HIGH SPIRITS: Present at the Creation
Aitken, Jonathan
ORTY YEARS ON WHEN AFAR AND ASUNDER/ Parted are those who are singing today are the chorus lines of the school song of Harrow, Winston Churchill’s alma mater. It evoked such emotion in the...
...Forty years of this conventional wisdom deserves to be challenged...
...A line from Yeats was much quoted by gloomy commentators of those days: Things fall apart/ The center cannot hold/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...
...Everyone underestimated the tenacity of the Palestinians, the emergence of the suicide bombers as a force for terrorism, and the inflammatory effect of Israel’s settlements on occupied Arab land...
...presidential politics...
...The Hilton management yielded to this pressure, to much jeering from the Red Guards as the symbols of what they called “imperialism, militarism, and commercialism” bit the dust...
...ORTY YEARS ON WHEN AFAR AND ASUNDER/ Parted are those who are singing today are the chorus lines of the school song of Harrow, Winston Churchill’s alma mater...
...Israel’s staggering territorial victories in the Six Day War of 1967 led to other wrong predictions, namely that the Arab armies had been broken forever and that a permanent peace on the basis of the captured borders would be a deliverable reality...
...Time also brought about the split between Moscow and Beijing, followed by a H I G H S P I R I T S 7 2 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 Present at the Creation by Jonathan Aitken F DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 7 3 split between Beijing and Hanoi...
...Although LBJ was increasingly beleaguered in the White House by the ferocity of the antiwar demonstrations, no serious reporter would have dared to forecast that the president would soon come perilously close to defeat in the New Hampshire primary, still less that he would decline to run for re-election in 1968...
...It was a great year for the newspaper and magazine business, so The American Spectator sure got the timing right for its launch date...
...To this day I keep in my desk the press card issued in September 1967 by the United States Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MAC-V), which under the signature of Captain R. W. Moorhead USN accredited me “to cover the operational advisory and support activities of the Free World Military Assistance Forces, Vietnam...
...I admired the courage of the American forces on the battlefield, believed that they were holding the line for the nations of non-Communist East Asia, and predicted that the long-term effects of fighting to save these dominoes would bring great benefits of economic and political freedom for the countries concerned...
...The message from presidential politics in 1967 was that unpredictability ruled...
...It evoked such emotion in the wartime Prime Minister that tears poured down his cheeks in old age when he returned to his school and heard the boys singing the refrain...
...At the time when the first copies of TAS were being printed, I was arriving in Saigon as a 25-yearold rookie war correspondent...
...Although many members of the press corps in Saigon were reporting, sometimes with the glee of Schadenfreude, that the war was going horribly wrong for the U.S., I formed a rather different opinion from the viewpoint of the rest of the free world...
...As for Haight-Ashbury and flower power, it was fun but futile...
...For the conflict in Vietnam bought time for the fragile community of non-Communist economies in the region...
...His biographies include Charles W. Colson: A Life Redeemed (Doubleday) and Nixon: A Life, now available in a new paperback edition (Regnery...
...But there were a few anxious moments, such as when Mao’s guardsmen demanded the hauling down of the three flags flying from the masts of the Hong Kong Hilton—the Union Jack, the Stars and Stripes, and the hotel’s own pennant...
...Perhaps its sentiments have some resonance as we celebrate the 40th anniversary of The American Spectator...
...More generally, there was a fear that the 1960s were beginning to explode, as the passions and poisons that had been fermenting inside American society for most of the decade boiled over with a fury that traumatized the nation...
...Moreover, the example of the four dragons and the four tigers converted both Communist China and Communist Vietnam to economic policies that are today more open and more free than anyone would have dreamed possible 40 years ago...
...TAS has evidently acquired the wisdom to cover the long view...
...I was in the Da Nang press center when I received a telegram from my editor in London ordering me to move to Hong Kong immediately since Chairman Mao’s Red Guards were destabilizing, perhaps overthrowing, the colony’s power structure...
...But 40 years on, even though I am mostly parted by time and fate from my fellow chroniclers who used to report the news with me from Vietnam, Hong Kong, Israel, Haight-Ashbury, and Washington, D.C., it feels good to have survived for four decades in the writing and publishing business...
...It feels even better to be writing in my usual High Spirits column, not about things temporal but about things eternal...
...These changes came about as indirect collateral effects of the Vietnam War...
...This was an exaggeration...
...Of course, the war had terrible negatives for the U.S military and unforeseen consequences for U.S...
...Four of them—South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—used that time to emulate Japan, transforming themselves into successful free market societies...
...Jonathan Aitken, The American Spectator’s High Spirits columnist, is most recently author of John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace (Crossway Books...
...The idea that flower power was some sort of new age spirituality looked bogus at the time and looks even more ridiculous now...
...How wrong they were...
...domestic politics...
...The latter proved right about the Golan Heights but wrong about the West Bank...
...But as its devotees made hits out of songs like the Beatles’ Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, The Doors’ Light My Fire, and Scott McKenzie’s If You’re Going to San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair), it was surprising how many writers in the mainstream media treated this pop music as if it carried a serious message...
...For most of the past four decades, the prevailing liberal consensus has been that this domino theory was nonsense and that America’s involvement in the Vietnam War was an unmitigated disaster...
...THE YEAR 1967 saw your High Spirits columnist also reporting on China’s Cultural Revolution, the Arab-Israeli war, flower power in Haight-Ashbury, and U.S...
...We reporters were failures as forecasters in the Middle East...
...Yet seen from the perspective of economic freedom in Asia, there were some powerful positives whose importance is often overlooked...
...I enjoyed my few days as a dropout in the company of such counter-revolutionary luminaries as Allen Ginsberg, Jim Morrison of the Doors, Pig Pen of the Grateful Dead, and Timothy Leary, the selfappointed high priest of LSD...
...THIS STROLL DOWN THE MEMORY LANES of 1967 shows that we did indeed live through tempestuous, if not anarchic times...
...These “four dragons” were later followed by “four tigers”—Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand...
...J O N A T H A N A I T K E N The idea that flower power was some sort of new age spirituality looked bogus at the time and looks even more ridiculous now...
...At that moment there were several voices in the press club predicting the imminent fall of Hong Kong...
...The Red Guards’ marches around Hong Kong were soon contained by the British-trained police...
Vol. 40 • January 2008 • No. 10
