Friday, January 23

The water was cold and grey. Aboard USS Pueblo, a small, slow vessel classified as an environmental research ship, the morning of January 23, 1968, was routine. Crew members processed intercepted radio signals. The air smelled of coffee, electronics, and damp wool. Then, a North Korean sub chaser and torpedo boats appeared. They circled. A SO-1 class sub chaser closed to 500 yards and signaled: ‘Heave to or I will open fire.’

Commander Lloyd Bucher ordered the destruction of classified material. The incinerator was inadequate. Sailors smashed equipment with axes and hammers, burned documents in waste bins, and tossed pieces overboard. The process was chaotic, frantic. North Korean sailors boarded, firing machine guns. One American, Fireman Duane Hodges, was killed. The Pueblo, with its 82 surviving crew, was taken into the port of Wonsan. For the next eleven months, the men endured beatings, starvation, and psychological torture, forced to sign confessions and pose for propaganda photos. The U.S. government, militarily overstretched in Vietnam, negotiated. What was said publicly—firm denials of espionage in international waters—clashed with the private reality of an intelligence mission gone terribly wrong. The crew was finally released on December 23, 1968, after the U.S. signed a document acknowledging the ship’s intrusion, then immediately repudiated it. The ship itself remains in North Korea, a museum piece. The event was a collision of arrogance, vulnerability, and geopolitical theater, played out not on a grand battlefield, but on the cramped deck of a poorly armed boat.

The announcement was a list of ten names. It was an attempt at a founding myth. On January 23, 1986, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation revealed its first inductees: Chuck Berry, James Brown, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Fats Domino, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and Elvis Presley. The selections were, by design, unimpeachable. They were also an argument.

The foundation, led by record executives and critics, was creating an institution. The act of enshrining is an act of power. It decides what counts, what is central, what is pure. The list privileged individual male pioneers, primarily from the 1950s, whose work had been successfully translated to a white, mainstream audience. It was a narrative of origins that smoothed over rock and roll’s tangled, racialized roots in rhythm and blues, gospel, and country. It presented a lineage.

Notice who was not on that first list. No women. No groups from the 1960s British Invasion or the psychedelic era that followed. No songwriters from the Brill Building. The foundation was drawing a border, declaring a pantheon. The subsequent ceremony, held months later, was a black-tie dinner in New York. It was a formalization of something that had been forged in roadhouses, radio stations, and recording studios where the rules were being broken, not written. The Hall of Fame, from its very first list, was always engaged in a quiet tension: celebrating the anarchic spirit of its subject through the deeply organized process of honoring it.

The ceremony was brief. In the White House Roosevelt Room on January 23, 1997, Vice President Al Gore administered the oath of office. Madeleine Albright, born Marie Jana Korbelová in Prague, placed her hand on a Bible and became the 64th United States Secretary of State. There was no fanfare meant to underscore the historical weight. The weight was in the image itself: a woman, a refugee from both Nazism and Communism, standing where only men had stood before.

Her appointment by President Bill Clinton was a functional one. She was a known quantity, having served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. The politics of the moment concerned NATO expansion and the aftermath of the Balkans wars. Yet the social resonance of the moment was separate from the day’s policy briefings. For nearly 208 years, the nation’s chief diplomat had been a man. The role’s iconography—the dark suit, the flag pin, the handshake with foreign counterparts—was inherently masculine. Albright did not alter the role’s demands, but her presence altered its perception. She became known for a specific, personal brand of diplomatic signaling: her brooches, which she used as subtle commentary. The change was not in the substance of power, but in its face. It was a quiet integration, proving the architecture of high office could hold a different shape. It made the second, and the third, conceivable.

In the chaos of the Somali Civil War, a document was sent. Its author was Mohammed Said Hersi Morgan, a military commander and son-in-law of the sitting president, Siad Barre. Its date was January 23, 1987. Its subject was the “Isaaq problem.” Morgan, known as “The Butcher of Hargeisa,” did not issue a battlefield order. He wrote a letter. He proposed, in cold bureaucratic language, a systematic campaign to eliminate the Isaaq clan from northern Somalia.

The letter outlined methods: confiscation of property, destruction of water sources, forced displacement, and targeted killing. It was a blueprint, a memo suggesting the logistics of annihilation. It treated genocide as a policy option, a matter of administrative planning. The Isaaq, a major clan in the northwest, were seen as supporting opposition groups. Barre’s government had already begun a brutal crackdown, but Morgan’s letter advocated for its comprehensive, formal escalation. It is unclear if Barre ever formally endorsed the specific plan, but the government’s actions in the subsequent years—including the bombing of cities and the widespread killing of civilians—mirrored its intent. An estimated 200,000 Isaaq people died.

The event poses a quiet, terrible question about the nature of evil in the modern era. It is not always a scream; sometimes it is a memo. It is not merely the rage of a mob, but the calculated recommendation of an officer, putting pen to paper to argue for the erasure of a people. The letter exists as a fossil of that mentality, a proof that the machinery of mass death can be proposed in sentences, with a salutation and a signature.