ABSTRACT

The 1960s mark a dividing point in the history of the Western world. The old generation in government was passing; the welfare state had come to provide a safety net; a university education was no longer the preserve of the privileged few; the young were freed from sexual taboos and fears, and they discovered a new sense of identity and mission: romantic, idealistic, searching for a cause more worthwhile than crass materialism in a secular age. That similar feelings were burgeoning in the Soviet-dominated East becomes clear from events in Poland and from the Prague Spring, but for the most part repression kept the lid on free expression. In the US, university students on the eastern seaboard in particular identified themselves in the 1960s with the civil-rights cause of black people, though in this context they had the support of a new-generation president in J. F. Kennedy. Elsewhere the old generation was still in control, typified by de Gaulle in the Elysée. In the US the promise of the Kennedy years ended with the president’s assassination. Vietnam increasingly blighted the lives of youth, of the conscripts sent to fight on the other side of the world; the war became the focus of a new student protest movement and aroused general disillusionment with the honesty of those who governed.