The Sixties

[traintech55]

now if nixon had beat kennedy? would he have escalated vietnam? maybe he'd have nuked 'em! would the world have been a better place if MLK had not been assasinated? i have my own blood soaked answer to this question, but i'm going for rationality here. would it have been?

It is a little known fact that Kennedy wanted to pull out of Vietnam. At least Nixon got us out of there.

 

[rags]

just for the record, the MLK question is something i've obviously asked myself. i might get some disagreement here, but i like to think that the world have been better. we all know how things turned out. i wish that it had not been so.

 

[sixpkrt]

I was born in the early 60's and didn't experience all the events mentioned in this thread, but I think the late 60's and early 70's did have the best Mopars of all time, IMO. My first car, a 69 Road Runner was 10 years old when I bought it and it still beat anyone on the that wanted to race.
As for the 60's I remember race riots and watching the burning of entire neighborhoods on tv across the country, seeing the nightly news on a 19" B&W tv showing the coverage of the Vietnam war, watching Chicago cops try to take control of the protesters during the presidential convention, soldiers coming back from the war being ridiculed. etc, etc. etc. I don't think the 60's was a very proud time in our country's history.
Today I live in suburbs of Chicago, and as I watch the news tonight I see we have reached another new low of our society, the kayos at the Trump event, forcing the cancellation of the event.
This is not a political statement on my part, but an observation, of how this decade is turning into a repeat of the 60's, presidential protests, black & white race issues, ISIS, etc, etc, etc. WTF

 

[Tink]

We were pretty "tech free" in the sixties. A transistor radio was high tech and stereo recordings broke ground. There were no portable phones or pagers. Guitar amplifiers used tubes and have never been better than then. Something about a stylus and a tube receiver makes music listening magical. It was the transistor radio that introduced ignition wiring magnetic field interference to us.

I try to avoid political discussions as they never come out well. Politics are like music in that you form your opinions early in life. Nixon was my CIC and I noticed what was going on with Watergate in real time. A sad time for our country. I was a young person when that happened but is was not in the sixties. Neil Armstrong's moon footprint was about at the end of the decade.

 

[tbm3fan]

Nixon wouldn't escalate? Nixon is the one who promised to get us out of Vietnam with honor. He then proceeded with his secret war in Cambodia and Laos. A friend of mine flew Cobras 3 klicks from the Cambodian border. You should hear his stories about throwing dead enemy out of the choppers in 1972. Anyway, by the time we did get out, Cambodia had descended into hell because of us. Pol Pot killed far more Cambodians that the North Vietnamese ever did to those in the South. I lay all that on the first 6 months of 1968. The assassination of MLK and RFK opened the Pandora's box. I still believe to this day had RFK not been killed he would have won and we would have been out of Vietnam sooner. We then would have probably become friends with Vietnam sooner as the Vietnamese had no real grudge against us to begin with.

Remember when Kissinger made the deal for us to leave Vietnam Nixon promised the South the needed help should the North renege on the deal. The North did and the South came asking. Only one problem for the South and that was Watergate which made Ford President and he wanted no part of that deal and so declined.

 

[78Brougham]

Pick up a copy of "The politically incorrect guide to the Vietnam war" very enlightening