The Sexy Sixties: A Reporters Notebook

The book describes life in the 1960s, the most provocative and challenging decade of the last seventy years. Major changes in the United States and the world developed during that decade. The Vietnam war not only changed Americans' attitudes but those around the globe in understanding how international economic, political, and military struggles had become complex in the modern world. The race to the moon gripped the human imagination like nothing before, and it gave kids of the 1940s and 1950s a sense of science fiction becoming reality. The civil rights movement helped partially overcome centuries long oppression of black Americans but did not solve all problems, because people, black and white, are humans with good and bad characteristics. The sexual revolution changed personal, family, and societal concepts, views, and behaviors in profound way. As if those developments weren't enough, the globe came as close as it ever did to a nuclear war and perhaps the annihilation of mankind with the Cuban missile crisis. In a five-year period, assassins killed a president, a presidential candidate, and the head of the civil rights movement. There were also lesser but significant happenings. America's political parties changed their courses and moved in different directions; popular music changed radically; increasing numbers of the young people went off to college; affluence changed social development; and recreational drug use became widely accepted. The book describes the nine years I spent as a journalist, the stories I wrote about, and the times in which they occurred, and it discusses the fascinating people I covered and details the important events I chronicled. It also presents a few of my views on journalism-what it was, what it has become, and what it should be.