MAN OF THE YEAR

TIME magazine’s “Man of the Year” issue, begun in 1927 with its cover story on aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, has long since become an American institution, and is still the best-known feature of the magazine, now struggling for survival, like all general interest news magazines.  The annual announcement of the TIME editors’ choice was always a front-page news event in itself, though I wonder how many people were paying attention last week when this year’s choice–the Fed’s Ben Bernanke– was announced.

MEN AND WOMEN AND PEOPLE (and non-people) OF THE YEAR

Browsing the whole 82-year list is, however, an instructive way to pass the time.  (You can do it, of course, online at http://bit.ly/6PSngy).  The chosen one is supposed to be the “person who has affected our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year.”  (About that “good or ill” phrase:  Bad guys are rarely chosen–Hitler in 1938; Iran’s Ayatollah in 1980; and that’s about it.)  The list is a good source for trivia buffs:  the first “Woman of the Year”? Wallis Warfield Simpson, 1936; the first “Man and Wife [that's what it says] of the Year”?  Mr. and Mrs. Chiang Kai-shek,  1937; the first “collective” Man of the Year?  The American Fighting Man, 1950.  (There were other collective choices in the 1960s: “Young People,” 1966; and “Middle Americans,” 1969).  The first (and so far only) non-human?  ”The Machine of the Year,” about personal computers in 1982.   When did the feature change to “Person of the Year”?  1999, with Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com.

1968′S CHOICE:  A TOUGH DECISION

It cannot have been an easy task for the TIME editors to choose the magazine’s 1968 Man of the Year, and clearly the decision was made at the last minute–since the Apollo VIII astronauts were still in outer space during the last week of the year.  My guess is that there were many other candidates who ended up on the cutting room floor:  Martin Luther King?  (He had been the choice in 1963).  Robert Kennedy?  Richard Nixon?  (He would be named twice in the coming years). George Wallace?  The Protesters at the Democratic National Convention?  The Czech Resistance, or Alexander Dubcek?  (the “Hungarian Freedom Fighter” had been named in 1956).

Not surprisingly, given the multiple “candidates,” all of them with some potential controversial baggage, the editors made a “feel-good,” forward-looking choice with the Apollo VIII crew.  Of course, the editors were also paying homage to the American space program, heretofore absent from the “Man of the Year” rolls.  (The 1968 choice also trumped, in advance, the men who actually landed on the Moon in 1969, as well as the crew of the Challenger who died in 1986.)  As they entered their orbit of the Moon on Christmas Eve 1968, the crew, William Anders, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman, read a passage from the book of Genesis (”In the beginning . . . “) in what became the most watched television broadcast of its time.

A NEW AGE

With its characteristically florid prose, TIME honored this 1968 crew:  ”In the closing days of 1968, all mankind could exult in the vision of a new universe. For all its upheavals and frustrations, the year would be remembered to the end of time for the dazzling skills and Promethean daring that sent mortals around the moon. It would be celebrated as the year in which men saw at first hand their little earth entire, a remote, blue-brown sphere hovering like a migrant bird in the hostile night of space.

“The year’s transcendent legacy may well be that in Christmas week 1968, the human race glimpsed not a new continent or a new colony, but a new age, one that will inevitably reshape man’s view of himself and his destiny.”

Generation gap– a Sixties “meme”

Certain phrases migrate from being just a combination of words to something with a little more immortality.  Mundanely, we might call them “catchphrases.” Today we would probably call these virally spreading cultural nuggets ”memes.”  That word probably had little currency in the 1960s, but one of 1968’s most pervasive memes was “generation gap.”  It was the upheavals of the 1960s that gave rise to this term, if not the actual phenomenon, which had been around for centuries.  Sociologist Kenneth Keniston, in his influential 1968 study Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth, found his informants to be “hostile . . . to patterns of power and authority.” No lesser lights than Bruno Bettelheim, Erik Erikson, and Margaret Mead all produced social-psychological studies focusing on generational divides and challenges in this era.

Understanding the gap

Margaret Mead, in the book Culture and Commitment (subtitled “A Study in the Generation Gap”), based on a series of lectures in 1969, turned her anthropologist’s eye to the problem:  ”Today, nowhere in the world are there elders who know what children know, not matter how remote and simple the societies in which the children live. In the past there were always some elders who knew more than any children in terms of their experience of having grown up with a cultural system.  Today there are none.”  Classically, of course, young people define themselves in relation to—if not always in opposition to—the values of their parents’ generation. But the Sixties sharpened this process, compelling one to find a place on one side or the other of a yawning “generation gap.”

To be young again

A national obsession with youth and youthfulness and youthful rebellion was evident throughout the decade.  LIFE magazine, with this May 17 issue, was actually a little behind the curve in finding currency in this concept.  TIME, after all, had declared “Men and Women Under 25″ to be their “Persons of the Year” way back in January 1966.  LIFE’s hook was to document an actual gap, to publish the conflicting views of two men–Richard Lorber (age 20) and his uncle, Ernest Fladell (age 42), both New Yorkers, who decided to write a book together about their experiences when young Lorber moved in with his uncle in 1967.   That’s Lorber’s head on the cover, with his uncle pictured in his right eyeglass lens.  (Of course, it’s not surprising that LIFE’s choice for these stand-ins for “the gap” are both white males.)

Communicating across the gap–or not

The pair have some archetypal adventures together:  Richard turns Ernie on to pot; Ernie enjoys it, but Richard turns resentful when afterwards Ernie professes great insight into the drug’s appeal:  ”It is as if he had crashed a very private party I was having with myself.”   Richie and Ernie hook up with Richie’s friends in Greenwich Village (Ernie wants to meet a “few bona fide hippies”), and it gets a little weird with some girls they hang out with. (Ernie proclaims that “the so-called sexual revolution isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.”) They visit a few head shops in the East Village (e.g., the “Psychedelicatessan”).  They disagree–strongly–about the “Negro riots” which Richie sees as “the most hopeful sign I have seen in the past year;” he understands “exactly” how blacks have been “driven to violence.”  Ernie is appalled:  ”I don’t think he knows what he’s talking about.”  Richie and Ernie (a veteran of World War II) disagree on military service.  After Ernie’s draft board reclassifies him, he gets worried, and tells Ernie that he was “facing one of the most agonizing decisions of his life.”  Ernie says: “I went to war weak with fear but strong in pride. Richard has only fear.”