Iowa Almanac
Iowa Almanac -- Friday, July 26, 2024
Fail safe, more from the Iowa Almanac in a moment! Enough this summer with an Iowa Soybean Association Farmer membership powered by the Soybean Check-On. Access timely industry info, engage in on-farm research, and join producer programs all designed to support your operations' unique needs. Activate or confirm your membership before August 31st and be entered to win one of many unique prizes, including a solo stove. Visit iasoybeans.com today to learn more! The Iowa Soybean Association, driven to deliver for Iowa's nearly 37,000 soybean farmers. Eugene Burdick was born in Sheldon in Northwest Iowa in 1918. He and his family moved to California when he was a boy, and he wound up attending Stanford University. After earning a PhD from Oxford, he worked as a professor in the Political Science Department of the University of California, Berkeley. His talent at researching the most urgent problems of our civic culture led to him writing a series of scholarly articles, which gained him recognition throughout the world. But it was when he turned those talents toward fictionalized books and movies that he reached an even wider audience. Among his best-known books were 1958's The Ugly American and FailSafe, written in 1962. Both became Book of the Month Club selections and then major motion pictures. Audiences became concerned, some for the first time, about the basic problems of foreign policy and national defense. FailSafe starred Henry Fonda and Walter Matthau and described how Cold War tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States led to an accidental thermonuclear first strike after a mistake sent a group of U.S. bombers to bomb Moscow. The movie was released in 1964. A year later, on July 26, 1965, Burdick died suddenly from a heart attack while playing tennis. Despite living with diabetes and a chronic heart condition, Burdick was a man who could not say no, writing, traveling, competing in sports and teaching despite failing health. Many Americans first learned of the gravity of global relations when reading books or seeing movies based on the work of Iowa native Eugene Burdick, who died at age 46, on this date in 1965. And that's Iowa Almanac for July 26, follow us on Twitter @IowaAlmanac. Until Monday, I'm Jeff Stein.