Iconic Photos

It was the only known color photograph of Britain’s King Edward VII. Found in April 2009 in a cupboard in Exbury, the informal portrait, which shows the monarch dressed in a kilt and full highland costume. It was taken in September 1909 by a close friend Lionel de Rothschild, a banker and Conservative MP, who invited the king to one of his regular trips to Scotland for the autumn grouse season, at Tulchan in Strathspey, 15 miles from Balmoral. The portrait is thought to be one of the last pictures of Edward, who died eight months later.

Rothschild was an enthusiastic amateur photographer who experimented in taking the pictures and went about perfecting the new process of taking images. These images were discovered by Lionel de Rothschild, his grandson, wrapped in old newspapers in Exbury House, which has been in the Rothschild family for 90 years. Now the photograph now forms part of the Rothschild Archive. The picture is an example of an autochrome, the first colour photographic method to be commercially viable, and the archives include 700 non-royal images from the early 1900s, including one of the earliest known photographs of London Zoo, taken in 1910; that of Lady Helen Vincent, a renowned beauty of the time and the wife of the diplomat Sir Edgar Vincent, posing beside a stone sculpture; and that of three soldiers posing at a Military Encampment at Tidworth, Wiltshire, in 1911 and that of members of the de Rothschild family enjoying a day out in the woods in 1912. These photos show the Edwardian world in a new light, in a soft and subtle colour.

Note: autochrome plates could not be printed or copied and had to be seen through a viewer.

Today “Liberal Republican” is an oxymoron, but in the 70s and the 80s, they did exist, Nelson Rockefeller was their leader. Elected four times as governor and one of America’s wealthiest politicians, Rockefeller resigned in 1973 to devote all of his time to a potential presidential run in 1976. But when Vice President Spiro T. Agnew resigned in disgrace after pleading guilty to not paying taxes, Rockefeller called Nixon and asked for the vice presidency.

Nixon decided instead to appoint House Minority Leader and Michigan congressman Gerald Ford. After Nixon’s resignation Gerald Ford was sworn in as President. Ford offered the Vice Presidency to Rockefeller. Knowing that he would not be the nominee for president in 1976, Rockefeller relaxed and enjoyed his duties as vice president. This attitude was caught on camera, above in Binghamton, NY.; A heckler was shouting insults and Rockefeller leaned over the podium and gave him the finger. The picture appeared in newspaper across the nation, the public opinion was divided: some criticizing it as a crude gesture, but others admitting that it was nice to see politician who wasn’t afraid to show just what he really meant.

Shortly after taking office both Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Rockefeller had been diagnosed with cancer and had to have mastectomies. It was major headline news and focused the nations attention on the dangers of breast cancer. Then when California’s former two-term governor Ronald Reagan announced that he would be a candidate for the Republican nomination, Ford had to appease the conservatives, and replace Rockefeller was replaced on the ticket with Senator Robert Dole of Kansas. It was a rally for Dole in Binghamton that Rockefeller hold up his middle finger with ‘sneering, Satanic expression’. For him, not running for reelection again, the defiant middle finger was a kind of declaration of independence freeing him from the unspoken rule that politicians must always flatter the audience and ignore the hecklers.

He retired soon after; Rockefeller could have died with the respect, but it was reported that his fatal heart attack was induced by a more than the usual late night ‘office work’ with a young female associate.

In March 2009 died Leonore Annenberg, the society doyenne who was President Ronald Reagan’s first chief of protocol and who, with her late husband, the ambassador and publisher Walter H. Annenberg, gave away billions to philanthropic causes. She was 91.

Not long after his inauguration in 1981, Reagan nominated Leonore “Lee” Annenberg as his chief of protocol; it was a position on the rank with ambassador, requiring confirmation by the Senate, which sailed through on a 96-to-0 vote and rolled up her Bill Blass sleeves. ”It’s the first paying job I’ve ever had,” she joked, but invited diplomats to dinners at her own expense.

Unorthodox, superbly rich and headstrong, she was never a popular figure inside the White House, and a picture of her curtsying to the visiting Prince Charles at Andrews Air Force Base was later splashed across the front pages of hundreds of newspapers, with some commentators said it was unseemly in the republic which gained its independence by overthrowing the same dynasty Lee was curtsying to.

What made matters worse was a repeated curtsy, this time by Diana Vreeland, the former editor of Vogue and a longtime friend of the Reagans, at the private dinner for Prince Charles at the White House. Nancy Reagan was photographed next to Vreeland unfazed and smiling. The press went wild.

The British Consulate’s insistence that this was the correct form while meeting royalty didn’t help either. A few weeks later, on July 17th, when she met Prince Charles again at the Royal Ballet’s 50th Anniversary gala in the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, Lee Anneberg decided not to curtsy again.

For the Annebergs, the last straw was a presidential trip to Egypt for the funeral of the assassinated president, Anwar El-Sadat. Normally, the protocol chief would have handled the arrangements, but they were taken over by the White House. Mrs. Annenberg resigned after 11 months in office, saying she wanted to spend more time with her husband.

No Botanists, surveyors and experts were consulted in choosing the site of Fordlandia, thereby creating the city in the middle of a swampland.

It was a grand, if eccentric, economic experiment, but by staging it in the Amazonian jungles, the American industrialist Henry Ford made a fatal error. In 1927, 65-year old tycoon sent two ships to scout the area. Ford wanted all of the parts he needed for his vehicles, but did not have the rubber; to break the Europeans monopoly on rubber, he made a deal with the Brazilian government to buy 2.5 million acres of Amazon land, roughly the size of Connecticut.

He planned not only to plant rubber trees, but also to mine the land for gold; drill for oil; and harvest timber. In addition, he hoped to bring his American-style sensibilities to the region: the production line; sanitation; buildings such as Churches, cottages; a hospital; a movie theater; and the idea of fair wages for hard work.White picket fences, movie screen, hospital, water tower, “main street,” three schools, church, hamburgers, square dancing lessons, etc etc.

What he didn’t bring was a an expertise in growing rubber trees, or an understanding of the Amazon and it’s people. They planted the trees so closely packed. Disease and insects plagued the land, and Ford had to relocate the city. Although he never actually bothered to visit the place, puritanical Henry Ford allowed no alcohol or tobacco in the city. The workers hated their unfamiliar lifestyles that they revolted and the Brazilian army had to be called it.

Later, an “Island of Innocence” 5 miles upstream which had bars, clubs, and brothels, was built. Henry Ford envisioned his own version of Gold Rush era San Francisco, but then synthetic rubber came along. Announcing curtly, “our war experience has taught us that synthetic rubber is superior to natural rubber for certain of our products,” Ford finally threw his towel in 1945. By this time, he had lost over $20 million in Brazil (modern equivalent: $200 million). Ford sold the land back to the Brazilian government for $250,000, a token sum. Not a single drop of rubber from Fordlandia made it to the states.

The Saarland Guards take down the Customs sign between two neighboring countries

Chancellor Adenauer in the Saarland

It has been nearly twenty years since the Berlin Wall fell and two Germanies were reunited. In our recounting of this post-war German history, we often forget at least one other important event: The 1957 Kleine Wiedervereinigung (or small reunification) between Germany and the Saarland.

To that point, the Saarland had been one of the world’s most hotly disputed areas. Occupied by the French during the Napoleonic Wars, the Saarland was where the first shots of the Franco-Prussian War were fired. After this, the Saar became German until WWI, after which Britain and France established a nominally independent occupation government, sanctioned by a 15 year League of Nations mandate.

When this expired in 1935, a plebiscite returned the Saarland to Germany, and twenty years later, in a similar referendum,  two thirds of the Saarland voted against autonomy and for the reunification with Germany. Thus on 1st January 1957, it was returned to German control for the second time in 22 years.

The Saarland joins as the tenth state in the Federal Republic. Visiting the state, which rolled out the red carpet for him, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer said he hoped Germany’s “lost” territories in the East might some day follow the example of the Saar. They did.

(Between 1945-1957, the Saarland had its own separate sports teams, and represented autonomously in the Olympics and other competitions. It was ruled by a Minister-President, who at the moment of its reunification was Adenauer’s close friend, Hubert Ney, above, directly behind Adenauer).

the Minister-President oversaw the last lowering of the independent Saarland’s flag

Norbert Sudhaus was allegedly the first

American Franker Shorter was the eventual winner

On September 10, 1972, German student Norbert Sudhaus wore a track uniform and joined the Olympic Marathon Race in Munich for the last quarter-mile as a gag. He entered the stadium and ran part way around the track. Thinking he was the winner, the crowd began cheering him. Officials then realized the hoax and ushered the jokester off the course. That didn’t help poor Frank Shorter, the American who eventually won the marathon but who entered the stadium to the sound of boos and catcalls (directed at Sudhaus) and the sight of a commotion far ahead of him. When asked what he thought of the guy who came in ahead of him, Shorter said, “What guy?”

Funnily enough, this was the third time in Olympic history that an American had won the marathon—and in none of those three instances did the winner enter the stadium first. In 1904, the winner Fred Lorz was disqualified when it was discovered that he covered most of the course by car, using low visibilities as a cover, and an American won the race. Four years later, the gold medal was defaulted to American Johnny Hayes after the first person to cross the line was disqualified for receiving a misplaced assistance from the officials. Only in 1984, Joan Benoit Samuelson would become the first American to cross the marathon line first and win.

An obscure first time governor when Richard Nixon chose him as his running mate, Spiro Agnew was one of America’s ‘Most Admired Men’ less than a year later. His role was that as the voice of the so-called “silent majority” and boy, he delivered one scathing one criticism after another on political opponents, especially journalists and anti-war activists. His unusual, often alliterative epithets (joint products of Angrew and two White House speechwriters William Safire and Pat Buchanan) included such gems as “pusillanimous pussyfooters”, “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history” and “an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.”

The last was directed towards the press corps. Another phrase, also directed towards the media, ”nattering nabobs of negativism” was especially enduring. First used during Agnew’s address to the California Republican state convention in San Diego on September 11, 1970, the phrase was coined by William Safire, who died earlier this month at the age of 79 after a legendary career at the New York Times.

There Safire was the first regular conservative commentator for the liberal newspaper, and was beloved even by liberals for his witty “On Language” column where he playfully skewered language fumblers from across the political spectrum. Safire, a college dropout, was a longtime Republican operative; he set up the famous Nixon-Khrushchev ‘kitchen debate’ in Moscow, won the Pulitzer Prize for his columns, and never quailed from voicing strong opinions; one of his last controversial columns called Hillary Clinton a “congenital liar.”

In the end, William Safire may be remembered for “nattering nabobs of negativism”, and his “rules for writers”: Remember to never split an infinitive. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. Avoid clichés like the plague. And don’t overuse exclamation marks!!

(Above, Agnew, Safire, Buchanan, and other members of the Nixon speechwriting team on a flight to a campaign stop in 1972).

Their relationship is on the rocks, and Maggie is with the Stones. By their sixth anniversary, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and wife Margaret Trudeau had decided to go their separate ways. Thirty years younger than the PM and a hippie free spirit, Maggie Trudeau was unhappy about her husband’s constant work-related absences and was forced to raise her three young sons largely by herself.

Bipolar and depressed, Margaret smuggled drugs in the prime minister’s luggage and tore apart a tapestry in the prime minister’s official residence in Ottawa, but the public learnt about this dramatic fashion, when Maggie is spotted at a Rolling Stones concert at Toronto’s El Mocambo club. She later invites them back to her hotel room. Even before she finally separated from her allegedly gay husband in 1977, she frequented Studio 54 nightclub in New York City and the photos like the one above were  featured on many front pages. She was also associated with Rolling Stone’s Mick Jagger and U.S. Senator, Ted Kennedy.

In October 1884, forty-one astronomers and representatives from 25 countries gathered in Washington D.C. for the International Meridian Conference to recommend a common prime meridian for geographical and nautical charts that would be acceptable to all parties concerned. It was 125 years ago this week.

By the end of the difficult summit, which dragged on until “smoke came out”, Greenwich, UK had won the prize of longitude 0º by a vote of 22 to one, with only San Domingo against and France and Brazil abstaining. One of the main reasons for British victory over key rivals Washington, Berlin and Paris, was that 72% of the world’s shipping already depended on sea charts that used Greenwich as the Prime Meridian. It was also convenient that Greenwich’s location insured that the 180º meridian, where formally the date line should be located, mostly passed over water.

The International Date Line, however, was never defined by any international treaty, conference, law or agreement. Only in the early 20th-century, the mapmakers created it based on the recommendations of the hydrographic departments of the British and the American Navies. The original international dateline was almost straight, but in 1921, when the Swedish-Canadian polar explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962) tried to claim the Russian lands east of the dateline for Canada, the dateline was switched to prevent further disputes.

Choosing time zones had been a great matter of controversies since. The Communists in China reverted an earlier system of having five time zones for a single Beijing standard time, an anomaly that created three and half hour time difference across Chinese-Afghan border. Equally large India snubbed its former rulers by choosing to be +0530 GMT (“turn your watch upside down if you’re in the UK, and that’s the time in India”, the saying goes) and Nepal uniquely had +0445 GMT, a visage of an absolutist past. Until 1995, Kiribati, which straddled the International Date Line (half of its islands were a day ahead of the others), and its change in 1995 created a dent on the date line.

Ideally, there would be 24 time zones across the world, but at the last count there were 39.

The official portraits of French officials are an integral part of a long tradition. In Dans Le Portrait du roi (1981), Louis Marin analyzes the practices of representation of power under Louis XIV, whose celebrated portrait by Rigaud provides a model to be imitated by many rulers.

The first President of the Republic to adopt the photographic portrait is Adolphe Thiers in 1871; with full dress, a neutral background, a classical pose, the formal looking president rests his hand on a stack of books. His successor, René Coty, was the only president during the Fourth Republic to smile.

With the portrait of Charles de Gaulle, color and modernity arrived, but he revived the portraiture’s traditionalist roots too. His choice of the library inside the Elysees Palace also started a tradition followed by most presidents of the Fifth Republic. But not Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. VGE’s 1974 photo, taken by Jacques-Henri Lartigue, is now in the MoMA in New York. It was the first time that the portrait of French head of state is taken by a renowned artist. When d’Estaing asked Lartigue, Lartigue replied that he was not an official photographer; d’Estaing stated that was why he wanted Lartigue to take his portrait.

Giscard definitely set the bar high; even France’s only socialist president Francois Mitterrand, who campaigned on “quiet strength”, couldn’t resist engaging a high-profile photographer. In his case, it was the celebrated Gisele Freund, the intellectual portraitist of many great writers of the 1930s. Socialist and minimalist in appearance, the photo did away with the most conspicuous trappings of the exalted office. Mitterrand poses in an intellectual manner as if he too belonged to those artisans of the 30s, a book of Montaigne’s Essays lay open on his lap.

Jacques Chirac took the photo session outside. Relaxed looking president definitely looked more distant than his predecessors in this photo by Bettina Rheims. The current president Nicholas Sarkozy chose relatively unknown photographer Philippe Warrin (better known for his paparazzi work) but he brought back the grandeur of the office unseen since the days of Charles de Gaulle. The photo was criticized for imitating the American official portrait styles; it is the first official portrait of a French president with a European Union flag; the stars of the European flag with the stripes of the French flag created a faux American flag, many Frenchmen complained.

For many years, he was a Communist dictator the West could agree with: he first decade in power was marked by an open policy towards the West, and independence from the Soviet Union’s policies. Nicolae Ceausescu presented himself as a reforming communist in his highly publicized (and eccentric, of which more will be said later) state visits to the US, France, UK and Spain. Under him, Romania was the first European communist state to recognize West Germany, the first to join the International Monetary Fund, and the first to receive a US President (Nixon in 1973).

Above was the picture of Ceausescu together with French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing in Bucharest. When when Ceausescu’s Communist Party officials saw the topmost photo, they were horrified to find out that not only did their revered leader appear short compared to towering d’Estaing, but Giscard was also wearing a hat. Ceausescu, who was carrying his, looked like he was begging. The images were doctored for the official party daily, adding a few extra centimetres to Ceausescu and putting a hat on his head. Except no one remember to airbrush out the hat in his hands. When the mistake was spotted, police were sent across the country charged with securing every copy of the paper and its front-page image of the dictator with two hats. (Ceausescu like many dicators was touchy about his height. At group portrait sessions of the communist parties, the members had to respect a certain hierarchy and no one of the group was allowed to surpass Ceausescu in height. They either had to knee or the photos had to be tempered).

Such was a chaotic Romania under Ceausescu.  In 1978, he ordered a new entrance to metro filled up within twelve hours after it was dug just to have a better background for one of his speeches. Although he was feted from the White House to China’s Great Hall of the People, but Ceausescu was so paranoid that foreigners would poison his clothes that he started wearing only clothes that had been under surveillance in a specially constructed warehouse, and each item of clothing would be worn only once, and then burned. To Buckingham Palace, he took his own sheets, and paranoid that he would catch a fatal disease from shaking hands, he washed his hands with alcohol after shaking Queen Elizabeth’s hand.

Like Caligula before him, he made his black Labrador Corbu a colonel in the Romanian Army. Corbu was driven through Bucharest in a limousine; it had its own motorcade, and mansion. The dog being a present from British Liberal Party leader David Steel, the Romanian ambassador in London was under official orders to go to Sainsbury’s every week to buy British dog biscuits which were then sent back in the diplomatic bag.

Perhaps the crowning eccentricity of Ceausescu was his idea to build the Palace of the Parliament, the world’s largest, most expensive and heaviest administrative building. The old city of Bucharest was lain waste by the construction of this and the Boulevard of Socialist Victory leading to the Parliament. Both were never finished. He ordered that typewriters be registered, noting that they were in possession of citizens who pose a “danger to public order or state security”.

Ceauşescu’s government was overthrown in a December 1989 military coup, and he was shot following a televised two-hour session by a kangaroo court, ending two decades of his farcical rule.

So there is this friend who first gave me an idea: using Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” as a template to see how many of these culturally significant events that I have already covered in writing this blog. Joel’s song, and subsequent music video which follows an American middle-class couple during tumultuous social times was a rebuttal to the criticism of Baby Boomer generation. In the video, during each chorus, Joel beats on a table while in the background, appropriately for this blog, famous photographs are burnt.

So here is the song:

Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray, South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio

Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television, North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe

Rosenbergs, H-Bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom, Brando, “The King and I”, and “The Catcher in the Rye“

Eisenhower, vaccine, England’s got a new queen, Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye

CHORUS

Josef Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev, Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc

Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, dacron, Dien Bien Phu and “Rock Around the Clock”

Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn’s got a winning team, Davy Crockett, “Peter Pan”, Elvis Presley, Disneyland

Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev, Princess Grace, “Peyton Place”, trouble in the Suez

CHORUS

Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac, Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, “Bridge on the River Kwai”

Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball, Starkweather, homicide, children of thalidomide

Buddy Holly, “Ben-Hur”, space monkey, Mafia, hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no go

U2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy, Chubby Checker, “Psycho”, Belgians in the Congo

CHORUS

Hemingway, Eichmann, “Stranger in a Strange Land”, Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs Invasion

“Lawrence of Arabia”, British Beatlemania, Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson

Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex, JFK, blown away, what else do I have to say

CHORUS

Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon, back again, Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock

Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline, Ayatollolah’s in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan

“Wheel of Fortune” , Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide, Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, Crack, Bernie Goetz

Hypodermics on the shore, China’s under martial law, Rock and Roller Cola Wars, I can’t take it anymore

CHORUS