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    EDITOR'S NOTE-The material below the dash is for those who
wish a recap of the Top 10 stories of 1972.
Top 10 of 1972 310 Six Takes Total 1,800
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
    President Nixon's visit to China last February has been voted
the top news story of 1972 by editors and news directors of
Associated Press member newspapers and radio and television
stations.
    Nixon called the seven-day visit ''the week that changed
the world.'' He conferred with Chairman Mao Tse-tung and Premier
Chou En-Lai and broke a 22-year vacuum in Sino-American relations.
    The other top news stories of the year selected in the AP
poll were:
    2 - The attempted assassination of Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace
as he campaigned for the presidency.
    3 - Terror at the summer Olympics.
    4 - President Nixon's re-election.
    5 - Henry A. Kissinger and his mission to end the war.
    6 - President Nixon's visit to Moscow and the signing of the
strategic arms limitation agreement.
    7 - Sen. Thomas Eagleton and the Democratic vice presidential
candidacy.
    8 - The Vietnam war.
    9 - Flooding that killed hundreds in West Virginia, South Dakota,
Pennsylvania and seven other states.
    10 - Supreme Court ruling on capital punishment.
    ---
    The presidential visit to Peking began with a stomach upset
that wasn't. On July 9, 1971, Kissinger, the President's assistant
for national security affairs, canceled a dinner with the
president of Pakistan. By informants' accounts, he arranged
a look-alike to motorcade to the mountains near Rawalpindi,
where he said he would recover, while in fact he flew in secret
to mainland China and arranged for Nixon's visit.
    The President, Mrs. Nixon and entourage received a correct,
formal but low-key welcome to Peking, and Nixon was whisked
off to Mao's private study, where he; the 78-year-old leader
of 750 million people; Kissinger, and Premier Chou talked for
a full hour. The Chinese called the discussion ''serious and
frank.'' Thereafter, Nixon and Chou met every day for five
days in more than 20 hours of private conferences. Exactly
what was said was kept secret.

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    NEW YORK Take 2: Top 10 of 1972: secret. 300.
    While her husband worked, the First Lady visited an agricultural
commune, tasted Chinese food, mingled with school children,
talked with patients about acupuncture. The Nixons ate their
way with ivory chopsticks through an eight-course state dinner.
And the President survived innumerable ''gambay'' toasts,
bottoms up, with mao tai. As he raised his glass, he quoted
Chairman Mao's admonition: ''So many deeds cry out to be done,
and always urgently.'' This was the day, indeed the hour,
he said, ''for our two peoples to rise to the heights of greatness
which can build a new and better world.''
    2 - ''Hey, George,'' called the young man with short, pale
blond hair. ''Aren't you going to shake my hand?''
    George Corley Wallace, governor of Alabama, campaigning May
15 in Laurel, Md., for the Democratic presidential nomination,
turned, hand extended, toward the man, hiding his eyes behind
opaque sunglasses.
    Arthur Herman Bremer, a 21-year-old from Milwaukee, thrust
a snub-nosed revolver toward the candidate and fired five
times, 18 inches from his target. Wallace was thrown back
onto the asphalt. He lay there, conscious but stunned, legs
twisted crazily, blood streaming from his right arm and oozing
through his shirt. Three others, including an Alabama state
trooper and a Secret Service agent assigned to guard him,
were wounded.
    Wallace was paralyzed from the waist down. Bremer was sentenced
to 63 years in prison. The sentence was later reduced by 10
years.
    But Wallace, irrepressable, might run again.
    ''I recognize the fact that there is not much chance that
I will ever walk again,'' he said. ''Well, I am still interested
in 1976. Whether or not I will be a candidate, I will decide
that question later. But my doctors tell me that I am going
to be physically able to do whatever I would like to do in
'76 and even before that. I am not a candidate at this time,
but I am still interested to the point that I do not rule
it out.''
    3 - They had been called the ''happy games.''
    For 10 days the Munich Olympics had been friendly and serene.
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    NEW YORK Take 3 Top 10 of 1972: serene. 400.

    Now it was 4:30 a.m., Sept. 4, and as the first rays of the
sun streaked the Bavarian sky, four Arabs in track suits silently
scaled the fence surrounding Olympic Village. Seconds later,
four more.
    They melted into the shadows of a building and pulled out
a can of blacking. Faces smeared, they headed for Building
31, where Israeli athletes, coaches and officials shared five
apartments. From plastic bags they drew pistols, submachine
guns and grenades. At a signal from their leader, they burst
in on Moshe Weinberg, 33, Israeli wrestling coach, and shot
him dead. Then Yosef Romano, 33, Israeli weight lifter.
    Nine other Israelis didn't make it in the rush to escape,
and the Arab terrorists herded them into a room. The terrorists
demanded release of 200 fellow Arabs being held in Israel in
return for the Israelis' freedom.
    Premier Golda Meir made a decision: No yielding to terror.
    The Arabs, identified by now as commandos in the Black September
organization, called for a bus and helicopters. They would
take their hostages to Fuerstenfeldbruck Air Base, where a
Boeing 727 would fly them to an Arab capital. But sharpshooters
lay in wait. The helicopters landed. They fired.
    The terrorists began firing. One ignited a helicopter containing
some of the hostages. The toll: All nine hostages, five Arabs,
one German policeman.
    The games went on. But the spirit wasn't the same.
    4 - Riding a crest of popular support for both foreign and
domestic moves, President Nixon flicked aside his Democratic
opponent, Sen. George McGovern, in an election day landslide of
historic proportions.
    The incumbentpicked up all but 17 of the nation's 538 electoral
votes, winning in 49 states with 60.7 per cent of the over-all
popular vote.
    Almost as impressive as the magnitude of his win was the narrowness
of his coat tails. The Democrats added two seats in the Senate,
which promised to be even more of an antagonist to many White
House proposals than it had been in the previous four years.
Republicans had believed a landslide would give them some additional
20 seats in the House, but they had to settle for 12.
    Pundits generally felt the voters had declared for the status
quo, especially rejecting what was popularly seen as McGovern's
plan for extensive and even radical experiments in social
legislation.

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    NEW YORK Take 4: Top 10 of 1972: legislation. 400.

    They also noted a generally inexpert McGovern campaign, highlighted
by the dismissal of Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri as second
man on the ticket.
    5 - His blue-gray eyes almost hidden by hornrim glasses, he
looked like the accountant he once wanted to be - hardly like
a swinger regarded as the sex symbol of an entire administration.
    But Henry A. Kissinger's influence; ah! that was something
to behold.
    ''When the President puts his feet up at the end of the day,''
Kissinger once told a reporter, ''and says, 'O.K., Henry,
you've presented all the options, now what do you think?'
Of course, I tell him what I think.''
    So it was that Kissinger was quarterbacking negotiations
for peace in Vietnam when the North virtually agreed to Nixon's
May 8 outline for an end to the war. It was, Washington initially
thought, the breakthrough the United States had been seeking
since 1968.
    But the Communists wanted a signature before Oct. 31.
    The powers of a Communist-neutral-Saigon commission, created
under terms of the agreement, and other vital points remained
fuzzy, however, and, despite hints, there was no specific provision
for withdrawal of 145,000 Northern troops.
    South Vietnam President Thieu was displeased. He met with
Kissinger in Saigon and let it be known he thought the United
States was selling out its ally. Kissinger said one more meeting
of three or four days in Paris would settle things.
    But renewed talks were adjourned twice. The Communists accused
Washington of deserting the tentative agreement and, for its
part, renewed demands for Thieu's ouster. And Kissinger . . .
typically, he was most visible at a French restaurant with
a blonde on his arm.
    6 - Improbable as it seemed, there he was, Richard M. Nixon,
arch crusader against communism, on Soviet television saying:
''Dobry vecher.'' Good evening.
    Before his fireside chat was over, the very symbol of imperialism
and natural enemy of the Soviet system had told the Russian
people about prospects for a less perilous world.
    At a summit conference concluded May 27 in Moscow, the United
States and the Soviet Union had signed an agreement limiting
strategic nuclear arms, negotiated at the SALT talks in Helsinki,
and committed themselves to a policy of restraint in the nuclear
age. They had agreed to collaborate in space. Together, they
would study air, water and soil pollution and how to attack
them, and they would cooperate in research on heart disease,
cancer and public health.
    Leonid I. Brezhnev, general secretary of the Communist party,
hadn't gotten the trade agreements he wanted. And Nixon hadn't
gotten the Soviet influence he had hoped for to end the Vietnam
war.

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    NEW YORK Take 5: Top 10 of 1972: war. 400.
    But the President spoke about Moscow's ''mushroom rain - a
warm rain, with the sun breaking through, that makes the mushrooms
grow and therefore is considered a good omen.''
    He felt hopeful.
    ''Spasibo i do svidaniya,'' he said. Thank you and goodbye.
    7 - Perhaps no single issue in the 1972 election campaign hurt
Democratic presidential hopes more than the handling of the
Eagleton affair.
    Sen. George McGovern picked Missouri's Sen. Thomas Eagleton
as his running mate, counting on his expected appeal to the
young and the liberal.
    Eagleton revealed he had undergone psychiatric treatment,
including shock therapy. McGovern at first pledged ''1,000
per cent'' support for Eagleton, but later forced the Missourian
off the ticket.
    The move cost McGovern dearly - the polls showed the South
Dakotan regained his pre-Eagleton support only in the final
weeks.
    8 - For more than a year allied intelligence has predicted a
North Vietnamese military spectacular to test Saigon's army
once U.S. ground combat troops were pulled out of South Vietnam.
    It broke like a grey-black monsoon squall on Easter weekend
and raged for more than a month. An entire South Vietnamese
division was routed and destroyed as a fighting force. And
for the first time in the war, a provincial capital, Quang
Tri City, was captured.
    Washington responded with resumption of air attacks against
North Vietnam, the mining of that country's harbors and an
over-all air assault throughout Indochina, unmatched historically
in its fury.
    Slowly the initiative changed hands and the mood of gloom
lifted in Saigon. Quang Tri was recaptured and serious threats
to two other provincial capitals were crushed.
    However, Communist troops made a shambles of the Allies'
pacification program and Communist klags flew over hundreds of towns
and hamlets formerly considered securely in the government column.
    But the over-all failure of the enemy offensive to shatter
Saigon's army and morale probably led to key enemy concessions
at the Paris peace talks. The cost: perhaps 300,000 military
and civilian dead and wounded and tens of thousands of new
refugees.
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    NEW YORK Take 6: Top 10 of 1972: refugees. 300.

    9 - It rained for three days in the hills, and Elk Lick carried
the water into Buffalo Creek, which dumped it behind an earth
and slate dam fashioned from coal mine waste at the top of
Buffalo Creek hollow.
    On Feb. 26, the dam broke. A torrent of sludge and water
swept through the 16 coal camps in the Logan County hollow
of West Virginia, obliterating several, destroying the homes
of 4,000 persons and killing 118.
    In a tragic sequel, 238 persons died June 10 when a massive
cloudburst broke Canyon Lake dam and sent Rapid Crrek on a
rampage through the middle of Rapid City, S.D. Four thousand
were left homeless. Damage exceeded $100 million.
    Just two weeks later, Tropical Storm Agnes slammed into the
northeast, spilling rivers over their banks and killing scores.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called
the flooding ''the most extensive in the country's history.''
Damage was estimated at more than $1.6 billion.
    In Pennsylvania, hardest hit by the relentless water, 50
lives were lost. Harrisburg, the capital, was virtually cut
off by the Susquehanna, flowing at 55 billion gallons a day.
    Full recovery remains years away.
    10 - On June 29, the Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty
as administered in the United States. The 5-4 decision
held it in violation of the Constitution's prohibition against
''cruel and unusual punishment.''
    Death row inmates throughout the country cheered and whooped.
''I've been thinking about death for a long time,'' said convicted
rapist Lucious Jackson Jr. ''Now I can think about living.''
    The ruling was an exception to the court's trend to the right
in 1972 - making it, President Nixon said, ''as balanced as
I have had an opportunity to make it.'' The trend was largely
because of Nixon appointees.
    Chief Justice Warren E. Burger and Justices Harry A. Blackmun,
William H. Rehnquist and Lewis F. Powell would have retained
the death penalty.
    End Adv Wed. Ams Dec. 27, Sent Dec. 19
    
2124pES 12-19


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