History, the chronicle of humanity’s power struggles, oftentimes moves with agonizing slowness taking decades, generations and centuries for events to manifest. Then again, a single event can disrupt the trajectory of history in a microsecond.
Sixty years ago today that trajectory was changed drastically, suddenly and forever.
The 1960s started out so well. We Baby Boomers were, at 73 million, a massive population demographic, the “pig in the python” so to speak. We were joining the rapidly expanding masses of American teens on the threshold of a brand-new decade, which our elders assured us was a star-spangled future just waiting for us. For a time, the 1960s held hope for being a bright and shining decade, a robust future for America, progress.
John Kennedy was our president. To my generation he was more like a movie star (the term “rock star” was not yet in use) than a politician. At 43, he was the youngest man to be elected president of the United States. Witty, intelligent and charming, the press loved him and created a mystique around the Kennedys they termed “Camelot.” It was refreshing to see the Kennedy children playing underfoot in the Oval Office because their dad worked there. We saw an administration that was young and vital, not men older than our own grandfathers.
A young administration with fresh ideas would certainly bring America further greatness.
For instance, Kennedy’s Peace Corps was an opportunity for the youth of America to personally participate in finding a way for all people to co-exist, as the president put it, “on this small planet.” The Peace Corps would spread American know-how to less developed countries, exporting the means of peace instead of weapons of war.
It was a perilous time. The Cold War raged. TV newscasts showed U.S. and Soviet tanks muzzle-to-muzzle as the Berlin Wall went up. Soviet Premier Kruschev got caught putting nuclear missiles in Cuba. We congratulated our leaders on threading the needle, avoiding a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.
Abraham Zapruder’s 8mm home movie preserved for all time the shocking moment John Kennedy’s head exploded in a red mist and the first lady of the United States scrambled to retrieve her husband’s brains from the trunk lid of the Lincoln in which they were riding. In an interview Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent assigned to Mrs. Kennedy, said, “She was screaming, ‘They’ve blown his head off. I love you, Jack!’”
The ‘60s became the decade of political assassinations which claimed the lives of, among others, Medgar Evers, John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. While each one of these deaths is a tragedy, it was the assassination of John Kennedy that turned the world on edge altering the trajectory of history. In that single moment, that microsecond, an assassin’s bullet derailed the hopes and dreams for the American 1960s.
We Boomers did not know at the time we were witnessing the single, terrible event that pivoted the decade from one of promise, prosperity and unity of purpose into a decade of divisiveness, death and destruction, setting the machinery in motion for a conflagration in Southeast, Asia which would result in the civilian deaths of 2 million Vietnamese, 50 thousand Laotians and 3 million Cambodians — as well as the deaths of 58,000 American soldiers.
At the time of Kennedy’s death there were 15,000 advisors in Vietnam. Kennedy intended to withdraw them. President Lyndon B. Johnson reversed Kennedy’s position on Vietnam and U.S. ground forces were committed in spring of 1965. Two-and-a-half million American troops were deployed to Vietnam from 1965 through 1973 with fatalities sometimes hitting in excess of 400 per week.
The optimistic spirit of the 1960s was no more. The world as we knew it, a world where our nation would be led by young, forward-thinking individuals, had been obliterated. The decade that started out with so much promise for humanity lurched toward war, dissent and an endless procession of flag-draped coffins.
On Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, in that single moment when an assassin squeezed his trigger, the nation was taken hostage. I was 16. That moment and that single bullet were the focus point upon which the axis of the ‘60s pivoted. Our lives, America and the world, changed forever. We just didn’t know it, yet.
(W. Eugene Johnson of Hazel Hurst is the author of “Flashing Back: Coming of Age in the American 1960s.”)
