The 1960s were a time of dramatic political and cultural
upheaval both in the United States and around the globe. Many date the decade's true cultural beginning to November
22, 1963, when President John E Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
Kennedy's shocking
murder seemed to be the starting point of one of the nation's most turbulent
eras, a time marked by further assassinations,
urban riots, mass protests, failed presidencies, an unpopular war, and new demands for
equal rights and social justice. In that sense, the tumult of the 1960s did not truly end until noon
on Aug. 9,
1974, when Richard Nixon became the first U.S. president to resign his office in the wake
of the Watergate scandal.
It was Kennedy
himself who
detected change in the air as he sought to become the nation's first Roman Catholic
president in 1960. Kennedy's campaign
was based on an explicit critique of the 1950s and the
gray-flannel administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Kennedy, as the Democratic Party's
nominee, argued
that it was time to get the country moving again, a sentiment that many young people - the advance guard of that giant cohort known as the "baby boom” - shared.
But in fields far removed from the campaign trail, the country was already moving in a new direction. Leading the way were
thousands of ordinary African Americans who were demanding an end to blatant
discrimination in the South and equal justice throughout the country. The civil
rights movement was already a powerful force
by the time the calendar turned from 1959 to 1960. The new decade
ushered in not the movement’s birth but its maturity. (The New York Times
‘Smarter by Sunday – 52 Weekends of Essential Knowledge for the Curious Mind’)
