Full list  |  Top Yuri Gagarin, 1961: 'I saw for the first time the earth's shape. I could easily see the shores of continents, islands, great rivers, folds of the terrain, large bodies of water. The horizon is dark blue, smoothly turning to black. . . the feelings which filled me I can express with one word — joy' Stephen Hawking, 2001: 'I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet.'

RUSSIA, EUROPE. The first human to exit earth and enter space did so on April 12, 1961. Though plenty of people travelled this way afterwards no other person will ever be able to claim they did it first - this was a genuine first-past-the-post world record that will forever stand.

The world record for reaching space is probably best remembered as one half of a double-gold from the post-war era. Both the first human-manufactured object to reach space (Sputnik in 1957) and the first human to reach space (Gagarin in 1961) were from the Soviet Union. In the case of Colonel Yuri Gagarin it was also a very Russian triumph as he was a born and bred Muscovite.

The particular symbolism of shaking the confines of gravity in one of the most decisive way possible should resonate for some considerable time. People in later centuries may relegate this event to a starting point rather than a triumph per se; probably in the same way that the Wright Brothers during the 1910s are treated as a simple starting point to the more impressive story of powered flight. America repeated the accomplishment soon afterwards and so too did China, although not for four more decades when Yang Liwei finally made it in 2003. Indeed this first space contact may fade from memory altogether. But in the 1960s it meant much.

Within a few years of sending objects into space humans had worked out how to send other humans into space. More than that they could return safely. The next step in preserving - and projecting the species was complete. And with it came a most significant conclusion, that humans might just not end up killing themselves off. As Robert Heinlein put it: 'Remember this: once the human race is established on more than one planet, and especially in more than one solar system, there is no way now imaginable to kill off the human race.'

In fairness it should be noted another superpower was also active in the 1960s race-to-space. Indeed there was a lot of shared learning even if it usually happened through espionage rather than cooperation. The USSR only narrowly beat America on this occasion. The first American reached space only a few weeks later - Alan Shepard of the United States Navy. Soon after John Glenn circumnavigated the globe in space.

But by then the global publicity and excitement of reaching and returning from space had largely come and gone and would never reappear. The once-in-history spoils went mostly to socialist Russia rather than capitalist America. If anything the second person in space is remembered more for hitting the first golf ball on the moon (February 6, 1971) though even that is an historical putt compared to Gagarin's fairway drive. More memorable than that is probably Gagarin's carefully calculated dig that he could see Florida from space.

Naturally a welcome fit for a Hero of The Soviet Union awaited Colonel Gagarin. He was appointed a deputy of the Supreme Soviet and received the Order of Lenin though the Gagarin story more or less stops with these accolades. There was no career in politics or other milestones as there was, for example, with American astronauts like John Glenn who became a prominent senator in Washington. After the fanfare subsided he stayed in cosmonaut training. Tragically the quietly-spoken Russian died a few years later in 1968 during, of all the ways to go for such a pioneer in travel, a basic training flight. But the end was not entirely anonymous. His ashes were interred in the Kremlin wall.

Full list  |  Top US President John Kennedy, 1961: 'While the wall is the most obvious and vivid demonstration of the failures of the Communist system – for all the world to see – we take no satisfaction in it; for it is, as your Mayor has said, and offence not only against history but against humanity.' US President Ronald Reagan, 1987: 'Our gathering today is being broadcast throughout Western Europe and North America. I understand that it is being seen and heard as well in the East. To those listening throughout Eastern Europe, a special word: Although I cannot be with you, I address my remarks to you just as surely as to those standing here before me. For I join you, as I join your fellow countrymen in the West, in this firm, this unalterable belief: Es gibt nur ein Berlin. [There is only one Berlin]'

GERMANY, EUROPE. The Berlin Wall appeared on August 13, 1961. For three decades the 150 kilometers of concrete and barbed wire and landmines and homicidal guards became probably the most striking icon of the twentieth-century division between societies.

It was the greatest triumph of socialism, critics mocked, because it actually worked as intended. On one side, the tardy east, was planned economies and socialism and restrictive societies. On the other side of the wall, the vibrant west, was a capitalist economy with personal freedoms. And thanks to the wall never the twain shall meet.

The tragedy of the Berlin Wall dated back to 1945 when the destroyed city in a vanquished country were both divided. The differences between the two systems that settled on the city and the surrounding country were stark. Limited ability to deliver much quickly became a clear feature of the planned socialist economy in East Germany and East Berlin. West Germany and West Berlin looked increasingly alive and prosperous – helped in part by injections of Marshall Aid, the biggest steroid in human history, but also by the logic of rewarding rather than rebuking personal effort. As talent from East Germany started seeping away into the more prosperous western and capitalist sector it was not long before Premier Kruschev declared he would terminate all western rights in Berlin.

As an example of just how prominent the Berlin Wall was in western thinking two famous speeches by American presidencies were made near the wall. In 1963, shortly after the wall had arisen, President Kennedy stressed it was more than just about a divided city. The Berlin Wall was about a schism in societies within which everyone had a stake and the need to make a choice. ‘All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin. And therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words Ich bin ein Berliner!’ Two decades later the wall was still there and another American President visited the city. President Reagan famously taunted the leader of USSR of the time: ‘Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’

Ever the one to sense a possibility President Reagan had made the right call. The wall came down in November 1989. Belatedly the Soviet leader Michael Gorbachev had visited Berlin and faced protestors asking why Russians had more freedoms than East Germans. It was perhaps a final irony. Checkpoint Charlie opened that night. The Brandenburg gate and other crossing points opened soon afterwards and within a year the war was destroyed.

Full list  |  Top Robert Sargent Shriver, first Director of the Peace Corps, 1961-1966: 'I want to warn anyone who sees the Peace Corps as an alternative to the draft that life may well be easier at Fort Dix or at a post in Germany than it will be with us.' US President Lyndon Johnson, 1968: 'Once you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.'

USA, THE AMERICAS. September 22 1961 saw the Peace Corps activated by the US Congress. A brainchild of President John F Kennedy, the Corps came to symbolise American interests during the Cold War but, later as the world changed, transformed into a mechanism to help America understand the world and the world better comprehend America.

The Peace Corps started quickly. Within a few years of the Congress mandate over 7,000 volunteers were serving around the world. Their aim, then as now, was to advance three goals: “(1) Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their needs for trained men and women; (2) Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served; (3) Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of all Americans.

Between 1961 and the end of the twentieth century over 150,000 Americans worked on overseas projects varying somewhere between a few months and a couple of years. All were volunteers and most were under thirty years old. That translates to about 4,000 a year or about ten volunteers departing America daily. Although the Peace Corps budget is a small one, only a few hundred million dollars for an entire year, with notional salary costs money it creates a much more significant impact.

Regrettably the Corps suffered from politicization both inside and outside America. It was often perceived as a creation of America’s 1960 election which Kennedy won narrowly with talk of ‘ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.’ Join the Peace Corps was one answer – and avoid the Vietnam draft was another. President Nixon, who lost narrowly to Kennedy in 1960 and was never a fan of the Corps, weakened its autonomy when he finally won office. It took a Democrat president, Jimmy Carter in 1979, to cement full independence.

Politicisation abroad also was a recurrent problem. Often recipient countries saw the Peace Corps as imperialism by other means – a way for Americans to ‘make them like us’ as one critic said. Though this distrust was often mutual. Volunteers (1985) isprobably the best known Peace Corps film and well worth a watch. It cuts bitingly and satirically into the American views of natives. As the Tom Hanks character remarks, playboy Lawrence Bourne III: ‘It’s not that I can't help these people, it's just that...I don't want to.’

Full list  |  Top John Lennon, 1966: 'We're more popular than Jesus.' Jimi Hendrix, 1969: 'Music doesn't lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music.'

BRITAIN, EUROPE. As tension in Europe concentrated on Berlin and space exploration injected tension into the Cold War changes in popular culture were far less combative though, in their way, more influential. Prominent among the changes in popular culture of the 1960s was music and lifestyles from a band formed in the west coast of Britain. Called The Beatles, a play on the beat of up-tempo music, released their first record called ‘Love Me Do’ on this day in 1962. Drawing on a medley of jazz influences dating back to the 1910s and the skiffle bands of the 1950s their music style had quickly acquired traction first in Liverpool and then, in the early 1960s, in Hamburg in west Germany. So, the band had shaped themselves musically in two of the great seaports of Europe and among doses of sailors and travellers thirsty for rock-and-roll. Quickly dubbed ‘The Fab Four’, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr became the most popular worldwide music band of the twentieth century. Music with attitude, entertainment with heart, revolutionised into a popular art form that elites could not ignore or disengage from.

Understanding why The Beatles were more noteworthy than other popular bands starts with their birth and background. All four Beatles shared not only residency of Liverpool, the often grim if usually lively port city in western England. They also shared birth dates from the dour years of World War Two – John Lennon and Ringo Starr in 1940, Paul McCartney in 1942 and George Harrison in 1943. So not only did they have no real memories of war, only the aftermath of war, they also emerged from the often fragmented and straining post-war working-class and blue-collar world. Ringo and John both came from broken homes where parents deserted toddlers. In a certain symbolic sense, therefore, the band marked the coming of age of the post-war generation – people who did not know the strife of the 1930s and the 1940s other than through the memories of their parents and who had fresh ideas on the post-war and less class-conscious colonial world. 

Beatles popularity enlarged so march that it marked a crucial change for how the political establishment in industrialized countries interacted with – and used – popular entertainers. For some time after jazz appeared in America it was a fringe pastime. Political and social elites may have enjoyed listening privately but rarely engaged with musical celebrities publicly. Music played in the White House and Downing Street and the palaces of Europe and elsewhere was orchestras. The Beatles popularity was so widespread, and their commentary so direct, avoiding them proved impossible. Engagement was also on their terms, the entertainers, rather than elected or privileged leaders. The band reveled in introducing regional accents for the first time on national television rather than the more sedate received pronunciation. Private contempt from elites gave way to direct protests from people as high as the British Prime Minister Ted Heath who  complained he could not understand the thick accent in 1963 (though curiously several others said that of plummy Heath, also of working-class origins). But this inane disparagement soon dropped. US President Lyndon Johnson carefully ensured there was no understanding difficulties when meeting them in 1964 and nor did British Queen Elizabeth in 1965.

The royal meeting in 1965 was momentous on several levels. One, the band had already set up a jaunty and less respectful distance to royalty. Playing the Royal Variety Show in 1963 – a national event watched by 26 million television viewers – John made a jaunty Liverpudlian dig at the wealth surrounding the royal presence: ‘Those of you in the cheap seats can clap, the rest of you just rattle your jewellery.’ Two years later and the band popularity had crossed not just the stratospheric level but the deity too, more of which later. But rather than keep a polite and implicitly condescending difference royalty embraced the band. The 1965 meeting was as part of an investiture of all band members to Members of the British Empire, the lowest rung on a traditional British award dating back to the First World War. As one evidence of the challenge facing the Queen, somehow to embrace popular culture within existing mechanisms, few better way than through medals and awards. Following the announcement several more staid members of the elite and military complained – and were ignored.

This was one of several signals that not only the marketing and media presence but also social force of the Beatles was too big to ignore. Many had spotted how in 1964, Can’t Buy Me Love, sold two million advance copies. This was before it even went on public display. Hard Day’s Night sold 1.5 million advance copies. It was not just music, either, that encapsulated how split this band above other popular musicians. Films too. Within months of Beatlemania gripping youth culture in Britain and the world came their first film, Hard Day’s Night, and in 1965 came ‘Help!’. Books written by the band might be rare. Only John Lennon published – In My Own Write in 1964 and A Spaniard In The Works in 1965 – but books written about the band were bountiful. So too were endless press editorials and features and clippings, 

In this climate recognition of and association with the band was no harm. Even if behind the scenes existed gentle mocking awarding elite medals was a shrewd connection to the hopes of youth culture. That association also played around the world. Almost from the get-go the band promoted in countries outside Britain. Prominent European tours included Sweden in 1963 and France in 1964 and a German version of Can’t Buy Me Love released in 1964. A 1964 world tour jetted the band to Hong Kong and Japan in the northern hemisphere and beyond the equator to Australia and New Zealand – many central parts to the assembling British Commonwealth. By far the greatest overseas connection of the Beatles was transcontinental with America. Even though their first single, Love Me Do, only released in the US in 1964, under various circumstances as group and individuals the band repeatedly toured for several decades and ended up living for years at a time. Where 26 million watched their performance on television in Britain at the Royal Variety Show, the number of television viewers doubled to 70 million viewers on the Ed Sullivan Show filmed in New York – and on which they appeared twice. John married a Japanese wife and Paul an American.

McCartney wrote ‘Yesterday’ which became the most recorded song in the twentieth century. By the end of the century it had played on American media over seven million times and altered sales records evermore. Over fifty Beatles hits charted in Britain and America and nearly half went to #1. Paul McCartney listed in the Guinness World Records book as the world’s most successful musician and composer in popular music history, holding at least 60 gold discs and selling 100 million singles. 

The Beatles impact on the musical and social world also introduced to the world an era when personalized entertainers could morph through various incarnations. This extended from the beginning and the guiding hand of George Martin, when Beatlemania swept Britain and America. Brian Epstein, a Liverpool music shop manager, moved the Beatles into synchronized suits and appearances on the Ed Sullivan show and other mainstream media. In so doing a larger voice was possible extending into controversial areas. It was not all positive by any stretch. In 1965 the band publicly talked of using hallucinogenic drugs and in the spring of 1967 the BBC banned a drug song called Day in the Life. All band members responded by supporting marijuana legalisation. The connection increased when Epstein died of an overdose in the summer of 1967. Another film appeared in 1968, the animated Yellow submarine, which lauded drugs, and the album Sergeant Peppers Lonely Heart Club Band. When Paul spoke openly of having taken LSD the boy-next-door twee of Love Me Do shifted into rock and alternative sounds with the 1967 Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Trendy time spent with Maharishi Yogi in India and Woodstock in 1969 cemented their connection not to twee but to revolutionary hippie. Furore followed John’s comments to a British tabloid newspaper (London’s Evening Standard in March, 1966) implying the Beatles popularity exceeded Jesus. But it did not destroy a career as it might have done an elected politician. Clarifications and fumbling followed, centred on the implication it only applied to Britain where indeed the Church continued to decline. While this did little to calm Bible Belt scorn – albums and memorabilia burnings happened and the Klu Klux Klan threatened more violent measures at concerts – it was soon forgotten by the core base. 

When John Lennon returned his MBE, the high civic award from Britain’s monarchy, it was with a sense of theatrical but also the bizarre. The return was in protest against ‘Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam, and against ‘Cold Turkey’ slipping down the charts.’ The politics, yes, but the commercial too. In 1980 a demented fan in New York murdered John Lennon, aged forty. Close moves of the monarchy to stay close. In 1997 the Queen knighted Paul, who kept his MBE from the 1960s. The last UK gig was in May 1966 and the last concert the band played together was August, 1966. The band formally ended on New Years Eve of 1970. The joyous optimism and opinionated jocularity left a lasting mark on world culture. A musical style that morphed beyond Beatlemania into a larger movement of the Mersey Beat, distinctive group styles, plus long hair and cheeky chat.   

The influence of the Beatles on music and how music reflected society was significant. One development was individualization of band members. Their background was modest blue-collar. John was the querky one, Paul the polite boy next door, George the thoughtful one, and Ringo the lovable clown. Bands like The Animals, Dave Clark Five, and Rolling Stones followed where the Beatles. Lennon captured the dimensions the band introduced like this: ‘My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.’

Full list  |  Top US President John Kennedy: 'Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.' US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara: 'Kennedy was trying to keep us out of war. I was trying to help him keep us out of war. And General Curtis LeMay, whom I served under as a matter of fact in World War II, was saying let's go in, let's totally destroy Cuba.'

USA, THE AMERICAS. On October 22 in 1962, President John F Kennedy publicly addressed American on a matter of the highest national importance. Soviet missiles recently observed in Cuba would not be allowed to become active and a strict quarantine would be enforced. Nuclear war looked frighteningly close.

In the days following Kennedy’s television announcement about the discovery of SS-4 Sandal missiles the world feared nuclear war as never before. Although only medium range the Soviet missiles in Cuba could carry three-ton bombs up to 1,500 kilometers. That was relatively small by the nuclear possibilities of the day. But it still made eighty million Americans vulnerable to direct nuclear attack. It was a huge adjustment of the strategic equilibrium that had existed for nearly two decades after the defeat of the Axis powers in Europe in the 1940s.

Kennedy’s decisive response was to tie missile removal to transparent yet measured actions. A quarantine of Cuba rather than an invasion was the American preference although underlining either option was the famous and deadly determination: ‘It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the western hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response on the Soviet Union.’

Behind the scenes the American position on the quarantine was anything but certain. Hardliner military personnel were eager for at least limited war. There was therefore real prospects of American air strikes followed by an invasion of Cuba even though Soviet troops would have inevitably died. That would have a cause-and effect spiral around the world involving Berlin and Europe and undoubtedly have brought nuclear war chillingly close.

Fortunately older and steadier hands in Washington won the day. These hands led most notably by Adlai Stevenson. A political veteran he pushed for greater use of the UN backed by a private agreement to withdraw American missiles from Turkey. Military hawks like Air Force General Curtis Le May were pushing for the air strike plus invasion option, in part to undo the failure of the recent attempt to topple Castro via an insurgency centred on the Bay of Pigs. In a famous move the Pentagon even christened a ‘pre-arranged exercise’ in Florida Operation ORTSAC, which is Castro spelt backwards.

Although Khrushchev ordered his ships to sail their course, that is to break through the American blockade, political pressure upped the stakes beyond what he and the Soviet Union were willing to pay. Emergency meetings of first the United Nations and the OAS, Organisation of American States, lined up behind America. Khrushchev blinked and turned back his ships. Kennedy afterwards said ‘Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right.’

Full list  |  Top US President John Kennedy, 1961: 'We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent or omniscient - that we are only six percent of the world's population - that we cannot impose our will upon the other ninety-four percent of mankind - that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity - and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.' Lance Morrow, 1963: 'The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out.'

USA, THE AMERICAS. This was the second murder of a sitting American president in the twentieth century after William McKinley in 1901. President McKinley passed relatively unknown into history, his successor Theodore Roosevelt was remembered far more, but President Kennedy was a much more prominent killing and much more memorable loss. Far more Americans connected emotionally with the Irish Catholic from Boston than his Southern Baptist successor Lyndon Johnson. Indeed at his funeral in Arlington the following Monday so emotionally charged was the image of John Kennedy Jr, just turning three, saluting the casket it moved not just tearful newscasters but even the usually austere French leader General De Gaulle.

In understanding why Kennedy created such a lasting impact the Cuban missile crisis is an inevitable starting point. In the autumn of 1962, only a year before his death, not just America but much of the world held their breath. Nuclear war seemed freakishly close and there was surreal debates of whether deaths in the early moments would be 200 million or 300 million. President Kennedy was widely and reasonably credited with avoiding that catastrophe.

Success in dodging nuclear war enhanced the mystique of the Kennedy biography in a way no other world event could have. Suddenly memories were adjusted of the performances on television in the 1960 debates against Nixon, the first televised presidential debate, which became almost eulogised as performances far beyond what they were. It injected a sparkling and never-before-sheen to a large extended family and society wife. The Soviet leader Kruschev who often sparred with the Kennedy view of the world where America helped others fight for freedom reflected unromantically: 'If I had been shot rather than Kennedy is that Onassis probably wouldn't have married Mrs Khrushchev.'

The Cuban missiles brought out how rarely youth and political acumen coincided. Kennedy went into politics young. Aged only 29 and in the autumn of 1946 Kennedy entered the House of Representatives. He served eight years as a Congressman, for Boston, and another six years as a Massachusetts senator. The timing of finally reaching the White House as the youngest elected president seemed almost impecable, just as the post-war baby boomers came of voting age. The generation that did not know the Second World War in the way Kennedy did warmed instinctively to Kennedy’s warning against Pax Americana and his emphasis that people of the world breath the same air and are all mortal.

This connection with American youth had global implications. In his thousand days of office Kennedy injected freshness to American engagement with the world. His creation of the Peace Corps prospered, inevitably perhaps, and so did foreign aid and an emotional commitment to help the world make itself a better place. He awarded Winston Churchill honorary US citizenship. He promised the moon in a decade and inspired talk of what was at stake: 'We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world - or to make it the last.' In practice this did not always play out not as he would like. The inept Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba proved a military fiasco. Washington supported regimes fighting Communism in Vietnam and elsewhere too. Though there was always caution in overseas intervention too. Kennedy once noted: ‘At the end it’s their war. They’re the ones who have to win it or lose it.’

During these days the White House was rechristened as Camelot. Echoic of Britain’s mythological knights coordinating at the round table how good can trump evil this symbolised a shift from the staid and cautious Truman and Eisenhower presidencies. The Kennedy presidency was the new generation and it was a legacy America did not give up easily. A year after the killing his vice-president Lyndon B. Johnson crushed the Republican challenger, Barry Goldwater, with over 60 per cent of votes.

When President Johnson replaced Kennedy he said: ‘for me it is a deep personal tragedy. I know the world shares the deep sorrow that Mrs Kennedy and her family bear.’ This proved a telling remark for Johnson inherited from Kennedy the toughest foreign policy decision of all on Vietnam. Germany's Konrad Adenaur spotted the dillema: 'Kennedy cooked the soup that Johnson had to eat.' By 1965 it was President Johnson and not President Kennedy ordering bombing raids against North Vietnam.

The thirty-fifth American president was campaigning in a traditionally Republican area. This explained the fated decision of removing the protective bubble around the car, or so some said. Conspiracists said there was more to it than the simple explanation that this openness would allow the President to connect with more people. Passing a government building in Dealey Plaza the famous shots rang out. When Mr Kennedy arrived in Parkland Memorial hospital neither heartbeat nor blood pressure were present. Nor was much brain matter, for the back of the presidents head contained a 120mm hole.

Full list  |  Top Kelvin MacKenzie, Editor of The Sun 1981-1993: 'You just don't understand the readers, do you, eh? He's the bloke you see in the pub, a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house, he's afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and the weirdoes and drug dealers.' Jerry Seinfeld: 'People who read the tabloids deserve to be lied to.'

BRITAIN, EUROPE. September 14, 1964 saw the war-weary Daily Herald, Britain’s first mass-circulation socialist newspaper founded before the Great War transform into The Sun. The new title had a wobbly dawn and was too wrapped up in stodgy attachment to the left-wing bloodline that defined its raison d’etre through two massive wars that slaughtered the proletariat. But the sale ignited interest in Britain's mass media that was to change newspapers and much else for the three decades before the arrival of the internet in the late 1990s. As proof of just how much things had changed soon afterwards (1969) The Sun was sold again, this time to the Australian, later American, Rupert Murdoch. News Corporation re-launched The Sun much more assertively to its logical niche as a tabloid weekday complement to the weekend and highly sensational News of the World.

One measure of just how much traction The Sun acquired in Britain is that by the end of the twentieth century daily readership – people who read but might not have bought the newspaper – exceeded ten million. Daily circulation – people who bought the newspaper – consistently exceeded three million which was easily the highest of any English-language newspaper in the world. By comparison America’s best selling newspaper was three-quarters of this quantity (USA today sold around 2.4 million in 2000) despite the US population being five times greater than the UK.

The Sun’s breezy style and usually flagrant disrespect for authority was emulated in Britain by many, notably the Daily Mirror, with which it battled particularly intensely for circulation, and the Daily Record and Daily Star. While at times all red tops were strikingly similar – having red nameplates and differing from the black tops like the Daily Express and Daily Mail – the simple writing style of The Sun and preference for pictures stood out. As with the creation of the distinctive BBC in the 1920s, emulated widely as a model of public broadcasting around the British Empire, so the idiosyncratic style initiated or at least developed by The Sun was widely copied around the world.

It did not stop with print either, By the 1990s, after three decades of pretty constant and continued success, The Sun’s format started to push beyond print into the internet (copycat websites were numerous) and tabloid television. Shows like Hard Copy in America and Live TV in Britain – run during the 1990s by a former editor of The Sun – acquired particularly significant reach. Even the physics of the newspaper proved influential. Decades after The Sun first used a small tabloid format three previously adamant broadsheets — The Times of London and The Scotsman of Edinburgh plus The Independent — switched to tabloid size (although dogmatically refusing to call themselves a tabloid but ‘compacts’).

The Sun impact went beyond the British media. By the 1980s America also had a stable of Sun-like tabloids using a similar breezy-cum-ballsy style and included the infamous National Enquirer, New York Post (acquired in 1976 by the same owner as The Sun) and The Examiner. Germany published Bild-Zeitung; India had Stardust; Japan Yukan Fuji and Malaysia The Star. The Sun was always several degrees of overheating apart and each adapted their own tone and language and pace. Yet each variant incorporated central dimensions pioneered by The Sun – direct, oversimplified, superficial, bigoted, nasty, and sometimes everything together. It may have needed unparalleled pinches of salt and saint-like patience from press watchdogs but The Sun brand and philosophy of journalism proved simply difficult to disregard.

While The Sun was certainly not the only tabloid newspaper to prosper in the latter half of the twentieth century it was probably the most successful and set several striking precedents far beyond topless ‘Page Three girls’ (first exposed in the late 1960s) or bingo (a fairly radical idea when it first appeared in the 1980s). Foremost among these precedents was management of newspaper production which had blighted and imprisoned British print media since before the Great War — when The Sun changed hands in 1969 it only went through when the Murdoch side agreed to the continued presence of trade unions. The promise did not last. Within a little over a decade and to prevent production costs spiralling further Rupert Murdoch moved production to Wapping in east London. This was controversial but radically lowered printing costs and heralded a new age of de-unionised workforces. In addition to the brisk content was subsequently emulated around much of the world.

Perhaps The Sun’s greatest – and most often visible – accomplishment was lowering the bar on quality, according to some anyway, validating Wilde’s remark that modern journalism is the survival of the most vulgar. Its unique disrespect for authority and disdain for politeness was probably most famously captured by The Sun headlines. By the 1980s it was jaunty enough to run ‘Gotcha!’ following the sinking by the Royal Navy of the Argentinean battleship General Belgrano, which killed over 300 crew. In the 1990s was ‘Up Yours Delors’ during discussions on the ECU, European Currency Unit, the forerunner to the Euro. (The slur on Jacques Delors, President of the European Commission, was adapted following England’s defeat of Argentina 1-0 in the soccer world cup of 2002 to ‘Up Yours Senors’.) After NATO bombed Slobodan Milosevic’s army in Belgrade came ‘Clobba Slobba’. Jacques Chirac of France was routinely referred to as ‘Le Worm’. Sometimes it was pointless tall-poppy syndrome, the peons ruthlessly attacking the needlessly superior, but at other times the headline and the following copy captured a public mood in a way no other media could claim ownership.  

Regardless of the conflicting views of whether tabloids were good for readers or clogged synapses, or maybe a bit of both, it’s difficult to eliminate the impact of tabloid journalism. This influence dated back to America in the 1930s when the News had first got behind, then carefully not got behind, the Roosevelt administration. It is true that tabloid journalism is much older than The Sun. Arguably the first tabloid was another Sun, the New York Sun, founded in the 1830s as a ‘penny paper’ using a lot of pictures designed to appeal to lower income immigrants with not always fluent English. Fast-forward a century and 1960s America at the time of the launch of the Sun featured a variety of newspapers including the National Enquirer, Daily News, and Daily Mirror. But the early American tone revolved mainly around news stories like Prohibition, World War I, World War II, and later the Korean War. Only after The Sun altered the flavour of Fleet Street (which no longer centred around the London street) did the more idiosyncratic cheque-book journalism appear plus themes like UFO and various extraterrestrial sightings, Martians, malevolent two-headed cows, and other tilts at windmills.

In Britain The Sun had stayed more or less religiously on the left until 1979 until, for the first time the paper endorsed the right-wing Thatcher government. The Conservatives won in 1979 and The Sun supported them in three more elections in 1983, 1987 and 1992. They claimed a central role in the victory and this was reinforced in 1997 when it switched back to Labour, under Tony Blair, and again in. This is overstated. The trend in the Conservative makority in Britain in the 1980s was clearly down – from a plump 143 in 1983 to a taut 100 in 1987 and a skinny 22 in 1992.

and journalists in a democracy, the changing role of technology in the media, and the presence of tabloid journalism and other more entertainment-driven qualities that many people see as problems with the contemporary media. Tabloid itself, the word rather than the newspaper, was not a twentieth century or Murdoch word or way of thinking. It emerged from the late nineteenth century in America when the name first appeared as shorthand for concentrated pharmaceutical tablets. From this idea of distilled and compressed format it was fairly logical to apply it to more accessible products, such as newspapers that were more concentrated than expansive broadsheets. Pithy and simple and straightforward was the watchword.

The tabloid media that The Sun inspired has at best mixed accolades. As a segment of the media it has hogged the claims for spreading malicious and the unfounded and wrecking lives and careers and even for causing the death of Princess Diana of Wales. Celebrities consistently take umbrage at being included, though perhaps its also fair to note that several also regret not being included.

Full list  |  Top US President John Kennedy, 1962: 'There is another type of warfare – new in its intensity, ancient in its origins – war by guerillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins; war by ambush instead of by combat, by infiltration instead of by aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him. It is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what have been strangely called ‘wars of liberation’, to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom they have finally achieved.' Che Guevera, 1967: 'How close we could look into a bright future should two, three or many Vietnams flourish throughout the world with their share of deaths and their immense tragedies, their everyday heroism and their repeated blows against imperialism, impelled to disperse its forces under the sudden attack and the increasing hatred of all peoples of the world.'

BOLIVIA, THE AMERICAS. On October 9, 1967, Che Guevara was executed by the Bolivian Army whilst working with guerrillas to further Marxist revolution. In death, the middle-class and asthmatic Argentinean doctor became a global icon for unyielding revolutionary and anti-establishment causes yet oddly transcending both the capitalist and the socialist world.

You could never consider Che Guevera – real name Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna – anything but old school empassioned revolutionary. Perhaps his most chilling belief was people without hatred ‘can never vanquish a brutal enemy.’ In that instance the opponent he was talking about was capitalism in general and America specifically.

After leaving his native Argentina Mr Guevera found this empassioned philosophy melded neatly with Castro in overthrowing Batista. But despite closeness to Castro he left Cuba. First he went to foment revolution in the Congo in Africa and then visited China in Asia. In fairness, the struggles he undertook en route were embraced with some dignity despite his asthma and comfortable upbringing.

Nevertheless, there were persistent impressions in Che of somebody hovering around the fringes of lunacy. Unyieldingly Che often characterised revolution as ‘not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.’ Shortly before his assassination, in which the CIA was involved, Che even wished for two or three Vietnams – seeing in the destructive Civil Wars the platform for true global socialism.

One worrying example of Che’s slightly dodgy mental state appeared when he visited Moscow to negotiate missiles for Cuba. Kruschev was a willing foil. He liked mixing with empassioned revolutionaries. Yet he also saw in Mr Guevera enough to make him retain Soviet control of the missiles even though they were based in Cuba. That caution proved significant. Later Mr Guevara claimed that during the Cuban Missile Crisis he would have fired on America if they controlled the missiles (as he requested). Almost certainly this would have sparked nuclear war. Perhaps liberals like Jean-Paul Sartre did not know this when they called him ‘the most complete human being of our age’.

Despite being a little loopy Che in death became a global rallying point for revolutionaries. So did his bearded image with a beret showing a single star – it became an icon of revolution. That likeness, by the way, was taken during a funeral in 1960 some time before he became truly famous. A biographical film – Che was played by the Egyptian born Omar Sharif – cemented matters. Even at the end of the twentieth century some Cuban schoolchildren promise that ‘As pioneers for Communism, we will be like Che!’

Full list  |  Top Dr Christiaan Barnard, 1969: 'It is infinitely better to transplant a heart than to bury it so it can be devoured by worms.' Luis Bunuel, Spanish filmmaker, 1983: 'In the name of Hippocrates, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.'

SOUTH AFRICA, AFRICA. Despite the advances in surgery achieved during the Second World War it was only on December 3, 1967 that a succesful heart transplant happened. Several surgeons in the UK and the US were getting close but line-honours went to South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard: ‘On Saturday I was a surgeon in South Africa, very little known. On Monday, I was world renowned.’

His first heart transplant needed five hours of surgery. Afterwards and for the first time in human history the heart of one person – a lady in her twenties called Ms Denise Darvall who had been fatally wounded in a car crash – was healthy and beating inside another living person – a male dentist in his fifties called Mr Lewis Washkansky. And so Mr Barnard earned for himself has a place in medical history dating back to the eighteenth century when Scottish anatmost and surgeon John Hunter – when a time to be both a describer of the internal features of the human body and a maniuplator meant much.

So heart transplants could work in practice. Indeed the advances made by Mr Barnard and others ensured that by the end of the twentieth century heart transplants were relatively common. The ascendance may not have been entirely complete over what was once considered either spiritually sacrosanct – the root of the soul and the source of life – or medically daunting – a massive ball of nerve endings and veins and major arteries which needs to work constantly. But it was very close and the survivability odds increasaingly high. Most now survive the process.

It is often overlooked that despite the number of surgeons working on it around the world for quite a time it did not look too hopeful. Indeed at one stage there was talk of forgetting the whole idea. Mr Barnard’s first example was only a success measured in the very short-term. True, Mr Washkansky with his new heart regained consciousness and talked to the media. That ensured Mr Barnard's place in history. However the medications needed to prevent rejection of the new organ also prevented his natural ability to combat other infections. Eighteen days after the operation Mr Washkansky died from pneumonia. All told in the first two hundred heart transplants that happened over the next few years throughout the western world the survival rate was as low as 1-in-5. In the late 1960s and early 1970s most died soon afterwards.

But lessons were learned and the ability of surgeons to fight infections and of medical communities to arrange for donor hearts improved. Mr Barnard's second heart transplant patient survived for over 500 days. His fifth and sixth patients survived 13 and 24 years respectively.

Full list  |  Top US National Security Adviser Walt W. Rostow, speaking before Tet in 1967: 'I see light at the end of the tunnel.' US President Lyndon Johnson, speaking after Tet in 1968: 'Our objective in South Vietnam has never been the annihilation of the enemy. It has been to bring about a recognition in Hanoi that its objective - taking over the South by force - could not be achieved.'

VIETNAM, ASIA. On January 31, 1968 a large-scale military offensive unfolded against multiple targets throughout South Vietnam. Taking canny advantage of a traditional time of truce the attack on South and on American troops stationed in the South became one of the most visible and influential reality checks in American thinking in the late twentieth century. Being powerful at times didn't mean being omnipowerful after all.

By most measures the military scale of the Tet attack was as unprecedented as was fighting during the traditional lunar new year lull in hostilities. Well over fifty areas were targeted throuhgout the country. It was the sort of large-scale military coordination and decisiveness seen in 1940s Europe when German troops blizkrieged through the entire western flank of Poland.

Critically Tet turned in many peoples minds a previously rural and somewhat distant war into an urban and immediate fight. As well as major cities like Saigon (later Ho Chi Minh City) and Nha Trang and Dalat and Hue nearly all other minor cities and many towns throughout South Vietnam were attacked. Also targeted were a series of American bases in important locations. These included Khe Sanh near the border between the North and the South which was held by the Americans, just, but at high cost.

Fighting in many instances was brief and more symbolic than real but in others it was extraordinarily bitter. The battles in Hue (an ancient city on the Vietnamese coast) and Saigon (the capital city in the South and later to be renamed Ho Chi Minh City) lasted for weeks and were particularly visible on televisions around the world and particularly in America. The symbolism of American troops defending previously safe areas was not lost on the civilian audience. Television started to play its role in the war. As one commentator put it television ensured that Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America and not on the battlefields of Vietnam.

Other galling symbols from Tet included the unfortunate and surreal American claim that "it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it". This was said of a town called Ben Tre in the Mekong delta near Saigon. In Saigon itself a police officer was filmed executing on-the-spot an unfortunate combatant with a point blank bullet to the head. That famous photograph by Eddie Adams won a Pulitzer but did little to interrupt the officer's life. He later retired to America where he set up a pizza restaurant.

The military results of Tet were pretty clear. The North lost. For the loss of approximately 3,000 South Vietnamese and 1,500 Americans the combined North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fatalities were somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000. Figures vary between sources but as a rough conclusion this is a loss ratio somewhere around 1:8. As relative losses go few come more severe than this.

Yet the military victory was not accompanied by a political and psychological win. This was the decisive outcome from Tet. Eerily, in fact, the series of attacks reinforced the predictions of Ho Chi Minh from the 1940s (when he was speaking to a French rather than American audience): ‘You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours but even at those odds you will lose and I will win.'

As Ho predicted the political results within America were indelible. Gone within months of Tet were both the senior American military leader in Vietnam (General Westmoreland was promoted out of the country, a notable fall from grace for Time Magazine's 1965 Person of the Year) and the senior political leader in America (President Johnson announced he would not stand for reelection). Gone too was much of the American military strategy in place since 1965. Vice-President Hubert Humphrey concluded that 'Tet really set us back' and elder statesman Dean Acheson agreed: 'we could no longer do what we set out to do in the time available; we had to disengage’. Bombing of the north was halted (although it reappeared later under a different American president) and the base at Khe Sanh was abandoned in the summer. It's not hard to see that isolationism preferably and certainly non-interventionism became a dominant strand in American thinking from Tet until the neo-conservative revival following 9/11 in the early 2000s.

In 1965 American Air Force General Curtis Le May had threatened to bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age. Coming from the man influential in fire bombing Tokyo in 1945 where 100,000 died this was probably no idle threat. But after Tet people like Le May were marginalised. Dean Acheson captured the mood of the majority again: 'America cannot by military means keep the North Vietnamese off the South Vietnamese'.

Instead of bombing people back to the stone age the policy watchword after 1968 was Vietnamisation. American troops would do less and less fighting. Vietnamese would fight Vietnamese. Instead the Americans would do more and more talking and more and more tactical withdrawals. Eventually this led to the first Paris Peace talks in May of that year. Though, true to form, America could not decide internally what it wanted and the final Paris Peace Accords were only signed in 1973. On April 30, 1975 and eight years after Tet the Communists finally conquered all of Saigon.

Full list  |  Top Governor of Alabama George Wallace, 1963: 'I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say, Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!' Martin Luther King, 1968: 'If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn't committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right.'

USA, THE AMERICAS. The assassination of Dr Martin Luther King (1929–1968) on April 4, 1968 illustrated tragically Voltaire’s warning it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

In the late 1960s racist tensions were elevated in America and had been for much of the post-war period. Successive Republican and Democratic presidencies had shuffled awkwardly slowly to resolving the injustice of racial inequities. As one marker of division black and white schools had only been finally and decisively segregated in the 1950s (the Brown versus Board of Education verdict of 1954). But as Dr King and others pointed out that was only one step on the road and one anyway that should have been settled a century if not centuries earlier. Still in the 1960s equality of voting rights and economic opportunites remained at best ambiguous and often outright amputated from some communities. It was little real wonder that people across America and especially in the southern states talked openly and ominously of divisions between the races: ‘If you’re white you’re all right; if you’re brown stick around; but if you’re black get back, get back.'

Dr King stood out from the crowd not for seeing the problem but for seeing and articulating convincingly that the best, in fact the only, solution was non-violence. Among other things this moral aspiration explains why he was Time Magazine's Person of the Year in 1963. Fittingly enough at the time of his death he was trying to calm tensions in Memphis where a third of the population was black – around 200,000 from 600,000 – yet was economically marginalized. His more famous speeches and legacies usually reinforced a commitment to equality for all races achieved without races killing each other. The 'I Have A Dream' speech in Washington DC especially but also 'Letter from Birmingham Jail' and 'I See the Promised Land' each became important strands within American self-identity in the late twentieth century.

Views on just how much Dr King loathed violence certainly vary. Many at the time commented that for a peace loving champion it was extraordinary how many violent riots appeared when he was involved. His private life ws not univesally considered as meticulous and for someone eulogising sin and sin and atonement licentious looked at the very least rather odd. But for the most part the King preference for non-violence was a contadiction to the emphatic violence envisaged and hoped for by some on both sides of the racial split. Violence was after all, and for worryingly large segments of the population, a cherry pie American value. Radicals like Malcolm X expressed the need for forthright action: ‘Show me a black man who isn’t an extremist and I’ll show you one who needs psychiatric attention.' To this view simply by being black there was a need to fight back against mainstream America, which is to say white America. There were plenty of white Americans who thought much the same only with the colours inverted.

Within this climate Dr Martin Luther King was prominent in not favouring violence as a method or way of thinking that would achieve a solution. Like Gandhi he preached non-violence. Protest, disobedience, insubordination, yes, but not violence. The ‘I have a dream’ speech in Washington, delivered in 1963, pushed especially the vision of an America based upon harmony and equality for all. As recognition of his peaceful intentions in the following year Dr King received the Nobel Prize for Peace. He was the youngest recipient aged only 35. Gandhi, curiously, was nominated for the Peace Prize several times in the 1930s and 1940s but never won.

At the time of his death Dr King's influence in pushing non-violence was large. When President Johnson spoke of the Civil Rights Act as a universal challenge ‘to eliminate the last vestiges of injustice in our beloved country’ people looked to Dr King for reaction on behalf of African-Americans. Was the government fair and honourable? King often responded ambiguously but still in ways that helped advance no-violence if you read them closely enough: ‘It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me. But it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.’

Certainly not all of the King story was immaculate. Relations with government officials behind the scenes were decidedly edgy. The FBI had eavesdropped on Dr King from the early 1960s, an act oddly initiated by the left-leaning Kennedy administration. This had thrown up some signs of Communist sympathies and a sparkling personal life not entirely consistent with a God-fearing Reverend. Others looked closely at his doctorate and found some worrying signs of plagiarism. At one point results from that and other official enquiries led the Head of the FBI, J Edgar Hoover, to call King 'the most notorious liar in the country'. President Johnson dismissed him as a hypocrite teacher. Extra-marital affairs and other behaviour seemed to contradict the Gandhi-like man.

The assassination itself was also odd. The killer was another lone gunman, James Earl Ray. Yet as with the killing of President Kennedy in 1963 rumours swirled of a wider conspiracy potentially including the government. For some time Mr Ray had been walking around town with a bundle of US$20 dollar bills. He used them to purchase his hotel room and some binoculars with which to observe Dr King and various other purchases but nobody could quite work out how he acquired such large sums. Like Lee Harvey Oswald, Ray had been in the Army and like Oswald his record was mixed. He had been jailed for drunkenness in Germany. Briefly also he escaped to Britain after the assassination. On conviction he claimed innocence for the rest of his life and died a prisoner in 1998.

The killing itself unfolded in a small Memphis motel called the Lorraine. The owner Lorraine Bailey, by the way, was so shocked by the assassination that she died within hours from a brain haemorrhage. Dozens died in riots after the killing too.

But eventually the not always impressive private life of Dr King and suspicions around his death faded from interest. What counted more was that most people concluded he was right when the government was wrong. As recognition of that reality came four important symbols: first, on news of his death President Johnson declared a day of mourning; second, President Carter awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1977; third, President Reagan declared his birthday a national holiday with the first national observance in 1986 (it is held on the third Monday of the year); fourth, he received the American Congressional Gold Medal posthumously in 2004.

Full list  |  Top Robert Kennedy: 'Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.' Sirhan Sirhan: 'Kennedy, you son of a gun.'

USA, THE AMERICAS. Probably the most remembered event in the oddly, and eerily bleak, end to the life of Robert Francis Kennedy happened at the 1964 Democratic Convention. That years annual gathering was significant because it was held within a year of the murder of President John F Kennedy. How would one living brother talk of his dead brother? How would an attorney general assess his assassinated President? How would another Kennedy be received?

Plenty said that the Kennedy mantle was sought by a slew - some said sludge - of poltical devotees and dilentatnes and divas. Yet the general conclusion is that Robert Kennedy performed the best of them all at the Convention. Certainly after he finished his speech there was fairly thunderous applause for the younger Kennedy. To the political class and to the press the symbolism looked unmistakable. Here stood the logical inheritor of the Democrat’s stolen presidency. Robert Kennedy, like his murdered brother, might be the son of a millionaire Catholic business leader. But that was forgivable. More importantly he combined passion and radicalism with credibility and common sense. A second Kennedy presidency looked like a real deal. Robert Kennedy certainly stirred the crowd with language carefully echoic of his brother. In 1961 John Kennedy talked of bearing any burden. In 1964 Robert Kennedy talked equally passionately of grand themes: ‘Jefferson said of this country that we are the last best hope of mankind. That is what I want the United States to be. This is a generous and compassionate country, That is what I want this country to be.’

From this epiphany in 1964 until Mr Kennedy's death in 1968 there was a curious and rather depressing inevitability. Could his inheritance really come good so quick? There was the arrival in quick succession of an eighth child and a 1964 senate race victory by a landslide. Such good fortune was surely another Kennedy calamity in the making?

Had he lived Robert Kennedy would almost certainly have influenced both American liberalism and American identity in the latter twentieth century. Several signs were around in the early 1960s such as the 1962 push to use soldiers to ensure the first African-American attended the University of Mississippi. It was one of several Civil Rights initiatives where Robert Kennedy was influential.

But Robert Kennedy took the political thirst for dignity into dimensions apart from his brother. The young senator reignited talk of the great crimes of humanity inside America. Unlike John he backed it with visits to inspect poverty and illiteracy and intolerance. During one prominent trip in the American south he said: ‘These [poverty and disease] are the central enemies of our age. And I say to you that these enemies will be overcome.’ Perhaps it was little surprise that after the death of a second Kennedy some blacks talked of losing their last great hope.

As well as symbolising a lost dimension to Civil Rights the death of Robert Kennedy also impacted America’s handling of the Vietnamese civil war. In his first full year at the Senate, 1965, there is evidence that Robert Kennedy wished to speak out much more against American involvement. He held back somewhat only because propping up anti-communist regimes in south-east Asia was a central part of his brothers legacy, or at least that was what President Johnson had convinced America. Betraying some of his brothers memory so openly was ticklish.

But by 1967 the war had morphed from Kennedy's skirmish to Johnson’s war and the junior Senator felt free to criticise more publicly. He particularly focused on carpet bombing. Then there was the famous or infamous visit to Europe. There the young Kennedy that had wowed the Democrats in 1964 looked diplomatic and considered in the company of European leaders. Voices inside Washinton started to talk of a presence far more diplomatic and considered than President Johnson when discussing peace in Vietnam with the likes of General De Gaulle. The results of Kennedy's 1967 trip were inexact. With De Gaulle involved you could be sure of that but they offered a glimmer of a chink wrapped inside a snippet of light at the end of a very dark tunnel. Americans tired of endless sacrifice in Vietnam speculated that if Kennedy won in 1968 the American exit from Vietnam would acquire some real traction.

For the growing number of fans it was not difficult to see parallels between Robert Kennedy's pragmatism over Vietnam with the role John Kennedy played in the Cuban crisis in 1962. Then, rather than bomb the missile sites, which Air Force General Curtis Le May and other Americans favoured, John Kennedy pushed for a quarantine around Cuba. In allowing the Soviets to back down the world arguably avoided nuclear war.

Of course President Johnson did not see matters all this way. Indeed when Robert Kennedy returned from France the President threatened to destroy him for disloyalty. There followed some conveniently timed setbacks in Kennedy’s left-wing credentials. Federal officals revealed that as Attorney-General, Robert Kennedy was the youngest in American history by the way, he ordered wire-taps on Dr Martin Luther King.

But the ire of President and dents to his political capital was not prevent Robert Kennedy declaring his candidacy for the presidency in the spring of 1968. The spat with Johnson immediately defined Robert Kennedy’s presidential goals. His opening speech claimed that he did not run to oppose any man. Few believed him on that one. By then the tension with the Johnson administration as well as tension with the Texan president was too familiar. But so enervating was Vietnam on America, and civil rights too, that many were willing to give the Bostonian the benefit of the doubt. It was a time in American public life where running against an incumbent Democrat President was not off the table.

Finally it was Johnson that resolved the impending problem. He would not run again. The war and his crushed dreams of a Great Society were all too much and so the decks on the Democratic side cleared. Kennedy could be an official Democrat candidate, Eugene McCarthy permitting..

It was the election primaries that took Robert Kennedy to California and the fatal meeting with the mad gunman in the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles. Sirhan Sirhan was angry at the death of his parents and said to be high on drugs at the time. Afterwards he said he did not remember what he did. After the shooting Kennedy lived on for several days but died a few days later in hospital, aged 42. At the hotel he asked ‘Is everybody else all right?’ This was perhaps the comment on the America he would have sought; a world where the capitalist superpower would look after the little guys.

Full list  |  Top James Thurber, US writer, 1955: 'Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge.' US Senator Alan Cranston, 1974: 'Its operation in a world beset by fuel and energy crises makes no sense at all.'

FRANCE, EUROPE. March 2, 1969 saw the the first jet plane flight capable of carrying commercial passengers at supersonic speeds. The test flight carried no passenges in the hop from Toulouse in France and arrived in JFK airport in New York, America. Although it was several years before passenger flights at supersonic speeds became common - Concorde needed above average levels of testing owing to the unqiue technology - the supersonic milestone was symbolically breached on behalf not of the military but of the people.

Concorde probably tops the list of the most distinctive passenger aircraft from the twentieth century. Its delta wings and pointy cone nose were uniquely eye-catching. Underneath the hood was some serious firepower. Supersonic speeds for Concorde this was Mach 2 or approximately 2,200 kilometres per hour. In order to achieve this Concorde flew very high at 16,700 metres above the surface of the earth. Light air at this height was was almost twice as high as conventional aircraft and almost twice the height of Mount Everest – passengers could see the curvature of the earth on clear days. It was also the only passenger plane in the century that could add up to 25% more thrust by re-heating its exhaust. The after-burner only happened rarely, during take-off and for acceleration through the speed of sound, but was still a real thrill for passengers and pilots alike.

But Concorde was always a troubled supersonic superstar. True, journey times nearly halved which was particulalry attractive on long legs where time saved could approach half-a-day or more. Concorde could in theory be an inter-continental workhorse like no other. And during the 1970s there were hopeful signs that this was the future of long haul. Air France inaugurated Concorde flights from Paris to Rio de Janeiro in Latin America. British Airways flew (or more accurately experimented with flights) to Bahrain, Singapore, and Sydney in Asia. Both airlines flew to America – Washington DC initially and then New York later. The Concorde record for London-New York was a trifling 2 hours 53 minutes or half the time needed for conventional jet planes.

Sadly Concorde turned out to have inherent limits. The primary shortcoming was financial. Indeed America decided early in the 1970s that it would not join the Anglo-French alliance in making supersonic flight common for civilians. This was not just aversion to cooperating with the French. The Americans dedided outright they would not develop a supersonic passenger plane. It was simply not financially viable, they thought anyway, when you looked at the cold calculations.

Mind you the Soviet Union was still at a stage where it thought itself immune to cold calculations. During the 1960s they decided they would create a supersonic plane themselves. The Soviet version was the Tupolev Tu-144. Dubbed Concordski this looked almost identical to Concorde – having double-delta shaped wings, a distinctively long and angular nose cone that dropped to improve visibility on landing, and limited passenger capacity. Concordski faded from the scene during the 1980s after little more than a decade in action. The Anglo-French and original Concord was retired by British Airways and Air France in the early 2000s.

What was the core problem? One thing was nothing to do with Concorde but which it was inherently dependent upon: concentrations of sufficiently rich passengers sufficiently far from each other. Concorde illuminated that the only profitable distances that could turn this trick was either New York-London or New York-Paris. The concentration of wealth wasn't enough in places like Rio or Sydney. Concorde also needed significantly more fuel than other passenger jets yet to cover this cost it could only carry a hundred passengers. This was at a time when other passenger jets could carry three or four times this amount. So Concore tickets were extremely expensive. All these limits explained why more investment in an already expensive idea never really appeared. During its operational life – all planes were phased out by the 2000s after only three decades – nothing substantial was scaled up.

Sound was also a problem for Concorde alone among passenger jets. Objects traveling through Earth's atmosphere at supersonic speed generate a sonic boom. In practice this means a shock wave is heard on the ground that sounds like a loud explosion. Entities as varied as New York City and the Malaysia Government protested that such a boom was unsettling or dangerous for civilian populations. Citing dangerous decibel thresholds they refused to allow Concorde flights (although in the American case the restriction was lifted by the US Supreme Court).

With the fading away of Concorde aviation took perhaps the only backward step in the twentieth century. Almost every other innovation had led to more. Nevertheless, although Concorde dried up the investment in supersonic passenger flight a safe bet is that large-scale supersonic flight will be back in the twenty-first century in some form. Perhaps the plane will not look like Concorde and it will certainly be bigger. Meanwhile perhaps the best accolode for Concorde is that as a pionner it did a lot with so little. Only twenty aircraft were built. Of these only sixteen were commercially active and really in only two airlines - British Airways and Air France.

Full list  |  Top Commander of Apollo 11 Neil Armstrong, speaking in 1994: 'History will remember the twentieth century for two technological developments: atomic energy and space flight.' US news anchor Walter Cronkite, speaking in 2006: 'When the eagle landed on the moon, I was speechless—overwhelmed, like most of the world. Couldn't say a word. I think all I said was, 'Wow! Jeez!' Not exactly immortal. Well, I was nothing if not human.'

USA, THE AMERICAS AND THE MOON. On July 20, 1969 the first human from planet earth walked on another planet. When Neil Armstrong, aged 38, touched down he told the world it was a small step for man and a giant one for mankind. Contemplation not just of visible planets but invisible galaxies entered the human psyche. Later Armstrong said: ‘In my own view the important achievement of Apollo was a demonstration that humanity is not forever chained to this planet, and our visions go rather further than that, and our opportunities are unlimited.’

The American code for a successful landing was ‘The Eagle has landed.’ At the time over 600 million watched for signs of an eagle landing on live television. The small craft touched down in an area of the moon called the Sea of Tranquillity and the first person on the moon concluded as he took the small step from the ladder to the surface: 'That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.'

Eight years earlier President Kennedy had promised the moon. As commentators like Arthur C Clarke noted the moon ‘is the first milestone on the road to the stars.’ And on Christmas Eve in 1968 the first Americans had orbited the moon in Apollo 8. On May 18, 1969, Apollo 10 had swooped low over the lunar surface.

Totally a dozen Americans set foot on the moon in the following five years. Astronaut Eugene Cernan was the last in December 1972 and the next visit is scheduled for around 2020, nearly half a century later, when the plan is for astronauts to stay up to six months at a time. For the most part the trek to the nearest planet was safe although Apollo 13 in 1970 was a very close shave. That moon landing had to be abandoned and the three astronauts limped back home. Astronauts on Challenger in the 1980s and Columbia in the 1990s were less fortunate and paid the last full measure of devotion.

Within three decades of America’s victory and Armstrong’s triumph an international space station was constructed and deployed in orbit around earth. It was supported, financially and technologically, not just by America but by sixteen nations. With this advance came answers to the telling questions of the twentieth century: can humans function in micro-gravity? Can surgery in space be performed realistically? Can food be cultivated? Can water be produced? Perhaps most tellingly of all, can humans psychological balance be maintained?

Full list  |  Top Lt William Calley, US Army, 1971: 'They were all enemy. They were all to be destroyed.' Michael Herr, US journalist, 1989: 'All the wrong people remember Vietnam. I think all the people who remember it should forget it, and all the people who forgot it should remember it.'

USA, THE AMERICAS. On November 20, 1969 the American media first published evidence of a massacre committed by American troops during the Vietnam War. The My Lai massacre proved a precipitate turning point in American willingness to wage war and helped to make it a case of when, not if, America would withdraw from south-east Asia.

The basics of My Lai became grisly familiar to a generation of Americans wrestling with an indecisive war in a distant continent. On March 16, 1968, in South Vietnam a company of American troops went on a search-and-destroy mission. The target was enemy guerillas. Somewhere along the way they murdered several hundred people who were mostly civilians. Remaining villagers would have been killed but for the intervention of American troops with helicopters who put themselves between the mad platoon and the survivors.

But it was more than just an isolated loss of control. Worse was the defining personality connected with the butchery. Lieutenant William Calley, it might be politely said, did not bring fresh dimensions to military genius. Neither his juniors nor his seniors particularly respected the twenty-four year old lieutenant. Later testimonies suggested his captain (the next senior rank above) even dubbed Calley as ‘Lieutenant Shithead.’ Yet whatever his weakness Lieutenant Calley was chillingly similar to other soldiers. He commanded troops and weaponry. He seemed emblematic of a deep American failure to either win hearts or minds or indeed to control their own hearts and minds.

Hereafter the Vietnam fiasco became two lines on a graph: support from Vietnamese hearts and minds withered and faded while American doubts increased. Soon came the policy of Vietnamisation. This ensured that American troops would take a secondary place in fighting.

Beyond what My Lai meant for Vietnam it also influenced American media and indeed global media too. True, American military authorities had investigated. They even announced punishments for Lt Calley before the story broke – which is often overlooked. But it took the American press to amplify the circumstances to their correct magnitude. Foremost among journalists was Seymour Hersch of the New York Times (although Time, Life and Newsweek magazines also covered the story on this day). He correctly spotted the true significance of the event. All told during America’s participation in the Vietnam war around two dozen US soldiers faced war crime charges but precious few were punished. When Mr Calley himself weaseled out of house arrest and assumed a normal life there was a deep sense in America that if the press, rather than the army, ran matters this would not have happened.