History Comes to Life: Biography With Mike Wallace- The Amazing Grace Kelly, in 1963

Source: History Comes To Life

Source: This piece was originally posted at The Daily Review

I don’t know of a another women where the name and word Grace better fits than Grace Kelley. Their parents named her perfectly and I’m not sure there’s a women who looks more like a princess than Grace Kelly. Perhaps Queen Noor of Jordan, who I believe at least is a better looking Goddess than Grace, looks more like a princess. The only word I have for Grace Kelly is more. I wish she was in Hollywood longer and did more films and perhaps worked in television where there would have been so much great work for her in either. And I wish she had lived longer, because similar to Diana Dors, (speaking of goddess’ and princess’s) they both died in their early fifties. Two Hollywood Goddess’s from the Silent Generation, both dying in their early fifties and both women by most accounts living responsible lives. And not big consumers of alcohol and other drugs.

Grace, was a great actress, with a great face, great voice, very charming, good sense of humor. Never looks more than half her age with one of the sweetest baby-faces and voices you would ever see and hear. Who was in great Alfred Hitchcock movies like To Catch a Thief and Rear Window. Where she was the lead actress in both movies where when you see her in those movies it was hard to concentrate on anyone else. Because she was so sweet and well, graceful and just grabbed your attention and made it difficult for you to think about anything else. In the chase scene in To Catch a Thief where she’s driving with Cary Grant, she looks like a teenage girl going out for a drive with her daddy. That is how sweet she always was and never did anything to suggest she wasn’t that sweet in real-life and not just fooling people with her appearance.

Grace Kelly, not the sexiest actress of all-time and not very sexy compared with a lot of other Hollywood Goddess’s and I believe, because she had a tendency to come off as a kid, because she was so adorable. But other than Elizabeth Taylor I believe Grace is the best actress of her generation. Someone who would have remained a star through the 1960s and even longer than that had she simply wanted that. But I guess it is hard to turn down the opportunity to be a European princess especially in a beautiful country like Monaco. And again she was a women who looked like a princess and had the personality to match. She was someone of many talents including that as an actress and I wish she just had done that a lot longer.

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Hezakya Mixologist: CBS News Special Report- Black Power/White Black Lash, From 1966

Black Panthers

This post was originally posted at The New Democrat Plus

To me at least Black Power wasn’t one movement, but a larger movement with several different sub-divisions. You had the more socialist if not Marxist revolutionary Black Panthers on the Far-Left with their own militia. You had Malcolm X and his movement that was sort of in the middle. That was truly about freedom and individualism for the African-American community and for them to be free to live their own lives. And you had the more social democratic pacifist movement led by Martin Luther King and his organization as well. But all of these groups essentially had similar if not the same goals, but with different tactics in how to accomplish those goals.

All three of these groups wanted power for the entire African-American community. That would not longer be forced to live under poverty, racism and have to be second-class citizens to Caucasian-Americans. I think one of the tragedies of Malcolm X being murdered in 1965 is that he and his movement I believe would’ve been a bumper between the Black Panthers and the MLK group. And perhaps without the Malcolm X being murdered maybe we don’t see the race riots that we did in 1965 and 66. We’ll never know that, but he was moderating before he was murdered in 1965 and maybe we would’ve seen that.

Black Power for the most part wasn’t about having African-Americans throwing the Caucasian community out of power in the 1960s and overthrowing the U.S. Government. It was about empowering an entire community of Americans to be able to live in their own freedom as well. And no longer forced to live under anyone else’s authority. The Black Panthers might have had more extreme leftist goals of overthrowing and entire country. But generally speaking the people in Black Power movement was about empowering African-Americans. And only using violence when it was used against them.

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All David Letterman: Video: CBS’s The Late Show: Mike Wallace on Things in 1988

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This post was originally posted at The New Democrat on WordPress

As far as the 1988 vice presidential debate between Senator Lloyd Bentsen and Dan Quayle, people who believe Dan Quayle won that debate and would find him to be an acceptable Vice President and more important President of the United States as a result, are the same people who fail in school and have to repeat grades and courses. People who don’t do their homework. The same people who voted for George W. Bush as for President twice and now think he was a bad President. “Damn! If I only did my homework!”

Not saying Dan Quayle is a dumb man. I don’t think he was a dumb U.S. Representative or Senator in Congress or a dumb Vice President even. From what I heard he was a solid Vice President for President George H.W. Bush and President Bush kept him busy, but behind the scenes so he couldn’t make any big public mistakes, like the potato incident in 1991 or 92. But not being dumb is not a qualification for being Vice President or President of the Untied States. That is the bare-minimum to serving in those roles.

I think Dan Quayle had he stayed in the U.S. Senate and continued to study and do his homework, would’ve turned out to be a fine Senator and member of Congress. There are plenty of people who graduate college and never become famous. And why is that, because even though they are fairly intelligent, there’s nothing really impressive about them, at least upstairs. And they end up selling insurance, driving trucks, perhaps working at a small law firm. Chasing accidents and looking to score money from bogus accident cases.

As far as David Letterman not doing Diane Sawyer on 60 Minutes, wait that didn’t some out right. Actually it came out perfectly and I’ll let the readers figure out what I mean by this. But as far Dave not being interviewed by Diane, to clean this up a little bit, Diane was probably too distracting for him. To cute and sweet and he would’ve ended up staring at her face in some trance as a result.

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CBS News: Mike Wallace- ‘The Homosexuals (1967)’

Source:CBS News– 1967 documentary about homosexuality.

Source:The Daily Journal  

“”It’s been nearly 50 years since CBS News first took on the subject of gay rights. It was in a documentary. You’ll recognize the host, Mike Wallace, but you won’t recognize your country.

“Most Americans are repelled by the mere notion of homosexuality,” reported Wallace in the documentary. “A CBS poll shows two out of three Americans look on homosexuality with disgust, discomfort, or fear.”

The year was 1967 and whoever named the program cut straight to the chase: “CBS Reports: The Homesexuals.”

From CBS News

“The Homosexuals” is a 1967 episode of the documentary television series CBS Reports. The hour-long broadcast featured a discussion of a number of topics related to homosexuality and homosexuals. Mike Wallace anchored the episode, which aired on March 7, 1967. Although this was the first network documentary dealing with the topic of homosexuality, it was not the first televised in the United States. That was The Rejected, produced and aired in 1961 on KQED, a public television station out of San Francisco.Three years in the making, “The Homosexuals” went through two producers and multiple revisions. The episode included interviews with several gay men, psychiatrists, legal experts and cultural critics, interspersed with footage of a gay bar and a police sex sting. “The Homosexuals” garnered mixed critical response.”

Source:Kim Smythe– 1967 documentary about CBS News.

From Kim Smythe 

“Veteran journalist Mike Wallace, who died Saturday at age 93, had many claims to fame and one credit that might be considered a claim to infamy — his participation in the sensationalistic 1960s documentary The Homosexuals.

Wallace would later express regret about the tone of the documentary, which aired only once, March 7, 1967, on CBS. Hosted and narrated by Wallace, it characterized gay men as promiscuous and lonely, given to fleeting, anonymous sexual encounters. It acknowledged the discrimination they faced, but with “no sense of righteous indignation” about that, the journal Film Threat once noted. The program largely ignored lesbians. Still, it marked a breakthrough in gay visibility on television.

“Years after the broadcast, Mike Wallace would admit regret that The Homosexuals was not more balanced and sympathetic in its focus,” according to the Film Threat article. “In 1995, Wallace made a surprise appearance at New York’s Lighthouse Cinema, which was showing The Homosexuals as part of a Gay Pride line-up. The audience treated Wallace with deep respect and the veteran newsman hosted an impromptu Q&A session after the film was screened.”

Source:The Advocate– from Mike Wallace’s 1967 CBS News documentary about homosexuality.

From The Advocate

If you look at this documentary especially by the standards and culture of today, Mike Wallace’s 1967 documentary about homosexuality looks very homophobic. It wouldn’t be made today at least the way it was written and the people that were interviewed, especially Christian-Right folks who think that homosexuality should be a crime and we should go back to Beaver Cleaver’s and Ozzie and Harriet’s 1950s America. And the Far-Left political correctness movement would be the hell out it talking about how bigoted the documentary is.

But to state the obvious: 1967 is not 2012. The view that homosexuality was a crime and a sin was actually mainstream even in the late 1960s. And if you had no issues with gays and homosexuality back then and believed gays should be treated equally as straights, you would be considered a radical back then.

In my personal opinion and I believe I’m part of a solid majority today in 2012, gays are entitled to the same legal and constitutional rights and responsibilities as straights, just as I believe that ethnic and racial minorities have the same rights and responsibilities as European-Americans and even Anglo-Saxons. But if I was around in 1967 with those same views, I would be the radical. And people who are considered Far-Rightists today, would be part of the mainstream when it comes to American public opinion and culture.

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