April 1968
In This Issue
Explore the April 1968 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
How Could Vietnam Happen? An Autopsy
From the beginning of John Kennedy's Administration into this fifth year of Lyndon Johnson's presidency, substantially the same small group of men have presided over the destiny of the United States. In that time they have carried the country from a limited involvement in Vietnam into a war that is brutal, probably unwinnable, and, to an increasing body of opinion, calamitous and immoral. How could it happen?
Report: Washington
"Mr. Johnson will run against beards, draft-card burners, criminals, and rioters, and perhaps Eartha Kitt. If the great unwashed disrupt the Chicago convention, so much the better for him, for the President will capitalize on the anti-dissent dissent."
A Theologian Comments
Egypt
Thomas Nast and the First Reconstruction
The political cartoonist who drew the elephant and donkey as symbols of the two political parties, Thomas Nast chronicled the hopes and later the disillusions of the mid-nineteenth-century’s civil rights leaders. Morton Keller, professor of history at Brandeis University and an authority on the post-Civil War era, restores to the public light this timeless and timely cartoonist in the following article adapted from his book THE ART AND POLITICS OF THOMAS NAST,to be published this month by Oxford University Press.
Five Green Waves
The Biggest Sponge Exchange on Earth
From Tara to Lara
The Peripatetic Reviewer
Updike's Yankee Traders
Reader's Choice
Potpourri
Campaigning
Washington
After the War
If Something Happens to Me, Whatever You Do, Don't Sell My Ibm
by “ADAM SMITHS,”who is not 245 years old but is instead a pseudonymous chronicler of the mystification and mores of Wall Street. Next month Random House will publish his book THE MONEY GAME, from which these comedies of the investment life are taken.
A Father Speaks
When life “is not good, it deserves neither protection nor preservation.”That is the proposition examined in the following pages by a grieving father whose son was horn a mongoloid, and a distinguished moral philosopher who attempts to pul the issue into ethical perspective. Mr. Card is a veteran education writer for the New York POST aud author of THE SCHOOL LUNCHROOM: TIME OF TRIAL.Professor Fletcher, author of MORAL RESPONSIBILITY: SITUATION ETHICS AT WORKand other books, teaches pastoral theology and Christian ethics at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
A Theologian Comments
What Makes Bill Buckley Run
Rebuffed by the voters in New York City’s 1966 mayoralty campaign, the author persists, and this month offers himself to Yale alumni as a candidate for election to the Yale Corporation, in which post he hopes to influence the education of future Elis, and transform, in whatever way possible, the course of instruction in America’s private colleges. Mr. Buckley, once chairman of the YALE DAILY NEWS,stirred up the Ivy League in 1951 with his book GOD AND MAN AT YALE,an eloquent objection to nonsecular education at his alma mater. He is an editor,columnist, and television personality widely associated with conservative causes.
Man in the Drawer
The Deserted Poet
Poems
Making It in the Big City
For months before publication, the new autobiographical book by Norman Podhoretz, editor of COMMENTARYmagazine, was the subject of tense speculation, heated gossip, and wouldn’t-touchit-wilh-a-bangalore-torpedo disclaimers in New York’s books-and-brains circles. Now Mr. Podhoretz’s MAKING ITis out, and the public is allowed to consider what all the sollo voce shouting was about. The author of this critique is a New York-based critic and novelist whose latest book was, appropriately enough, OFFICE POLITICS.
