160 Years of Atlantic Stories

A year-by-year catalogue of some of the magazine's most momentous work.

Harvey Georges / AP

Inside the Department of Dirty Tricks

“The evidence, fragmentary as it is, suggests that the CIA customarily drew the line at what is commonly meant by the word ‘murder.’ However, in the late 1950s, the CIA began to get orders to kill people.”

Doug Wilson / Getty

Soldiers of Misfortune

A report on the veterans of Vietnam—and on the often disgraceful treatment they have received from their countrymen.

A satellite hovers above Mars with Earth in the background
Associated Press

Life on Mars

Space scientists won’t say so, but the results of three brilliantly conceived experiments lead inevitably to one startling conclusion: Life, in some form, exists on Mars.

CBS Photo Archive / Getty

CBS: The Power and the Profits

However the Toynbee or the Gibbon of the future adjudges what happened to American society, he will need to reckon large with the impact of radio and television.

Bettmann / Getty

The Man Who Runs the Senate

Robert Byrd, a little-known, fiddle-playing West Virginian, is the Senate’s Democratic whip, probably its next majority leader, and just possibly a favorite son at the 1976 Democratic Convention. Says he: “I believe that a big man can make a small job important.” Some of his colleagues think Byrd also proves the converse: that big job can help a small man to grow.

A black and white photograph of Daniel Ellsberg speaking to an unofficial House panel investigating the significance of the war documents on July 28, 1971.
AP

The Pentagon Papers Trial

“Inevitably political, the Pentagon Papers case is a decisive test of the federal government's capacity to control the disclosure of information stamped ‘secret,’ of an individual’s right to defy the security classification system, and at least peripherally, of the press’s ability to rely on ‘leaks’ in government circles.”