A great day in history
17 August—Half a century ago, Thursday, 17 August 1972, the flying weather was pretty good, so United States aircraft flew 370 sorties over North Vietnam, the highest number of the year, as the killing continued and Henry Kissinger was in Saigon doing whatever he could to try to end it.
Edward Heath, the Incredible Sulk, was Leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Georges Pompidou was President of the Fifth French Republic. Giovanni Battista Montini was Pope Paul VI and head of the Roman Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State.
Tricky Dicky Nixon was President of the United States. Operatives (professional criminals formerly employed by the U.S. government) of the Committee to Reelect the President (i.e., the tricky dick), affectionately known as CREEP, had broken into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Watergate Office Building a couple of months earlier and stolen copies of supposedly secret campaign documents and bugged the DNC’s phones. But Nixon was still playing innocent. Because he was not a crook.
Davy Crockett might have celebrated his 186th birthday on 17 August 1972 had he not died at the Alamo in 1836. Well, maybe not—unless he ate lots and lots of yogurt. Mae West turned 80 and Maureen O’Hara may have observed her 62nd birthday. Robert De Niro turned 29. Francis Gary Powers, the USAF pilot whose CIA U-2 had been shot down by the Soviets in 1960 was lucky to celebrate his 43rd birthday back in the good old U.S.A. on 17 August 1972.
Mark Felt, Associate Director of the FBI at the time, turned 59 on 17 August 1972; he’d later become Woodward and Bernstein’s notorious Deep Throat, who brought down Nixon because Tricky Dicky didn’t give him J. Edgar Hoover’s job after the dirty old eonist kicked the bucket.
Sean Penn celebrated his 12th birthday and Donnie Wahlberg turned three on 17 August 1972.
So who cares about all that crap? Context. Just context.
Because 17 August 1972 is especially noteworthy as the day Simon and Schuster and Sherry and I moved to Litchfield . . .