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In The January 1965 issue of this Journal we published ‘Halloween, the 50-megaton bomb, and the Cuban crisis’. We there suggested that the Halloween myth of the return of the dead had been acted out in 1961, we showed the need to appease the dead before they can be driven away, lest they avenge themselves in physical ways. And we remarked: ‘The ancestors’ ghosts, according to the myth, were driven away for a year only; they will come back on next Halloween, as they did at Halloween 1962.'
On Halloween 1963 the world was confronted with a United States-Soviet clash and a showdown at Berlin. Also with a call for war in Algeria, which became an undeclared border war. Then the New York Herald Tribune of 12 October 1963 spoke of ‘the treacherous October tidings pushing the United States and Russia in an eyeball confrontation that could lead to conflict’.
On 23 October 1963 the same New York Herald Tribune had the following heading: ‘On anniversary of missiles crisis gun play on high seas of Cuba’. The same issue contained a cartoon where President Kennedy was riding through the sky on a broom, clad as a witch.
On 1 November 1963 the civil-war shooting started in Saigon.
On Halloween 1964 the world was confronted with what the New York Herald Tribune of 16 October 1964 called ‘Earthquake in the Kremlin’, namely Khrushchev's dethronement which occurred on 15 October. ‘The world can derive no comfort from Khrushchev's dethronement’, wrote the New York Herald Tribune. ‘If, as seems virtually certain, Moscow now takes a tighter grasp on the reins of world Communism, if it seeks to patch up its difference with Mao Tse-tung, it may well fail… Yet dangers lie in the struggles as well as in the prospects of success for a reversion to Stalinism’, i.e. for a reversion to appeasement of the ancestor. On 16 October the New York World Telegram wrote: ‘With nuclear war hanging in the balance, at least the next few months of adjustment to a new power in Russia will be a period of tension in