As World Fairs had in the past the fair in 1964 provided a timely glimpse
of the planet's current realities and future expectations.
The New York Times described it as a "glittering mirror
of our national opulence."
It seemed to portend a future
where the biggest worry for average Americans
would be how to spend their leisure time.
I just took it for granted that I, you know, I'd always have a roof over my head and enough to eat.
I never thought that I'd have to worry about where my next meal was coming from.
These thoughts just didn't occur to me.
But of course part of the reason we could think that way is that
we took prosperity more or less for granted.
In his speech at the World's Fair, President Lyndon Johnson
touted a world of prosperity.
"But that people, people: they shall have the best. All of these dreams."
Only to find himself interrupted in mid-speech
by demonstrators who felt themselves froze out of the world.
Despite a lengthy struggle, millions of Black Americans
still did not share in the nation's prosperity
or enjoy the full rights of their citizenship.
In 1964, many expected that such inequities
would soon be addressed.
We thought that essentially the material problems of the world had been solved
and that the important thing now was to solve the moral problems.
It was a society that had to be changed and there was not gonna be a change
unless some people decided that they would dedicate their lives to changing it.
It was not gonna change spontaneously.
The World's Fair that year was held in Flushing Meadows, New York.
It was supposed to promote the culture
and customs of people everywhere, in keeping with its theme
of "peace through understanding."
But it would not be long before Americans would be driven apart by societal disagreements
within their own borders, and a terrible, costly war
on the other side of the globe.
The country was not about to experience much of either peace or understanding.
"We shall overcome"
In the mid-1960s, the determination to challenge traditional boundaries
seemed to be growing in almost every arena.
Perhaps most striking was a broadening struggle for civil rights,
a struggle that many whites now joined in large numbers.
In the summer of 1964, hundreds of college students, white and black,
headed south to Mississippi, where many Blacks were still mired in a Jim Crow world
of poverty and political impotence.
These students from the North hoped to register Black voters
and establish so-called "Freedom Schools" to teach literacy skills
to those who'd been denied them.
They were traveling into a world where many people were set in their ways.
President Lyndon Johnson warned the students
that the federal government could not guarantee their safety.
They received a lot of training in order to prepare them
for life in Mississippi, which was not gonna
be very easy--it wasn't easy for us--and we tried to make that very clear to people.
I mean, our lives were in imminent danger every minute of the day.
When we crossed the line into Mississippi
and it said 'Mississippi welcomes you,"
it was the first time I felt really afraid.
In the first group to arrive in Mississippi
were students Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney.
Within days, all three of them were missing.
Bob Moses, who was the head of the
Mississippi summer project, brought the group together,
told us that they were missing,
and it was clear to all of us that it was
extremely likely that they were dead.
Six weeks after their disappearance,
the three were discovered buried in an earthen dam
shot in the head.
In that summer of 1964 the Ku Klux Klan
was still trying to stop the forces of change
but among the students and in the homes and churches
of the Black community,
the feeling grew stronger that change could not be prevented.
We went up to the home
of a very poor Black woman,
sharecropper shack,
she had a bunch of kids.
She came to the door, she looked at her feet,
she said "Yes'm" "No'm"
to everything we said.
And we tried to persuade her to sign this.
And it was very clear if she signed it she might
get thrown out of her home.
After a few minutes of talking
she suddenly straightened up, looked us in the eyes,
and said 'I'll sign it.' And she signed it.
That's how powerful the movement was.
And the movement expanded to other causes
at the end of the so-called "Freedom Summer."
The first amendment didn't apply to any
campuses in the country.
You couldn't give a speech
without getting it cleared by the administration.
When Freedom Summer veterans at the University of California at Berkeley
tried to recruit others to their cause
they were barred by university regents.
It just set off this explosion among the students
and people who had never had a political thought in their head
just got fired by the idea that someone couldn't
tell them when and where to say what they wanted to say.
United by what they saw as an injustice
thousands of students began a series of protests
that lasted eight weeks.
When college officials threatened to expel
several of the student leaders
the conflict reached a boiling point.
"There's a time when the operation of the machine
becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart,
that you can't take part. You can't even
passively take part."
You have to put your body on the wheels
and we're gonna go in there
and we're gonna take over this building.
And so the crowd began to move. I just went with it.
Some people looked a little scared because
they'd never done anything like that before.
I was scared.
"We're pissed off and we're sick and tired."
When the student takeover of a campus building
resulted in more than 800 arrests,
the university faculty finally
weighed in on the side of the demonstrators.
Cornered as they were, the regents
granted free speech to the students
and thus began an era of confrontation at American universities.
In late 1964, another fight was looming for Americans,
this one thousands of miles from home,
and with far more devastating consequences.
For several years, American advisers
had been sent to South Vietnam to help
prevent what the administration said
was a takeover by the Communist North.
Things were not going well in the South.
President Lyndon Johnson decided
to dramatically increase the US military commitment to Vietnam.
And just as they had throughout history, young Americans
answered the call to arms.
I didn't wanna see my son go
and he promised nothing was gonna happen to him,
you know, and that it was gonna be over very shortly
and he'd be home before I knew it.
You grew up watching those John Wayne movies
where the good guys always win.
I was being John Wayne,
I was gonna go and I was gonna beat them
and nothing could hurt me.
Like many other young men in 1965,
Jack Bronson knew very little about war
except that America didn't lose them.
This one looked at first to be no exception.
Th United States, which had defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan and held back
the Communist Chinese
in Korea, now faced a third world army
of North Vietnamese soldiers
and South Vietnamese Vietcong guerrillas.
American commanders confidently predicted a swift
and positive conclusion.
I was excited about going to war.
The whole battalion was excited about going to war.
We were gung-ho.
With 125,000 fresh troops
and an armada of helicopters ranging all over South Vietnam
American generals were spoiling for a good fight.
They were about to get one.
On November 15th 1965 Lieutenant Larry Gwen's unit
was helicoptered to a valley in central Vietnam
near the Cambodian border.
They had gone to intersect the North Vietnamese supply routes to the south.
North Vietnamese soldiers watched them arrive.
It was my first real hot landing zone.
And it was so hot that I had exited my ship,
knelt on the grass for about 10 seconds,
and a guy pops up next to me, whom I knew had just been shot through the shoulder
and said 'I'm hit, Lieutenant.'
A major battle with the enemy was just
what the military brass had been hoping for
only it was not going according to plan.
At 10 in the morning Lieutenant Gwen was fighting for his life.
Our first Lieutenant was overrun
our second Lieutenant was pinned down by mortar fire.
I saw about 40 North Vietnamese soldiers
coming across the landing zone at us.
And all I did was say 'here they come'
and start shooting at them.
1:00 PM the American commander sent out
an emergency signal: "Broken Arrow. US troops in danger of being overrun."
Every available aircraft was called in
against the North Vietnamese positions.
Including the giant B-52 bombers.
The B-52 is terrible, terrible in many ways.
Because firstly, there was no way you can fight back.
You can't run.
There's no time for you to run.
You just lay there, wait for the death to come and grip you.
And thousands of men died in those desperate
hours. By the time the battle was over
3500 North Vietnamese and 305 Americans
had been killed.
It was obvious to the men in the field what lay ahead.
Preoccupied as he was with the growing
war in Vietnam, President Johnson knew
that he had to address problems at home.
Despite America's prosperity,
40 million citizens still lived below the poverty line.
"And this administration today here and now
declares unconditional war on poverty in America."
In May 1964 the president unveiled the grand plan
for what he called "the Great Society."
Mr. Johnson hoped to match the power and vitality
of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal
with a list of welfare, job and educational opportunities
to aide underprivileged Americans.
But the privilege that many southern Blacks most desired
was the right to vote, still often denied them.
In Selma, Alabama, 97% of 15,000 eligible Black voters
were unregistered.
Some because of cynicism or apathy,
but most because they faced violence and intimidation
from local authorities.
People could only attempt to register
on the first and third Mondays of each month.
"The voter registrar is not in session
this afternoon, as you were informed.
You came down to make a mockery
out of this courthouse..."
And you had to get some white person
to vouch that you were of good character.
No white person in his right mind
in the state of Alabama
was going to vouch that a Black person
was of good character.
"If we're wrong, why don't you
arrest us?..."
Selma rapidly became the new flashpoint
of the Civil Rights Movement.
On March 7th 1965
600 Civil Rights activists planned a march
that was to take them from Selma
to the state capital in Montgomery
some 54 miles away.
Their route would take the non-violent demonstrators
through what amounted to enemy territory.
Roads and highways controlled by
the Alabama state police.
They came toward us
beating us with nightsticks
with bullwhips
and trampling us with horses.
I was hit in the head
and just left lying there, and
I felt like it was the last protest.
The violence and brutality which ended this march
quickly provoked plans
for a much larger one, now joined
by Dr. Martin Luther King.
"We've gone too far now to turn back."
Dr. King was determined to focus
national attention on Selma
and he enlisted the help of supporters
from New York to Hollywood.
"The reverend said 'The white man can't
cool it because he never dug it.'"
Marlon Brando was the one who
got me involved in Civil Rights, honestly.
I was walking down the street
and he just pulled up in a car
and he said 'How'd you like to go down to Selma?'
and I said 'Selma?' 'Selma, we're gonna have a march
from Selma to Montgomery. You wanna come?'
and I said, 'Sure.'
Before the second march had even begun
the reverend James Reeb, a Civil Rights sympathizer,
was beaten to death by a white mob.
But rather than intimidating the marchers
that violence seemed to give them a powerful ally.
That night I was with Martin Luther King Jr.
in Selma when we heard Lyndon Johnson
we watched him make one of the greatest speeches
any American president ever made
on the whole question of Civil Rights.
"Their cause
must be our cause too.
It's all of us
who must overcome
the crippling legacy of
bigotry and injustice.
And we shall overcome."
Just think of a President with a southern accent
from Texas saying to the Congress of the United States
"We shall overcome."
Finally, popular protest and public power
had come together.
And Dr. King literally started crying.
Tears came down his face.
I knew then that we would make it
from Selma to Montgomery.
On March 21st 1965,
3200 people set out from Selma.
Four days later, as the march approached Montgomery,
there were 25,000 people marching.
It was an amazing moment.
It was scary, it was scary.
There were helicopters everywhere,
like some sort of angry bugs.
And there were only confederate flags
flying, we were the only ones with American flags.
You know, and Martin Luther King gave a great speech.
"All the world today knows
that we are here and we are standing
before the forces of power
in the state of Alabama saying
'We ain't gon' let nobody
turn us around.'"
There's very few times in your life that you know
that you're someplace that, you're in a moment
where--this is one of those things that as long as there's time
there's gonna be this moment, and that was it.
On August 6th, Lyndon Johnson signed
the Voting Rights Act,
finally guaranteeing Black Americans
the right to vote.
But just as it reached a high point
the Civil Rights Movement seemed
to split into warring factions.
A revolution of rising expectations
stirs people to believe that
the promised land is there.
It was when change was coming, when there was
a sense of possibility,
that everything broke loose and went wild.
"You're better than the white men.
You are better than the white men.
And that's not saying anything."
Despite the gains of recent years
it seemed to many Blacks that the pace of change
was too slow, that Martin Luther King
was too accomodating.
These Blacks began to adopt the separatist
rhetoric of the charismatic Malcolm X.
I used to hear Malcolm say, "If a man
slaps me in the face, I'm not turning my cheek.
If I slap him back, he won't slap me again."
That made a lot of sense.
Malcolm at that time said "Clearly, alright,
what we need is power"
while King would say "What we need is morality
to help..." Malcolm said "Forget about them
just get guns and that's how they gonna regulate the problem."
The contradiction, however, was that
Martin Luther King was involved in action,
confronting the enemy,
Malcolm X was not.
So what you had to do was
take the confrontation of King,
and match it as best you can with
the philosophy of Malcolm X,
which is precisely what we did.
"We want black power."
The response was overwhelming.
In 1966, militants in Oakland California
founded the Black Panther party for self-defense
and told America that the fight for Civil Rights
would never be the same.
If you come down here jumping on us
and beating us up like you were beating up
the peaceful protesters with your dogs,
your cattle prods,
and are shooting them up,
murdering these peaceful protesters,
we're not gonna take it.
When you start shooting, we're shooting back.
"The revolution has come"
The call by militant leaders for total revolution
received a sympathetic ear in
many of the nation's impoverished inner cities,
where the Great Society was still nowhere to be seen.
We're in the south, where we had a powerful, nonviolent movement.
People had a way to channel their frustration.
In many poor areas of America,
especially outside of the South,
the fires of frustration,
the fires of discontent,
were beginning to burn.
In 1967 that anger and discontent exploded
into violence in Newark, New Jersey,
Detroit, Michigan, and more than 100 other cities.
80 people died in urban riots that summer.
Lyndon Johnson was shocked, I think,
at the riots.
And angry.
He took it personally
and he got angry at Blacks for being
ungrateful for these great laws that had been passed.
Despite his disappointment,
Lyndon Johnson believed that his
war on poverty could still succeed.
All he needed was more money.
Well, the president said to me, you know,
"We have this war going on now in Vietnam.
It's going to take up all of the extra money we have
right now to fight that war. But," he said,
"Sarg, look, we're gonna be out of that war,
that'll be finished in the next 12 to 18 months.
As soon as that's finished, I will take the money
we are now devoting to the war in Vietnam
and we'll put it in the war against poverty."
Obviously, that never happened.
In 1964, a British rock band
showed up in the United States
that was described by one historian as
"raunchier and more rebellious than the Beatles."
They were called
the Rolling Stones
and in the mid-1960s they created
a song that became an anthem.
I had one of the first early
Norelcos, sort of cassette players
and I'd put it next to the bed
and with the guitar
and I crashed out
and when I woke up in the morning
I noticed that the tape had gone to the end
and I'd put it in at the beginning
and I ran it back, pushed play, and
somewhere in the middle of the night
I had woken up and played
"duh, duh, duh, I can't get no satisfaction."
And it's there, the verse and the chorus are there,
and then it stops and the rest of the tape
is me snoring.
"I can't get no satisfaction"
Rock music had accompanied America's youth
on its journey to the forefront
of the nation's consciousness.
With songs like "Satisfaction," #1 on the charts
in 1965, the journey took quite a radical turn.
The message is the ordinary
order of things is
either broken or corrupt.
I can't get no satisfaction,
I gotta do something wilder.
That's how you get your satisfaction.
The message it sends is "cut loose"
It was music that gave us
as an entity
as a community, a sense of cohesion
and a sense of existing.
A real sense of being more than a few demonstrations.
The Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, the Doors,
Bob Dylan, all of them sang in a way that
invited challenge
to the establishment.
I think people were absolutely
waking up but they didn't know exactly
how to get out of bed yet.
And what to do when they put their feet
on the floor.
We began to look around for
things to do which would alert people
to other possibilities, other ways
of living.
For some, other possibilities meant completely
rejecting the values that had united
their parents' generation.
I mean, where is it written in stone
that people have to work from 9 to 5?
The Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco
became the center of the counter culture.
Suddenly, there was an environment
where your personal history did not matter.
Nobody cared who your parents were,
whether you were rich, whether you were poor,
you get up every day
and you had no idea what the day would bring.
There were the greatest looking women
parading up and down the street
There was a sense of adventure
random combinations
You could catch a woman's eye and
offer her your arm
and without a word, walk away
and spend an afternoon
making love and if you didn't talk
that was okay.
I was looking for a new way to express myself.
You know, and I think everybody was.
And unfortunately, a lot of people went to drugs.
Because it came naturally out of
it came naturally out of what we were doing
at the time.
"It's a food for the soul.
Right now I'm on LSD.
Every color is going through my mind."
The psychedelic drug LSD became
a rite of passage for many in the counter culture.
These were awfully hard on people
who were in their 40s at that time.
Just awfully hard,
with the hair and the drugs and the music,
and the dirty clothes,
and the foul language. It all became
regardless of the political position one took.
"Brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers,
if you truly care about your country..."
Despised by many people in the older generation,
the social ferment of the 1960s would nonetheless
change forever the way young Americans
looked at themselves.
A long-dormant struggle for equality
was revived by the new freedom that many
young women were feeling.
Women were given more choice
with the introduction
of the birth control pill.
We could now control when and if
we chose to have children.
And it helped to propel
I think, the development of
the Women's Movement.
In the 1960s, discrimination against women
was solidly entrenched,
particularly in the workplace.
Job ads were divided into sections
marked "male" and "female."
Airline stewardesses were
simply dismissed on their 32nd birthday.
"The great majority of American women
are not participating in terms of
their full potential ability."
In 1966 a group of feminists,
most notably Betty Friedan,
founded the National Organization for Women.
This was a turning point
in the Women's Liberation movement
that was typical of many struggles
at the time.
Thus began another era of militancy.
"Women have been particularly oppressed
and now women are on the move
and there ain't gon' be no stopping us."
This one was--was my struggle,
in which I was the actor.
"Miss America stands 5 feet 7, 125 pounds
and measures 36-24 1/2-36."
On September 7th 1968
the new Miss America was crowned
in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
Outside, 200 women demonstrated against the pageant.
They threw their bras and their high heeled shoes,
which they called "instruments of oppression,"
into so-called "freedom trash cans."
"Women, use your brains, not your bodies."
We had learned that from the Civil Rights Movement.
You demonstrate, you stand up,
you get in their face,
and you get behind the scenes
and you pass your legislation.
We learned. We were political.
For American soldiers in the field,
it was grinding and bloody.
But by mid-1966 the Vietnam war was
settling into just the kind of conflict
that General William Westmoreland
believed America would win,
a war of atrition.
What General Westmoreland didn't recognize
was that the North Vietnamese
also saw a war they could win.
As long as they didn't meet the Americans head-on.
The booby-trap, the land mine,
the raid, the ambush,
any square yard of Vietnam
could be this absolutely utterly peaceful place
one second.
And the next second,
it was the end of the world.
We are not fighting a conventional war.
We would go in a kind of surprise attack
and then withdraw immediately.
Very effective.
As the US grew frustrated by its inability
to score decisive victories against the North Vietnamese
and the Vietcong,
the administration continued to pour more men
and more machinery into Vietnam.
By mid-1967, close to half a million Americans
were involved in the fight.
In the face of these escalations,
the North Vietnamese continually
adapted their strategies.
The only option they never discussed among themselves
was surrender.
As long as alive Vietnamese there, the resistance
would go on.
We just wouldn't accept two Vietnams.
For American troops, most of whom left Vietnam
after one year of duty, things were not quite as clear
at all. Almost anyone was a potential enemy.
As the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong
enjoyed widespread sympathy in South Vietnam
in such an atmosphere of confusion
areas were conquered and then abandoned.
Villages saved, and then destroyed.
"I believe I am correct in saying that in the
past four and a half years
the Vietcong have lost 89,000 men."
Many Americans were dying, too,
without ever understanding what they'd been fighting for.
There was one kid who was previously injured
and I had my arms around him
trying to comfort him, but he was losing consciousness,
and he just kept staring up
with an expression on his face of
"Why? Why? What's happening to me? What's happening?"
By then, 1967 and 68,
when we were losing hundreds a week
in that same fashion, you had to start
questioning how much longer could this go on.
On January 20th 1968 US Marines
got involved in a battle with the North Vietnamese
near the American base at Khe Sanh.
It was the beginning of a critical campaign.
For several weeks the North Vietnamese
hammered Khe-Sanh and its defenders.
We were moving our way up
the trench line and we came to a machine gun book.
Someone was firing a machine gun.
And I said "Where's everybody else?"
and he said "There isn't anybody else."
And I said "Where is your crew?"
And he said "They're gone."
The siege continued throughout February
and into March.
At home television viewers were shocked
by the spectacle.
Jack Bronson was a medic.
They screamed for me,
they screamed for their mothers.
It is not like the movies;
you are looking at this person
who is begging not to die.
And the first question they always would ask me:
"Am I gonna make it, doc?"
And I had to lie a lot of times.
When I was hit, I knew I was hurt bad.
And I can remember laying there
and I could hear the Vietnamese.
Cause they kept throwing grenades at us.
I could hear them talking.
And I can remember saying to myself,
"You are going to die."
I got the telegram telling me
that he was very seriously hurt
and that the prognosis was not good.
He was so far away that if I could only see him
it wouldn't be so bad.
But he's way out there...
he didn't know whether I loved him,
or if I could only hold his hand or something
cause I didn't expect to see him again.
Severely wounded Jack Bronson would return
home to a country unsure what to make of his sacrifice.
In late March, the North Vietnamese simply
melted away and Khe-Sanh became another
in a growing tally of dubious victories,
a base desperately fought over,
and then abandoned.
"Yeah, I don't know, they say we're fighting for something.
I don't know."
By now many Americans on the homefront
didn't see the Vietnam war as one of national survival.
Opposition to the high price being paid
in American servicemen began to build.
As we began to see what was happening
in that war, watching on television,
it was stunning.
You know, it was something that
we had never seen--we'd never seen that face of war--
you know, it was always World War II.
The Good War. And nobody ever saw the Korean War
I mean, how many pictures have you seen of the Korean War?
Suddenly, there it was, 6:00, and you know, there were bodies,
and firefights.
What made the experiences of the Vietnam war generation
so different from those of the World War II:
their parents hadn't had TV when they were kids.
That made them different from every generation
that had gone before.
The anti-war demonstrators in the United States
now took their protest to a new level.
took part in one of the growing number of demonstrations
against the war.
The confrontation was very intense,
the cops very suddenly had moved in on people
and started to crack heads.
And they beat people pretty badly.
There was a lot of blood,
there were a lot of injuries,
and all of a sudden people understood
themselves as being at odds
with the powers that be.
That, for us, was a signal that we needed
to come back strong,
become more militant.
In trying to stop the war in Vietnam
the demonstrations intensified the war at home.
There was a class dimension to the Vietnam protests.
To a large extent it was college kids
saying they didn't want to go fight this
war that they didn't see much point in
so the blue collar kids did.
It was one of the uglier things about
the Vietnam war, to an extent
it was fought by the less fortunate
in the society.
In February and March 1968
television brought another set of horrifying
images home to Americans.
US soldiers were fighting for their lives
from one end of South Vietnam
to the other,
the US embassy in Saigon was being overrun.
This was the Tet Offensive, a military defeat
for the North Vietnamese,
but ultimately a political victory.
Despite hearing repeatedly
that there was light at the end of the tunnel
most Americans came to realize they were not
going to win the war in Vietnam anytime soon
if ever.
On March 31st 1968, with the presidential election
just a few months away,
an exhausted Lyndon Johnson
seemed to come to the same conclusion.
"I shall not seek
and I will not accept
the nomination of my party for another term
as your president."
And I looked at the guys in the bunker
with me and I thought, I said,
"He's getting out."
And the other guy says, "What do you mean?"
I said "He's not gonna run for president,
he's not running anymore.
He's getting out, he's the commander in chief.
If he's getting out, what are we doing here?"
In America 1968 "peace and understanding"
were fast becoming distant memories.
As the Vietnam war became the longest war in American history
over 100 college campuses were wracked by furious protests.
In the spring many of the nation's cities
exploded once again with racial violence,
propelled by the terrible events of April 4 1968.
When I heard of the news
that Martin Luther King had been shot
in Memphis, and then seconds later
killed in Memphis, it was
as if a member of my family had been killed.
And it said to me, "Here's this guy
who's been going around
preaching peace and non-violence
and peaceful resistance,
and now someone has shot him dead."
And it shattered my belief that we could
work these things out in a peaceful way.
"It's perhaps well to ask what kind of
a nation we are and what direction
we want to move in."
That night, Robert Kennedy
the leading candidate
for the Democratic Presidential nomination,
announced King's death to a room full
of campaign workers.
In Kennedy, many Americans, both black and white,
saw a man who could turn back the tide
of violence.
Two months after the death of Martin Luther King,
Robert Kennedy was killed.
My wife came into the bedroom and said,
"You know what they've done now?
They shot Bobby Kennedy."
This "they," a sort of paranoid moment
of our own, the sense of
everything coming undone.
And you never quite get over it,
you no longer feel safe,
in your life the way you did as a child,
when your parents were alive.
In those turbulent days,
you felt you never really will be safe.
"Will the convention be in order"
In late August the city of Chicago
was the host city for the Democratic National Convention.
"Will the sergeant of arms enforce order in the convention"
Delegates from all 50 states
arrived to find Chicago an armed camp
The city's mayor, Richard Daly,
knew that tens of thousands of young demonstrators
were also on their way.
"Chairman, they're here as guests of the Democratic party
and let them conduct themselves accordingly."
They were determined to have their say.
All across the country the new Left was
trying to provoke people into actions
that would escalate the whole thing.
You never saw people so provoked in all your life
as those Chicago police,
the things those kids said to them.
"I take one look at these pigs out here
and I know what America's about."
The gestures they made to them,
deliberately designed to bring on this reaction.
I volunteered to go to the Democratic National Convention
because I wanted to see it.
And I can remember up at 2 in the morning
trying to get to sleep
it was a little difficult because
our windows were open, it was very hot,
and all we could hear was the chant
"F you, Daly"
It was quite an event.
The Democratic party was coming apart
right there in the streets of Chicago.
It seemed to many the country itself
was coming apart.
In November, America elected a new president
who promised to heal the nation's wounds.
Richard Milhouse Nixon.
"We're gonna sock it to 'em!"
Just as American unity and confidence
seemed to be crumbling,
a man from Ohio lands on the moon.
We'll see that on the next episode
of the Century: America's Time.
Thank you for joining us.
I'm Peter Jennings.