straits by then, following a devastating newspaper strike in late 1962 and early 1963. Journal-American editors, apparently sensing that psychotherapy and rock music were starting to enter the consciousness of both blue-collar and white-collar New Yorkers, enlisted Dr. Joyce Brothers to write front-page articles in February 1964 analyzing the Beatles. While the Beatles were filming Help! in the Bahamas, columnist Phyllis Battelle interviewed them for articles that ran on the Journal-American front page and in other Hearst papers, including the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, for four consecutive days, from April 25 to 28, 1965. During every visit that the Beatles made to New York in 1964 and 1965, including their appearances at Shea Stadium, various Journal-American columnists and reporters devoted a lot of space to them. Throughout 1964 and 1965, Dorothy Kilgallen's Voice of Broadway column, which ran Sunday through Friday, often reported short news items about trendy young rock groups and performers such as The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Dave Clark Five, Mary Wells and Sam Cooke. The newspaper was trying to keep up with the many mid-1960s changes in popular music and its interracial fan bases. It published enlarged photographs of civil rights demonstrations, Dorothy Kilgallen's skepticism about the Warren Commission report as well as many reporters' stories on the increasing crime rate in New York's five boroughs. Most of the front page of the Sunday edition of January 12, 1964 ran stories that were relevant to the previous day's announcement by U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry that "a blue ribbon committee of scientists and doctors," in the words of reporter Jack Pickering, had concluded that cigarette smoking was dangerous. The Journal-Americans feel of the pulse of the changing times of the mid-1960s hid the trouble that was going on behind the scenes at the paper, which was unknown to many New Yorkers until after it had ceased publication. Besides trouble with advertisers, another major factor that led to the Journal-Americans demise was a power struggle between Hearst CEO Richard E. Berlin and two of Hearst's sons, who had trouble carrying on the father's legacy after his 1951 death. William Randolph Hearst Jr. claimed in 1991 that Berlin, who died in 1986, had suffered from Alzheimer's disease starting in the mid-1960s and that caused him to shut down several Hearst newspapers without just cause. Merger The Journal-American ceased publishing in April 1966, officially the victim of a