Heartlight

ONE BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, I960 All bright and glittering in the smokeless air, Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still! WILLIAM WORDSWORTH in january of this year a massachusetts senator named john f. Kennedy announced that he was going to run for president of the United States. In February, the civil-rights protests that had torn the New South apart for the last four years escalated in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Elvis Presleya white entertainer whose musical roots were in black "soul" musicreceived his first gold album. In May, a U.S. pilot named Francis Gary Powers was shot down as he piloted his U-2 over Russia, sharply escalating the Cold War tension that held all Europe in the grip of a political winter, and the Queen of England's younger sister, Margaret, married Antony Armstrong-Jones in a wedding that captured the glamour-starved public imagination in a way that nothing had since Grace Kelly's fairy-tale wedding four years before. 1960. The year when the future itself was the New Frontier. But it was a frontier that was not without its Old World goblins. This was the year during which many in the world would awaken from their emotional paralysis and finally begin to total up the true cost of "the last good war"the war before Korea, the war whose cost had been buried in the postwar economic boom, 1960 was the year that Adolph Eichman was finally arrested in Buenos Aires and taken to stand trial for his crimes in the embattled state of Israel. His trial would be broadcast worldwide, cementing the new medium'stelevision'splace on the New Frontier, making it an integral part of a world that could still believe in the global classroom and the global village. 1960. It was a year when the Great Powers continued to divest themselves of colonial possessions that seemed to belong to another time. A year that saw increased fighting in an area of the world still often miscalled the Belgian Congo, and a fledgling United Nations that was starting to flex its international muscle (while the Vatican and its newest Pope, John XXIII, claimed the same "right and duty" to intervene in foreign affairs for itself). That summer, a thirteen-year-old government agency called the Central Intelligence Agency, which had been formed out of the remnants of the wartime OSS as a direct challenge to the FBI's increasing power, would begin the disastrously unsuccessful series of assassination attempts against foreign dictatorsnotably last year's new Caribbean strongman, Fidel Castro of Cubathat would cause its fall from grace a quarter of a century later when the details of its various attempts were finally made public. At the Democratic National Convention, the popular and well-connected young senator from Massachusetts would choose a fifty-two-year-old Texan named Lyndon Baines Johnson as his running mate, and the Soviet Union would continue consolidating the gains of its infant space program. It was a year of hope and despair; twelve months that saw the appetite for freedom spread like wildfire through Asia and the Middle East while Europe groaned beneath the weight of an Iron Curtain rung down upon it by allies turned to enemies. Like a phoenix from the ashes, the Russian Bear had risen up out of the cinders of the Allied victory to menace the nations of the West anew, armed with weapons that made a war too terrible for sane men to contemplate. Civilization stood poised on the brink of nuclear hellfire, and the world powers jockeyed for position in the new world order that was to come. This was the world that Colin Niall MacLaren had returned toBradley, Marion Zimmer is the author of 'Heartlight' with ISBN 9780812571073 and ISBN 081257107X.