Prophets and Losses

This is the biggest fool thing we have ever done. The atomic bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives. --Admiral William D. Leahy in 1945

Such are the hazards of prophecy. Yet at the start of every decade, magazines and newspapers march into print with predictions.* Sometimes, as James E. Bylin demonstrated in the Wall Street Journal last week, they make better reading at the end of the decade. Some forecasts for the '60s exhumed by Bylin:

> Historian Crane Brinton, in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, predicted by 1970--decidedly prematurely --the start of "plain, unblushing repression of much that our Freudian age regards as irrepressible. Indeed a partial return to public and private Victorian decencies."

> Newsweek, which devoted an entire issue to the '60s, promised "the tourist who really wants to get away from it all--safaris in Viet Nam." Alaska, Newsweek foresaw, would grow in population "from 225,000 to 500,000" (present population: 281,000). And Hollywood "will hold its own" against television with "fewer and more spectacular films," despite such advances as "wall-size screens" and "various kinds of pay-TV."

> LIFE, leaping ahead to 1975, prophesied: "The family helicopter will be as attainable as the family convertible is today." Other LIFE forecasts that have another five years in which to come true: air pollution will be eliminated; mail will be whisked round the world by rocket; autos will be banned from downtown streets; and steamship passage to Europe will be as little as $50.

* As did TIME two weeks ago about the '70s.

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