tangents

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IN RETROSPECT...

The week of October 11th to 17th in the year of 1964 could truly be labeled "This Was The Week That Was":

1-Nikita Khrushchev was suddenly ousted as dictator of the mighty Soviet Union and Aleksei Kosygin

became Premier and Leonid Brezhnev was named Secretary of the Communist Party.

2-Mao Tse-Tung's Communist China finally exploded a nuclear device. This event had taken China 14 years, cost them more than 200 million dollars and utilized the combined talents of 1,800 scientists and engineers.

3-In a significant election in Great Britain, Labor nosed out the Tories and Harold Wilson replaced Sir Douglas-Home as the Prime Minister.

4-It was revealed that an overworked Washington official, close to the President, had been arrested at the Y just two blocks from the White House as a sexual deviate.

How did American Editors and writers react to such a history-making week? Let us take TIME magazine as a fairly typical example:

It devoted approximately six pages (plus references elsewhere) to the case of the arrested Washington official, four pages to the momentous events in Moscow, two pages to the important British election and less than a page to the Chinese nuclear explosion. The grotesqueries of the American press are known to the entire world and this was but one more blatant example of their talent for putting the wrong emphasis on the

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wrong thing at the wrong time.

How will the Historians rate these four events from This Was The Week That Was? It is safe to say that long after the name of Jenkins is forgotten they will still be discussing the other three events. And yet, there is a special significance to

the manner in which TIME and the press in general evaluated the events of the week. On page 21 of the October 23rd issue of TIME the writer gives us all the gory details of the crucifixion of the overworked aide of the President: "Soon after 8 p.m., he left, ostensibly for the White House.

"But Jenkins took a detour, headed instead for the Y.M.C.A. on G Street. Meanwhile, two plainclothes members of the Washington morals squad, Privates Lamonte P. Drouillard and R. L. Graham walked through the front door of the "Y" into the lobby, then descended to the basement men's room. . . . During one five-hour period earlier this year, police arrested eight homosexuals there, including two college professors and several Government workers.

"The two cops entered the room, walked past two adjoining pay toilets and up four narrow steps leading to a shower room that has been padlocked for ten years

"They entered the shower room and stationed themselves at two peep-holes in the door that gave them a view of the washroom and enabled them to peep over the toilet partitions. On that night the cops spotted Jenkins in a pay toilet with Andy Choka, 60, a Hungarian-born veteran of the U.S. Army . . . . Jenkins' back partly ob-