The Century: America's Time - 1960-1964: Poisoned Dreams

At the lunch counter in this Greensboro, North Carolina

Woolworth's in February of 1960,

four college freshmen took a stand by simply sitting down.

The day that we decided to sit down

we figured we could go to jail.

If that was what we faced,

then it was worth doing that.

By asking for a cup of coffee

and a doughnut, Joe McNeil

and his friends had taken on segregation,

an established way of life in the American South,

one which would not allow Blacks to eat with whites

at a lunch counter

or use the same restrooms, or drink from

the same water fountains.

There comes a time in life where you say

hey, we're gonna confront it,

and see where it goes.

Within weeks of the Greensboro sit-in

similar protests were breaking out in

more than 30 southern cities.

There was a astounding

rapid, ripple effect

because every time you turned on the radio or TV

there was another sit-in someplace.

And all of the people sitting in

were young.

We had crossed a line.

I was no longer afraid of getting arrested.

The first time I got arrested, I tell you

I was free. I was liberated.

Young people getting arrested on purpose

so they could be free.

They touched the conscience of America.

As we began to see what was coming out of the South,

we knew that there was something wrong in this country.

And I think that that had a powerful effect on us.

The effect was to believe that

it was possible to make change in the world

and that you had a responsibility to take part in that change.

In the early 1960s young people came to the forefront

in America. The Civil Rights Movement was often

driven by their anger, the culture of the era

was certainly shaped by their tastes and desires.

The country would elect its youngest president

at the beginning of the decade.

His energy and enthusiasm seemed to promise

a revitalized nation, a country spirited and strong enough

to meet the challenges at home

and--in an increasingly dangerous world--

the challenges abroad.

The Cold's War's shadow continued to hang

like a dark cloud over an otherwise optimistic horizon.

The presidential candidates in 1960,

Massachusetts senator John Kennedy

and Vice President Richard Nixon,

were only in their mid-40s. Both were ardent Cold Warriors.

"But I am not satisfied as an American

to be second to the Soviet Union."

"What we wanna do is not to turn their way but to do it our way.

And that's exactly what we're talking about."

The country had a consensus at that time.

There were no real divisions

among the majority of Americans over the Cold War

and communism.

And Nixon and Kennedy emphasized their anti-communist credentials

which were sterling on both sides.

Both men were Navy veterans, the candidates

had been freshmen congressmen together

after the war,

but somehow Kennedy seemed the younger,

and identified himself as the candidate of a new generation.

His enthusiasm, his energy and determination

was infectious, and we all felt

and the country felt

that yes, you know, we're on the march again

and that it was a good march.

You know, we went to several states to campaign.

I was in my early 20s.

I walked a precinct in Redondo Beach.

I don't think I've ever done that before or since.

Um, he effected everybody.

The favorite candidate of much of the entertainment

community reached the high point of his campaign

in a series of debates on television.

These were the first presidential debates, ever.

Ever. There had never been a presidential debate before.

And the fact that it was happening live

and on television gave it a kind of theater

that was remarkable.

"The question now is

can freedom be maintained."

The candidates were close on the issues,

particularly on a tough stance against the Soviet Union.

"I of course disagree with Senator Kennedy."

Studies after the debate show that those who heard it on

the radio thought Mr. Nixon had won.

Those who saw it on television gave the edge to Kennedy.

The image that came over definitely favored Kennedy.

To see his earnestness, to feel his charm,

to feel his idealism...

I'm convinced that he would not have won without the debates.

After the closest presidential election of the century,

the country's oldest elected president at the time

was succeeded by its youngest.

I remember watching the inaugural, with pleasure

and even a kind of pride.

I was struck by the fact that he didn't wear an overcoat

though it was a very cold January day.

"Let the word go forth

from this time and place

to friend and foe alike

that the torch has been passed

to a new generation of Americans."

It was very exhilarating, in a sense, to

have a man as young and articulate and electric

as John Kennedy was.

What he said was quite hawkish,

when we look back on it.

"We shall pay any price,

bear any burden,

meet any hardship,

support any friend,

oppose any foe,

to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

After the soaring words of the inaugural speech

the inaugural parties gave final proof to the notion

that a younger and more glamorous administration

had arrived.

I remember Lenny Bruce saying

"Isn't it great to have a president who you can imagine sleeping with his wife?"

And I thought, at the time, "God, I think that too."

You could identify with the man, in that sense.

It was the first president that seemed like a guy,

not like something on a dollar bill.

The idea of a White House run and staffed

by younger people

with a 32-year-old chief speech writer

and a press secretary in his 30s and all these

people around Kennedy,

there was that feeling that "Well, if they're

running the political system, surely we can be

somehow involved in it."

We wanted to serve, we wanted to do something

because young people, me included, in those days,

did wonder how we were ever gonna top

the generation before us. Our fathers had fought in World War II.

They had won, they had beaten the Depression,

in some way. What are we gonna do?

On April 12th 1961,

the Soviets sent cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin

into orbit around the globe.

First Sputnik in '57, and then Yuri Gagarin going into space,

in '61, terrified the American people.

People were sitting around and talking about

what would we do if the Russians had arms, missiles, whatever?

On the moon?

And could shoot--we were making this stuff up--but

shoot at us at will?

And we'd have to surrender, you know,

we had to choose "better red than dead."

That's what people were thinking, then.

In what would become a spiraling series of superpower

moves and counter moves, just three weeks after

the Soviet's man launched, the US sent astronaut

Alan Shepard into space.

And President Kennedy promised even greater heights.

"We choose to go to the moon..."

A man on the moon, walking on the moon?

Now? In this decade?

"We choose to go to the moon

in this decade and do the other things

not because they are easy

but because they are hard."

You gotta be kidding.

But Kennedy wasn't kidding.

"Because that goal will serve to organize

and measure the best of our energies

and skills. Because that challenge is one

that we're willing to accept,

one we are unwilling to postpone,

and one we intend to win."

This bold push into space was also seen as

an aggressive manifestation of the Cold War.

And so was a Kennedy-supported CIA scheme in April of 1961,

to land Cuban exiles in their homeland

to ignite an uprising against Fidel Castro.

When the mission failed, leaving the exiles

stranded at Cuba's Bay of Pigs,

America and the president were humiliated.

Three months later, as if sensing American weakness,

Khrushchev demanded that all Allied forced be removed

from Berlin.

"We cannot and will not permit the communists to drive us out of Berlin,

either gradually or by force."

Kennedy put the United States pretty close to war.

A lot of people, like me, got draft notices.

It looked like we were going to war.

For the second time in the century, Americans

faced the threat of war over Berlin.

But now both sides had nuclear weapons,

and the means to deliver them.

No president ever spoke more frankly to the nation

about the real possibility of nuclear war.

"In the event of an attack, the lives of those families

which are not hit in a nuclear blast and fire

can still be saved,

if they can be warned to take shelter

and if that shelter is available.

We owe that kind of insurance to our families.

And to our country."

Families were advised to build bomb shelters.

Schools held atomic attack drills.

When I was a kid,

I was very worried about the bomb.

I used to sit under that desk thinking

"Now, would the radiation fall on top of the desk

and miss me? But what happens when I get out from under the desk?

Then will the radiation fall on me?"

I didn't quite get it but it didn't seem to be

sensible that I was hiding under this desk.

And so I had this worry, and everybody talked about

this worry, about the bomb.

This nuclear threat over Berlin was diffused,

but the Soviet-American confrontation

would continue.

In October 1961, the Soviets began building the Berlin Wall.

The Wall would become a symbol of the Cold War's

brutal reality.

The newsreels presented Americans with haunting images

of people risking their lives to escape communism.

Once a country went communist, it stayed communist.

They had secret police and the whole totalitarian structure

so that there was no regressing.

That the Soviet Union and its allies were a formidable

global presence seemed very clear to me.

An even more direct threat to American security began to unfold

on October 14th 1962

when American U-2 surveillance planes

flying over Cuba made a discovery.

It was unbelievable.

I couldn't believe that the Soviets would introduce

nuclear-tipped missiles into Cuba

targeted on the eastern part of the United States.

They never had moved nuclear weapons off the soil

of the Soviet Union.

We didn't believe they would; they did.

It was my father's decision and his own idea.

It was only one reason: to show that we're great power

and we will protect all our allies

and if anybody will try to fight against our lives

that will mean beginning of the third World War.

The Cuban Missile Crisis would last for 13 days that October.

The president and his most trusted advisers

tried to figure out how to get Khrushchev

to remove the missiles from Cuba.

As far as the president was concerned, this was a superpower confrontation

it was the Soviets who had put nuclear missiles

in Cuba, it was the Soviets who would have to remove them.

"It shall be the policy of this nation

to regard any nuclear missile

launched from Cuba against any nation

in the Western hemisphere

as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States,

requiring a full retaliatory response on the Soviet Union."

The US military was put on the maximum

level of alert, DEFCON 2.

The president ordered the Navy to mount a blockade

around Cuba.

"All ships of any kind bound for Cuba

from whatever nation or port

will, if found to contain cargo of offensive weapons,

be turned back.

This quarantine will be extended if needed

to other types of cargo and carriers."

For 72 hours, the world watched and waited as Soviet ships

approached the quarantine line.

They kept coming, they kept coming,

they kept coming, they kept coming,

so there were these days of incredible tension.

Millions of Americans believed that they were about to die.

We literally sat and talked about the fact that we were

living then, out in the wilds of New Jersey,

and were we far enough away from New York City to survive?

I remember that really being a terrifying moment.

I was at NYU at the time.

And the professor was sitting there

and he looked up at the clock on the wall

and he goes "Well they'll be meeting about now.

They're meeting now, so we'll just have to wait."

And there was like, deep silence,

and nothing happened, you know.

It was a deep breath.

And then, the Soviet premier ordered his ships to turn back.

In the end, the Soviet leader agreed to withdraw the missiles

in return for a US pledge not to invade Cuba.

There isn't gonna be any learning curve

with respect to nuclear war.

Would you make a mistake with respect to the decision

to use nuclear weapons, you're going to destroy nations.

Both Khrushchev and Kennedy realized how close they'd come

and they were determined to avoid that in the future.

In 1961 the author James Baldwin

wrote, "To be a negro in this country and to be

relatively conscious is to be in a rage all the time."

It was two worlds: a black world and a white world.

As a young child I remember very well

seeing the signs

and I resented it.

If you went to the Dairy Queen,

white people could go in and sit down.

You got your ice cream at a window.

I never rode a bus because I knew I'd have to sit in the back.

I didn't go downtown to the movie theaters

because I'd have to sit in the

"Jim Crow Gallery."

I remember on one occasion I tried to go to the county library,

and we couldn't even go in and check out a book.

That did not change until the Civil Rights Movement.

In the early 1960s, young people would take the lead

in the battle for racial equality.

Federal courts had ruled that segregated waiting areas

in bus stations were illegal.

But the law was not being enforced.

To pressure the Kennedy administration to intervene,

activists rode public buses into the Deep South

to integrate the facilities.

Outside of Anniston, Alabama,

the bus carrying the first group of self-proclaimed

"Freedom Riders" was firebombed.

By the time the Freedom Rides started,

there was a realization that some of us would have to die.

And that we should not fear death, and we liken this

very much to military service.

That if you serve your country in the military you might

lose your life. We were serving our country at home.

We knew that this was a very dangerous mission.

But we felt we had a moral obligation

and a mandate to make this trip.

John Lewis, then a student leader, was a Freedom Rider

on a bus that arrived in Montgomery, Alabama.

The very moment we started down the steps,

a mob out of nowhere, people by the hundreds,

came out with baseball bats, stones, chains, and started beating us.

I was hit in the head with a wooden crate.

I was left behind unconscious in a pool of blood.

I thought I was going to die.

Many of the young people in the Civil Rights Movement

united in an organization called the

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC.

SNCC is special because we are young,

we're 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 years old.

Most of us have dropped out of school,

so we're no longer students but we don't have mortgages,

we don't have car payments, we don't have families,

we don't have husbands and wives and children,

so we can do these things.
And because we're young we're also foolish.

And we're willing to take risks.

We wanted to create a mass movement,

we wanted to get hundreds and thousands

of people involved.

We had been talking about developing a nonviolent army

that would be prepared to go into a community,

be arrested, court arrests and so forth,

break down that fear of jail as a weapon,

and also break down the infrastructure of the local area

by filling up their jails.

"Alright, stop it right here."

It was a tactic that SNCC took to Albany, Georgia.

Anybody who found the courage

to be involved could be involved.

In the first weeks of the Albany campaign,

more than 500 young people were arrested.

Once you get in jail, it's a sobering experience

because jail is not like a rally,

and jail is not like a march,

some people would get into jail,
they would clang those doors,

and they would actually cry,

and then there would be people who felt that

we're in jail, and we need to pray.

Then there were teenagers who wanted to do
rock 'n roll or they were talking about their boyfriends.

And it was in jail where I began to be asked to sing a lot.

"Got no money for to go their bail

Keep your eyes on the prize

Hold on, Paul and Silas began to shout,

Jail door open and they walked out."

If you were in the movement, all of the singing

is one way of being heard and announcing your presence.

You can't sing a song without producing power.

And you would often see people singing in the face of police.

If I sing, you stand in my sound.

In Albany, Georgia, we forced the jails open

by numbers, and they could not stop us from singing and praying.

The movement was energized, but the law

did not change. The nine month effort to desegregate Albany, Georgia failed.

The next major campaign was fought on even tougher ground

It was probably the most violent and vicious

racist city in the South.

There had been 60 bombings of Black peoples' homes

in Birmingham in '61 and '62.

One target for the movement in Birmingham was to

desegregate the schools.

Alabama's governor, George Wallace,

had promised they would stay white.

"And I say segregation now,

segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever."

Our demonstrations in Birmingham

were usually simply marches to the courthouse

or to city hall, and we almost never got more than two

blocks from the church and then we were arrested.

Day after day, hundreds of demonstrators

filled Birmingham jails.

Among those arrested was the organizer of the Birmingham

campaign, the reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

By then he was the acknowledged leader of the entire

Civil Rights Movement.

My heroes for the second half of the 20th century?

Martin Luther King. All of these people

are people who accepted the fact that you have to put everything on the line

because if you don't, you're not gonna get anything done in America,

because America is not gonna change.

Only you can change.

As part of the campaign, Dr. King enlisted

an army of schoolchildren, aged six to sixteen.

After the first day of demonstrations,

nearly 1000 of them had been herded into police vans

and sent to jail.

The next day, the police changed their tactics.

The law enforcement in Birmingham

was headed by one Bull Connor.

And Bull Connor was an old-fashioned

lock 'em up, throw them in jail, throw away the key,

beat them up, put dogs on them, hose them down with fire hoses,

anything he could think of to try to stop this movement

by force, he did.

I watched the violence in Birmingham on TV.

It shocked me to see the dogs being unleashed

on people, and it shamed me.

This was the front page of every major newspaper in the world.

And it told a story that America was ashamed of.

"Fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city,

North and South,

where legal remedies are not at hand.

Redress is sought in the streets.

Next week I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act,

to make a commitment it has not fully made

in this century to the proposition

that race has no place in American life or law."

Trying to raise congressional support for the Kennedy Civil Rights bill,

Civil Rights leaders called for a march on Washington.

On August 28th 1963, more than 200,000 people showed up.

We knew it was a special day.

And once I got there and saw the crowds coming

from all over America, black and white, poor people,

rich people, show business, politicians...

Martin called it "a coalition of good will,"

or a "coalition of conscience"

that could change the soul of the nation on the race issue.

This was bringing a mass meeting into the homes

of millions of Americans who were seeing this thing that I had seen

over and over and over again in small town churches

everywhere, seeing this for the first time.

And hearing the oratory of America's premier orator,

Martin Luther King.

"No, we are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied

until justice rolls down like water,

and righteousness like a mighty stream."

I remember thinking, when I saw Martin Luther King,

that he was going in his dream,

to bring the nation along, that he was irresistible

in his call to mercy and love.

I mean, that he was absolutely the most irresistible voice

that had ever been heard.

"I have a dream

my four little children

will one day live in a nation where they will

not be judged by the color of their skin

but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today."

You know, I was a little young,

I do remember it.

And Martin Luther King was a very powerful effect on me

but it wasn't so much that I understood what he was saying

but I knew that he stood for me.

Because I needed somebody to stand for me.

"We will be able to speed up that day

when all of God's children, black men and white men,

Jews and Gentiles,

Protestants and Catholics,

will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last, free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last!"

To me, that day represented one of the finest hours

in American history.

In the early 1960s, answering the president's call to action

young people had a new way in which to serve:

the Peace Corps.

The Corps' first director was the president's brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver.

Messages kept pouring into the White House from people,

younger people for the most part but older people too,

saying "Yes, I'm ready to serve."

I thought joining the Peace Corps was a perfect way to

do good in the world.

I mean, I thought it was sort of hands across the ocean.

Then I was gonna go and help the poor people of the world

do something better with their lives.

Marnie Mueller was sent to Guayaquil, Ecuador.

It was somehow giving people the notion

that if they got together, they had power to make change.

The Peace Corps was also a way to counter the appeal of

communism in the developing world.

Other young Americans responded to the president's

Cold War call more directly.

We're being trained to be in the military, to do what the military does,

to fight if we have to, to defend the country, so I mean,

we all wanted to go, we thought this was our job.

On the same day that President Kennedy established

the Peace Corps, he provided more funds for an elite group of warriors called the Special Forces.

They would become known as the Green Berets.

"This is another type of warfare

new in its intensity

ancient in its origin

war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins."

The very first mission for these highly trained soldiers

would be in Vietnam, in southeast Asia.

When President Kennedy took office, there were 1000 military advisers

in south Vietnam, sent there to defend against

what America believed was communist expansion.

It was a policy based on something called the domino theory.

In a sense, we saw if Vietnam falls the dominoes will fall.

Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia,

the rest of southeast Asia would fall under communist domination

and they would be strengthened across the globe.

And it was to prevent that that Kennedy felt he had to

make a move to strengthen the South Vietnamese government.

The South Vietnamese government run by Ngo Dinh Diem

at the time needed the help.

The leader of North Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh,

wanted the North and South to be reunited.

He was supplying guerrillas in South Vietnam

who were growing in numbers and aggressiveness.

In Vietnam, you had an insurgence, Vietcong.

They are the insurgents; we become specialists in countering insurgents.

Bill Bowles was one of the first special forces sent to train

South Vietnamese troops in the fall of 1961.

President Kennedy had increased the number of military advisers

to more than 3000.

We had trained these, this civilian defense group

for maybe a month and we decided to send them to villages around Anang

and we had 4 Americans out there.

And on the way between the villages

they were ambushed by the Vietcong.

Two of my buddies were killed,

two others were missing.

I was shocked.

I guess more than anything it brought home the idea,

Hey this is not play, this is not a game

this is not a training exercise anymore

this is kill or be killed.

By 1963 the situation was deteriorating.

On the streets of the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon,

President Diem, desperate to maintain control, was cracking down

on his political and religious opponents.

In protest, Buddhist monks set themselves on fire.

For many Americans, these were the first television images they saw of Vietnam.

It was a horrible, horrible experience

because we...in a sense we saw Vietnam disintegrating

before our eyes, at least the structure of the state disintegrating.

Diem had lost control of it.

American policy makers supported a coup to remove Diem

which resulted in his assassination.

US complicity in Diem's death

and the resulting turmoil in South Vietnam

only deepened America's involvement.

As I left there in '63, it was obvious that the war was escalating.

We had camps in places that you couldn't even say the name.

And we had more people getting killed than ever before.

America would commit more and more soldiers.

It would become the longest war in American history.

It was fought largely by young men,

described by one journalist as "rock 'n rollers with one foot in the grave."

But in the autumn of 1963

very few Americans were paying attention to Vietnam.

There was so much to feel good about at home.

The country had never been more prosperous.

People were looking towards a bright future.

At this point, they trusted their leaders to solve the problems elsewhere.

"World peace, like community peace,

does not require that each man love his neighbor.

It requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance."

In June of 1963, in a speech the President gave at

American University in Washington,

it seemed that maybe even the anxieties of the Cold War

could be dispelled.

"But we can still hail the Russian people

for their many achievements."

Khrushchev and Kennedy had both

convinced the world that they were real tough guys,

and they wouldn't back down.

That's exactly the time that people then sit and negotiate

out their problems.
Both men understood that,

and Kennedy laid that out.

"Our problems are man-made

therefore they can be solved by man."

Two months after that speech,

the US and Soviet Union agreed to the first comprehensive

nuclear test ban treaty.

Dean Ashton said once that the office kind of confers

a nobility on the man,

and during Kennedy's tenure in office

we had a very exalted sense of a president.

Our young emperor, you know.

In the summer of 1963, John F. Kennedy's political

and personal ratings were the highest of his presidency.

Because he was the first young president, he was

a towering cultural figure.

I mean, the pictures of him walking around

with his little kids and whatnot

had enormous impact.

It made us feel 10 feet high.

We thought we were involved.

"President of the United States, and

what a crowd, what a welcome he's getting now.

And there's Jackie, she's getting just as big a welcome.

And the crowd is absolutely going wild.

This is a friendly crowd in downtown Dallas

as the President and the First Lady pass by."

"It--it appears as though something has happened

in the motorcade route.

Something, I repeat, has happened in the motorcade route.

Stand by just a moment please."

It did seem as though everything became unpinned.

I was sitting in the dental chair when the

the first bulletin came over, but then the

bulletins became increasingly serious,

so that within an hour, about the time I was out of the chair,

you know, John Kennedy was dead.

"Dallas, November 22nd.

President...President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed here today.

Period. The President suffered a massive gunshot wound

in the brain, and was pronounced dead at 1:00 pm Central Standard Time."

So I dictated my story that day

and this was such an unexpected, unbelievable thing

that had happened.

It was terribly emotional.

No Americans living at that time had ever witnessed anything like this,

the assassination of a president.

I mean, that assassin's bullet killed something else.

The feeling of--if you're exalted, you're invulnerable.

All of a sudden, you know, even this guy's vulnerable, for God's sake.

I cried, like many, many Americans.

You know, we had our differences

but I felt we had lost a friend.

We had lost a leader.

He was such a source of inspiration.

How did we make it? How did we survive?

Where did we go from here?

With the death of Kennedy, the end of the feeling of

progress was never gonna end.

The innocence,

everything coming...the reality.

A slap in the face, a national car crash.

I think some of the self-confidence of America died that day.

Some of the

optimism of America died that day.

Walking up

Connecticut Avenue to the church

and you'd look at the people who were watching us walk up the street

and it was absolute incredulity

on the face of every living person.

You get their eyes and your eyes and

what they were looking at you for

was hopefully to get some expression from your face,

from your eyes,

that would help them to understand what had happened and why.

And nobody understood it.

For an already shaken America,

there were yet more crises ahead.

We'll see that on the next episode of The Century: America's Time.

I'm Peter Jennings.

Thank you for joining us.