The 1960 Presidential Elections were going comfortably in favour of the Republican candidate. Of course he didn't have to take on the TV debates, rather it was an act of bravado, a final opportunity to trounce his youthful opponent.
The story's outcome is now just another part of popular history. What was said is irrelevant as who won or lost the debates. What does matter is that the avuncular good looks, the charm of Democrat JOHN F. KENNEDY illuminated millions of American living rooms while the Republican, RICHARD NIXON, appeared as he would a decade later: thuggish, shifty, his make-up running under the hot studio lights. And, one hardly need add, it was KENNEDY who won a surprise victory a few weeks later.
In 1949, there were an estimated one million television sets in the United States. 1) By 1959, there were ten million. Although the TV set was still a luxury item, it was not an uncommon one. Certainly, as the 1960 elections show, it was sufficiently accessible to the masses that NIXON's easy progress to the White House was abruptly halted. Significantly, the debates were also broadcast on radio where, it was felt, they were either a draw or possibly represented a victory for NIXON. On television, it was all KENNEDY, the medium had demonstrated its power.
During the 1960s, the television set became just another household object. By the early 1970s there were 50 million TV sets in the States alone. People deplored its popularity. It was seen as vulgar, crass, a threat to children's literacy. While reading was considered a worthwhile activity, watching was not. Nonetheless, a generation was indeed growing up with and through television, its curiosity ranging way beyond what was intended as children's TV .
What a distressing contrast,
there is between the radiant
intelligence of a child and the
feeble mentality of the
average adult.
Sigmund Freud
Through the TV looking-glass is a world where fact and fantasy meet. KENNEDY, for instance, was a president script-written for television. He swept into the White House and transformed it into Camelot (as it was known during his administration). Certainly, the news program fitted in perfectly alongside ROGER MOORE in Ivanhoe as the enigmatic LEE HARVEY OSWALD could have been something out of the Twilight Zone. Growing up in front of the box meant a witnessing, a sharing of one's personal history with world events: remembering where you were when KENNEDY was shot became tangible evidence of your part in the Zeitgeist.
The children of the first TV generation were marked out not only by the newness of their relationship to television but by the fact of their sheer numbers. By 1967, half the American population was under the age of 30, the lowest median age in the nation's history. It simply stands to reason that the Sixties was to be an era dominated by youth.
In a sense, the years of the 1960s seemed to grow with the burgeoning TV generation. THE BEATLES were the decade's first media craze: the lovable mop-tops who were adored by grannies and toddlers alike. Their songs were simple, straight-forward paeans to exuberance: She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah! A couple of years later and pubescent libidos first stirred to the strut and fuck riffs of THE ROLLING STONES. They looked like they could be dirty and that's exactly what you wanted them to be.
If, as has been suggested, the 1960s was one long party, it was well underway by the mid-Sixties. London swung, skirts shrunk and Vogue magazine talked about Youthquakers 2). News traveled fast because it traveled by TV. Its screen provided a mirror between the youthful viewer and the beautiful people beyond. Style was just there for the taking. And even from the comparative isolation of individual living rooms, this experience was essentially one which was shared. For instance: seeing THE BEATLES at Shea Stadium was not a question of living in the vicinity of New York City, it was a matter of conviction in and commitment to your generation (and turning your television on at the right time).
Girl: What are you rebelling against?
Brando: Whaddya got?
The Wild Ones
Considering (as Freud 3) did) adolescence as the genital stage, a revival of earlier oedipal attachments and rivalries with the need to resolve these conflicts through greater independence must make the Sixties the quintessential adolescent age. We want the world and we want it now, sang the archadolescent JIM MORRISON. The desire for greater independence, freedom, meant questioning authority, all authority: be it parents, school, college or government.
By 1968, rebelliousness had turned into uprisings and resistance: Paris, Prague, Chicago. Freudian-Marxist HERBERT MARCUSE gave a generation of students their voice and political groups proliferated. From their earliest years, the TV generation has been exposed to night after night of evidence of the world's imperfection, its curious logic as demonstrated by the American major in Vietnam who stated that we had to destroy Ben Tre in order to save it. While the transition to adulthood is often marked by a rebellious adolescence, there are also those who don't want to grow up at all, the PETER PANS clinging to the vast imaginative realms of childhood. In 1967, this crisis triggered a mass metamorphosis of teenagers and young adults into flower children: wide-eyed, long-haired seekers of some elusive Eden of love and peace. Haight Ashbury was its first location due, in part, to a rather bland but seminal song (If you go to San Francisco be sure to wear some flowers in your hair) which enticed thousands of hippies to the city. ALLEN GINSBERG came to chant mantras and a vote-conscious BOBBY KENNEDY commented approvingly: They want to be recognized as individuals (according to a poll in the Haight, he was currently running second in presidential popularity - to SNOOPY).
However fast this Eden crumbled in San Francisco (and as early as October 1967 there was a mock funeral to mourn the death of Hippie), the ideal continued elsewhere. For what had started primarily as a utopic Californian phenomenon rapidly took root everywhere, its forms subtly differing from Amsterdam to Copenhagen and across the hippie trail to Marrakesh, Ibiza and Katmandu. Dropping out was one of life's alternatives in the late Sixties and although a (counter-)culture arose with its forms of the media (with magazines like Rolling Stone and Oz), it was still television which provided the day-to-day news of events world-wide. While it was impossible to attend every happening, demonstration or festival, one could still witness many of them on television. This produced a curious equality of experience: by growing up with TV, you were automatically implicated in the spirit of the age.
I asked myself many times,
'What made Charlie change?
What was the main cause?'
and one thought kept
recurring: If Abbey Road
had come out sooner, maybe
there wouldn't have been a
murder.
a friend of Charles Manson 4)
Then, suddenly, as it seemed that the party would go on forever, it was over. Woodstock became Altamont, the hippie dream had soured into the nightmare of the TATE-LA BIANCA murders.
For all the euphoria, from that day in Dallas onwards there always been a darker side to the Sixties. But if this was tragedy, were was the fatal flaw? With hindsight, one can say that for all their idealism, the hippies and the politicos always seemed doomed to be no more successful than their parents were.
Throughout that era of the global village, (which I would define as extending beyond the chronological boundaries of the decade itself), the United States took stage center. Why? Because of its political and cultural dominance and the war in Vietnam made the American president the biggest father-figure of all to rebel against. Finally, the birds came home to roost in 1972 with the Watergate trials.
The American nation followed Watergate like a particularly morbid soap opera. For those who missed the daytime edition of these sessions televised daily, there was a four hour evening repeat on educational TV. It evoked the fascinated horror of watching the predator coming in for the kill with each new relevation of life at the White House. The machinations of the dirty tricks department, CREEP (NIXON's re-election campaign) and the ironical fact that NIXON had the whole place so well bugged that potentially any conversation could be used as evidence against him were just minor details to be gleaned from the transmissions. And slowly, inextricably, the spotlight of guilt came to rest on one man above all others: on the President himself. Writer MARY MCCARTHY has suggested that Watergate was America's way of atoning for its sins in Vietnam: Atonement is directed not toward the victims but toward the crime-on God or the fragile social tissue holding living beings together. Some degree of repair here is possible, or at least the attempt is salutary and may benefit the criminal If nobody else. 5) How else could a nation in the early 1970s have cleansed its collective conscience than through the mass witnessing of this dies irae on television?
And meanwhile Vietnam was lumbering to a clumsy and belated close. No victory, there was only the knowledge that the army of well-built young men brought up on the meaty diet of post-war affluence had failed to defeat their slight Third World opponents. Worse still, it emerged that some of these action men of the TV generation even had difficulty in distinguishing reality from the TV screen. As Vietnam correspondent MICHAEL HERR records in his book Dispatches: You don't know what a media freak is until you've seen the way a few of those grunts would run around during a fight when they knew that there was a TV crew nearby... we'd seen too many movies... It was the same violence only moved over to another medium; some kind of jungle play with giant helicopters and fantastic special effects, actors out there lying in canvas body bags waiting for the scene 10 end so they could get up and walk it off. But that was some scene (you found out), there was no cutting it. 6) Too much television, evidently, could be dangerous to your health.
With PAPA NIXON effectively deposed and his nation humiliated there was no greater (temporal) authority to be challenged and youthful rebellion cooled. Rock'n Roll, the music that promised in the Sixties to set you free settled down in the Seventies to produce a staple diet of such pop pap as PETER FRAMPTON and THE BEE GEES. THE BEATLES had disbanded, THE STONES were tamed (I know it's only rock'n roll but I like it) and DYLAN had found CHRIST.
The Sixties is usually pronounced with a sigh of nostalgia or a leer of disdain. Depending on your point of view it was either a magical time or an era of mass indulgence. Probably it was both. Certainly, its kaleidoscopic diversity has not been equaled since. Singer JONI MITCHELL commented in a recent interview that in the Sixties people wanted to change the world, in the Seventies they wanted to change themselves and in the Eighties they just wanted to make money. Not surprisingly, when getting a job is by no means automatic, increasing value is placed on material possessions (preppies and yuppies are masters of the nuances of this game). With REAGAN and THATCHER in power, the political climate has swung to the right and liberalism has been largely eclipsed. But curiously there is a growing nostalgia for the Sixties which is reflected in fashion, music and the number of books being published on the subject. The appeal is, I think, not simply the style but the aura of freshness it exudes, a yearning for innocence which was, ironically, the goal of much of the Sixties youthful energy. Edenic this impetus may still be but it is no longer utopic. What is missing is the excitement of the new when nothing exists and everything seems possible, the first time, the trial run: the first TV generation.
"Don't you understand?
This is life, this is what is happening.
We can't switch to another channel."
If you'd like to quote something: Wright, Annie/ "Through the Looking Glass." Mediamatic Magazine vol. 1 # 1 (1986).
1)Encyclopedia Britannica 1973
2)Vogue (American Edition) august 1965
3) Sigmunt Freud A general introduction to psychoanalysis New York 1953
4) Lance Fairweather Manson in: The Sixties New York 1974
5) Mary McCarthy The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits New York 1974
6) Michael Herr Dispatches New York 1977