Considering the sourCe, it was a startling claim. A longtime lieutenant of TIME and LIFE founder Henry Luce, journalist Richard Clurman found himself chatting one day in the late 1960s with Leonard Bernstein, the legendary composer and conductor of the New York Philharmonic. “Elvis Presley,” Bernstein said, “is the greatest cultural force in the 20th century.” Taken aback, Clurman, who recounted the exchange to the writer David Halberstam, offered an alternative.
“What about Picasso?” Clurman ventured. “No, it’s Elvis,” Bernstein insisted. “He introduced the beat to everything and he changed everything— music, language, clothes, it’s a whole new social revolution—the ’60s come from it.”
As does so much else. Forty years after Presley’s August 1977 death in an upstairs bathroom at Graceland, his Memphis mansion, the revolution Bernstein identified unfolds…
