Ending up the look back at various years in review with 1974. Seems only fitting. Ending up one crazy year by looking at another crazy year in history.

That one that started off embroiled in major scandal and ending up with the resignation of a President, the first time it happened.

The Nixon era was over and the Ford era, short as it was, began.

The year started off with an Oil embargo and the Middle East took center stage, again. Newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was abducted and slowly morphed into Tanya. The Turks invaded Cyprus. Ford pardoned Nixon. Haile Selassie was deposed as ruler of Ethiopia. Aerosol became persona non grata and PLO chief Yassar Arafat addressed the UN for the first time.

A year jammed with a lot of changes and drama.

The Year in Review with CBS-News from December 29, 1974.

They don't make years quite like that anymore. Not yet, anyway.

And then there was 1968. The year just about everything came unhinged. The Vietnam War escalated and got very personal. The protests escalated accordingly - people who weren't against the war were violently opposed to it now. President Johnson declined re-election, leaving the field open for former Attorney General and Senator Robert F. Kennedy to run. The Civil Rights Movement was becoming increasingly violent, culminating in the assassination of Martin Luther King. France went on strike and took it to the streets, shutting the entire country down. Robert F. Kennedy would be assassinated. Chaos would erupt at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Nixon would emerge as President and that era would soon start.

And beyond all that Apollo 8 made the very first orbit of the moon. A rehearsal for the landing to take place in 1969. Even from outer space, the view of earth from the landscape of the moon gave one the impression Earth was just not a happy place to be.

But we were stuck there.

Those highlights and a ton of other news from that year, all via the BBC and their Radio 1 Year-end retrospect for December 31, 1968 which looked at the year from a world wide standpoint.

And some people say 2012 will make 1968 look like a picnic.

One wonders - at least you have some frame of reference to consider.

Continuing the review of years past - 1991 gets votes for sheer memorability. A lot happened that year and much of it would have repercussions for years, if not decades to come.

Operation Desert Storm was one of those situations that would rear its ugly head in the next decade. So was the Stock Market, so were hedge funds, so were CEO's salaries - a lot of things we sort of shrugged our shoulders over came back to bite us in later years.

And who could forget Clarence Thomas? Certainly the Bush (#1) Administration's gift that's kept on giving for a lot of years since.

You could point to this year as the start of a lot of fast-and-loose living. Of course, there was still the Dot Com bubble to appear, but that wasn't for another year or so. 1991 was bad enough all on its own.

Here is NPR's take on it via All Things Considered from December 31st, complete with a vocal rendition of "My Favorite Things" as a reminder 1991 being just a little more haywire than a lot of years in the past.

And maybe you just forgot all about it. I know I certainly tried.

When asked to give a one word summary of 2005, the operative word was: Disaster.

Six years ago but feeling a lot longer, 2005 was seemingly one continuous body blow after the next. From escalating violence in Iraq, Earthquakes in Pakistan and India where the estimate death toll topped 100,000. The threat of Bird Flu coming from China. Tube station bombings in London and Hurricane Katrina that all but wiped New Orleans off the map. You could confidently say 2005 was a monumentally disastrous year.

The death of Pope John Paul II, the Saddam Hussein trial, George Bush's extreme Supreme Court nominations, it ran the gamut. And not surprisingly, a lot of us didn't survive.

So in case you forgot, or have that morbid curiosity to relive, here is the CBS Weekend Roundup of the Year for 2005.

A good reminder as to why we're so crazy and out of control right now.

By all accounts, 1986 seemed to be mostly about Terrorists, countries harboring terrorists, and countries getting caught.

Probably the most dramatic would be the Iran-Contra scandal that blossomed forth in 1986. The other would be the ongoing problem with Libya and Libya's ties with terrorist organizations.

Not a good year if you were an American tourist. It seemed that bombs were going off in tourist hangouts all over Europe during the Summer and countries were scrambling to find solutions.

It wasn't all bad news though. A popular uprising toppled the Marcos regime in the Philippines, paving the way for democratically elected Corzon Aquino to assume leadership for the first time in many years. The upshot was we didn't have to hear about Imelda Marcos' shoes for a while.

But the year was laced with drama. No less grim was that of Chernobyl and the specter of nuclear power plant accidents and disasters, which were on the rise. Up to that point we only had Three Mile Island to compare it all to. Now the new measure for disaster was Chernobyl.

All in all 1986 gave the decade a dose of reality it was avoiding for a while. Since the Reagan Years sought to paint a rosy picture of the Shining City On A Hill - the terrible reality was the facade was crumbling.

1986 as part of the CBS Radio Series Where We Stand with Walter Cronkite.

Continuing the yearly reviews, we're smack in the middle of 1966. And depending on how you look at it, it was either the tipping point where it all came unglued or we were on the verge of everything changing.

The 1966 mid-year elections and the Republicans were energized from their 1964 massacre. Governorships saw Republicans in office for the first time, including California and the beginning of what was to become The Reagan Years. Nelson Rockefeller took New York. George Romney kept Michigan. Edward Brooke, the first Black Senator and Republican was elected. Charles Percy became the first Republican Senator from Illinois.

All in contrast to the escalation of the war in Vietnam. Hanoi was being bombed, with civilians being reported among the casualties for the first time. LBJ went on a tour of Asia in order to drum up support of his Vietnam policy and came away with mass protests in Manila.

Domestically, violence was getting to be a familiar face around the country. Civil Rights demonstrations turned violent in Chicago and a sense of unease swept over the country in the wake of the goings on in 1965. It was also a year for mass murder, with 8 student nurses murdered in a dorm and 12 students killed and 40 wounded at the hands of a sniper perched on a clock tower at the University of Texas in Austin. Even politicians weren't immune with the murder of Senatorial candidate Charles Percy's daughter at the family home during his campaign.

The economy was heading into Inflation territory, but the Space program was making strides with The Gemini Program continuing and offering high points to the year.

And if all that weren't enough, The Beatles landed in the lap of controversy with John Lennon being misquoted in the press about being more popular than Jesus Christ touching off a firestorm among the unhinged. The innocent answer to a question about the current lack of faith in the world and the irony that a group like the Beatles would be more popular in the eyes of the younger generation than a religious figure got perceived as a boast rather than an indictment and piles of now-valuable Beatles albums went up in flames as a result.

And they didn't call the 60's Insane for nothing.

And here is the recap of that year by way of ABC Radio Program Voices In The Headlines.

Continuing the look back at various years in history - today it's 1960. The one that got the decade that was off to a frenzied start.

Beginning with the hopeful wedding of Princess Margaret and quickly falling apart with the Francis Gary Powers U-2 Spy plane incident and the disintegration of the Paris Summit Conference. It was that kind of year.

Continuing with Cuba, the upheavals in Africa, riots in Japan, the Cold War spiraling out of control at the UN. Civil war in The Congo, and winding up with the election of John F. Kennedy to President.

Compared to other years in other decades 1960 probably paled by comparison. But at the time it signaled an end to the nervous 50's and a beginning of a new and interesting decade. Even if the operative word "interesting" was used in the Chinese curse sense.

And you get to hear all about it, from UPI's Yearly Radio Roundup of news events of the year.

Since we're rapidly coming to the end of 2011, it's around that time to start looking back at events of the past years. This one isn't over yet, but there's a whole lot of others we can take a look at in the meantime.

So for the next 10 days I'll be running Year End Reviews from various dates in history. Hence, the Thousand Yard Stare.

Today it's 1953, by way of a slightly over-dramatic and somewhat crappy sounding, but still informative review from NBC Radio first broadcast on December 21, 1953.

Highlights of the year were the Inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower to his first term as President. The death of Stalin, the end of The Korean War, the death of Henry Cabot Lodge Sr., the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth and the rise of McCarthyism, along with the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and riots in East Berlin.

A jam-packed year with historic moments and earth shattering events. Like I said, it's a little dramatic in places but that more or less goes along with the times - it's the events that are interesting and for an hour you get a thorough picture of what 1953 was all about.

Come back tomorrow for the next installment.