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In 1948 Alfred Kinsey published his report on Americans' previously concealed sex lives. The Nobel Prize in Medicine went to the Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Muller, for his work in developing the "miracle" compound DDT. Fourteen years later, during the Kennedy Administration, the New Yorker would begin serializing Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. George Orwell transposed two numbers to get 1984.
Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu militant from an organization called Mahasabha (the Great Society). The Marshall Plan began. The state of Israel was born. In the summer of the Berlin airlift, Lyndon Johnson clattered across Texas in history's first campaign-by-helicopter--Lyndon swooping down ex machina to meet and greet the astonished farmers.
1948 was the year when three future U.S. Presidents passed through formative ordeals and emerged reborn--launched toward their destinies. All three of those destinies would be literally or politically fatal years later, in the Vietnam-Watergate era, which, in turn, formed the U.S.'s present leaders. The year 1948 was the seedbed.
FROM THE BEST YEAR OF THEIR LIVES: KENNEDY, JOHNSON, AND NIXON IN 1948: LEARNING THE SECRETS OF POWER, BY LANCE MORROW. COPYRIGHT ©2005 BY LANCE MORROW. TO BE PUBLISHED BY BASIC BOOKS INC.