LIFE magazine

“The Corridors of the Heart,” LIFE magazine, January 1968

Today marks the 43rd anniversary of the first adult human-to-human heart transplant in the United States, at Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California, under the direction of Dr. Norman Shumway.  The unidentified 54-year-old patient, who received the heart of a 43-year-old man, died 15 days later of multiple systemic complications.  The very first human-to-human heart transplant operation had been performed just a few weeks earlier, in South Africa, by Dr. Christiaan Barnard, who had consequently become an international celebrity.  The operations launched a virtual “space race” in risky heart operations, with doctors on several continents one-upping each other.

The frenzy over (and frequency of) heart transplants only intensified during the period 1968-70, before backing off for some years.  In this early, “heroic” period, however, the focus on the heart reflected larger cultural preoccupations with the human body– with knowing about it, visualizing it, exposing it, really seeing it in new and sometimes shocking ways.

One of the most vivid reflections of this new obsession with the body and its “mysteries” was to be found in the startling images made by Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson (born 1922).    His series of photographs of living human fetuses, published in 1965 in LIFE magazine, had an extraordinary–and probably still unmeasured–impact on public consciousness about reproduction and contraception.  LIFE sold millions of copies of its issue with the Nilsson photos, and may have hoped to have a similar effect with this issue, from January 19, 1968, with a ten-page spread of still amazing photos of the inside of a beating human heart.  Eerily lit and enlarged to fit on LIFE-sized pages, the photos are stunningly reminiscent of the 1966 science-fiction film Fantastic Voyage, about a nano-journey by scientists through the human body.  There is, in this January 1968 issue, barely a glimmer of the horrors of the year to come: not a single mention about the war, or civil rights, and only a few bouyant pieces about the emerging presidential race.  There’s an article about the boys in the cast of Oliver!, then in production, and critic Richard Schickel’s review (lukewarm) of The Graduate.

Trumping all the news and reviews are those blood-red photos of a beating heart.  It’s hard to overstate the extent to which Nilsson’s photographs changed the way we saw the world.  In the article that accompanies the photos, LIFE’s staff writer Loudon Wainwright, Jr. (the singer/songwriter’s father) writes:  ”The heart. Before, when it wore out, that was the end.  Death.  But just in the past month, a new operation–taking a healthy heart from a newly dead person and planting it in a person whose heart was failing–has stirred the world.  It is a wondrous beginning, but in that beginning failure is almost certain.”

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On this day, February 10, in 1968,  Peggy Fleming won the gold medal in figure skating at the Winter Olympics in Grenoble, France–the only gold won that year by an American athlete at the competition.  A few weeks later,  this “Olympic Charmer” showed up on the cover of LIFE magazine, wearing her gold medal and her memorable chartreuse skating outfit.  Fleming, who came into the Olympics as the three-time World Champion, was expected to win, but her triumph  galvanized the American figure-skating world, still recovering from the catastrophic plane crash seven years earlier that had killed the entire U. S. figure-skating team.  (Another American skater, Tim Wood, won silver at Grenoble.)  Fleming’s win was the first in an unbroken string of medals (not all of them gold)  for American women in skaters at the Olympic Games that extends down to the last games in 2006, and includes such well-known names as Dorothy Hamill, Kristi Yamaguchi, Michelle Kwan, and Nancy Kerrigan.

Peggy Fleming’s performance at the 1968 Games is the stuff of legend, and it is of course available on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw9XZAA72lw). Watching it, one is struck again by the contrast between her style–classic, balletic, and graceful–and that of the women in the sport today, when the competition has come to be dominated by speed and jumping.  Fleming was– and remains, at age 61–a class act.

It’s not surprising that a youthful and triumphant image was chosen for the cover of LIFE this week.  Fleming’s gold was just about the only good news around.   Inside this issue, the Olympic Games take a back seat to a huge photo spread and a depressing article on the Marines at the seemingly endless battle for Khe Sanh in Vietnam (announced on the cover next to Peggy’s saluting arm).  LIFE’s editorial in this issue is headlined: “Wherever we look, something’s wrong.”    It begins: “The American people . . . unexpectedly find themselves mired in frustration, self-doubt, and even impotence. . . . America is in a multiple crisis: military, monetary, social, constitutional, and moral,” and the editors call for an “honest rethinking of our purpose in the world.”

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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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