Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties

This book explores life in America during that brief promising moment in the early Sixties when John F. Kennedy was President. Kennedy’s Cold War frustrations in Cuba and Vietnam worried Americans. The 1962 missile crisis narrowly avoided a nuclear disaster. The civil rights movement gained momentum with student sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and crises in Mississippi and Alabama. Martin Luther King, Jr., emerged as a spokesman for non-violent social change. The American family was undergoing rapid change. Betty Friedan began to launch the Women’s Movement. The Beat authors Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg gained respectability and, at the same time, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan revived folk music. Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol produced Pop Art, while Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, and Ken Kesey began to promote psychedelic drugs. The early Sixties was a period of marked political, social and cultural change which this book relates and discusses.