SURREAL END TO THE 1960s

Decade was amplified during span of 34 days.

As much as any decade had been before, or has been since, the 1960s was a time of dramatic societal upheaval. Changes occurred across a wide spectrum including technology, social, politics, the military and the world of sports:

Change in the way we consume media. Change in how presidential debates are presented, won and lost.

Change in who’s the music we listen (and dance) to.

Change in the understood imminence of nuclear annihilation. Change in how we report and respond to war.

Change in people’s trust in government. Change in the influence the younger generation has on the older generation.

Change in the way black Americans integrate into society, including the Supreme Court tossing out laws preventing black and white marriage.

With the implementation of Medicare and Medicaid, change in how we care for folks needing help.

Change in America’s view of recreational drugs.

Change in popular culture, as TV brought a president’s assassination, war, riots, entertainment, terrorism and the Olympics directly into American living rooms.

Yes, even change in the respect the National Football League afforded the upstart American Football League.

Within the 1960s, the year 1968 is regarded as THE most jaw-dropping year of the decade, firmly planted as one of the most transformative years in American history. And with good reason. The collision of evolving pop culture, counterculture, protests and riots reached its zenith in 1968.

Sports contributed to the aura of 1968, too. Baseball had a 30-game winner, pitcher Denny McClain of the Detroit Tigers, who led the Tigers to a World Series title.

After the 1968 season, the American Football League’s New York Jets, led by quarterback “Broadway” Joe Namath, shook up the sports world when they upset the National Football League’s heavily favored Baltimore Colts in the Super Bowl (played on January 12, 1969).

At its climax, in 1968, hippies, drugs and free love flowed inward and outward from ground zero in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. On the East Coast, intellectuals in New York City laid it on straight; in the inner-cities, from Oakland to Chicago, tough, no-nonsense black guys altered the comfort-level of establishment authorities.

1968 also witnessed two societal-trajectory-altering assassinations. In April 1968, civil rights activist the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death in Memphis. Two months later, Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down following a victorious campaign rally in Los Angeles.

The world, or so it seemed to me, at the time only 10-years-old, was falling apart, heading toward God-only-knows-what.

Pleas to get out of the Vietnam War grew into massive protests, as government and military lies settled undeniably into focus, thanks to the reflection of network TV, and a cadre of brave field reporters. Ultimately, the root cause of President Lyndon Johnson opting not to seek re-election was the dogged, persistent reporting of the news media. (Fortunately, the American people were smart enough not to brush it off as fake news.)

Not to be outdone by what was taking place on foreign soil and being broadcast in real-time to Americans back home, news reporters covering the Democratic National Convention, in 1968, had a coup of their own.

Chicago-style police brutality, which is alive and well to this day, was captured along Balbo Avenue, while Mayor Richard J. Daley orchestrated the violence from inside the Dems convention at the International Amphitheatre.

In what the federal government would later call “a police riot”, the images of cops billy clubbing and bloodying young protestors turned American stomachs, cementing The Establishment as public enemy #1.

The nauseating sideshow in Chicago not only allowed the whole world to watch, it stoked fears that America was teetering like an aerialist, moments before falling off a high-wire.

Hello 1969.

When the clock struck midnight on January 1, 1969, there was the usual hoopla over having survived another year – especially a year as fraught as 1968 – and palpable trepidation about what lie ahead in the decade’s final 365 days.

Indeed, 1968 would be tough to imitate. However, in the year that followed, as time marched into the second half of the summer, a series of implausible events left an indelible mark not only on 1969, but the entire 1960s decade.

During a barely more than one-month timeframe, spanning 34 days from July 16 to August 18, Americans, and the entire world, witnessed a surreal smorgasbord of astonishing technological achievement, political scandal, sanguine savagery, and an unparalleled gathering of humanity.

Men walking on the Moon.

On July 16, people around the world were mesmerized watching the liftoff of Apollo 11, as it began a 3-day trip; destination the Moon. We followed along with nervous anticipation as the space capsule arrived at, and then orbited the lunar planet.

The Apollo 11 mission fulfilled the visionary and confident goal set forth by President John F. Kennedy who, in a 1962 speech at Rice University challenged America to, by the end of the decade, send astronauts to the Moon and safely return them to Earth.

The greatest human travel adventure in world history was cemented when Neil Armstrong stepped down from the Lunar Module ladder onto the powdery lunar surface, simultaneously leaping into forever legendary status.

With all due and proper reverence to the greatest human explorers throughout the ages, Armstrong (and those who followed him) walking on the Moon is an unmatched human achievement. It still stands as the greatest science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) achievement of my lifetime.

On July 20, 1969, mankind became one as the world watched Armstrong, and fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin, frolic on the powdery surface of the Moon, a faraway 239,000 miles from Earth. The mission returned safely to Earth on July 24.

Nothing done by mortal men, before or since, has been more extraordinary. Humans walking on the Moon was epic. The imagination of the soul was stirred, as the world shared the marvelous visual experience of seeing images of planet Earth, from the perspective of the astronauts on the Moon.

Men landing on the Moon was an amazing feat, providing inspiration and ambition for generations to come. As the saying goes, if we can put men on the Moon, why is it we cannot figure out how to provide affordable healthcare for everyone?

Anyhow, what was happening far away on the Moon provided a temporary respite for one of America’s great political dynasties…

Unresolved scandal.

In Massachusetts, at the other end of the East Coast, and just two days after the Apollo 11 mission launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, a scene unfolded that is still not fully understood.

There was a party on the tiny island of Chappaquiddick, that began on July 18, and included former staff from the late-Robert Kennedy’s campaign. Two attendees left the party together; married Senator Teddy Kennedy accompanied by 28-year-old RFK campaign staffer Mary Jo Kopechne (who, ironically, was at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when RFK was assassinated the year before).

After driving around a bit, sometime after midnight in the early minutes of July 19, Kennedy drove his car off the narrow Dike bridge, plunging into the water with the car landing upside down and submerged.

Kennedy, age 37, had tragically lost his three older brothers. Joe Jr., the eldest, was killed in 1944 at the age of 29, while flying a daring combat mission in World War II. John, president of the United States, was assassinated in 1963 at the age of 46. And Robert, at age 42, was assassinated in 1968 while campaigning to become the Democratic nominee for president.

Who knows what Teddy Kennedy was thinking as he scrambled to free himself from a car submerged in water? He clearly wasn’t seriously thinking of saving Mary Jo Kopechne.

Around 10 a.m. on July 19 Kennedy, via written statement nearly 10 hours after the accident occurred, finally told authorities what happened. By then, it was too late for Kopechne who had already suffocated or drowned. (Because an autopsy was not performed, no one knows for sure how Kopechne died.)

The diver who recovered Kopechne’s body staunchly believed she suffocated but would have survived if Kennedy had called for help immediately after the accident happened.

As many men of privilege often do, Kennedy skated by, charged only with leaving the scene of an accident, and received just two months of probation.

Despite his subsequent outstanding senatorial career, Kennedy admitted in 2009 that “atonement is a process that never ends.” The dark cloud of Chappaquiddick, if not the echoes of Mary Jo Kopechne’s cries for help, never left Kennedy.

One day after Chappaquiddick, men walked on the moon. And then, less than three weeks later

Mayhem.

The balloon of euphoria, from the history-altering success of Apollo 11, was burst when Americans heard the horrifying reports of grisly murders on the West Coast.

On August 8-9, in the hills surrounding Los Angeles, pregnant actress Sharon Tate, and four of her friends were brutally murdered. The next night, August 9-10, brought the equally chilling murders of wealthy supermarket entrepreneur Leno LaBianca, and his wife Rosemary.

Perpetrated by crazed cult leader Charles Manson, a deranged madman who fantasized of becoming a famous musician (Manson was befriended and then discarded by Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson), Tate-LaBianca are among the most famously notorious murders in American history.

Maniacally plotted with the intent to start a race war between whites and blacks (which never materialized), the killers were young, free-spirited, pliable Manson “family” members who’d devolved from laid-back hippie runaways into drug-fueled, zealous, psychopathic murderers.

In the usually laid-back, super-rich communities in Southern California, celebrities showed up at shooting ranges and gun shops. Throughout the nation suspicions shifted into overdrive as America grappled with the senselessness of the murder of a beautiful, pregnant celebrity.

Luckily, one of the Manson “girls”, as they referred to themselves, bragged to her cellmate that she participated in the murder of Tate and the others, including Folger’s coffee fortune heiress Abigail Folger.

Chief Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi brought a measure of calm when his case against Manson, three young women, and a young man, resulted in death-penalty convictions. (All were sparred the death chamber when California repealed the death penalty in 1972.)

The Manson killings were a capstone to a decade of violence that was defined by assassinations, authorities in the South hosing down blacks, the 1965 Watts/L.A. riots, nationwide riots following King’s assassination, and continuous street fighting between protesters and government authorities over civil rights and the Vietnam War.

Manson’s murderous splurge accelerated the spiraling of America away from endless utopia into the grip of deep-seated fear and despair. But there would be one more party…

Grooving on a farm.

1969’s improbable 34-day stretch ended with the sensational Woodstock Music Festival, which took place August 15-18. Quartered in the upstate New York hamlet of White Lake, in the town of Bethel, the most prolific outdoor music festival in American history drew a crowd of more than 400,000, placing an exclamation point on the 1960s decade.

A stout musician line-up featured Joan Baez, Jimmy Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Ravi Shankar, Richie Havens, Jefferson Airplane, The Who, Santana, Joe Cocker, The Grateful Dead, Crosby, Stills & Nash (and Young), Country Joe McDonald, Sly & The Family Stone, and many more of the era’s top artists.

The festival attracted legions of fans from across the nation and beyond; fans wanting to hear live music, get high and experience a taste of the love that flowed freely during the 1960s. The festival was a final grasp of a moment in time that was quickly slipping away.

Woodstock was more than a music festival. It was a grand-scale event where attendees, free from the confines of parental or any other authority oversight, could listen to music, sing, dance, shout, hangout, talk pop culture, flaunt their fashion sense, cook, eat, drink, do drugs and make love. And like anything that feels good, too much of a good thing sometimes leads to a hangover, or worse.

On September 18, 1970, just over a year after performing at Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix died at the age of 27, from an overdose of barbiturates. Less than one month later, on October 4, 1970, another Woodstock performer, Janis Joplin, also 27-years-old, succumbed from an overdose of heroin.

Titled the Woodstock Music Festival, because the investment group backing the festival was named Woodstock Ventures, it was the grooviest grooving ever experienced at an outdoor music festival.

And Woodstock became the mother and father of modern music festivals, paving the way for the Lollapalooza’s and Coachella’s and Pitchfork’s.

Douglas FreelandJuly 19, 2018