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Introduction

The Sixties resound in our historical memory as do few other eras. It was a time when events went into overdrive, and the postwar social trajectory was deflected off line. Life blueprints were rejected; people struck out on new courses. The air resounded with harsh voices demanding, raging, denouncing, promising, accusing, cajoling.

Few who reached adulthood between 1961 and 1971 remained unmarked by the events of those years. For the first time, a generation of American college students contended with real-world politics, where significant gains and losses were at stake. Young men and women just reaching sexual maturity faced novelty, uncertainty, and opportunity as had no previous generation. Nor were the young the only ones whose lives were recast. The attack on authority and hierarchy and the exaltation of the self freed some adults to reconnoiter their options as never before. New careers, new loves, new connections, and new interests and attitudes could now be sampled and indulged.

And beyond the personal, there was the whole society. The Sixties delegitimized all sources of authority—governments, universities, parents, critics, experts, employers, the police, families, the military. In this decade’s wake, all hierarchical structures became more pliant, all judgments and critical evaluations and “canons” less definitive and acceptable. The decade also witnessed the “liberation” of whole categories of people who had previously been penalized for their race, age, physical fitness, gender, or sexual preference.

The experiences of the period cut deep crevices into the nation’s social and psychic terrain. Even in the blandest “eras of good feelings,” consensus had never truly ruled the national mood. But Americans seldom disagreed so angrily about society’s course as during the Sixties, especially after 1965. The powerful insurgent wave produced an almost equally strong reaction. If on one side there were anarchic hippies, riotous inner cities, and angry antiwar protesters, on the other there were vengeful hard hats, foultongued racists, and resentful backlash voters. For every Tom Hayden or Malcolm X, there was a George Wallace or Sheriff “Bull” Connor.

As Dickens said of an earlier but similar era: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.”

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The Sixties began with the inauguration of a president who had been “born in this century” and who promised to get “the country moving again.” Youth was replacing age in the White House, and that alone promised change. But few could guess that the ten years following the inauguration of John F. Kennedy would witness a world turned upside down.

America, on that blustery inauguration day in January 1961, was still deep in the throes of postwar conformity. Skirts were worn below the knee, dresses were tailored, and women’s shoes had high heels and pointy toes. On prime-time TV, the favorite programs were The Flintstones, Ozzie and Harriet, One Happy Family, and The Bob Hope Show. In film, the 1961 Academy Award for best picture went to a musical fable about feuding New York gangs, but West Side Story was monumentally innocent despite its subject matter. On Broadway, My Fair Lady was still drawing crowds after 2,300 performances. Elvis had already stirred the rage of parents and moralists with his swiveling hips and suggestive phrasing, but the most popular recording artist in 1961 was Eddie Fisher, the quintessential boy next door. Sexual mores were strict. Illegitimacy was rare in the middle class, and most Americans considered homosexuality a sin, and drove its practitioners deep into the closet. The suburbs defined the lives of millions, and no one had yet noticed the quiet desperation of women living in houses with lawns and picture windows. On college campuses, except for a sprinkling of the most “progressive” and cosmopolitan ones, fraternities and sororities, pledge week, pep rallies, dances, and “sandbox” politics were the dominant extracurricular activities.

In general, political discourse was timid and self-congratulatory. In 1959, the New York intelligentsia had announced “the end of ideology”—a rejection of utopianism and the radical visions of the generation preceding. America, they said, was a success, prosperous and orderly, needing only a little fine-tuning. In the future, the task of governing would be left to the experts, who would apply social science skills to problem solving without the awkward impediment of all-encompassing social formulas.

There was, in fact, one destablizing domestic issue on that January day. Ever since the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, the clamor for racial justice had been growing louder. On February 1, 1960, a small group of black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, had given new life to the civil rights movement by sitting down at the “whites only” local Woolworth’s lunch counter and waiting to be served. The Second Reconstruction was well under way, yet all through Dixie in January 1961 Jim Crow still reigned in schools, theaters, playgrounds, restaurants, hotels, and other facilities. In most of the Deep South, few blacks were yet registered to vote, and there were almost no black public officials. And if blacks were finally raising their voices to demand their place in the sun, other outsiders—Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, women, gays—still had not begun to stir.

The time was not without foreign anxieties. By 1961, Joseph McCarthy was dead and the “ism” he spawned had abated, but the fear of Communism and the cold war were very much alive. The new president’s inaugural address that January day emphasized foreign policy and the resolve of the United States to fend off international Communism. “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” The Soviet Union, Red China, and Fidel Castro’s Cuba loomed as threats to the American way of life. In January 1961, no one was shooting at anyone, but both “the West” and “the Communist bloc” were piling up arms against the day of reckoning and releasing lethal clouds of strontium 90 into the atmosphere as they tested ever bigger H-bombs in the South Pacific, Siberia, and the American Southwest. The cold war made many Americans uneasy, but only a few took action. A handful of pacifists and humanists sought to stop the war machine. Yet in the winter of 1961, few Americans disputed the policy of containment and the need for continued vigilance and sacrifice to prevent Communist conquest.

Just beneath the surface, however, forces stirred that would soon transform the lives of almost everyone. First, the political pendulum was about to shift leftward. John F. Kennedy was a Democrat, elected after a twoterm Republican, but he was never an extreme liberal. Until he visited the “hollows” of West Virginia in 1960 on his campaign tour, poverty for him was only a rumor. But with a party tradition to confirm and a party constituency to satisfy, he found himself father of a program—the New Frontier—that aimed to complete the promises of Roosevelt and Truman. Once in office, Kennedy extracted relatively little in the way of liberal social legislation from a still-conservative Congress unimpressed by his razor-thin victory. Yet Jack and his first lady, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, created a glittering facade of glamour and success. Camelot hid ugly currents of narcissism, callowness, recklessness, and deception, but by the time he flew off to Texas with Jackie in November 1963 to mend political fences, John Kennedy was widely admired, and most pundits assumed he would be easily reelected in 1964.

Ineffectual on Capitol Hill, JFK grew increasingly adept at foreign policy. He stumbled at first by approving a badly planned, badly conceived, undermanned invasion of Castro’s Cuba by CIA-trained Cuban exiles, then abandoning the invaders when they faced defeat. But Kennedy redeemed himself by staring down Nikita Khrushchev’s reckless emplacement of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Kennedy also forced the Soviets to back down from their threat to strangle Allied-occupied Berlin. In the fall of 1963, responding to public fears of atmospheric radioactive pollution, he negotiated a partial nuclear test ban treaty with the USSR.

Kennedy’s tragic death in Dallas was a defining event of the decade. The assassination and the police blunders that followed it shook the public’s basic trust in the political system and set in motion a process that would erode values and delegitimize institutions in the years ahead. Yet for a time, the nation seemed to recover. Lyndon Johnson reassured the public by his tact and sensitivity during the first days of national grief and shock. Vowing to continue his predecessor’s policies, he exploited the public’s guilts and sorrows to push through stalled social legislation, securing a major tax cut and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In May 1964, before eighty thousand University of Michigan graduates and their guests, he described his vision of a Great Society that would not only round out the New Deal–Fair Deal but also augment the quality of life of a society that had already achieved material abundance.