Life Story

Before Americans got their news from television, they got it from LIFE, the weekly magazine that set the standard for photojournalism. In LIFE Story Gerald Moore--a writer and editor who worked at the magazine in the last glory years before TV made it obsolete--recalls the dizzying excitement and glamour of LIFE's fast-moving, powerful approach to spreading the news. Moore covered the major stories of the late 1960s and early 1970s: LSD, assassinations, the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, the McCarthy campaign, urban riots, the My Lai massacre, and the beginnings of feminism. Before joining LIFE at the age of twenty-seven, he worked as a police officer in Albuquerque and then a reporter at the Albuquerque Tribune--both jobs teaching him the tools of his trade. His story offers a wonderful look back at the good and the bad old days of journalism.