November 30
President Clinton becomes the first incumbent U.S. chief executive to visit Northern Ireland. He urges Catholics and Protestants to maintain their ceasefire and not to surrender to the impulses of “old habits and hard grudges.” From behind a bulletproof screen, Clinton turns on Christmas lights in Belfast.
December 1
A federal appellate court removes District Judge Wayne Alley from hearing the case against Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols in the Oklahoma City bombing. The appellate court says that bomb damage to Alley’s courtroom and chambers could give rise to doubts about his impartiality. The chief U.S. district judge in Denver, Richard Matsch, is appointed to replace Alley. Matsch later orders separate trials for McVeigh and Nichols, and he moves the proceedings to Denver.
December 2
In Germany, President Clinton tells American troops who will be in the vanguard of 60,000 NATO peacekeepers in Bosnia and Herzegovina that they are to strike “immediately, and with decisive force” if threatened. He also tells them “the stakes demand [the] American leadership that you will provide.”
December 4
Publication date of Bob Metcalfe’s prediction, in a column in InfoWorld, that the Internet “will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 will collapse.” Metcalfe, the founder of 3M Corporation, later vows to eat his Internet-collapse column if the prediction goes unfulfilled. It does, and he does, at an international conference in April 1997.
December 7
Declaring that Microsoft is now “hard core about the Internet,” Bill Gates announces what in effect is a counterattack on Netscape and a bid to dominate the still-emerging Web-browser market.
December 8
Thirty years after the band was created and four months after the death of its founder and front man, Jerry Garcia, the remaining members of the Grateful Dead say the group is disbanding.
December 9
Kweisi Mfume, a five-term Democratic congressman from Maryland, is chosen executive director of the NAACP. Mfume fills a post vacant since the Rev. Benjamin Chavis was fired in 1993 following accusations of financial mismanagement and sexual harassment. Mfume serves nearly nine years.
December 11
The NBC Today show, featuring anchors Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric, begins a sixteen-year weekly winning streak as television’s most-watched morning news program. The streak lasts 852 weeks, ending in April 2012.
December 14
Microsoft and NBC announce a joint venture to establish MSNBC, an all-news cable channel intended to compete with CNN in covering breaking news.
December 15
The AltaVista online search engine is launched by Digital Equipment Corporation and quickly becomes one of the Internet’s most popular tools. AltaVista uses several hundred “spiders” to index the World Wide Web.
December 16
President Clinton and Republicans in Congress blame each other as another budget impasse leads to another partial shutdown of the federal government.
December 18
Richard C. Holbrooke, a principal architect of the Dayton peace accords, says he will leave his State Department position early in 1996. “I am not walking away,” Holbrooke says in an interview with the Washington Post. “I will leave with total support for this administration, and the policies which I was part of.”
December 20
Buckingham Palace says that Queen Elizabeth has urged Prince Charles and Princess Diana to end their troubled marriage.
December 23
The Vatican announces that the pope’s annual Christmas message will, for the first time, be posted on the Internet.
December 24
Smoke from a fire in the three-room primate house at the Philadelphia Zoo kills twenty-three rare gorillas, orangutans, gibbons, and lemurs.
December 25
Pope John Paul II, suffering flu-like symptoms, cuts short his traditional Christmas greetings, telling a crowd at the Vatican, “I cannot go on. Merry Christmas and God bless.” He reappears twenty minutes later and apologizes.
December 27
Alaska Airlines becomes the first U.S. carrier to sell tickets on the Internet.
December 28
CompuServe, one of the leading online commercial computer services, complies with an order from a German prosecutor and suspends member access to two hundred sexually explicit Internet discussion groups.
December 31
President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky engage in the third sexual encounter of their erratic relationship. Later in the day, Clinton, his wife, and their daughter travel to South Carolina for a year-end retreat at Hilton Head.
Notes
PREFACE
1. See John Lancaster, “1979 and All That,” New Yorker, August 5, 2013, 68. Lancaster observed: “There are years whose impact on human history is apparent to everyone at the time—1776, say, or 1945, or 2001—and then there are years whose significance seems to grow in retrospect, as it becomes clear that the consequences of certain events are still being felt decades later.”
2. See, for example, Christian Caryl, Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (New York: Basic Books, 2013).
3. For examples of year-studies that assert such claims, at least in their titles, see Fred Kaplan, 1959: The Year Everything Changed (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2009), and Rob Kirkpatrick, 1969: The Year Everything Changed (New York: Skyhorse, 2011). Similarly, see Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 1492: The Year the World Began (New York: HarperOne, 2009).
4. See David Maraniss, Barack Obama: The Story (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), 573. Maraniss noted that Dreams from My Father leapt “from the remainder bin to bestsellerdom” after Obama’s keynote address in August 2004 at the Democratic National Convention. The speech made him “an overnight sensation,” Maraniss wrote. Dreams from My Father was reviewed by the New York Times, which said Obama’s story “bogs down in discussions of racial exploitation without really shedding any new light on the subject.” Paul Watkins, “A Promise of Redemption: A Memoir by a Young Lawyer, the Son of a White American Mother and a Black Kenyan Father,” New York Times Sunday Book Review, August 6, 1995, 17.
5. See, for example, Renee C. Romano, “Not Dead Yet: My Identity Crisis as a Historian of the Recent Past,” in Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back, ed. Claire Bond Potter and Renee C. Romano (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 28–29.
INTRODUCTION TO AN IMPROBABLE YEAR
1. Todd Copilevitz, “In 1995 Everyone Became Caught in the Same Web,” Dallas Morning News, December 29, 1995.
2. J. M. Lawrence, “1995 Was Year of the Apology,” Boston Herald, December 31, 1995, retrieved from Factiva database.
3. Thomas Ferrick, Jr., “1995 Marked by Turmoil Reminiscent of Another Era,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 31, 1995.
4. W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm, “The Good Old Days Are Now,” Reason 27, no. 7 (December 1995): 24. Cox and Alm also observed: “No catalog of higher living standards would be complete without products that didn’t even exist for past generations. . . . Microwave ovens, answering machines, food processors, home computers, exercise equipment, cable TV, Rollerblades, fax machines, and soft contact lenses are staples of the 1990s lifestyle. As important, many products, from computers to clothing[,] have been getting higher in quality even as they drop in price” (22).
5. Nick Leeson with Edward Whitley, Rogue Trader: How I Brought Down Barings Bank and Shook the Financial World (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), 177.
6. Quoted in Fred Barbash, “A Pretender Tweaks the Throne,” Washington Post, October 29, 1995. See also Ed Vulliamy, “Disc Jockey Dupes Queen into Chat on Phone-In,” Guardian (London), October 28, 1995.
7. Afterward, a spokesman for the palace said testily: “We think it’s annoying. We think it’s irritating. We think it’s a waste of the queen’s time.” Brassard, though, reveled in his hoax
and said the queen “is very funny. . . . That kind of conversation is a good thing because we see the human side of the person.” Quoted in Dirk Beveridge, “Buckingham Palace: Hoax Call to Queen Was Aided by Canadian Foul-Up,” Associated Press, October 28, 1995, retrieved from LexisNexis database. Quebec voted narrowly to defeat the separatist referendum a few days later, putting an end to an internal threat to Canada’s territorial integrity.
8. William J. Broad, “U.S. Craft Docks Flawlessly with Russian Space Station,” New York Times, June 30, 1995. It was the first U.S.-Russian space linkup in twenty years.
9. The previous record was eighty-four days. See William J. Broad, “New Attack Planned on Ills of Space Travel,” New York Times, July 11, 1995.
10. John Noble Wilford, “Lovesick Woodpeckers Poke Hole in a Shuttle’s Schedule,” New York Times, June 3, 1995. The birds were identified as yellow-shafted flickers, which can display “such behavior during courtship and to proclaim its territory,” Wilford noted, adding that “the male flickers were undoubtedly trying to attract the attention of females by taking on something far more monumental than a dead [tree] limb.”
11. Quoted in “Actor Hugh Grant Arrested for Alleged Sex Encounter with Prostitute,” Associated Press, June 27, 1995, retrieved from LexisNexis database.
12. See “Hugh Grant Talks about His Arrest,” CNN Larry King Live, July 12, 1995, transcript retrieved from LexisNexis database.
13. Quoted in W. Speers, “For Elizabeth Hurley, the Pain Just Won’t Go Away,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 4, 1995. Hurley, who was interviewed on the ABC News television program 20/20, also said, “There has never been a time in my life when I’ve felt less inclined to get married.”
14. See George Rush, “No Longer Divine, Hugh & Liz Split,” New York Daily News, May 23, 2000. It emerged years later that the British tabloid News of the World paid Divine Brown about $160,000 for an exclusive interview after her encounter with Grant. It also paid about $80,000 to fly Brown’s family members to a resort in Nevada, to seclude them from rival journalists. See Katrin Bennhold, “Testimony at Hacking Trial Gives Peek into British Tabloids,” New York Times, March 6, 2014.
15. John Crudele, “Profit and Loss: Why Stock Market Could Suffer in ’95,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 1, 1995.
16. Cited in Mike Clark, “Film’s Finest Hours, From ‘Babe’ to ‘Toy’ Land,” USA Today, December 27, 1995.
17. Janet Maslin, “Film Review: There’s a New Toy in the House: Uh-oh,” New York Times, November 22, 1995.
18. See Gregory P. Laughlin, “Extrasolar Planetary Systems,” American Scientist 94, no. 5 (September–October 2006): 421. Laughlin also wrote: “To look at the illuminated face of the planet at all, you would need extremely dark sunglasses, or better yet, a welder’s mask.”
19. See Ray Jayawardhana, Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life beyond Our Solar System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). Jayawardhana wrote:“On a number of occasions, starting as early as the mid-nineteenth century, astronomers thought they had hit the jackpot. Their announcements [about would-be extra-solar planets] often resulted in newspaper headlines, and fed into speculations of alien life, but did not survive closer scrutiny. In every case, the culprit turned out to be observational error” (46).
20. See Artie P. Hatzes and Guenther Wuchterl, “Giant Planet Seeks Nursery Place,” Nature 436 (July 14, 2005): 182. For a discussion of the dominant theory of the time, see Alan P. Boss, “Proximity of Jupiter-Like Planets to Low-Mass Stars,” Science (January 20, 1995): 360–62. Boss wrote: “Jupiter-like planets are thus likely to be found orbiting low-mass stars at distances not much different . . . than those in our solar system” (362).
21. As Jayawardhana noted in Strange New Worlds: “Planet formation models [then] did not allow for gas giants to form so close to their stars; the temperatures are too high for the material needed to form the planet cores to remain solid” (74).
22. Quoted in Jayawardhana, Strange New Worlds, 74. Mayor and Queloz reported their discovery—“the first example of an extrasolar planetary system associated with a solar-type star”—in “A Jupiter-Mass Companion to a Solar-Type Star,” Nature 378 (November 23, 1995): 355–59.
23. Confirmation came from American astronomers Geoffrey Marcy and R. Paul Butler of San Francisco State University. Butler later said: “Mayor jump-started us. His discovery brought a level of excitement to the field.” Quoted in John Noble Wilford, “In a Golden Age of Discovery, Faraway Worlds Beckon,” New York Times, February 9, 1997.
24. Michel Mayor and Pierre-Yves Frei, New Worlds in the Cosmos: The Discovery of Exoplanets (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 18.
25. Michel Mayor, interview with author, June 6, 2011.
26. Michael Hanlon, “Heavens, It’s Weird Out There,” Sunday Times (London), December 11, 2011.
27. The prospect that intelligent life exists beyond the Earth may be extraordinarily small. As physicist Paul Davies has observed, “If life arose simply by the accumulation of many specific chemical accidents in one place, it is easy to imagine that only one in, say, a trillion trillion habitable planets would ever host such a dream run. Set against a number that big . . . it is irrelevant whether the Milky Way contains 40 billion habitable planets or just a handful. Forty billion hardly makes a dent in a trillion trillion.” Davis, “Are We Alone in the Universe?” New York Times, November 19, 2013.
28. See Dennis Overbye, “NASA Planet-Hunting Star Idled by Broken Parts,” New York Times, August 16, 2013. See also Lee Hotz, “Hundreds of Planets Found, Four Perhaps Suitable for Life,” Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2014. Kepler also found a few circumbinary systems in which a planet revolves around two stars—not entirely unlike Tatooine, Luke Skywalker’s home planet in the Star Wars movies. See Sindya N. Bhanoo, “Kepler Finds More Planets Orbiting Two Stars,” New York Times, January 17, 2012.
29. Barbara Holland, Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), ix.
30. Ibid., xi. Of cigarettes, Holland wrote: “They’re no longer a legitimate pleasure, but they were a pleasure once. We may have been stupid to smoke, but we didn’t smoke from sheer stupidity; we smoked because we liked it” (21). Holland died of lung cancer in 2010. See William Grimes, “Obituaries: Barbara Holland, Defender of Small Vices, Dies at 77,” New York Times, September 14, 2010.
31. Russell Baker, “Hymns to Joy,” New York Times, March 21, 1995. Baker also wrote: “I read her book during a recent vacation which provided a rare opportunity to read for the pure pleasure of reading. It’s odd but true about the newspaper business that while it encourages a lot of reading, most of this reading is either not worth doing or not much fun.”
32. See, for example, “Top 10 Commencement Speeches,” Time magazine, accessed October 26, 2013, http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1898670_1898671_1898650,00.html.
33. The full text of Baker’s commencement speech is accessible at www.humanity.org/voices/commencements/russell-baker-connecticut-college-speech-1995?page=baker_at_connecticut§ionName=voices.
34. See Brett Pulley, “Thousands in New York Prepare for Black Men’s March,” New York Times, October 14, 1995.
35. See Michael A. Fletcher and Hamil R. Harris, “United They’ll Stand, March on Washington,” Washington Post, September 10, 1995.
36. Angela Davis, an activist college professor and a former Black Panther, assailed the exclusion of women, saying: “No march, movement or agenda that defines manhood in the narrowest terms and seeks to make women lesser partners in this quest for equality can be considered a positive step.” Quoted in Rachel Jones, “Organizers Downplay Farrakhan’s Role in the March,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 14, 1995. In addition, the New York Times reported that while “it is difficult to determine just how divided black women are about this long-planned assault on black male stagnation, there is an unmistakable buzz i
n black women’s circles about the wisdom of the march. Expressions of exhilaration and frustration can be heard from book groups to church groups, from board rooms to bedrooms. And some of the buzz is downright angry.” Michel Marriott, “Black Women Are Split Over All-Male March on Washington,” New York Times, October 14, 1995. The Times article quoted Barbara Arnwine, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, as saying: “The role African-American women are given in this march is to tend the bake sale, raise the money or stay at home and take care of the children. I think that it is awful.” In the end, the event brought what the Washington Post said was a “sprinkling of wives, mothers, daughters and sisters who mingled among [the participants] to show support and to share in a historical event.” Marcia Slacum Greene and Tracy Thompson, “A Welcome for Women on the Mall; Most Heed Call to Stay Away from March, Meet Elsewhere,” Washington Post, October 17, 1995.
37. A few days before the rally, the transcript was released of an interview Farrakhan had given in early October, in which he said: “Many of the Jews who owned the homes, the apartments in the black community, we considered them bloodsuckers because they took from our community and built their community but didn’t offer anything back to our community.” Quoted in Charles Bierbauer, “Its Goal More Widely Accepted Than Its Leader,” CNN, October 17, 1995, accessed November 4, 2013, www.cnn.com/US/9510/megamarch/10–17/notebook/.
38. Ibid.
39. See Mario A. Brossard and Richard Morin, “Leader Popular among Marchers,” Washington Post, October 17, 1995. Brossard and Morin reported that 87 percent of survey respondents viewed Farrakhan favorably, exceeding the popularity of other prominent African Americans, including Colin Powell and Jesse Jackson.
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