How did Americans really feel in 1964? Check the media reflections: “World Without Love”, “Don’t Let the Rain Come Down” and “Suspicion” placed high on the charts. The Drifters, “Up on the Roof” in 1962, now hid “Under the Boardwalk”. “Harris Against the World” and “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” premiered on TV, and the titles warned of paranoia and depression in the year to come. Boomer kids really related to the characters on “Gilligan’s Island”… trapped, isolated, helpless and lonely, while “The Fugitive” (“What did I do to deserve this?”) continued to soar in the ratings.
Did anyone notice at the time, that our laughter was strained and mixed with tears? The media offered comedies on topics that never seemed funny before: castaways stranded on a remote island, a stumbling blind man (“The Adventures of Mr. Magoo”), monsters, witches, robots, Martians, spies and counterspies (“Man From U.N.C.L.E.”).
The movie industry must always find a way to top the tube, and in 1964 offered the hilarious subject of world destruction in Dr. Stranglove; or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and Fail Safe. The plot of both films involved the accidental bombing of, and retaliation by Russia (inspired by the Cuban Missile Crisis). Each film boasted excellent directors (Kubric and Lumet, respectively), writing and acting, and yet, Strangelove became a Boomer classic while the second film faded from memory. Fail Safe was too damn serious for the time. When the President (Henry Fonda) agreed to sacrifice New York City, as an eye for an eye, he forced Americans to consider the severity of the game that we played with the Russians. Kubric, hip to the times, decided to turn a serious novel, Red Alert, into a black comedy. The audience began laughing during the opening credits, as a B-52 bomber refueled in midair. The planes looked like two giant insects humping as “Try a Little Tenderness” played in the background. Kubric allowed us to laugh at our pain, and one our greatest fears… the bomb. We felt relief, rather than the anxiety on top of fear that we got from watching Fail Safe.
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LBJ’s TV ad campaign people also recognized the mood of the country in planning his bid for reelection. Instead of giving Lyndon a positive image, they attached one negative reflection to Goldwater. Barry ran on a “no-nonsense” platform. His policy on Vietnam, for instance: “Let’s get in there and win the damn thing and then get the hell out.” In the most effective, and perhaps, the most misleading political campaign spot in the history of television, LBJ’s ad showed a little girl picking petals off a daisy, completely unaware of the violent mushroom cloud erupting behind her. The public made an instant connection between Barry and the bomb. Many Americans were fooled into thinking that if Goldwater became President he would waste no time in dropping the big one on Hanoi, and then Russia would retaliate and drop one on us. That fear magnified as the People’s Republic of China exploded its first atomic bomb just three weeks before the election. Meanwhile, Lyndon quietly used the Gulf of Tonkin incident (or non-incident, as we now know) to force Congress to give him carte blanche in Vietnam. Goldwater promised to abolish the draft during the campaign, and Johnson insinuated that he might do the same, but once the election was out of the way, LBJ moved in another direction. LBJ quickly went to work with Selective Service Director Hershey on a plan to speed up the classification of 18-year-olds (pioneer Boomers). The average draft age at the time was 23. A year later, the most popular joke among Republicans was: “My friends warned me that if I voted for Goldwater, we would be at war within a year. They were right; I did, and we are.”
Television embarked on the greatest sales campaign of all time, in an effort to sell patriotism. As usual, Boomers were the targets of the pitch. The networks pushed the “glory of war” concept with “12 O’Clock High”, “Combat”, “World War I” and “The Lieutenant”, and tried to sell “War is fun” with “Gomer Pyle, USMC”, “Broadside”, “No Time for Sergeants” and “McHale’s Navy”.
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Boomers wanted fun all right, but war wasn’t quite what they had in mind. They did, however, find something more to their liking. Our poor parents. Just when they thought that it was safe to turn on the radio… The dreaded din of Rock & Roll returned!
Everything seemed bland and lifeless on Top 40 radio after Kennedy split from the scene. Those four intense media days were a hard act to follow. Boomers wanted something new, exciting and fun, and station managers desperately searched everywhere for a different sound. They noticed faint rumblings from one group, far away across the Atlantic, whose joyful noise dominated the British charts for all of 1963, but remained virtually unknown in the USA. Capitol Records had recently rejected the band: “You just don’t have the new American sound, boys.” (Thank God for that.) Now, a few weeks later, radio stations scrambled to smuggle in some 45s of the Fab Four. The Beatles had just the right sound at the right time, loud, a real backbeat, and pure fun.