Disturbing History - The 1960's

Episode Date: September 13, 2026

Everybody knows the line: “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” It became shorthand for an entire generation, even though the man who said it was a 24-year-old Berkeley graduate student who would turn thirty just months after the decade ended.In the second installment of Disturbing History’s series on the American decades, Brian turns to the 1960s—a decade remembered for rebellion, protest, Vietnam, assassinations, the counterculture, and the moon landing. But, as with the 1950s, the familiar photograph only tells part of the story.The decade brought enormous change: poverty declined, college enrollment surged, Medicare became law, the birth control pill transformed American life, and hundreds of millions watched humanity reach the moon.Then the photograph gets turned over. There are hydrogen bombs accidentally dropped over North Carolina and Spain, a nuclear explosion in space, a Soviet launch disaster hidden for decades, and a submarine officer whose refusal to authorize a nuclear torpedo may have helped prevent catastrophe.There is Frances Kelsey standing against thalidomide, Rachel Carson challenging the chemical industry, Ralph Nader being followed by General Motors investigators, and a polluted river becoming a symbol of an environmental crisis.The episode also revisits some of the decade’s most enduring stories: the supposed thirty-eight witnesses to the murder of Kitty Genovese, the mythical baby boom after the New York blackout, the disputed Gulf of Tonkin incident, Project 100,000, the collapse of the Haight-Ashbury counterculture, Apollo 1, Soyuz 1, and the speech prepared in case the first astronauts on the moon never came home.Behind all of it were dangers that received far less attention: staggering highway deaths, Vietnam, and a 1968 influenza pandemic that killed tens of thousands of Americans while much of the country barely stopped to notice.The episode closes by asking six questions: What do we remember? What did we forget? What did we fear? What was actually killing us? What wasn’t the government telling us? And what did the decade hand forward?The answer ends inside a glass jar on December 1, 1969, as 366 blue capsules containing every possible birthday were drawn on live television to decide which young American men would be called to war first.The 1960s changed America. The disturbing part is how much of the story we remember incorrectly.Disturbing History is a Paranormal World Productions podcast hosted, researched, and produced by Brian King-Sharp.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact. This is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian.

Investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner. of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes the history is disturbing to us.

And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull it threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. victors. Sometimes, it's rewritten by the disturbed. Last episode opened with a quotation

about the young that gets passed around every time adults get upset about teenagers. The children now love luxury, it says. They have bad manners and contempt for authority. They disrespect their elders and contradict their parents and tyrannize their teachers. People attribute it to Socrates, and they share it to make a point that if the Greeks were saying this about kids 2400 years ago, then complaining about kids must be eternal and none of it should be taken too seriously. And Socrates never said it.

The earliest version anyone has ever traced was written in 1907 by a Cambridge graduate student summarizing the general tone of ancient complaints. And somewhere along the way, his summary got promoted to a quotation and a dead philosopher's name got stapled onto it. I bring it back up because the 60s has a quotation of its own, and it works the same way from the other direction.

Don't trust anyone over 30. Everybody knows that one. It turns up in every documentary and every retrospective about the decade, and it gets used as shorthand for a whole generation's attitude, proof that the kids of the 60s had written off everyone who came before them. It usually gets said in a tone that suggests the person quoting it has caught the 60s in the act. The line is real, which already puts it.

it ahead of Socrates. What's wrong is everything people think they know about it. It was said in November of 1964 by a 24-year-old graduate student at Berkeley named Jack Weinberg. Students had shut down part of the campus over a ban on political activity. Weinberg had been arrested in the middle of it, and a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle was interviewing him. Weinberg has told the story many times since. The reporter kept pushing the idea that the students were being manipulated by older radicals, by communists, by somebody behind the curtain. He got tired of it, and he told the man the students had a saying that they didn't trust anybody over 30. He meant it as a brush off. He was telling the reporter there was no adult pulling the strings, that this was

theirs. It got printed and it got repeated, and inside of five years it was the single most quoted sentence about the generation gap in the English language. And the man who said it, who was born in 1940, turned 30 in the spring of 1970, about four months after the decade ended. So the 50s complaint about the young got attributed to a dead Greek to make it sound eternal. And the 60s answer to that complaint got attributed to a whole generation when it was one tired kid trying to get a reporter off his back. Both of them tell you more about the people repeating them than about the people who supposedly said them.

Last episode, we started this series in the 1950s, and we ended it with the children hiding under their school desks, growing up into the long-haired, loud, disrespectful young adults, their parents were certain would tear it all down. This episode is the decade where that happened, or where everybody said it did. It's the decade the complaint changed hands. The way we're going to work, it is the same as last time. We're going to look at the front of the photograph first. then we're going to turn it over and read what's written on the back, and the front of this one opens in the snow.

On the night of the 19th of January, 1961, about eight inches of snow fell on Washington. Hundreds of people abandoned their cars on the roads in from Virginia and Maryland and walked. The army sent engineers onto Pennsylvania Avenue with flame throwers to burn the ice off the parade route so the new president's car could get through. At noon, when the ceremony started, it was around 22 degrees. Robert Frost had been asked to read a poem. He was 86 years old, and he'd written a new one for the day, and when he got up to the lectern and looked down at the page, the sun coming off

all that fresh snow was too bright for him to make out the words. He tried for a few lines. Then he put the paper down and recited a different poem instead, one he'd published 19 years earlier and knew from memory. A few minutes later, a 43-year-old man took the oath of office from 70-year-old man. John Kennedy was the youngest person ever elected to the presidency. Dwight Eisenhower that morning was the oldest man who had ever held it. Kennedy told the crowd the torch had been passed to a new generation of Americans, and he described that generation as born in this century, tempered by war and disciplined by a hard and bitter peace. He was talking about himself and the men who'd come home from Europe and the Pacific and taken off the uniform

and gone to work. He wasn't talking about anybody's children. Nobody on that platform said a word about the children. The oldest of the baby boom were 15 that morning, and there were something like 76 million of them coming, and the country had spent 10 years building the suburbs and the schools and the highways around them. That's the picture.

A young president in the snow, an old general handing him the keys, and the biggest generation in American history standing just outside the frame, about to walk into it. We'll start with the money, because that's where it starts every time. In 1960, the median American family earned a little over $5,600 a year. By 1970, that number was close to 9,900, and even after prices, an ordinary family finished the decade about a third better off than it started. The poverty rate, which the government only started measuring in 1959,

fell from about 22% to about 12% over the same 10 years, which is the largest drop in poverty ever recorded in this country in a single decade, before, or since. Unemployment at the end of 1969 was 3.5%. The lawn from the 50s was still there, and the house on it was still affordable on one paycheck, and now there was a color television inside it. The kids went to college in numbers nobody had ever seen. There were about 3.5 million students in American colleges in 1960 and close to 8.5 million 10 years later. And a good part of that was the state university systems doubling and tripling in size to hold them.

The generation the adults were about to spend 10 years calling lazy was, by every measure the government kept, the best educated group of people that had ever lived anywhere. The government did things in the 60s that it had been arguing about for 30 years. In July of 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare and Medicaid into law in Harry Truman's library in Missouri, with Truman sitting next to him and handed a man who'd first proposed National Health Insurance in 1945, the first Medicare card ever issued. 19 million Americans over 65 had hospital coverage inside a year. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 went on the books,

and we've spent whole episodes on what that fight cost, and I'm not going to walk it again here, except to say that the children who'd watched Little Rock on television as 10-year-olds were the young adults marching in Selma, and the law changed because they did. The medicine kept coming. Polio was effectively gone from the country by the middle of the decade, and a measles vaccine arrived in 1963. And in the spring of 1960, the Food and Drug Administration approved a pill that led a woman decide when to have a child, which is a sentence that had never been true before in the history of the species. The music was the best popular music anybody had made, and the adults knew it even

while they were complaining about it. On the 9th of February, 1964, four musicians from Liverpool played the Ed Sullivan Show, and something like 73 million people watched, close to four out of every 10 people in the country, more than had watched Elvis eight years earlier on the same stage. And on the 20th of July, 1969, two men walked on the moon while an estimated 600 million people watched on live television, which was about a fifth of every human being alive. Eight years earlier, the American program had exactly 15 minutes of manned flight to its name. That's the front of the photograph, and there's nothing on it that anybody has to be embarrassed about missing. For a family that had bought the house in 1955 and sent the kids to the state,

University in 1965 and watched the moon landing on the color set in 1969. The 60s was the decade the promise got kept. The back of the photograph starts with the same men who were standing on the platform in the snow and with what they were doing with the thing they were proudest of. The men who ran the 60s had built the bomb. That's the achievement they'd carried out of the war and the one they never stopped talking about. And by 1961 they had thousands of them. And they'd spent the 50s telling their children to hide under a desk in case the Russians ever used one. Four days after Kennedy took the oath in the early hours of the 24th of January, 1961, a B-52 bomber out of Seymour Johnson Air Force base was flying a routine airborne alert over eastern North Carolina with two hydrogen

bombs in its bay. The Air Force kept bombers in the air around the clock in those years, loaded so that no Soviet first strike could catch the whole force on the ground. Sometime around midnight the crew found a fuel leak in the right wing. They were told to burn off fuel and bring the airplane home. The leak got worse. The wing gave way, and somewhere around 10,000 feet, the bomber started coming apart in the air. Five of the eight men aboard got out alive. The bombs were marked 39s, each with a yield of a few megatons,

meaning each one carried something like 200 times the force of the bomb that fell on Hiroshima. Both of them dropped out of the airplane over farmland near a crossroads called Farrow, outside Goldsboro. The first bomb's parachute opened. It came down nose first, and the next morning it was found hung up in a tree, standing nearly upright in a field. The second bomb never got a parachute out. It hit the ground at high speed and broke apart, and the pieces went into a boggy patch of farmland. The Air Force dug and recovered the core. The secondary, the part of the part that holds the uranium, went deeper than anybody could reach, and it's still down there today at something like 180 feet. Under a piece of ground, the Air Force bought an easement on, so nobody can

ever dig it up. In 1969, an engineer at Sandia National Laboratories named Parker Jones wrote an internal report on that accident, and the report stayed classified until 2013, when the journalist Eric Schlosser pried it loose with a freedom of information request. What Jones wrote, is that the parachute bomb had gone through most of its arming sequence on the way down, and that one low voltage switch, the kind of switch that could have been shorted by the same electrical failure tearing the airplane apart, was what stood between that bomb and a full detonation over North Carolina.

Schlosser reads the memo as saying three of the four safety steps failed. Other people who've read the same document don't go that far. Whatever the count, the bomb was found with its arming sequence partly run, The Air Force said nothing about it at the time, and the report sat in a drawer for 44 years. The public was told a bomber had crashed. That was one week into the decade, and it wasn't the last one. On the 9th of July, 1962, the United States set off a hydrogen bomb in space, a test called Starfish Prime. A Thor rocket launched from Johnston Island in the Pacific, carried a warhead of about 1.4 megatons to an altitude of around 250, miles and detonated it there, above the atmosphere, to find out what a nuclear explosion did at that

height. 900 miles away in Hawaii, the sky lit up for several minutes in reds and greens, and that part was expected, and people in Honolulu held rooftop parties to watch it. What wasn't expected was that the pulse from the explosion knocked out something like 300 streetlights on Oahu, set off burglar alarms, and damaged a telephone microwave link between the islands. The electromagnetic pulse from a bomb at that altitude turned out to be far stronger than the physicists had predicted. The test also wrapped a new radiation belt around the planet, charged particles caught in the Earth's magnetic field, and in some regions it stayed there for

years. The very next day, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company launched Telstar One, the first satellite ever built to relay live television across the Atlantic. Two weeks later, it carried the first live transatlantic broadcast, and the whole world watched it work, and a British instrumental named after it went to number one in the United States that December. Telstar had flown straight up into Starfish Prime's radiation. Its transistors degraded through the fall. It failed in November. The engineers coaxed it back to life for a while, and it died for good in February of 1963. At least three other satellites were crippled or killed by the same belt, and it took months before anyone put the two together. Then there's the one in Spain.

On the 17th of January, 1966, a B-52 carrying four hydrogen bombs collided with the tanker refueling it at about 30,000 feet over the southern coast, and seven of the 11 men on the two aircraft died. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The four bombs came down on and around a farming village called Palomare's. Two of them hit the ground hard enough that their conventional explosive went off, and while there was no nuclear detonation, the blast scattered plutonium across roughly a square mile of tomato fields and hillsides. A third came down mostly intact in a dry riverbed. The fourth went into the Mediterranean, and it took 80 days to get it back. A local fisherman who'd watched it come down, told the Navy where to look. A research, submersible

named Alvin founded in March at about 2,500 feet, and during the first attempt to raise it, the bomb slipped out of its lines and was lost all over again. While it was still down there, the American ambassador to Spain, Angier Biddle Duke, went swimming in the sea off Palomars with a Spanish cabinet minister in front of the photographers to show the world the water was safe. The cleanup meant scraping the topsoil off the fields, sealing about 1,400 tons of Spanish dirt into steel drums and shipping it to South Carolina. Plutonium was still turning up in that soil in the 2000s. Two years after that, another B-52 on the same kind of alert went into the sea ice near the American base at Thule, in Greenland, with four more bombs aboard, and the conventional

explosives went off, and the plutonium went into the ice, and one crewman died. After Thule, the Air Force finally stopped keeping armed bombers in the air around the clock. In seven years, the United States had dropped, lost, or scattered pieces of at least 10 hydrogen bombs across North Carolina and Spain and Greenland, with one of them sitting on the bottom of the Mediterranean for the better part of a spring, and none of it happened because of the Russians. The Russians were doing worse and hiding it better. On the 24th of October 1960, three months before the inauguration, a Soviet marshal named Mitrefon Netalin, sat down on a stool a few dozen feet from a fully-fueled intercontinental ballistic missile. At the launch site, the world would come to know as Bikonur and waited for his engineers to fix it.

Moscow wanted it flown before the anniversary of the Revolution two weeks off. When problems showed up in the countdown, the right thing to do was drain the tanks and start over. and that would have cost days. So the order came down to work on it with the fuel aboard, and the fuel was nitric acid and a hydrazine compound, which ignite the instant they touch. About half an hour before the launch, a fault in the control sequence fired the second stage engine

while the rocket was still standing on the pad, with a full first stage under it, and the whole thing went up at once. The chief designer lived because he'd walked off to a bunker to smoke a cigarette. Netalin was identified by what was left of a metal that had melted into his chest. The Russian sources put the dead anywhere from about 75 to more than 120, and nobody will ever settle it, because the Soviet government announced that Marshall Nettelin had died in a plane crash

and kept the accident secret for the next 29 years. And the closest to anyone came to actually using one of these things, wasn't a president or a general. On the 27th of October 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Soviet submarine designated B-59 was near the American quarantine line in the Caribbean, submerged for days in tropical water with the air conditioning broken, and the temperature inside over 100 degrees, out of contact with Moscow, carrying one torpedo with a nuclear warhead.

American destroyers found it and started dropping practice depth charges, which was the Navy's announced way of telling a submarine to surface, and the men inside didn't know the charges were practice charges. What happened next comes almost entirely from a communications officer, a board named Vadim Orlov, who told it publicly in 2002. By his account, the captain decided a war had started above them and wanted to fire the torpedo, and firing it took the agreement of three officers, and one of them, A brigade chief of staff named Vasili Archipov, who happened to be riding on that boat,

wouldn't give it. The submarine surfaced instead. Nobody else who was in that compartment has confirmed the details, and Archipov died in 1998 without ever telling it himself. So that's what the men in charge were doing with the thing they were proudest of. They were dropping it on farms, setting it off in orbit, losing it in the sea, and on one October afternoon, leaving the decision to a Soviet officer nobody had heard of. All of that was going on in the same years those men were writing editorials about their son's hair. The 50s had a shelf full of things that were quietly killing people. The cigarettes and the lead paint and the DDT and the steel dashboard. And the 60s is the decade the bill for that shelf started coming due. It's also the decade the country found out what

happened to the people who tried to say so. In August of 1960, a pharmacologist and physician named Francis Oldham Kelsey took a job at the Food and Drug Administration as a medical officer reviewing new drug applications. She'd been there about a month when her first assignment landed on her desk, and it was handed to her as an easy one. The application came from the Merrill Company of Cincinnati

for a sedative already sold all over Europe and in Canada, under a dozen names, popular with pregnant women because it settled morning sickness. Morel wanted to sell it here as Kevodon. The generic name was thalidomide. Under the rules at the time, the agency had 60 days to object to an application, or the drug was automatically approved. Kelsey read the file and didn't like what she saw,

because the animal studies didn't line up with what the company was claiming about how the drug behaved in the body. Then a British medical journal ran a letter from a physician reporting nerve damage in the hands and feet of patients who'd been on it for a while, and she asked Morel to explain that. Then she asked what the drug did inside a pregnant woman, since pregnant women were exactly who the company was selling it to. And when the answer didn't satisfy her, she asked again. Every time the 60 days ran out, she sent the application back marked incomplete, which restarted the clock.

Merrill's people came to her office. They went over her head to her superiors and described her as a bureaucrat holding up a perfectly safe medication for no good reason. The file shows about half a dozen resubmissions over the following year. While all of that was going on, Merrill was handing the drug out anyway. Under the rules for investigational drugs, a company could ship samples to physicians for testing and didn't have to report much of anything. And Morel sent something like 2.5 million tablets to more than 1,200 American doctors who gave them to patients who in a lot of cases had no idea they were part of anything.

In November of 1961, a pediatrician in Germany named Wiedekin-Lens and an obstetrician in Australia named William McBride, working with no knowledge of each other, both connected thalidomide to a wave of babies being born with shortened or missing arms and legs. The German manufacturer pulled it that month. Morel withdrew its American application the following March. Worldwide, the number of children born damaged by thalidomide is usually put at around 10,000. In the United States, the number is 17, and those 17 came out of the sample pills. Kennedy gave Francis Kelsey the highest award the government hands to a civilian employee

in August of 1962. And two months later, Congress passed a law requiring a drug company to prove a drug actually worked before it could sell it, and to tell people when they were part of a trial. The company standing in her office calling her an obstacle had already put the drug in the hands of 1,200 physicians. And under the law as it stood, she couldn't stop them. What she stopped was that drug going on to the shelf of every pharmacy in America with a label on it that said it was safe. Cigarettes finally got their day, too.

On Saturday the 11th of January, 1964, the Surgeon General of the United States, Luther Terry, held a press conference in the auditorium of the State Department. He'd picked a Saturday so the stock market would have the weekend to absorb it. and the reporters were locked in the room until the briefing was over. The report was the work of ten scientists chosen with the tobacco industry's agreement and its conclusion was that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer in men, probably caused it in women, and was the most important cause of chronic bronchitis.

Terry had been a smoker himself. About 42% of American adults smoked that year. Two years earlier, the Flintstones had been sponsored by Winston. In the commercials Fred and Barney sneak off from the yard work to have a smoke behind the house while the wives do the chores. And Fred looks into the camera and tells the audience that Winston's taste good like a cigarette should. That was a cartoon in prime time in 1960 and 61. And it stayed that way until the show added a baby and switched to selling cereal.

The Surgeon General's report didn't ban anything. And the warning labels didn't come until the following year. and the television ads kept running until 1971. But that Saturday in 1964 is the day the generation that had smoked its way through the Depression, and the war was told in an official government document that the doctors in the camel ads had been wrong. The DDT fog trucks from the 50s got their reckoning from a marine biologist named Rachel Carson, and the reckoning is instructive mostly for what the industry did to her. Silent Spring came out on the 27th of September.

September 1962, after running in the New Yorker that summer, and its argument was that the pesticides being sprayed across American farms and suburbs were killing birds and fish and working their way up into people, and that the agencies responsible for regulating those chemicals were being run by the industry that sold them. Before the book was in stores, the Velsicol chemical corporation wrote to her publisher threatening to sue. Monsanto put out a parody called The Desolate Year, imagining in America overrun by insects because nobody was allowed to spray. Trade groups and their friends in the press called her hysterical, an amateur, and a spinster with no children who had no business worrying about the next generation.

That last one has been attributed for 60 years to Ezra Taft Benson, Eisenhower's Secretary of Agriculture, in a letter to Eisenhower. I couldn't find the letter, and I'd treat it as a story that's been repeated rather than a document that's been read. Carson was 55 and she had breast cancer, and it had spread, and she told almost nobody because she knew the industry would use it to say the disease had made her bitter about chemicals. She did the CBS Reports interview in April of 1963 wearing a wig, and three of the program's five sponsors pulled their advertising before it aired. Five weeks later, Kennedy's own science advisory committee released a report backing most of

what she'd written, and she said, She testified before a Senate subcommittee that June. She died on the 14th of April, 1964, and the country didn't ban DDT for another eight years. The steel dashboard got its reckoning from a 31-year-old lawyer nobody had heard of, named Ralph Nader, who published a book called Unsafe at Any Speed in November of 1965. Its first chapter was about the Chevrolet Corvair. A rear-engine compact General Motors had been selling since 1960. And it argued that the car's suspension made it prone to rolling over and that the company had known it for years.

General Motors responded by hiring private investigators. The company went through a law firm to retain a detective named Vincent Gillen, and Gillen's people interviewed Nader's friends and old classmates and asked whether he drank, whether he was in debt, whether he was anti-Semitic, whether he was a homosexual. They tailed him around the streets of Washington. On at least two occasions, women approached him in public places, once in a drugstore, and tried to get him to come somewhere private with them. All of it came out under oath in March of 1966, at a Senate hearing where the President

of General Motors, James Ruch, sat in front of the cameras and apologized to Ralph Nader for what his company had done. Six months later, Johnson signed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, the first federal safety standards for cars, and seat belts as standard equipment and padded dashboards and collapsible steering columns and the whole machinery of recalls traced back to that hearing. Nader sued General Motors for invasion of privacy and settled in 1970 for $425,000, which he used to fund the organizations he'd run for the rest of his life. And in June of 1969, the Cuyahoga River caught fire in Cleveland,

an oil slick on the surface lit most likely by a spark off a passing train, and it burned for about 30 minutes and did around $50,000 of damage to two railroad bridges, and the fire department put it out before the newspapers got a photographer there. That fire became the most famous river fire in American history, because Time magazine ran a story on it that August, with a photograph of a river in flames. And the photograph wasn't from 1969. It was from a fire on the same river in 1952, which had been far bigger, with flames five stories high, and which nobody outside Cleveland had paid the slightest attention to.

The Cuyahoga had burned at least a dozen times going back to the 1860s. What was different in 1969 was that the country was finally ready to be disgusted by it. Cleveland's voters had already approved a $100 million bond to clean the river up. the mayor Carl Stokes took reporters down to the water the next day. And within 18 months, Nixon had created the Environmental Protection Agency. The warnings from the 50s had all been right, and in the 60s the people who said so out loud got threatened by chemical companies, tailed by detectives, and called hysterical spinsters by former cabinet secretaries.

And then the laws got passed anyway, mostly because the evidence had gotten too heavy to hold down. Stay tuned for more disturbing. history. We'll be back after these messages. The 50s government warned Kodak about the fallout and didn't warn the dairy farmers. And the 60s government kept that habit. The first one is the war. On the 2nd of August 1964, the destroyer Maddox was working the Gulf of Tonkin off North Vietnam when three North Vietnamese torpedo boats came out after it. Two nights later, the Maddox and a second destroyer, the Turner Joy, reported they were under attack again. at night, in bad weather, on the strength of sonar and radar contacts, and with no visual confirmation

of anything. Within hours, President Johnson went on television shortly before midnight to announce that American ships had been attacked on the high seas and that he'd ordered air strikes. Three days later, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, 416 to nothing in the House, and 88 to 2 in the Senate. The second attack almost certainly was. never happened. The doubt started that same night aboard the ships. The captain of the Maddox sent a message saying the whole thing might have been over-eager sonar men and freak weather effects and that he wanted a complete evaluation before anybody acted on it, and that message reached Washington before the airstrikes launched. George Ball, the number two man at the State

Department, wrote in his memoir years later that Johnson told him in private that for all he knew those sailors had been shooting at flying fish. which is Ball's recollection of a private conversation and the only source for it. The document that settled the question came from inside the National Security Agency, where a historian named Robert Hanyak went back through the intercepts of North Vietnamese radio traffic the agency had fed to Washington that day, and concluded in a study published in 2001 and declassified in 2005, that they'd been mistranslated and selectively assembled in a way

that made it look like an attack was underway, when the traffic showed nothing of the kind. He didn't find that anyone had done it on orders from above. He found people under enormous pressure who wanted the analysis to line up with what the president had already said on television. The resolution carried the war for the next six years. By the end of 1969, close to 50,000 Americans had died in it, most of them in their early 20s, which is to say most of them were the kids the country had seen. spent the decade complaining about. The second one is who got sent. In August of 1966,

the Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara announced a program that would lower the mental and physical standards for military service so that men who'd scored too low on the entrance test to be taken could be brought in. He called it Project 100,000, after the number of men a year it was meant to add, and it ran until the end of 1971 and brought in something over 3,000 50,000 of them. The Pentagon called them New Standards men. McNamara's public framing was that the service would lift these men out of poverty, teach them a trade, and send them home better off. What it actually did, according to the Defense Department's own later reviews, and to a book-length study by a veteran named Hamilton Gregory, who went through basic training alongside some of them,

was put a large number of men with very low reading ability, and in a lot of cases documented intellectual disability into infantry units in a shooting war, because infantry was where the standards were lowest, and the need was highest. The Defense Department's own analysis found they died at a higher rate than the rest of the force, and the figure that gets cited most often as around 5,500 killed. Congress never held a hearing on it while it was running. A documented number of those men couldn't read the form they signed on the way in. The third one is what the kids who did the fighting were told about how it was going, and that's a story for the 70s episode,

because the paperwork that proved it didn't come out until 1971. What I'll say here is that the men who'd fought the war they were proud of spent the 60s sending their sons to a war they were lying about, on a resolution passed on an attack that didn't happen. There's a habit the 50s had that the 60s kept, and it's worth its own section, because the 60s is where it did the most damage. It's the habit of the 60s.

of the country's most respected newspaper, printing a story that felt true without checking whether it was, and then everybody building on it for 50 years. On the 13th of March, 1964, at about 320 in the morning, a 28-year-old bar manager named Catherine Genevice was attacked outside her apartment building in the Q Garden section of Queens. Everyone who knew her called her kitty. A man named Winston Mosley stabbed her on the sidewalk, left, came back a few minutes later. found her in a rear vestibule of the building where she'd tried to get inside, stabbed her again, and sexually assaulted her.

She died on the way to the hospital. Two weeks later, the New York Times ran a front page story under a headline saying 37 people had watched the murder, and not one of them had called the police. The body of the story said 38. It described three separate attacks over roughly half an hour, and quoted a police inspector saying a single phone call could have saved her life. The paper's Metropolitan editor, Abe Rosenthal, turned it into a book that year called 38 witnesses, and that number has been taught in every introductory psychology course in America for 60 years.

Two researchers named John Darley and Biblatane built a whole field of study on it, the bystander effect. The idea that the more witnesses there are to an emergency, the less likely any one of them is to act. And for the rest of the decade, whenever anybody wanted to say the country had gone, gone cold, that people didn't care about their neighbors anymore, that something in the American character had gone soft and selfish. Q Gardens was the example they reached for. The story the Times printed isn't what happened. In 2007, three British psychologists went back through the trial record and the original police reports. Others followed, and in 2016 when Mosley died,

the Times itself ran an obituary acknowledging its original account had been flawed. The record shows two attacks rather than three. The first one happened on the sidewalk on Austin Street, and a man named Robert Moser heard it, threw open his window and shouted down at Mosley to leave that girl alone, and Mosley ran. Genevesee wounded got herself around the corner and into the vestibule at the back, out of sight of nearly every window on the block, and that's where Mosley found her when he came back. At least one neighbor did call the police during the second attack, after some delay, and a woman named Sophia Farrar went down to that vestibule and held Kitty Genovese in her arms while they waited for the ambulance.

She died in the arms of a neighbor who'd come down the stairs to find her. The 38 appears to have come from a police estimate of how many people in the surrounding buildings might have heard something at some point during the night. There's no list of 38 names. Most of the people who heard anything heard a brief commotion in the street, saw nothing when they looked, and went back to bed. And several told investigators they figured it was a drunken argument and given what a stabbing on a sidewalk at three in the morning sounds like from four floors up,

I don't think that's an unreasonable thing to have thought. I spent 16 years taking calls, and my read on Q Gardens is the same as my read on what happens in every neighborhood, in every city on every night of the year. A few people heard something they couldn't identify. One of them yelled out the window, and it worked for a minute. The rest of it happened where nobody could see.

And in 1964, there was no number to call anyway, because 911 didn't exist. If a person in Queens wanted the police in the middle of the night, they looked up the precinct in the phone book, or dialed the operator and waited. The first 911 call in the country wasn't placed until February of 1968 in Haleyville, Alabama, as a demonstration. And the number wasn't in general use in New York.

until years after that. Winston Mosley was arrested six days after the murder in the middle of a burglary, confessed to killing Kitty Genovese and two other women, and died in prison in March of 2016 at 81, after 52 years inside. The same newspaper did it again, 18 months later. On the 9th of November, 1965 at 16 minutes past five in the afternoon, a protective relay at a hydroelectric station on the Canadian side of Niagara, Niagara Falls tripped. It had been set to a threshold lower than the line it was guarding could carry.

And when the evening load rose past that setting, the relay opened. The power jumped to the other lines. Those tripped in turn. And inside about 13 minutes, the cascade had taken down the grid across Ontario and New York and New England and parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. 30 million people lost power. In New York City, it stayed off as long as 13 hours in places, and something like 800,000 people were in the subway when the lights went out. Nine months later, the Times ran a story reporting that several New York hospitals were seeing a sharp jump in births, and the story connected the two directly, and the blackout baby boom became a piece of American folklore that still gets repeated. In 1970, a sociologist named

Jay Richard Udry pulled the actual birth records for the city and compared that nine-month window to the same window in the years on either side. There was no increase at all. The Times had called a handful of hospitals. The hospitals had said they were busy, and nobody had checked it against anything. I put those two next to each other because the Genovese story is the one the decades adults used to prove the country had lost its soul. And it was wrong.

And the blackout story is the one everybody still tells at parties, and it was wrong. And both came from the same building in the same two years, and nobody at the building checked either one. which brings me to what the decade was afraid of, and it was afraid of its children. In the 50s, the fear had a comic book and a boy from Memphis. In the 60s, it had hair. Newsweek's write-up of that Sullivan broadcast called the Beatles a nightmare to look at, and something close to a disaster to listen to,

and described their hair as pudding bowls. William Buckley, in a syndicated column that September, wrote that they weren't merely awful but so unmusical and so unmusical, and so insensitive to the art that they qualified as crowned heads of anti-music. Those were two of the most prominent voices in American journalism, and that's what they made of the most popular musical act in the history of the medium. The hair ended up in federal court. In 1966, three boys who played in a band together

were barred from their Dallas High School for wearing their hair over their ears and collars. The way they'd seen it done on Sullivan. Their family sued, and the case went to the first. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled in 1968 that a school could regulate the length of a boy's hair, and the Supreme Court declined to hear it. Justice William Douglas dissented from that refusal, and what he wanted to know was what business the government had, telling a citizen how long his hair could be. Two years after Jack Weinberg's interview, a former actor named Ronald Reagan ran for Governor of California on a promise, among other things, to clean up the mess at Berkeley,

and he won by about a million votes. By the fall of 1967, he was giving speeches describing a hippie as somebody who dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah. That line is attributed to him in a great many accounts, and the Reagan Library has never disowned it, but I couldn't pin it to a dated transcript. The adult's confusion about the whole thing

is written down in one magazine in one year. On the 8th of April, 1966, Time put out an issue with a cover that had no photograph on it for the first time in its history. A black background with three words in red asking whether God was dead. The story inside was about a movement in academic theology most people had never heard of, and it drew more letters than any cover the magazine had ever run. Eight months later, for its last issue of the year, the same magazine named Its Man of the Year,

and the Man of the Year was every American age, 25 and under. The editor's reasoning was that by their count, close to half the population, now fell into that bracket, and that this was the best educated and best-fed generation in history, and it was about to take over. The same editors, most of the men in their 40s and 50s produced both of those covers, one asking whether the thing that held the country together was gone, and the other handing the country to a group of people whose oldest members had just turned 20, and the kids, for

their part, had already started to say the same thing about the ones coming up behind them. In the summer of 1967, somewhere around 100,000 young people came to the Hate-Ashbury District of San Francisco, and time put them on the cover in July, and called it a subculture with a philosophy, and the neighborhood's free clinic, which had opened that June, was treating drug reactions and hepatitis and venereal disease and plain malnutrition by the hundreds. On the 6th of October, 1967, a group in the neighborhood called the Diggers, who'd been running free food lines and free stores on those streets since before the crowd showed up, held a funeral. They built a coffin, filled it with beads and flowers and cut hair and the rest of the props of the movement,

and carried it down Hate Street in a procession, under banners announcing the death of hippie, devoted son of mass media. They'd picked the date on purpose. It was one year to the day after California had made LSD illegal. So by October of 1967, the people who'd started the thing had held its funeral, on the grounds that the kids who'd come after them had ruined it. The complaint had changed hands inside a single summer. The paranoia ran both directions. A month after the diggers buried the hippie, a New York publisher put out a book called

Report from Iron Mountain on the possibility and desirability of peace. It presented itself as a leaked government study. the work of 15 unnamed experts who'd met in secret in an underground facility and concluded that war did things for a country no other institution could, that it steadied the economy and controlled the population, and gave the state its authority, and that peace would be a catastrophe unless substitutes could be found. Stay tuned for more disturbing history.

We'll be back after these messages. The substitutes it discussed in a tone of perfect seriousness included manufactured threats from outer space, environmental doomsday campaigns, and bringing back slavery. The whole thing had been written by a freelance writer named Leonard Lewin, with help from a small circle around a satirical magazine, and he'd written it well enough that people couldn't tell. It became a bestseller and got translated into more than a dozen languages.

Newspaper columnists treated it as genuine, and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who was in on the joke, reviewed it under a pen name and vouched for it. Lewin confessed in the New York Times book review in 1972. In the 90s, a far-right publishing operation reprinted it as a suppressed government document anyway, and it went around militia circles as proof of exactly the thing Lewin had invented, and he sued them for copyright infringement, and won.

The adults thought the kids were going to burn the country down. The kids thought the adults were running it out of a bunker. A made-up book about the bunker sold out of the bunker, sold out of the its printing and the funeral for the hippie came with a coffin. The one thing the decade was right to be afraid of was the same thing the 50s had been right to be afraid of, which was a machine that wasn't ready. Three weeks into 1967 on the 27th of January, three astronauts were strapped into an Apollo command module on the launch pad at Cape Kennedy for a rehearsal of the countdown. The rocket underneath them wasn't fueled, so the test was rated low risk, and the fire and

rescue crews weren't standing by in position. The cabin was filled with pure oxygen at a pressure higher than sea level, which was the design, and the hatch opened inward, and it took a crewman with both hands free, and nothing in the way about 90 seconds to get it open under the best conditions anyone could arrange. At about 6.30 in the evening, a wire under the left-hand seat arched. In pure oxygen at that pressure, the fire went from a spark to filling the cabin in a matter of seconds. The Crew's last transmissions were a report of fire in the cockpit and a call to get them out. Virgil Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee were dead inside of about half a minute, and it took the pad crew five minutes to get that hatch open.

Grissom had said two years earlier that if the crew died, they hoped people would accept it and that it wouldn't delay the program because the conquest of space was worth the risk of a life. Nasa tore the spacecraft down and rebuilt it, changed the hatch, changed the atmosphere on the pad and didn't fly another crew for 20 months. Three months later, the Soviets lost Vladimir Kamarov. He flew Soyuz 1 on the 23rd of April, 1967, in a ship so new that every unmanned test before it had had problems.

One of the two solar panels didn't open. The ship had trouble holding its orientation. The mission was cut short after a day, and Kamarov brought it down by hand. The main parachute didn't come out of it. of its container. The reserve shoot came out and tangled with the drogue, and the capsule hit the ground near Orenberg at highway speed and burned. He was the first human being to die on a space flight. There's a widely repeated version of that dissent from a book published in 2011 that leaned on a former Soviet intelligence source in which Kamarov curses the engineers and

the Kremlin over the radio on the way down. I've seen no primary document that supports it, and the Russians who've studied the flight disputed. What's documented is the failed shoot, the open coffin at the funeral, and the 18 months before the Soviets flew another man in a Soyuz. Kamarov's ashes went into the Kremlin wall, and the Apollo crew was buried at Arlington and West Point. Two years later, the same program that had killed Grissom and White and Chaffee on the pad put Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon,

and the men in the White House were ready for it to go the other way. That July, a speechwriter named William Sapphire wrote a two-page memo to the chief of staff with the subject line in event of moon disaster, and it sat in the national archives until a reporter came across it in 1999. It was a speech for Nixon to read if Armstrong and Aldrin got stranded on the surface and couldn't get back up to Michael Collins in the command module. It described them as men who'd gone to the moon to explore in peace and would stay there to rest in peace. and it laid out the procedure. The president would telephone the widows before the speech.

NASA would cut off communication with the two men, and a clergyman would perform the right of burial at sea, commending their souls to the deepest of the deep. Fortunately, nobody had to read it. When the three of them were brought ashore in Honolulu on the 24th of July, they filled out a customs form. The standard general declaration any flight crew arriving from abroad filed at the time. and NASA has published it.

It lists the flight as originating at the moon, with a stop at Honolulu. Under cargo, it says moon rock and moon dust samples, and where the form asks about any condition aboard that might lead to the spread of disease, somebody wrote, to be determined. Then they went into a sealed trailer, and from the trailer into a sealed laboratory in Houston, for 21 days, because nobody could rule out that they'd brought something home. What was actually killing people in the 60s is the same list as the 50s, with one line added,

and the added line is the one nobody remembers. The cars killed more every year. In 1969, a little over 53,000 Americans died on the roads, close to the number of Americans who died in the entire Vietnam War, and Nader's law was two years old and hadn't caught up to the fleet yet. The cigarettes kept killing, because the ads kept running. The war killed close to 50,000 by the end of the decade. And the country was in a pandemic, and almost nobody remembers it.

A new strain of influenza was identified in Hong Kong in July of 1968. It reached the United States in September, most likely carried by troops coming home from Vietnam through California. And it spread through the fall and peaked in December and January. And by the time it had run its course, it had killed something like 100,000 Americans and around a million people worldwide, which are the numbers the Centers for Disease Control still uses. Nothing closed, and the newspapers barely covered it. The schools stayed open. Apollo 8 went around the moon at Christmas right at the peak, and the following August, when 400,000 people gathered in a farm field in upstate New York for a music festival, that virus was still moving through the country.

1968 had Tet and King and Robert Kennedy and Chicago in it, and 100,000 dead. And a hundred thousand dead Americans from the flu, didn't make the list. Then there's the one that changed how my own line of work operates. On the night of the 31st of July, 1966, a 25-year-old engineering student at the University of Texas named Charles Whitman killed his mother in her apartment in Austin, then drove home and killed his wife in her sleep, and left typed and handwritten notes at both places. The next morning, he packed a foot locker with rifles and a shotgun and pistols and several hundred rounds. And several hundred rounds of ammunition, along with food and water and toilet paper, wielded into the main building on campus, rode the elevator to the observation deck of the tower, killed a receptionist and two

visitors on the way, and started shooting at the people on the ground 300 feet below him. He kept it up for about 96 minutes. He killed 14 people from that tower and wounded more than 30, and one of the wounded died of his injuries 35 years later. Austin had no tactical unit, because no city in America had one. The men who ended it were two patrol officers, Houston McCoy and Romero Martinez, who went up the tower with a civilian named Alan Crum, who'd volunteered to go with them,

came out onto the deck and shot Whitman at close range. Every department in the country that watched Austin on the evening news built a special weapons team over the next few years, and that's where the tactical team in every department in the country, including the one I served in, came from. In one of the notes he'd left the night before, Whitman said he'd been having irrational thoughts and terrible headaches, that he didn't understand himself anymore, and that he wanted an autopsy after he was dead to find out whether there was something physically wrong with him. Five months earlier, he'd told a university psychiatrist in a session that's in the record,

that he'd been thinking about going up the tower with a deer rifle and shooting people, and the psychiatrist wrote it down and told him to come back in a week, and Whitman never went back. The autopsy found a tumor in his brain. The governor appointed a commission of physicians, and what they concluded was that the tumor could have contributed to his inability to control his actions, and that it was impossible to say whether it had. The medical record stops at that sentence.

The tumor and the headaches and the note were all real. So were the two women he killed in their beds the night before. And I don't think a man who lost control of himself for 96 minutes on a tower accounts for what happened in those two bedrooms. When I add this decade up, it comes out in the same columns as the last one. What we remember is the moon, the Beatles on Sullivan,

the college campus is filling up, the poverty rate cut in half, Medicare, the pill, the Civil Rights Act, and a family that had bought the house in the 50s watching the promise get kept on a color television. That part was real, and for the family in that living room,

it was the best decade anybody had ever handed. them. What we forgot is that the men who ran it were dropping hydrogen bombs on North Carolina farms and Spanish tomato fields and Greenland Ice, setting one off in orbit and killing the satellite they launched the next day, and that on one afternoon in October of 1962, the decision not to fire a nuclear torpedo at the United States Navy was made by a Soviet officer nobody had heard of on a submarine with no air conditioning. What we feared was hair and a band and a hundred 100,000 kids in San Francisco who'd already held their own funeral by October and a government bunker that turned out to be a freelance writer's joke. What was actually killing us was 53,000 a

year on the highways. The cigarettes the ads were still selling. A war passed on an attack that never happened and a flu that killed 100,000 Americans in a year. Nobody had room to notice. What the government wasn't telling us is that the second Tonkin attack was a mistranslansel. that 350,000 men who couldn't pass the entrance exam were sent to the infantry anyway and died at a higher rate, and that the bomb in the tree outside Goldsboro had most of its arming sequence run, a fact the Air Force kept in a drawer for 44 years. And the things it did tell us. The 38 witnesses who never existed and the babies who were never born, nine months after the blackout, came from the newspaper everybody trusted most, and nobody there checked. And the last college,

the one this whole series runs on is what the decade handed forward. Our imaginary American born in 1940 turned 20 is this decade open, and I've got a real one to stand in for him now, because Jack Weinberg was born in 1942. He said the line about 30 when he was 24. He'd watched Little Rock at 17 and folded up under a desk for Bert the Turtle at 11. By the time the decade ended, he'd been arrested, quoted in every newspaper in the country.

and turned into the voice of a generation on the strength of one sentence, he'd meant as a joke. And he was about to turn 30, and the kids at Woodstock were 18 and had never heard of him. In that same decade, handed those kids a draft. On the 1st of December, 1969, at Selective Service headquarters in Washington, the government held the first draft lottery since 1942, and it went out live on television. Every day of the year, including the 29th of February, was written on a slip of paper and sealed inside a blue plastic capsule,

and the 366 capsules went into a big glass jar. Capsules were drawn out one at a time, and the order they came out in was the order in which men born on those days would be called up. Every man born between 1944 and 1950, every American man between 19 and 26, had a birthday in that jar. A congressman from New York named Alexander Perney, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee reached in and drew the first one, and the date inside it was the 14th of September.

The last capsule out of the jar, number 366, was the 8th of June, and a man born on that day was never going to be called at all. The drawing turned out not to be random. The capsules had been loaded month by month, January 1st, and December last, and hadn't been mixed nearly enough. So when statisticians went through the results, the birthdays from the end of the year had come out significantly earlier than the birthdays from the beginning. A man born in December drew an average number around 120. A man born in January drew around 200.

The finding was published in the journal Science, and the government changed the procedure the following year. The men whose birthdays were in that jar had been born between 1944 and 1950. The oldest of them had been 17 on the morning Robert Frost put down his poem in the glare, and the youngest had been ten. They were the children the 50s had raised on the promise that they lived in the freest and most decent country on earth, and the 60s had spent 10 years telling them they were soft, and then it put their birthdays in a jar on live television and reached in. Those were the kids who were going to ruin everything.

Some of them went to Canada, and some of them went to Vietnam, mom and some of them went to Woodstock and all of them the ones who came home grew up and bought houses and had children of their own and then they started complaining about their children we'll save that for next time when we travel back to the 1970s