1968 - Mark Kurlansky [13]
“The big cliffhanger for 1968,” wrote Bernadine Morris in The New York Times, “is whether hemlines, officially poised above the knees for several seasons, are ready to take a plunge of a foot or so to calf level.” A story circulating in January that the Federal Housing Administration had issued a wordy directive to employees stating that wearing miniskirts in cold weather would lead to a buildup of fat molecules on the legs turned out to be a hoax.
However, it was true that the British government was losing tax revenue on miniskirts. The 12.5 percent sales tax charged on skirts, in order to exempt children’s clothing, specified that only skirts that measured twenty-four inches waist to hem were taxable. The fashionable women’s skirt length in Britain in the winter of 1968 was between thirteen and twenty inches.
But the leading fashion concept for 1968 was that there were no limits or taboos. Conformity was out of fashion, and writers were predicting a continuing trend toward a liberating diversity in what people could wear.
It was an important year for women, not because of skirt lengths but because of events such as Muriel Siebert announcing on January 1 that she had become the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange in its 175-year history. Seibert, a thirty-eight-year-old blond woman from Cleveland known to her friends as Mickey, had decided to ignore the advice of numerous men in the financial world that it would be wiser to let a man buy the seat. “It was last Thursday,” she said. “The board of governors approved my membership. I went to the exchange and handed over a check covering the balance of the $445,000 seat purchase plus the $7,515 initiation fee. I walked outside and bought three bottles of French champagne for the people in my office. I still couldn’t believe it was me. I was walking on cloud nine.”
It seemed little would be without controversy this year. The good news might have been that Christiaan Barnard of the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, had successfully transplanted the heart of a twenty-four-year-old into Philip Blaiberg, a fifty-eight-year-old dentist. This was the third heart transplant, the second by Barnard but the first that medical science regarded as successful. Barnard started 1968 and spent much of the year as an international celebrity, signing autographs, giving interviews with his easy smile and quotable statements, which from the outset in January was frowned upon by his profession. Barnard pointed out that despite his sudden fame he still earned only his $8,500 yearly salary. But there were also doubts about his feat. A German doctor called it a crime. A New York biologist, apparently confusing doctors with lawyers, said that he should be “disbarred for life.” Three distinguished American cardiologists called for a moratorium on heart transplants, which Barnard immediately said he would ignore.
In theory, the operation involves two doomed patients. One gives up his heart and dies but would have died in any event; the other is saved. But some doctors and laymen wondered if doctors should be deciding who is doomed. Shouldn’t everyone hope for a miracle? And how is it decided who receives a new heart? Were doctors now making godlike decisions? The controversy was not helped by Barnard, who said in an interview in Paris Match, “Obviously, if I had to choose between two patients in the same need and one was a congenital idiot and one a mathematics genius, I would pick the latter.” Controversy was also fueled by the fact that Barnard came from South Africa, the increasingly stigmatized land of apartheid, and that he had saved a white man by removing a black man’s heart and implanting it in him. Such an irony was not likely to be overlooked in a year like this.
Ever since Fidel Castro’s 1959 New Year’s victory, the beginning of every year has