1956
Khrushchev's secret speech denounces Stalin
In a closed session of the Soviet Communist Party Congress, Nikita Khrushchev spent four hours listing Stalin's crimes: the purges, the torture, the cult of personality, the wartime blunders. The text leaked and electrified the world. Communists in Warsaw and Budapest began to imagine reform. Mao, hearing, was disturbed; de-Stalinization would complicate his own cult of personality.
Suez Crisis
After Egypt's Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, Britain, France, and Israel secretly agreed on an invasion to seize it back. Israeli paratroopers dropped into Sinai; Anglo-French bombers hit Egyptian airfields. Eisenhower, furious at not being consulted and fearing Soviet intervention, forced a humiliating withdrawal. The British Empire had been publicly exposed as no longer a first-rank power.
Elvis meets Sullivan
Ed Sullivan, after vowing never to have him on, finally booked Elvis Presley for three appearances on his Sunday night variety show. Sixty million Americans watched Presley swivel his hips; the cameras were asked to show him only from the waist up. Parents were horrified. Teenagers were not. Rock and roll had entered the living room.
Hungarian Uprising
Budapest students toppled a giant statue of Stalin and dragged it through the streets. Within days a reformist government had declared neutrality and begun to leave the Warsaw Pact. The Soviets sent tanks. For a week the Hungarians fought them with Molotov cocktails. Twenty-five hundred died; two hundred thousand fled west. Imre Nagy was hanged.
First transatlantic phone cable
The TAT-1 cable was laid across the Atlantic seabed between Scotland and Newfoundland, allowing thirty-six simultaneous telephone calls between the United States and Europe for the first time. Before this, transatlantic calls had gone by high-frequency radio, often inaudibly. The cable made reliable voice contact possible between continents. Global communication had acquired its first high-capacity wire.
Jackson Pollock dies drunk
The American abstract painter, who had made pouring and dripping look like the only honest thing left to do with a canvas, drove his convertible into a tree on Long Island at high speed, killing himself and a passenger. He was forty-four. The reputations of his canvases soared; abstract expressionism found its tragic hero.