January 2011

By the end of September George Wallace had arrived in the polls; 21 percent of Americans were supporting the former Alabama governor for President, making him a credible third-party force in the race while his Alabaman campaign workers struggled to get him onto every state ballot in the country.

But the show that created its own category that fall was the so-called television magazine thought up by the “CBS Evening News” producer Don Hewitt and co-edited by Mike Wallace and Harry Reasoner. “60 Minutes” premiered on September 24 as a biweekly program. Wallace’s first interview in this new forum was with Attorney General Ramsey Clark; as the show progressed, he applied his argumentative pressure to kings, radicals, and accused war criminals. Even before Watergate unleashed a generation of TV investigators, “60 Minutes” laid into all kinds of failed figures of authority, from deadbeat insurers to overcharging defense contractors. Wallace became the master of the closed-door indictment, and the line “They wouldn’t talk to us” became nearly a guilty verdict. Harry Reasoner was his perfect complement on the program, a wry antidote to Wallace’s tough style. In 1970 Reasoner left “60 Minutes” for ABC and was replaced by Morley Safer.

Civilian fathers of servicemen overseas were matching their office dress colors—ties, suspenders, socks, or whole suits—to those of the American service ribbons worn by their sons. Some gray pinstripes gave way temporarily to Pacific Blue; ties became popular in such Army decoration colors as Asiatic Gold and Middle East Maroon.

After a month of preparations, on September 12 the American 1st Army, along with four French divisions, attacked the German salient at St. Mihiel, where more than sixty-thousand soldiers were dug in. It was the Americans’ debut as an independent battle force. The French town had been held by the Germans for four years, and, wrote John J. Pershing, commanding general, “The salient was practically a great field fortress. It had, however, the characteristic weakness of all salients in that it could be attacked from both flanks in converging operations.”

In the autumn of 1884, a young Lakota named Standing Bear, a student at the Carlisle Indian School, was granted permission to travel into Philadelphia and attend a stage show. Something called the “Sitting Bull Combination” was appearing there, a troupe that included the chief and holy man Sitting Bull and a handful of warriors—Spotted Horn Bull, Gray Eagle, Flying By, Long Dog, Crow Eagle, along with several of their wives.

The performance consisted of a sort of tableau, in which the men sat smoking their pipes in front of a tepee and the women bent over a pot, pretending to cook a meal, while a white lecturer explained the “inner life of the Indian.” Then, Sitting Bull, who neither spoke nor understood English, stepped forward and delivered an address in Lakota, explaining that the time for war against the whites had ended, that what was needed now was education for the children of his tribe.