PBS The Sixties The Years That Shaped a Generation
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00:00:00That war was an emergency. It was on our mind every single hour of the day.
00:00:20Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest our rights.
00:00:29When they said I'm black and I'm proud, that meant something.
00:00:33It was the age of selfishness. It was the age of self-indulgence. It was the age of anti-authority.
00:00:39It was absolutely exhilarating. It was the greatest time to be alive, ever, for sure.
00:00:52The 60s was the last idealistic time.
00:00:55My thanks to all of you, and now it's on to Chicago, and let's win there.
00:01:05I think an era ended with Robert Kennedy's death and Martin Luther King's, and doomed us for some time, and we may still be in that time.
00:01:13I think Jack Newfield said it best when he said, after that we became might-have-beens, a generation of might-have-beens.
00:01:21I think there's an amount of bitterness and animosity that our generation is going to carry to its grave.
00:01:42The 60s, the years that shaped a generation, was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.
00:01:50Thank you.
00:02:02In the late 1960s and early 1970s, something happened to a generation of young Americans that would mark them forever.
00:02:11It is a story of war, the struggle for racial equality, and the explosion of a counterculture.
00:02:22It was a time when a generation rebelled and lost its innocence.
00:02:29No one could have guessed in the early 1960s that a tiny Asian country would come to dominate the hearts and minds of a generation of young Americans.
00:02:39The decade that would end in disillusionment and rage began on a moral high note.
00:02:46It seemed that the time for racial equality in America had finally come.
00:02:52Because of a woman named Rosa Parks and a bunch of college kids who sat down at a Woolworth's lunch encounter in 1960,
00:03:00and of course Martin Luther King, who was surely the most important American in the 20th century,
00:03:06it was their declaration that the United States was going to become a nation of equality.
00:03:13It was their declaration that the world was going to change and that white men were no longer going to control everything in America
00:03:21and that everyone was finally going to be treated equally.
00:03:25It was their example which made everything else possible.
00:03:29In the mid-1960s, President Lyndon Johnson was flush with success from passage of the Civil Rights Act.
00:03:37This Civil Rights Act is a challenge to all of us to go to work in our communities and our states, in our homes and in our hearts,
00:03:46to eliminate the last vestiges of injustice in our beloved country.
00:03:54Johnson vowed to create a great society and declared war on poverty.
00:04:00But in the heat of an election campaign, Johnson made a fateful decision to commit additional American soldiers to an escalating war in Vietnam.
00:04:09It is my duty to the American people to report that renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin
00:04:24have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action and reply.
00:04:33It would later be determined that the Johnson administration had lied about the attack on the Maddox.
00:04:55But at the time, Congress was convinced and overwhelmingly passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.
00:05:01President Johnson was given virtually unlimited power to wage war in Southeast Asia.
00:05:10By Americanizing the war in Vietnam, President Johnson set in motion forces that would divide the country more bitterly than at any time since the Civil War.
00:05:26The conflict in Vietnam would prove the dark lens through which the entire decade was viewed.
00:05:33It was the first televised war and the images were inescapable.
00:05:39Before the end of 1967, half a million American soldiers would be stationed in Vietnam.
00:05:45At first, Americans accepted the war as part of a larger struggle against communism.
00:05:52After several years of bloodshed, many had begun to speak out in opposition.
00:05:58I speak out against this war not in anger but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart
00:06:07and above all with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as the moral example of the world.
00:06:17I speak out against this war because I'm disappointed with America.
00:06:23The speech was very tough. I mean, we've turned King into, you know, a safe figure.
00:06:28In that speech, he said, my government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.
00:06:34It was true, explains why he could not be silent about it. It was a turning point.
00:06:40By 1967, the tide of public opinion had begun to turn against the war.
00:06:47Young people in particular began to rebel, calling for a society that rejected war and violence.
00:06:59In June, the Beatles officially ushered in what would later be dubbed Summer of Love
00:07:04with their hit song, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
00:07:19Eric Burden and the Animals gave the counterculture a world capital,
00:07:23the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco.
00:07:34The media was advertising the Haight-Ashbury, doing a lot of stories about them.
00:07:50Kids were coming here and the police were harassing them and there were no social services
00:07:55and there were no, nothing offered to them.
00:07:57So the diggers just started to feed people and so they were using my kitchen.
00:08:01The diggers named themselves after 17th century English radicals who had denounced private property.
00:08:16They begged, borrowed and stole to provide free food.
00:08:20And with it, they offered a new way to see the world.
00:08:24The only thing you had to do to get this food was you had to step through a square frame made out of two by fours.
00:08:31It was about six foot by six foot.
00:08:33It was painted yellow and it was called the free frame of reference.
00:08:37And you stepped through it and they gave you a little one about this big to wear around your neck.
00:08:42And they just invited you to look through a free frame of reference.
00:08:46You know, what if it's free? What if it's free?
00:08:49So it was like a leaderless invitation to reinvent your own world, your own definitions of freedom.
00:08:56And the diggers basically understood that it was culture
00:09:00and the premises of culture that attached and bound and chained people.
00:09:05And that's what you had to shake up.
00:09:06You had to create new forms so that people could experience new ways of living
00:09:10and if they liked them, they might defend them.
00:09:19Millions of young Americans had grown up in an era of unparalleled affluence.
00:09:24But here they were denouncing materialism, competition and conformity,
00:09:28the very values that had paved the way for that affluence.
00:09:32It was also an era of sexual freedom, ushered in by the birth control pill,
00:09:37long before the emergence of AIDS.
00:09:40Marriage and monogamy seemed passé.
00:09:42Music and drugs would change the world.
00:09:45And the message was hard to resist.
00:09:50I was looking at the guys who weren't doing the acidist squares.
00:09:54I actually had thoughts like, you're letting your generation down, you know, if you don't try this.
00:10:01You've got to try this. It's something that will liberate you.
00:10:06And I firmly believed that it was possible to change the world.
00:10:15We were experimenting with a lot of things back then.
00:10:18We were experimenting with drugs, we were experimenting with relationships,
00:10:22we were experimenting with music.
00:10:29All of a sudden, I'm a guy who can play the guitar pretty well,
00:10:34and it's the 1960s and guitar players are like leading the revolution.
00:10:39So I decide, heck, forget the school stuff, forget the lawyer stuff,
00:10:44forget the semantics, go out there and play a guitar, get a following, start a revolution.
00:10:59We had reached a moment in history where our traditional thoughts
00:11:03and traditional adherences to custom and to authority
00:11:07brought us to the brink of a global disaster the likes of which the world had never even thought about.
00:11:14And enough people said, no, we're not doing this anymore, we're not just going thoughtlessly anymore.
00:11:21We've got to think for ourselves. You can't trust the authority.
00:11:25Conservatives were appalled by the anarchy of the counterculture.
00:11:29It broke loose in the 60s, accelerated enormously,
00:11:34in large part because of an enormous generation of great size
00:11:40which swamped the institutions that are supposed to civilize them,
00:11:44in part because of rock music.
00:11:51There were two very different movements going on at this time.
00:11:55One was a political movement that was dedicated almost entirely to ending the war in Vietnam.
00:12:03The other movement was, if you will, a consciousness movement.
00:12:08The musicians, in effect, bridged the two movements.
00:12:17We didn't have control of the radios or the TVs or the media or the press or anything.
00:12:22It all happened through the music in a language that the people who owned it didn't even understand.
00:12:28It was fabulous.
00:12:53And then there was a sort of word-of-mouth thing about this festival that was going to happen in Monterey.
00:13:00And then the next thing I knew I was in a jet plane with Brian Jones, Hendrickson, the experience.
00:13:11The Summer of Love began south of San Francisco,
00:13:14where the largest collection of rock bands yet assembled played to the largest crowd yet gathered.
00:13:20There would be bigger, more famous rock festivals in later years,
00:13:23but Monterey Pop became legendary as the first, and some say, the best.
00:13:33Monterey Pop culminated with a performance by a brilliant young guitarist named Jimmy Hendrix.
00:13:51Hendrix ended his performance by setting his guitar on fire and smashing it on the stage.
00:14:02There had never been anything quite like it.
00:14:08Memorialized on film, the performance would later be viewed as a symbol for the counterculture itself,
00:14:14a grand gesture signifying the destruction of the old social order and everything it stood for.
00:14:23There was a force trying to stabilize what was wrong
00:14:28and make a statement through music instead of through violence.
00:14:44I think for people my age back then, radio was the great secret common ground.
00:14:50It was the way we communicated with one another, and it was where all of our prophets and leaders were.
00:14:56It was where Bob Dylan and the Beatles and the Supremes and Aretha Franklin and Warren Nero were,
00:15:01and they were all singing quite revolutionary messages, and they were the ones who bound us together.
00:15:15While the white counterculture celebrated the summer of love,
00:15:19African Americans were undergoing a transformation of their own.
00:15:23Over a period of less than a year, you had people who were calm, respectable, responsible Negroes.
00:15:31All of a sudden, militants wearing dashikis with huge afros, taking Swahili class, identifying with the homeland.
00:15:45There is nothing more exhilarating or seductive than a change in consciousness.
00:15:52And in the 1960s, Blacks made a transition, especially on the college campus,
00:15:58from being Negroes to being Black to being Afro-Americans.
00:16:14When they said, I'm Black and I'm proud, that meant something.
00:16:23Across the bay from San Francisco in Oakland, California, the Black Panther Party burst on the scene.
00:16:29Founded by Bobby Seale, the Black Panther Party is a movement that has been around for a long time.
00:16:36Across the bay from San Francisco in Oakland, California, the Black Panther Party burst on the scene.
00:16:42Founded by Bobby Seale, a street-smart community organizer,
00:16:46and Huey Newton, a charismatic young law student angry with the police.
00:16:51Ironically, Newton's law school instructor was Ed Meese,
00:16:56later a close advisor and attorney general for President Ronald Reagan.
00:17:01Huey Newton, before he started the Black Panthers, was a student of mine.
00:17:05And he was taking these courses he later wrote in his book, so he would know what he called pigs knew.
00:17:11And so he took my course. In the middle of the course, one day he asked if he could ride to the courthouse with me.
00:17:19And so I said, sure. I thought maybe he had been so inspired by my teaching that he would want to see some court trials.
00:17:26Well, it turned out, actually, he was on trial. He had stabbed someone with a steak knife at a barbecue some months before.
00:17:33Well, he was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon, a sentence to probation, and a year in the county jail.
00:17:38A year later, he came back to my class, and the other classes he was taking finished, got an A,
00:17:44and it was after that that he formed the Black Panthers.
00:17:48We are a new organization. We observe these police who have been brutalizing our people in the community.
00:17:53And we're a political organization. We're going to try to unify the people, and we know the law.
00:17:57They provided surveillance on police officers because Oakland at that time had one of the most racist police forces in the country.
00:18:05While we had an advancing, developing, expanding black middle class, we also had a decolonization.
00:18:14We also had a declining, eroding, expanding black underclass and lower class.
00:18:25The Black Panther Party was one of the few organizations that attempted to organize and advance the interests of that particular population.
00:18:38The Black Panthers were one manifestation of black America's growing frustration.
00:18:45Black communities in other cities simply exploded in rage.
00:19:00Beginning with Watts in 1965, black neighborhoods erupted with pent-up fury.
00:19:06On July 11, 1967, Newark, New Jersey, burst into flame.
00:19:13The next week, it was Detroit, where, by the end of the third day,
00:19:17100 blocks of the Motor City were engulfed in chaos and destruction.
00:19:24Finally, President Johnson sent in nearly 5,000 federal troops, but with orders that they carry unloaded weapons.
00:19:33Still, when the Detroit riots ended, there were 43 dead, 33 of them African Americans.
00:19:47The Kerner Commission report was, in my view, the most accurate, high-level public document on the problems of the inner cities that had been put in the public domain.
00:20:01Hoover was trying to convince Johnson that these riots were a communist plot,
00:20:06and so they had expected that these high-level people would find communists.
00:20:12Instead, they found racism, and they found a whole variety of American institutions implicated in it.
00:20:23The Kerner Commission stated that white society created, maintained, and condoned the black ghetto.
00:20:29It recommended a massive, sustained national commitment to ending discrimination.
00:20:34But the war in Vietnam would soon overshadow the war on poverty.
00:20:39The nation's attention had shifted to a tiny country called Vietnam.
00:20:44The president essentially spurned, shunned the Kerner Commission report.
00:20:59Where is Vietnam? I had no idea.
00:21:17The next question is, well, why would my friends be sent there to die?
00:21:23Why were we killing people there?
00:21:25I mean, it was at that naive level, very, very, very simple kinds of questions.
00:21:30So then I took my first political act of my life, which is I wrote a letter to President Johnson.
00:21:35And I said, explain it. What is this?
00:21:39We are there to permit the people of South Vietnam to determine for themselves who their leaders should be and what kind of a government they should have.
00:21:50Some have said we were there to preserve the independence of an independent South Vietnam.
00:21:56Not at all.
00:21:58I'm sure we hoped that South Vietnam could be an independent state, a, quote, democratic, unquote, state.
00:22:08But that's not why we sent U.S. troops there.
00:22:12We sent U.S. troops there to prevent the control of South Vietnam by North Vietnam acting as a pawn of the Chinese communists and the Soviet communists, which we believed that it occurred would endanger the security of the West worldwide.
00:22:30The monolithic communism.
00:22:32The reason we were to be in Vietnam is if you don't stop them there, you have to stop them in San Diego, OK?
00:22:36Look what happened. The Vietnamese win and they go to war with the Chinese.
00:22:40They didn't go to San Diego. They go to war with the Chinese.
00:22:47In the fall of 1967, the anti-war movement began to focus on the draft and draft resistance.
00:22:54The anti-war movement was the great example of enlightened self-interest.
00:22:58I mean, we did it because it was right, but we also did it because we didn't want to get killed.
00:23:03Though African-Americans comprised less than 12 percent of the population, nearly a quarter of the U.S. Army was black.
00:23:10There were very few educated white people who went to Vietnam against their will.
00:23:17Early in the year, 25 years old and with no college deferment to protect him, heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali had electrified the anti-war movement and the black community by refusing to be drafted.
00:23:34By the fall of 1967, a call arose from protest to resistance.
00:23:40Anti-war organizers began to plan a nationwide stop-the-draft week for October.
00:23:46It would culminate in a march on the Pentagon.
00:23:49One of the demonstrators was author Norman Mailer, who would later win the Pulitzer Prize for his book on the march, Armies of the Night.
00:23:57The majority of the people who came were middle class.
00:24:00They were essentially gentle people.
00:24:02They were not warriors.
00:24:04And they came with the expectation that they might even get a policeman's billy club on their head.
00:24:17For the first time since the Bonus March of 1932, federal troops guarded the Capitol.
00:24:31Nonviolent protesters surrounded the Pentagon and chanted,
00:24:36claiming they would actually levitate the Pentagon.
00:24:40Paratroopers from the 82nd Division charged into the crowd.
00:24:45Dozens of demonstrators were beaten and arrested.
00:25:01I think Lyndon Johnson said to himself,
00:25:03if 50,000 of them do that, there's got to be somewhere between 10 and 50 million people potentially behind them.
00:25:11Because I couldn't get 50,000 people down here to support this war if I paid their train fare.
00:25:20And I think something happened to him on that day.
00:25:23Something happened to McNamara. He's even written about it.
00:25:26Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had already begun to doubt U.S. policy in Vietnam.
00:25:32In June, he had directed members of his staff to research a list of questions about the war.
00:25:38Their answers would become the Pentagon Papers.
00:25:41I wandered in on that Saturday morning to McNamara's office.
00:25:45We were writing the Pentagon Papers in an office adjacent to that.
00:25:49And I went in, not expecting to see him there.
00:25:51And he was there. I almost ducked out.
00:25:54He paid no attention to me. And I looked out again at the same scene he was looking out at.
00:25:58And I knew by that time that he agreed with them that what they were calling for was essentially right.
00:26:06I had tremendous admiration and respect and love for President Johnson.
00:26:10And I think he did for me.
00:26:12On November 1, 1967, I had presented to him a very, very controversial memorandum that said,
00:26:18essentially, we can't win the war militarily.
00:26:21We've got to change our strategy and, in effect, withdraw.
00:26:27And I took it directly to him because I knew that he might disagree with it.
00:26:32I hadn't shown it to others. He did show it to a few others.
00:26:35Two of his closest advisers said McNamara is, in effect, recommending we surrender.
00:26:41It would be total defeat. We can't do it.
00:26:44He really understood very early on that this was a disaster.
00:26:48But like so many other people, he didn't have the courage to take Lyndon Johnson on in public,
00:26:53and therefore he didn't contribute to a more rapid end of the war at all.
00:26:57I served as an appointee of the president.
00:27:00My obligation was to support his programs and, if I couldn't, to leave.
00:27:10But I felt that I could do more inside than I could have outside.
00:27:15The people out in the streets were thinking in moral terms.
00:27:18Inside the policy chambers, it was driven by ambition, calculation,
00:27:24a political logic of survival, cynicism, from day one.
00:27:30We're not against the soldiers. We're against the war.
00:27:33We're not against the soldiers. We're against the war.
00:27:37McNamara's doubts about the war were not expressed publicly until many years later.
00:27:42But in the streets outside, tens of thousands were marching on the Pentagon.
00:27:49It's the only time I ever remember feeling emotion for hours.
00:27:53Not simple emotion, either.
00:27:55I think the basic emotion was the depth and the tragedy of this moment,
00:27:59and is this country doomed or not?
00:28:02Are we going to tear apart or will we mend this? Will we come together?
00:28:07Because at the moment, it really seemed like there was no reconciliation possible.
00:28:12By early 1968, the war in Vietnam had claimed over 15,000 American lives.
00:28:36Never before in U.S. history had such a vast number of people mobilized to protest a war.
00:28:45Why are you marching?
00:28:49Well, I am personally marching with the Painters' Union here in San Francisco,
00:28:53and we're attempting to protest the war in Vietnam.
00:28:56You think this is going to help?
00:28:58I hope so. Either that or a revolution, one or the other.
00:29:02The powerful in our country had ceased to be responsible,
00:29:07and so the powerless, students, poor people, were trying to take some responsibility
00:29:13and say, here's how things should go.
00:29:16One politician dared to come forward, Eugene McCarthy, a senator from Minnesota.
00:29:22As I see the campaign in 1968, the issue of Vietnam itself is a vital one, of course,
00:29:29and you could pass a harsh judgment on that war if it were isolated altogether from any domestic consequences.
00:29:35This very intelligent, elegant, enigmatic poet from Minnesota
00:29:43who actually never wants to be president himself.
00:29:46He was this calm, civilized person who made it much easier for people to become anti-war
00:29:54because, after all, at the beginning of 1968, it was still quite a radical thing to be.
00:30:00McCarthy, the outsider, attracted a loyal army of college students.
00:30:05It became known as the Children's Crusade.
00:30:08On the Republican side, Richard Nixon, a Cold War stalwart who'd lost two elections,
00:30:13was hoping to make the biggest comeback of his life.
00:30:17The presidential race was barely underway when all hell broke loose.
00:30:26During the Tet Lunar New Year at the end of January,
00:30:29Vietnamese communists launched their biggest offensive of the war,
00:30:32simultaneously attacking all the major cities and towns in South Vietnam.
00:30:39The surprise attack stunned Americans, especially when they watched on television
00:30:44as Viet Cong guerrillas stormed the U.S. embassy in Saigon.
00:30:49Now CIA men and MPs have gone into the embassy
00:30:53and are trying to get the snipers out by themselves.
00:30:59The Tet offensive failed militarily.
00:31:02The Vietnamese communists were driven out of the cities.
00:31:05But the fighting went on for more than a month
00:31:08and shattered forever the illusion of American omnipotence.
00:31:12Of all the nightmarish images that haunted Americans,
00:31:15the one that lingered longest was this,
00:31:18South Vietnam's police chief coldly executing a suspected Viet Cong guerrilla.
00:31:27These ruins are in Saigon, capital and largest city of South Vietnam.
00:31:32They were left here by an act of war.
00:31:35I went to Vietnam in 1968 because of the Tet offensive.
00:31:39The fact that despite all of the propaganda that they could mount such an offensive
00:31:44when we had been told we were winning this war.
00:31:46It was a momentous moment when Cronkite got up out of his chair
00:31:51and went to Vietnam and came back with these famous reports
00:31:55that the war was unwinnable and that we should look for an honorable way out.
00:31:59Well, Walter Cronkite didn't do things like that.
00:32:02This district used to be a model of pacification.
00:32:05Now again, most of it is at the mercy of the enemy.
00:32:08Correspondent Robert Shackney talked to Captain Donald Jones,
00:32:11Deputy Pacification Advisor for the district.
00:32:14I walked unarmed with just one major casually through Go Voi in December.
00:32:20Could I do it today?
00:32:21No, you could not. You could not walk through Go Voi today.
00:32:26Are you discouraged?
00:32:29Yes.
00:32:30I was told by the military management of the war
00:32:34that with another 150,000 or 200,000, perhaps 300,000 troops,
00:32:39we could now finish the job.
00:32:41Well, that's what they'd been telling us for five years.
00:32:44Give us another 10,000. Give us another 50,000.
00:32:47This sounded to me like more of the same.
00:32:50And I came back with the conclusion that we were mired in stalemate
00:32:57and that the best thing for us to do was to acknowledge this fact,
00:33:01to negotiate with the people who had done the very best they could,
00:33:05and get out.
00:33:07George Christian, who was Johnson's press secretary,
00:33:10said later that when Cronkite said what he said about the war,
00:33:14it was as if an earthquake had gone through the White House.
00:33:17The Vietnam War was the wheel on which the American establishment was broken,
00:33:22and Tet was the breaking point.
00:33:24The Tet Offensive gave life to the McCarthy campaign,
00:33:27which was now attracting celebrities like Paul Newman.
00:33:30You have areas where you feel your own rumblings and your own dissension
00:33:36and your own questioning.
00:33:38Then I think it's necessary to get behind the senator now.
00:33:42I liked McCarthy. I always did. I disagreed with him on the war.
00:33:46But the truth is, his campaign was magnificent up there in New Hampshire.
00:33:51He ran a very classy campaign.
00:33:54It was an intellectuals' campaign, but it wasn't egghead like Stevenson.
00:33:58He had a wonderful sense of humor, and the people who were behind McCarthy,
00:34:02those kids, the Be Clean for Gene kids,
00:34:04we would see them all over because we'd cross paths in New Hampshire.
00:34:07They were not radicals.
00:34:09They were intellectual, and they would pick at our motel,
00:34:12and I would go out and talk to them and argue with them.
00:34:18McCarthy and his student volunteers captured nearly 43% of the vote in New Hampshire,
00:34:24humiliating President Johnson.
00:34:26It was a symbolic upset with enormous repercussions.
00:34:30Immediately, Robert Kennedy, who had been vacillating,
00:34:33announced he too would run for president.
00:34:36It was Lyndon Johnson's worst political nightmare.
00:34:39Good evening, my fellow Americans.
00:34:42Tonight I want to speak to you of peace in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.
00:34:49No other question so preoccupies our people.
00:34:56On March 31, Johnson announced a partial bombing halt of North Vietnam
00:35:01and called for peace talks.
00:35:03Then he dropped a bombshell of his own.
00:35:06I shall not seek, and I will not accept,
00:35:12the nomination of my party for another term as your president.
00:35:18People felt that they had won.
00:35:21Kennedy, whose political power was immense,
00:35:25who had accomplished so much for evil and good,
00:35:28had suddenly said, I quit.
00:35:32You're often amazed when things that you devoutly wish for actually come to pass,
00:35:37and this was one of those moments.
00:35:41It seemed anything could happen now.
00:35:43It was the magic of 1968.
00:35:46McCarthy or Kennedy might be president.
00:35:49But what might actually end?
00:35:51For those who wanted social change, it was a moment of pure euphoria.
00:36:07At the end of March in Memphis, Tennessee,
00:36:10garbage workers who were mostly black and grossly underpaid were out on strike.
00:36:19This was the beginning of a new era.
00:36:30These men, who were really at the low rung on the totem pole,
00:36:35just got tired of being treated less than men.
00:36:39And if you notice that sign they had,
00:36:42it didn't say peace, it didn't say freedom, it didn't say justice.
00:36:46All it said was, I am a man.
00:36:56Martin Luther King, the nation's preeminent civil rights leader,
00:37:00came to Memphis to express moral support for the men on strike.
00:37:17On March 28th, the Memphis police were out in force.
00:37:21About 12,000 demonstrators gathered to march down Beale Street
00:37:26in support of the garbage workers.
00:37:28King was planning to lead a poor people's march on Washington that summer,
00:37:32an ambitious new campaign focusing on economic justice.
00:37:36Memphis was supposed to be the dry run.
00:37:39There was a group of young guys called the invaders,
00:37:42some of whom were on the FBI's payroll.
00:37:46We didn't know that at the time.
00:37:49But they were there really to stir up trouble.
00:37:59These young guys had taken the sticks off of the placards,
00:38:03started breaking out windows, and they started the riot.
00:38:06And, you know, once you start it, everybody gets in it.
00:38:13And rather than try and isolate the people who were rioting,
00:38:17the police just waded into the crowd, just beating people indiscriminately,
00:38:21just beating them. It was horrible.
00:38:31Martin was taken up physically, put in a car,
00:38:35and taken to the closest hotel for his own safety.
00:38:39And he said, we've got to have a peaceful march.
00:38:43If we don't do it here, we can't go to Washington.
00:38:48King was despondent.
00:38:50Others were losing faith in his nonviolent philosophy.
00:38:53Maybe his time was past.
00:38:56Martin Luther King was at a crossroads.
00:38:59Despite doubts, despite death threats, he refused to turn back.
00:39:04On the night of April 3rd, he appeared before a packed congregation at Mason Temple.
00:39:09It was thundering and lightning, and the rain was coming hard.
00:39:15And Martin didn't take a text. We called it a mountaintop speech.
00:39:19He just started speaking extemporaneously.
00:39:22And I'd not heard him. Of all the speeches at times I'd heard him speak,
00:39:26I'd not heard him like this.
00:39:28Like anybody, I would like to live a long life.
00:39:33Longevity has its place.
00:39:37But I'm not concerned about that now.
00:39:41I just want to do God's will.
00:39:45And he's allowed me to go up to the mountain.
00:39:49And I've looked over.
00:39:52And I've seen the promised land.
00:39:57I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight
00:40:02that we as a people will get to the promised land.
00:40:12So I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything.
00:40:16I'm not fearing any man.
00:40:18Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
00:40:24I feel that he was going through a purging of his fear,
00:40:29that I no longer fear death.
00:40:31He always said he would not live to be 40. He didn't think he would.
00:40:34He wanted to, but he never thought he'd live to be 40 years old.
00:40:37He was 39 when he was killed.
00:40:40The next day, meeting with aides at his motel, King seemed rejuvenated.
00:40:45As evening approached, he stepped out on the balcony
00:40:48to talk with Jesse Jackson and others.
00:40:52We were on our way to Reverend Billy Kyle's home for dinner.
00:40:57And I remember we had our little band there from Chicago,
00:41:00Ben Branch and some musicians.
00:41:02And we were going to have a big rally at Mason Temple that night after dinner.
00:41:06So I was coming across the courtyard.
00:41:08And he said, Jesse, we're late for dinner.
00:41:10I said, Doc, I've been waiting for you.
00:41:12He said, but you don't have your tie on.
00:41:14I said, Doc, you know a tie is not a prerequisite for dinner.
00:41:16It's just an appetite. He said, boy, you're crazy.
00:41:18I said to Ben, play my favorite song tonight for me, Precious Lord.
00:41:21Ben said, I will. And I said, Doc.
00:41:23He said, yes. And he said, yes.
00:41:25The bullet hit right here, and they just knocked him back against the wall,
00:41:28and it was over.
00:41:30Police were coming toward us with drawn guns.
00:41:32We were saying, the bullet came from that way.
00:41:35It couldn't have come from this way.
00:41:37So why are you coming toward us with drawn guns?
00:41:39It came from that way.
00:41:41It came from that way.
00:41:45In black communities across the country,
00:41:47the reaction to King's assassination was a violent eruption of rage and despair.
00:41:52Rioting broke out in more than 100 cities.
00:41:5520,000 army regulars and 34,000 National Guardsmen were mobilized.
00:42:01In Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley ordered police to shoot to kill.
00:42:06Nationwide, 46 people died.
00:42:09Martin Luther King was dead.
00:42:11America was burning.
00:42:14Many feared that the last hope for racial equality and nonviolence had been extinguished.
00:42:20This seemed like the definitive statement.
00:42:24America tried to redeem itself,
00:42:27and now they've killed the man who was taking us to the mountain.
00:42:44Soon we'll be done
00:42:52With the troubles of the world
00:43:00Troubles of the world
00:43:08Troubles of the world
00:43:17Soon we'll be done
00:43:24With the troubles of the world
00:43:33We're going home
00:43:38To live with God
00:43:50I'm going home
00:43:55To live with God
00:44:06We were in shock.
00:44:08Even though we expected it, when it happened, you didn't know what to do.
00:44:16And we stayed in shock for a very long time. A very long time.
00:44:20At this point, I had been so knocked out of my middle-class assumptions
00:44:25that I didn't know what would happen.
00:44:27Perhaps the country could be reformed and Robert Kennedy would be president.
00:44:31Perhaps we'd be plunged into a civil war. I'd be imprisoned and killed.
00:44:35It seemed impossible to tell what country we were in and what was about to happen.
00:44:47Higher education was opening up in the 60s.
00:44:50It wasn't just a social elite, but you're getting the children of working-class people,
00:44:54very high expectations.
00:45:171968 was the year of the student.
00:45:20There were 7 million enrolled in American colleges.
00:45:23And the mood on campus was unmistakably rebellious.
00:45:27People cutting class to go off on demonstrations or march on Washington and so forth.
00:45:32And a general lack of civility and a general disrespect for intellectual activity,
00:45:38which was regarded as they used to say,
00:45:42not relevant.
00:45:44In the spring of 1968, Columbia University in New York
00:45:48became the flashpoint of student revolt.
00:45:51There were two demands.
00:45:53End Columbia's affiliation with IDA, a military think tank,
00:45:57and stop construction of a university gym that would replace a park in Harlem.
00:46:02On April 23rd, a crowd of black and white students tore down fences
00:46:07On April 23rd, a crowd of black and white students tore down fences
00:46:11at the construction site, only to be driven back by police.
00:46:19The retreating students decided spontaneously to occupy several campus buildings.
00:46:25The atmosphere, as far as anything I know, was very peaceable in those occupied buildings.
00:46:31A couple of friends of mine actually got married in their building.
00:46:34My wife was a vegan and her husband got married.
00:47:04That's one of the places where women's liberation was born in those occupied buildings.
00:47:09You know, just over simple things like women saying,
00:47:13hey, why should we be serving, preparing food?
00:47:17The lifestyle was communal.
00:47:19Drugs and liquor were banned by popular vote,
00:47:22but food and drink were smuggled in.
00:47:25And as the occupation continued,
00:47:27in between the talk of theory,
00:47:29University President Grayson Kirk was not amused.
00:47:32Our young people, in disturbing numbers,
00:47:35appear to reject all form of authority, he said.
00:47:39I know of no time in our history when the gap between the generations
00:47:43has been wider or more complex.
00:47:46I know of no time in our history when the gap between the generations
00:47:50has been wider or more complex.
00:47:53I know of no time in our history when the gap between the generations
00:47:57has been wider or more potentially dangerous.
00:48:20When they took over the campus
00:48:23and they put feces in somebody's office
00:48:26and they're throwing people's papers out
00:48:28and they're getting professors taking their life work
00:48:30and throwing it out on the floor,
00:48:32I wrote a statement for Nixon
00:48:34and some of the Nixon people were really opposed.
00:48:36And I just denounced the demonstrators 100% at fault,
00:48:40overprivileged kids.
00:48:42The first thing we did when we got into Kirk's office was hit his files.
00:48:46Besides a bunch of crap in his girly magazines,
00:48:50we found a bunch of papers linking Columbia to the RDA,
00:48:53a whole bunch of shit about putting down SDS,
00:48:56and a lot of letters about cleaning up the area
00:48:58by moving out the blocks in the Puerto Ricans.
00:49:02After a week, the administration had had enough.
00:49:05They called in the police to clear out all five occupied buildings.
00:49:09We have been informed that the police department
00:49:12will take all the necessary action
00:49:14in connection with our complaint against you.
00:49:18It was class warfare,
00:49:201,000 blue-collar New York cops
00:49:22against some radical Ivy League kids.
00:49:40I was completely shocked
00:49:42when the police went in and beat up people so badly.
00:49:46Nothing prepared me for that.
00:49:49Nearly 150 people were injured, and many were arrested.
00:49:53But President Kirk was forced to resign,
00:49:56and eventually the students won most of their demands.
00:50:00Students were at like a revolutionary breaking point.
00:50:03I remember some poll that said
00:50:05one million college students
00:50:07self-described themselves as revolutionaries.
00:50:10It wasn't just the United States.
00:50:12It was international.
00:50:14Suddenly, students in Germany, France, Japan, Ireland, China, Mexico
00:50:19had all taken to the streets,
00:50:21demanding everything, student power,
00:50:24an end to the war in Vietnam,
00:50:26or simply more freedom.
00:50:28We were hearing by 1968 in this country,
00:50:31over and over we were hearing the analysis
00:50:33that we were a generation of spoiled kids,
00:50:35that we were Dr. Spock's kids,
00:50:37that permissive child raising,
00:50:39which actually I never experienced in my own life,
00:50:42was the source of the movement.
00:50:45Well, that couldn't have been true in Germany.
00:50:47It was not true in Italy.
00:50:49I mean, it was not true in Japan.
00:50:51And the fact that it was international, I think,
00:50:54completely refutes that very simplistic psychological argument
00:50:59which we heard all the time.
00:51:01Everything that happened overseas
00:51:03fueled the sense that we were on the cusp
00:51:06of some momentous change in the history of the world.
00:51:11The Columbia strike may have reminded people of the Paris Commune,
00:51:15but May 68 in France was the real thing.
00:51:18What began as a student protest
00:51:20for reform of the archaic authoritarian French university system
00:51:24sparked a general strike that electrified the country.
00:51:28They were anarchists, most of them.
00:51:30That was the spirit.
00:51:31The slogan was all power to the imagination,
00:51:34that you can do anything,
00:51:36that we don't have to live with all the various forms of repression
00:51:39which we're used to.
00:51:40So it was anti-capitalist,
00:51:42but that was just part of this general,
00:51:44complete sort of cultural revolution
00:51:47that the French students were anticipating.
00:51:50And so it's interesting that although they were the furthest out
00:51:53in any way politically,
00:51:55that was also the one place where workers joined with students
00:52:00and almost toppled the government.
00:52:05May 10, the night of the barricades.
00:52:0720,000 students marched in the Latin Quarter.
00:52:10Police and students clashed.
00:52:12Street fighting went on for weeks.
00:52:14The rioting and marches of up to half a million people
00:52:18frightened not only President de Gaulle,
00:52:20but the French Communist Party as well.
00:52:23The old left thought this new left was out of control,
00:52:26that they had impossible dreams.
00:52:28The two principal slogans, I think,
00:52:31were quotations from Marx and Rimbaud.
00:52:36From Marx, let us change the world.
00:52:39From Rimbaud, let us change life.
00:52:42Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican novelist,
00:52:45was an active participant in May 68,
00:52:48along with many international students caught up in the excitement.
00:52:51What there was was a sense of extraordinary brotherhood and sisterhood.
00:52:56There was this capacity to embrace people in the streets.
00:53:01There were couples kissing.
00:53:03There were couples that fell apart
00:53:05because they did not share political views.
00:53:07Paris was divided by the River Seine as never before.
00:53:10On the left bank, you had the left, the revolutionaries, the dreamers.
00:53:15On the right side, you had the conservatives,
00:53:18you had the Gaullists, you had the financiers,
00:53:21the money people, the bourgeoisie.
00:53:23So the city was divided as much as in Les Miserables,
00:53:28in Victor Hugo, or in any of the great locations,
00:53:31of this city that seems to need a great revolutionary explosion from time to time.
00:53:37Eventually, the May uprising subsided.
00:53:40The powerful trade unions controlled by the communists refused to take part,
00:53:45and police kept up relentless pressure.
00:53:47But over time, the students did succeed
00:53:50in reforming and modernizing the French educational system.
00:53:53And they rejuvenated the Socialist Party,
00:53:56which a decade later became the elected government of France.
00:53:59It became a great gigantic fraternal feast
00:54:01in which everybody was kissing everybody, embracing everybody,
00:54:04patting everybody on the back,
00:54:06and saying how happy they were and how free they felt.
00:54:09And this was contagious, it was marvelous,
00:54:11and I don't think we'll ever see it again.
00:54:30By late spring, the presidential primaries were in full swing.
00:54:34Eugene McCarthy was more popular than ever with college students,
00:54:38like the thousands who cheered him at Berkeley.
00:54:43I think there are really three agencies of government
00:54:47that need to be somewhat altered.
00:54:50One is the Central Intelligence Agency.
00:54:53The second is the FBI.
00:54:56And...
00:55:02And the third are the draft boards under General Hershey.
00:55:06McCarthy's supporters were suspicious of Robert Kennedy,
00:55:09who they regarded as an opportunist.
00:55:11But it was also clear that Kennedy was a more charismatic campaigner
00:55:15and was appealing to a broader coalition,
00:55:17not just students, but blue-collar workers, women,
00:55:21a wide range of minority groups,
00:55:23and the poor.
00:55:25Kennedy himself was undergoing a dramatic political transformation.
00:55:28The man who was known as Ruthless, who had been a hawk on Vietnam,
00:55:32was now calling for peace and becoming an advocate for the dispossessed.
00:55:36I think one thing that happened to him was that his brother was murdered.
00:55:40And I think that had a profound impact on him.
00:55:44On an airplane during the campaign, someone asked him,
00:55:48it may have been Jack Newfield,
00:55:51what's your position on capital punishment?
00:55:54Some issue had come up.
00:55:56And he said, I'm against it.
00:55:59And whoever it was said to him,
00:56:01well, when you were at the Justice Department,
00:56:04that wasn't your position when you were Attorney General.
00:56:07And he said, well, then I hadn't read Camus.
00:56:11Well, what politician, first of all, reads Camus,
00:56:14and second, uses it as a reason for having changed a position?
00:56:19Albert Camus, the French existentialist,
00:56:22had written about the rebel spirit.
00:56:24And the Kennedy campaign, though run by professionals,
00:56:27began to take on an anti-establishment character.
00:56:30In California, Kennedy made common cause
00:56:33with Cesar Chavez and his farmworkers' union.
00:56:36I share that more romantic version of the Kennedy story.
00:56:41But again, it's one of those stories
00:56:43in which we project our own fantasies and our own hopes.
00:56:47The California primary was the showdown
00:56:49between Kennedy and McCarthy,
00:56:51the two candidates calling for change within the system,
00:56:55the two rebel spirits.
00:56:57On June 4th, it was Kennedy who emerged victorious.
00:57:01It was after midnight.
00:57:03The ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles was jammed,
00:57:06the heat stifling.
00:57:08But Kennedy was at his best.
00:57:10What I think is quite clear
00:57:12is that we can work together in the last analysis,
00:57:15and that what has been going on within the United States
00:57:18over the period of the last 3 years,
00:57:20the divisions, the violence,
00:57:22the disenchantment with our society,
00:57:24the divisions, whether it's between blacks and whites,
00:57:27between the poor and the more affluent,
00:57:29or between age groups or in the war in Vietnam,
00:57:32that we can start to work together.
00:57:34We are a great country and a selfish country
00:57:36and a compassionate country.
00:57:38And I intend to make that my basis for running
00:57:40over the period of the last 3 years.
00:57:43The anti-war movement, the reformers,
00:57:45now had a presidential candidate who might actually win.
00:57:49The country wants to move in a different direction.
00:57:51We want to deal with our own problems within our own country,
00:57:54and we want peace in Vietnam.
00:57:59The minute he finished, I turned and walked through this pantry area
00:58:03on my way to where the press conference would be held,
00:58:06and Kennedy was right behind me.
00:58:09And I heard the shots ring out, and I turned,
00:58:13and he was already down and bleeding badly,
00:58:17and the place went crazy.
00:58:20It was an absolute scene of bedlam.
00:58:31And after the whole scene was over and Kennedy was removed,
00:58:35a number of my colleagues, including a couple of burly photographers,
00:58:40broke down, put their heads down on this serving table
00:58:46and wept openly.
00:58:48Music
00:59:03An extraordinary thing happened when Kennedy's body
00:59:06was transported by train to Washington
00:59:09for burial at Arlington National Cemetery.
00:59:12Thousands of people spontaneously appeared along the tracks
00:59:15in silent tribute.
00:59:17Music
00:59:38I think an era ended with Robert Kennedy's death and Martin Luther King's,
00:59:43an era in which we could have accomplished great things working together.
00:59:47It doomed us for some time, and we may still be in that time,
00:59:51to be shattered, fragmented,
00:59:54something less than the people we could be.
00:59:57And I think Jack Newfield said it best when he said,
01:00:00after that we became might-have-beens, a generation of might-have-beens.
01:00:04Music
01:00:17The Republican Convention in Miami was a world apart,
01:00:21safe from turmoil.
01:00:23Nixon and his running mate Spiro Agnew
01:00:26appealed to those they called the forgotten Americans,
01:00:29yearning for stability, law and order.
01:00:33Music
01:00:39All of the crises of the 60s were coming together at once.
01:00:43The student, the anti-war demonstrations,
01:00:46the turning of the civil rights movement away
01:00:50from sort of non-violent demonstrations to get laws changed,
01:00:53to riots and quasi-revolution.
01:00:57And I think there was a sense that the country was coming apart,
01:01:02and here we were, suddenly we were losing the war.
01:01:05My fellow Americans, the long, dark night for America is about to end.
01:01:12Applause
01:01:24The time has come, the time has come
01:01:29for us to leave the valley of despair and climb the mountain
01:01:33so that we may see the glory of the dawn,
01:01:36a new day for America and a new dawn for peace and freedom in the world.
01:01:42But at the Democratic Convention in Chicago,
01:01:45the system was falling apart on national television.
01:01:50It was one of these dreadful and amazing confrontations
01:01:56where the forces that had been building for a long time come into collision.
01:02:01Leaders of the anti-war movement, Dave Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden,
01:02:06were determined to protest at the Democratic Convention.
01:02:09Richard J. Daley
01:02:11Mayor Richard Daley, the last of the big city bosses,
01:02:14was not about to let that happen.
01:02:16Daley would not grant permits allowing protesters to march or hold rallies.
01:02:21And as long as I'm mayor of this town, there will be law and order in Chicago.
01:02:25Applause
01:02:30The city was an armed camp.
01:02:32There were 12,000 police, 6,000 Illinois National Guardsmen,
01:02:36another 6,000 Army troops, including some just back from Vietnam.
01:02:41There were never more than about 10,000 demonstrators,
01:02:44easily outnumbered by police and soldiers.
01:02:47Some of us felt, I was certainly one of them,
01:02:50that it was altogether likely that we would not come out of the week alive.
01:02:55Somebody was not going to make it through the week.
01:02:57Applause
01:02:59Wednesday, August 28th, was the day everything exploded.
01:03:03It began with a peaceful rally at the Bandshell in Grant Park.
01:03:07Anti-war organizers were still planning to march to the convention.
01:03:12But when a young protester climbed the flagpole and lowered the American flag,
01:03:16the police charged.
01:03:25That afternoon at the convention, Democrats voted down the peace platform.
01:03:31For McCarthy and Kennedy delegates, it was a bitter defeat.
01:03:38Back on the streets, angry, frustrated demonstrators
01:03:41managed to reassemble in front of the Hilton Hotel,
01:03:44where the candidates had their headquarters.
01:03:47They were just as nasty and crude and awful and ugly as they could be.
01:03:52And you could see those cops were just sitting there seething
01:03:55with anger and resentment over it.
01:03:58Under the full glare of TV lights and cameras, the police attacked.
01:04:04They clubbed indiscriminately.
01:04:06Protesters, reporters, bystanders.
01:04:09The official government investigation would call this a police riot.
01:04:21In a confrontation that would be replayed countless times,
01:04:25Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff denounced Mayor Daley's police.
01:04:30With George McGovern as President of the United States,
01:04:34we wouldn't have to have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.
01:04:47Mr. Daley is not pleased with Senator Ribicoff.
01:04:53How hard it is to accept the truth.
01:05:01And he looked at Mayor Daley.
01:05:06That night, Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic nomination,
01:05:09but it was a hollow victory.
01:05:11You had Hubert Humphrey weeping in the shower from the effects of tear gas
01:05:16that was being spread in the park beneath the Conrad Hilton Hotel.
01:05:21The way it played out was extremely dramatic,
01:05:25but what played out there was a fact, that the Democratic Party was finished.
01:05:30And Nixon used an effective line after that Democratic convention.
01:05:35He said, look, if they can't unite their party, how can they unite the country?
01:05:40And he was right.
01:05:42But the truth was, I don't think anybody could have united us in 1968.
01:05:50Just a few days before Daley called the Army into Chicago, Russian tanks invaded Prague.
01:05:57They made Mayor Daley look like a pacifist.
01:06:00Many anti-war Americans identified with the young, free-thinking Czech students
01:06:05who wanted to change the old communist system.
01:06:08Dubček, who represented the Prague Spring, he was like a mild reformer.
01:06:15And this tremendous movement grew in Prague,
01:06:20which thought that it was going to change the world, just like we did.
01:06:24And, you know, it did finally, and God bless them,
01:06:27but they paid a big price of almost 30 years before it finally happened.
01:06:35Preoccupied with the war in Vietnam,
01:06:38the United States took no action to stop the Russians.
01:06:41The Czechs had little to defend themselves beyond their own powers of persuasion.
01:06:46Invited by the Czech author Milan Kundera to observe what was happening,
01:06:51Carlos Fuentes and other writers came to Prague.
01:06:56We were witnesses to the fact that this was a revolution
01:07:02to give socialism a human face, as Dubček had said,
01:07:06and this other revolution of the year 1968 was trampled by the Soviet Union,
01:07:11which did not want socialism with any face.
01:07:14It wanted Soviet imperial domination of its perimeter of defense.
01:07:19We have a policy that cares for the society, that takes care of the society,
01:07:23but it also respects personal freedom.
01:07:26This is what the Czechs wanted, and of course the Soviet Union would not tolerate it.
01:07:30And it was the beginning of the end, I think, for the Soviet empire.
01:07:33Twenty years later, the Velvet Revolution ended Soviet domination of Czechoslovakia,
01:07:39and playwright Václav Havel, a veteran of the Prague Spring,
01:07:43became president of a democratic country.
01:07:49PRAGUE
01:07:54In 1968, here was Paris, Chicago, Prague, and finally Mexico City.
01:08:01This plaza, the scene of another bloody confrontation.
01:08:05It had been building all summer.
01:08:07Mexican students were on the march,
01:08:09challenging an authoritarian government that claimed to be democratic.
01:08:14On the night of October 2nd, students filled the plaza.
01:08:17Soldiers with fixed bayonets surrounded them.
01:08:20Suddenly, without warning, a helicopter hovering overhead opened fire.
01:08:24They wanted something called freedom.
01:08:26Imagine, as simple as that.
01:08:28They wanted freedom, and they went out in the streets to demand this freedom.
01:08:32And the answer of the government was to mow them down on October 2nd, 1968,
01:08:36at Plata del Olco, the plaza of the free cultures.
01:08:39Plata del Olco, the same place where Pedro de Alvarado had massacred the Aztecs in 1521.
01:08:45The massacre, known as the Night of Sorrow, was the worst single disaster of 1968.
01:08:51But the world barely noticed.
01:08:54The Mexican government shrouded the massacre in secrecy.
01:08:59Only recently has it been officially acknowledged and investigated.
01:09:03But it was a turning point in Mexican history.
01:09:06The night when one party rule lost whatever legitimacy it had.
01:09:13From this terrifying event in which over 500 young men and women died, a new Mexico was born.
01:09:20A new democratic Mexico that has finally flowered.
01:09:24And these days, in the 1990s, it took a long time,
01:09:27but it would not have happened without the events of 1968.
01:09:32The massacre took place just before the Olympics in Mexico City,
01:09:35and horrified Harry Edwards, who was organizing a boycott of the games by black athletes.
01:09:41There were so many people being picked up, so many people being killed,
01:09:44that they were literally hauling out corpses in fishnets under helicopters like they did in Vietnam,
01:09:50because they did not want mass funerals and so forth,
01:09:55either just prior to and most certainly not during the Olympic games.
01:10:00The world heard very little about the student massacre.
01:10:03But no one missed the black power protests at the Olympics,
01:10:07by American sprinters Tommy Smith and John Carlos.
01:10:10Smith and Carlos' demonstration was not anti-American.
01:10:15It was pro-human rights, and most specifically, pro-black rights.
01:10:23People either wept and cheered, or they were outraged to the rafters.
01:10:34Smith and Carlos were expelled from the Olympics,
01:10:37but their black power salute became one of the most provocative and enduring images of 1968.
01:10:50Another protest movement would emerge by summer's end.
01:10:54Spearheaded by veterans of the anti-war and civil rights movements,
01:10:58it tapped into a deep well of anger at the inequalities between men and women.
01:11:04One early participant was Susan Brownmiller,
01:11:07a TV news writer who thought she was finished with activism.
01:11:11A friend of mine said to me one day,
01:11:14you know, women are meeting, and they're really talking about women's issues.
01:11:19And I said, I don't believe it.
01:11:22And she said, well, there's a meeting next Tuesday, maybe you'd want to come.
01:11:27Everyone goes around the room and speaks from their own experience.
01:11:32They began to talk about unwanted pregnancy and how each of them had coped with it.
01:11:38And it was my turn.
01:11:42And I was older, you know, I was in my 30s, they were in their 20s.
01:11:48And I'm a competitive person, and I'm thinking to myself,
01:11:52they're talking about one abortion, huh?
01:11:55So I said, I've had three abortions, all illegal.
01:12:01And then I started to cry.
01:12:04And I said, I guess I'm lucky to be alive.
01:12:08And what was so astonishing about that moment is that my best friend Jan,
01:12:11who had brought me to this meeting, didn't know about those abortions.
01:12:14You told nobody, you know, you made your arrangements, you went off secretly.
01:12:18In 1968 in New York, it was a first for women to say, yeah, I had an illegal abortion.
01:12:30From the privacy of consciousness-raising groups,
01:12:33the Women's Liberation Movement quickly catapulted itself into the public arena.
01:12:38With picket signs in their hands and guerrilla theater tactics up their sleeves,
01:12:43one hundred women converged on the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City.
01:12:48But first, they had notified the press, which turned out in force.
01:12:53The Miss America contest was so mind-boggling to reporters
01:12:57because no one had thought that maybe some of us didn't like the idea
01:13:02of a beauty contest where women paraded in bathing suits and high-heeled shoes.
01:13:08Miss America!
01:13:12Yes, sirree, boys! Step right up!
01:13:15How much am I offered for this number one piece of prime American property?
01:13:21She sings in the kitchen, hundreds of times a day!
01:13:24We, the radical activists, knew how to put on a good demo, you know.
01:13:30It was the radical movement's first national action.
01:13:39The demonstrators had hoped to burn bras, like draft cards,
01:13:43but the city refused to grant them a fire permit.
01:13:46Famous for a bra-burning that never happened,
01:13:50the protest generated enormous publicity and debate.
01:13:54Despite the lack of actual flames,
01:13:56the Miss America pageant protest sparked a social revolution that is still underway.
01:14:03I caught you cheatin' and runnin' around
01:14:08There's a smile upon your face while another takes my place
01:14:13And there'll be laughter instead of fear
01:14:16More than ever, conservative Americans thought the country and the world
01:14:20were on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
01:14:22They wanted law and order.
01:14:24George Wallace was their man.
01:14:28Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.
01:14:31Well, I'm for Wallace because I feel that all through history,
01:14:37whenever times became so difficult,
01:14:40a leader has arose, and this is the leader.
01:14:47Independent presidential candidate George Wallace
01:14:50had once declared segregation forever.
01:14:53Now the Alabama governor was holding rallies as far north as San Francisco,
01:14:58and polls in October showed him winning 20% of the vote.
01:15:02What do you think's wrong with America?
01:15:04With America? The rioting, the trouble in the streets,
01:15:08the trouble in our schools, the Supreme Court,
01:15:10which is almost, well, let's say, we think is pro-communist.
01:15:14We want Wallace! We want Wallace! We want Wallace!
01:15:19Now let's talk about law and order a moment,
01:15:21and we need to talk about it,
01:15:23but really you don't have to talk about it,
01:15:25you see it all around you all the time,
01:15:27the breakdown of law and order.
01:15:29The reaction that he stirred scared me
01:15:32because he had the capacity of just working up a crowd to a frenzy.
01:15:37When that same group from Berkeley were grubbing around
01:15:40in their beards and filth in Selma, Alabama, for eight weeks,
01:15:44the Washington Post said, it is a great and holy crusade,
01:15:48and now they've created themselves a Frankenstein monster,
01:15:51and the chickens are coming home to roost all over this country.
01:15:59Wallace enjoyed responding to the protesters who heckled him.
01:16:03Come up here after I've completed my speech,
01:16:06and I'll autograph your sandals for you.
01:16:08I'll let you all do that.
01:16:10And I'll, uh...
01:16:14Oh, yeah, a good haircut would help you.
01:16:16I think that solves your problem.
01:16:18A good barber could cure you.
01:16:20It was really the beginning of what is today
01:16:23the phenomenon of the angry white man.
01:16:27I'll tell you, they ought to take them people over there
01:16:29and put them in a bunch of cages and ship them off in a ship
01:16:33and dump them, or take them to Vietnam, get them off,
01:16:36put them on the front line and bring our boys back
01:16:38and A-bomb them guys.
01:16:40It also contained an element of economic populism
01:16:43that was very important.
01:16:45Of course, these people were trying to beat the hell out of me,
01:16:48so it was hard for me to see their economic agenda.
01:16:51God bless America
01:16:55My home sweet land
01:17:03The more mainstream law and order candidates, Nixon and Agnew,
01:17:07built up a commanding lead over Hubert Humphrey.
01:17:10Nixon ran a very controlled, almost antiseptic campaign,
01:17:14dominated by Madison Avenue advisers
01:17:17who recommended carefully orchestrated appearances.
01:17:21It would later be described as the selling of the president.
01:17:26The Humphrey campaign was stalled.
01:17:30He was afraid to break with President Johnson
01:17:32and speak out against the war.
01:17:35He's a truly tragic figure.
01:17:38I mean, he's a real visionary from 1948 on.
01:17:42He makes his first name with a fantastic speech
01:17:45in favor of civil rights in 1948 at the Democratic National Convention.
01:17:49And throughout the 50s and 60s, he's a real beacon of liberalism.
01:17:53But Johnson treats him terribly, as Lyndon Johnson put it.
01:17:58As Lyndon Johnson put it very specifically,
01:18:00don't worry about Hubert, I've got his pecker in my pocket.
01:18:04After the debacle in Chicago,
01:18:06the anti-war movement was boycotting Humphrey.
01:18:09There were some of us who already were thinking,
01:18:11you know, Nixon would not be the end of the world.
01:18:14People like I.F. Stone had argued you get a better shot at peace
01:18:17with a Republican than with a Democrat
01:18:19because they don't have to worry about being red-baited.
01:18:22But it would never have entered my mind to vote for Hubert Humphrey.
01:18:27Who was, as far as I was concerned, was deeply implicated in the war.
01:18:31People threw excrement at him and called his wife a whore.
01:18:35And the great irony, of course, was that throughout the fall campaign,
01:18:38all of the anti-war demonstrators
01:18:40continuously harassed Humphrey and ignored Nixon altogether.
01:18:45And that was a tragedy.
01:18:48This is one of the greatest mistakes of the 60s, in my view.
01:18:53The election was so close that you can attribute many factors
01:18:58to the margin of difference.
01:19:00But certainly one of the factors was that those who hated the war
01:19:07decided to be so pure as to sit it out.
01:19:11I was one of them.
01:19:13I know very few people who voted in that year, and we were wrong.
01:19:16One of the missed opportunities in the movement during the war
01:19:23was not to imagine how many insiders there were
01:19:28that essentially agreed with him,
01:19:31and to have pressed them, to challenge them more,
01:19:34to speak out more openly.
01:19:36And it's not until September 30th in a famous speech in Salt Lake City
01:19:39where he finally puts a little bit of distance between himself and the president
01:19:43and says, I will be in favor of a bombing halt,
01:19:46and the next day he's at the University of Tennessee
01:19:49and there's this incredible sign in the crowd saying,
01:19:52If you mean it, we're with you.
01:19:54I think if he had renounced the war and the Johnson war policy
01:19:59maybe a few weeks sooner, he might very well have won that election.
01:20:04He came very, very close.
01:20:06Richard Nixon won by a razor-thin margin, less than 1% of the vote.
01:20:12The Vietnam War would last seven more years.
01:20:15Johnson's war would become Nixon's war.
01:20:19The political division that erupted in 1968 would soon widen into chasms.
01:20:2568 is the cusp between the hope and the rage,
01:20:30and it's in many ways the years when the most benign hopes burned out
01:20:34or were obliterated.
01:20:41.
01:20:56Richard Nixon was now president, and Ronald Reagan was governor of California.
01:21:01Together they would lead a backlash against rebellious students
01:21:05and the anti-war movement.
01:21:07.
01:21:10As 1969 dawned, the most sustained student demonstrations of the decade
01:21:16were already underway, not at an elite school, but at a state college,
01:21:21and not over the war, but over identity.
01:21:24.
01:21:29The origins of college and university ethnic studies departments nationwide
01:21:34were forged in the heat of a 134-day strike at San Francisco State College.
01:21:40.
01:21:47Governor Reagan sent his executive assistant, Ed Meese, to San Francisco
01:21:52to support the college's tough new president, S.I. Hayakawa.
01:21:57One of my jobs was to make sure that President Hayakawa was safe
01:22:02because there was some thought that they might try to storm his office,
01:22:05so we had the necessary police and state resources there to protect him.
01:22:10.
01:22:12Dissident forces decided that they would stage a major demonstration.
01:22:16.
01:22:27President Hayakawa personally got on top of the truck
01:22:30and pulled out the wires and silenced the sound truck.
01:22:33S.I. Hayakawa, in essence, became sort of a hitman for Ronald Reagan.
01:22:39.
01:23:02The striking students ultimately won the black studies department,
01:23:06and in the process, 700 were arrested.
01:23:09.
01:23:14College president S.I. Hayakawa went on to become a United States senator.
01:23:19.
01:23:27Governor Reagan found the conflict a useful trial run for his next challenge in nearby Berkeley,
01:23:33where anti-war students and counterculture youth joined forces
01:23:37to claim some undeveloped university land as their own.
01:23:41.
01:23:44The great hope implicit in the People's Park is that in our leisure time, so to speak,
01:23:50we will make the social revolution.
01:23:52.
01:23:54The spirit which built the People's Park is stronger than gas and clubs.
01:23:59.
01:24:01It is even stronger than universities.
01:24:03I want to inform you that this property is private.
01:24:06It is posted. You are now trespassing.
01:24:09.
01:24:12And so the university set out to move the people who were lounging around on the property
01:24:17off of the property and put up fences so that they could begin the construction.
01:24:21.
01:24:23Leftist organizers, some students, some non-students,
01:24:27decided that they would use that as the pretext for a demonstration and a protest.
01:24:32.
01:24:36They tried to kill police officers.
01:24:39They hurled spikes from the top of buildings on the police.
01:24:42.
01:24:46Governor Reagan, expressing the fury that many officials felt at youthful defiance,
01:24:50stated,
01:24:52If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement.
01:24:56.
01:25:04Alameda County sheriffs shot over 50 protesters with buckshot.
01:25:08One protester died.
01:25:11What happened to James Rector was the result of his being involved in illegal activity.
01:25:16.
01:25:18Reagan called in the National Guard, which quelled the disturbance.
01:25:23They occupied Berkeley for a month,
01:25:26leaving the Bay Area activist community brokenhearted and demoralized.
01:25:31.
01:25:40That summer, one dream was realized and another vanquished.
01:25:45On July 20th, the space program founded by President John Kennedy triumphed with a walk on the moon.
01:25:52The day before, JFK's only surviving brother, Senator Ted Kennedy,
01:25:58saved his own life after a car accident,
01:26:01but his presidential promise died along with his drowned companion.
01:26:06But I really didn't become totally dispirited
01:26:10until Ted Kennedy went off the bridge at Chappaquiddick.
01:26:14Ted has been a terrific senator, whatever else you might say.
01:26:17He's been a terrific senator.
01:26:19And he was the last person who scared Nixon.
01:26:22And once Ted went off that bridge, Nixon veered to the right.
01:26:26And that was that, and I knew it.
01:26:29And for me, that was when the 60s ended.
01:26:33.
01:26:43For America's counterculture, the 60s were about to peak on a farm in upstate New York.
01:26:50There's people as far as the eye can see in every direction,
01:26:55under every tree, under every leaf, on every road.
01:26:59And I remember being in this helicopter, and the door was open,
01:27:02and this big cop looked down and said,
01:27:05there's a lot of hippies down there.
01:27:07And I'm going, well, yeah.
01:27:09And the cop next to him going, yeah.
01:27:11And the first cop said, I bet they're doing lots of illegal stuff.
01:27:15And the next one said, yeah.
01:27:17And the first one said, I'm not going in there.
01:27:19And I said, no.
01:27:21And I suddenly realized, man, this was going to be a party.
01:27:24This was going to be fun.
01:27:26.
01:27:31Despite overcrowding and rain, the party lasted for three days.
01:27:35MC Wavy Gravy announced to a sea of bodies and mud
01:27:40that festival organizers would be serving breakfast in bed for $400,000.
01:27:47Woodstock is distinguishable not only because it was the largest pop festival of its time,
01:27:52but it was also, in effect, the last.
01:27:54.
01:28:05Four months later, a festival promoted as Woodstock West turned into Anti-Woodstock.
01:28:11.
01:28:17The Rolling Stones headlined a concert at Altamont, east of San Francisco,
01:28:21where the counterculture had so famously blossomed.
01:28:24.
01:28:29The Altamont concert ended in violence and disarray.
01:28:32Something seemed to have gone terribly wrong.
01:28:34.
01:28:37Gangsters moved in.
01:28:39Kilos of weed got exchanged for bricks.
01:28:42People were shot.
01:28:44There were murders.
01:28:45There was this and that.
01:28:46The whole tenor of things got uglier and harder and meaner.
01:28:49Marred by violence and drug abuse,
01:28:51Altamont sealed the fate of large-scale free concerts.
01:28:55The expansive spirit of the Love Generation would never be quite the same again.
01:29:00A lot of us fell right off the edge, and I was one of them,
01:29:04and a lot of us were really hurt by hard drugs.
01:29:11.
01:29:19The counterculture paid a price for its excesses.
01:29:22In the next few years, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison would be dead,
01:29:28all from drug abuse.
01:29:31Many former urban dwellers sought to build a new life in the country.
01:29:35Communal living and homegrown food would be the antidote to the excesses of the city.
01:29:41And there came a movement to become land-based,
01:29:45to get below the skin of asphalt, as somebody called it.
01:29:49It's where I live here now in Mendocino County.
01:29:52Many, many people came here in the 60s in full retreat from the urban environment,
01:30:01deciding that if we're going to create a new society,
01:30:04we just have to forget their society and go start one of our own.
01:30:08.
01:30:33As Nixon's first year in the White House came to a close,
01:30:37the number of Americans being killed in Vietnam remained high.
01:30:43We wanted to end the war, but you can't turn this thing off as if it were a television channel.
01:30:51Nixon's new strategy was Vietnamization.
01:30:55He began to withdraw American troops,
01:30:58announcing that South Vietnam would take over the ground war.
01:31:04Privately, he began direct negotiations with the North Vietnamese,
01:31:09excluding South Vietnam's President Thieu.
01:31:13Simultaneously, he ordered massive secret bombings in Laos and Cambodia.
01:31:25What we attempted to do was to extricate the United States from Vietnam,
01:31:31but to do it in such a way that it would not affect our international responsibilities around the world.
01:31:40More people die, more Americans, and no doubt Vietnamese,
01:31:45die during the Nixon-we're-on-our-way-getting-out years
01:31:51than during the Kennedy and Johnson years put together.
01:31:56A nationwide moratorium on October 15, 1969, called for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam.
01:32:04With protests in every city across the country,
01:32:08it became the largest one-day demonstration ever in a Western democracy.
01:32:13Unknown to its participants, the moratorium would significantly alter Nixon's war plans.
01:32:20He was making secret threats of escalation to North Vietnam,
01:32:25secretly from the American public,
01:32:28but not at all secret, of course, from the target of these threats.
01:32:32In short, he made those threats explicitly to the Soviets,
01:32:36for the Vietnamese, and directly to the Vietnamese,
01:32:39that he was prepared to use nuclear weapons.
01:32:42The march of the moratorium in cities across the country on October 15,
01:32:46just before his secret ultimatum, was too large.
01:32:50Two million people on one day across the country
01:32:53convinced him, reasonably, that this was not the time to escalate the war,
01:32:58and in particular not the time to use nuclear weapons for the first time since Hiroshima.
01:33:04It was pretty clear that there was so much protest within our country
01:33:10that it was very difficult to conduct the war at all.
01:33:17Nixon's public response, a speech he wrote himself, was a masterstroke.
01:33:22He said that he was not prepared to use nuclear weapons,
01:33:27Nixon's public response, a speech he wrote himself, was a masterstroke.
01:33:32So tonight, to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans,
01:33:40I ask for your support.
01:33:42I pledged in my campaign for the presidency to end the war
01:33:47in a way that we could win the peace.
01:33:50I have initiated a plan of action which will enable me to keep that pledge.
01:33:55Let us be united for peace.
01:33:58Let us also be united against defeat.
01:34:02Because let us understand,
01:34:04North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States.
01:34:10Only Americans can do that.
01:34:14And so then the press attacked it, savaged it,
01:34:16and so I wrote Nixon a memo and said it's time to attack the media.
01:34:20And I said the Vice President of the United States ought to deliver this speech,
01:34:23and so I wrote that Agnew speech,
01:34:26and there was one editor for that Agnew speech, Richard Milhouse Nixon,
01:34:30and he said this will tear the scab off those bastards.
01:34:34And we broke out laughing.
01:34:37And it did.
01:34:39Perhaps the place to start looking for a credibility gap
01:34:44is not in the offices of the government in Washington,
01:34:46but in the studios of the networks in New York.
01:34:49He was the point man for Richard Nixon,
01:34:52and Richard Nixon's war against the countercultures.
01:34:55And then with speeches by William Safire and Pat Buchanan,
01:34:59he became eventually the hero of the right wing for his attacks on the press.
01:35:04Like Nixon's silent majority, Agnew's famous phrases,
01:35:09effete snobs, and nattering nabobs of negativism,
01:35:13served to further polarize the country.
01:35:15Two, four, six, eight, organize and smash the state!
01:35:22Exactly one month after the moratorium,
01:35:25700,000 Americans converged on Washington.
01:35:29The administration had already ordered the FBI to monitor the demonstration,
01:35:33convinced that it was influenced by communists.
01:35:37Just walk!
01:35:41While a handful tried to storm the South Vietnamese embassy,
01:35:44Yale chaplain William Sloan Coffin and Dr. Benjamin Spock
01:35:49led a peaceful march against death from Arlington Cemetery to the White House.
01:35:54Attorney General John Mitchell said,
01:35:57it looked like the Russian Revolution.
01:36:00It was the very deep sense of patriotism that animated many of us,
01:36:04not all of us, you know.
01:36:06Sure, there was a certain amount of defiant, revolt,
01:36:11adolescence, if you will, but that's overdone.
01:36:14First contingent in this march against death.
01:36:18There are facilities in the White House in case of a bombing attack.
01:36:24I moved into one of these facilities for a few days
01:36:28and slept in the basement of the White House.
01:36:31And, you know, the White House was ringed by students that were protesting.
01:36:40It didn't interfere with what we were doing, but it was uncomfortable.
01:37:04The following spring, on April 30, 1970,
01:37:08President Nixon announced that American troops had entered Cambodia.
01:37:21By early 1970, anti-war sentiment is so sweeping in America,
01:37:28not only in public opinion, but on the campuses in particular,
01:37:31that it doesn't require any leadership.
01:37:34Protests erupted on campuses nationwide.
01:37:37The murder of four students at Kent State
01:37:39and two at Jackson State by National Guardsmen
01:37:42shocked and further divided the nation.
01:37:46It was as if the relationships between the generations
01:37:49had cracked up on some fundamental level.
01:37:54And, yes, it was about the Vietnam War.
01:37:57It was about race. It was about poverty.
01:38:00But these things seemed to be reflections of a failure
01:38:05on the part of the older generation that was so profound.
01:38:09The movement was moving left, and the country was moving right.
01:38:14The country was polarizing.
01:38:18Increasing numbers of white radicals began to aspire
01:38:21to the more confrontational model of the Black Panthers.
01:38:26Am I under arrest? Am I under arrest?
01:38:30Take your hands off me if I'm not under arrest!
01:38:34The Panthers ran on two levels, you know.
01:38:37I mean, we now know that Huey was kind of a schizophrenic guy,
01:38:44a brilliant idealist, and a thug.
01:38:49There were those two strains in the Panthers.
01:38:54They would do breakfast programs for kids,
01:38:57and then they would do thuggery.
01:38:59In America, black people are treated very much
01:39:03as the Vietnamese people or any other colonized people
01:39:06because we're used, we're brutalized.
01:39:08The police in our community occupy our area.
01:39:12Our community as a foreign troop occupies territory.
01:39:18They moved largely from a service
01:39:21and self-defense kind of organization
01:39:23into an organization that adopted
01:39:25what was essentially a siege mentality.
01:39:28Let us arm ourselves to defend ourselves
01:39:31because if we don't, we're all dead.
01:39:33And of course, that's the way that things ultimately played out.
01:39:38Huey Newton.
01:39:40Huey Newton fell apart.
01:39:42Started abusing drugs.
01:39:44One day I walked in the house over there where I stayed.
01:39:47Man, he's got a big brick of cocaine.
01:39:49I said, what is this?
01:39:51You don't understand, he said.
01:39:53We're going to raise some money for the party.
01:39:55I said, it's not like this, Huey.
01:39:57I said, it's not like this.
01:39:59This is cheap.
01:40:00I said, do you realize politically
01:40:02they will destroy us with this bullshit?
01:40:04With the demise of the Black Panther Party,
01:40:07into that gap stepped the gangs,
01:40:10the drug traffickers, and so forth.
01:40:13The Crips and the Bloods are a direct child,
01:40:18if you were, of the demise of the Black Panther Party.
01:40:22While the Panthers' collapse,
01:40:24fueled by FBI counterintelligence tactics,
01:40:27took years,
01:40:29white radicals self-destructed almost overnight.
01:40:41A tiny handful of white radicals,
01:40:44including a group that called itself the Weather Underground,
01:40:47called for armed revolution.
01:40:49But for most of the anti-war movement,
01:40:52this seemed both futile and morally irresponsible.
01:40:59This was very painful to see people who you trusted
01:41:04and were close to seem to flip out
01:41:07and start saying things like,
01:41:09if you're not ready to pick up the gun, you're not serious.
01:41:12I mean, it just sounded crazy.
01:41:15We grew up really believing in America and what it stood for.
01:41:19Vietnam came along, and A, I think most importantly,
01:41:23it violated our view of America
01:41:25because we were killing innocent peasants.
01:41:28But B, on a very deep psychological level,
01:41:31to realize that your elders are prepared to see you die
01:41:35for an unworthy cause,
01:41:37for something you don't want to go die for,
01:41:40I think threw us into a moral abyss.
01:41:45.
01:42:03Americans were shocked by the trial of Lt. William Calley.
01:42:07Calley was accused and convicted of massacring villagers
01:42:11in the Vietnamese village of My Lai.
01:42:14Later, it was revealed that the U.S. had been secretly bombing
01:42:18Laos and Cambodia.
01:42:22Ambassador Sullivan, in that cool, dignified way he has,
01:42:26said the United States has never bombed any civilian targets in Laos.
01:42:31And I hear this voice, it was one of these out-of-body experiences
01:42:35of Senator Kennedy going, well, excuse me, Ambassador,
01:42:38but I understand there's a young man in the room
01:42:41who's just been returned from Laos,
01:42:43and I suddenly stand up, you know, and I remember my heart churning,
01:42:47but I was surprised when I saw the footage recently
01:42:50that I was very calm, I was even smoking a cigarette,
01:42:53and I said, you know,
01:42:55Ambassador Sullivan is simply not telling the truth.
01:42:57I've interviewed thousands of peasants.
01:42:59Every single one says their village was destroyed,
01:43:02people have been murdered.
01:43:04It's simply not true that we're not bombing Laos.
01:43:07VETS
01:43:11Of the 27 million young men of draft age during the war,
01:43:15slightly over 2 million, or 6%, saw combat in Vietnam.
01:43:22A small but vocal minority of Vietnam vets
01:43:25returned to speak out against the war.
01:43:31In April 1971, they brought their message to Washington, D.C.,
01:43:35and the nation's television cameras.
01:43:52Vietnam veterans marched on the Supreme Court,
01:43:55calling for the court to declare the war unconstitutional.
01:43:59Stop demonstrating immediately and leave the premises,
01:44:03or you will be arrested.
01:44:05Another group of veterans, including John Kerry,
01:44:08testified before Congress.
01:44:10Finally, this administration has done us the ultimate dishonor.
01:44:15They have attempted to disown us
01:44:18and the sacrifices we made for this country.
01:44:34VETS
01:44:38The veterans coming back from Vietnam
01:44:40and protesting against the war
01:44:42and forming the Veterans Against the War,
01:44:45to me that was perhaps the most powerful evidence
01:44:50that the government can have
01:44:52to have to do something about stopping the war.
01:44:55The demonstration culminated with a group of veterans
01:44:58returning the combat medals they had earned in Vietnam.
01:45:01I'm going to turn in my Vietnam service ribbons.
01:45:06One bronze star for heroism, which was really asinine.
01:45:13One purple heart.
01:45:14I'd like to say just one thing to the people of Vietnam.
01:45:17God, I'm sorry.
01:45:32VETS
01:45:42We did end the war. We didn't just try to, we did.
01:45:46The real debate between us and our critics concerned months.
01:45:50Could it have been ended a year earlier, six months earlier?
01:45:53How do I know?
01:45:55It was not until 1973 that a cease-fire agreement was signed
01:45:59and the last U.S. troops came home.
01:46:04But the seeds for Nixon's political demise
01:46:07were sown by a massive leak of secret government documents.
01:46:11The documents would come to be known as the Pentagon Papers.
01:46:15The man who leaked the documents was Daniel Ellsberg.
01:46:19If I hadn't believed that the war was about to get larger,
01:46:23I wouldn't have exposed myself to a life in prison
01:46:27just to set the record straight.
01:46:29And he told us about how he and Tony Russo,
01:46:33while they were with the Rand Corporation,
01:46:36had secretly copied 7,000 pages of this top-secret document,
01:46:41which became known as the Pentagon Papers,
01:46:44and how they were going to reveal it to the public.
01:46:48Ellsberg is one of the brightest people I have ever met.
01:46:53I knew him at Harvard.
01:46:55At that time he was a hardliner, and he had gone to Vietnam
01:47:00to help organize anti-guerrilla activities
01:47:03and even to participate in them.
01:47:06When he came back, he turned.
01:47:09I had secret inside information from my work in the White House
01:47:13for Henry Kissinger at the very beginning of the administration
01:47:17that Nixon had never intended to get out with anything other than success.
01:47:21Not one of those 15,000 Pentagon Papers
01:47:24did any damage to Nixon.
01:47:26All those papers, every last one of them,
01:47:30dealt with the Johnson and Kennedy administration.
01:47:33The Pentagon Papers offered a detailed and devastating indictment
01:47:37of U.S. policy in Vietnam.
01:47:40They revealed the lies Kennedy and Johnson had told the public,
01:47:44the years of secret bombing raids in Laos,
01:47:47and the CIA intelligence reports
01:47:49that consistently undercut official presidential statements
01:47:53characterizing the war.
01:47:55That was their great claim, we know stuff you don't know.
01:47:58Remember that?
01:48:00Now I would say we know everything that they know.
01:48:02We've got the documents, and we see
01:48:04there was absolutely no logical justification for what they did,
01:48:07and they knew it all along.
01:48:09You know, it's astounding.
01:48:11President Nixon set out to destroy Daniel Ellsberg's reputation.
01:48:15The White House plumbers, so named for their assignment to stop leaks,
01:48:20broke into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist.
01:48:23They escaped that time,
01:48:25but a year later, during the 1972 presidential campaign,
01:48:29the plumbers were caught
01:48:31breaking into Democratic National Headquarters
01:48:33in the Watergate building.
01:48:35What surprised me was Watergate.
01:48:37I could not believe that anybody that successful,
01:48:42and obviously he could see the success he was about to have,
01:48:47would get himself into a mess like that.
01:48:49That was unbelievable.
01:48:51I take it to be an expression of the deepest insecurity,
01:48:55personal insecurity.
01:49:01On August 8, 1974, under threat of impeachment,
01:49:06Richard M. Nixon resigned as President of the United States.
01:49:13Without the Vietnam War, there would have been, of course,
01:49:16no Pentagon Papers and no Watergate.
01:49:18It works the other way, too.
01:49:20Without Watergate, the war would have gone on for years.
01:49:29But the impact of the 60s was not limited to American foreign policy.
01:49:33The environmental, gay rights, and women's movements,
01:49:37all born in the 60s,
01:49:39would, in the decades that followed,
01:49:41grow huge and have a profound impact on American society.
01:49:46You went from civil rights to anti-war to women to gay.
01:49:49I mean, you can trace that.
01:49:51The largest ever demonstration for women's rights
01:49:54underscored the rapid advances women seemed to be making.
01:49:58The House of Representatives passed the Equal Rights Amendment,
01:50:02and new abortion laws in New York State
01:50:05would help lay the groundwork for nationwide abortion protection
01:50:09in Roe v. Wade three years later.
01:50:13The 60s are one of these amazing moments in history.
01:50:16There are not very many of them.
01:50:18When down a number of channels
01:50:21come people of very different sorts
01:50:23who simultaneously get it into their heads
01:50:26that the world doesn't have to be what it was
01:50:29or what it's assumed to be.
01:50:31On balance, the 60s are a success
01:50:33because of what they did for black people
01:50:35and for women and for gay people,
01:50:37and even for handicapped people.
01:50:39I mean, it really empowers everybody.
01:50:41We can look back and feel good about the work that we have engaged in,
01:50:45the blood we've shed, even the lives that we've lost.
01:50:48All has been ultimately for the good.
01:50:57Former activists remember the 60s as a time when they felt empowered,
01:51:02a time when change seemed possible and idealism flourished.
01:51:08But others remember those days very differently.
01:51:11For them, the 60s were a disturbing time,
01:51:14a time when America's fundamental values seemed threatened.
01:51:18I think there's an amount of bitterness and animosity
01:51:23that our generation is going to carry to its grave.
01:51:26It tore the nation apart,
01:51:29and I think to some degree we're still suffering from that.
01:51:33It was the age of selfishness, it was the age of self-indulgence,
01:51:36it was the age of anti-authority,
01:51:39it was an age in which people did all kinds of wrong things.
01:51:43That was the start, really, of the drug problem in the United States.
01:51:46To people who were of a conservative bent, everything seemed threatening,
01:51:50and it all seemed indistinguishably threatening, indissolubly threatening.
01:51:54You know, the Beatles saying they're as popular as Jesus.
01:51:58You might as well be trashing the American flag,
01:52:02you might as well be dodging the draft.
01:52:04To them, it all looked like the same thing.
01:52:06Me and my friends who were, you know,
01:52:09taking drugs and practicing all sorts of excess
01:52:12were also dedicating our lives to learning about the environment,
01:52:16learning about how to grow chemical-free food,
01:52:19learning about what health is, studying acupuncture,
01:52:22becoming nurses, becoming healers.
01:52:25The fact that these ideas and premises
01:52:28that have so affected mainstream culture
01:52:31and came out of contradictory people
01:52:34is not a reason to invalidate them.
01:52:37It should be an urge for you to do better.
01:52:40We did the best we could. We came from a different generation.
01:52:43I know that my generation worked to make things better for all people,
01:52:49and that's about the best you can do in life.
01:52:52It's important for the youth of a generation
01:52:55to feel that they can change the world, because they really can,
01:52:59because the youth of the world are the conscience of the world,
01:53:03and we depend on them to make things change.
01:53:09And that was a time of tremendous change
01:53:11where youth were tremendously motivated.
01:53:13It would be good to see that happen again.
01:53:29¶¶
01:53:59¶¶
01:54:30The 60s, the years that shaped a generation,
01:54:33was made possible by contributions to your PBS station
01:54:36from viewers like you.
01:54:38Thank you.