The Long Slide: JFK to Watergate and Beyond

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

I am old enough to have been rooted in two political eras of United States history.  The first was the post-World War II period or what many refer to as the Cold War era.  For me at least, the breaking point of that period of history came with the election of John F. Kennedy in November of 1960.  At that juncture the country seemed to be on the verge of 'rocketing' into the future.   The Soviets had launched Sputnik into space more than three years before, and both the Russians and the Americans had their early satellites orbiting the Earth by the time of Kennedy's election.  The Russian cosmonaut, Yuri Gargarin became the first human in space on April 12, 1961, shortly afterKennedy's inauguration,  and a month after that, on May 5, 1961, astronaut Alan B. Shepard became the first American in space.

Then Kennedy announced a national goal of getting a man on the moon during the decade of the 1960's, a goal that the United States met, although it happened nearly six years after Kennedy's tragic early death.

To me that Norman Rockwell, post war era in America disappeared the day that John Kennedy took office on January 20th, 1961.  There are others who feel that the world didn't really shift until Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963, and still others who say that the "feel" of Truman and Eisenhower extended up until the onset of the British rock-and-roll invasion which began in early 1964 and continued for a decade. 

And there was also the Vietnam War which America rushed to join at about the same time that John Kennedy was killed in Dallas, a war that took the lives of half-a-million young Americans and countless Vietnamese - and showed our society - on new color televisions - the tortured and mangled bowels of war without honor.

There is also one more significant marker that many cite between the world as it was then and the world that we inhabit today.  That marker, or breaking point, occurred fifty years ago today when a group of burglars broke into the Democratic National Headquarters at the new Watergate complex in Washington, DC.  Those criminals, some of whom were prominent in Republican politics, became known as the "plumbers," and were eventually brought to trial to answer for their crimes.  

But Watergate was more than just a burglary and an attempt to "bug" a political party's national headquarters.  It also became synonymous with political dirty tricks and eventually, fourteen months later, brought about the end of the presidency of Richard Nixon, a man who had been on the sleazy edge of American politics since the years just after World War II.  Watergate brought down Nixon and ended his political career, but the incident also destroyed the notion of politics, to many at least, as some sort of noble calling, and placed it more-or-less in the septic tank of American public service occupations.

Richard Nixon's abasement of politics and the presidency stayed with us like a multi-generational case of political herpes that just keeps popping up.  We were soon saddled with Reagan's Iran-Contra affair where our government was secretly selling arms in the Middle East - to our old enemy, Iran - and using that money to fund anti-revolutionary movements in the Americas.  That was followed by Bill Clinton's proclivity for sordid affairs and his adolescent attempts to cover them up, George W. Bush's vanity and oil wars in the Middle East, and finally Donald Trump's reign of cruel incompetence.  

Our world today is not the world of the 1950's where I was able to frolick in relative ease and comfort as I made my way into adult life - and clearly, sometime around that time that I became an adult, according to the calendar, the world changed drastically.

One era had ceased to exist, and new national identity began to emerge.  The new era was brought in with the promise of exploration and discovery, but it quickly stagnated into a dark time of scandal and self-dealing - one in which our bedrock political institution of American democracy even came to be at risk of disappearing.

Clearly another major cultural and political shift is in order, and it will likely take a seismic event to get us there.  My generation started out with great promise, but quickly hit the skids and brought our nation and society to the brink of oblivion - at least ethical oblivion.   May the younger generations have the courage and foresight to chart a better course and move society into a safe, sane, and caring future - back to where we thought we were headed in the early 1960's.