News, to Remember and Forget
As a nation, we continued to achieve exciting things in space and in the gymnasium, but the world at large remained troubling.
The Bay of Pigs debacle was shameful. The Cuban Missile Crisis ended better, despite the brinkmanship. It was, incidentally, not quite the victory that we thought at the time: in exchange for the removal of USSR missiles from Cuba, we removed our comparable Moscow-aimed missiles from Turkey.
East German border guard Hans Konrad Schumann, 19,
escapes to the West by leaping over barbed wire
iconicphotos.wordpress.com
The world watched as East Germany built a wall across Berlin. At least 140 people would later die trying to cross it, but in the beginning, thousands made it to the West safely. Viet Cong forces won their first victory of many. Buddhist monks died in flaming protest against the South Vietnamese Diem government - a regime later toppled by its own military, its leaders executed.
In domestic news, Martin Luther King led demonstrations for equal civil rights, and then organized a March on Washington. A Klan church bombing killed four Alabama girls. Prayer in public school was banned. Timothy Leary was fired from Harvard because of unauthorized experiments with psychedelic drugs. The first liver transplant was performed. Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe died, as did Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington.
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