For the Record

No year could be all bad in which: The Washington Post was accused, with reason, of strikebreaking and using scabs; Indira Gandhi went authoritarian; and Teddy Kennedy spent three days of his skiing vacation at Sun Valley on cross-country skis rather than cross a picket line (whereafter—-having made the gesture—Teddy removed himself and family to a non-union slope).

It was also a year in which bank rates in Argentina went to 40 per cent —in response to the country’s 300-percent-plus inflation. . . . West Germany reported that more than 160,000 East Germans had managed to flee to freedom in the years since the Wall went up, despite barbed wire, mines, killer dogs, and border patrols. … It was West Germany’s worst economic year since the early Fifties—even pornography sales were off 10 per cent. . . . Italy’s Communist Party reported an all-time high in Party memberships, up 150,000 from a year earlier, to 1.7 million. . . . Fidel Castro gave his people a candyplum for Christmas: there will be no more rationing of sugar in Cuba. . . . Across the globe in Vientiane, Laos, they were busy planting “Trees of Hatred” in front of each government ministry as a reminder of “U.S. war crimes.” . . . And Pravda, on Christmas day, told its people that millions of workers and intellectuals in the West had a miserable Christmas, many of them unemployed, “many going mad with despair.” . . . The Communist Daily World, which had been advertising tours to Portugal earlier in the year (including “visits to social institutions, orientation meetings with trade union and political officials”), cut it out in late November, when things turned sour for the Communists there.

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No year could be all bad in which: The Washington Post was accused, with reason, of strikebreaking and using scabs; Indira Gandhi went authoritarian; and Teddy Kennedy spent three days of his skiing vacation at Sun Valley on cross-country skis rather than cross a picket line (whereafter—-having made the gesture—Teddy removed himself and family to a non-union slope).

It was also a year in which bank rates in Argentina went to 40 per cent —in response to the country’s 300-percent-plus inflation. . . . West Germany reported that more than 160,000 East Germans had managed to flee to freedom in the years since the Wall went up, despite barbed wire, mines, killer dogs, and border patrols. … It was West Germany’s worst economic year since the early Fifties—even pornography sales were off 10 per cent. . . . Italy’s Communist Party reported an all-time high in Party memberships, up 150,000 from a year earlier, to 1.7 million. . . . Fidel Castro gave his people a candyplum for Christmas: there will be no more rationing of sugar in Cuba. . . . Across the globe in Vientiane, Laos, they were busy planting “Trees of Hatred” in front of each government ministry as a reminder of “U.S. war crimes.” . . . And Pravda, on Christmas day, told its people that millions of workers and intellectuals in the West had a miserable Christmas, many of them unemployed, “many going mad with despair.” . . . The Communist Daily World, which had been advertising tours to Portugal earlier in the year (including “visits to social institutions, orientation meetings with trade union and political officials”), cut it out in late November, when things turned sour for the Communists there.