The Century: America's Time - 1965-1970: Unpinned

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.