Bryce Zabel's INSTANT HISTORY

Newsweek #1 - Time Finally Gets Some Competition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A First Snapshot of Instant History...

This pretty much says it all..

Obama's Main Competitor

In only a few weeks now, President Barack Obama will stand before a crowd in Washington, D.C. and take the oath of office. We already know that this will be historic simply from the point-of-view of Obama's background and race. The other competition, however, is performance. We know he's a great orator and people will expect a barn-burning or inspirational speech. He won't have any problem eclipsing names like George W. Bush or even Jimmy Carter or Richard Nixon. No, the man Obama has to stand up to for comparison is President John Kennedy.

48 years ago, the inaugural was similarly a piece of history. Not only was it jeopardized by bad weather, but it brought generational change to the White House. It was at that tiime that newly elected President John Kennedy spoke those words we still remember.

"Ask not what your country can do for you..." We've heard this so many times, we can finish JFK's words in our sleep.  That speech, delivered on a brutally cold January day in 1961 where a blizzard threatened to shut down the entire affair, still goes down as the best inauguration speech, probably ever, certainly of the 20th century.

This is actually my favorite newsmagazine cover -- the day that John F. Kennedy assumed the presidency.  It's a color photograph that Time's editors had decided two weeks earlier should be taken at the precise moment when he raised his right hand and took the oath as the nation's 35th President.  Just possibly this was the last inauguration where Americans were absolutely filled to the brim with the possibilities that life would be getting much, much better.

Time -- with coverage coming from 17 correspondents -- led with the speech itself -- definitely getting right that it would become the classic speech, the one by which all others have been measured.

A blizzard threatened to turn the whole momentous occasion into a farce -- but President John Kennedy, delivering his inaugural address, more than saved the day.  Kennedy's inauguration speech went beyond mere rhetoric derived from the U.S. past; it has profound meaning for the U.S. future.  In lean, lucid phrases the nation's new President pledged to the U.S. to remain faithful to its friends, firm against its enemies but always willing to bring an end to the cold war impasse.

Sometimes, like the JFK coverage, they got the story just right.  That's the fun of the Instant History blog.  There will be other times where the writing of the moment was swayed by being too inside the story to see clearly.  And there will be other times still where you will see that issues of political correctness and other bias have twisted the honest reporting of the moment into something that the original journalists would never agree with.

Reaction to the speech was immediate.  From all shades of political outlook, from people who had voted for Kennedy in November and people who had voted against him, came a surge of praise and congratulation. Even so partisan a Republican as Senate Minority Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen described it as "inspiring" and as "a very compact message of hope."

The Time reporters here got the speech just right.  Who knew when President Kennedy delivered that address that he and his presidency would end in such a tragic manner that it would affect Americans' sense of trust in their own government and that, as the years passed, he would be revealed to have had such huge personal flaws in terms of his risk-taking behavior?

One thing that impressed me in re-reading this article was how close we came to never hearing that speech delivered in the stirring way it was given.  Snow had started to fall the night before and kept falling. 

By nightfall on inaugural eve, confusion was complete.  At least 10,000 cars were stalled and abandoned.  Airplanes stacked up over the airport, then flew away; Herbert Hoover, winging up from Miami, had to turn back, never got to the inaugural.  It took Pat Nixon 2 1/2 hours to get from her Wesley Heights home to the Senate Office Building, where her husband was holding a farewell party for his staff. . . At the White House, 30 members of President Eisenhower's staff were snowbound for the night.  Determined partygoers struggled through the storm, some of the men in white ties and parkas, some of the women wearing leotards under their gowns.

Eventually, though, on that terribly cold day, the story was all about hope... a time when a leader could challenge us to "...ask what you can do for your country" without getting in a big political debate.

Who knows what Obama will ask of his listeners this time around?  We'll know soon enough.

Time & Newsweek: McCain's Makeover

The Eyes Have It

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

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

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

Above: Newsweek | Below: Time

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

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

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

Yeah.  Probably not.

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

Hair today, gone tomorrow...

Bobby Kennedy - Gone Forty Years Now

Sadly, we're coming up on the anniversary of that time nearly forty years ago when hope was crushed by another assassin's bullet. This picture you see is done by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein and originally debuted as the cover of Time magazine the week before Robert Kennedy's untimely death.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Table of Contents page, they usually would have a short piece of writing setting up the pieces to follow. In this issue, they broke with their form and printed a long excerpt from a speech ("Ripple of Hope") RFK had given on June 6, 1966 in South Africa. That was exactly two years to the day before he was murdered and now, in 2008, we should celebrate that speech's importance at the same time we mourn the 1968 murder. Here it is, as they presented it:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Kennedy might still be alive today had he not been shot. He would have been 83 years old. My own father lived within a year of that.

The Best Inaugural Speech Ever

In less than a year now, a new president will stand before a crowd in Washington, D.C. and take the oath of office. At this point we can say with certainty that it will be historic. It might be a woman, an African-American, or even a former POW. One thing is already pretty clear and that's the simple fact that after this barn-burner of an election, whoever gives their first inaugural speech is going to be speaking to an entire world that is poised to listen.

48 years ago, the inaugural was similarly a piece of history. Not only was it jeopardized by bad weather, but it brought generational change to the White House. It was at that tiime that newly elected President John Kennedy spoke those words we still remember.

"Ask not what your country can do for you..." We've heard this so many times, we can finish JFK's words in our sleep.  That speech, delivered on a brutally cold January day in 1961 where a blizzard threatened to shut down the entire affair, still goes down as the best inauguration speech, probably ever, certainly of the 20th century.

This is actually my favorite newsmagazine cover -- the day that John F. Kennedy assumed the presidency.  It's a color photograph that Time's editors had decided two weeks earlier should be taken at the precise moment when he raised his right hand and took the oath as the nation's 35th President.  Just possibly this was the last inauguration where Americans were absolutely filled to the brim with the possibilities that life would be getting much, much better.

Time -- with coverage coming from 17 correspondents -- led with the speech itself -- definitely getting right that it would become the classic speech, the one by which all others have been measured.

A blizzard threatened to turn the whole momentous occasion into a farce -- but President John Kennedy, delivering his inaugural address, more than saved the day.  Kennedy's inauguration speech went beyond mere rhetoric derived from the U.S. past; it has profound meaning for the U.S. future.  In lean, lucid phrases the nation's new President pledged to the U.S. to remain faithful to its friends, firm against its enemies but always willing to bring an end to the cold war impasse.

Sometimes, like the JFK coverage, they got the story just right.  That's the fun of the Instant History blog.  There will be other times where the writing of the moment was swayed by being too inside the story to see clearly.  And there will be other times still where you will see that issues of political correctness and other bias have twisted the honest reporting of the moment into something that the original journalists would never agree with.

Reaction to the speech was immediate.  From all shades of political outlook, from people who had voted for Kennedy in November and people who had voted against him, came a surge of praise and congratulation. Even so partisan a Republican as Senate Minority Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen described it as "inspiring" and as "a very compact message of hope."

The Time reporters here got the speech just right.  Who knew when President Kennedy delivered that address that he and his presidency would end in such a tragic manner that it would affect Americans' sense of trust in their own government and that, as the years passed, he would be revealed to have had such huge personal flaws in terms of his risk-taking behavior?

One thing that impressed me in re-reading this article was how close we came to never hearing that speech delivered in the stirring way it was given.  Snow had started to fall the night before and kept falling. 

By nightfall on inaugural eve, confusion was complete.  At least 10,000 cars were stalled and abandoned.  Airplanes stacked up over the airport, then flew away; Herbert Hoover, winging up from Miami, had to turn back, never got to the inaugural.  It took Pat Nixon 2 1/2 hours to get from her Wesley Heights home to the Senate Office Building, where her husband was holding a farewell party for his staff. . . At the White House, 30 members of President Eisenhower's staff were snowbound for the night.  Determined partygoers struggled through the storm, some of the men in white ties and parkas, some of the women wearing leotards under their gowns.

Eventually, though, on that terribly cold day, the story was all about hope... a time when a leader could challenge us to "...ask what you can do for your country" without getting in a big political debate.

One year until the next inaugural day.