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The Wonderful World of Color
At the beginning of a decade when everything was beginning to seem possible, nothing seemed impossible.
Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures
The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently. . . . The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence.
Bono, as quoted in Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
A lot of people today speak almost nostalgically about the 1960s. They rave about vinyl records, great music, and groovy fashions. Yes. But to understand the forces that birthed the cultural revolution and shaped the funky characters of the Jesus Movement—like Greg Laurie—we need to take a deeper magical mystery tour of the time period.
They say that if you remember the ’60s, then you weren’t there. But maybe that’s not true. It was a season that was both mellow and radical; its pilgrims experienced a sensual explosion in which it seemed everything was sharper, clearer, richer, and deeper.
Most people remember the sights of it all: the colors. A decade that started in black and white, as dull and conservative as a military crew cut, bloomed into a bodacious bounty of flower-power pop art, neon peace signs, skies full of diamonds, and visions through kaleidoscope eyes.
And the smells. There was that burnt-green smell of marijuana, and the sweat of hundreds of thousands of your closest friends at Woodstock and the other concerts and love-ins of the era. The scent of sea salt, surf, and Coppertone at the beach. The aromas of hot coffee, or jugs of cheap red wine, at poetry readings and love-ins and urban coffeehouses.
Taste. If the mainstream trends of the ’60s followed the new fast-food giant, McDonald’s, and the conveniences of mass-produced frozen dinners with their uniform rectangles of robot food, the hippies were trying to get back to the garden, anticipating the organic and slow-food trends of our own day. “Welcome to Our Space. Positive energy projection is the trip,” proclaimed a menu at a hippie café in northern California. “Care in the preparation of food requires time, especially if we’re busy! So please take a deep breath, relax and dig on the love & artistry about you. May all our offerings please you. Peace within you.”
Touch. Besides drugs—and helped along by drugs—the biggest upheaval of the decade was the sexual revolution. Rejecting the double standards or cloistered sexuality of the 1950s, the young people of the ’60s happily rode a tide of free love, sexual experimentation, and the beginnings of the women’s movement, all helped along by the introduction of the birth control pill into the US market in 1961.
Sometimes the senses all seemed to merge, like on those LSD trips when people thought they could smell colors or taste music. Or sometimes senses all went away, as for those who sought higher consciousness through Eastern religions and emptied themselves of everything.
The one thing everyone agrees on, however, is the power of the sounds of the ’60s. Even today’s twentysomethings who know nothing about the decade talk nostalgically about those days of the best music of all time: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, the Kinks, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Cream, the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan . . . the list, like the beat, goes on. And on.
Much of the music mirrored what was happening in popular culture, even as it led the way. Back then, if you listened to what the Beatles were doing, you pretty much had a bead on youth culture. “I want to hold your hand” became “Why don’t we do it in the road?” “Love, love me, do” became “I’d love to turn you on.” If George Harrison was into Eastern religion and the Maharishi and sitars, next thing you knew, everyone was singing about Vishnu and checking out transcendental meditation. If John Lennon said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus—in spite of the uproar from angry pastors with crew cuts—most people under thirty just shrugged and agreed with John.
Beatles aside, here’s a black-and-white scene from the very beginning of the decade, one that changed the stage for the wonderful world of color.
The setting is a bland television studio in Chicago. The camera is focused on two men in business suits. One man is sweating, mopping his face, his dark eyes darting back and forth; he is pale, thin, and looks exhausted. The other is tanned, rested, and confident, looking straight into the camera, right into the eyes of America. Even the black-and-white TVs of the day tell the story: Senator John F. Kennedy, facing off against Vice President Richard Nixon, is the golden man of the moment.
Nixon had been in the hospital, lost twenty pounds, and was sick that evening of the first televised presidential debate. He’d refused television makeup, and his heavy five o’clock shadow made his face look shady. He looked so bad that his mother called him after the broadcast to see if he was all right.
Content-wise, each candidate made his points; in fact, most radio listeners thought that Nixon had won the debate. But television viewers had the opposite reaction. Sweaty Nixon looked like a jowly mutt, and to millions of newly minted American television watchers, there was no contest. Who would want to vote for a clammy crank? Give us the debonair, handsome one with the amazing hair!
Though charisma had always had its part in the political process, television’s magnified lens meant that forever onward, until Jesus returns, political discourse would now be shaped by image over substance.
Still, the handsome, young Senator Kennedy prevailed in the 1960 election by only a narrow margin. And yes, Richard Nixon came back in 1968 and created his own unique presidential history in the ’70s. But in January 1961, President Kennedy and his sophisticated wife, Jackie, swept into the White House on a glamorous tide of youth, charm, art, and culture.
A month before John Kennedy’s inauguration, a coalition of communists and insurgents called the Vietcong had organized to fight against the existing regime in South Vietnam. In early 1961, President Kennedy sent an evaluation team to Vietnam; they recommended a buildup of American military, economic, and technical aid to confront this communist threat. Concerned about a domino effect in Southeast Asia, with countries tumbling to communist rule one by one, the Kennedy White House quietly increased the US presence in Vietnam.
Then Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union, put the youthful President Kennedy to the test. (Khrushchev, famously belligerent, had lost his temper at a United Nations General Assembly session in 1960, ripped off his shoe, and started beating his desk with it.) The USSR had long wanted beachheads for nuclear weapons able to strike the United States, and on October 14, 1962, an American spy plane photographed a Soviet medium-range ballistic missile being assembled for installation on the island of Cuba. This was ninety miles from the coast of Florida; a launch on the US from Cuba would mean the death of eighty million Americans within ten minutes.
The Cuban Missile Crisis brought America to the actual brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. It seemed that the world as we knew it would end in a mushroom cloud; it seemed all those bomb drills would come, in fact, to a horrific reality. There seemed no way out until, thirteen days later, the standoff between the communist leader and the young American president ended. The USSR agreed to remove its missiles if America agreed not to attack Cuba.
It was a reprieve, but no one knew for how long. There was little cause to feel confident about lasting peace in a Cold War world.
The following summer, the two superpowers did sign a treaty limiting nuclear testing and installed a state-of-the-art instant communications system in the White House and the Kremlin. Even youngsters knew about the “hotline” that would protect the world from nuclear war: it looked like a toddler’s toy, a bulky red rotary phone that would allow the superpowers to talk each other down the tree of mutually assured destruction. (Actually, messages between Kennedy and Khrushchev would be encrypted and take minutes to reach the other leader. It was considered revolutionary in 1963, a great improvement over the regular transatlantic phone call from the White House, which had to be bounced between several countries before it reached the Kremlin and was consequently just a teeny bit prone to interception.)
As President Kennedy told Americans in a sober speech in June 1963, the hoped-for cooperation between the superpowers recognized our mutual humanity. “In the final analysis,” he said poignantly, “our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
Five months later, President Kennedy’s own mortal run on this small planet ended. Ask any baby boomer, and they can tell you in a heartbeat where they were on November 22, 1963.
The images are seared in our minds. The motorcade of open-topped black limousines in Dallas, Texas. The waving crowds, craning to get a view of JFK and Jackie, so elegant in her famous pink Chanel suit and her matching pillbox hat. She carried a bouquet of blood-red roses as she and the president waved to the adoring crowds.
Texas governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie, rode in the limo seat in front of the president and first lady. Nellie turned around. “Mr. President,” she called above the crowd noise, smiling big like the Texan she was, “you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you!”
A few seconds later there was a rifle shot. Then another. The president and Governor Connally were both hit, though not mortally. Then came the third shot, the one that took off the top of the president’s skull and blew part of his bone and brain matter onto the back of the limousine. There was Jackie Kennedy, crawling in that moment of horror onto the trunk to retrieve it; a Secret Service agent threw himself into the car and it screeched toward the hospital as Jackie cradled her ruined husband in her arms.
Then the aftermath, the images that flooded national television.
The president of the United States, declared dead on national television by a stunned and grief-stricken Walter Cronkite. Shock. Disbelief. America came to a halt. The president’s seat in the limousine: red roses and blood. A new image: a dazed Jackie Kennedy, the pink Chanel suit smeared with gore, standing by Vice President Lyndon Johnson and his wife on Air Force One as Johnson is sworn in as the new president. JFK’s coffin is in the back of the plane.
Two days later, millions watched NBC’s live coverage of events as JFK’s accused assassin, a malcontent named Lee Harvey Oswald, was being transferred from the Dallas Police Headquarters to jail. Handcuffed to a local detective, Oswald was surrounded by law enforcement as he was escorted through the basement of the building.
At 11:21 a.m. local time, Jack Ruby, a Dallas strip club operator with ties to the Mafia, suddenly lunged out of the crowd, stuck a handgun within inches of Oswald’s gut, and pulled the trigger. An ambulance rushed Oswald to Parkland Memorial Hospital—the same emergency room where frenzied doctors had fought to save President Kennedy from his mortal wound two days earlier. Oswald died at 1:07 p.m.
If life as usual had already felt fragile, now all bets were off. The vital, powerful, golden president had been killed by a no-name, dishonorably discharged, communist loser. Then the assassin himself was assassinated—right in front of everyone in the nation, on live television. Now anything could happen in America.
During the grim months after President Kennedy’s assassination and the tough challenges of Lyndon Johnson’s new presidency, there were still diversions.
Perhaps the biggest national distraction was the arrival in February 1964 of that original boy band from Britain, whose latest song had just hit number one on the US charts. Teenaged girls screamed and fainted when the group arrived in New York surrounded by reporters. Parents across the country wondered what all the fuss was about. All Mom and Dad knew was that the band was named after insects. Beatles.
Seventy-three million fellow Americans, including eleven-year-old Greg Laurie, camped out in front of their big-box TVs when the Beatles sang live on the Ed Sullivan Show. Strangers to the times need to understand that the Ed Sullivan Show was a huge deal, a “really big shew,” as he used to say back in the day. Sullivan hosted the longest-running variety show in the history of American television. In an era before there were a million TV channels and a billion other entertainment options, he ruled the airwaves. Families across America gathered around the TV on Sunday nights at 8:00 p.m. It was a national ritual.
Since Sullivan had almost no personality of his own, he had a unique ability to highlight his guests’ personalities. He hunched his shoulders and mumbled, seeming to have a speech impediment or at least unusual syntax. Time magazine said that “his smile is that of a man sucking a lemon . . . yet, instead of frightening children, Ed Sullivan charms the whole family.”1
Sixty percent of the televisions in America were tuned in to watch the Beatles on Ed’s show.
The Fab Four sang a few of their greatest hits like “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” John, Paul, George, and Ringo wore black suits with skinny ties and gently shook their mop-tops while they sang. They were in their early twenties at the time; Ed kept beaming and calling them “talented youngsters.”
The British Invasion had begun.
There was another invasion, of course, one far more significant than the trends of pop culture, though it merged with them to create the consciousness of a generation. America’s involvement in Southeast Asia had begun with a cadre of political and military advisors, like a trickle of stones sliding down a hill. But those stones became an avalanche, and eventually tens of thousands of young Americans found themselves sliding into the jungles of Vietnam, not quite knowing what they were fighting for.
In early 1965, the US commenced Operation Rolling Thunder, a gradual and sustained bombing of North Vietnam. It was designed to boost morale in the non-communist South and to destroy the North’s transportation system, industrial base, and air defenses, as well as disrupt the steady flow of fighters and weapons into the South. Rolling Thunder would roll for the next three and a half years as the storm in Vietnam got stronger and the voices crying out against it at home got louder.
On March 16, an eighty-two-year-old Detroit pacifist named Alice Herz set herself on fire to protest the war in Vietnam. She died the next day.
Elsewhere, young men started publicly burning their draft cards. Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, organized opposition to the war, and protests began to simmer and explode on college campuses across the country.
By April 1965, twenty-five thousand American soldiers were patrolling the rice paddies of Vietnam. By the end of the year that number would be two hundred thousand.
A lot of young Americans—both in Southeast Asia, where drugs were plentiful and cheap, and at home—were embracing the growing drug culture as the gateway to spiritual enlightenment, good times, or just an escape from the status quo. Marijuana was everywhere, but LSD was the drug movement’s poster child. It stimulated serotonin receptors in the brain; you never knew just where you would go or how you would feel, but you could drop a tab and take an eight-hour trip without ever leaving your chair. It was legal in the US until the mid-1960s.
The Pied Pipers of the day, the Beatles, first got into LSD in the spring of 1965. John Lennon and George Harrison were at a party in England with their wives, and their obliging host dropped sugar cubes laced with LSD into their after-dinner coffee.
“I had such an overwhelming feeling of well-being, that there was a God, and I could see him in every blade of grass. It was like gaining hundreds of years of experience in 12 hours,” George later told Rolling Stone. After they got back home, John said, “God, it was just terrifying, but it was fantastic. George’s house seemed to be just like a big submarine.”2
Paul McCartney waited a year or so to drop acid. He said it opened his eyes to “the fact that there is a God. . . . It is obvious that God isn’t in a pill, but it explained the mystery of life.” Then the drug “started to find its way into everything we did, really. It colored perceptions. I think we started to realize that there weren’t as many frontiers as we’d thought there were. And we realized we could break barriers.”3
By halfway through the decade of the 1960s, there were two distinct Americas.
One was the conventional, achievement-driven, work-ethic world that had followed the ’50s, populated mostly by people over the age of thirty. The other was a growing youth counterculture that rejected mainstream values of conformity, convention, and climbing the corporate ladder. The new culture embraced the planet, higher consciousness, and alternative realities. Drugs were a way to enlightenment, life was about making love not war, possessions ended up possessing you, music was truth, and freedom was the ultimate high.
By mid-1965, this hip youth movement had been tagged with its own noun, and the word hippie found its way into news reports. Fathers who knew best cautioned their kids from turning into dreaded hippies with long hair and bad values.
One of those dads was a conservative, unremarkable California pastor named Charles Ward Smith.
And no one could have guessed, at the time, that God would use Chuck Smith as a wild, culture-changing revolutionary.