The Making of the President 1968 [antikvár]

FOREWORD TfflS book is an attempt to tell what happened on earth in America, in 1968, while Americans prepared to land on the moon. Whenever they turned their eyes upward, on summer evenings or fall nights, the moon tantalized Americans. But the stories of the space adventure filled them with a pride, hope and faith in themselves that vanished each day with the rising of the sun. For by day, the imagination of Americans was largely earthbound, thek thoughts turned inward, their emotions tormented by unending war and the vam quest for peace. They were little different from the people of Spain who were far more intent in 1491-1492 on the final struggle against the Moors in Granada than on the vision of Christopher Columbus, who persuaded the court of Castile and Aragon that the world was round, finite and in man's grasp. From the very beginning, the arbitrary calendar year has had to measure two kinds of tune, one measure for the community and the law, another measure for man and his plans. Does the calendar reach outward to frame man in his universe? Or does it reflect inward, on the season and cycles of man? The Egyptians, three thousand years before Christ, were perplexed by the same problem in working out the first primitive calendars. Should they rely on the Calendar of Thoth, which divided the year into four-week cycles, those same uncertain cycles that move a woman's body to her periods of fertility? Or should they choose the calendar of the sun, by whose turnings they could determine flood and ebb on the Nile—and thus manage affairs of state, setting the flood warnings, the sowing, the planting, and the tax season by that day in early summer when Sinus first appeared above the horizon, a flash before the rising of the sun. The Egyptians chose the sun and outer world as measure; and ever since, the 365-day year has been the measure of historians. Historians may see 1968 as another such conventional measure framing man in his universe—the year that Americans gave earth-bound men their first close glimpse of the moon and prepared for