Comeback

NATION

THE BATTLE OVER ABORTION A question of "life" or "choice"

"We must do everything we can under our constitutional system to stop the killing of unborn children. We're talking about life and death." So said Carl Anderson, legislative aide to Republican Senator Jesse Helms, at a Conservative Political Action Conference a week ago in Washington, D.C. The words were no less harsh at a seminar of 80 women held in a Manhattan town house. Said Harriet Pilpel, general counsel for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a privately funded family-planning service: "If the bills pending before Congress pass and are not held to be unconstitutional, there will be very little privacy left at all for any fertile woman."

Abortion. It is, without question, the most emotional issue of politics and morality that faces the nation today. The language of the debate is so passionate and polemical, and the conflicting, irreconcilable values so deeply felt, that the issue could well test the foundations of a pluralistic system designed to accommodate deep-rooted moral differences. Says Philadelphia Surgeon Dr. Everett Koop, an antiabortion activist whom Reagan plans to nominate as Surgeon General: "Nothing like it has separated our society since the days of slavery." On one side are the crusaders "for life," who argue on religious and moral grounds that abortion is the murder of an unborn person (the fetus) and thus should be outlawed by constitutional amendment. On the other side are crusaders "for choice," who contend that abortion is a right that women must have if they are ever to be free to control their own bodies, indeed, their own lives.

Should abortion be banned? Should it be funded for the poor? In considering such explosive questions, legislators have plunged into a war zone.

April 6, 1981

THE REAGAN TAX CUT The revolution begins

Champagne corks were popping in the Oval Office Wednesday afternoon when the call came from the vanquished to the victor. "Well, Mr. President, you're tough," said Dan Rostenkowski of Illinois, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. "You beat us." Indeed he had, and with surprising ease. In the final legislative battle over Ronald Reagan's economic program, 48 House Democrats deserted their party to help the President win a 238-to-195 victory on a vote for a bill that provides the largest tax cut in U.S. history. "We have made a new beginning," exulted the President. If not a revolution. Not since the first six months of Franklin Roosevelt's Administration has a new President done so much of such magnitude so quickly to change the economic direction of the nation.

Aug. 10, 1981

WORLD

DEADLY MELTDOWN Fear spreads from Chernobyl

The most frightening part of the nuclear accident was the radiation that spewed from the reactor and then was carried by winds on its silent, deadly path. In the first few hours of the Chernobyl disaster, lethal forms of iodine and cesium were released into the atmosphere. They were accompanied by other highly dangerous radioactive emissions. At first the radiation cloud drifted above some of the Soviet Union's best farmland, but then it moved north toward Scandinavia. By week's end an ominous pall of radiation had spread across Eastern Europe and toward the shores of the Mediterranean. How far it would travel and whom it would affect depended on the vagaries of meteorological patterns. For many days, perhaps weeks, it would keep millions of people on edge, despite assurances from officials worldwide that any danger was minimal.

May 12, 1986

SPACE

TOUCHDOWN, COLUMBIA! The shuttle's first landing

"Gear down," reported a chase jet, buzzing alongside and counting off the altitude: "50 feet...40...5--4--3--2--1--Touchdown!" As its rear wheels made contact, the flight director in far-off Houston told his tense crew: "Prepare for exhilaration." Nine seconds later, the nose wheels were down too. Columbia settled softly onto the lake bed. [Commander John] Young had floated the shuttle 3,000 ft. beyond the planned landing spot, able to use its surprising lift to make a notably smooth touchdown. As it rolled to a stop through the shimmering desert air, The Star-Spangled Banner rattled forth from hundreds of portable radios tuned to a local station. From Mission Control in Houston's Johnson Space Center came an exuberant "Welcome home, Columbia. Beautiful." The picture-perfect landing on California's Mojave Desert last week all but obscured the historic nature of those last, breathtaking moments of Columbia's 54 1/2-hr. odyssey. Gone were the great parachutes and swinging capsules of earlier space missions, splashing into the sea, never to travel into space again. For the first time, a man-made machine had returned from the heavens like an ordinary airplane--in fact, far more smoothly than many a commercial jet. So long delayed, so widely criticized, Columbia's flight should finally put to rest any doubts that there will one day be regular commuter runs into the cosmos.

April 27, 1981

FIERY END TO THE TEACHER'S MISSION The Challenger explodes

The eye accepted what the mind could not: a sudden burst of white and yellow fire, then white trails streaming up and out from the fireball to form a twisted Y against a pure heaven, and the metal turning to rags, dragging white ribbons into the ocean. A terrible beauty exploded like a primal event of physics--the birth of a universe; the death of a star; a fierce, enigmatic violence out of the blue. The mind recoiled in sheer surprise. Then it filled with horror.

One thought first of the teacher and her children--her own and her students. One wanted to snatch them away from the sight and rescind the thing they had seen. But the moment was irrevocable. Over and over, the bright extinction played on the television screen, almost ghoulishly repeated until it had sunk into the collective memory. And there it will abide, abetted by the weird metaphysics of videotape, which permits the endless repetition of a brute finality.

The loss of the shuttle was a more profound event than that suggests. It inflicted upon Americans the purest pain that they have collectively felt in years. It was a pain uncontaminated by the anger and hatred and hungering for revenge that come in the aftermath of terrorist killings, for example. It was pain uncomplicated by the divisions, political, racial, moral, that usually beset American tragedies (Viet Nam and Watergate, to name two). The shuttle crew, spectacularly democratic (male, female, black, white, Japanese American, Catholic, Jewish, Protestant), was the best of us, Americans thought, doing the best of things Americans do. The mission seemed symbolically immaculate, the farthest reach of a perfectly American ambition to cross frontiers. And it simply vanished in the air.

Feb. 10, 1986

ECONOMY & BUSINESS

ONE CAP FOR HEALTH COSTS

Even as medical bills climb, 277 so-called health maintenance organizations (HMOs) are managing to keep their members healthy and out of the poorhouse to boot. HMOs are group-practice health plans in which a family pays a flat fee of, say, $160 per month, and in return is provided with comprehensive medical care, ranging from doctors' visits to heart surgery. Corporations are especially fond of the concept, which helps them as much as their employees. Ford Motor Co.'s employee insurance program has offered HMOs since the early 1960s. Although only 8% of its employees are now enrolled in HMO programs, Ford will save an estimated $5 million in medical benefits this year.

Conventional health insurance companies are already beginning to feel the pressure from HMOs. The Massachusetts Blue Cross operates five HMOs of its own, with a total membership of 100,000 subscribers, up from 42,000 in 1980. In the St. Paul-Minneapolis area, HMOs are grabbing away subscribers at a breakneck pace, and claim a membership of 25% of the population.

July 12, 1982

LIVING

COCAINE: MIDDLE CLASS HIGH

Today, in part precisely because it is such an emblem of wealth and status, coke is the drug of choice for perhaps millions of solid, conventional and often upwardly mobile citizens. There is little likelihood that the cocaine blizzard will soon abate. A drug habit born of a desire to escape the bad news in life is not likely to be discouraged by the bad news about the drug itself. And so middle class Americans continue to succumb to the powder's crystalline dazzle. Few are yet aware or willing to concede that at the very least, taking cocaine is dangerous to their psychological health. It may be no easy task to reconvince them that good times are made, not sniffed.

July 6, 1981

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

The past decade has seen a 52% increase in the number of black managers, professionals, technicians and government officials. The gap between black and white median income is wider now than in the late 1970s--largely because blacks did not recover from the last recession as completely as whites did. Still, roughly one-third of all black households have solidly middle-class incomes of $35,000 or more, compared with about 70% of all white households. Blacks manage the department stores that once rejected their patronage. They make decisions at cor- porations where once they worked only on assembly lines. They represent congressional districts where they were formerly denied the right to vote. They send their children to leading schools and universities that once blackballed them.

But for all its undeniable progress, the black middle class still seems poised on the banks of the mainstream rather than swimming in its current. Its members are haunted by a feeling of alienation from the white majority with which they have so much in common. They speak again and again of "living in two worlds." In one they are judged by their credentials and capabilities. In the other, race still comes first.

March 13, 1989

MUSIC

THINK SMALL: HERE COME CDS

This is the year to pity poor music lovers. Just when they thought they had assembled the best audio system budgets could buy, along comes a development that may render their expensive turntables and library of LPs as out of date as Edison's first talking machine. This month Sony and Magnavox are introducing a limited number of digital record players in audio and department stores across the U.S. The machines, which retail for $800 to $1,000, use a laser beam instead of a conventional tone arm and stylus to play compact discs, or CDs, that will sell for about $17. Says Dan Davis, vice president of the National Association of Recording Merchandisers: "There is a consensus that this is perhaps the most exciting of the breakthroughs in the field, including the LP and stereo."

March 21, 1983

MILESTONES

DIVORCED. Elizabeth Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Burton Warner, 50, violet-eyed empress of stage, screen and altar; and John Warner, 55, Republican Senator from Virginia; after six years of marriage; she for the sixth time, he for the second; in Fauquier County, Va.

Nov. 15, 1982