Two big stories happened 41 years ago today. One would affect the nation’s politics for decades to come. But it didn’t lead the front page of the next day’s Omaha World-Herald (or very many morning newspapers, I suspect).
Note the Roe vs. Wade story squeezed under a two-column headline off to the left, getting a tiny fraction of the space devoted to the death of former President Lyndon B. Johnson.
I’d be interested to know how many morning newspapers made a similar call that day. The story by Eileen Wirth (now chair of the Creighton University Journalism Department) says the initial reaction in Nebraska was a promise to keep their abortion laws as strict as the Supreme Court ruling allowed. (I’ll send Eileen a link to the story and invite her to add any memories of that story and that paper.)
Update: See Eileen’s response toward the end of this post.
But I doubt any of her sources or the editors who downplayed the story had any notion that we’d still be fighting about Roe vs. Wade in our fifth decade after that ruling.
