The Decade That Shook It All Up

By Mitch Frank

If you had to pick one day from Martin Luther King Jr.'s life that made the greatest impact on the world, which would it be? It could be the day he stood in front of the Great Emancipator's statue and told more than 250,000 marchers and millions of TV viewers about his dream for America. It might be the day he sat scribbling in a jail cell in Birmingham, Ala., challenging the moderates of white America to stop offering sympathy and start offering real change. Or maybe it's the day a bullet took him down and made the country wonder if it could ever fulfill his promise of a better future.

TIME will celebrate its 80th anniversary next month by choosing 80 days from the past eight decades that, like the day of King's speech in Washington, changed the world. Restricting the list to 80 won't be easy, and over the next few weeks a series of articles will explore some of the tough choices we face.

As we look back at the 1960s, for instance, it's obvious that decade alone could provide 80; almost everything changed during those tumultuous years. America entered the decade as a young, brash superpower and left it chastened by the stout resistance of Ho Chi Minh's fighters in Vietnam and shaken by the deep divide over the war among its citizens at home. On the domestic front, women, gays and lesbians and young people joined blacks on the ramparts to press for their own liberation. Popular culture turned around so far and so fast that it became known as the counterculture. Which days shook things up most?

When the decade began, the world was defined clearly by a sharp split between democracy and communism. That schism became tangible on the night of Aug. 13, 1961, when East Germany's communist rulers began to build a wall around West Berlin, and the divide threatened to destroy the world a year later, on Oct. 15, 1962, when the U.S. discovered Soviet warheads in Cuba, setting off the 13-day showdown of the Cuban missile crisis.

America's leader during these crises, John F. Kennedy, was a firm cold warrior, but his youthful idealism and energy made a strong impression on the generation just coming of age, particularly on March 1, 1961, when he founded the Peace Corps, which sent thousands of young people to Third World countries to share American know-how.

Many of the nation's dreams seemed to go off course in Dallas on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, when Kennedy was shot. Then much of the country's bold optimism soured as Americans watched the war in Vietnam spin out of control on the news. When Ho's forces surprised U.S. troops with the Tet offensive on Jan. 30, 1968, threatening Saigon, most Americans realized the government had been deluding itself that victory was close at hand. Disillusion was followed by despair when assassins shot King on April 4, 1968, and Robert Kennedy two months later, on June 5, and as young protesters overshadowed that summer's Democratic convention in Chicago.

By then, all conventions were out the window. The introduction of the birth control pill on May 9, 1960, had unleashed the sexual revolution. Pope John XXIII led an ambitious attempt to modernize the Roman Catholic Church when he convened Vatican II on Oct. 11, 1962. The Beatles heralded not only a change in music but also the arrival of the youth movement when they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show on Feb. 9, 1964. By Aug. 15, 1969, the revolution was in full swing when thousands of young people gathered in upstate New York for the Woodstock festival.

Just when the whole planet seemed to be spinning out of control, everyone stopped on June 20, 1969, to watch two men walk on the moon. It was the most thrilling night in exploration's history and is sure to be a day that our issue will remember. --By Mitch Frank