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The article discusses the important role of U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird in U.S. President Richard Nixon's Vietnamization, a policy to end the country's involvement in the Vietnam War while improving South Vietnamese military capabilities, during his term in office from 1969 to 1973. It explores the origin of the strategy which defined the country's exit from Vietnam. It also looks at the influence Laird had on Nixon in 1969 and his battle with Kissinger over the direction of the strategy.

The Woodstock Music and Art Fair in August 1969 was an iconic moment of the 1960s for a generation of young people. However, coverage of the breaking story by major newspapers and magazines did not emphasize the event's cultural significance, focusing instead on crowd size and related logistical problems and public safety issues. This study of breaking coverage by six daily newspapers and three magazines examines how prominently the story was displayed, the sources who were quoted, and to what extent the cultural angle was reported. A key finding was that each publication relied mostly on official sources and consulted few young festival attendees for their perspective. The breaking coverage thus focused on the negative aspects of the massive assembly, overlooking the cultural perspective that has come to characterize the event in history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The immediate subject of James Boggs's The American Revolution is the far-reaching transformation of American industry through automation and cybernetic command. He offers a political reading of these new forces of production that greatly diminished the power of industrial workers on the shop floor and in U.S. politics more generally during the post-World War II period. In light of the new social and economic terrain of postindustrial society, Boggs urges a rethinking of leftist revolution. In this essay, I excavate certain aspects of Boggs's formative critique of automation and its implications for working-class life and politics and consider how well his analysis of the social contradictions produced under postindustrialism anticipates the emergence of the New Right. In contrast to Cold War liberals and latter-day purveyors of underclass rhetoric who emphasize alleged cultural dysfunction to explain inequality, Boggs saw the new urban poor, those who face chronic unemployment under automation, as potential agents of social change and developed a novel concept of cultural revolution whereby the 'classless society' could be achieved through a revolution in values rather than the pursuit of statist transition. Cooperatively organized production might eliminate material need, deliver more leisure time, and enable a freer, more socially just order than that available under liberal capitalism. For Boggs, this was the profound, cultural challenge facing Americans under postindustrialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapidity with which news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy reached virtually every adult in the United States is an impressive demonstration of the influence of the modern news media. Here is a study of the diffusion of the news in a northern California city. Generally, the media are able to prepare for extraordinary events, as with national election results or manned space flights. In such situations, the predominant mode of diffusion of information is from the mass media directly to the public, and then into interpersonal channels. Study of the initial diffusion of knowledge about the assassination of President Kennedy and subsequent use of mass media and interpersonal communication channels does more than replicate previous studies. First, there is the event itself. Very few events disrupt normal patterns of daily activity, change work schedules, alter weekend plans, and bring an entire nation, save the mass media, to a slow walk. The study of an event that elicits such widespread and immediate responses yields valuable insights into individual reactions to perceived stress or crisis.