Another damp, foggy start to the day, but we’ll be in the 80s by afternoon.
Next 1/2 season brings you a Scottish Duel in Paris
and here we go back to the 60’s
By the end of 1964 the war was heating up with North Vietnam invading Laos and incidents with naval vessels (which on further inspection appears to have been fabricated) which convinced the Congress to pass a resolution which allowed undeclared war being waged against North Vietnam including the stationing of 2 carriers off shore. By early 1965 Rolling Thunder (limited bombing of North Vietnam to deter support for Viet Cong) began a three year, eight month campaign which involved 305,380 raids and 634,000 tons of bombs, along with the death of 818 of our pilots and 182,000 North Vietnam citizens. At the end of 1966 Dr. Martin Luther King announced his opposition to the war.
1965 was the year I graduated from High School and the year in March of the First Anti-Vietnam War Teach-In involving anti-war faculty and the yet to be in-famous SDS. I’m sure I heard the news, I’m not sure when exactly it made an impression on me. I was all wrapped in in finishing High School and had obtained my acceptance to college. In 1965 I started college but funding became a problem so I dropped out (to a chorus of you’ll never go back) and took the world’s most boring job (thank god for computers) filing driver’s license applications and related documents. I saved the money and was back at college by the start of school in 1966 vowing I would never file anything ever again.
1964 saw the defeat of Goldwater by Johnson (60% popular vote) who had became president when Kennedy was assassinated. By ’65 we had Medicare, the Voting Rights Act, but as you’ve seen we also had an escalation of the war, interestingly enough it was Goldwater that ran as a hawk about the war while Johnson gave us the impression that he would back down the involvement. By late 1966 we also had our first African American governor (Edward Brook, Republican Mass.) in 85 years.
I was starting to look at politics, but my view was more contained with voting rights and the mistreatment, that was currently on the airways, to the Black Americans, especially in the South–at this time we weren’t so interested in how this was occurring, though less obviously, in our own back yard (at that time I lived in Michigan). I went to a private church school and we had less politics and more religion, that would change some (in part thanks to yours truly) but never to the point that the public colleges became involved.
1965 Gave us a not kind examination of the Auto Industry by Ralph Nader in his book Unsafe At Any Speed. Entertainment wise there was the Cold-War satire movie The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, as well as a TV show that lasted 3 years and hasn’t left us yet Star Trek, a series that has gone where no other before and we don’t have a since yet.
But one of the most defining personalities of the 60’s was born, or should I say “redefined” in 1965 when Michael Fallen coined the word “hippie” to define “beatniks” who went to Haight-Ashbury; in a series of articles that he wrote in the San Francisco Examiner. The word, and all that it would eventually go on to stand for, wasn’t really part of the general public knowledge at that time. I personally don’t remember when I first heard it but I do remember the later years when it became to be used by the general “straight” public as a definition for any long haired, unconventional, bell bottom wearing soul that they came across. To those of us who embraced the anti-war position and marched and protested it usually also meant those that were hip, cool, but a bit farther out than those of us who continued in school etc. We liked hippies and might even refer to ourselves like that when we were trying to be groovy, but most of us felt they were a whole lot “farther out” than the average college student.
With the summer of ’64 we went from Freedom to atrocity when 3 young activist trying to increase voter registration in Mississippi were murdered. It was also that summer that brought us the Civil Rights Act and a Nobel Peace Prize for Martin Luther King. In 1965 Malcom X was assassinated in NYC and Watts Race Riots cost LA 34 lives. By 1966 Stokely Carmichael becomes head of the SNCC invoking “Black Power”, NOW (National Organization for Women) was founded, as was the militant Black Panther Party by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton.
Now if all that doesn’t convince you that we were in for some unsettled years I don’t know what will. A country on edge with cold war and spending untold resource in a small country for reasons that many of us never quite understood. To prevent Communism from spreading, for economic gain or because Kennedy was a Catholic and so was the ruling class in Vietnam when this all started (that was an actual theory I am not making this stuff up), choose a reason they all had their supporters and they all proved pointless in the end. Add an entire minority sick of oppression and a second minority that also felt put upon (may I remind you that black men were granted the vote before black and white women were) and you have the ingredients for a prime explosion or two.
“The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn’t the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility.”
― John Lennon
Sources:
http://www.pbs.org/opb/thesixties/timeline/timeline_text.html