ON NOVEMBER 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy became immortal, not just for what he had done in life but for what he stood for in death—an unfulfilled dream of a prosperous, confident, envied America moving toward the last third of the twentieth century and the new millennium. The first Boomers would link themselves in a special way to that dream as the president died in their own year of transition from high school to college or career. Yet far more postwar children would be affected by the fact that the stature of the slain president allowed his successor to initiate a new dream that in one way or another touched almost every young person in the nation.
Five days after the fatal shots were fired in Dallas, a somber Texan stood behind the lectern of the House of Representatives and observed that “the greatest leader of our time has been struck down by the foulest deed of our times. All I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today.” Yet now Lyndon Baines Johnson was president of the United States, and after the shock of his predecessor’s death had begun to fade, he found the energy to declare, “Now the ideas and ideal which he [Kennedy] so nobly represented must and will be translated into effective action.” Soon this former elementary and high school teacher would propose the legislation necessary to implement a “Great Society” that would affect the lives of all 76 million Boomers. As politicians debated a flurry of bills and community leaders named airports, stadiums, and schools for the slain leader, young Americans passed the mantle of charismatic celebrity from John Kennedy to four young Englishmen.
On Friday, February 7, 1964, Pan Am Flight 101 landed at recently renamed John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, and four modishly dressed young men almost scampered down the aircraft steps as security personnel barely held back thousands of screaming fans, most of whom had skipped school to see Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr officially launch a British invasion of American youth culture. Two days later a live audience of several hundred bemused adults and ecstatic teens and preteens, and a television audience of 73 million, watched a stiff but cordial welcome by host Ed Sullivan as the Beatles played the first of five songs. Between the first chords of “All My Loving” and the final crescendo of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” nearly an hour later, the younger members of the live audience and their counterparts at home endured Fred Kaps’s magic tricks, Frank Gorshin’s impressions of Hollywood stars, and Tessie O’Shea’s medley of Broadway tunes in order to bask in just under fifteen minutes of performance by four mop-headed Liverpudlians who would quickly entrance nearly every Boomer over the age of five. Within days of their third appearance on Ed Sullivan, the Beatles would hold the top-four-selling songs and provide a musical beachhead for dozens of other British groups who would take America by storm.
It is impossible to overstate the impact the Beatles and other British acts had on almost any Boomer old enough to enjoy music. If the vigor and magic of the Kennedy presidency defined much of youth culture in the early sixties, Beatlemania became a focal point for Boomers in the middle of this tumultuous decade. Beyond Beatles songs, concerts, movies, and television appearances, the British invasion encouraged more than a few boys to grow their hair longer and adopt at least some elements of British youth fashion while a growing number of American girls looked to London for “smashing” styles and hairdos that changed the appearance of much of young America.
As Boomers lined up outside theaters in the summer of 1964 to watch the Beatles cavort in their first film, A Hard Day’s Night, President Johnson was energetically transforming the promise of Kennedy’s New Frontier into the reality of the Great Society. Almost a year earlier, some 250,000 marchers, perhaps 60,000 of them white, had descended on the sultry national capital to join in peaceful witness to the cause of civil rights. The voice that captured their attention belonged to Martin Luther King, Jr. This was the first time that most Americans had watched King deliver a full-length address, and in many respects his words that day were directed at the emerging Boomer generation, which would dominate the future America of his dream. His initial remarks about the manacles of segregation, the poverty of African Americans, and the horrors of police brutality quickly gave way to a dream of a new beginning “where sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down at the table of brotherhood.” At that moment King offered the nation a vision in which the spirit of brotherhood would eventually heal the wounds of racism and slavery, and many of the expectant participants in this future vision were young people watching the drama unfold on flickering television sets on this hot, late-summer afternoon.
A short distance from the site of the demonstration, John Kennedy had watched King’s address on television and gradually moved toward support of a civil rights bill that seemed trapped in limbo on the day of the president’s assassination. That afternoon, as the tragic events unfolded in Dallas, Martin Luther King’s six-year-old son Marty asked innocently, “Daddy, President Kennedy was your best friend, wasn’t he?” Almost immediately Lyndon Johnson took up the slain president’s goals while using his powerful persuasive talents to push a far more comprehensive list of social reforms.
The foundation of the Great Society was the passage of the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. When opponents of the Civil Rights Act tried to delete critical provisions, Johnson refused to compromise, and before school reopened in the late summer of 1964 the president was able to turn his energies to the goal he most cherished, a massive expansion of educational opportunities for the nation’s young people. Johnson, once a passionate, energetic teacher who enjoyed positive results from his imaginative teaching strategies, was now extending his classroom across a continent.
He had been thrust into the presidency of a nation with a massively overcrowded school system in which the five richest states outspent the five poorest states by two to one. Less than a third of the nation’s elementary schools provided a full-fledged library for their pupils, and even those that did frequently had more students than books. Many schools were short of textbooks, scientific equipment, and physical education facilities seven years after the shock of Sputnik had promised massive reform. The president was deeply aware of these problems and insisted that “nothing matters more to the future of our country. The nation’s strength, economic productivity, and democratic freedoms all depend on an educated citizenry.”
Johnson had watched his predecessor’s educational funding bills founder on arguments over equivalent benefits for parochial schools. Now he asked his trusted advisers to create a legislative strategy that would break the impasse. The solution that emerged was to shift the focus of aid to nonpublic schools from the institution to the student. Thus parochial and private students could receive remedial reading instruction, diagnostic testing, counseling services, and many other programs operated out of annexes located just outside the front door of the school, beyond the “wall of separation.” Administrators also suggested that school buses, school nurses, and similar provisions were health and safety issues for the individual child and were not direct benefits to the institution. These flexible interpretations transformed many of Kennedy’s legislative opponents into supporters of Great Society education bills, and the results were startling.
On Palm Sunday, April 11, 1965, Lyndon Johnson sat on the lawn of his old grade school, Junction Elementary, in New Stonewall, Texas, with his first-grade teacher, Kate Loney, and several of his own former students and signed into law the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Six months later the president traveled to his college alma mater, Southwest Texas State University, and put his signature on the Higher Education Act of 1965. In two strokes of a pen the educational opportunities available to the Boomer generation were radically enhanced. The bills served as umbrellas for almost sixty other laws aiding education from preschool through postdoctoral studies.
One of the most innovative programs of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which would affect many younger Boomers, was Operation Head Start. This program offered instruction, nutritious meals, counseling, and recreation for disadvantaged preschoolers. It was based on the belief that the environment of poverty created cultural deficits that damaged children’s learning, and that it was possible to compensate for these deficits by early intervention in the child’s life.
The people involved in Head Start tended to subscribe to the “whole child” concept favored by progressive educators, in which an appropriate education encompassed all the needs and interests of children—emotional, physical, and cultural, as well as academic. For them it was more important to nurture children in a secure environment and to develop learning readiness than to emphasize early attention to academic basics. Thus Head Start programs embraced a wide range of objectives, including motor skill development, advice on family parenting skills, and health and nutrition issues. Within weeks of its inauguration, Head Start enrolled more than a half-million children and received information from hundreds of advisory boards of parents.
Although Head Start was the most rapidly implemented aspect of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Boomer children and their parents quickly noticed other changes in their school experience. Elementary schools that had never operated a library now had funding to hire a school librarian who offered reading awareness programs and ordered substantial numbers of books and related materials under increasingly generous budgets. School counselors, previously limited largely to secondary school vocational interests and college admissions duties, now became involved in more extensive aspects of student life down to the lowest grade levels. University graduate admissions programs found themselves scrambling to find faculty who could instruct future guidance counselors as their numbers seemed to grow geometrically.
One of the most important elements of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was major educational funding. The president’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, reads to a classroom for Project Head Start, one of the longest-lasting and most influential programs of the Johnson presidency. (Lyndon Baines Johnson Library)
The companion Higher Education Act was designed to help colleges cope with the surge of students that had reached six million at the passage of the act and would climb to ten million before current high school freshmen reached their senior year of college. Johnson administration policymakers were particularly concerned that while 78 percent of high school graduates with a family income over $12,000 now entered college, only 33 percent of those with family income under $3,000 did so. An average mid-sixties family with an income of $6,000 could expect a tuition bill of about $1,500 at a public university and $2,300 at a private college, guaranteeing that only a mortgage payment would produce a larger drain on family income. Great Society legislation now allowed any full-time student to borrow $1,500 a year with no payments until a year after graduation, while Title IV of the Higher Education Act provided an initial $70 million a year in grants of $1,000 to $1,500 a year to lower-income students, coupled with an additional $200 million a year in work-study funds to meet gaps between grants and actual expenses.
The unanimous Senate vote for the Higher Education Act reflected the realization that American higher education was becoming a major element in the ongoing cold-war struggle against the Soviet Union and China, and that virtually every state in the Union could benefit from a massive infusion of federal funds for colleges. Beyond the reality that federal funds would now pay a substantial portion of student tuition, the act also provided both private and public institutions with generous subsidies. For example, Title I budgeted $50 million a year to colleges to study solutions to local community problems; Title II budgeted the same amount for expanding college library acquisitions as well as an additional $415 million to train librarians; Title III offered $55 million a year for teaching fellowships for graduate students and junior faculty to acquire doctorates and gain full faculty status; Title VI provided $275 million a year to the National Teacher Corps to train teachers for low-income school districts; Title VII disbursed $190 million annually to build campus science, mathematics, foreign-language, and engineering facilities.
The enactment of more than sixty laws aiding education could sometimes prove to be a mixed blessing for schools and colleges, where administrators had to cope with an often bewildering mountain of federal regulations and forms. But for most Boomers the Great Society provided enormous benefits, from access to far more books in elementary school libraries to better high school counseling facilities to an opportunity to enter college, even if family income could not support the venture.
Beyond the educational arena, by the mid-sixties the influence of British youth culture on the Boomer generation extended well beyond the initial attraction of the Beatles. At the same time the emergence of color television, cable, and Ultra High Frequency broadcasting dramatically expanded home entertainment horizons, and the rise of James Bond and other related spy films offered Boomers a sophisticated, scary, yet entertaining view of the cold war that so dominated their lives.
The first hint of the distinctiveness of the mid-sixties youth culture came when Boomers surged into theaters to watch a low-budget British black-and-white movie that featured only the sketchiest of plots. A Hard Day’s Night was essentially a platform for a compilation of new Beatles songs, interspersed with sight gags and a dialogue with such heavy British accents that subtitles would not have been out of place. Watching John, Paul, George, and Ringo romp and sing, millions of young people convinced themselves—and adult America—that the Beatles were not fads that would go the way of Davy Crockett caps and Hula Hoops but represented a freshness and humor that would require mainstream society to sit up and take notice.
The television networks quickly got the message that young people now wanted their music to be more than a listening experience. ABC dropped its exuberant, high-rated folk-song program Hootenanny for the even more exuberant rock program Shindig. NBC followed suit with its own presentation of Hullaballoo. Both of these programs featured lithesome, white-booted “go-go” dancers, a live audience of screaming kids, and segments “direct from London” with groups and singers who hoped to make their own transatlantic leap to fame like the Beatles.
Largely due to heavy television promotion and extensive airplay, the Beatles found their monopoly on American attention very short-lived. Although many cynical adults claimed that virtually all of the “British Invasion” acts looked alike and sang alike, each act had a distinctive persona and became a favorite of particular groups of American youngsters. It was soon apparent that the chief threat to the Beatles’ supremacy would be the London-based Rolling Stones, whose leaders, Mick Jagger and Brian Jones, presented a grittier, blues-oriented sound and edgier appearance than their Liverpool counterparts. As the Beatles gradually shifted from concert performers and movie stars to a studio experience, the Rolling Stones emerged as the long-term kings of the live performance well into the twenty-first century.
Yet the niches extended far beyond Liverpool versus London. The Kinks featured a driving guitar beat and socially satiric songs that spoke of the frequent boredom of suburban youth on both sides of the Atlantic. The Moody Blues experimented with a fusion of pop-rock and classical. Herman’s Hermits featured incredibly youthful-looking teen singer Peter Noone and lighthearted songs that mesmerized younger audiences while offering American adults a hint of the traditional British music hall experience with hits like “I’m Henry the Eighth.” Dusty Springfield used her rather exotic makeup and short skirts to invite American teenage girls into a sophisticated world of romance.
By the close of 1965 American kids could listen to British groups with American names, such as the Dakotas, the Nashville Teens, and the Swinging Blue Jeans; experience the sounds of vaguely scary acts such as the Zombies, the Mindbenders, and the Animals; and even begin to distinguish between the Liverpool accents of Gerry and the Pacemakers and the London accents of the Dave Clark Five. British terms such as “fab” began to replace the American equivalent “boss,” and the “mod” fashions of London’s Carnaby Street edged into American department stores. As boys’ crew cuts gave way to more moppish hairstyles and girls dabbled with the heavy eye makeup and shorter skirts of British “birds,” the first hints of a new generation gap emerged between parents and children. Soon these points of contention would seem trivial in comparison to the confrontations of the last years of the decade.
The songs and fashions of the “British Invasion” may have given younger Americans a more sophisticated view of an increasingly international youth culture, but the emergence of a new British film genre hinted that the cold war might be far more complex than they had been taught. In 1963 United Artists released Dr. No, the first film version of the British writer Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, which were particular favorites of President Kennedy. The initial film and its sequel, From Russia with Love, were solid if not spectacular hits, but in 1964 the even faster action and gadgetry of Goldfinger hit the screen in the wake of Beatlemania. Its characters, such as the Korean butler-assassin Odd Job and the female villain-turned-heroine Pussy Galore, suddenly became household names while the largely implied rather than explicit sexual content persuaded more than a few parents tacitly to allow their children to see the film. Goldfinger and its two immediate successors, Thunderball and You Only Live Twice, exposed American young people to a conflict that questioned some of the political realities of both their parents’ World War II and the current cold war. In these films, for example, the Soviet Union and its government are virtually never the nemesis to Western security or world peace. At times Russia is depicted as an implicit ally of the West against the far more evil forces of the mysterious renegade organization Spectre, which successively attempts to set off an atomic bomb in Fort Knox, launch a nuclear attack on Miami, and initiate World War III by forcing America and Russia into a confrontation that neither side really wants. In You Only Live Twice, the Japanese enemy of only two decades earlier is now depicted as a staunch ally of the West with noble, English-speaking officials commanding fearsome but heroic troops. Each of these films offered the intriguing possibility of a future American-Soviet alliance, with a hint that the cold war was far less pervasive or permanent than children had learned in school.
The huge success of the Bond series quickly influenced the television programs that young viewers found attractive. One of the most popular Bond spinoffs was NBC’s Man from U.N.C.L.E., which pitted a UN-like force of agents against a criminal outlaw conspiracy called Thrush. The two top U.N.C.L.E. agents are an American and a citizen of Soviet Georgia, played by David McCallum, who became the more popular character to young viewers. The spy mania of the mid-sixties also induced NBC to launch the groundbreaking I Spy, which paired a white agent, played by Robert Culp, and an African-American operative, played by Bill Cosby, in a series of global adventures largely filmed on location. Cosby became the first black star of a prime-time dramatic series, and the humorous yet socially equal bonding between the two characters became a hopeful sign of changing racial attitudes.
Aside from the action and adventure of numerous spy series, a combination of fantasy, comedy-horror, and science fiction became the subject of numerous cafeteria and after-school conversations. A quintet of comedies featuring comic relations between witches, aliens, genies, and more normal humans attracted even the youngest children. The Addams Family, The Munsters, Bewitched, My Favorite Martian, and I Dream of Jeannie took lighthearted and occasionally satiric views of situations that in earlier eras had produced terror. Samantha Stevens turned the witch as hag into a glamorous, caring housewife while Tim O’Hara’s Martian “Uncle Martin” turned the alien invader persona into a social-life counselor with extraordinary but often comic powers.
The more serious side of this genre emerged with the premiere of Star Trek in September 1966, and offered young viewers the tantalizing prospect of an interracial, even interspecies, crew and a basically optimistic view of the world that Boomer descendants would inherit. Most of the crew of the USS Enterprise seemed only slightly older than the Boomer viewers, and the plots frequently pitted the impetuous, youthful energy of Captain Kirk against the calm, logical wisdom of Mr. Spock, producing different yet complementary role models. Even young children thrilling to the threats posed by a Salt Creature or Klingon could not help but gain a sense that living in a rapidly changing yet essentially tolerant society was not an unfavorable experience for their own future.
The music, film, and television of the mid-sixties each, in their own way, contributed to a youth culture that challenged Boomers to believe change was good and at least some of the realities of the early postwar world might be challenged. The Great Society offered affluence, increasing educational opportunity, and hope for a more equitable society as Boomers approached adulthood. Yet the Johnson administration’s policies in Southeast Asia, the increasingly impersonal and overcrowded atmosphere of the American higher education system, and an emerging generational confrontation over the definition of acceptable personal behavior were all encouraging a fortunate young generation to question the system its elders had constructed.