The presentation was covered by Time magazine in their August 2, 1954 issue:
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| Photo Credit: Time Magazine and United Press |
The Springfield Union also covered the story on the front page of the July 23, 1954 paper (click on any image for a larger version):
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| Article Credit: The Springfield Union |
What else did Time think was newsworthy in August 1954?
"Do It Yourself: The New Billion Dollar Hobby" was the cover story. Today the annual gross revenue of Home Depot alone is nearly $90 billion.
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| Image Credit: Time Magazine |
Meanwhile in Congress, Roy Cohn, chief counsel for the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee, was forced to tender his resignation and return to his Manhattan law practice. Wisconsin's Senator Joe McCarthy, who had once described Cohn as being "as indispensable as I am" in the effort to ferret out Communists," called it "a great victory for the Communists." McCarthy's own star would fade soon after and by the end of 1954 he faced censure by the Senate. Cohn would go on to represent many influential and politically connected clients including a current presidential candidate. McCarthy died in 1957, Cohn in 1986.
Ernest Hemingway was in Havana where he was honored with the Order of Carlos Manuel de Cespedes on his 55th birthday, having survived a plane crash in Africa. Hemingway died in 1961. Today his home in Havana is a museum and there are high hopes that the new U.S.-Cuba relationship will bring much needed improvements to the run-down facility.
Time provided a summation of the 1954 Geneva Conference which was intended to end the Indo-China War: "After eight years and at the cost of 34,000 French and Vietnamese dead, a war had ended in defeat... Historians might yet mark Geneva as the first date in a new era: the decline of the West." Among other things the agreement partitioned Vietnam at the 17th parallel, which would "presumably end in July 1956, when there are to be general elections... to create a single government for the entire country." What could possibly go wrong?
On a much lighter note, the cats were really swinging at the first Newport Jazz Festival. An estimated 13,000 people attended the Festival, which began on July 17, 1954.
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| Image credit: WhatsUpNewp.com |
