vintage Italian Lira coins lend village. “No one fought back,” he said.
a rich sense of style and elegance “After four hours, they killed the entire
to this distinctive necklace. village and withdrew, leaving our vil-
lage full of blood and fire.” Cong’s full-
Beautifully restored genuine
time job is to make sure the massacre is
coins sway gracefully from the
not forgotten.
diamond-cut sterling For Americans, My Lai was supposed
silver chain. to be a never-again moment. In 1969, the
antiwar movement turned one of Hae-
berle’s photographs of dead women and
children into a poster, overlaid with a
short, chilling quote from Meadlo: “And
babies.” It was largely because of My Lai
$
125 that returning Vietnam veterans were
Plus Free Shipping widely derided as “baby killers.”
Lira Coin Necklace from Italy Even decades later, military personnel
Coins range from 3ŝ4"-1" diameter. used the massacre as a cautionary tale,
Shown smaller than actual size. a reminder of what can happen when
young soldiers unleash their rage on ci-
Ross-Simons Item #872839 vilians. “No My Lais in this division—do
To receive this special offer, use offer code: AMORE36 you hear me?” Maj. Gen. Ronald Griffith
1.800.556.7376 or visit www.ross-simons.com/AMORE told his brigade commanders before en-
tering battle in the Persian Gulf War.
Yet Cong and the other survivors are
SMITHSONIAN; January/February 2018; Volume 48, Num- painfully aware that all the soldiers in-
ber 9. Smithsonian (ISSN 0037-7333) is published monthly volved in the massacre went free. The
(except for a January/February issue and a July/August only one to be convicted was released
issue) by Smithsonian Enterprises, 600 Maryland Ave. S.W.,
Suite 6001, Washington, D.C. 20024. Periodical postage
after a brief and comfortable captivity. I
paid at Washington, D.C. and additional mailing offices. asked Cong whether he would welcome
POSTMASTER: send address changes to Smithsonian a visit from Calley. “For Vietnamese peo-
Customer Service, P.O. Box 62170, Tampa, FL 33662-2170.
ple, when a person knows his sin, he or
Printed in the USA. Canadian Publication Agreement No.
40043911. Canadian return address: Asendia USA, PO Box she must repent, pray and acknowledge
1051, Fort Erie, ON L2A 6C7. it in front of the spirits,” Cong told me.
We may occasionally publish extra issues. ©Smithsonian “Then he will be forgiven and his mind
Institution 2018. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole will be relaxed.” Indeed, the home of ev-
or in part without permission is prohibited. Editorial offices
are at MRC 513, P.O. Box 37012, Washington, D.C. 20013
ery survivor I interviewed had an altar
(202-633-6090). Advertising and circulation offices are at in the living room, where incense was

WhiteWalls
420 Lexington Ave., New York, NY 10170 (212-916-1300). burned and offerings were made to help
® Memberships: All subscribers to Smithsonian are mem- the living venerate dead family members.
bers of the Smithsonian Institution. Ninety-nine percent of It seems unlikely that Calley will make
dues is designated for magazine subscriptions.
Magnetic Whiteboard that trip. (Smithsonian offered him the
Back Issues: To purchase a back issue, please call or email
Steel Wall Panels James Babcock at 212-916-1323 or [email protected]. Back opportunity to accompany me to Viet-
Turn your room, office, or hallway into a issue price is $7.00 (U.S. funds). nam and he declined.) “If Mr. Calley does
creative hot-spot. WhiteWalls® provide Mailing Lists: From time to time we make our subscriber not return to Vietnam to repent and apol-
the vital avenue your team needs to: list available to companies that sell goods and services we ogize to the 504 spirits who were killed,”
believe would interest our readers. If you would rather not
See the big picture Cong told me, “he will always be haunted,
receive this information, please send your current mailing
Show what's happening label, or an exact copy, to: Smithsonian Customer Service, constantly obsessed until he dies, and
P.O. Box 62170, Tampa, FL 33662-2170. even when he dies, he won’t be at peace.
Work through complex problems
Subscription Service: Should you wish to change your So I hope he will come to Vietnam. These
address, or order new subscriptions, you can do so by writ- 504 spirits will forgive his sins, his igno-
ing Smithsonian Customer Service, P.O. Box 62170, Tampa,
WhiteWalls.com FL 33662-2170, or by calling 1-800-766-2149 (outside of rant mind that caused their death.”
800-624-4154 U.S., call 1-813-910-3609).
130 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018
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 Ask
Smithsonian
YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED BY OUR EXPERTS

force that propels the plague that killed scores of

astronauts outward; millions of people in 14th-
that force would century Europe and Asia.
enable them to walk
on the walls. But Could Neanderthals talk?
keep in mind that If so, what was their
the ISS is about the language like?
size of a football field, Rob Loughridge,
with solar panels and Honolulu, Hawaii
other delicate offshoots.
Getting it to rotate, We can be confident
and keeping the rate of that Neanderthals could
rotation constant, just communicate vocally, says
isn’t feasible. Rick Potts, director of the
Human Origins Program
What happened to the rats at the National Museum
that carried the fleas that of Natural History—all
Can ILLUSTRATION BY
Gracia Lam carried the Black Death? primates, our closest
all living Joan J. Brown, biological relatives, do.
things— Fairfax, Virginia Unfortunately, words and
grammar do not fossilize,
plants, may be unable to produce Many of them died. The so we can’t tell much about
insects and melanin, but their other bacterium believed to what they said. Differences
bacteria— pigments will show, and have caused that fearsome between human and
be albino? they are more properly pandemic, Yersinia Neanderthal skulls suggest
Lilliana Hitchcock, called “amelanistic.” In pestis, infects rodents that the human larynx, or
Houston, Texas either case, an organism as well as humans, voice box, extends deeper
lacking melanin will notes Kali Holder, into the throat, and it
If by “albino” you mean be more susceptible to veterinary pathology is our lower larynx that
an organism lacking the ultraviolet rays. fellow at the Smithsonian allows us to produce the
pigment melanin, then Conservation Biology miraculous diversity of
loosely speaking, yes, Why don’t they use artificial Institute. Historical consonants, vowels, clicks
says Carly Muletz Wolz, gravity on the International evidence indicates that the and other sounds that make
a research scientist at Space Station? black rat (Rattus rattus) up human speech. So it’s
Smithsonian’s Center for Pat Andérson, was more vulnerable than unlikely that Neanderthals
Conservation Genomics. Shasta Lake, California the brown rat (Rattus spoke like us.
Albinism, which is caused norvegicus), and black rats
by a hereditary genetic Creating artificial have traditionally taken TEXT BY Anna Diamond
mutation, is noticeable gravity on the space the blame for spreading
among mammals because station is possible—but the Black Death in Europe.
melanin is the only pigment impractical, says Valerie Recent research, however,
they produce; without it, Neal, a curator at the suggests that a more
their hair, skin and eyes National Air and Space complicated interplay
will lack color. But other Museum’s Space History of disease vectors and
life-forms produce a variety Department. To simulate environmental factors
of pigments in addition to gravity, you’d need to spin led to the Black Death— Submit your queries at
melanin; some specimens the station to produce a successive waves of Smithsonian.com/ask

132 SMITHSONIAN.COM | January • February 2018

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