Yale University - Banner / Pot Pourri Yearbook (New Haven, CT)

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$ J APRIL and May were noisy in the world and at Yale, and most of the sounds were ominous. Dienbienphu entered the world ' s vocabu- lary, and the Senate-McCarthy-Army hearings began. McCarthy ' s grating voice began with point of order and scarcely ceased. Ray Jenkins ' southern drawl and the mellifluous tones of Joseph Welch became familiar to a nation of living-room listeners. Other sounds were more pleasing. Roger Bannister heard the enthusiastic roar of track fans as he became the first human to break the four-minute mile. A few days later, Earl Warren ' s voice droned out over a packed court room, and his words heralded the end of segregation in the public schools. This was not a pleasant sound to most of the South. Yale shuddered at the screech of slipping tires as two seniors died near Poughkeepsie in an auto accident. While William Buckley defended McCarthy before an overflow crowd in Woolsey Hall, the first stone was being set in place toward the forthcoming censure hearings. Yale men were facing the pressing problems of trying to avoid being swept off the streets by the mobs of Hillhouse students. The Class of 1958 fell heir to the benevolent despotism of Harold B. Whiteman, as Prince Hal was appointed Dean of «f Freshmen, and the check-cashing line at the Co-op continued to £ grow longer as College Weekend approached. How was your P. R. rating? One of the few pleasant sounds to French soldiers in Indo- china was the name of the Angel of Dienbienphu, Nurse Genevieve De Galard-Terraube. The Geneva Conference moved on, while, on the other side of the world, the carrier Bennington caught fire, killing or wounding three hundred. Some of these men were old enough to die, but the Senate had just ruled them too young to vote. There was the sound of irony in the month of May. Ernest Hemingway ' s plane crashed in the jungle, but Papa walked away from the debris to laugh at his own obituaries. Bozell — Yes Buckley — Yes 7s McCarthy more of an asset than a liability? 1 Countryman — No Harper — No

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aie is not an ivory tower, insisted a newspaper advertisement slipped under every door early in the year. In 1954-1955, the Yale community was forced to an awareness of the truth of this claim. No longer could the Yale undergraduate wrap himself in a cocoon of his personal affairs, isolated from what was happening in the outside world. If a man half a world and a whole philosophy away were to give an order, the Yale student might find himself suddenly shouldering a rifle, piloting a jet, or clearing away the rubble of a demolished city. Perhaps his generation was not as fatalistic or apathetic as its critics would paint it; but neither did it have the carefree abandon with which such an age is associated. It was a nervous America, and a nervous Yale. Tradition remained, but the ivory tower had crumbled. MARCH began insignificantly enough with the introduc- tion of the Hawaiian-Alaskan statehood bill, and already many began to worry about designing a new flag. Billy Graham was touring England, telling Englishmen The voice of God is with you tonight. Arturo Toscanini became old suddenly, lost his place in the middle of a symphony, and later announced his official retirement. A master had stepped down. Investigation committees became acutely interested in Robert Oppenheimer and comic books, and seemed on the verge of ban- ning both. But the big sound of the month was the biggest the world had ever heard. The hydrogen bomb was exploded, releas- ing a power 750 times that of the puny atom bomb. What would be next? Scientists had the answer to that too, as they announced one year later the cobalt bomb, capable of ridding the world of all of us. It was an age of progress. Arturo Toscanini ' s baton wavered in the midst of a symphony, and the famed conductor later announced his retirement. A gallery of central figures in the Senate-Army-McCarthy hearing. tfelch Schine lenkins Cohn McCarthy

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SIGHTS tloiniiiiiK l Juno. If you were at Yale, you saw 1954 candidates for degree on June 2, Frank Lloyd Wright being among those to receive an honorary degree. If you were a member of the French National Assembly, you saw the first, but not the last, of a new premier, Pierre Mendes- France. If you were a congressman, you saw the wrong end of a Puerto-Rican pistol, and you might have gone to the hospital because of it. If you were Ed Furgol, you saw your final putt drop to win the National Open golf championship. If you were Joseph elch, you saw Joe McCarthy through a blur of tears, and you blurted out: Have vou no sense of d ' For France and the free world: a Pyrrhic victory. JULY was a month of quotas. Aneurin Bevan fought the EDC with no ■runs for the Huns ; eight months later Be- van was ousted from the Labor Party. Roy Cohn resigned as chief counsel to McCarthy: I extend to the great American jury my heartfelt thanks for its loyal support. John I -n-ter Dulles, Secretary of State, began bifl agonizing reappraisal, and after seven and a half years fighting ended in Indo-China. A Edward R. Murrow might have said, you could hear the world quiet down. Names and personalities also made the news of tin- world in that month. Hfolotoi laughed when he heard that the Geneva Con- For Dr. Sam: Guilty. ference had failed. Dr. Sam Sheppard in- sisted that a bushy-haired man had mur- dered his wife, but a jury thought differently, when, five months later, the longest criminal court trial in United States history ended. Christian Dior crashed the headlines in the most effective way possible: he flattened the American woman ' s figure. The World Council of Churches held a mass meeting in Evanston, Illinois. August was a month of birth and death: Vito Marcantonio, De Gasperi, and the EDC in France had passed away, but ex-president Herbert Hoover celebrated his eightieth birthday. For M endes-F ranee : cheers and jeers. % ' Id