Among the names not in the news were Gloria Steinem, Kate Millet, Germaine Greer, and Bobby Riggs, then an executive for the American Photograph Corporation. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had just been published, but Women’s Lib was, so to speak, still in the uterus. “Nobody,” reported that November 22 issue of Time, “is more noisily dissatisfied these days than that symbol of stability—the fortyish housewife with teen-age children and a reasonably successful husband,” but by the audiometers of the early 1970s the noise was almost imperceptible. The Seven College Conference, which had set up vocational workshops for college women “who are now ready for activity outside the home,” had found just fifty such women. None described males as porcine. The vocations were largely limited to education, library science, social work, and—this was regarded as a breakthrough—public relations. Anne Cronin, director of the conference, fielded questions about what men might think with the defensiveness bluestockings had shown since the fall of the Claflin sisters. “In only one or two cases,” she told a newspaperman, “have husbands gotten stuffy about their wives’ going back into careers. For the most part, they’re serious and understanding. We’re not breaking up any homes that wouldn’t break up anyway.”
The fashions of the gentle sex were neither bold nor forward. There were no pantsuits, not even for toiling airline stewardesses. Styles were set by Jacqueline Kennedy—the pillbox hat, the shoes with very pointed toes and very slender heels, the hair length just below the ears and softly curled or bouffant. Skirts were a little below the knee, and the waistless sheath was popular. It was all very feminine. Male supremacy was riding high. No protests followed the showing, as a late movie, of Cary Grant and Myrna Loy in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House—nobody wondered what Mrs. Blandings might want in her dream house—and the author of a magazine profile of Dorothy Kilgallen, describing her race around the world as a journalistic stunt in 1936, was allowed to say: “Just like a woman, Dorothy came in late.” In the summer of 1963 Ian Fleming’s The Spy Who Loved Me appeared in paperback with this choice passage:
All women love semi-rape. They love to be taken. It was his sweet brutality against my bruised body that had made his act of love so piercingly wonderful. That and the coinciding of nerves completely relaxed after the removal of tension and danger, the warmth of gratitude, and a woman’s natural feelings for her hero. I had no regrets and no shame…. [A]ll my life I would be grateful to him, for everything. And I would remember him forever as my image of a man.
The New York Times Magazine carried a report on the campus mood that third week of November 1963. In it, undergraduate editors generally found their fellow students to be detached, determined to succeed, and concerned less with issues than with security and their personal lives. In their hours of relaxation Tarzan movies were the current thing. The University of Chicago was trying to revive football. Two Cornell fraternity teams had just played a thirty-hour touch football game; the final score was 664–538. LSU coeds had staged a “drawers raid” on a men’s fraternity—all college residences were male or female, of course. Berkeley students, ever in the sexual vanguard, had asked the dispensary there to dispense contraceptives. They weren’t militant about it, however; the demand was negotiable and was in fact ignored.
Camelot had ended its Broadway run in January 1963. Tom Jones was awarded the Academy Award as the best picture of the year. Sidney Poitier was voted the best actor for his performance in Lilies of the Field; Patricia Neal for hers in Hud. Films drawing big audiences in November 1963 were Mary, Mary and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Popular television shows were Dr. Kildare, Andy Griffith, My Three Sons, Perry Mason, Hazel, Lucy, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Twilight Zone. NBC’s Monday movie scheduled for November 25—it would not be shown—was Singing in the Rain.
That year was the high point of the Ajax White Knight and White Tornado (“Cleans like a white tornado!”) commercials, according to Harry McMahan of Advertising Age. Piel’s Beer was presenting the Return of Bert and Harry. Maxwell House Instant Coffee offered a Cup and a Half. The Chevrolet commercial had a car riding on the water of a Venice canal, and Hertz commercials were dropping people into convertibles. Songs which were popular were “Go Away Little Girl,” “Dominique,” “If I Had a Hammer,” “Puff the Magic Dragon,” and “Blowing in the Wind.”
Best-selling fiction included Mary McCarthy’s The Group, Morris West’s The Shoes of the Fisherman, James Michener’s Caravans, and Helen MacInnes’s The Venetian Affair. Best-selling nonfiction included James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, from which the ecology movement may be said to date, and two books which would be affected by the events of the coming weekend, Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death and Victor Lasky’s J.F.K.: The Man and the Myth. The first of these acquired historical significance because Robert Kennedy, who had read it, was guided by it in choosing a coffin for his brother’s funeral. The Lasky book, which led the nonfiction best-seller lists, was a hatchet job and it would be withdrawn from the bookstores by its publisher.
In sports, Texas was ranked college football’s number one. Darrell Royal’s marvel that season was a shoeless field-goal kicker named Tony Crosby. The weekend before President Kennedy flew to Dallas, Crosby booted one 42 yards to beat TCU. Among the pros, Jimmy Brown of the Cleveland Browns was at the height of his remarkable powers. The New York Giants and the Chicago Bears were headed for a collision at the end of the National Football League season; Chicago would win the championship 14 to 10. In the American Football League finale, the San Diego Chargers would take the Boston Patriots 51 to 10. There was no superbowl. In hockey the big noise was Gordie Howe of the Detroit Red Wings. Having played 1,132 games in which he had lost twelve teeth and sustained wounds requiring 300 stitches, Gordie scored his 545th goal against the Montreal Canadiens in November 1963; it was a record. In basketball Bob Cousy of the Boston Celtics had hung up his jockstrap at the end of the 1962 season. As a consequence the Celts had been expected to be pushovers, but when Kennedy left the White House for the last time the 1963 season was two months old and the Celtics had lost only one game—by one point. Center Bill Russell was the big (six feet ten inches) reason.
***
Among the places not in the news that year were Woodstock, Watts, East Village, Grant Park, Wounded Knee, People’s Park, My Lai, Khe Sanh, Kent State, Biafra, Lincoln Park, Bangladesh, Attica, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Chappaquiddick, Bimini, Botswana, Qatar, and Watergate, though the Watergate office-and-apartment complex was under construction beside the State Department in Washington; President Kennedy’s funeral procession would pass it. Haight-Ashbury was a drab working-class district in San Francisco. No one living in the Haight, as it would later be known, was then familiar with the hippy terms acid-zap, freak out, superstar, mind-blowing, bummer, joints, munchies, turn on, tune in, rip off, drop out, commune, horse, crash pad, steam, zonked, love-in, be-in, share-in, flower power, trash, Panhandle Park, acid-American Dayglo art, role-playing, bunch-punching, past-blasting, guerrilla theater, psychedelic Satanism, and Christ vibes.
The New York Times carried a dispatch from its London bureau about “a group of four male pop singers now highly popular in Great Britain and the cause of numerous teen-age riots.” They were the Beatles. In November 1963 they were on their way to the United States, preceded by recordings of their first three hits: “She Loves You,” “Wanna Hold Your Hand,” and “Standing There.”
The Vietnamese generals who had staged the Saigon coup, David Halberstam reported, wanted to see General Harkins replaced, but the Pentagon expressed confidence that Harkins would fulfill his promises to beat the Viet Cong. Any suspicion that the United States might not be able to find a military solution in Vietnam was challenged by Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric in an address to the Business Council in Hot Springs, Virginia. The U.S. had such lethal power, Gilpatric said, that defiance of it would be an act of self-destruction.
Nicole Alphand,
the wife of the French ambassador, was on the cover of the November 22 Time. Jimmy Hoffa was being indicted. Charles de Gaulle was vetoing Britain’s entrance into the Common Market. Governor Ross Barnett was endorsing the findings of a grand jury which blamed the federal government for the recent disorders that had accompanied the admission of James Meredith to the state university in Oxford. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, having fallen in love during the filming of Cleopatra, were divesting themselves of their spouses and planning an early wedding. The Mona Lisa was in the United States, heavily chaperoned.
In 1963 there were 189,242,000 Americans (in 1973 there would be 209,000,000), of whom 70,000,000 were employed (1973: 80,627,000). Five percent were unemployed. The population center of the United States lay four miles east of Salem, Illinois, having moved fifty-seven miles to the west in the 1950s, the greatest westward drift since the 1880s. World War II was no longer the paramount experience of most Americans. Because of the huge number of war babies, the median age was 29.5.
A startling figure came from organized labor: between 1960 and 1962 unions had lost about a half-million members. The percentage of workmen belonging to them had dropped from 24.4 percent in 1955 to 22.2 percent in 1962, and Murray Kempton, no enemy of unions, was talking about the “twilight” of the labor movement.
One reason for this was the passage of time. Fewer and fewer workers could remember the heroic strikes of the 1930s. At the same time, the character of the work force was changing. In the years since V-J Day the number of blue-collar workers had decreased by four million while the number of white-collar workers—managers, professionals, salesmen, office workers—had grown by nearly ten million.
Furthermore, the blue-collar of November 1963 would hardly have been recognized as a fellow worker by his oppressed father of the 1930s. In June 1963 the weekly pay of the average production worker for slightly more than forty hours’ work passed $100—four times the Depression wage for the same job. About 40 percent of all families now earned more than $7,000 a year. John Brooks pointed out that the word “proletarian” had virtually disappeared from the language. “People think that prices are going up,” Caroline Bird wrote, “but it is their own standard of living that is rising.”
The best place to measure the long-range impact of boom was in the classroom. In his comprehensive study of economic development, Edward F. Denison put education at the very top of factors contributing to economic expansion. Between the Crash in 1929 and the end of the Kennedy Presidency, America’s investment in education increased tenfold, to 39 billion dollars a year.
The sociological implications of this can hardly be exaggerated. In 1900 only 4 percent of Americans of college age were enrolled in a college or university. In 1957 the figure was 32 percent; when Kennedy took office it was 40 percent, and when he died it was 50 percent. Andrew Hacker calculated that between 60 and 70 percent of all Americans now belonged to the middle class. It was, in fact, swiftly becoming the only class, the values of which were those which had once belonged to a small, highly educated upper middle class.
“The American economy has become so big,” a European diplomat said, “that it is beyond the imagination to comprehend.” U.S. editorial writers marveled at West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder, but a far greater economic miracle had been taking place at home. A few figures suggest its scope. Approximately 90,000 Americans were now millionaires—as against 27,000 in the early 1950s—and each year now the figure grew by 5,000. Since World War II American investments abroad had leaped from 12 billion dollars to 80 billion. The annual sales of a single corporation, General Motors, were 17 billion dollars, almost equal to a third of the Bundesrepublik’s Gross National Product. The increase alone of the U.S. Gross National Product in the first four years of the 1960s would be greater than the entire GNP of Germany in one year, 1964—122 billion dollars to 100 billion. The value of New York Stock Exchange investments had grown from 46 billion dollars to 411 billion since the war; Wall Street’s public relations men spoke glowingly of a “people’s capitalism,” and with considerable justification—the stocks listed on the Big Board were held by some twenty million Americans.
Social prophets of the time regarded this as an unmixed blessing. Some, like John Kenneth Galbraith, thought that profits should be distributed differently, but the assumption that affluence was benign was virtually unchallenged. Lenny Bruce was just an obscene comic one jump ahead of the law in 1963; Ralph Nader was an obscure lecturer in history and government at the University of Hartford. The New Left notion that the country was threatened not by international Communism but by technology and the sheer magnitude of American institutions—that the immensity of U.S. corporations and the Washington bureaucracy was mere obesity—lay quiet in the womb of time. The faith of liberals in big government was still strong.
“Change is the biggest story in the world today,” James Reston said at Columbia University in 1963. Nowhere was this more evident than in the growing mobility of American society. The great internal migration of the early 1940s had continued in the postwar years, fueled by the conclusion of southern blacks that a better life awaited them in the northern cities and by technological innovation. American agriculture in 1963 produced 60 percent more food than in 1940, while the number of hours needed to do the nation’s farming dropped from twenty million to nine million. As a consequence, by 1963 the number of Americans living in urban and suburban communities had reached 75 percent. The “farm bloc” no longer struck fear in the hearts of congressmen. The Grange had lost its political potency.
Even the vehicles of change were changing. The railroad depot was becoming one of the loneliest places in metropolitan America; for every passenger mile crossed on trains three were crossed on airplanes. (In 1973 the ratio would be one to thirteen.) Ninety percent of local transport was by auto; altogether, car traffic amounted to nearly 800 billion vehicle miles in 1963. The U.S. Department of Commerce reckoned that there were now 17,000 automobile graveyards in the United States, and with the completion of President Eisenhower’s nonstop, limited-access, high-speed interstate highway system, the great American traffic jam was beginning to sprawl across state lines.
Across the street from the flyblown train depots the lights in the old mansard-roofed city hotels were darkening. Over 4,000 of them had shut down completely since V-J Day. The travelers who bypassed them were staying instead at motels, which had been evolving from shabby prewar “tourist cabins” into lush pavilions offering all the traditional services of hotels and a few new ones. Black-and-white television had become standard equipment in all but the grubbiest motels (color TV was still a novelty). There were now 56.4 million television sets in the United States. That fact, combined with the discovery of 1960 census takers that only 8.5 percent of the population lacked radios, meant that a communications system of unprecedented magnitude was ready to report any news flash of national importance. In the early afternoon of November 22 the source for all information would be two wire service reporters clutching commandeered telephones at Dallas’s Parkland Memorial Hospital. An investigation conducted the following winter by the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago found that by 1 P.M. Dallas time, a half-hour after the shooting, 68 percent of all adults in the United States—over 75 million people—knew about it. Before the end of the afternoon 99.8 percent knew. Even those without television or radio had ready access to those with it.
On September 2, 1963, the CBS Evening News increased its nightly news show to thirty minutes and NBC followed its example on September 9, developments which were to have the most profound implications for the Vietnam War; to fill the extra time, networks would run footage showing, among other things, American soldiers lopping off Viet Cong ears. In November 1963 it had not come to that. There weren’t even any television commentators in Saigon then. That year just seventeen Americans were killed in Vietnam and 218 were wounded. The most interesting story from Saigon in the third week of November 1963 was a report on Co
lt’s new M-16 rifle. It was smaller and lighter than the M-14. An Army spokesman explained it was one of the reasons anti-Communist forces were wiping out the Viet Cong so effortlessly in guerrilla warfare.
Polls in foreign countries, tabulated by the United States Information Agency, showed U.S. prestige to be very high in 1963. Other stories from abroad were a report from Katanga, which was ending its two-year secession from the Congo, and an appraisal of Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s new Tory government in London. It was shaky; the country was still in a state of shock over Lord Denning’s report on the Profumo scandal, starring Christine Keeler, that year’s most eminent British prostitute.
At home the Dow Jones industrial average hovered around 732. A Roman Catholic prelate excommunicated New Orleans segregationists who refused to bow to the church’s endorsement of integration. None of them had heard of the Fathers Berrigan. Other names not in the news included Daniel Ellsberg, Clifford Irving, William Calley, Jimi Hendrix, James Earl Ray, Jeb Stuart Magruder, Angela Davis, Andy Warhol, Arthur Bremer, Vida Blue, Archie Bunker, Myra Breckenridge, and Spiro T. Agnew, who was then in the second year of a four-year term as a local official in Baltimore County. No one had heard of Jesus freaks, the Whole Earth Catalog, Crawdaddy, Screw, Money, hotpants, waterbeds, Sesame Street, Love Story, the Black Liberation Army, or Gay Lib.
The November 1963 issue of the Reader’s Digest anticipated the future with an article reprinted from Good Housekeeping: “Sleeping Pills and Pep Pills—Handle with Extreme Caution!” In the November 24, 1963, New York Times Magazine, which was fated to be one of its least read issues, Mary Anne Guitar analyzed some new expressions in subteen slang: “rat fink,” “triple rat fink,” a “real blast” (party), “fake out,” “tough toenails,” “the straight skinnies,” “Jeez-o-man,” “hung up,” “hairy,” “wuzza-wuzza,” and “gasser.” Of the preteens, who would become the college generation of 1973, Miss Guitar said that their coinages were no worse, and sometimes more imaginative, than their elders’: “According to reliable reports, ‘terrific’ is the word on the New Frontier.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 150