The 1960's

Everybody knows the line: “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” It became shorthand for an entire generation, even though the man who said it was a 24-year-old Berkeley graduate student who would turn thirty just months after the decade ended.

In the second installment of Disturbing History’s series on the American decades, Brian turns to the 1960s—a decade remembered for rebellion, protest, Vietnam, assassinations, the counterculture, and the moon landing. But, as with the 1950s, the familiar photograph only tells part of the story.

The decade brought enormous change: poverty declined, college enrollment surged, Medicare became law, the birth control pill transformed American life, and hundreds of millions watched humanity reach the moon.

Then the photograph gets turned over. There are hydrogen bombs accidentally dropped over North Carolina and Spain, a nuclear explosion in space, a Soviet launch disaster hidden for decades, and a submarine officer whose refusal to authorize a nuclear torpedo may have helped prevent catastrophe.

There is Frances Kelsey standing against thalidomide, Rachel Carson challenging the chemical industry, Ralph Nader being followed by General Motors investigators, and a polluted river becoming a symbol of an environmental crisis.

The episode also revisits some of the decade’s most enduring stories: the supposed thirty-eight witnesses to the murder of Kitty Genovese, the mythical baby boom after the New York blackout, the disputed Gulf of Tonkin incident, Project 100,000, the collapse of the Haight-Ashbury counterculture, Apollo 1, Soyuz 1, and the speech prepared in case the first astronauts on the moon never came home.

Behind all of it were dangers that received far less attention: staggering highway deaths, Vietnam, and a 1968 influenza pandemic that killed tens of thousands of Americans while much of the country barely stopped to notice.

The episode closes by asking six questions: What do we remember? What did we forget? What did we fear? What was actually killing us? What wasn’t the government telling us? And what did the decade hand forward?

The answer ends inside a glass jar on December 1, 1969, as 366 blue capsules containing every possible birthday were drawn on live television to decide which young American men would be called to war first.

The 1960s changed America. The disturbing part is how much of the story we remember incorrectly.

Disturbing History is a Paranormal World Productions podcast hosted, researched, and produced by Brian King-Sharp.

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Disturbing History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.

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