There was some heart, perhaps: a smiling little man became pope, and caught the imaginations of more than a few scattered millions. Then he, too, died, and life returned to what passes for normal.
Fall carries with it the charm, if that is the word, of politics. Great names are made and broken in October and November, and the making and the breaking is usually enough to banish the doldrums of summer. Certainly the process produces surprises. If apathy and doldrums still lingered in late September, Ed King banished them.
Primary night brought The Duke, the strongman hero of the winter blizzard, up against the reality of his own spectacular lack of popularity. The mellow man in the crew-neck sweater, the man who had looked so great in February, had come a cropper in November, for the simple fact that he was not a likeable man. Dukakis could not campaign well, and Ed King did. King also had the issue.
The issue was tax cuts, stolen from the newspapers out in California, where they lumped it under the unlikely name of Proposition 13. King took the issue and played it like a fine instrument, caressing it and keeping it polished, and he carried it out of the September primary with a mandate to reverse the trend in government toward human services and other "wastes." The clenched fists were raised and a throaty roar went up when Ed King beat the Duke, because his people knew the issue could not lose.
And so the politicians got to work. A lot of them showed up in Cambridge for the dedication of the Kennedy School of Government--although Jimmy Carter and Tip O'Neill were conspicuous by their absence. There was a flash of April anger, as protesters denounced the naming of the school's library after an industrialist who had made his fortune in the South African gold trade. Mark Smith, a black senior, rose to address the crowd on the issue, and he spoke with power and elegance. The crowd applauded and left, to don their tuxes and gowns for the formal ball that night. The politicians went back to their trade.
November brought the inevitable: Ed King's coronation, and the defeat of Ed Brooke, the senator whose personal life had become a continuing feature on the Herald-American's front page. The fists were raised again at King headquarters, the frightening roar resounded, and the circus was over.
The real world faded into the background after that. Jimmy Carter managed to penetrate once in a while, with some new advance or retreat from the principles of Camp David that he and Time magazine had so carefully formulated; largely, however, the concerns of the campus became internal ones. Salmonella ravaged, or at least attempted to ravage, a good number of Houses, and conversation turned to acronyms: CRR, ACSR, HRDC. Life seemed simple.
But of course it isn't, and so of course the headlines began screaming again soon enough: Guyana, Leo Ryan, Jim Jones. Then George Moscone, and sanity and structure gave way to the theater of the absurd. Nothing profound, naturally--simply a reminder that the neat little island remains surrounded by a world that knows and cares little about the gentilities of life in Cambridge.
And so the things have ended, closing out a tough year. Nineteen-seventy-eight wound up producing the Core and a student government, a new governor and two new popes, the ballyhooed hope in the Mideast and the equally ballyhooed horror in South America. And of course the snow--soft and gentle, splendid in its beauty as in its potentially horrible strength