LIFE 1968: The Year That Changed America

By The Editors of LIFE

Let Life magazine take you back to the year 1968-the year that changed everything and, in many ways, foreshadowed life in the United States today. LIFE 1968 lets readers explore this tumultuous year through unforgettable pictures and incisive text from the pages of Life, America's great photographic newsmagazine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Life
• Release date: Jan 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781547841219

Book preview

Setting the Stage

The hope and tumult of 1967 was a precursor to the year when everything changed

BERNIE BOSTON/THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY

During a protest at the Pentagon on October 21, 1967, demonstrator George Harris slipped carnations into the muzzles of troops’ rifles.

There seemed to be much hope in 1967. Hope for peace. Hope for an end to racial strife. Hope for a better world.

At the start of that year, 30,000 starry-eyed people massed in San Francisco for an event known as the Human Be-In, or the Gathering of the Tribes. Hang your fear at the door and join the future, organizers told attendees, and Timothy Leary advised them to turn on, tune in, drop out. Even for those watching at a distance, January 1967 seemed to be a time of possibility. There was a feeling of a revolution of consciousness, says critic and Rolling Stone contributing editor Anthony DeCurtis, the idea that if you free your mind everything will follow from that.

What would that future bring? Many wished that 1967 would bring an end to the war in Vietnam. With nearly half a million American troops there, opposition to the conflict had matured as draft dodgers headed for Canada and others took to the streets. Less than two weeks after Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. officially came out against the war in April, he joined more than 125,000 people in New York to march for peace, and 60,000 others marched in San Francisco. Carrying banners with peace signs and Bring Our Boys Home placards, they chanted, Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? At the end of the month, heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali refused induction into the Army. In October, 100,000 demonstrators marched on the Pentagon, and Jerry Rubin, a leader of the Youth International Party (better known as the Yippies), led the crowd in an attempt to levitate the building. From that moment, President Lyndon Johnson’s attorney general Ramsey Clark later noted, I got the feeling that we’d reached a turning point in the commitment of many people to ending the war in Vietnam.

Many also wished for peace at home. This was the year of the Long Hot Summer, as riots sparked by racial incidents scorched scores of cities, such as Detroit, where 43 people died. Although Congress had recently passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and the Supreme Court had legalized interracial marriage, many African Americans felt that not enough had changed and that drastic action was needed.

Some seemed to think that music, technology, and love might dampen the fires. In June, the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Three weeks later, the BBC dressed the Fab Four in psychedelic garb and surrounded them with flowers. As they sang All You Need Is Love, the network beamed the performance to some 400 million people in 31 countries via a satellite launched by NASA the year before. This was the first live satellite feed, an event that elicited the belief that there was a way to stop the fraying and bind society together.

Yet underneath the hope lurked a sense of being unhinged, of being lost. When Paul Simon wrote the song Mrs. Robinson for the film The Graduate, he captured the feeling of a people turning its lonely eyes to the symbols of a serenity that had somehow been lost. That national soul-searching was epitomized by the denizens of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. There, during the Summer of Love, those seeking to drop out of society donned flowers and tie-dyes, took drugs, and sought liberation from Eisenhower-era domesticity.

In 1967, the feel was very loose. It was, ‘We are a tribe and we are all connected,’ recalls Abe Peck, a professor emeritus of journalism at Northwestern University and author of Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press. At the time, he was a former Army reservist who had dropped out of grad school and driven out west from New York in a Volkswagen van with his buddies to spend the summer there.

Many soldiers at the Oakland Army Base, 11 miles across the bay from Haight-Ashbury, also walked those streets during their leaves. While they enjoyed their brief freedom and gazed on the unfettered souls of the nonconscripted, they knew