Kennedy Assassination Impacts
Do you think that the 60s counterculture in America would have played out the way it did if Kennedy was not assassinated? Clearly there is a sharp cultural divide between the 60s prior to 1964 and after. The mid and then precipitously in the late 60s, the counterculture became more prominent. This went surely hand-in-hand with the evolution of various things- Civil Rights Movement, the beatniks (or just the "Beats" were existential writers like Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and can perhaps be associated with 20s writers like Hesse, Elliot, etc.).
France and Germany had their existentialists, post-modernists, and post-structuralists. Certainly Sartre, Foucault, Bouvier, Camus. There was the Frankfurt School with Marcuse, Adorno, and Horkheimer.The 1968 riots in Paris and Germany certainly seem connected with what was going on in the US.
So my point there is that there was surely social and political forces in place that "distrusted" government. There were also the McCarthy HUAC hearings in the 40s and 50s which caused a backlash against this kind of witchhunts. There was early Rock and Roll and the greasers and jazz which had elements of rebellion and progressive elements. So surely, society was ripe for the dramatic social cultural shift of the late 60s. Even Eisenhower, the great military general planted seeds of doubt by questioning the military-industrial complex. But it seems like Kennedy's assassination was the tipping point.
Kennedy's assassination started sowing doubt. Within a year, the Warren Commission which was supposed to investigate the assassination (and comprised by senator and future president, Gerald Ford and most notably former CIA Director Allen Dulles who was fired by Kennedy...), did not put people's minds at ease that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. There was mistrust, soon conspiracy theories abounded and it seemed to implicate the FBI, CIA, and Mafia. Some pointed to Cold War adversaries like Castro. There was a whirlwind of theories and interconnections. Vietnam started ramping up almost immediately with drafts. Kennedy was unsure if he was going to escalate, and it looked like he was going to pull out of Vietnam. He did not follow through with the Bay of Pigs the way the CIA wanted. He deftly maneuvered around the Cuban Missile Crisis which could have started a nuclear war. He distrusted the organization which he thought was getting perhaps too powerful. LBJ starts the draft soon after and starts sending hundreds of thousands of young people to fight in Vietnam.
@BC, I would think you might have the most to say on this. I'd like to hear your answer. Am I overmining too much from the Kennedy Assassination? Do you think in some counterfactual history, if Kennedy lived, the course of the very radical changes in culture would have went differently? Would the traditionalist mores of post war America the post war 40s, 50s and early 60s have continued into the late 60s ups and on into today? All the counter cultural, freedoms of expression in public speech and entertainment, womens rights etc have went down the way they did in the late 60s?
France and Germany had their existentialists, post-modernists, and post-structuralists. Certainly Sartre, Foucault, Bouvier, Camus. There was the Frankfurt School with Marcuse, Adorno, and Horkheimer.The 1968 riots in Paris and Germany certainly seem connected with what was going on in the US.
So my point there is that there was surely social and political forces in place that "distrusted" government. There were also the McCarthy HUAC hearings in the 40s and 50s which caused a backlash against this kind of witchhunts. There was early Rock and Roll and the greasers and jazz which had elements of rebellion and progressive elements. So surely, society was ripe for the dramatic social cultural shift of the late 60s. Even Eisenhower, the great military general planted seeds of doubt by questioning the military-industrial complex. But it seems like Kennedy's assassination was the tipping point.
Kennedy's assassination started sowing doubt. Within a year, the Warren Commission which was supposed to investigate the assassination (and comprised by senator and future president, Gerald Ford and most notably former CIA Director Allen Dulles who was fired by Kennedy...), did not put people's minds at ease that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. There was mistrust, soon conspiracy theories abounded and it seemed to implicate the FBI, CIA, and Mafia. Some pointed to Cold War adversaries like Castro. There was a whirlwind of theories and interconnections. Vietnam started ramping up almost immediately with drafts. Kennedy was unsure if he was going to escalate, and it looked like he was going to pull out of Vietnam. He did not follow through with the Bay of Pigs the way the CIA wanted. He deftly maneuvered around the Cuban Missile Crisis which could have started a nuclear war. He distrusted the organization which he thought was getting perhaps too powerful. LBJ starts the draft soon after and starts sending hundreds of thousands of young people to fight in Vietnam.
@BC, I would think you might have the most to say on this. I'd like to hear your answer. Am I overmining too much from the Kennedy Assassination? Do you think in some counterfactual history, if Kennedy lived, the course of the very radical changes in culture would have went differently? Would the traditionalist mores of post war America the post war 40s, 50s and early 60s have continued into the late 60s ups and on into today? All the counter cultural, freedoms of expression in public speech and entertainment, womens rights etc have went down the way they did in the late 60s?
Comments (57)
Of course, the Kennedy Assassination was hugely important in that decade. It was like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 in that people remembered the context of hearing the news. The Kennedy Administration was culturally important too, especially compared to the 1950s / Eisenhower Administration. But then there is the larger governing context:
Kennedy himself seems less important as time goes on. It's impossible (of course) to say how history would have unfolded had he completed two terms.
Some recent articles raise the question as to whether Kennedy's assassination, the subsequent investigations, and the enduring conspiracy thinking about it cracked public trust in the political system / government.
The assassination itself blew up presidential inviolability in our time, even though 3 previous presidents had been killed in office -- Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley -- and attempts have been made on others. It is significant that the assassination was very public. Shortly afterwards, Jack Ruby assassinated Lee Harvey Oswald on live television. All that was bad enough, but then there were the doubts that the whole story had come out.
I don't know whether the whole story came out or not. There might be more to the story that has not been heard, and if the conspirators were competent in their conspiracy, we never will. At any rate, I think the enduring conspiracy has been more damaging than the assassination itself. People moved on after his death, as people do. Conspiracy fans don't move on.
There is a parallel with Trump. I loath Trump, his presidency was incompetent, and his influence on the the Supreme Court is enduring. His voting fraud conspiracy is malignant. It has been proven baseless again and again, but it endures as a Republican brain rot. The regularly watered conspiracy is subversive. So are most conspiracy obsessions.
Another conspiracy, predating both Kennedy's election and assassination was a far-right conspiracy that communists and homosexuals had infiltrated critical departments in the government. (That's what the Army - McCarthy hearings were about.) The commie/queer infestation conspiracy lasted well into the 1960s. There was also the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, and a similar one in the Senate, another subversive operation, in that it tended to equate dissent with treason.
I have no idea what influence the assassination (JFK's departure) had on the culture more broadly and whether it shaped the 1960s and 1970's in any way. I'm sure it is not hard to find a way to argue in either direction. Whether Kennedy would have pulled out of Vietnam and dismantled the Cold War (a kind of classic Oliver Stone view) is one of those perennial history parlor games.
We Boomers were, in general, uniquely privileged in American history (with some obvious exceptions). I'm inclined to attribute most of the American "counterculture" (not including the Civil Rights movement, which I think was something different) to those of us who were especially spoiled by the favorable post WWII economic climate. Our parents endured that war and the Great Depression. Most of us were relatively well off, thanks to our parents. Vietnam caused some fear in us, but many were protected by exemptions. We were remarkably free to do as we pleased. We had the opportunity to experiment in new ways of thinking and acting others never had. Now, we simply want security. And money.
Look at us now. Indeed, look at us most any time since 1975. Where are the protestors, revolutionaries of the past? What "radical changes in culture" have taken place, through our efforts?
I doubt the myth of Kennedy and Camelot. JFK was a pragmatist (small "p"). He'd do what was necessary to get votes, though he might do it with more style and wit than other politicians. I don't think he'd have withdrawn from Vietnam.
Yes, and seems to been a bit more than projection from Roy Cohn and Joseph McCarthy. Interesting that Cohn is also tied up with Trump, as an early mentor on the New York scene in the 70s and 80s. It was Cohn, if I read this right, who most influenced Trump's unique talent to be able to lie, attack, and never admit fault. If you keep attacking and making even more brazen accusations and invective, you can get away with anything, and hide behind the ambiguities of the law. That is a huge aside but thought it was an interesting connection...
But there was a sense of unity in the post-war years that certainly seemed to completely crack at on November 22, 1963. The list you mentioned was certainly there, but would the slide into the hippies, and women and gay rights movements, and freedom of expression (more violence and sex in movies and media), have went down the way it would have? Would there not have been a more gradual change perhaps with a Jack Kennedy in power in 1967?
Oh for sure, Kennedy's assassination, the lies about Vietnam during LBJ and Nixon, Watergate, Ford pardon (though best in hindsight) seemed to rip any pro-American unity after WW2, but it wasn't just political it seems. The Free Speech movements, and the X rights movements, the libertine youth culture of the 60s and beyond to today, seemed to start very soon after his assassination...
But I guess my hypothesis I am proposing is that the cultural radicalism of the late 60s was precipitated more by his assassination. But that could be as I stated, "overmining" that idea. Perhaps it was minor in its contribution and it was going to go that way anyway... Certainly maybe no Vietnam, etc. So it's an interesting question. Would the late 60s look more like the early 60s without Kennedy's assassination?
And to this:
Quoting Ciceronianus
I think it is the same Baby Boomer generation that killed their own movements. When you have children you go from making All in the Family type shows about real social issues of the time, to Full House, and why did Uncle Jesse lose his cool. You go from the freedoms of your youth, the fears of your parents, and safety.. From Carter to Reagan.. From radical to Wall Street, and the rest. Look at Jerry Rubin.
To a non-American this seems a very weird idea. There was a schism between many young people of the 60's and their parents, but there were new bonds too: notably young white people supported Civil Rights in the USA, and in the UK young white people began to sing, play and modify black music. Young women were getting equal education in large numbers for the first time. And I remember a strong feeling of international connectedness, when as a young man I first left England to visit Europe in 1969, and the USA in 1970. We read Ginsberg, Kerouac, Saul Bellow, Sartre and Camus.
From across the sea I hated LBJ at the time for his rhetoric, and for carrying on the war till he didn't, but think in retrospect he was brilliant at what he achieved in domestic legislative change, whereas Kennedy seems like all front, looking back.
I think generalising about what 'baby boomers' in general subsequently did is a dangerous game. Over the course of a life, different sectors of a generation become important. The quiet people of the 60's became the Thatcherites and Reaganites of the 80's, while the previous radicals lost power - though the continued growth of feminism, gay rights and of advocacy by people of colour carried on in threads that didn't depend on who happened to be in power at the time.
That was another question. How far did those reverberations go? This is a philosophy forum.. How influential are events in one country in the ripple effect of others? Certainly Britain (and the Anglo-world in general and Western Europe too), seems connected to the events in the US in interconnected ways...The Beatles coming to America and Elvis before could certainly be contenders for stepping up the level of cultural progressivism that followed.. but there is something about Kennedy's assassination that does seem like a dividing point.
How would one draw a direct connection between the assassination and these events? I hear about the libertine youth culture of the 1960's, but I wonder how extensive this was. All the people I know who were young back then were too busy working to be libertine for more than a few hours a week. Likewise I hear about all the things the 1980's were meant to be and although I was young then, I had no awareness of, or participation in any of it. All I could see in the 1980's was an increase in collective greed and narcissism and the neo-liberal noose tightening.
I sort of tried to in the OP. Did this cursory attempt fail? Essentially, the distrust in government, the ramping of the draft, the free drugs and sex movement amongst the youth increased exponentially from 1964 onwards. Perhaps that was just inevitable based on the factors laid out in the OP and the ones that BC also mentioned...
As to today.. The drugs and sex use is around, but less of the activism. Perhaps this also addresses what @Ciceronianus mentioned about after 1975... The late 60s is felt in everything cultural since. The idealism however, has shifted as the forms of media and issues have changed, and technology in general. Isolated.. The 60s had enough and not enough technology to allow it to be what it was. Drugs, concerts, sit-ins, real life demonstrations and debates, not video games, social media, and philosophy forums perhaps.
Yes.
60s counterculture was far more than just only in America, mind you, hence one political assassination in one country in the West hasn't that kind of impact.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Vietnam war was more influential. Especially when the US still had the draft, not a volunteer force. Those who were drafter over 2,5 million saw service in Vietnam. I can imagine that for example the War on Terror would have had different effect on the young American males here on PF if they would have found themselves at an military outpost in some Iraqi town or in the mountains of Afghanistan.
If the US still would have had the draft and not a volunteer force, far more would have served in Afghanistan and in Iraq than served in the Vietnam war, actually.
I echo Tom Storm's comments about those public matters that are popularly believed to count. I visited 'Swinging London' when it was swinging, and I can tell you, it never swung for me.
But I did experience a 60's sense of radical change, linked to music, and to university politics, and to soft drugs, and to clever women. When I came to Berkeley in 1970, though, People's Park was locked up and Nixon was running things! (but there was still music, drugs and clever women)
Absolutely. It's that there is NOT a citizen-army in foreign wars since Vietnam that you see the decrease in radicalism. Korea squeaked by being so close to WW2, but yet, is that the only reason Korea was not protested as much? There is an interesting counterexample. The Korean War also had a draft and also killed 10s of thousands of Americans...
But back to your main point.. Vietnam was a direct result of Kennedy not pulling American advisory forces that were already there. He died before he was (probably) going to do that. LBJ immediately escalated.. So the result can be seen as very directly.
Quoting ssu
Probably.
I don't think it failed. I just can't see a direct connection between the assassination of a politician (even if he was charming and represented some symbolic Camelot bullshit) and free drugs and sex. Are you saying that these developing social behaviors were propelled and energized by disillusionment or that this mid century expression of hedonism was born in the face of political bewilderment and disappointment? I'm interested in your thesis but I just need to connect the dots.
Indeed. I really liked your account there :lol: . Would that have been that way in some counterhistory with a second term, alive JFK? Perhaps, perhaps not.
Yes both. The disillusionment was there perhaps, but nascent. It was the assassination that pushed it, and accelerated its effects more than if he was not assassinated. Perhaps the "Mad Men" era 50s and early 60s would have went straight on into the late 60s and beyond, no real "crack" between youth culture and previous generation as it happened.
One of the benefits of reading only slightly ancient history (which I think you do) is that we find junior men interacting say... 40 years ago, influencing one another, and learning how to get and use power and money, and going on to become important senior men in various fields--like DT.
What role did JFK play in the cultural bloom of the 1960s? He arrive too late to start it. I have to remind myself of precedents whenever I think about Stonewall in 1969. Women's lib, gay lib, civil rights--all sorts of social changes that became visible--had been percolating upwards for a couple of decades, and longer.
During WWII, the Army/Navy discharged quite a few (don't have a number, maybe 10-15k) gay men and women. The witch hunters weren't entirely wrong -- there were queers in the armed forces and government. They tended to discharge the perverts in one of three ports -- NYC, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Rather than go back to Omaha or Atlanta in disgrace, they stayed on, and greatly enlarged the local gay population. These three cities were the places Gay Lib took off first and fastest. The Mattachine Society was founded in 1950 in LA by a commie pinko fag (Harry Hay). The Beat Movement which started in the 1940s was the vanguard for the 1960s. Their poetry, for instance, was far out -- as the hippies would say.
"Beat" is allegedly derived from "beatitude".
Hey! it wasn't a slide -- it was an ascent.
So I don't know how it would have turned out if JFK had remained president for 2 terms. Johnson was able to accomplish major new programs as president because he was a political "insider" par excellence. Kennedy may have been an insider in New England\, but not in Washington, seems to me. Jack's history is a lot more interesting if combined with the history of his father, Joe Kennedy. And less glorious.
I like to think JFK, had he been president in 1964 would have taken a more thoughtful and nuanced approach to the Gulf of Tonkin incidents. I suspect he would not have accelerated USA involvement in Vietnam like his successor did.
Quoting BC
I voted for him. And in 1961 he extended my tour of duty in the USAF for a year because of the construction of the Berlin Wall. This delayed my entrance to grad school but I wasn't really distressed. My impression of the early 1960s is the glamour of the inhabitants of the White House had a substantial effect on American society. But so much else was happening. My wife and I sang Kumbaya with Joan Baez at Stillman College in Alabama and attended civil rights demonstrations. And I watched Lee Harvey be assassinated live on TV. And around the campfires in the Climbers Campground in the Tetons drugs appeared and occasionally things got out of control. I resigned my commission as captain in the Reserves, preferring to focus on family and future rather than the insanity of Vietnam. I can't forget Huntley-Brinkley each evening giving the numbers of Americans killed or wounded that day.
So, are there any members of this forum who fought in that conflict?
Ha, funny, hopefully you also saw it in the positive sense that there was less "resistance" to change, rather than a more intractable slog.
It might have been the biggest cultural transformation that took place in history in the shortest amount of time between the years of 1963-1969. I'm trying to think of a time where more change could have occurred in that short amount of time in terms of social mores, economic and social legislation, and forms of dress and speech. Perhaps the 20s comes close.
In retrospect the Kennedy's were classier than their immediate predecessors and successors. Jacqueline delivered high style, something that Mamie and Ladybird decidedly didn't. The Kennedy clan had élan. Money helps, of course. Haute couture and 50¢ wouldn't get me a cup of coffee, but on the right shoulders it's influential. So I've heard.
The pill. Mustn't forget the pill. And then later, the Roe vs Wade decision.
There were people who hated Roosevelt and New Deal programs like Social Security. There were people who hated Johnson and Medicare. There were people who hated the pill and Roe vs. Wade. These troglodytes don't seem to get over their hates, and now they have successfully gotten rid of Roe. There are recurrent proposals to privatize SS.
Point is, these were big cultural transformations as you say, and there are people who hated it, and haven't gotten over it. There's nothing that can be protected by law that can't be unprotected later on.
I expect there will be more reactionary moves in the coming years. They might fail (let us hope) but they will be tried.
Happy Pilgrims Unfortunately Saved From Starvation By Natives Day, folks! :yum: :party:
Yes. Here history shows clearly that social science aren't anything remotely like natural sciences. Decisions in the end of few important people do matter.
Quoting 180 Proof
Think again here, @180 Proof, there are only a limited number of key politicians on the top of the two ruling parties. Sooner or later the voters would have had enough of the democrats, hence the Republicans would at some time win the elections. Who there for them than Nixon if Goldwater isn't elected? The situation with the issues at hand might be somewhat different, the actors not.
Besides, your current President is perfect proof of this: just how long Joe Biden has been around?
Longer than people think.
The fact is that the top echelon of politicians is and has stayed very small. If you take from both parties 100 most powerful, most influential politicians, it's likely that those 200 people will be found in any administration holding prominent positions and responsible for, well, quite a lot. The occasional Trump doesn't "drain the swamp" as people believe in their dreams. Naturally many will fall for the populist lies.
Does this refute what I said to @schopenhauer1 above? Of course not: history is of both 'chance' and the affects of even one individual and also the Longue duree, changes in institutions and structures and transformations where you can do away with individuals affecting the events.
Certainly this Supreme Court is far more conservative compared to the Warren, Burger, and even Rehnquist courts.
US Congress looks like a cage match...
Quoting BC
Eisenhower increased the nuke count, used the CIA fairly frequently, and if there was anything like a "deep state", then it would be here with multiple levels of FBI headed by Hoover, John Foster and Allen Dulles taking care of Department of State and Director of CIA.
But Kennedy, in a way, represented a continuation of Cold War policies of Eisenhower, at the beginning at least. Even if he did privately discuss breaking up the CIA, he did not want to get into a hot war, even in "vulnerable" targets like Vietnam or South America. He was more about idealist visions, peace, etc. But he maintained a strong military stance when needed. He often pointed to a "nuclear gap" between Soviets and the US in the debates with Nixon, but when he became president he signed a nuclear test ban treaty.
Conspiracy theorists would say there is something of the "deep state" involved with Kennedy. They did not like his turning away from their apparatus built under the last two presidents. Ironically, it is this "deep state" as well that is invoked by Trump as trying to get rid of him for "disrupting" the system. What system does he propose he is "disrupting"? As @ssu proposed, he is simply one of them, not apart from. It is just that he doesn't hide his intentions well because of his inbuilt narcissism. That, and his inability to talk in a mature, professional way makes him an "outsider" :roll:. Is an immature narcissist without any real convictions in any ideology less dangerous than a golden tongued, seemingly do-gooder ideologue? I would say they are both bad but different beasts. Trump will use his power to exact revenge in the name of himself (and couch it poorly in some vague cause). He is transparently transactional. Quite the opposite of Kennedy's approach to being president. A long long way off. Both used their "star power" in different ways. Even Nixon, as paranoid, and dirty as he was in his campaigning, was immensely well-read and articulate on foreign policy matters. He had depth and knowledge of the position, even if his character was deeply flawed.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Quoting schopenhauer1
Perhaps the Kennedy assassination was as much a symptom as a cause of the rapid changes that went down in the 1960s. A feeling of impending unhingedness was in the air already in 1960, hinted at in popular entertainment via movies like Psycho, and 1962s Manchurian Candidate. The Twilight Zone was an interesting example. Its power to disturb depended on conformist assumptions carried over from the 1950s of a single reality. To venture into the terrain of alternate realties, to be a freak, was to descend into terrifying chaos. 10 years later this clinging to the one true reality had been defeated. The counterculture motto was to proudly let ones freak flag fly.
I would not underestimate the role of lsd in catalyzing and accelerating this shift in mindset from conformity to the embrace of weirdness. Lsd was legal until 1966, and in the the early 60s was given to many volunteers on the West Coast as part of CIA mind control research. The writer Ken Kesey was one of these volunteers, and it changed his life. Tom Wollfes The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test chronicled how the relatively small 1950s beatnik counterculture was mass produced for a generation of baby boomers through the formation of the hippie counterculture centered around San Franciscos Haight Ashbury and Keseys merry pranksters . The perfect vehicle for spreading the gospel of lsd was rock music. The acids tests, one of the origins of the modern rock concert, were wild gatherings replete with a giant vat of Kool- aid laced with lsd (unbeknownst to some attendees). Psychedelic bands like the Grateful Dead cut their teeth on these events and spread the gospel to the hinterlands through AM radio. Many prominent figures claimed that lsd changed their entire way of looking at the world. Among those was Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary, who was convinced that dosing all of the worlds political leaders would end war. The worldviews of John Lennon and George Harrison were so radically transformed by the drug that they feared they could no longer relate to Paul McCartney, which induced him to try it.
The documentary Berkeley in the 60s has a scene in which it becomes apparent that the old school political activists at Berkeley have suddenly become psychedelicized. A narrator recounts how they went from singing We Shall Overcome to We All Live in a Yellow Submarine, marking the rise of a hybrid of activist and hippie, the Yippies, a melding of Berkeley politics and Haight Ashbury counterculture.
I dont think lsd in itself was responsible for the profound changes in ways of thinking that happened in that decade. Rather , it acted as a source of inspiration for some of those who were already headed in that direction. The Berkeley documentary articulates this well. It was a generation looking to find themselves, and over the course of that decade they became self-consciously aware. For instance, initially, the goals of campus activists were restricted to narrow changes within the system. They saw themselves as connected linearly with previous generations of leftists. But over time they realized that what they were onto was a sweeping rethinking of all values, political, aesthetic, social , sexual and spiritual, touching on all aspects of life. Lsd can help loosen attachments to old ways of thinking, but only if one is already wanting to go there.
Its ironic that younger generations now associate baby boomers with right wing thinking, which reflects the fact that only a small percentage of baby boomers at gatherings like Woodstock were really committed to countercultural ideals.
Indeed.
Quoting Joshs
Funny how the CIA keeps popping up. Not to stoke any conspiracies.. But this one is just pure cause and effect. Soon after its invention by scientist in Sweden, it is tested in CIA around the Bay Area in California, and soon becomes an underground "hit" (no pun). Then, it explodes into the broader youth culture by 66-67. Even more so after its federal illegal status.
Quoting Joshs
:lol:
Quoting Joshs
Indeed, and again, this "gap" (both intergenerational and intra-generationally as you point out with the conservative Baby Boomers), perhaps widened due to the assassination. Within a few years it went from business suits, and martinis, to folkies and sit-ins, to full on hippie sexual and drug rebellion. That rebellion died down but the exploitive, explicit aspects remain. In 1963, you could not say fart on TV. By 1970 you had George Carlin 7 words you can't say on tv, mocking everything about the the mores of the seemingly "repressed" 1950s- early 1960s mentality. And no, I do not discount Lenny Bruce who paved the way in the 1950s and literally died for his cause for free speech. However, when he was repeatedly arrested, it seemed a matter of course because he was so transgressive. George Carlin, was sort of riding the wave that was already ripe for it by 1970. And though uppers and downers were around, as well as marijuana and cocaine, these were usually either taken as supplements, and doctor recommended, or were more confined to circles of musicians and entertainers. By the end of the 60s, it was part of being of a generation. Heroin, cocaine, crack, and such became popular in the 70s and 80s, and continue on. Then you have the opioid crisis. And you have the War on Drugs, and such.. So all of these things remained, but the "experimental" mentality of the LSD era, and linking it (however tenuously) to spirituality, gave way to just finding the next fix.
Especially with the assassination of JFK, there is this underlying idea that if JFK wouldn't have been assassinated, then everything would have been better. The confidence of Americans in their own government would be higher, there wouldn't have been what we now know as the (US) Vietnam war. And the US would be a happier place. Here the "everything" part is debatable.
But then we are in the fairy-tale land of "what if" -alternative realities. Would the post-Houston JFK been like that? Would he have withdrawn from Vietnam and let South Vietnam fall? Cold War had it's own logic to go. Politics is still teamwork, and there were many on the LBJ team that had been on the JFK team, starting from people like Robert McNamara.
The idea that the alternative universe without JFK assassination would be totally different from our reality now seems to me to be unlikely. A lot of things would be the same. Yet to be consistent to myself, we of course cannot know.
Yes, not everything can be so reducible.
Quoting ssu
Yeah, probably giving Kennedy too much credit here, but his few years in office were supposed to be looked at fondly because of his instincts against pro-war advisors, though he did respect McNamara. McNamara was for supporting Diem, and Kennedy reluctantly was for the coup due to Diem's authoritarian policies. Conspiracy theorists might even consider that to be the basis for the "coup" against him from the powers within. You don't need the conspiracy part though. He did make a lot of enemies. He mainly trusted his brother more than any other. Cabinet and lower-ranked agencies in the executive branch probably loved Eisenhower's "hands-off" approach. He made the final decisions, but he let his advisors have much more free reign. He ran it more like a military. Kennedy was much more involved in each decision it seems, and had his own ideas.
Interestingly, McNamara and Kennedy moved away from "massive retaliation" and "first strike" to countering "liberation movements". This meant equipping the army with counterinsurgency tactics and thus developed the Special Forces like the Green Berets.
My broader question was not about foreign affairs as much as culture. Was the Kennedy assassination the thing that most pushed the nascent radical change that occurred in the 60s? Possibly. Kennedy seemed to an idealist approach and used the power of the podium. LBJ was much better at internal politics. He knew when to intimidate, call in a favor, things like this. He knew the internal workings of the Senate more than anyone. He took the heat for the major legislation that Kennedy died before enacting.
And this is key to the conspiracy theories. If Kennedy was going to make positive changes, then there was 'good reason' for vested groups to take him out. Personally, I have tended to think Oswald alone did it, but a government conspiracy is almost a faith-based position with some folk these days. Discussing the evidence can be like arguing with apologists.
Writer and political pundit, Gore Vidal, who was a close friend of Kennedy's and a progressive writes often about how Kennedy was a friend of the military industrial complex and was pretty keen to escalate Vietnam. Vidal thought that if Kennedy had lived it would be business as usual. But who knows?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Agree, I think the myth of Kennedy as a secular saint, the youthful, good looking, dynamic president, whose tragic, spectacular and enigmatic death led to the premature fall of Camelot is a powerful myth from so many points of reference. And sometimes cultures pivot on such myths.
I do love me some Gore Vidal. A great writer. And yes, he may have been right.
Quoting Tom Storm
Indeed, I think there is something to the idea that it is hard to see the fall of Camelot failed war in Vietnam. Instead of chants against LBJ, it would be Kennedy, and Kennedy would have been the face of the warmonger leading the youth to their deaths over a conflict that seemed unnecessary, not LBJ. But in many accounts, it seems like the narrative is to put Kennedy in the light of someone who slowly realizes over time, that the pro-military advisors are too hawkish and need to be reigned in. He seemed to be more a fan of building soft power (Peace Corps, Alliance for Progress in Latin America, advisors rather than full military, grand speeches, etc.).
But I am thinking the "radicalism", during a Kennedy tenure might have been a gradual, unitary approach (more about condemning the bigots and reactionaries), than an all out "break" of a generation of people. The business suits and martinis perhaps, would have continued. The beats and the folkies would have their place.. But the sex, drugs, and rock and roll, perhaps would have taken on a different form, the youth movements would have been a more moderate liberal progression rather than mass campus riots. Media would have still had their restrictions. Since there would be no Vietnam, no Watergate, the media would have also been more "cozy" with the politicians, not reporting on personal affairs, wheelings and dealings, and Washington insider information, but just the surface issues. It would have taken longer for us to get the kind of "anything goes" media we have now that has evolved even more since social media, and the echo chamber. Technology also has a huge influence of course. Movies and tv would have possibly continued to be a kind of restricted, less grit, sarcasm, violence, sex, realism perhaps. It would have been more gradual.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yes, I think a case can be made for this.
Has this thread been partly motivated by you asking yourself, how did we end up in the cesspit we have now?
Incidentally, have you ever seen the 1976 movie, Network? It kind of prefigures the mercenary media, reality TV, emotion driven, content free filth we are now awash in.
It was actually just that November 22nd was the anniversary of Kennedy's assassination and thought it was apropos. Always interested in history and its philosophical implications, and thought it a perfect tie in, and very relevant. Also, yes, that movie does predict where things would go. What used to be called Yellow Journalism just became Journalism.
I do think there was a strangely fast break in the 60s, and though that decade is definitely the focus of many documentaries, etc. I think that the rapid cultural shift that happened can't be overstated. It is fascinating and lends itself to philosophical questions as to how much impact an event can have in the broader culture. Is it more causation or more correlation? Without going too much into how much any event can be considered a "cause", I would propose that the Kennedy assassination at least correlated strongly with a radical cultural shift that came immediately after. That in itself is something interesting.
Nixon was a natural-born target for loathing, but he was a reasonably competent [s]crook[/s] chief executive, many of whose policies were OK. Nixon's rep also benefits from the descending quality of succeeding presidents, especially demented Reagan and Narcissico Trump.
It was the cover-up that did Nixon in more than anything else. Cover-ups are a sign of the sinner sinking ever deeper into sin, and prosecutors jump on on it. My advice: If crooked politics is your game, prepare to get caught and then confess and apologize early and often. Don't stiffen up and deny everything, unless you have buried all the witnesses and nobody knows where.
:lol:
Quoting BC
It's funny cause with Trump, he brazenly says what he's going to do, does it, then knows that the ambiguities of the system will allow him to get away with it anyways.
See the difference between Nixon and say, a Trump was that at the time of Nixon there were at least SOME Republicans in the select committee, that when the White House tapes were obtained, finally had to admit that Nixon was indeed a crook and voted to move forward with an impeachment hearing. That would never happen today. The days of having the idea of fair play even if it is not your side are long gone.
True.
No. From my perspective at the time, social movements were on their way.
I think of Lem's rebuttal of the Butterfly Theories of history; his Ergodic Theory of history tells us that, in the passages of civilizations, were we to travel back in time and change an incident that from our advanced perspective might well have changed a huge part of the way history evolved, we would be disappointed at how little would have been altered. No Hitler? Someone else would have popped up. JFK surviving assassination? Not much difference in how society developed.
( On the other hand I have a personal acquaintance with the butterfly notion: how a tiny act can affect how a certain future (millions) perform something they enjoy doing. )
Interesting yeah, this seems even more deterministic actually because there are enough background sameness to basically steer the trajectory a general way. But then can there ever be huge enough event to cause significant change? And conversely, how many little events add up to the kind of intransigent determinism you are proposing?
Perhaps the rise of Alexander the Great, or the Atomic Age. I would speculate lots of instances.
Your second question is a good one. Actually, the Atomic Age and the resulting societal changes came about through incremental incidents over a period of time, one researcher at a time. Well, sort of.
What President wouldn't have been disappointed after the Bay of Pigs disaster? Yet here I wouldn't go all 'Oliver Stone' and make the dichotomy of there being the hawks inside government and JFK.
Quoting schopenhauer1
That basically nuclear weapons are only a deterrent and you cannot actually use them for anything else started to be quickly obvious from the 1950's. Nuclear strategy and counterinsurgency are simply two different areas. JFK was quite central in giving a boost to the Special Forces and actually authorized the use of green berets (by which the forces are now called). Now the Special Warfare Center and School is named after him.
This questions just how 'pacifist' JFK was again when the president takes notable personal interest in clandestine warfare.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I think the Civil Rights movement and 60's cultural revolution would have happened with or without the assassination of the President. US presidents do get killed and many (like Reagan) have had these attempts on them. Yet that culture change happened also in France, in the UK and all around the Western world.
That said, I think the JFK assassination itself and especially the way it was handled was very important to the long process of the erosion of trust in their own government, which Americans have. The assassinations of the two Kennedy's and MLK are in the same category here, something reinforcing this idea that not all is well and there's a deep state lurking in the shadows. Erosion in the confidence of your government isn't anything new, actually, very famous event was the Dreyfus affair in France in the 1890's where the hold modern thought of 'the government is lying' and 'it shouldn't lie' resulting in the erosion of trust in the government. And let's remind ourselves that the notion of the "deep state" actually came from Turkey!
Americans I guess all the time have had doubts about Central government (and central banks, btw) and also before, against standing armies. That is quite American.
Yet what if the assassination was only a hitjob from the mob and nobody in the government had nothing to do with it? The Cosa Nostra had back then still quite a lot of power and had only surfaced to being a country wide network only in the 1950's. It was only tackled decades later. Yet thinking about it this way, and you have all the actors like closet-gay Hoover and others looking quite different, just pathetic and simply botching up the intelligence.
For the conspiracy theories usually the most enjoyable are the ones that are the most sinister. And these overplay the abilities of the "deep state" and create this huge web where nothing happens by chance or accident. Yet now conspiracy theories have become mainstream and in elections they play a huge part. When visiting with my family Washington DC, I went to Capitol and listened for a while some Republican member of the house speaking what a threat the FBI is for the United States and it's citizens.
That brought it home to me how lunatic US politics is now.
I would say that those individuals who have started new monotheist religions have done huge societal change. We don't have this mush of having many gods around now in the West. And what they have specifically said and taught does matter.
One might argue that their emergence and success is because of structural reasons: for Christianity the size of the Roman Empire and the ability for people and thoughts to spread there was crucial and for Islam it was that just prior Byzantium and the Sassanids had fought a very bloody war where East Rome had finally crushed the Sassanid Empire. So both very in a weak state when a new force from the deserts of Arabia hit them.
Yet what is written in the Koran or the Bible do matter. Authors were important.
Humans arent as clever as conspiracy theorists think. Can you think of a single conspiracy that was able to keep their secret for 60 years?
I think it was mainly the baby boomers driving that rapid change. I also think that the best way to chronicle the transformation is through the evolution of rock music, which dictated attitudes, fashion and politics. Between 1962 and 1969 rock music reinvented itself on a yearly basis. Given the fact that the oldest boomers were in their late teens when Kennedy was assassinated, its not surprising that 1964 seems to herald a sharp acceleration of musical and cultural change. After all, innovators like the Beatles and Bob Dylan were just starting out in 1962, and reached their creative peak around 1966. I think its pure coincidence that this seems to come on the heels of the assassination.
One of the pitfalls when doing alternative history is that in retrospect, all events seem inevitable. That's just how the notion of causality works. It can be very difficult to get away from the position that sees actual events as the default that was always going to happen unless you introduce huge changes.
You only need to make relatively minor changes and the Nazi invasion of France fails and now World War 2 never happens in remotely the way it did.
How much do you need to nudge events in the Korean war to get nukes dropped on China? Perhaps all you need is a general being a bit more persuasive in some meeting. Then you have a nuclear US-China war in the 1950s.
Had Kennedy not been assassinated, I don't think we'd have seen some hugely different policies in the US. Nor does it seem likely that social trends in general would have been much altered. Certainly the appeal of conspiracy theories seems independent of any specific one.
On the other hand it might easily completely change the entire list of presidents from Kennedy onward. Elections are responsive enough to the moment to moment circumstances that all the results might markedly differ. And that could have let to different decisions in various crises.
"all 'Oliver Stone'" :lol:
Quoting ssu
I think of the downfall of Douglas MacArthur in Korea here :grimace:. But yes, 50s seemed to be quiet coups and Mutually Assured Deterrence (MAD). Kennedy was about countering the numerous communist liberation fronts. However, again, he seemed more interested in soft power. I consider "advisors" soft power as they are meant to build up the country's military internally. Like Eisenhower, he did not want to deal with hot wars. If anything, small commando-style teams would be the dominant military force.
Quoting ssu
Good points. I like how you traced some of the history there. The Dreyfus Affair is a great example of a government hiding evidence (for real, not conspiratorially). What I find ironic about the American conspiracy theories of the deep state, is that the mistrust of the FBI and CIA used to be leftwing ideas. Now they are more associated with rightwing ideas. The Democrats have shifted to the more globalist party since Trumpism. This is more a call back to the 30s or maybe even the 1910s. Think here of a Woodrow Wilson or a Teddy Roosevelt (robust American power abroad), versus isolationists like Robert Taft and pseudo-fascists even with their America First Committees endorsed by people like Charles Lindbergh. Even more ironically, Joseph Kennedy, John's Kennedy's father, was avidly isolationist right up until the beginning of the war.
Quoting ssu
Indeed, the intractable 2nd Amendment for example, whatever you may think either way, is more a symbol of this suspicion than anything else.
Quoting ssu
Indeed, to conspiracy theorists, there was intent from everyone. It seemed the Mafia was involved in almost every version of the theory. It could be Mafia alone. It could be Mafia acting on behalf of the CIA, etc. Remember this too, Robert Kennedy was using the FBI to prosecute the Mafia during the JFK years, and this didn't sit well with them. There are some theories linking Mafia ties with the father Joseph and helping JFK win elections in Illinois. So Robert Kennedy's campaign against the Mafia, not a nice thank you gift...
Quoting ssu
Indeed. Conspiracy theories are part-and-parcel of Republican politics now. If all politicians are corrupt, if media cannot be trusted or always sourced from a "better" source, then nothing can be trusted.
Indeed. Bob Dylan and the Beatles are good places to start as to the shift in culture. Certainly, Dylan was already writing more sophisticated songs about government and the inner psychological sphere. It pushed the folkie sound beyond either traditionalist songs or political rallying songs (Pete Seeger comes to mind for example). Now some people might say the Beatles creative peak was a year or two later :wink:.
Yes, there were certainly social and generational factors already in place. Perhaps the distrust factor though, would have been less sharp, however.
Yeah, perhaps if General MacArthur got his way...
Quoting Echarmion
Yes, for sure it's almost impossible to see where counterfactuals would have led with the web of causality involved. The polarization you see in politics however, seems to be a reality of the political landscape. Certainly the 60s shaped this.
Also it's worth mentioning that the biggest taboo in a democracy is politicians killing each other to gain power. If it happens, if you get leaders that have murdered their way to the top, there's not much left democracy in the first place however active the voters participate on elections. Hence the most popular conspiracies put politicians (even LBJ) as the culprits.
And if political violence does happen, we often simply look away and just sideline it, because those kind of things happen in Third World countries and "Banana Republics", not established Western democracies. Yet there is no guarantee that political violence couldn't or wouldn't happen: in Norway it took only one very dedicated terrorist to create huge carnage.
(77 Deaths and over 300 wounded in Norway, just by one lunatic.)
And there has been political violence in the US, with both Democrat and Republican politicians have been attacked. And with an abundant number of people having semi-automatic firearms, Americans have been lucky that unfortunate incidents haven't happened yet. All it takes is two panicky gun carrying activists on opposing sides in a riot and the mess will be awful.
It's debatable about whether or not Kennedy would have jumped into the war to the extent Johnson did. He was not Johnson, but McNamara was there either way.
Civil Rights legislation may not have passed. Getting them passed was Johnson's primary positive legacy, and he utilized Kennedy's death to help push it. History would have been different..No telling how things might have evolved.
The civil rights movement was the only substantive thing about the 1960s counterculture. Everything else was fluff. We are a far cry from all the drugs, wars and politicians of the 6070s, but the civil rights are here to stay.
Quoting Relativist
A central element of the counter culture was the rise of the hippies. The epicenter of the hippie counterculture in the U.S. was San Franciscos Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, and to a lesser extent NYCs East Village. The hippies were generally apolitical and werent protesters. So while the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement helped to draw people to the hippies, their origins have to do more with a combining of the Beat philosophy of the 1950s and the inspiration of lsd and other psychedelic drugs, along with rock and roll.
To me the politics was the least interesting aspect of the counterculture. What fascinated me were the new philosophical, spiritual, social and sexual attitudes it spawned.
First contraceptive pills came to the market in 1960.
That was a medical advance that had an impact of it's own, even if other societal changes did matter (as for example condoms have been around for quite a long time).
It certainly did. On the other hand, what sort of pill do you think influenced this song lyric from the band The Byrds?
"Oh, how is it that I could come out to you,
And be still floatin',
And never hit bottom but keep falling through,
Just relaxed and paying attention?
All my two-dimensional boundaries were gone,
I had lost to them badly,
I saw that world crumble and thought I was dead,
But I found my senses still working.
And as I continued to drop through the hole,
I found all surrounding,
To show me that joy innocently is,
Just be quiet and feel it around you.
And I opened my heart to the whole universe,
And I found it was loving,
And I saw the great blunder my teachers had made,
Scientific delirium madness.
I will keep falling as long as I live,
Ah, without ending,
And I will remember the place that is now,
That has ended before the beginning ...
Oh, how is it that I could come out to you,
And be still floatin',
And never hit bottom but keep falling through,
Just relaxed and paying attention?"
I can agree. The internet would never have been tolerated as it is if not for that.