Global interconnections

The guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and US colleges

Just about 42 years ago, this issue of LOOK magazine was hitting American mailboxes and newstands.  On the cover was one of the more unusual stories of our transformative year:  the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and the impact of his “transcendental meditation” on the American college scene.

Beatles, Mia, and a Beach Boy in India

Actually, the Maharishi (only “Mahesh” is part of his given name; maharishi and yogi are honorifics) had been making international news since the 1950s, teaching his meditation techniques and spiritual beliefs on an incredible series of round-the-world tours, including the United States (his first tour here was in 1959) and cities on nearly every continent.  But it was only when the Beatles (along with Mia Farrow and her sister Prudence; singer/songwriter Donovan; and Beach Boy Mike Love) made a pilgrimage to India in early 1968 to study with the Maharishi that his fame exploded.  The Beatles, of course, were “more popular than Jesus,” in John Lennon’s famous line from 1966; and Mia Farrow had been an American tabloid fixture since her marriage to Frank Sinatra in 1966. (Her breakout movie, Rosemary’s Baby, wasn’t released until months after she returned from India.)  Suddenly, in early 1968, the beatific image and inscrutable pronouncements of the Maharishi seemed to be everywhere.

“The Non-Drug Turn-On Hits Campus”

Not surprisingly, the guru and his teachings had their greatest impact–in the United States, at least–on young people.  ”TM” followers were mostly white, college-educated baby boomers, rejecting the conventions (like traditional Western religions) of their parents’ generation and seeking distinct new identities and “heightened consciousness.”  The author of the article here in LOOK goes to a lecture by Jerry Jarvis, head of the Student International Meditation Society, the principal vehicle by which American college students connected with transcendental meditation.  (The preppy kids on the magazine cover are at Yale, but the event described here is at Berkeley.)

Something super-groovy

“The students had heard of the Maharishi . . . There wasn’t one who didn’t realize that he was the same jet-age guru who had guided the Beatles off the psychedelic drug scene by way of a new, nonchemical turn-on.  The motives of the Berkeley crowd were typical: some came to hear about what had gotten the Beatles so excited; some had a vague interest in all things Eastern and alien; many were acid heads or pot devotees in search of ‘mind-expanding’ ecstasy without the ill-effects of psychedelics (the chief of which being jail).  But more than anything else, the majority of the crowd knew individual meditators who were noticeably Better People as a result, and who must therefore be on to something super-groovy.”

The article concludes by quoting a “Los Angeles meditator”:  ”The student’s life is so tense today.  You go to school and get involved in the peace movement and the Sexual Freedom League and everything, and, gee, by that time you’re too uptight to have to think about studying too!  We’re really fortunate in this generation to have the Maharishi.”

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Biafra: A disaster from the 1960s

The images from the catastrophe in Haiti this past week reminded me of another time that Americans were gripped by a similar disaster and its shocking images: the civil war in the tiny breakaway state of Biafra that was coming to a bloody peak in 1968.

“Look at us as human beings”

Ask people today where “Biafra” is and I suspect there would be few looks of recognition.  The civil war began there in 1967, when mostly Ibo tribesmen of southeastern Nigeria attempted to secede and create a new country: Biafra.  But, as LIFE’s editors said in 1968, it was a civil war that “has raged with a savagery barely noticed by the rest of the world.”  The vastly better equipped Nigerian forces–with arms supplied by Great Britain, Russia, and Arab countries–bombed Biafran towns and created blockades that led to mass starvation. The Biafran leader, Odumegwu Ojukwu, said to a reporter: “All I really ask is that the outside world look at us as human beings and not as Negroes bashing heads.”

Images of starvation

It was not the first time that the West had seen images of war and revolution coming from Africa, struggling to overcome centuries of colonial rule.  But in the 1960s, the word “Biafra” began to take on especially totemic meaning. In the American media at least, the word became synonymous with images of starvation, particular of starving children, with bellies incongruously bloating below stick-like ribcages, and always the huge, pleading eyes (like the “big-eyed” Keane paintings so popular in the 1960s).  People in the West even learned a new African word: kwashiorkor, a word describing protein malnutrition.

A world getting smaller

It’s striking to compare this LIFE cover from July 1968 is to one published just a few months earlier, a photograph by Gordon Parks to illustrate LIFE’s story about race and urban America, “The Negro and the Cities: The Cry That Will Be Heard.”  The inescapable similarities provide more evidence that visual culture in 1968 increasingly reflected the sense that the world’s concerns and peoples were coming closer together.

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When 1968 became “1968″

Forty-one years ago today, LIFE magazine brought out this issue entirely devoted to a breathless review of the year that had just ended:  1968.  The scale of attention here was unprecedented for the venerable LIFE magazine, and I don’t believe it was repeated during the rest of the magazine’s tenure.  Surely, year-end journalistic wrap-ups were (and are) commonplace, but this was something more: an entirely retrospective issue of a magazine that ordinarily prided itself on its up-to-the-minute journalism (especially photojournalism).  Such was the stunning power of the “Incredible Year”  and the extraordinary self-consciousness of the moment.  At virtually the first possible moment, 1968 became “1968″–something larger, more symbolic, more worthy of engraving in virtual monuments.

Battered by a series of awful waves

LIFE begins its coverage with a fast-paced timeline, with a few words and thumbnail photos for each month.  ”What ELSE could have happened in one spin around the sun?  It was a year when everybody had to be heard–students, blacks, hippies, yippies, rightists, leftists, dissidents–and then heeded, instantly.  It was a year of confrontation, a year the Establishment became the Enemy, the alienated became the activist and nobody could hear the sensible voice of the quiet man.  It was a year that pulled down the moon almost close enough to touch and put new hearts in people who would have died without them. It was a year nudity lost its novelty and sex came on strong.  Most of all, it was a year we had to learn to expect the astounding, to accept the unthinkable.  Assassination, starvation, invasion–the events, like a series of waves, battered us with awful rapidity.  In short, it was an incredible  year.”

Discovery, Shock, War–and Sex

The rest of the magazine is classic LIFE: huge spreads of great photographs, under categories like  ”Discovery,” with photos of the Apollo VIII mission; “Shock,” focusing on the King and Kennedy assassinations; “Dissent,” on the student uprisings in Mexico City, Paris, Berlin, New York; “War,” with subheadings of “Starvation” (more Biafran children) and “Vietnam,” a gruesome pile of wounded American soldiers; “Comeback” (Nixon, of course).  ”Social Notes” included spreads on the Jackie-O wedding in October, and the Julie & David nuptials.  There is a photo-spread articles on people surviving with heart transplants, and another on the “Black is Beautiful” movement, with a jaw-dropping, full-page, color photo of a bare-chested Jim Brown–football hero turned movie star–being fondled by Raquel Welch.

Saving LIFE in the basement

A classic issue of LIFE, in short.  And the editors knew it.  The first page of the issue (after an Oldsmobile ad, of course) makes the bold-faced claim that “1 out of 4 Americans will read this issue of LIFE . . . 48 million people will be reading it with you. . . . Which makes Life the single most powerful communications medium that ever existed.”  These are the kinds of “souvenir” magazines that people would save in their basements for years.  The particular issue in my hands now, with a scan of the cover appearing above, was saved by LIFE subscriber Michael Spock of Lincoln, Massachusetts–son of one of the people whose photo appears on page 4:  Dr. Benjamin Spock, convicted in June of conspiracy for counseling draft-evaders.

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Forty-one years ago:  the Soviets’ crushing of the “Prague Spring,” the “brave rebirth of national pride and expectation”

Forty-one years ago today, LIFE published an extraordinary 19-page story, with the magazine’s vivid trademark photographs, on the crushing of the “Prague Spring,” the Czechoslovakian experiment with openness and Socialist liberalism that LIFE called a “brief idyl of liberation, the brave rebirth of national pride and expectation.” The invasion of Czechoslovakia by nearly 5,000 Soviet tanks and 165,000 troops (along with forces from four other Soviet-bloc countries) had begun 10 days earlier, on Tuesday, August 20th.  The invaders were met by thousands of mostly youthful street-protesters, and though the confrontations turned violent–thirty-eight protesters were killed–there was no massive or official retaliation.

Meanwhile, in Chicago….

Halfway around the world, in Chicago, thousands of politicians and protesters were beginning to gather in anticipation of the Democratic Party’s national nominating convention.  And the events in Czechoslovakia weighed very heavily on both sides.  Senator George McGovern, a trailing candidate for the nomination that would eventually be won by Hubert Humphrey, lashed out at the Johnson administration, saying it must “bear a considerable part of the blame of the Soviet Union’s military takeover of Czechoslovakia.”  McGovern’s and others’ efforts to obtain an antiwar plank in the party’s platform were crumbling in the face of the Soviet actions.   The story in Czechoslovakia was, in America, refracted through the lens of the ongoing American debacle in Vietnam. McGovern spoke for many when he said: “You cannot justify intervention in Vietnam on the grounds that our security is threatened by a government 10,000 miles away without inviting the Russians to intervene because they feel threatened by a government on their own border.” (NYT 8/24/68).

Czechoslovakia and Vietnam: a 1968 linkage

In a lengthy editorial in this issue of LIFE, Thomas Griffith also made the linkage between the Soviet invasion and the war in Vietnam, especially the effect of the invasion on American politicians’ constantly shifting stances on the war.  ”In the past year, this nation has undergone a remarkable swing of opinion about the war in Vietnam–so much so that names like hawk and dove no longer fit.  The longing to get out is widespread, and peace with honor the common cry.”  Still, the “tanks of Prague” made it much less likely that Americans would look favorably on an end to the Vietnam war that entailed substantial concessions to the Communist North.

Covering Prague in 1968

The convergence of events in Prague and Chicago would have another, unexpected result in the way that 1968 was “covered.”  As reported by New York Times TV critic Jack Gould on August 23, 1968, The CBS Evening News expanded the night before from a half hour (it had been a 15-minute show only 5 years earlier) to a full hour “because of the heavy volume of news,” and said that the format afforded “a less hurried presentation of the day’s developments,” and lessened “the need for the compression of stories into cryptic bulletins.”  Walter Cronkite presided over an hour of news that focused in its first half on Czechoslovakia and world reaction, and in the 2nd half to developments at the DNC in Chicago, as well as to stories from Vietnam and Bogotá (a visit by Pope Paul VI). “Easing the tyranny of time that always hangs so heavily over electronic journalists might have interesting and fruitful consequences,” Gould concluded.  The expansion of the nightly news to a full hour did not last, but exactly a month later, CBS would launch a one-hour news program called 60 Minutes.  More on the debut of that durable show in a later post.

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