75 Years Of Miscellany

TIME, THE EERILY PRESCIENT WEEKLY NEWSMAGAZINE Tomorrow's news today? We didn't always know it

"Near week's end, [President] Kennedy flew into Manhattan, aged his Secret Service detail ten years by forgoing the usual motorcycle escort into the city. At one of ten midtown traffic lights that stopped the presidential limousine, an ambitious female camera bug rushed up and fired a flashbulb at Kennedy's side of the car. Moaned a New York police official: 'She might well have been an assassin.'" --Nov. 22, 1963, date of issue on sale the week Kennedy was shot in Dallas

"Computermen have even been advised to get their machines out to 'see life' by setting up communications links between them and other computers in dispersed locations. Thus, computers will eventually become as close to everyday life as the telephone--a sort of public utility of information." --April 2, 1965, from a cover story on "The Computer in Society"

"Whatever their feelings about the war, [most Democrats] are beginning to line up behind [President] Johnson for 1968. Short of death or disablement, about the only thing that could keep Johnson from renomination in Chicago would be a Trumanesque decision to retire." --Oct. 20, 1967

"When the President of the U.S. makes a sudden, unexplained move during what is supposed to be a weekend of rest, it sends a ripple of consternation across the land. That is what happened when President Nixon, relaxing at his Camp David, Md., retreat, snatched up his briefcase, dashed to his helicopter and zipped back to the White House. To make matters murkier, White House spokesmen offered the lamest excuses. Speculation mounted. Quite simply, the President was escaping from the pollen hanging heavy over Camp David. Indeed, one wonders at the effort to cover up the President's allergy." --June 26, 1972, the issue published the week before the Watergate break-in

"When game is afoot, royal-watchers routinely engage in round-the-clock stakeouts, read lips with binoculars, suborn servants, chase their prey at crazy speeds in high-powered cars. There has been so much of this mad motoring that the wonder is that no member of the royal family or the public has been killed." --Feb. 28, 1983, from a cover story on "Royalty vs. the Press"

"This is not your father's White House. If anything, it's your daughter's." --March 8, 1993, from an article on the new youth culture at the Clinton White House

TIME, THE NOT-ALWAYS-SO-EERILY-PRESCIENT WEEKLY NEWSMAGAZINE Our seers haven't always been in good working order

"What failures loomed, none could say. Would the nightmare, to many tragically cruel, never end? As shades of Tuesday evening fell, it seemed again that the worst was past. Hysteria, it was hoped, had met its master in the Banking Power of the U.S." --Nov. 4, 1929, from coverage of the October stock-market crash

"In 1931, Adolf Hitler was Germany's rising star. In 1932 he and his Nazis slipped back to the tune of 2,000,000 lost votes. His thunder was largely stolen by General Kurt von Schleicher, the new Chancellor to whom many a German looks as Man of Next Year." --Jan. 2, 1933 (weeks before Hitler became Chancellor), from Man of the Year profile of Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Republicans had waited for years for the great day when the country would come to its senses and turn the Democrats out. [T]his week the day seemed surely at hand." --Nov. 1, 1948, from the last pre-Election Day issue covering the campaign between Harry S Truman and Thomas Dewey

"Recently, Peking has made it a point to proclaim its delight at the prospect of the U.S.'s depleting its resources in a major land war in Asia. That prospect may seem less pleasing today. Where the Communists almost had victory within their grasp last spring, the U.S. now bars the way and stands ready to repel any other attempted aggression. Unless Peking and Hanoi withdraw from South Vietnam--and lose face throughout Asia--it is the Communists themselves who risk being bogged in wars that they can neither afford nor end. Their blunder came as no surprise." --Jan. 7, 1966, from Man of the Year profile of General William Westmoreland

"Untold adventure awaits him. He is the man who will land on the moon, cure cancer and the common cold, lay out blight-proof, smog-free cities, enrich the underdeveloped world and, no doubt, write finis to poverty and war. With his skeptical yet humanistic outlook, his disdain for fanaticism and his scorn for the spurious, the Man of the Year suggests that he will infuse the future with a new sense of morality." --Jan. 6, 1967, from Man of the Year profile of the "25 and Under" generation

"The Washington Times last week lobbed a pre-emptive strike against Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, warning that his private life will be fair game if he decides to run for President. If the country loses the candidacy of one of the nation's most successful Governors to moral terrorism, the press may yet come to see that there is more to journalism than moving product, no matter how heated the competition." --Aug. 12, 1991, from an article on press coverage of politicians' private lives

A BERLITZ FOR SQUARES Readers baffled by hipster lingo, whether it be Hollywood tough-guy speak or Haight-Ashbury hippie cant, know they can count on TIME for a translation

"A 'beard,' in Hollywood parlance, is a man employed by a male star to accompany him when he appears in public with a woman not his wife. Sometimes female stars use them too. A 'hunker' is somebody kept on the payroll to know baseball scores, send out for coffee and strike matches on." --Aug. 29, 1955, from a footnote to a cover story on Frank Sinatra

"Jazz has unhappily splintered into hostile camps, musically and racially. The spirit and sound of each variety of jazz is carefully analyzed, isolated and pronounced a 'bag.' Within each bag, imitation of the 'daddy' spreads through the ranks like summer fires." --Feb. 28, 1964, from a cover story on Thelonious Monk

"[H]irsute, shoeless hippies huddled in doorways, smoking pot, 'rapping' (achieving rapport with random talk), or banging beer cans in time to ubiquitous jukebox rhythms. Last week the sidewalks and doorways were filling with new arrivals just off the bus and looking for a place to 'crash' (sleep). They scorn money--they call it 'bread.' They feel 'uptight' (tense and frightened) about many disparate things--from sex to the draft, college grades to thermonuclear war." --July 7, 1967, from a cover story on San Francisco's hippies

"Coke paraphernalia are openly displayed in 'head shops' like Washington's Pleasure Chest. The process of spreading the coke on a table in 'lines' for sniffing is as elaborate and careful as a Japanese tea ceremony. Since sniffing cocaine produces such a quick, short boost, more and more users have sought the deeper ecstatic 'rush' that comes from 'freebasing,' smoking a chemically treated form of the powder." --July 6, 1981, from a cover story on cocaine culture

REGRETS, WE HAVE A FEW As with most publications, TIME's approach to questions of ethnicity and gender wasn't always what it should have been

"Dr. Einstein, like so many other Jews and scholars, takes no physical exercise at all." --Feb. 18, 1929, from a cover story on Albert Einstein

"That a negroid nation should be menaced by spectacular Dictator Benito Mussolini highly excited the world's Negroes last week. Not only Harlem but every other darktown was on the qui vive at news from Rome that for three nights running Il Duce had sat up secretly with His Grand Council, contriving who knew what against the African Majesty of cocoa-butter-colored Haile Selassie I." --Feb. 25, 1935, coverage of Italy's threatened invasion of Ethiopia

"There is no infallible way of telling [Chinese and Japanese people] apart. Even an anthropologist, with calipers and plenty of time to measure heads, noses, shoulders, hips, is sometimes stumped. A few rules of thumb--not always reliable...Japanese--except for wrestlers--are seldom fat; they often dry up and grow lean as they age. The Chinese often put on weight. The Chinese expression is likely to be more placid, kindly, open; the Japanese more positive, dogmatic, arrogant. Japanese walk stiffly erect, hard-heeled. Chinese, more relaxed, have an easy gait, sometimes shuffle." --Dec. 22, 1941, from "How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs"

"No one knows how many shirts lay wrinkling in laundry baskets last week as thousands of women across the country turned out for the first big demonstration of the Women's Liberation movement. They took over [Manhattan's Fifth Avenue], providing not only protest but some of the best sidewalk ogling in years." --Sept. 7, 1970

THE REVIEWS ARE IN Just as TIME commented on the world, so did the world comment on TIME. In some cases, depending on the source, brickbats may have been welcomed

"Prosy was the first issue of Time on March 3, 1923. Yet to suggest itself as a rational method of communication, of infuriating readers into buying the magazine, was strange inverted Timestyle. It was months before [editor Briton] Hadden's impish contempt for his readers, his impatience with the English language, crystallized into gibberish. By the end of the first year, however, Timeditors were calling people able, potent, nimble. 'Great word! Great word!' would crow Hadden, coming upon 'snaggle-toothed,' 'pig-faced.' Appearing also were first gratuitous invasions of privacy. Stressed was the bastardy of Ramsay MacDonald, the 'cozy hospitality' of Mae West. Backwards ran sentences until reeled the mind." --Wolcott Gibbs, profiling Henry Luce in Timese in the New Yorker, 1936

"Time made its debut not long after Ulysses. The prim, as well as the encyclopedic, arrogance of Stephen Daedalus offered an easily adaptable pose for the restless young journalist. In a word, Time, Life, and Fortune are the American Bloomsbury, our psychological bureaucracy, inhabited by well-paid artist-apes. The 'sophisticated' tone of Time, then, arises from nothing more than queasiness about the main march of the human affections, which issues as hard-boiled flippancy. And it is the whole world, of course, which is dear dirty Dublin to the omnivorous hackmen of T.L.F." --Marshall McLuhan in the journal Neurotica, 1949

"Oh, Mr. Screwluce! Timidity will never win back your mag's deserters and their splendid coin. Milquetoasting will get people to thinking that your reformed Communist (recent Time chief editor Whittaker Chambers) represented ALL your editorial guts." --Walter Winchell, column, 1949

"Time Inc. people keep themselves apart from the New York literary world. Generally they don't know 'anybody' or, if they did before they were hired, soon stop seeing 'anybody' but other Time Inc. people and other Toots Shor customers." --David Cort (a former Time employee) in the Nation, 1955

"Time was conceived as a moral, civic, and literary experience of a normative kind. About a special country. For all that the writing style of Time was often mannered, it reflected the work of editorial talents from Middle America, so that if [it] sometimes seemed supercilious, the reader was getting the high wit and lusty talent of utterly indigenous Americans arguing the conventional virtues." --William F. Buckley Jr., in Esquire, 1983