Cold War (1998) s01e13 Episode Script
Make Love Not War
Beatlemania hits the United States.
With sex, drugs and rock n' roll- the Sixties shake American values.
The work ethic, military duty, even family life are under attack.
The Cold War continues, but for a generation, it's time to make love, not war.
In 1960 America was moving towards the peak of its prosperity and power.
The Democrats' choice to run for President was young Jack Kennedy, good-looking son of an Irish- American multi-millionaire.
The Kennedy family, but Jack in particular and Jackie especially as well, just seemed to be the natural fulfillment of the American political process.
They seemed to be the best that the process could bring forward, and represented a new and glittering age.
You have to make your decision of what you want this country to be.
What you want Illinois to be? How ready you are to move this country forward? That is the question which separates Mr.
Nixon and myself.
Kennedy brought in a sense of excitement and youth after the kind of sleepy Eisenhower years, and almost seemed to symbolize this, you know, youth passion.
The Republican Party choice, Vice-President Richard Nixon, shared Kennedy's patriotic anti-Communist fervor.
But he had not been groomed for television.
The whole business of presenting visuals became very, very important.
The Kennedy family put up hundreds of thousands of dollars, equipped a bus, it had film crews aboard, and they would go wherever John Kennedy was appearing, and film him; and then those films became a part of his advertising on television.
It was the first time that it had really been done in an effective and organized way.
Kennedy had attacked Eisenhower's conduct of the Cold War.
To America and the world, he proclaimed Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of Liberty.
Kennedy increased the military budget.
Defense contracts brought the military industrial complex unparalleled strength an riches.
It meant more jobs.
The Cold War was the noblest of enterprises and it fit right in with the need for technologists like myself and the need for the Government-sponsored programs that were opposing the Soviet advances.
Attitudes were interesting at that time, because the defense industry and its budgets seemed to be based on the fact that the Russians were ten feet tall.
Most of us were very hawkish about things, I mean our well-being, our sustenance was dependent on the defense industry.
America was booming.
The state of California, where much of the aerospace industry was based, became the sixth largest economy in the world.
The big thing in those days was get into missiles, get into spacecraft, get into satellites.
Big things are happening and they're all happening out in California.
Some friends of ours were going to California because Hughes we understand, was building up an electronics place and Disneyland was hiring and work was bad in Chicago in '56-'57 so we decided to move out here.
Post-war settlers in California left behind the decaying cities of the East.
They found suburban life in the sun affordable, idyllic.
We would hang around the sales office until we saw the new plot map go up, and then we picked up the lot that we wanted.
And talking with the sales agent, he told us that Sunday morning we are going to open this tract for buyers.
And we said, "What time are you opening Sunday morning?" He told us.
We went to church early that day.
By 8 o'clock or whenever he opened his doors, we were first in line.
And for $200 cash, check written, why we were in the place.
We paid $10,999, which is, tell somebody back in Chicago that and they'd think you were buying a barn, you know.
And it was nice-there was three bedrooms, one bath, and we increased.
We had to put the we put a block wall fence, we put a patio out there, and we put in the corner of our backyard, we put like the desert, we put a little cactus and stuff, so we're reminded we're living in California.
This good life was not available to all Americans.
The question came up about selling these homes to members of minorities, ethnic minorities, blacks specifically.
And we were assured that we did not have to worry about anything of the sort happening, that the tract simply was not selling to blacks.
The Constitution and the Bill of Rights had not removed the wedges of prejudice that were driven through American society.
Black Americans too wanted freedom.
Where Kennedy meant freedom from communism, they meant freedom from hunger, from fear, from humiliation.
We looked at racism by degree, you know, so if you lived in St.
Louis you said, "Well it could have been worse - you could be in Mississippi", you know.
If you lived in Mississippi, you said, "Well, we're lucky they didn't kill us all".
That type of peace.
And so consequently, if a black person rose up and fought back, they said, "You're crazy, Nigger!" Even black folk said, "You're crazy".
Now somebody had to say, "Hey, it's all right, when something is wrong, to say it's wrong.
And in a democracy, if somethings wrong and you say it's wrong, you can gather to petition your government to tell them it's wrong.
And you know what? If you do, they might do something about it!" That's essentially what the civil rights movement was about.
â« You better keep your eyes on that prize â« â« Oh, Lord, Oh, Lord â« In many southern states, laws prevented blacks and whites travelling together, eating together, even going to the same school.
Black Americans were denied jobs and the right to vote.
Civil rights activists demonstrating against unjust laws were careful not to provoke the police by any display of aggression.
They were beaten just the same.
It wasn't the first time armed whites had assaulted unarmed blacks, but now television was watching.
Discrimination against blacks damaged America's credibility as Freedom's champion in the Cold War.
Kennedy was being urged by his brother, Attorney-General Bobby Kennedy, to back the Civil Rights Movement.
Aware that he needed the votes of white Southerners, Kennedy found if difficult to commit himself.
â« We shall overcome, we shall overcome â« â« We shall overcome some day â« August 28th, 1963- a civil rights rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington urged the White House to ban racist laws and give black Americans equal job opportunities.
A quarter of a million people showed up to listen to a thirty-four year old Southern Baptist minister.
Let freedom ring and if America is to be a great nation this must become true.
So let freedom ring.
When we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty! We are free at last!" I never heard King say one thing when that camera was on about white folks and another thing when it was off.
He never called them 'honkies', he never called them 'rednecks' He always had the same love.
Now I'm talking about when just he and I are in a room talking.
I'm cussing and calling them everything I can think of, and blah, blah, blah, and he never left that spirit of love.
George Wallace, Democratic Governor of Alabama, saw the growing civil rights movement as part of a communist conspiracy.
The Communist Party USA has been alert to capitalize on every possible issue or event which could be used to exploit the American Negro in furtherance of party aims.
In its efforts to influence the American Negro, the party attempts to infiltrate the legitimate Negro organizations for the purpose of stirring up racial prejudices and hatred.
In this way the party strikes a blow at our democratic form of government by attempting to influence public opinion throughout the world against the United States.
In the name of national security, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, gave the FBI permission to tap the telephones of Martin Luther King and his colleagues.
J Edgar Hoover, Chief of the FBI, was convinced that the Civil Rights movement had been infiltrated by communists.
Hoover hated King.
Hoover is close enough to the South to be in a southern culture, and in that society there was a real sense of belief, a religious belief, a political belief, that there was no such thing as equality between blacks and whites.
Hoover had coverage by agents listening to the wire-tap twenty-four hours a day.
We had scuttlebutt and rumor about his personal life.
We didn't have facts to show that King was a communist.
In the build-up to the 1964 election campaign, President Kennedy took his wife on a ceremonial visit to Dallas.
There, he met his death.
Americans tried to find outsiders to blame for their President's killing.
There was a fear that the assassination might be the start of a communist attack on the United States.
This is a sad time for all people.
We have suffered a loss that cannot be weighed.
For me it is a deep personal tragedy.
On the very night Johnson became President, when we flew back from Dallas on November 22nd, 1963, I was one of three people who sat with him in his bedroom.
And that night, I learned, he had sketched out the Great Society; and what he wanted to do- as he said, "Now that I've got the power, I aim to use it".
This administration today here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.
And I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with me in that effort.
In one of the richest countries in the world, millions of people were living in poverty, without decent housing, without health care, without education.
Amongst Blacks, unemployment was nine times that of Whites.
Central to Johnson's vision of the Great Society was the abolition of racial discrimination.
In July 1964, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Bill.
He uses nearly a hundred pens to affix the signature and date.
Souvenirs go to Republican leader, Everett Dirksen and Democratic Whip, Hubert Humphrey.
The President seems to have mastered the art of just touching each pen to the paper.
Integration leader Martin Luther King receives his pen, a gift he said he would cherish.
Attention all bases, attention all bases.
This is iron Hand, this is iron Hand.
This is attack alert.
The Cold War military build-up continued.
The United States remained on high alert against a Soviet nuclear attack.
It prepared to counter-attack on an unimaginable scale.
An increasing minority were questioning the cost and the effect on American life.
They had the pride of billions and billions and billions and trillions of dollars of investment, trillions of dollars of war materials, secrecy, perquisites, pride, an incredible conspiracy of silence surrounding what was supposed to be a democratic nation.
The defense industry was a generous employer.
The Pentagon presented the military machine as the defender of the American Dream.
The day begins and gives new meaning to the words of Walt Whitman.
Everything comes out of the people, everyday people.
The people as you find them.
And leave them.
People people just people.
Life in this neighborhood was very very good indeed.
We all had jobs, we knew we were going to keep them, we all owned our homes, we're all white, middle class, approaching middle age.
The children were very much the same size and shape.
Fourth of July, all the moms made their potato salads and their cold cuts.
It was all out there in the middle of the cul-de-sac on picnic tables.
We'd blocked off the end of the cul-de-sac, there was no traffic.
The kids would play and they'd have their streamers and their tricycles, you know, all decorated.
And we would have a fine, fine time on the Fourth of July.
Throughout 1964, Johnson was oh the Campaign trail to get himself elected President and to build the Great Society.
His Republican opponent was Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona.
He voted against the Civil Rights Bill.
Goldwater promised to get tough with the Soviets.
He denounced Johnson's Great Society as creeping socialism.
The message of our campaign is clear.
It's this.
Stop the spread of socialism at home and communism abroad.
The American people needed more convincing.
Goldwater was heavily defeated.
On the Berkeley campus of the University of California, dissent flourished.
There had been a long tradition in Berkeley, going back many many years, of distributing literature, and giving political speeches, and setting up tables promoting your political groups, right there on the campus grounds.
An edict came down which said that all of that must stop.
The students borrowed the tactics of the Civil Rights movement.
They organized strikes and sit-ins.
In the confrontation with the students, the polite became increasingly heavy handed.
The press and the public had little sympathy.
Some of the press corps said that forty-nine percent of us were communists and so you saw people wearing buttons saying, "I'm part of the forty-nine percent".
Which was a big deal you see.
This is a very important turning point because I was terrified of being called a communist, absolutely terrified.
I was going to be a public school teacher- this could end my career.
To put that button on, to sing songs that we made up, like, "There are five thousand students in the plaza, the microphones loud, it's drawing a crowd, I'm sure that the rules say it's just not allowed.
" But to sing that, it would stick in my throat, because it was terrifying to be thought of as a communist.
American ideals of political freedom were now being extended into the personal realm.
The pursuit of happiness seemed incomplete without the exercise of sexual freedoms.
The free enterprise system richly rewarded the adroit merchandising of sexual fantasy.
Good Evening.
My name is Vera and I'm going to be your Bunny tonight.
The philosophy that I have always - that I grew up with and that I espoused in the editorial series, was really personal freedom, political freedom, economic freedom.
With the emphasis on the personal.
The notion that we indeed did and do own our own minds and bodies, and that anything from church or state that limits that is inappropriate and inconsistent with the pluralistic society that America is supposed to be.
People were saying that there was nothing automatically wrong about having sex before marriage.
The birth control pill was available to students at the Student Health Service and most of the women I know were availing themselves of it.
We agreed with the men that pre-marital sex was not an evil thing for which you would die in eternal damnation.
On the other hand there were an awful lot of "love 'em and leave 'em" guys.
So what exactly were the rules of this game? This was a tough time for women.
American men were still marching off to war.
In March 1965, President Johnson began sending ground troops to Vietnam.
Inside the Army base at Oakland, California, a scene reminiscent of the recent past.
The years of the Korean and World War Two campaigns is re-enacted by yet another generation of young Americans.
I looked on Vietnam initially as the country is potentially at risk.
Here's another opportunity to demonstrate strength to the communist world, as it were - our skills, scientific, technical, manufacturing, whatever it might be.
What a wonderful opportunity! Kennedy's famous inaugural address at which he said, "Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country," was really a rallying cry for my generation, at least part of my generation.
We were the new Romans who faced the barbarians on the frontiers of the new Rome.
I joined the Marines out of that sense of patriotism and once we were sent to Vietnam, this was all considered to be right and fitting.
This is what we were supposed to do.
â« Silver wings upon their chest â« â« These are men, America's best â« Despite the extension of the military draft, Johnson's war in Vietnam enjoyed popular support.
PP? While some young Americans went off to war in Vietnam, others were seeking thrills of a different kind.
They rejected American materialism, not for communism but for love, peace and rock n' roll.
â« Dancing in the street â« PP? All over the country young men of draft age turned on, tuned in and dropped out.
It was fun to make people say "Oh, look at the freaks!" or "Is it a girl or a boy?" or things like that.
Unless it was some place where people were really hostile and wanted to beat you up, it was kind of fun.
I to this day think that it's young people's job to horrify older people.
I think the first reaction of most of us, who were veterans and were working hard and trying to raise a family, suddenly confronted with a generation that seemed not to give a damn.
They wore beads and earrings, and they smoked marijuana, which was a thing to do, and they spoke a different language.
These young Americans rejected the work ethic and monogamy for spontaneity, sensuality and psychedelic drugs.
There was the cosmic consciousness, there was being God, there was understanding it all now.
And I became in short order pretty impatient with the rest of the world.
They're still having wars, they're doing stupid things.
Mostly the Flower children did their own thing.
The police, obliged to play the heavy father, were often totally at a loss.
I really did think the revolution was going to happen.
Not necessarily guns and blood.
If pressed, I might have had a hard time saying just what I thought was going to happen.
The one thing I was fond of saying was, "There are more of us being born, and more of them dying all the time" and I really thought that all we had to do was show them, and once people realized 'Oh yeah, this is a better way to live! Love is much better than war!' The vast majority of Americans spurned youth counter-culture.
Hollywood film star, Ronald Reagan, was out to become Republican Governor of California.
Feels very good! Yeah! Reagan urged a massive effort to win the war in Vietnam.
I have always felt that we should be making an all-out effort to win.
Does that imply you don't think the government is? Well, I think for quite some time and I still believe, I have agreed with those military men and those who have suggested that perhaps more of a blockade with regard to North Vietnam, the blocking of the harbor and so forth, to stop the shipments of munitions in as well as trying to intercept them on their way south, would be more effective.
More bombing? Yes.
But protest against the war was growing.
There were marches and draft card burnings.
The war, these Americans argued, was immoral and unjust.
It felt like we were walking around in a large mass hallucination, sustained by all the politicians, but particularly Lyndon Johnson and later by Nixon - extremely - based on lies and secrecy, sustained by the media, who were not able to who couldn't conceive that the whole structure of the United States mentality could be so wrong and so disastrous and so earth destroying.
I had the opportunity to travel to Vietnam and see firsthand some of the things that were going on; and I studied and read quite a bit about it.
I became quite convinced that there psi was no bash to be there, and that in time that we could bring the whole country, you know, to that point of view.
At the Oakland Draft Induction Center, Berkeley students organized a blockade, trying to prevent conscripts registering for military service.
The army was forced to bus the conscripts in behind a massive police cordon.
'I ain't marching anymore'.
I do remember the first time I was maced.
That wasn't particularly fun.
It was very typical for the police line's there and the student line is here and there's sort of, you know, ritualized back and-forth.
Well, with going through this ritualized back-and-forth and this guy takes out this can and sprays it in your face and you're blinded, you know you feel blinded.
You are temporarily blinded and you don't know what the hell and of course it never happened before, so if you're temporarily blind you don't know - it doesn't come with the word temporary in front of it - you don't know what the hell's happened.
PP? Most Americans still supported President Johnson's war in Vietnam.
Some saw the anti-war protesters as little more than traitors.
Ninety-nine percent of the people in this country are terrific Americans and disagree entirely with flag burnings, carrying enemy colors, giving medical supplies to the enemy, etcetera.
Many could not understand why Johnson did not use more of America's massive firepower to end the war.
But Johnson did not want to risk a wider conflict.
Johnson's sole motivation was to try, as we say in Texas, 'To haul ass out of that war', get out of there.
He didn't know how to do it.
He could not just unilaterally retreat and take the soldiers out.
Then every right-wing enemy would have said, 'You coward! You poltroon! You disgrace the American nation and you in a sense spat on its flag because you put your tail between your legs and you ran!' Johnson's war dragged on.
By the end of 1967, there were half a million American soldiers in Vietnam.
We had an anti-war rally with a focus on the fact that twenty-six, twenty-eight percent of the people who were dying on the front lines in Vietnam were Black Americans whose same rights were not being recognized in this country.
And the whole focus was, 'Down with the War!' and 'Black People do not serve in the military!' Millions took notice when heavyweight boxing champion Mohammed Ali defied the draft.
He declared his allegiance to a non-American cause - Islam.
Shortly put- Are the Black Muslims taking you for a ride? I said not black Muslims, Muslims! I beg your pardon.
Are the Muslims taking you for a ride? No, no, the white people have been taking us for a ride for the past 400 years in America! In the Black ghetto of Oakland, California, activists trained as paramilitaries in what they saw as a civil war against a racist police force.
Led by Huey Newton, they called themselves the Black Panthers.
Where the peaceniks offered flowers, the Panthers pointed guns.
We took our guns with us, to let the police know that, 'We have an equalizer and we're going to exercise', as Huey used to say, 'this constitutional right to observe you, whether you like it or not.
' That's what Huey says is, "Right on Huey! That's what we're doing!' But the police at one point says, 'You have no right to observe me!' Huey says, 'No! California State Supreme Court Ruling states that every citizen has the right to stand and observe a police officer carrying out his duty, as long as they stand a reasonable distance away.
A reasonable distance in that particular ruling was constituted as eight to ten feet.
I'm standing approximately twenty feet from you, and I'll observe you whether you like it or not!' Now you have to imagine thirty or forty black folks standing by and listening to this stuff, and some woman said, 'Well, go head on and tell it brother!' I mean, that's capturing the imagination, the feelings, the emotions.
Some other black said "Man!" he's scratched his head- "What kind of Negroes is these?" America's Black ghettos were now war zones.
In the summer of 1967, there were riots in Newark and Detroit.
In Detroit the police asked for a war budget of nine million dollars to buy military equipment.
For too many Americans, Johnson's Great Society was a sham.
PP? In March 1968, as the war in Vietnam and conflict at home continued, Johnson threw in the towel.
He declared he would not run for a second term as President.
Martin Luther King still pursued his dream.
So I'm happy tonight.
I'm not worried about anything.
I'm not fearing any man.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord! The following night, Martin Luther King was killed by a white gunman.
Behind the mule wagon carrying King's coffin was a bare-headed Bobby Kennedy.
He was grieving - and campaigning to become the Democrats' next presidential candidate.
The country wants to move in a different direction.
We want to deal with our own problems within our own country and we want peace in Vietnam.
Bobby Kennedy won the Californian Primary.
His rival, fellow Democrat Eugene McCarthy, was also for peace.
McCarthy supporters, watching television, saw another Kennedy killed by an assassin's bullet.
"If you do not leave the room, we cannot get medical aid to the Senator! Now would you please, "Kennedy's been shot somebody's shot Robert Kennedy!" I found my wife Terry on the sofa weeping at dawn, because I missed, I realized she wasn't in bed - where is she? I went out looking.
She's on the sofa, she's weeping and of course the news is still rolling you know, and the playbacks of the assassination and I just could not come to grips with that one.
I thought this proves that there good men are being sent to slaughter.
August 1968.
Democratic Party delegates arrive in Chicago for the Convention to choose their candidate for the presidential elections in November.
The burning issue was the war in Vietnam.
Vice-President Hubert Humphrey was confident he would win the nomination.
He supported Johnson's dream of a Great Society and, in public, the war in Vietnam.
The hopes of the anti-war faction within the democratic party now lay with Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota.
When I moved into my headquarters in the hotel, I had Secret Service - they were very honest people and they said, "Look, this room is not bugged; you can say anything here.
But don't talk on the telephone, because you've been tapped - we know you're tapped The authorities were nervous.
A hundred thousand anti war demonstrators were expected in Chicago.
We permit people- we don't care who they are- to come to Chicago and visit us, and we will permit people to carry on their rights as American citizens, to petition and demonstrate.
But there's no person any place anywhere, or any thousands of them that will come to Chicago and take over our streets, our convention or our city.
The present day politicians and their armies of automatons have selfishly robbed us of our birthright.
The evilness they stand for will go unchallenged no longer! Political pigs, your days are numbered! We are the second American revolution, we are winning! Yippee! The demonstrators gathered in the city's parks in preparation for a march on the convention hall.
Mayor Daley had no intention of allowing them to march anywhere and wanted them out of the parks.
They wanted a focal point and the focal point would be the park.
Daley said, 'You can't sleep in the park'.
They said, 'We're going to sleep in the park.
' That was their main focus, because they knew there'd be a confrontation.
Inside the Convention, Daley prevented McCarthy delegates debating the war on primetime TV.
They're here as guests of the Democratic Party and let them conduct themselves accordingly or clear the gallery! Will the Convention be will the Sergeant-at-Arms enforce order in the Convention! On the day the Democratic Party was due to nominate its presidential candidate, anti-war protesters battled it out with police.
It was quite an experience really, having, I don't know the number - you know, forty - fifty policemen yelling "Kill Davis", with a much bigger group behind them.
And the first hit was to the head and drove me to the ground, and then it was just being beaten on the back, you know, over and over again.
It was, I would say, probably the only time in my life where I really thought I might not make this.
As the Democratic Party Convention lined up behind Humphrey, the peaceniks made one last attempt to march on the convention hall.
The police were waiting for them - and for anyone else who stayed in the street.
The majority of the people supported the Chicago police in the convention.
I think there was a poll afterwards where about 78% of the people in the US supported the Chicago police.
At the Convention McCarthy's supporters were overwhelmed.
Vice-President Hubert Humphrey became the Democrats' candidate for the Presidential elections in November.
He would face a tough and seasoned Republican Party opponent.
When the strongest nation in the world can be tied down for four years in a war in Vietnam with no end in sight, when the richest nation in the world can't manage its own economy, when the nation with the greatest tradition of the rule of law is plagued by unprecedented lawlessness, when a nation has been known for a century for equality of opportunity is torn by unprecedented racial violence, and when the President of the United States cannot travel abroad or to any major city at home without fear of a hostile demonstration - then it's time for a new leadership for the United States of America.
He was saying, "I'm tougher, I'm smarter, I understand the world better.
My opponents are divided.
They've been taken over by the fringe elements of the Democratic Party, and a bunch of loonies are in charge.
We're stable, we have a sense of direction.
You know where we stand on things.
You can confide in us.
And we won't let the Russians or the Chinese push us around.
" Richard Nixon's victory was wafer-thin- less than one percent of the vote.
The Cold War and the war in Vietnam would continue.
Juan Claudio Epsteyn E- mail:
With sex, drugs and rock n' roll- the Sixties shake American values.
The work ethic, military duty, even family life are under attack.
The Cold War continues, but for a generation, it's time to make love, not war.
In 1960 America was moving towards the peak of its prosperity and power.
The Democrats' choice to run for President was young Jack Kennedy, good-looking son of an Irish- American multi-millionaire.
The Kennedy family, but Jack in particular and Jackie especially as well, just seemed to be the natural fulfillment of the American political process.
They seemed to be the best that the process could bring forward, and represented a new and glittering age.
You have to make your decision of what you want this country to be.
What you want Illinois to be? How ready you are to move this country forward? That is the question which separates Mr.
Nixon and myself.
Kennedy brought in a sense of excitement and youth after the kind of sleepy Eisenhower years, and almost seemed to symbolize this, you know, youth passion.
The Republican Party choice, Vice-President Richard Nixon, shared Kennedy's patriotic anti-Communist fervor.
But he had not been groomed for television.
The whole business of presenting visuals became very, very important.
The Kennedy family put up hundreds of thousands of dollars, equipped a bus, it had film crews aboard, and they would go wherever John Kennedy was appearing, and film him; and then those films became a part of his advertising on television.
It was the first time that it had really been done in an effective and organized way.
Kennedy had attacked Eisenhower's conduct of the Cold War.
To America and the world, he proclaimed Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of Liberty.
Kennedy increased the military budget.
Defense contracts brought the military industrial complex unparalleled strength an riches.
It meant more jobs.
The Cold War was the noblest of enterprises and it fit right in with the need for technologists like myself and the need for the Government-sponsored programs that were opposing the Soviet advances.
Attitudes were interesting at that time, because the defense industry and its budgets seemed to be based on the fact that the Russians were ten feet tall.
Most of us were very hawkish about things, I mean our well-being, our sustenance was dependent on the defense industry.
America was booming.
The state of California, where much of the aerospace industry was based, became the sixth largest economy in the world.
The big thing in those days was get into missiles, get into spacecraft, get into satellites.
Big things are happening and they're all happening out in California.
Some friends of ours were going to California because Hughes we understand, was building up an electronics place and Disneyland was hiring and work was bad in Chicago in '56-'57 so we decided to move out here.
Post-war settlers in California left behind the decaying cities of the East.
They found suburban life in the sun affordable, idyllic.
We would hang around the sales office until we saw the new plot map go up, and then we picked up the lot that we wanted.
And talking with the sales agent, he told us that Sunday morning we are going to open this tract for buyers.
And we said, "What time are you opening Sunday morning?" He told us.
We went to church early that day.
By 8 o'clock or whenever he opened his doors, we were first in line.
And for $200 cash, check written, why we were in the place.
We paid $10,999, which is, tell somebody back in Chicago that and they'd think you were buying a barn, you know.
And it was nice-there was three bedrooms, one bath, and we increased.
We had to put the we put a block wall fence, we put a patio out there, and we put in the corner of our backyard, we put like the desert, we put a little cactus and stuff, so we're reminded we're living in California.
This good life was not available to all Americans.
The question came up about selling these homes to members of minorities, ethnic minorities, blacks specifically.
And we were assured that we did not have to worry about anything of the sort happening, that the tract simply was not selling to blacks.
The Constitution and the Bill of Rights had not removed the wedges of prejudice that were driven through American society.
Black Americans too wanted freedom.
Where Kennedy meant freedom from communism, they meant freedom from hunger, from fear, from humiliation.
We looked at racism by degree, you know, so if you lived in St.
Louis you said, "Well it could have been worse - you could be in Mississippi", you know.
If you lived in Mississippi, you said, "Well, we're lucky they didn't kill us all".
That type of peace.
And so consequently, if a black person rose up and fought back, they said, "You're crazy, Nigger!" Even black folk said, "You're crazy".
Now somebody had to say, "Hey, it's all right, when something is wrong, to say it's wrong.
And in a democracy, if somethings wrong and you say it's wrong, you can gather to petition your government to tell them it's wrong.
And you know what? If you do, they might do something about it!" That's essentially what the civil rights movement was about.
â« You better keep your eyes on that prize â« â« Oh, Lord, Oh, Lord â« In many southern states, laws prevented blacks and whites travelling together, eating together, even going to the same school.
Black Americans were denied jobs and the right to vote.
Civil rights activists demonstrating against unjust laws were careful not to provoke the police by any display of aggression.
They were beaten just the same.
It wasn't the first time armed whites had assaulted unarmed blacks, but now television was watching.
Discrimination against blacks damaged America's credibility as Freedom's champion in the Cold War.
Kennedy was being urged by his brother, Attorney-General Bobby Kennedy, to back the Civil Rights Movement.
Aware that he needed the votes of white Southerners, Kennedy found if difficult to commit himself.
â« We shall overcome, we shall overcome â« â« We shall overcome some day â« August 28th, 1963- a civil rights rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington urged the White House to ban racist laws and give black Americans equal job opportunities.
A quarter of a million people showed up to listen to a thirty-four year old Southern Baptist minister.
Let freedom ring and if America is to be a great nation this must become true.
So let freedom ring.
When we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty! We are free at last!" I never heard King say one thing when that camera was on about white folks and another thing when it was off.
He never called them 'honkies', he never called them 'rednecks' He always had the same love.
Now I'm talking about when just he and I are in a room talking.
I'm cussing and calling them everything I can think of, and blah, blah, blah, and he never left that spirit of love.
George Wallace, Democratic Governor of Alabama, saw the growing civil rights movement as part of a communist conspiracy.
The Communist Party USA has been alert to capitalize on every possible issue or event which could be used to exploit the American Negro in furtherance of party aims.
In its efforts to influence the American Negro, the party attempts to infiltrate the legitimate Negro organizations for the purpose of stirring up racial prejudices and hatred.
In this way the party strikes a blow at our democratic form of government by attempting to influence public opinion throughout the world against the United States.
In the name of national security, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, gave the FBI permission to tap the telephones of Martin Luther King and his colleagues.
J Edgar Hoover, Chief of the FBI, was convinced that the Civil Rights movement had been infiltrated by communists.
Hoover hated King.
Hoover is close enough to the South to be in a southern culture, and in that society there was a real sense of belief, a religious belief, a political belief, that there was no such thing as equality between blacks and whites.
Hoover had coverage by agents listening to the wire-tap twenty-four hours a day.
We had scuttlebutt and rumor about his personal life.
We didn't have facts to show that King was a communist.
In the build-up to the 1964 election campaign, President Kennedy took his wife on a ceremonial visit to Dallas.
There, he met his death.
Americans tried to find outsiders to blame for their President's killing.
There was a fear that the assassination might be the start of a communist attack on the United States.
This is a sad time for all people.
We have suffered a loss that cannot be weighed.
For me it is a deep personal tragedy.
On the very night Johnson became President, when we flew back from Dallas on November 22nd, 1963, I was one of three people who sat with him in his bedroom.
And that night, I learned, he had sketched out the Great Society; and what he wanted to do- as he said, "Now that I've got the power, I aim to use it".
This administration today here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.
And I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with me in that effort.
In one of the richest countries in the world, millions of people were living in poverty, without decent housing, without health care, without education.
Amongst Blacks, unemployment was nine times that of Whites.
Central to Johnson's vision of the Great Society was the abolition of racial discrimination.
In July 1964, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Bill.
He uses nearly a hundred pens to affix the signature and date.
Souvenirs go to Republican leader, Everett Dirksen and Democratic Whip, Hubert Humphrey.
The President seems to have mastered the art of just touching each pen to the paper.
Integration leader Martin Luther King receives his pen, a gift he said he would cherish.
Attention all bases, attention all bases.
This is iron Hand, this is iron Hand.
This is attack alert.
The Cold War military build-up continued.
The United States remained on high alert against a Soviet nuclear attack.
It prepared to counter-attack on an unimaginable scale.
An increasing minority were questioning the cost and the effect on American life.
They had the pride of billions and billions and billions and trillions of dollars of investment, trillions of dollars of war materials, secrecy, perquisites, pride, an incredible conspiracy of silence surrounding what was supposed to be a democratic nation.
The defense industry was a generous employer.
The Pentagon presented the military machine as the defender of the American Dream.
The day begins and gives new meaning to the words of Walt Whitman.
Everything comes out of the people, everyday people.
The people as you find them.
And leave them.
People people just people.
Life in this neighborhood was very very good indeed.
We all had jobs, we knew we were going to keep them, we all owned our homes, we're all white, middle class, approaching middle age.
The children were very much the same size and shape.
Fourth of July, all the moms made their potato salads and their cold cuts.
It was all out there in the middle of the cul-de-sac on picnic tables.
We'd blocked off the end of the cul-de-sac, there was no traffic.
The kids would play and they'd have their streamers and their tricycles, you know, all decorated.
And we would have a fine, fine time on the Fourth of July.
Throughout 1964, Johnson was oh the Campaign trail to get himself elected President and to build the Great Society.
His Republican opponent was Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona.
He voted against the Civil Rights Bill.
Goldwater promised to get tough with the Soviets.
He denounced Johnson's Great Society as creeping socialism.
The message of our campaign is clear.
It's this.
Stop the spread of socialism at home and communism abroad.
The American people needed more convincing.
Goldwater was heavily defeated.
On the Berkeley campus of the University of California, dissent flourished.
There had been a long tradition in Berkeley, going back many many years, of distributing literature, and giving political speeches, and setting up tables promoting your political groups, right there on the campus grounds.
An edict came down which said that all of that must stop.
The students borrowed the tactics of the Civil Rights movement.
They organized strikes and sit-ins.
In the confrontation with the students, the polite became increasingly heavy handed.
The press and the public had little sympathy.
Some of the press corps said that forty-nine percent of us were communists and so you saw people wearing buttons saying, "I'm part of the forty-nine percent".
Which was a big deal you see.
This is a very important turning point because I was terrified of being called a communist, absolutely terrified.
I was going to be a public school teacher- this could end my career.
To put that button on, to sing songs that we made up, like, "There are five thousand students in the plaza, the microphones loud, it's drawing a crowd, I'm sure that the rules say it's just not allowed.
" But to sing that, it would stick in my throat, because it was terrifying to be thought of as a communist.
American ideals of political freedom were now being extended into the personal realm.
The pursuit of happiness seemed incomplete without the exercise of sexual freedoms.
The free enterprise system richly rewarded the adroit merchandising of sexual fantasy.
Good Evening.
My name is Vera and I'm going to be your Bunny tonight.
The philosophy that I have always - that I grew up with and that I espoused in the editorial series, was really personal freedom, political freedom, economic freedom.
With the emphasis on the personal.
The notion that we indeed did and do own our own minds and bodies, and that anything from church or state that limits that is inappropriate and inconsistent with the pluralistic society that America is supposed to be.
People were saying that there was nothing automatically wrong about having sex before marriage.
The birth control pill was available to students at the Student Health Service and most of the women I know were availing themselves of it.
We agreed with the men that pre-marital sex was not an evil thing for which you would die in eternal damnation.
On the other hand there were an awful lot of "love 'em and leave 'em" guys.
So what exactly were the rules of this game? This was a tough time for women.
American men were still marching off to war.
In March 1965, President Johnson began sending ground troops to Vietnam.
Inside the Army base at Oakland, California, a scene reminiscent of the recent past.
The years of the Korean and World War Two campaigns is re-enacted by yet another generation of young Americans.
I looked on Vietnam initially as the country is potentially at risk.
Here's another opportunity to demonstrate strength to the communist world, as it were - our skills, scientific, technical, manufacturing, whatever it might be.
What a wonderful opportunity! Kennedy's famous inaugural address at which he said, "Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country," was really a rallying cry for my generation, at least part of my generation.
We were the new Romans who faced the barbarians on the frontiers of the new Rome.
I joined the Marines out of that sense of patriotism and once we were sent to Vietnam, this was all considered to be right and fitting.
This is what we were supposed to do.
â« Silver wings upon their chest â« â« These are men, America's best â« Despite the extension of the military draft, Johnson's war in Vietnam enjoyed popular support.
PP? While some young Americans went off to war in Vietnam, others were seeking thrills of a different kind.
They rejected American materialism, not for communism but for love, peace and rock n' roll.
â« Dancing in the street â« PP? All over the country young men of draft age turned on, tuned in and dropped out.
It was fun to make people say "Oh, look at the freaks!" or "Is it a girl or a boy?" or things like that.
Unless it was some place where people were really hostile and wanted to beat you up, it was kind of fun.
I to this day think that it's young people's job to horrify older people.
I think the first reaction of most of us, who were veterans and were working hard and trying to raise a family, suddenly confronted with a generation that seemed not to give a damn.
They wore beads and earrings, and they smoked marijuana, which was a thing to do, and they spoke a different language.
These young Americans rejected the work ethic and monogamy for spontaneity, sensuality and psychedelic drugs.
There was the cosmic consciousness, there was being God, there was understanding it all now.
And I became in short order pretty impatient with the rest of the world.
They're still having wars, they're doing stupid things.
Mostly the Flower children did their own thing.
The police, obliged to play the heavy father, were often totally at a loss.
I really did think the revolution was going to happen.
Not necessarily guns and blood.
If pressed, I might have had a hard time saying just what I thought was going to happen.
The one thing I was fond of saying was, "There are more of us being born, and more of them dying all the time" and I really thought that all we had to do was show them, and once people realized 'Oh yeah, this is a better way to live! Love is much better than war!' The vast majority of Americans spurned youth counter-culture.
Hollywood film star, Ronald Reagan, was out to become Republican Governor of California.
Feels very good! Yeah! Reagan urged a massive effort to win the war in Vietnam.
I have always felt that we should be making an all-out effort to win.
Does that imply you don't think the government is? Well, I think for quite some time and I still believe, I have agreed with those military men and those who have suggested that perhaps more of a blockade with regard to North Vietnam, the blocking of the harbor and so forth, to stop the shipments of munitions in as well as trying to intercept them on their way south, would be more effective.
More bombing? Yes.
But protest against the war was growing.
There were marches and draft card burnings.
The war, these Americans argued, was immoral and unjust.
It felt like we were walking around in a large mass hallucination, sustained by all the politicians, but particularly Lyndon Johnson and later by Nixon - extremely - based on lies and secrecy, sustained by the media, who were not able to who couldn't conceive that the whole structure of the United States mentality could be so wrong and so disastrous and so earth destroying.
I had the opportunity to travel to Vietnam and see firsthand some of the things that were going on; and I studied and read quite a bit about it.
I became quite convinced that there psi was no bash to be there, and that in time that we could bring the whole country, you know, to that point of view.
At the Oakland Draft Induction Center, Berkeley students organized a blockade, trying to prevent conscripts registering for military service.
The army was forced to bus the conscripts in behind a massive police cordon.
'I ain't marching anymore'.
I do remember the first time I was maced.
That wasn't particularly fun.
It was very typical for the police line's there and the student line is here and there's sort of, you know, ritualized back and-forth.
Well, with going through this ritualized back-and-forth and this guy takes out this can and sprays it in your face and you're blinded, you know you feel blinded.
You are temporarily blinded and you don't know what the hell and of course it never happened before, so if you're temporarily blind you don't know - it doesn't come with the word temporary in front of it - you don't know what the hell's happened.
PP? Most Americans still supported President Johnson's war in Vietnam.
Some saw the anti-war protesters as little more than traitors.
Ninety-nine percent of the people in this country are terrific Americans and disagree entirely with flag burnings, carrying enemy colors, giving medical supplies to the enemy, etcetera.
Many could not understand why Johnson did not use more of America's massive firepower to end the war.
But Johnson did not want to risk a wider conflict.
Johnson's sole motivation was to try, as we say in Texas, 'To haul ass out of that war', get out of there.
He didn't know how to do it.
He could not just unilaterally retreat and take the soldiers out.
Then every right-wing enemy would have said, 'You coward! You poltroon! You disgrace the American nation and you in a sense spat on its flag because you put your tail between your legs and you ran!' Johnson's war dragged on.
By the end of 1967, there were half a million American soldiers in Vietnam.
We had an anti-war rally with a focus on the fact that twenty-six, twenty-eight percent of the people who were dying on the front lines in Vietnam were Black Americans whose same rights were not being recognized in this country.
And the whole focus was, 'Down with the War!' and 'Black People do not serve in the military!' Millions took notice when heavyweight boxing champion Mohammed Ali defied the draft.
He declared his allegiance to a non-American cause - Islam.
Shortly put- Are the Black Muslims taking you for a ride? I said not black Muslims, Muslims! I beg your pardon.
Are the Muslims taking you for a ride? No, no, the white people have been taking us for a ride for the past 400 years in America! In the Black ghetto of Oakland, California, activists trained as paramilitaries in what they saw as a civil war against a racist police force.
Led by Huey Newton, they called themselves the Black Panthers.
Where the peaceniks offered flowers, the Panthers pointed guns.
We took our guns with us, to let the police know that, 'We have an equalizer and we're going to exercise', as Huey used to say, 'this constitutional right to observe you, whether you like it or not.
' That's what Huey says is, "Right on Huey! That's what we're doing!' But the police at one point says, 'You have no right to observe me!' Huey says, 'No! California State Supreme Court Ruling states that every citizen has the right to stand and observe a police officer carrying out his duty, as long as they stand a reasonable distance away.
A reasonable distance in that particular ruling was constituted as eight to ten feet.
I'm standing approximately twenty feet from you, and I'll observe you whether you like it or not!' Now you have to imagine thirty or forty black folks standing by and listening to this stuff, and some woman said, 'Well, go head on and tell it brother!' I mean, that's capturing the imagination, the feelings, the emotions.
Some other black said "Man!" he's scratched his head- "What kind of Negroes is these?" America's Black ghettos were now war zones.
In the summer of 1967, there were riots in Newark and Detroit.
In Detroit the police asked for a war budget of nine million dollars to buy military equipment.
For too many Americans, Johnson's Great Society was a sham.
PP? In March 1968, as the war in Vietnam and conflict at home continued, Johnson threw in the towel.
He declared he would not run for a second term as President.
Martin Luther King still pursued his dream.
So I'm happy tonight.
I'm not worried about anything.
I'm not fearing any man.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord! The following night, Martin Luther King was killed by a white gunman.
Behind the mule wagon carrying King's coffin was a bare-headed Bobby Kennedy.
He was grieving - and campaigning to become the Democrats' next presidential candidate.
The country wants to move in a different direction.
We want to deal with our own problems within our own country and we want peace in Vietnam.
Bobby Kennedy won the Californian Primary.
His rival, fellow Democrat Eugene McCarthy, was also for peace.
McCarthy supporters, watching television, saw another Kennedy killed by an assassin's bullet.
"If you do not leave the room, we cannot get medical aid to the Senator! Now would you please, "Kennedy's been shot somebody's shot Robert Kennedy!" I found my wife Terry on the sofa weeping at dawn, because I missed, I realized she wasn't in bed - where is she? I went out looking.
She's on the sofa, she's weeping and of course the news is still rolling you know, and the playbacks of the assassination and I just could not come to grips with that one.
I thought this proves that there good men are being sent to slaughter.
August 1968.
Democratic Party delegates arrive in Chicago for the Convention to choose their candidate for the presidential elections in November.
The burning issue was the war in Vietnam.
Vice-President Hubert Humphrey was confident he would win the nomination.
He supported Johnson's dream of a Great Society and, in public, the war in Vietnam.
The hopes of the anti-war faction within the democratic party now lay with Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota.
When I moved into my headquarters in the hotel, I had Secret Service - they were very honest people and they said, "Look, this room is not bugged; you can say anything here.
But don't talk on the telephone, because you've been tapped - we know you're tapped The authorities were nervous.
A hundred thousand anti war demonstrators were expected in Chicago.
We permit people- we don't care who they are- to come to Chicago and visit us, and we will permit people to carry on their rights as American citizens, to petition and demonstrate.
But there's no person any place anywhere, or any thousands of them that will come to Chicago and take over our streets, our convention or our city.
The present day politicians and their armies of automatons have selfishly robbed us of our birthright.
The evilness they stand for will go unchallenged no longer! Political pigs, your days are numbered! We are the second American revolution, we are winning! Yippee! The demonstrators gathered in the city's parks in preparation for a march on the convention hall.
Mayor Daley had no intention of allowing them to march anywhere and wanted them out of the parks.
They wanted a focal point and the focal point would be the park.
Daley said, 'You can't sleep in the park'.
They said, 'We're going to sleep in the park.
' That was their main focus, because they knew there'd be a confrontation.
Inside the Convention, Daley prevented McCarthy delegates debating the war on primetime TV.
They're here as guests of the Democratic Party and let them conduct themselves accordingly or clear the gallery! Will the Convention be will the Sergeant-at-Arms enforce order in the Convention! On the day the Democratic Party was due to nominate its presidential candidate, anti-war protesters battled it out with police.
It was quite an experience really, having, I don't know the number - you know, forty - fifty policemen yelling "Kill Davis", with a much bigger group behind them.
And the first hit was to the head and drove me to the ground, and then it was just being beaten on the back, you know, over and over again.
It was, I would say, probably the only time in my life where I really thought I might not make this.
As the Democratic Party Convention lined up behind Humphrey, the peaceniks made one last attempt to march on the convention hall.
The police were waiting for them - and for anyone else who stayed in the street.
The majority of the people supported the Chicago police in the convention.
I think there was a poll afterwards where about 78% of the people in the US supported the Chicago police.
At the Convention McCarthy's supporters were overwhelmed.
Vice-President Hubert Humphrey became the Democrats' candidate for the Presidential elections in November.
He would face a tough and seasoned Republican Party opponent.
When the strongest nation in the world can be tied down for four years in a war in Vietnam with no end in sight, when the richest nation in the world can't manage its own economy, when the nation with the greatest tradition of the rule of law is plagued by unprecedented lawlessness, when a nation has been known for a century for equality of opportunity is torn by unprecedented racial violence, and when the President of the United States cannot travel abroad or to any major city at home without fear of a hostile demonstration - then it's time for a new leadership for the United States of America.
He was saying, "I'm tougher, I'm smarter, I understand the world better.
My opponents are divided.
They've been taken over by the fringe elements of the Democratic Party, and a bunch of loonies are in charge.
We're stable, we have a sense of direction.
You know where we stand on things.
You can confide in us.
And we won't let the Russians or the Chinese push us around.
" Richard Nixon's victory was wafer-thin- less than one percent of the vote.
The Cold War and the war in Vietnam would continue.
Juan Claudio Epsteyn E- mail: