Retro Raunch Revisit

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the publication debut of GALLERY magazine (1972). Famous lawyer F. Lee Bailey was a co-publisher and after the first issue too closely resembled PLAYBOY, Hugh Hefner sent a cease & desist letter resulting in GALLERY having to change its layout. With money problems right off the bat, legal battles in the US Supreme Court over obscenity, and wanting to devote more time to his passionate hobby (his helicopter company), Bailey left the magazine by year's end.


NOVEMBER 1972 ON THE WORLD STAGE President Richard Nixon has won an overwhelming Republican victory in the US Presidential elections for a second term in the White House. In a landslide, he took 61% of the popular vote (47,168,710 votes), compared with 38% (29,173,222 votes) for his Democrat rival Senator George McGovern. He won 521 (of 537) electoral college votes and carried 49 states while McGovern took just 17 votes and won only two states, Massachusetts and the predominantly black district of Washington,D.C. However, Nixon's Republican party lost ground in the Senate and fell short of gaining control of the House of Representatives. In total, the Democrats now control 57 of the 100 seats in the Senate while in the House of Representatives, the Republicans increased their seats from 179 to 191 which is still short of the Democrats with 243 (down 13). Independents gained only a single seat. Senator McGovern delivered his concession speech from his home town of Sioux Falls in South Dakota where he spoke of his desire to see an end to the war in Vietnam saying "we will press on with this effort until all the bloodshed, all the sorrow has ended once and for all." The President's victory -- by one of the largest margins in American history -- had been widely predicted by political correspondents. McGovern had become regarded as a radical as he advocated higher taxes, and supported what became known as the "three A's" (abortion, acid and amnesty). He supported cannabis reform law, an amnesty for those who dodged the draft to avoid military service in Vietnam, and a reduction of the restrictions on abortion. But the Senator's views were unpopular with the largely conservative voting population that saw him also misjudge the public's mood on various issues like the ever-contentious Vietnam war. When Nixon announced peace was at hand, McGovern complained it should have been made earlier. For his part, Nixon kept a very low profile during the campaign, standing by his record and in particular, his achievements in foreign policy where his popularity was boosted by his historic visit to China in February 1972, which led to the restoration of Sino-US diplomatic links as a co-part of "Détente" which was the reducing of strained foreign relations. Later in May, he also agreed to a first strategic arms limitation treaty with Moscow, known as SALT in which negotiations for the talks began back in November 1969 in Helsinki,Finalnd, and whose aim is to freeze the number of ballistic missile launch sites. In the immediate aftermath of the election, the only sections of the population who remained behind the Democrats were the under-privileged, black voters & other racial minorities -- but even among these groups, the Republicans increased their share of the vote based very much on campaign promises of a platform seeking to improve the lives of citizens one & all.