Original subtitles

*

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen across the nation,

we're packed in here, a half a million people I would say,

here in Times Square,

the village green of little old New York town.

NARRATOR: On December 31, 1963, the usual collection of revelers

gathered in Times Square to welcome the new year.

ANNOUNCER: And in a matter of seconds, it will be 1964.

The new year, a fresh start.

Two seconds, one...

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, 1964!

NARRATOR: As they broke out the champagne,

Americans were full of hope for the year ahead,

but their optimism was tinged with a deep anxiety.

No one could forget the shocking events that had occurred

just five weeks earlier in Dallas, Texas.

(gunshot)

REPORTER: Mrs. Kennedy cried out when the shots were fired,

was weeping and trying to hold up her husband's head.

ROBERT CARO: The year 1964 really began on November 22, 1963

with a tragedy of the assassination of a president.

DAN CARTER: It's difficult unless you lived through it

to realize how traumatic it was for Americans.

ROBERT DALLEK: It shook the national confidence.

Was the president so vulnerable?

Is the country that vulnerable?

From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official,

President Kennedy died

at 1:00 p.m. Central Standard Time,

2:00 Eastern Standard Time, some 38 minutes ago.

REPORTER: We just got the word Lyndon B. Johnson

has been sworn in as the president of the United States.

I know that the world shares the sorrow

that Mrs. Kennedy and her family bear.

I will do my best.

That is all I can do.

I ask for your help, and God's.

JANN WENNER: That singular event led to the '60s as we know it,

the letting loose of everything.

NARRATOR: It would be the year when change was inescapable,

the moment that fundamentally altered

the kind of nation America would become.

ROBERT LIPSYTE: It was in 1964

that every kind of split in American life

suddenly became open and visible.

I must be the greatest, I told the world.

RICK PERLSTEIN: It was the kind of watershed

that you very rarely see in history.

MARILYN B. YOUNG: Things are cracking and breaking and fracturing

and being, most importantly, rethought.

NARRATOR: It would be the year

when the future of the country

would be fiercely and passionately debated.

LEE EDWARDS: 1964 was the year

that changed American politics, absolutely.

My fellow citizens, we have come now to a time of testing.

DAVE DENNIS: We set the stage for this to be the greatest country ever.

We set the stage

whereby we could be a showcase for democracy.

RICHARD VIGUERIE: What happened in '64 was terrifying to us.

We saw America changing right in front of our eyes.

LEAH WRIGHT-RIGUEUR: It's just this explosive year where people are forced

to say what they mean, mean what they say,

and follow it up.

NARRATOR: 1964 would be the year when institutions came under assault

and when generations began to split apart.

WENNER: It was the coming of age of the biggest,

best-educated and wealthiest generation

in the history of America, and there's going to be trouble.

And there was.

(Bobby Vinton's "There! I've Said it Again" playing)

* I love you, there's nothing to hide *

* It's better...

NARRATOR: On January 1, the year ahead

did not appear to hold out the promise of revolutionary change.

* There! I've said it again...

NARRATOR: The new hit song on the radio

was Bobby Vinton's "There! I've Said It Again."

Vogue magazine's cover proclaimed

"The Look That's 1964"

and featured a modest sky-blue blouse and jaunty straw hat.

I think a lot of people would say

that we still weren't out of the '50s completely.

America hadn't taken its coat and tie off yet.

The thing was to have a very narrow lapel

and have a very narrow cut and to go out into the world

with quite clear circumstances

in which you advanced in one place, and that was that.

You dressed like everybody else.

Nobody was particularly noticeable.

NARRATOR: On television,

Bonanza remained one of the nation's highest-rated shows.

Hello, Dolly!, starring Carol Channing,

began its remarkable run on Broadway.

There, you see?

You were jealous.

Of course I was jealous.

NARRATOR: And in movie theaters, Rock Hudson and Doris Day

starred in the romantic comedy Send Me No Flowers.

STEPHANIE COONTZ: As a teenager, I thought

that I would just get married.

Every boy I used to date, I used to, you know,

put "Mrs. So-and-So" in front of his name, you know?

PERLSTEIN: Walter Lippmann, the kind of marquee pundit of the day,

said that America was more united and at peace with itself

than it ever had been.

I mean, 1964, we see this great mass middle class.

People who grew up with outhouses in their backyard

are taking their children to vacation houses on the lake.

And the idea was that America had figured it out.

COONTZ: We came out of World War II

the most prosperous nation in the world,

and there was this tremendous sense

that we had defeated Fascism.

WENNER: Our parents had collaborated as a society

in one of the greatest achievements ever--

you know, World War II and the destruction of Hitler.

You know, there's every reason to kind of get along

and feel comfortable and not rock the boat.

And it seemed like it was a period of quietude.

NARRATOR: As the year began, despite the outward appearance of calm,

Americans were still haunted

by the assassination of their president.

HODDING CARTER: Jack Kennedy represented the future.

He was the dream president, and here he was cut off,

and who succeeds him?

Lyndon Johnson.

Lyndon Johnson is not a figure of great popularity

in the general public.

JOHN BRACEY: Johnson has no legitimacy in that job.

You know, he's there because somebody got shot.

He wasn't elected; somebody got shot.

JON MARGOLIS: The Constitution says

when there is a vacancy, the vice president takes over.

But he didn't feel entirely legitimate.

It's not just political; it's sort of psychological.

"I'm here, I'm the most powerful person in the world,

"but the public didn't choose me.

I didn't get elected."

NARRATOR: Johnson's chance to prove himself--

the 1964 election-- was only ten months away,

and in the meantime,

the new president faced a daunting set of challenges.

John F. Kennedy had put forward a progressive legislative agenda

to address the increasingly volatile problem

of inequality in America:

a landmark Civil Rights bill

and a series of initiatives to fight poverty.

Neither of them had made progress in a divided Congress.

And on the international front,

Kennedy's policies had drawn America

deeper into the simmering conflict in Vietnam.

Now, on January 8, only seven weeks after taking office,

Lyndon Johnson had to make the case for his own administration

in his first State of the Union address.

REPORTER: It is now 12:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time in Washington.

Everyone is assembled.

Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States.

(applause)

DAN CARTER: Lyndon Johnson wanted to be a great president.

And I think he understood

we had developed this broad middle class,

but there were many groups that were completely left out.

If he could do something

that had never been done before in America,

and that was actually attack the root causes of poverty,

transform America, it would be a legacy

that no other president would have had.

This administration today, here and now,

declares unconditional war on poverty in America.

(applause)

CARO: What he spells out to that Congress, it's unprecedented.

He says, "We're not just going to try to alleviate poverty;

we're going to try and end it."

Let me make one principle of this administration

abundantly clear:

all of these increased opportunities

in employment and education and housing

must be open to Americans of every color.

(applause)

CARO: Johnson understands

poverty and race are inextricably mixed

in the great injustice in America.

He is the president who has this vision

of a vast domestic reform of justice.

You know, Martin Luther King said

the moral arc of the universe bends slowly,

but it bends towards justice.

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson is trying to bend that arc faster.

JOHNSON: Join with me

in working for a nation--

a nation that is free from want--

and a world that is free from hate.

(applause)

MARK KURLANSKY: For Johnson, the ghost of John Kennedy was huge in 1964.

When Kennedy was killed, it was felt that somehow,

this was a plot to stop progress.

Johnson has to make people feel

that the spirit of John Kennedy is living on,

although in doing that,

he would do much more than John Kennedy actually ever did.

EDWARDS: Johnson was going to promise to do away with poverty.

He was going to educate everybody.

And everybody was going to have a house,

everybody was going to have a TV set

and on and on and on and on.

Of course, the price tag for all of this

would be billions and billions of dollars.

For me, as a young conservative, I had very mixed feelings.

VIGUERIE: For the young conservatives, LBJ was over the top.

It was terrifying.

We felt that we could see our world slipping from us,

and we wanted to change that.

NARRATOR: In early January, the nation's press

assembled on the lawn of a hilltop house in Phoenix.

Arizona's two-term senator, Barry Goldwater,

was about to make a dramatic announcement,

one that would not only reshape the politics of 1964,

but transform the American political landscape

for generations to come.

GOLDWATER: First, I want to tell you

that I will seek the Republican presidential nomination,

and I've decided to do this

because of the principles in which I believe

and because I'm convinced that millions of Americans

share my belief in those principles.

VIGUERIE: Goldwater told us, he said, you know,

"Conservatives, we can take this party over."

Before that, we didn't have a voice,

we didn't have anybody speaking for us

because the Republican Party was establishment Republicans,

big government Republicans.

NARRATOR: For years, conservative activists

had been searching for a presidential candidate

who would embrace the ideals they cherished.

PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY: Before 1964, the Republican establishment

was picking all of our candidates.

They had given us two-time loser Tom Dewey.

They were "me too" Republicans.

Whatever the Democrats said, basically, they said, "me too,"

and we were tired of that.

We wanted a real conservative who would stand up

for real American and conservative principles.

EDWARDS: We believed that we had the right ideas.

You know, limited government,

individual freedom, free enterprise,

traditional American values, a strong national defense.

These were all not only conservative ideas,

but were American ideas.

We would organize ourselves into some kind of a youth group,

a political action group,

and coming out of that was Young Americans for Freedom.

And really from the beginning, we looked to Barry Goldwater.

NARRATOR: The senator's philosophy had been distilled into a book

entitled The Conscience of a Conservative,

which quickly became a kind of manifesto for the new right.

VIGUERIE: He believed in a balanced budget,

he believed in limited government,

he believed in increasing liberty and freedom

for individuals.

Finally, somebody is saying what we've been thinking about.

EDWARDS: So we bombarded Goldwater with telegrams,

with letters, with telephone calls and what have you,

saying, "You must run, you must run.

You must run for the country, you must run for the movement."

And finally, at the last minute, he said,

"All right, damn it, I will."

I won't change my beliefs to win votes.

I will offer a choice, not an echo.

This will not be an engagement of personalities;

it will be an engagement of principles.

MALE CHORUS: * Goldwater, go, go, go

* You're going to win, we know... *

ANNOUNCER: Goldwater's ultra-right supporters

aren't always middle aged, by any means.

To these young Republicans who wrote this ditty,

Barry Goldwater is the old Wild Westerner come to life,

a bulwark against the welfare state and Red tyranny.

SCHLAFLY: Goldwater was authentic.

He said what he believed and believed what he said,

and we liked that.

1964 was the birth of the modern conservative movement.

(fans screaming)

NARRATOR: At 1:20 p.m. on February 7, Pan Am Flight 101 touched down

at New York's recently renamed John F. Kennedy Airport,

and the Beatles arrived in America.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles!

(fans screaming)

* Close your eyes and I'll kiss you *

* Tomorrow I'll miss you...

SUSAN DOUGLAS: I remember watching them on the Ed Sullivan Show.

* I'll pretend that I'm kissing... *

DOUGLAS: I am in our TV room,

hugging a Naugahyde ottoman to help anchor me.

There they were with their long hair

and Paul's eyelashes and their heels,

and they sang about us.

They liked girls

and they also felt the same pain that girls did.

I think that's one of the big reasons

we all screamed our heads off.

* All my loving I will send to you. *

(fans screaming)

GITLIN: The Beatles arriving represent hopefulness.

They're just a whole lot of fun filling stadiums.

* She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah... *

(fans screaming)

I was just blown away by the kind of...

the life, the spirit, the enjoyment, the joy.

The music was wonderful.

FANS (chanting): We want the Beatles! We want the Beatles!

MARGOLIS: They did scare a lot of parents.

These kids, they were the first generation

who had been brought up in the well-ordered,

comfortable life of suburbia,

and therefore, many of them were quite bored.

And so they were beginning to rebel in sort of harmless ways.

And boys stopped cutting their hair,

and there were fights in households.

"You have to get a haircut."

"I won't get a haircut."

I mean, you know, that became kind of almost a public issue.

Is that a Beatle haircut you've got?

Yes.

How'd you work it out?

Well, I let my hair flop around until it's all messy.

What do your parents say about it?

They don't like it.

Then why do you comb it that way?

Because I like the Beatles!

You don't care if your parents like it or not?

Nope!

LIPSYTE: The Beatles,

they were in the beginning of their first American tour.

They were in Miami Beach,

so they went to have a picture taken with Sonny Liston,

the heavyweight champion of the world.

And he took one look at these four little boys and he said,

"I ain't posing with them sissies."

So the Beatles were stuffed back into their limo,

and as second-best,

they were taken to Cassius Clay's training camp.

Cassius Clay was fighting Sonny Liston

for the heavyweight championship of the world.

So I'm 26 years old.

I was a feature writer sent down to cover the fight.

I go down to where Cassius Clay trained.

I go up the stairs to the gym,

and there's this hubbub behind me.

And I ask one of the guys,

"Some group, you know, singers for girls."

And Cassius Clay has not arrived.

The Beatles turn around

because they're not going to wait for some Cassius Clay,

but the guards push them right up--

in those days, you could push the Beatles--

they pushed them right up the stairs

and they pushed all five of us into an empty dressing room

and locked the door.

The Beatles were raging

and they were banging and cursing,

and then suddenly, the door bursts open

and there is the most beautiful creature

any of us have ever seen.

You forget how big Cassius Clay was because he was so perfect.

And he was laughing and he said,

"Come on, Beatles, let's go make some money!"

And they followed him out like kindergarten kids.

LIPSYTE: February 18, 1964.

It's an amazing moment, the kind of confluence

of two of the great cultural rivers of our time.

And afterwards, the Beatles leave,

Cassius Clay goes back into that dressing room

to get his rubdown.

He beckons me over and he said,

"So who were those little sissies?"

NARRATOR: The heavyweight championship fight

between Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston

was scheduled for February 25

at the Miami Beach Convention Hall.

For the young challenger,

this moment had been a long time coming.

Clay had arrived on the boxing scene in 1954

and had captured the Olympic gold medal in 1960.

Yet his professional record wasn't all that impressive.

He had fought a string of weak, hand-picked opponents

on the way to his matchup with Liston.

By the eve of the fight, Clay was a seven-to-one underdog.

But the greater the odds against him,

the more outrageous Clay became.

15 times I have told the clown what round he's goin' down,

and this chump ain't no different.

He'll fall at eight to prove that I'm great,

and if he keeps talkin' jive, I'm gonna cut it to five.

If Sonny Liston whips me, I'll kiss his feet in the ring.

(crowd laughing)

I won't get hit, I won't get hit, I'm so quick.

He's gonna be so tired in five rounds.

He just didn't shut up.

He just...

He's rhyming all the time, he's making predictions.

You're not supposed to make predictions when you fight,

because you get in trouble.

He didn't care.

NARRATOR: Clay was not a typical heavyweight champ

in another respect.

A few years earlier,

he had begun flirting with the Muslim faith,

but he had kept his newfound spirituality quiet,

afraid that if it became public,

he would be denied a shot at the title.

Now, Clay's moment had come.

(bell rings)

ANNOUNCER: World heavyweight boxing title on the line.

MARGOLIS: Everybody who knew anything about boxing

knew that Sonny Liston

would just wipe up the floor with young Cassius Clay.

LIPSYTE: I was sitting at ringside.

Once the fight began,

there was no question Clay was in absolute control.

ANNOUNCER: Another jarring right hand that time, folks.

Another one!

Sonny wobbles!

Liston never came out for the seventh round.

He had a deep cut.

(bell rings)

ANNOUNCER: They might be stopping it.

That might be all, ladies and gentlemen.

Clay won the fight.

ANNOUNCER: Get up there, get up in the ring!

(cheering)

LIPSYTE: The morning after the fight,

he was uncharacteristically subdued and polite.

He more or less said

that he had done all these outrageous things,

said all this,

made these flamboyant actions to sell tickets for the fight,

but that now that it was over,

he could be a polite and responsible gentleman champion.

The younger reporters, we were really disappointed.

And somebody said, "Are you a card-carrying Muslim?"

And of course "card-carrying," even in 1964,

had some real resonance:

you know, card-carrying Communist.

What do I look like I am to you?

Do I act like I'm the man?

REPORTER: I don't know, Cassius, you just...

Like you say, you're the greatest.

I don't have to be what you want me to be.

I'm free to be what I want to be and think what I want to think.

MARGOLIS: He said, "I don't have to be what you want me to be."

And in a way, it was the same thing that the kids

who were not getting their haircuts were saying.

It was the same thing that people were saying in politics.

"You've had this role cut out for me,

but I don't have to play it anymore."

BRACEY: "I'm not following the mold,"

whatever the mold was.

Like, "I'm not in it.

I'm going to be myself and whatever that is."

NARRATOR: The next day, Cassius Clay put the rumors to rest,

announcing that he had, in fact, joined the Muslim faith.

Why do you insist on being called Muhammad Ali now?

That's the name given to me by my leading teacher,

the honorable Elijah Muhammad.

That's my original name, that's a black man name.

Cassius Clay was my slave name.

I'm no longer a slave.

What does it mean?

Muhammad means "worthy of all praises"

and Ali means "most high."

LIPSYTE: He made no apologies for himself.

He said, "Here I am."

He just seemed like somebody

who had come out of the neighborhood,

somebody who was going to stand up to the man

and say what he believed in.

The Beatles.

Cassius Clay.

I mean, this was the toppling

of the order that was my generation.

And it was thrilling.

COONTZ: My mom was a homemaker in Salt Lake City.

She had been a very adventurous young woman.

She worked in the shipyards during World War II

and was very proud of herself

and very resentful when they were fired

as soon as the first boatload of GIs came home.

But it was time to start a family,

and she settled down

and eventually got bored with it

but had been so kind of brainwashed

by the women's magazines and the TV shows

that even this woman who'd been

very kind of bohemian and radical in her youth

began to feel that there was something wrong with her

for not being totally happy.

The first time I learned this about her was in 1964.

I was away at school and we had a weekly phone call,

and she started telling me about this book that she was reading,

The Feminine Mystique,

and how indignant it made her and how it opened her eyes,

and then all this stuff poured out of her.

I had thought she was a totally happy homemaker.

She said, "Oh, my God,"

she said, "I was going crazy

and I thought it was something wrong with me."

NARRATOR: The work of a magazine writer

and student of psychology named Betty Friedan,

The Feminine Mystique hit the bestseller lists

on March 15, 1964.

It would become one of the most popular paperbacks of the year

and one of the most influential books of the century.

In its pages, Friedan defined something

that afflicted millions of American women:

she called it "the problem that has no name."

CLAIRE POTTER: The problem that had no name

was a strange stirring.

Today we would call it depression,

but what Friedan describes

is a set of feelings that women can't put into words.

That they are prosperous,

they have children, they have husbands--

in other words, they have everything

that they have been told by commercial culture

that they're supposed to want--

and yet they're still unhappy, and they don't know why.

INTERVIEWER: Now, Ms. Friedan, you feel then

that a very tremendous problem with women

is not knowing who they are:

a loss of touch with their own identity.

Well, it's not being anybody themselves, for so many,

and even feeling guilty.

You see, I've had letters from over 1,000 women

since my book came out, and a woman today

has been made to feel freakish and alone and guilty

if simply she wants to be more than her husband's wife,

her children's mother,

if she really wants to use her abilities in society.

And so all women have suffered by the feminine mystique.

POTTER: Betty Friedan defines the feminine mystique

as something that's invented in popular culture,

and specifically by advertisers.

You know, it's a crime

not to have delicious coffee like this all the time.

We will, now that I've discovered "the mountains"!

POTTER: Women are expected to be happy by consuming things:

consuming houses, consuming dishwashers,

consuming the right soap,

consuming the right clothes and makeup and shoes.

All these reasons for being happy come out of this bottle.

POTTER: The feminine mystique is something that doesn't exist,

that women can never be and women can never have,

and thus it becomes a trap for them.

Television, for instance.

You see, there are no what I call heroines

on television today.

There are... there's this mindless little drudge

who seems never to have gotten beyond fifth grade herself,

whose greatest thrill and ecstasy

is to get that kitchen sink or floor pure white

and who needs the advice of some wise, elderly man

even to do that, you see...

COONTZ: At one point, Friedan says, "A woman will look around

"and she'll think maybe it's her husband's fault,

"maybe her house isn't big enough,

"maybe she doesn't have enough kids,

maybe she needs another child."

She said none of it's that;

it's that you're missing the opportunity

to grow as a human being,

and that's a normal desire, and when it is thwarted,

it's normal to feel bad about it,

and so instead of allowing it to be thwarted,

you should do something about it.

ANNOUNCER: A surer sign of spring than the first robin.

Here are the hat fashions that will star

in the Easter Style parade.

NARRATOR: The spring of 1964 brought with it familiar rituals,

but also signs that change was in the air.

Visitors flocked past the tilted globe known as the Unisphere,

as the World's Fair opened in New York City.

Americans debated the surgeon general's recent announcement

that smoking increased the risk of lung cancer.

And a stylish new convertible, the Ford Mustang,

hit the American highway.

MARGOLIS: The Mustang was sportier

than any American car that had ever been created.

It was designed for young people, and in buying one,

a person was making a statement about him or herself

as much as buying a piece of transportation

to get from here to there.

FEMALE ANNOUNCER: Albert's a Mustanger now.

He bought a beautiful Mustang convertible.

All of a sudden, his whole life changed.

(fast jazz music playing)

Put a few kicks in your life.

NARRATOR: Americans were living

through a period of unprecedented prosperity,

flooding into newly built suburbs,

raising larger and larger families.

MARGOLIS: There had never been so many young people in the world,

and they'd never had so much money.

DOUGLAS: Our parents came of age

during the Depression and the Second World War.

These were times of sacrifice, of privation.

Our generation, we were told we were going to be different.

We were going to move into the suburbs.

We were going to go to college in record numbers.

We were told over and over again that we were special,

that our lives were going to be different.

We were being told that we mattered economically.

They were selling us everything.

And once you start to think that you matter economically,

you begin to think that you matter politically.

NARRATOR: On Friday, May 22,

the largest class in the history of the University of Michigan

gathered to hear its commencement address

delivered by the president of the United States.

Lyndon Johnson used the opportunity

to introduce a phrase he hoped would embody

the far-reaching goals of his presidency.

DALLEK: Franklin Roosevelt had the New Deal,

Harry Truman had the Fair Deal,

Kennedy had the New Frontier.

What is his administration going to be called?

JOHNSON: In your time, we have the opportunity

to move not only toward the rich society

and the powerful society,

but upward to the great society.

The great society demands an end to poverty and racial injustice.

CARO: "A Great Society."

That is his vision: a moral, just America.

When he said a great society, he meant a great society.

So will you join in the battle

to give every citizen the full equality

which God enjoins and the law requires,

whatever his belief or race or the color of his skin?

It has this kind of aching utopian energy

of the sort you can't even imagine

a presidential candidate speaking about now.

HODDING CARTER: The Great Society,

and where I was,

and where an awful lot of Americans were,

it offered such hope for so many people.

It was the audacity of saying

we ought to be as great as we say we are

and we ought to be a society

that makes good on its promises to all of its people,

and we can do it.

We can do it.

NARRATOR: The Michigan audience loved his speech,

and so did the nation's press.

But back in Washington, Lyndon Johnson knew

that no amount of soaring rhetoric

would make his Great Society a reality.

What was needed was legislation

that would use the power of the federal government

to advance the cause of equality.

This nation will rise up,

live out the true meaning of its creed.

NARRATOR: The March on Washington the summer before

had thrust civil rights onto the national stage,

but blacks in the South were still subject

to pervasive and often violent discrimination.

And mainstream civil rights leaders

were finding it increasingly hard

to manage the frustration within their movement.

CARO: You have this long pent-up fight for civil rights

reaching a crescendo.

If this doesn't change,

if after all this sacrifice on the streets of the South...

They had fire hoses turned on them and police dogs.

They were murdered there.

What's going to happen if that situation,

if government does not do something?

LEAH WRIGHT-RIGUEUR: In 1964, race is coming to a boiling point.

The civil rights bill is on the table.

Republicans and Democrats are arguing over, debating over

what will this mean to the country?

DALLEK: It was going to end segregation

in all places of public accommodation.

Restaurants, swimming pools, bus stations, train stations.

Cafeterias, lunch rooms, lunch counters, soda fountains,

gasoline stations, theaters...

It just was going to end a way of life across the South.

It was a huge political gamble

because Johnson is running for president.

Is he going to alienate all those Southern segregationists?

Is he going to lose the South?

GITLIN: Johnson had decided to turn the corner,

and if that meant that the Democratic Party

was going to forgo Southern support,

so be it.

Chips were down.

NARRATOR: By early June, Southerners in Congress

had been successfully blocking the bill

for more than two months,

and there was no reason to assume they would back down.

DAN CARTER: The problem for Johnson

in pushing through the civil rights bill

was the same problem it had been for Kennedy

and for anyone who wanted to promote civil rights.

You had this solid Deep South core of senators

solidly opposed to any federal action on civil rights,

and a handful of other conservative Republicans

outside the region,

which made it impossible to move forward.

CARO: The South in the Senate

has through the filibuster and the threat of the filibuster

defeated every strong civil rights bill

for almost a century.

There is no sign that this is going to change.

NARRATOR: To defeat the South's filibuster

and break their stranglehold on the measure,

Johnson needed 67 votes in the Senate.

That meant 23 Republicans had to cross the aisle

and support the bill.

PERLSTEIN: What Lyndon Johnson had that John F. Kennedy didn't

was an unbelievable power to sway legislators.

There was this thing called the Johnson treatment.

He'd kind of plant his shoes next to you,

he'd tower over you, he'd literally grab your lapels,

his hot breath would be six inches in front of your face.

CARO: I mean, this is the other side of Lyndon Johnson.

He doesn't just have the ideals; he knows how to push the levers.

PERLSTEIN: He had this politician's gift

for knowing exactly what each person

he was trying to persuade's vulnerabilities were,

and he would hit them like a jackhammer.

CARO: If the senator said,

"You know, that's going to kill me with my constituency,"

he would refute, he would cajole you

or threaten you or bribe you.

Anything he had to do to get your vote.

Richard Russell, the leader of the South,

says, flatly, "We could have beaten Kennedy on civil rights.

"We could have stopped 'em in the Senate.

But Lyndon Johnson," he says, "will beat us.

"He'll tear your arm off at the shoulder

"and beat you over the head with it,

"but he will get this passed.

We're going to lose."

NARRATOR: In the end, on June 19,

after the longest filibuster in the Senate's history,

27 Republicans voted for the bill.

Only six, including Barry Goldwater, voted no.

(applause)

ANNOUNCER: Congress passes the most sweeping civil rights bill

ever to be written into the law.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964

is signed at the White House by President Johnson.

NARRATOR: But even as Johnson was enshrining civil rights

into what he called "the books of law,"

he knew that the response to the measure

would challenge not only his presidency,

but the entire nation.

VIGUERIE: It was a game changer.

The creation of a new America.

DAN CARTER: The Civil Rights Bill,

it lays out all of these divisions in American society,

whether it's social divisions, cultural divisions,

racial divisions.

Suddenly, you can't escape from them anymore.

PERLSTEIN: It completely unravels

the entire social system of segregation in the South.

The very foundation upon which the quote-unquote

"Southern way of life" is built.

It's revolutionary.

HODDING CARTER: 90% of all the white people in the Deep South thought,

"Oh my God, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 means what?

"What do you mean you're going to tell me who I have to serve?

They're going to be in the same place as me?"

JOHNSON: My fellow Americans,

this civil rights act is a challenge to all of us

to go to work in our communities and our states,

in our homes and in our hearts

to eliminate the last vestiges of injustice.

REPORTER: This is the demonstration

that was supposed to have had some 600 or 1,000 people in it,

but now in addition to this civil rights demonstration,

we also had a demonstration

by some young people for Ringo Starr.

What is this all about?

This is Ringo's birthday.

He's 24, and this is a Beatles booster club.

And Ringo is going to be president, too.

You think so?

There are going to be

billions and trillions of girls voting for him.

If Ringo is not president, we want Johnson,

nothing but Johnson, because Johnson is the best.

We want Ringo.

Ringo is gonna win, though.

DOUGLAS: In 1964, we were literally beside ourselves--

pop psychologists and sociologists

trying to figure out, what did it mean

that young women were willing to violate police barricades,

ignore police authority completely

so they could try to touch Ringo's hair?

What adults were seeing was a new youthful energy

just being unleashed

by thousands and thousands of girls.

It was a kind of a collective jailbreak.

NARRATOR: The young girls at the barricades were not alone.

ANNOUNCER: Everybody's going to Bikini Beach!

NARRATOR: All during the summer of 1964,

new forms of rebellion were taking shape.

Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello's

sexy, skin-filled beach movies

raised eyebrows and packed summer movie theaters.

Pop artist Andy Warhol

thumbed his nose at the art establishment

with silk screens of Campbell's soup cans

that would appear in a gallery

made to look like an American supermarket.

And novelist Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters

hopped on their brightly painted Magic Bus,

setting off from California

on an LSD-infused road trip across the country.

GITLIN: In the summer of '64,

young people are proposing that an entrenched way of life

be dismantled and superseded.

WENNER: Young vs. old, the new vs. the old.

It was about that.

You know, "What are you rebelling against?"

"Well, what have you got?"

Because we were young,

and we knew better than anybody else.

And it was about our youthful ideals

and our youthful beliefs and what we want society to be.

NARRATOR: On June 15, about 300 students

and a group of veteran civil rights activists

joined together for an experiment in social change.

They had come to a small college in Ohio

to prepare for Freedom Summer, a radical new campaign

to increase voter registration of blacks in the Deep South.

The new recruits were young and idealistic.

They were also overwhelmingly white.

ED KING: I was there for training as a minister.

The point of the project was to expand the movement,

and here was this help from college students

recruited through college chaplains.

BRACEY: They were going to spend their summer in Mississippi

fighting for black people's freedom.

And I think they saw it that way.

They weren't radical, radical kids.

They thought this was right, this is something you can do,

it shouldn't take that long

because you're doing something that's right.

NARRATOR: The Freedom Summer Project was run

by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee,

known as SNCC.

GITLIN: Those who had been organizing for years conceived of a plan.

The idea, quite brilliant idea, was to import students,

young people, to make Mississippi front-burner news.

NARRATOR: The new strategy was necessary

because despite the promise of the Civil Rights Act,

organizers on the ground

were making little progress towards equality.

PERLSTEIN: When a black person tries to vote

in a place like Mississippi,

there are all sorts of obstacles,

both legal and illegal, they face.

I mean, a legal obstacle might be, say, a literacy test

in which they claim that they have to recite

the entire Constitution.

Illegal, you might be organizing to register voters in a church,

and the Ku Klux Klan might burn your church down.

KING: In Mississippi, we had been having

one black man a month murdered by the Klan

just to set an example

there will be no voter registration work in this area.

People felt like the government in Washington

lets these things happen.

BOB MOSES: Those kind of events,

it was just utter silence.

Utter silence.

There's... nobody knows, and the media doesn't care.

DENNIS: A lot of us were tired.

We had been in this thing nonstop.

So there were a lot of discussions

going on at that time.

"What's going to happen

if you bring in all these young kids into the places?"

But we really felt we had no choice.

The time was right.

You had to get America's attention.

NARRATOR: The students had come to Ohio

for a crash course in nonviolent activism

and the voter registration laws of Mississippi.

They were also warned about what was waiting for them

in the South.

Most likely, a cop won't try to chunk you in here,

but he will hit you across here.

We want to get used to this, used to people jeering at us.

Yell it out!

"Get out of here, nigger-lovers coming from the North.

Go home, Yankee!"

MOSES: The goal for me

was to help the students understand

their job was just to be in Mississippi and survive.

REPORTER: Do you worry about

what's going to happen to you in Mississippi?

Very much.

This is something which I had to think out

before I even decided whether to apply to the program,

and that is whether or not I was willing

not only to face a beating

but whether or not it was something

worth being killed for.

We all feel hopeful

that we are going to be able to do something.

When we sing songs together, I think a lot of us mean it:

that we shall overcome

and that something really will come out of this summer.

With some knowledge of what may await them

but with little protection against it,

they set forth for a summer in Mississippi.

POTTER: It is a year of choice,

and these college students are trying to decide

what they can do to create a more just world.

REPORTER: Yesterday, the first 200 civil rights workers

arrived in Mississippi and fanned out over the state.

BRACEY: I don't think they sensed the danger,

because you can't comprehend being in the United States

and having somebody who wants to shoot you

because you want black people to have the right to vote.

You know, we learned in civics class,

everybody's a citizen, they all have a right to vote.

What's the problem?

Well, you're in Mississippi.

REPORTER: You've got a telephone.

I understand there have been

quite a few people calling you.

What do they say?

Well, we got a series of phone calls

about two minutes after the telephone was installed.

There is of course incredible profanity,

numerous threats, bomb threats,

personalized threats asking for people by name.

RITA BENDER: People throw around the words "police state,"

but Mississippi was.

I guess I would call it a Klan state.

One thinks of the police as protectors.

The police were not the protectors.

NARRATOR: On June 21,

three members of the Freedom Summer Project

based in Meridian, Mississippi--

Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner--

drove to the nearby town of Longdale,

where a black church had been burned to the ground.

KING: The civil rights workers

went up to talk to church people

who had been beaten and attacked by the Klan.

And somebody reported to the police that they were around.

NARRATOR: Anxious not to be on the roads at night,

the three young men headed home.

Outside the town of Philadelphia,

they were arrested for speeding and taken to the county jail.

Around 10:00 p.m., they were released.

Then, they disappeared.

Andrew Goodman had only been in Mississippi for 24 hours,

having just arrived from his training course in Ohio.

James Chaney was a Mississippi native

working for an organization called CORE:

the Congress of Racial Equality.

Mickey Schwerner, also with CORE,

had arrived in the state six months earlier

with his wife Rita.

BENDER: Mickey and I first went to Meridian

to establish a community center there.

It would be a place where kids could simply come and hang out

and talk about what was going on in the community

and how they wanted to affect it.

DENNIS: When they first came in,

I was not very pleased, to be honest with you.

They came in this little Volkswagen

like little flower people,

so I didn't particularly like the idea.

But then one day,

Mickey called me and asked me to come over.

So I made an excuse, he said, "Please come over,"

so I went over there.

When I got there, they had the Freedom School set up,

they had books, they had all this stuff,

they had all these kids there and people coming in,

and I was just amazed.

And that's when I began to get to know Mickey Schwerner.

He made a statement to me at the time,

and I still don't know today whether he was joking or not,

he said, "Sometimes when I'm here and I'm with the people,

I don't know whether I'm black or white."

And I sort of laughed it off and told him, "You're white."

But I wasn't understanding at that time

really what he probably meant, you know,

and I wish I had a deeper conversation with him

about that point, because he didn't laugh.

REPORTER: There is some mystery and some fear

concerning three of the civil rights workers:

two whites from New York City and a Negro from Mississippi.

Police say they arrested the three men

for speeding yesterday,

but released them after they posted bond.

They have not been heard from since.

DAN CARTER: No one at the time thought,

"We're going to use them as kind of sacrificial lambs,"

but when it happened, that's exactly what it was.

All of a sudden, instead of the three paragraphs

on page 19a of the New York Times, it was front page.

James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner...

Schwerner, Chaney, Goodman...

Mississippi in the past few days

has become a kind of giant amplifier...

DAN CARTER: Every news story was dominated by it,

and the whole Freedom Summer

became a kind of national exposure

for what was going on in the Deep South.

I think it was pretty clear almost instantly.

When there was no information in the first few hours,

I think it was pretty clear that they had been killed.

REPORTER: Do you feel that your husband has been murdered?

I don't know.

I don't want to say.

BENDER: Since I was getting this attention in any event,

I needed to draw attention to what this was all about.

And it wasn't about three men,

although it certainly in a personal way was about that,

but it was really about what the violence was all about,

what the denial of just basic human rights was all about,

and who were the usual victims.

As you know, lynchings in Mississippi are not uncommon;

they have occurred for many, many, many years.

Maybe this one could be the last

if some positive steps were taken

to show that the people in this country have had enough,

that they require that human beings

be treated as human beings.

REPORTER: Someone spotted a charred blue station wagon in the woods

about 20 miles from Philadelphia.

The station wagon was the one in which they were last seen.

It had been burned, but it had not been wrecked.

These young men have probably been killed

in the state of Mississippi.

When black civil rights workers were murdered,

the country could live with that.

But okay, other people are in danger,

it looks like something else.

Goodman, 20, a New York college student,

had never participated in the civil rights movement...

WRIGHT-RIGUEUR: This is something that affects people

who are sitting at home saying,

"Well, this could never happen to somebody like me."

All of a sudden,

this is something that could happen to someone like me.

BENDER: Three days after the disappearance,

I went up to Washington and I met with President Johnson.

The major message of our meeting was, you know,

"We want you to do what it takes

"to figure out what happened to these three people.

"But Mr. President, there has to be

federal protection for civil rights workers."

I was really pushing the president to make a commitment,

and he was trying to be as evasive as he could be.

And so we left and we were walking down this long corridor

with the press secretary.

He was obviously somewhat miffed

and said to me, "You know,

you don't talk to the president of the United States that way,"

and I was a little bit miffed too, so I said,

"Well, I think I just did."

NARRATOR: Johnson remained committed to civil rights,

but worried about antagonizing the South

by sending federal forces into Mississippi.

Now with the three men missing

and the national media refusing to let go of the story,

the president felt enormous pressure to deliver results.

JOHNSON: I asked Hoover two weeks ago,

after talking to the attorney general,

to fill up Mississippi with FBI men

and infiltrate everything he could.

I've asked him to put more men after these three kids.

DENNIS: They were finding bodies in Mississippi.

While they were looking, they were finding bodies.

And so the press would come out and say they found two bodies,

or they found a body,

and they're checking, going to do an autopsy to see if...

because it's decomposed,

to see if it's one of the missing people.

And they'd come out and say,

"Nope, they were not one of the missing people,"

and it was just like,

"Okay, it really wasn't them, maybe they're still alive."

And you're like, "Wait a minute,

you're finding bodies, people," you know?

"You're finding bodies."

But they were black bodies.

Still, America had not dealt with this thing

about what really was going on in Mississippi.

SCHLAFLY: In 1964, I was the president

of the Illinois Federation of Republican Women,

and I went all over the state of Illinois

giving speeches for Goldwater.

We wanted the grassroots to nominate the candidate.

And that's why I wrote my book, A Choice, Not An Echo.

It started out as speeches,

and then I developed it into a little paperback book.

I plunged with an order for 25,000,

thinking that would take care of it,

and I ended up selling three million out of my garage.

NARRATOR: When Barry Goldwater announced his candidacy,

he was not considered a favorite

for the Republican presidential ticket.

But his celebration of individual liberty

and his attacks on the federal government

had struck a chord with the electorate.

PERLSTEIN: The Goldwater folks

are these young, young Americans for Freedom activists.

They're housewives.

DAN CARTER: Small businessmen, conservative professionals,

doctors, dentists, simply middle-class Americans

who were, as they saw it, fed up

with what was going on in American society.

NARRATOR: Members of what came to be known as "Goldwater's Army"

had fanned out across America,

knocking on doors, raising fistfuls of cash,

and lining up delegates to support his nomination.

Now, they jammed the aisles

of the aging, smoke-filled Cow Palace in San Francisco

as the 1964 Republican National Convention

was called to order on July 13.

VIGUERIE: It just didn't get any better than this.

We thought we had died and gone to heaven politically.

It was Mecca.

I mean, if you were a young conservative,

you just had to say, "I was there."

SCHLAFLY: We all marched around.

People were really revved up

about getting Goldwater nominated and elected.

NARRATOR: Finally, a true conservative

was poised to win the Republican nomination,

and he had done it by embracing positions

long considered too extreme for his own party.

Goldwater was against a progressive income tax,

believed Social Security should be voluntary,

and in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis,

even seemed willing to consider using nuclear weapons

against the Soviet Union.

His vote against the Civil Rights Act

had been yet another example

of the senator's determination to go his own way.

DAN CARTER: Goldwater was against the Civil Rights Bill

not because he was opposed to civil rights,

but because he was opposed to the role

of the federal government enforcing civil rights.

EDWARDS: If you look at the Goldwater record in Arizona,

it's extraordinary.

He helped to desegregate the Air National Guard.

He hired blacks for his department store.

He supported equal rights and equality,

but he wanted it to come about in a conservative way,

which is to say gradually,

which is to say through states' rights.

WRIGHT-RIGUEUR: Goldwater believes that states should have the right

to decide what is best for them.

For black voters, that's interpreted

as an open all-pass for segregationists,

for racists, for white supremacists.

REPORTER: The largest civil rights demonstration

since the March on Washington last summer

is assembled before the San Francisco City Hall.

40,000 people, half of them Negros,

demonstrate against Goldwater.

WRIGHT-RIGUEUR: At the 1964 convention, there are these people

angrily storming the streets outside of the Cow Palace,

saying, "We do not want Barry Goldwater!

We don't want Barry Goldwater!"

because they're terrified that the Republicans

will nominate somebody that represents

this conservative brand of Republicanism.

NARRATOR: But for the true believers inside the Cow Palace,

Goldwater was the leader of a conservative wave

that would sweep establishment Republicans aside.

At last, on the evening of July 15,

South Carolina put Goldwater over the top.

ANNOUNCER: South Carolina casts 16 votes for Senator Barry Goldwater.

(loud cheering)

REPORTER: Bellowing and shouting begins right then and there.

Barry Morris Goldwater,

grandson of a Polish immigrant, senator from Arizona

and leader of the conservatives is the Republican choice

to oppose Lyndon Johnson for the presidency.

EDWARDS: It was a delicious night for him and for us.

The Republican Party had become the Conservative Party.

(applause)

PERLSTEIN: When he was nominated,

the first thing you would think Barry Goldwater would want to do

is kind of heal all the factions

so everyone can kind of work together

and put their shoulder to the wheel

to support the party in November.

He does the exact opposite.

Anyone who joins us in all sincerity, we welcome.

Those who do not care for our cause

we don't expect to enter our ranks in any case.

I would remind you

that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.

(cheering)

Let me remind you also

that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

(applause)

DAN CARTER: What Goldwater wanted to say was,

"I'm a radical."

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.

HODDING CARTER: When that phrase was uttered,

it was deafening.

The reaction to that, that was it.

They were people on a mission

which was in the best American tradition:

to be emphatic about the redemption of our values

and to be immoderate in advancing their position.

PERLSTEIN: 1964, both left and right

are ready to kill each other,

fighting over the meaning of the same word: freedom.

For the right, the greatest traducer of freedom

is the federal government.

For the left, it's Southern segregationists.

There's no consensus over what that key concept,

that key American concept "freedom," even means.

NARRATOR: In the summer of 1964,

in a small recording studio at Detroit's Motown Records,

the singer Marvin Gaye

was laying down a demo for a new song

when one of the label's rising stars, Martha Reeves,

happened to walk into the studio.

KURLANSKY: Martha heard that Marvin Gaye was singing a new song,

and she loved Marvin Gaye.

She used to sing backup for him.

The song was called "Dancing in the Street."

Marvin Gaye saw her there and said,

"Oh, why don't we let Martha do it?"

So she sang it to the track, and she just nailed it.

* Calling out around the world

* Are you ready for a brand new beat? *

KURLANSKY: An interesting thing, "Dancing in the Street."

And then you have this very strong black voice

saying, "Summer's here and the time is right

for dancing in the street."

* Philadelphia, P.A.

* Dancing in the street

* Baltimore and D.C. now

* Dancing in the street

The song lists all these cities

and they are all cities

with large, volatile black populations.

You know, the lyrics are so right

for the political movement that was coming.

* Oh, it doesn't matter what you wear *

* Just as long as you are there *

* So come on...

KURLANSKY: In a way, people were being called upon to rise up.

* Everywhere around the world... *

NARRATOR: Over the course of the summer,

"Dancing in the Street" would become

one of Motown's biggest hits and an unexpected soundtrack

for a nation in the midst of radical change.

DAVE DENNIS: I came to New York in July to visit a friend of mine,

James Baldwin's brother, David Baldwin.

I was going to spend the night with him

and then leave the next day and go back to Mississippi.

And all of a sudden we heard all these sirens.

And we... "What the heck is going on?"

So it finally just kept going, so we decided

to step outside to see what we could see out there,

then there's just, you know, lit up.

It was... the Harlem riots were going on.

NARRATOR: On July 16, during an altercation with the manager

of a Manhattan apartment building,

a 15-year-old black teenager named James Powell

was shot and killed by a white off-duty police officer.

Two days later,

a protest over the missing Mississippi civil rights workers

turned violent, and Harlem began to burn.

Suddenly, the racial violence

that had been tearing apart the South

was now flaring up in a northern city.

JOHN BRACEY: When I was growing up,

policemen walked around communities--

white policemen, single white policemen--

to walk around a neighborhood

and tell you to move off the corner and so forth and you did.

You know, you'd be standing there making noise,

singing doo-wop or whatever and there'd be one white policeman

and he'd say, "Okay, it's too late.

Why don't you all go home?"

And you went home.

It never occurred to you

that you would question the authority of this policeman.

But when you shoot a black kid, it's like wait a minute,

that policeman coming around the corner

don't look the same anymore.

It's like, "Who are you to tell me what to do?"

"Why aren't you locking up these white people

that are messing with these black people?"

I mean, that's the hypocrisy that people see

and that's the hypocrisy that people respond to.

People came out in large numbers.

I walked downtown, just walking downtown.

Cop come up to me,

"Hey you! What you doing down here?

"Get up against the wall.

"Where's your identification?

Identify yourself."

What right he got to come up to me like that for?

MAN: You ain't white.

That's right, that's right!

That's right, brother.

BRACEY: There was an increasing skepticism about the commitment

of white Americans to any kind of racial equality at all.

Younger people are saying, "You're not moving fast enough,"

and Malcolm X is rising

as a counter-voice to the civil rights movement.

We want freedom, by any means necessary.

We want justice by any means necessary.

We want equality by any means necessary.

KURLANSKY: Malcolm X made a very famous speech.

It was this break in the civil rights movement

that happened right there in the summer of '64.

We don't feel that in 1964

that we should have to sit around and wait

for some degree of civil rights.

KURLANSKY: There was no more patience.

Black people had been left behind in an era of affluence.

(gunshots)

REPORTER: Just heard a volley of shots ring out.

This happened after a policeman was hit by a flying bottle.

Guns started to fire.

NARRATOR: As the riots erupted,

more than 8,000 people took to the streets,

hurling Molotov cocktails,

smashing windows and looting local businesses.

(sirens wailing)

DENNIS: I watched police as they came in in trucks like that

as taunting people,

and Dave and I were walking down.

There were some police and this kid darted out.

And the cop just ran out and he knocked over a can, a trash can,

but he was just trying to get out of the way, a little kid.

And this cop just turned around and unloaded on him.

Blew him away right in front of me.

And so David goes over

and they tried to get David away from him, poor boy.

And this cop...

went over and made David get on his knees

and he put his gun to his head.

And he said, "I'm gonna blow you away, nigger."

And David looked at him and said,

"You might as well kill me,

'cause you can't do me no more harm."

Mickey and them are missing.

I'm questioning myself.

I'm questioning what we're doing,

I'm questioning, is that...

What is it that this country really listens to.

I mean, what... are they really getting it, you know?

GITLIN: In Harlem it wasn't simply about police misconduct.

It was about low wages, it was about bad schools.

It's about poverty.

It's about racial subordination.

There was something cooking up, especially during the summer,

one more moment of brutality,

one more instance of mistreatment,

and, uh, you know, there's a lot of tinder ready to burn up.

NARRATOR: By the end of July,

the Freedom Summer project had nearly 900 volunteers

at work on voter registration in Mississippi.

But hanging over everything

was the disappearance of the three civil rights workers,

who had been missing for almost six weeks.

REPORTER: The hunt for clues,

or something more grim,

has reached the river dragging stage,

with small boats being used

along the muddy, shallow Pearl River.

DAN CARTER: Johnson called up J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI,

who was not terribly enthusiastic about civil rights,

and he said, "You do what you need to do, what you have to do.

"I don't care how much you spend,

"I don't care who you bend,

but you find out who killed these three young men."

NARRATOR: More than 250 FBI agents flooded into Mississippi,

such a large force that local residents complained

of a federal invasion of their state.

At first there was nothing to go on but rumors,

but as the long summer wore on, information began to leak out.

JON MARGOLIS: The FBI went in there

with skilled investigators

and lots of cash to pay, essentially, bribes to people

and they finally managed to get enough people

to provide enough information.

They were told that the bodies were probably buried

under this dam, and they dug and they found the bodies.

REPORTER: Two of those bodies were firmly identified

as those of Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman.

Authorities are all but certain

that the third body is that of James Chaney.

NARRATOR: A group of local Klansmen, including the sheriff's deputy,

had shot the men at close range.

Here we are, the Freedom Summer began the first day

with these three men disappearing,

and it's just about the last day of the summer

when we're having the funeral for them.

The law in Mississippi says

blacks and whites cannot be buried together

even if they've been executed together.

So the New York families are going to have services

in New York, but the service for James Chaney was basically

a memorial service for all three.

Dave Dennis is carrying a very heavy personal load;

he was the nonviolent general who had ordered them

to go into this very dangerous place.

I feel that he's got his freedom;

we're still fighting for it.

DENNIS: Well, I had been asked by the national office of CORE.

There was so much unrest around the country

and what was going on and bringing attention to this,

could you just take it easy?

And we can try to make a quiet, low-key kind of eulogy.

And so I'd written some notes, you know,

and I was going to try to do this.

What I want to talk about right now is the living dead

that we have right among our midst

not only in the state of Mississippi

but throughout the nation.

And I looked out there and...

And I saw little Ben Chaney.

And he loved his brother.

And I was tired of going to funerals, man.

I was tired of seeing it, and I looked at Ben Chaney,

I saw this kid in Harlem.

He couldn't have been much older.

And I lost it.

I lost it.

And I'm sick and tired

and I can't help but feel bitter, you see.

Deep down inside, I'm not gonna stand here

and ask anybody in here not to be angry tonight!

Don't bow down anymore.

Hold your heads up!

We want our freedom now.

I don't want to have to go to another memorial!

I'm tired of funerals.

I'm tired of it!

We've got to stand up!

DENNIS: The ultimate aim for Freedom Summer was to open the doors

to give black people the right to participate,

the right to vote.

We felt the country could really see what was going on,

that they were going to step up to the plate.

"Look, we can't have this, this is America.

"We are a democratic society.

These people need to be a part of this government."

So we really believed that.

The tragic thing about it,

the young people who came down believed that.

They believed in this country.

This country missed a golden opportunity

with those thousand kids.

BRACEY: And I think a lot of the hard lessons learned

by young white kids in Mississippi

that later got them into the left

and later turned a lot of people very kind of radical

was that their parents had been lying to them

about what their country was all about.

DENNIS: When those kids left, they left Mississippi disappointed,

they left Mississippi angry.

They went back to their universities and colleges

and they began to question everything

that this country was saying.

HODDING CARTER III: By 1964 I was editor of the family newspaper,

The Delta Democrat-Times of Greenville, Mississippi.

Freedom Summer, that stirred the beast.

All of a sudden, these freedom schools and houses

are popping up all over Mississippi.

And with them come burnings and explosions.

The death of those boys was it.

It was the end of the game for me.

I had been very careful for a long time.

I wanted to stay in business.

At that point, I said the hell with this.

I can't just sit here and be an observer

at a time in which change is supposed to be coming

and every lever of power in this state is being used to stop it,

including violence.

And knowing that there was not a thing

to be done about it in Mississippi,

I decided to go where I thought I could do some good,

and I went off to work for Lyndon Johnson.

There's an old hymn,

"Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide."

And that was it.

NARRATOR: As the November election approached,

Lyndon Johnson could look back on his first months in office

with justifiable pride.

He had steadied the nation

in the wake of President Kennedy's death,

passed historic civil rights legislation

and launched ambitious plans for the Great Society.

On the campaign trail,

the president was leading Barry Goldwater in the polls

and running on a platform of prosperity at home

and peace overseas.

Then, on the morning of August 4,

events on the other side of the globe threatened to derail

Johnson's plans.

Good evening, I'm Frank McGee, NBC News.

Today, for the second time, North Vietnamese torpedo boats

attacked United States naval vessels

patrolling in international waters.

NARRATOR: Reports claimed American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin

had been attacked twice,

and suddenly the Vietnam War was front-page news.

Johnson had hoped to put off the issue of Vietnam

until after the election in the fall.

In fact, for years, the war had remained a distant conflict

most Americans cared little about.

President Kennedy had begun sending military advisors

to Vietnam back in 1961.

By the time Johnson had inherited the war,

the number had grown to more than 16,000,

but the situation in South Vietnam

had continued to deteriorate.

Now, news of hostilities in the Gulf of Tonkin

meant the war could no longer be ignored.

Johnson was running for election as a peace candidate,

and all of a sudden there's this incandescent war moment.

There's a hysteria about our ships being fired upon,

and suddenly we were involved in a shootout.

NARRATOR: Although there was considerable doubt

about whether the second attack against American destroyers

had even happened, Johnson took decisive action,

ordering air strikes in retaliation and asking Congress

for increased authority to prosecute the war.

Johnson avails himself of the moment

to cash in on the avalanche of support.

ROBERT DALLEK: He goes to the Congress with what becomes known

as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

ROBERT CARO: Johnson wants a free hand.

And it's relatively easy for him to get it,

because people don't realize, Congress does not realize,

the Senate does not realize what we are getting into.

And here is a late development.

President Johnson will go

on live television and radio tonight

with a statement on the situation in Southeast Asia.

I shall immediately request the Congress to pass a resolution...

HODDING CARTER: Tonkin Gulf provided

a blank check for the expansion,

which was of course going to come apparently,

though God knows you didn't know it at the time.

I mean, that wasn't what the campaign seemed to be about.

We are not about to send American boys

9,000 or 10,000 miles away from home

to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.

(applause)

MAX FRANKEL: Johnson knew the right rhetoric.

He had to run as the fellow who was not going to go to war,

and that was the burden on his conscience and on his shoulders

because behind the scenes he knows

people were proposing a very significant escalation.

GITLIN: I think we smelled

very big trouble.

I don't know that we could have imagined just how big

and bad and long it was going to be.

But we... we took it very seriously.

I knew there was something fuzzy about it and I also knew

it was an overreaction.

To retaliate in that form

was a... didn't have to do with what occurred in the Gulf.

I knew that.

And yet I firmly believed he would end this thing.

* Come gather 'round people wherever you roam *

* And admit that the waters around you have grown *

* And accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone *

* If your time to you is worth savin' *

* Then you better start swimmin' or you'll sink like a stone *

* For the times, they are a-changin'. *

DOUGLAS: By the time Bob Dylan is singing

"The Times They Are a-Changin'" in 1964,

there was an emerging sense of betrayal.

1964 exposed fault lines around politics,

fault lines around race, fault lines around gender.

RICK PERLSTEIN: I think the story America had been telling itself,

that it was united and at peace with itself,

was an unsustainable story,

and it kind of cracks of its own internal contradictions.

And 1964 is when those contradictions come to a fore.

NARRATOR: In the autumn of 1964,

after months marked by racial violence

and echoes of war overseas, Americans revisited the event

that had so shaken the national confidence.

REPORTER: The final verdict on the fateful tragedy

which engulfed the nation ten months ago.

NARRATOR: On September 27, the Warren Commission announced

that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole gunman responsible

for the assassination of President Kennedy.

KURLANSKY: Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone.

What's going on here?

This was a widely believed thing

that some kind of conspiracy was involved.

The assassination of President Kennedy was, inevitably,

a mystery story on a grand scale.

NARRATOR: In the days following its release,

all three networks devoted extensive coverage

to the Warren Report,

fueling the national obsession with the assassination.

DOUGLAS: Television had a huge impact on people's sensibilities.

Television is now a major fixture in people's homes.

It's delivering a half an hour of news every night

and entertainment.

So it's all in there together.

(Mayberry theme playing)

NARRATOR: At first glance, the fall lineup that year

was a reassuring collection familiar faces:

Andy Griffith, Gomer Pyle and Dick Van Dyke.

DOUGLAS: Television was still primarily black and white.

You could see it as a black-and-white world.

You could see it as a very simple world.

But you also see television representing what's going on

in the culture in a very metaphorical fashion.

(theme song playing)

There's new shows like The Addams Family.

* They're creepy and they're kooky... "

DOUGLAS: Here are these ghoulish, monstrous, grotesque people

moving in, bringing in difference to the neighborhood.

Welcome, honeymooners, welcome!

Welcome!

Aren't they thoughtful, dear?

Throwing rice.

That's not rice, old man.

It's lizard's teeth.

(laughter)

DOUGLAS: It is this kitschy way to work through

how to manage white-bread neighborhoods

dealing with a very different kind of family moving in.

I mean you're going to have to learn

to be a suburban housewife.

I'll learn, you'll see, I'll learn.

Now, you'll have to learn to cook and keep house.

And soon we'll be a normal, happy couple with no problems.

DOUGLAS: People dismissed Bewitched

as the kitschiest, most ridiculous show ever.

But this was very much a kind of hinged show

around women's power and women's desire for power.

I have to check my roast.

DOUGLAS: Here is a show about a very beautiful suburban wife

who happens to be a witch,

who has magical powers that her husband begs her not to use.

You know, people think this is just entertainment...

Sam, now cut that out!

DOUGLAS: But people in television are members of our culture,

and they imbibe the zeitgeist of the times.

I thought we could start with a protest march.

I know one too.

DOUGLAS: Change is everywhere, rebellion is everywhere.

NARRATOR: As the new school year got underway

at the University of California at Berkeley,

students flocked to the campus from all over the nation.

In many ways they were typical American undergraduates--

clean-cut, career-minded and conventional in most respects.

But this year there was a difference.

Some of them had spent the previous months

working in Mississippi as part of Freedom Summer.

COHEN: By '64, Northern students are being inspired

by the Southern freedom struggle and using civil disobedience

to try to knock down all kinds of discrimination

in their backyards.

COONTZ: We would organize people

to go picket the Oakland Tribune

and other institutions that discriminated

against African Americans

and we put our tables up right at the entrance to the campus.

NARRATOR: The center of student activism was a row of tables

at the corner of Bancroft and Telegraph streets

that had been traditionally used

for the distribution of information

about a wide range of campus activities.

COHEN: They think that's on city property.

It turns out they're partially on campus property

and there's pressure put on the university administration.

How can the university be used

as a center for social protest and social change?

And they told us, "You can no longer organize

"off-campus activities.

You can't have political tables on campus."

And that leads to this huge battle over free speech.

At this particular point, we have been denied this,

and we think whether or not this is true or not

as far as why they're doing it,

the effect of cutting this off

is to stop political activity on this campus.

We told them they had to go back on the streets,

where they've been traditionally for this kind of activity.

And they then took the position that we want to undertake

these activities on campus property itself

and we said, "This is not possible."

That was sort of the crystallizing moment

at which the free speech movement came into being.

The free speech movement was organized

by veterans of Mississippi Summer,

and if you had been in Mississippi

and you were up against the Ku Klux Klan

and the racists' leadership,

to have some university administrator telling you,

"Ooh, boys and girls, you better not go pass out leaflets"...

That didn't go over well.

COHEN: This is not the right group to challenge or the right time.

Because by this time, even though they're young,

they have a lot more political experience

than the people who are, you know,

these middle-aged administrators who are trying to suppress them.

NARRATOR: Angry at what they perceived

as a violation of their First Amendment rights,

a diverse coalition of student groups decided to defy

the new restrictions

and set up their tables even further inside the campus.

In response, the administration suspended eight students

associated with the protests.

COONTZ: At one point, people were sitting at a table

and a guy named Jack Weinberg,

who was a veteran of the civil rights movement,

was at the table and he was not a student.

And when they asked him for a student I.D.

and he couldn't produce one, the police told him

that he was trespassing and he was going to be arrested.

STUDENT: You can't just pick on one.

I am arresting you.

You're either going to come with me...

STUDENT: All of us, you arrest us all.

We're all manning the table.

But instead of getting up, he used his civil rights training

and just went limp.

They drove a police car onto campus just about lunch hour,

when people were streaming out of their classes,

and we see somebody being bodily lifted into a police car.

And so people said, "What's going on?"

And they surrounded the police car, not on purpose,

but once we found out what was going on,

it was like, "No, that's not right."

CROWD (chanting): Let him go! Let him go! Let him go!

COONTZ: People start to argue about what we should do.

Should we let them take the car?

What if we get arrested?

What should we do?

And finally somebody brings a bullhorn and says,

"Why don't we stand on top of the car

so that people can hear?"

So, that's what we did.

One person at a time who was going to speak did that.

Every single one of them taking their shoes off

so that we wouldn't damage the car.

That was the kind of mentality.

And so there was spirited debate.

What emerged was not simply, "Let's go support civil rights,"

but "Let's have a university

that's sort of worthy of our better selves."

The remarkable thing about this entire situation

is that there's been a coalition

that I think is completely unusual in politics.

There's been a coalition from Youth for Goldwater

all the way over from the Young Socialist Alliance.

And usually these two groups don't even speak together.

This is an amazing thing to me

and a very happy experience in my life

to see so many democratic students.

CROWD: * Oh, deep in my heart, I...

I just did what any of my fellow students,

or my fellows in all these organizations, would have done.

So I was just singled out.

Chance selected me; I'm no martyr.

NARRATOR: Jack Weinberg spent 32 hours in the police car,

while more than a thousand students protested around him,

and leaders of the new movement,

including a young philosophy student named Mario Savio,

negotiated with the administration.

Finally, on the evening of October 2,

the university and the demonstrators reached a deal.

MAN: What's the word now, doctor?

Well, there has been an agreement signed.

Agreement signed?

Yes, by the student groups

and by me as president of the university,

which has several points to it.

The first point is that the student demonstrators

shall desist from their illegal actions

protesting university regulations.

We've also agreed to set up a committee to examine the rules.

NARRATOR: For weeks the activists and university officials negotiated,

searching for a way to end the crisis.

Then, the chancellor abruptly announced

that Mario Savio and three other students

would, in fact, be suspended.

Infuriated, Savio and the other leaders raised the stakes,

calling for an immediate occupation

of the administration building.

SAVIO: There's a time

when the operation of the machine becomes so odious,

makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part,

you can't even passively take part,

and you've got to put your bodies

upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers,

upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop.

COONTZ: Mario Savio was this eloquent, eloquent guy.

And I've never reread the speech,

but it was just burned in my memory.

JOAN BAEZ: * We shall overcome

* We shall overcome...

COHEN: People are marching slowly in.

Joan Baez is singing "We Shall Overcome."

It's not like a hijacking.

It's like a nonviolent occupation of the building

that follows Mario's speech.

The sense of community inside there was amazing.

People were holding Freedom School classes,

poetry's being read, films are being shown.

It's like they are doing all this educational reform work

right in the building.

So the Bay Area Civil Rights Movement

in the stairwell over there.

The door will be open for anyone who would like to leave

and you may leave at any time,

but you may not get back into the building.

COONTZ: This was not a party.

We were so idealistic,

and I remember calling my mom and I said,

"Mom, I think I'm going to get arrested."

I have an announcement.

This assemblage has developed to such a point

that the purpose and work of the university

have been materially impaired.

(applause)

NARRATOR: In the early hours of the morning,

hundreds of state and campus police entered the building

and began arresting the demonstrators.

Almost 800 students would be carted off to jail.

WENNER: I could see the arrests going on, you know,

and the cops they're dragging people down marble staircases.

I actually got up and walked, I have to say.

And then we were thrown into paddy wagons and driven off.

We started singing freedom songs.

WENNER: Well, it just galvanized everybody.

I mean it just riveted the entire campus.

NARRATOR: And within days, the academic senate,

composed of the university's faculty, voted overwhelmingly

in favor of the students.

The undergraduates who had faced disciplinary action

had their suspensions dropped.

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: Several thousand students have gathered

for what has been billed as a victory celebration,

a victory the students feel is assured as a result

of yesterday's action by the academic senate.

COONTZ: In 1964, even those of us who had

tremendous criticisms of the government--

its burgeoning involvement in Vietnam,

its failure to really enforce the Civil Rights Act--

nevertheless, we were... we still had a lot of illusions

or hope that America did stand for freedom,

would stand up for freedom.

And so there was the sense that when things went wrong,

they must not understand.

You know, maybe if we just explain to them

that this is not part of our tradition,

we should be doing something else.

And then when they didn't listen,

it was a radicalizing experience.

WENNER: It was, to me anyway, it was the precedent

of the modern student movement.

Student protest, as we know it, as we came to know it,

started there, then.

This is a moment when that sort of spreading

of that hyper democratic ethos of the freedom movement

from the South, is spreading nationally.

Soon it's going to be about the war.

Later, it's going to be about gender equality.

It's going to burst into lots of other areas as well.

So it really reshaped a lot of American politics.

It's not just something strange that's happening in California,

this is something that's going to be shaping

American politics for years to come.

My fellow Americans, your choice in this election

may be the most important that you will ever make.

NARRATOR: As the presidential campaign entered its final weeks,

both candidates appeared to be men with something to prove.

GOLDWATER: I pledge that I will restore

to America a dedication to principle and to conscience

among its public servants.

Government is not an enemy of the people.

Government is the people themselves.

NARRATOR: As he crisscrossed the country,

campaigning at a breakneck pace, Lyndon Johnson seemed determined

to win a victory that would vanquish any doubts

about his legitimacy, and validate the social programs

that were the centerpiece of his administration.

Barry Goldwater, on the other hand, seemed less interested

in winning the White House than in taking a stand

on the conservative principles

that he so passionately championed.

The Goldwater people and the Johnson people

saw this as a fundamental kind of choice.

I suggest tonight that the liberal approach

to America's problems has failed miserably in every sphere

of activity.

(cheers and applause)

Everyone can have a job.

Every kid can have an education.

We can get these folks off the streets.

In time, we can have the great society

that we're all entitled to.

(cheers and applause)

We can prevent depressions, we can have full employment.

I've heard these pipe dreams for the last 30 years.

And I've never seen one of them come true.

NARRATOR: As the candidates made their case to the voters,

a historic shift was underway in the electorate.

Because of his support for civil rights,

Johnson knew he was too unpopular

to do much campaigning in the Deep South.

His wife, Lady Bird, however, offered to go,

convinced that Southern chivalry would still prevail.

As it turned out, her reception was barely civil,

and in South Carolina, she was almost shouted off the stage.

Johnson is now thoroughly identified

with integration, with civil rights.

PERLSTEIN: Because of Barry Goldwater's vote

against the Civil Rights Act, because he speaks of the South

as a class of people who are victimized by the North,

this process of the solid Democratic South

becoming a vehicle for the Republican party begins.

And that really is the most important realignment

in the way the party system is structured

since the American Civil War.

NARRATOR: If Goldwater's fortunes were improving

throughout the South, nationally his campaign

was in need of a boost.

It came from a surprising source.

(applause)

REAGAN: Thank you, thank you very much.

NARRATOR: On October 27, just one week before the election,

the Goldwater campaign found themselves

with an unused 30-minute block of television time on NBC.

At the last minute the campaign chose to fill it with a speech

that had been recorded earlier that fall

by an actor-turned- Republican-activist

named Ronald Reagan.

For three decades we've sought to solve the problems

of unemployment through government planning

and the more the plans fail the more the planners plan.

But now if government planning and welfare had the answer

and they've had almost 30 years of it,

shouldn't we expect government to read the score to us

once in a while?

(applause)

SCHLAFLY: The Goldwater people just went bananas when they saw it.

Barry Goldwater has faith in us.

He has faith that you and I have the ability, and the dignity,

and the right to make our own decisions

and determine our own destiny.

Thank you very much.

(applause)

MARGOLIS: The reaction was so favorable that it was run again.

It was originally scheduled to run once, and it ran again.

And it established Ronald Reagan as a political factor

to be reckoned with in the future.

CARTER: People may not have thought about him

as a political candidate, but he was from '64 on

a serious political figure.

EDWARDS: Without any question,

that without Barry Goldwater

there would have been no Ronald Reagan.

NARRATOR: On Election Day, November 3,

Barry Goldwater and his wife arrived at their local precinct

in Phoenix to cast their votes.

The officials tried to wave the candidate inside,

but characteristically, Goldwater insisted

on waiting in line.

Lyndon Johnson kept campaigning until the last possible moment.

He had left nothing to chance, and by early that evening,

the results would show just how completely

the Johnson juggernaut had triumphed.

Lyndon Baines Johnson has been elected president

of the United States.

And the landslide has carried him in for his first term

in office on his own right, by his own election.

("Hail to the Chief" playing)

PERLSTEIN: Lyndon Johnson finally wins his landslide.

He gets 61% of the popular vote, he wins every state

except for a few in the South and Arizona,

which Barry Goldwater barely wins,

and the mandate for liberalism and the Great Society

and civil rights has been achieved.

NARRATOR: Not only was Johnson's presidential victory

unprecedented, he had carried with him huge new majorities

in both houses of Congress.

Now the astonishing ambition of the Great Society

seemed possible.

Bill after bill-- for Medicare, federal aid to education,

voting rights, environmental protection--

were all within reach.

And the conservative opposition had been vanquished.

PERLSTEIN: The pundits claim that conservatism is dead,

it's that definitive.

But the thing about it was, the only people

who didn't believe they were dead were the people

who were supposed to be dead.

MARGOLIS: The story they missed was that this candidate,

Barry Goldwater, who espoused policies

that were substantially outside the national consensus

of the last previous 20 years at least,

had gotten 40% of the vote.

EDWARDS: That told us we were right.

Our ideas are not only right, but they have a power.

They have an influence, they have a great, great potential.

I have no bitterness, no rancor at all.

KURLANSKY: 27 million people voted for Barry Goldwater,

and this became the base of a new Republican party.

(applause)

(Christmas music playing)

(cheers and applause)

JOHNSON: The lights of Christmas symbolize each year

the happiness of this wonderful season.

But this year I believe their brightness expresses

the hopefulness of the times in which we live.

CARO: At the end of the year, Lyndon Johnson

is where he has wanted to be all his life.

He has a vision for the country, you really feel this vision,

it's starting to move.

He's a figure just so immensely triumphant,

it's hard to believe that things are going to change

so dramatically.

NARRATOR: In the years ahead, Lyndon Johnson's dream

of a Great Society would be shattered by the long

and divisive war in Vietnam.

Embittered and unpopular, he would decide not to run

for president four years later.

The activists that had conceived of Freedom Summer

would fight on, some continuing the path of non-violence,

while others turned towards a new doctrine of black power.

Out of the ashes of the Goldwater campaign,

young Republicans would regroup, and finally make good

on their conservative revolution.

A new generation would challenge authority at every turn,

refusing to follow the rules, and helping to bring an end

to the war in Vietnam.

And women awakened by the Feminine Mystique would go on

to champion a movement that would fundamentally reshape

the nature of American society.

The spirit of revolution that would be sparked

by the tumultuous events of 1964, and reverberate throughout

the rest of the 1960s and beyond,

was summed up in a song by Sam Cooke,

released in the final months of that transformative year.

It was called "A Change Is Gonna Come".

* I was born by the river

KING: In '64, everywhere people are saying,

"I can do something.

"Change is possible.

"Change is worth living and dying for,

"and would we dare go forward?

Yes, we would."

VIGURIE: It was the creation of a new America.

It was a door to our future-- once we went through it

there was no going back.

COONTZ: 1964 saw a series of events

that really did crystallize the tension

between the tremendous sense of idealism

coexisting with the dawning sense of outrage.

DENNIS: Here it is, America.

Here's the bad, let's make it good.

That's what we're about.

We're Americans.

EDWARDS: We were still on fire, we were still feeling

what it was like to mobilize, and I think I determined

that coming out of that, that it is possible to change

the course of history.

HODDING CARTER III: I would pay money to go back, and just live through

that whole era again.

I would make all the same mistakes, but I'd know,

as I knew then, that I could never have asked

for a better time to be involved in the affairs of my nation.

'64 was the propulsion from the past into the future.

* It's been a long

* A long time coming

* But I know a change gonna come *

* Oh yes it will