as found to have a history of mental depression and resigned. Even as Nixon won, the Democrats won majorities in both houses of Congress. Britain imposed direct rule in Northern Ireland in that year, and Ireland, Britain, and Denmark agreed to full membership in the European Economic Community. Terrorism appeared at the Olympics in Munich, Germany when Arab terrorists killed two Israeli Olympic athletes and took nine others hostage, all of whom were killed in a shoot-out with West German police and soldiers. It was in 1972 when a shortage of petroleum was first noted by the United States. By the end of the year, there were fewer than 24,000 American troops in Vietnam, signaling the beginning of the end of that long war (Grun 570-572).
This was also a strong year for science. Two Apollo 16 astronauts, John Watts and Charles Duke, spent 71 hours on the surface of the moon, while the crew of Apollo 17, Eugene Cernan and Dr. Harrison Schmitt, stayed a record 74 hours 59 minutes on the moon. Dr. Richard Leakey and Glynn Isaac discovered a 2.5-million-year-old human skull in northern Kenya, the find that would later be offered to the world as Lucy. A Soviet spacecraft, the Venus 8, made a soft landing on Venus. In the southern Philippines, a people called the Tasadays were found and said to be a Stone Age tribe still living in the modern world. They were found living in caves and were given considerable attention, though it was later revealed that this find was a hoax (Grun 571-573).
In Rome, Michelangelo's statue known as the Pieta was damaged by a fanatic wielding a hammer. The Academy Award was given in April to the 1971 film The French Connection, whose star--Gene Hackman--received the award for Best Actor. Best Actress that year was Jane Fonda for Klute. Among the films opening in 1972 that would be important in the Academy Awards the following year were The Godfather and Play It Again, Sam, the latter written by and...