FOCUS: The Sixties

"We stand today on the edge of a new frontier -- the frontier of the 1960s, a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats. The new frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises - it is a set of challenges." - John F. Kennedy

"All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, 'Ich bin ein Berliner'." - John F Kennedy, speaking to the citizens of West Germany, June 26, 1963

"The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out." - Lance Morrow

"I have a dream that 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." - Martin Luther King, August 28, 1963

"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." - Neil Armstrong, when taking
his first steps on the Moon, July 21, 1969

"It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant...History is hard to know, because of all the tired bullshit, but even without being sure of 'history' it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour... booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turnoff to take when I got to the other end... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: no doubt at all about that...There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." - Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

"If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair." - Scott MacKenzie

"I still have trouble when I think about Chicago (68'). That week at the Convention changed everything I'd ever taken for granted about this country and my place in it... Everytime I tried to tell somebody what happened in Chicago I began crying, and it took me years to understand why...Chicago was the End of the Sixties, for me. The hippies, who had never really believed they were the wave of the future anyway, saw the election results as brutal confirmation of the futility of fighting the establishment on its own terms. The thrust is no longer for 'change' or 'progress' or revolution,' but merely to escape, to live on the far perimeter of a world that might have been. - Hunter S. Thompson

"He is the Willy Loman of Generation X, a traveling salesman who has the loyalty of a lizard with his tail broken off and the midnight taste of a man who'd double date with the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart." - Hunter S. Thompson, describing Bill Clinton in BBC News America

"For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part." - Jerry Garcia, The Grateful Dead

"The '60s are gone, dope will never be as cheap, sex never as free, and the rock and roll never as great." - Abbie Hoffman

"People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around - the music and the ideas." - Bob Dylan

"The trauma of the Sixties persuaded me that my generation's egalitarianism was a sentimental error. I now see the hierarchical as both beautiful and necessary. Efficiency liberates; egalitarianism tangles, delays, blocks, deadens." - Camille Paglia

I Have a Dream, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.


From FORA.tv
Don Lattin: The Harvard Psychedelic Club (Video)

From FORA.tv
Tom Brokaw, Boom! Voices of the Sixties (Video)

From FORA.tv
Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History (Video)

From Hillsdale College
Vietnam and the Rise of the New Left with Michael Medved (Video)

From The Commonwealth Club
On the Kennedy Years with David Talbot (Video)

From The Institute of Ideas
Radicalism Then and Now: The Legacy of 1968, Panel Discussion (Video)

From Grace Cathedral
Echoes of the 60s with Dr. Kathleen Frydl (Video)

From Hillsdale College
Lessons from the TET Offensive with Victor David Hanson (Video)

From C-SPAN
The Weather Underground with William Ayers and Don Strickland (Video)