The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  “I drove from Rhode Island with a group of friends. When we got on the New York Thruway, we began to see the first signs of how huge it would be—Volkswagens full of kids, motorcycles, hitchhikers carrying signs. Everybody waving at everybody else as people passed. The first traffic jam—about twenty miles from White Lake, on 17B—set the tone. It was a cheerful traffic jam. People talked from car to car. People came up and asked to sit on your hood. Somebody in our car spoke to a girl in a blue Volks next to us and, not having yet caught the tone, remarked that the jam was a drag. ‘Oh, no,’ she said quickly. ‘Everyone here is so beautiful.’ She gave us some wine, and we handed over peaches in exchange.

  “We inched along for two hours. Cars began parking on the roadside. Boys and girls would just sit on the hillsides with a bottle of wine. They had lots of time, and they were cheerful and happy. The feeling wasn’t ‘Oh, God, what a jam!’ but ‘Wow, look how many of us there are!’ There was a gathering feeling of awe that our group was this big, that the grapevine was this big. We were exhilarated. We were in a mass of us.

  “Finally, we got to a huge parking lot. It cost five dollars and it was already full. We were the last car in. We parked and started walking. This was 10 P.M. Thursday. There would be no music until Friday afternoon. We walked along in a stream, exchanging comments with every passerby. There were no houses, no local folk staring at us. People became aware of the land around us. Somebody said, ‘It’s like being part of an encamped army that has won.’ We felt as though it were liberated territory. We came to the top of a hill and looked down on a huge meadow—a natural amphitheatre—where the Festival would be. In the center, people were building the stage. People were lying around in sleeping bags or sitting around little fires. The grass was fresh with dew, and the stars were bright. It was wonderful. We went on and found a campground, full of people sitting around or sleeping or eating. We unpacked our gear. For fifty cents, we bought ‘macroburgers’ that some communal people from California had cooked. They were made of soybeans, rice, and vegetables—no meat—between slices of rye bread. The California people also gave us slices of huge cucumbers they had grown themselves. It all tasted good. The girl serving the macroburgers gave us water in a plastic cup. She said, ‘Save the cup. Somebody else may want it.’ The campground was full of the most ingenious shelters. One huge canopy was made of scraps of polyethylene fastened to scraps of wood. Beneath it about forty people were lying down, snuggled against each other, singing and playing music. There was a fence across the campground, and one tough guy—the only tough guy I saw—started to tear down the fence, but people remonstrated with him. They told him it was the farmer’s fence and it wasn’t necessary to take it down. He was only allowed to take down one panel to make an exit. It was like that through the whole Festival. Where the mass needed an opening, an opening was made. There was no needless destruction. It was a functional thing. There was a woods between us and the amphitheatre. Two paths through the woods had been marked with strings of Christmas lights. One was called the Gentle Path and the other the Groovy Way. Nobody knows who named them. Late that night, we went to sleep in our sleeping bags with the sound of singing and guitars and voices all around us. I slept well.

  “In the morning, it was raining lightly, but it didn’t last. I went looking for water. I found a tank truck, and there I met a Rhode Island girl I knew who was there brushing her teeth. She hugged me, and the crowd laughed. We breakfasted with some people from the Santa Fe Hog Farm Commune. They were serving out of a great vat of boiled wheat and raisins, scooped onto a paper plate with a dollop of honey on it. It was delicious. It held me all day.

  “That day, I just wandered around. I found a group of people who were blowing up a red balloon five feet across, so that their friends could find them, but lots of other people had the same balloons, so these huge red globes dotted the fields. Various groups of people had put up amusement devices for everybody to use free. One was called the Bumblebee Nest. It consisted of forked branches ingeniously fastened together with wooden pegs to support a platform of hay. It was just for the pleasure of sitting on. Somebody had an enclosure of chickens and had brought chicken feed. It was fun to feed the chickens. Somebody else had brought rabbits and made a big pen with benches in it, so you could sit and watch the rabbits and feed them. There was a huge tepeelike construction with a flat stone hung from ropes that you could stand on to swing. All these were free things that people had taken the trouble to provide for others. Most of the day, people wandered around and talked. I read and played cards. In the late afternoon, the music began. The amphitheatre was a mass of people, but there was no pushing. The sound system was excellent. We listened all afternoon and evening. The music was great, and the audience sang and clapped the rhythm. The performers loved it. There was a terrific feeling of unity between the crowd and the stage.

  “The next morning, we woke to find it raining hard. Some boys who had got soaked took off their clothes and walked around naked. It didn’t bother anyone. It brought home the idea that this was our land. Nobody was busting them. I was struck by how harmless it was—how the violence of sexuality was missing. The naked boys looked harmless and innocent.

  “The concessionaires—hot-dog stands and so on—started out with prohibitive prices, and the kids complained to the management. All day, there were announcements from the stage about where to get free food. Eventually, there was an announcement that the concessionaires had knocked their prices down to cost.

  “It rained hard the early part of the day, but the reaction of the crowd was ‘Don’t fight it.’ We sat and listened, soaking wet. The rain really did something to reinforce the spirit. There were radios on the campground, and we began to hear news reports that we were in the midst of a mass disaster. At every report, the crowd around the radio laughed. It was such a splendid example of the division between us and the outside world. It dramatized the whole crazy split that the world thought we were having a disaster and we knew we were having no such thing.

  “About three o’clock, the sun came out. Everyone took off his clothes to dry. I stripped to my shorts. We lay in the sun and listened to fantastic music. The most popular song was against the Vietnam war. Just as it finished, an Army helicopter flew over. The whole crowd—all those hundreds of thousands of people—looked up and waved their forefingers in the peace sign, and then gave a cheer for themselves. It was an extraordinary thing. Soon after that, the farmer who owned the land was introduced, and he got a huge cheer, too.

  “Late that afternoon, a ‘free stage’ began acting as a travellers’ aid, where volunteers arranged free rides for people and helped to solve problems. They took up a collection for a ten-year-old boy who had lost his money. They returned a lost child to her mother. They asked for volunteers to pick up garbage, and they made announcements warning those leaving to be careful on the way out—not to take grass with them, because of busts on the highway, and so on.

  “There was still another day to go, but I had to leave. We got our stuff together and jammed three hitchhikers into our car and drove it out of the mud. As we went out, people called to us, ‘Don’t leave! Don’t leave!’ Nobody wanted to let go of what we’d had there. What we’d had was a fleeting, wonderful moment of what you might call ‘community.’ ”

  Donald Malcolm, Lillian Ross, and E. B. White

  NOVEMBER 30, 1963 (THE ASSASSINATION OF JOHN F. KENNEDY)

  THE DEATH OF a President enters the house and becomes a death in the family. No other public death produces so personal an alteration in one’s world. Tritely, one remembers the precise spot on which one stood, resisting acceptance and grief. For us, it was a patch of crowded sidewalk. The circle of knowledge, whose center was a weak transistor radio, expanded in murmurs (“They say…They say…They say”), engulfed us, and moved on, until we were left in the silence of irrevocable fact, exchanging empty looks with our companions. Speech, when it returned, was not at first commensurate with national disaster, being li
ttle more than the incoherent responses of private pain common to all who have lost a father, a brother, or a son.

  · · ·

  Our last glimpse of President Kennedy was in Miami, where, four days before his death, he was engaged in the same kind of mission that took him to Dallas. He was slated to arrive at Miami International Airport at 5 P.M. on Monday, November 18th, to speak there to a crowd of voters, rounded up mostly by local Democrats, and, a couple of hours later, to address a convention of the Inter-American Press Association at the Americana Hotel, with appearances at a couple of social-political gatherings squeezed in between—all this after Saturday at Cape Canaveral, Sunday at Palm Beach, and all day Monday at Tampa, there inspecting MacDill Air Force Base, lunching at Army–Air Force Strike Command Headquarters at the base, journeying by helicopter to Lopez Field, in downtown Tampa, and speaking there on the fiftieth anniversary of commercial aviation, addressing the Florida State Chamber of Commerce, addressing a meeting of the Steelworkers’ Union, and riding around the Tampa streets, shaking hands through it all with everybody he could reach. The main danger that crossed our mind as we went out to the Miami airport that Monday afternoon with the press was that, in his eagerness to make himself accessible, he was probably coming in contact with scores of colds, and we marvelled at his physical stamina.

  The Miami Beach Daily Sun had kept the public posted with banner headlines like “SPECIAL VISITOR IS COMING HERE TONIGHT,” and the Miami Herald Spanish-language section carried a headline reading, “ARRIBA HOY KENNEDY A MIAMI—HABLARA A LOS EDITORES LATINOS.” There were signs everywhere at the airport of the precautions that the Secret Service, the F.B.I., and the local police had taken to reconcile maximum handshaking with maximum security. There were also signs everywhere of Democratic Party rifts, dissatisfactions, and antagonisms, all of which the President himself would be trying, by sheer will and the force of his personal presence, to reconcile. We encountered Congressman Claude Pepper before he left Miami to meet the President in Tampa. He planned to fly back to Miami with him on the Presidential plane, along with Senator George Smathers, Governor Farris Bryant, and Congressman Dante Fascell. Pepper told us he was very hopeful that Kennedy would carry the State of Florida in 1964, having lost it by only 46,776 votes in 1960. “Some Democrats didn’t fight too hard for him in 1960,” he said. “I want to see the Democratic Party fight harder in ’64.” Pepper didn’t know definitely whether he would introduce President Kennedy to the crowd at the airport. That was still to be decided, he told us—probably on the plane. He added, “All you’re supposed to say is ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.’ Sam Rayburn always used to say, ‘It is my distinguished honor to present the President of the United States.’ What I’d like to say is ‘My fellow-countrymen, it is our honor now to hear our friend the President and the next President of the United States.’ ”

  The President’s plane was scheduled to land in the Delta Airlines area, and a Delta hangar had been festooned with a red-and-white banner reading, “WELCOME MR. PRESIDENT.” Among the Secret Service men and the police and the political planners, we came across a planner who was passing out identifying badges of various colors to members of the V.I.P., official, platform, and press groups, along with diagrams showing the position of each group (including a group of two dozen Florida mayors), and also of a hundred-and-forty-five-member band, the Band of the Hour, from the University of Miami. Another planner—a Democratic State Committeeman for Dade County, of which Miami is the seat—was passing out placards to the public, stationed behind a wire fence. The signs read, “WELCOME PRESIDENT KENNEDY BISCAYNE DEMOCRATIC CLUB” and “POLISH-AMERICAN CLUB WELCOMES PRESIDENT KENNEDY” and “SENIOR CITIZENS’ COUNCIL WELCOMES PRESIDENT KENNEDY.” Milling about in the V.I.P. section were a number of V.I.P. children, wearing cardboard buttons that proclaimed, “MY MOM AND DAD ARE FOR YOU PRESIDENT KENNEDY.”

  Just behind the wire fence stood a pretty young Negro woman, who was herding a small group of Negro children. She was Mrs. Lillian Peterson, she told us, and the children were part of her fourth-grade class at the Lillie C. Evans Elementary School. She said that no one had invited them to come to the airport; they had just come. The children looked at us solemnly and, at their teacher’s prompting, identified themselves as Barbara Laidler (wearing a green ribbon bow in her hair), Anthony Shinhoster, Ietta Odom, Gregory Gill, and William Ingram. “We’ve just finished studying the United States of America and our three chief executives,” Mrs. Peterson told us. “I drew a diagram for the children showing the Mayor in a small circle on the bottom, the Governor in a bigger circle over him, and the President in the biggest circle on top. The fourth grade, you know, is really the foundation grade for the rest of your life. These children have the responsibility of sharing the President’s visit with others in the class, who could not come. They have the responsibility of writing a report about what they see today.”

  Around four-fifteen, four helicopters arrived and sat waiting to take the President and his party from the airport to a secret landing area near the Americana Hotel. In the V.I.P. section there appeared a group of women wearing Uncle Sam hats—red-and-white striped crowns, brims with white stars on blue, and the words “WIN WITH KENNEDY.” An F.B.I. man instructed the band’s conductor, a man with white hair, to play ruffles and flourishes when the President arrived, and then “Hail to the Chief.” At four-twenty-two, the band broke into “On the Square,” and it got through “The Colossus of Columbia March,” “The Crosley March,” “Nobles of the Mystic Shrine,” “God Bless America,” and “March of the Mighty” before the blue-and-white Presidential plane, bearing the words “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” and the Presidential seal, finally landed, at five-twelve.

  President Kennedy emerged from the tail of the plane, looking relaxed and good-humored, and got to work immediately at what he was expected to do, and more. With the Congressmen, the Senator, and the Governor sticking close to him, he extended his hand wherever he was directed to extend it, and he seemed to find a number of hands to shake on his own, too. He varied his “Hello” and “How are you?” and “Glad to see you” with an occasional “Nice going, boy.” When the President appeared on the platform, there was a big cheer from the crowd (it numbered about eight thousand), and though he had yet to be introduced, he came forward eagerly to smile and wave and give a little bow. Pepper, on the platform, introduced Governor Bryant, and the Governor, it turned out, had the privilege of introducing the President. The Governor said that they were all proud of what President Kennedy had done for Florida, and that he felt a special pride and pleasure in presenting the President of the United States.

  President Kennedy took it from there, in his own ebullient way. “I’ve been making nonpartisan speeches all day, and I’m glad to come here as a Democrat,” he started off, in old-fashioned campaign style. The crowd loved it. There were cheers from both sides of the wire fence, and all the politicians on the platform appeared happy and satisfied. The President went on to talk about the national purpose—among other things, taking care of seven or eight million boys and girls who will want to go to college in the year 1970. The President said he was going to go on fighting for Congressional enactment of his program, even though certain people “oppose what I am trying to do, just as they opposed everything Franklin Roosevelt tried to do and everything Harry Truman tried to do.” The crowd cheered again. The President wound up by saying that the Democrats had won in Dade County by nearly sixty-five thousand votes in the last Presidential election, and he was convinced that the State of Florida was going to be Democratic in 1964. At that, the V.I.P.s, the politicians, the public—everybody—seemed to be united in cheers and smiles.

  President Kennedy then left the platform and started walking among the people, smiling, shaking hands, and saying hello. He made a special point of going over to the conductor of the Band of the Hour and thanking him. Behind the President, the politicians piled up, greeting each other joyously with cri
es of “Hey, Sheriff!” and “Hey, Judge!” and “Hey, Mayor!” We ran into the State President of the Young Democratic Clubs of Florida, a young man named Dick Pettigrew, who had flown in from Tampa on the President’s plane. He was glowing. “I never saw so many people in my life as I did in Tampa,” he told us. “The President made a brilliant speech before the Chamber of Commerce. He did a beautiful job of explaining why the administration is not anti-business. The Secret Service man next to me on the plane said that the applause the President got was not just polite applause, it was genuine.” Then we ran into Congressman Pepper, and he, too, was glowing over the reception in Tampa. “If President Roosevelt, at the heyday of his popularity, had been riding through Tampa, he never would have got such a reception!” Pepper told us.

  We noticed that Mrs. Peterson and her fourth-graders were crowded against the wire fence, their hands outstretched, and we noticed that the President kept trying to pull away from the Secret Service men and head in their direction. A white man was holding Barbara up high to get a better look (her green hair ribbon was now untied and fluttering), so that she could give a responsible report to the rest of her class and share with them everything that she saw that day.