This is an American story.

It starts with the son of Italian immigrants who came over after World War I to escape Fascism and landed in the slums of the Jersey shore meeting the daughter of a New York City real estate lawyer who took holiday meals at a country club in Westchester County, marrying, and giving birth to a child. Her family thought the greaser was beneath her; his family disapproved of him not marrying a nice Italian girl. He was the baby of his family. By the time he was an adult, Joe DiMaggio had married Marilyn Monroe and made Italians White.

The man - let's call him Fred - was born in 1932, carried childhood memories of Great Depression poverty and wartime restrictions, and was too young to fight in the War. Italian Catholic, family was important and gender roles were traditional, America was the Arsenal of Democracy and Communism was evil. He was drafted in 1950 and served for two years, then got out, went to trade school, got a good job, cheered the Yankees and Knicks and Giants, smoked cigarettes and partied with his fellas, and eventually found a wife. It took a while. He was 32 when he married.

The woman - let's call her Anne - was born almost ten years later in 1942. She escaped the Depression but her parents and older sister remembered. She grew up with posh schools, green lawns and weekends at the country club. A bobby soxer, she swooned for JFK and went to DC to work for him. Secretarial school gave her skills she used in those heady days of being an independent young woman hunting a husband. She smoked cigarettes and partied with her girls, and at 23 found herself in San Juan, Puerto Rico on the same singles tour as Fred.

In October, they married. They were a good-looking young couple from good families with good jobs. Well, soon that would be one good job, because she would get pregnant almost right away, quit smoking and working, and become a good American housewife and mother. He went on to be the provider.

They had begun their American Dream, the good life in White America.

When Fred and Anne married, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson (hereinafter "LBJ") was busy fighting Communism. Fred and Anne were fervent believers in that effort. They believed what their government told them, what their tv stations and magazines and newspapers all owned by very wealthy men told them. Communism was evil, the North Vietnamese were invaders of a free country, and the Viet Cong were Communist subversives trying to overthrow the legitimate government of South Vietnam. The United States was there to help the poor, beleaguered South Vietnamese and defend freedom and democracy.

And it was all bullshit. The Vietnamese people didn't divide Vietnam into North and South, the Western powers did after the Vietnamese people drove the French Armee out of their country, liberating themselves from French imperialism. The division was supposed to be temporary, until free elections could be held. Of course, those elections never happened. The Western powers and their puppet government in South Vietnam proclaimed that it was because "fair and free elections" could not be guaranteed in the north, but the truth was because they knew damn well that Ho Chi Minh - the George Washington of his people who was inspired by the American Revolution and "American ideals" and had multiple times asked the United States for help before turning to the Russians and Chinese - would win any election in a fucking landslide.

So when the French wadded away with their tails between their legs, the United States stepped in to keep the hated South Vietnamese government in control. To the Vietnamese, it was simply one White foreigner replacing another, and the Vietnamese who exercised power were still simply collaborators with foreign imperialists.

No, the truth was that it was Ho Chi Minh and his government in Hanoi that had the legitimate claim to govern the country, and the "Viet Cong" - whose real name was the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF from this point forward) - were freedom fighters against foreign imperialism. They were fighting for their liberty, their homes, their families.

I begin with Vietnam because that war dominated the age, defined the way Americans would think and feel for decades, and determined the psycho-emotional development of three generations. Two succeeding generations have no idea how profoundly the Vietnam Intervention impacted their own development because of its indirectness and distance.

The Sixties were an epochal divide in American history as profound as any experienced by literate civilization, and 1965 was both literally and thematically smack dab in the middle of it. The civil rights movement's momentum for positive change had begun to wane as the makers of White opinion capitalized on Black militancy to repair much of the damage caused by Bull Connor, a purple haze enshrouded the college campus homes of the Baby Boom generation, half a dozen nations were exploding nuclear bombs in the air, land and sea, and in Vietnam, LBJ was horrifically escalating the American military destructiveness. Opposition to the war at home and abroad escalated apace.

In late 1964, American political operatives and the U.S. Navy fabricated "the Gulf of Tonkin Incident", concocting a fake attack on U.S. Navy ships by North Vietnamese gunboats in the Gulf of Tonkin - Vietnamese territorial waters. LBJ used the fake outrage elicited by that fake incident to con the Congress into passing "the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution" that authorized him to use whatever American military forces and measures he deemed necessary without needing any further Congressional action.

LBJ used that authorization to pour over a hundred thousand additional American troops into Vietnam. Before Gulf of Tonkin, American forces provided the spine of the imperial war effort, without which the "Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN)" would have dissolved into a puddle of piss on the ground and millions of Vietnamese lives would have been spared. In 1965, the United States took over the war effort.

It wasn't just the number of troops that increased dramatically in 1965. It was also the tons of bombs dropped on the Vietnamese people and the willful, deliberate destruction of the ecosystem.

In ostensible response to a NLF attack on the American air base in Pleiku, LBJ launched the wonderfully-named Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained "strategic bombing" campaign against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) on March 2, 1965. One could call this the official beginning of the grand American tradition of "bombing the shit out of brown people" that has continued to this day, gleefully carried out by President Obama with the new toy of unmanned drones.

Flying a hundred or more sorties a day for three years, American planes dropped ton after ton of bombs on Vietnam, murdering civilians by the score. Because China and the Soviet Union provided material assistance, the Vietnamese were able to shoot down hundreds of American planes and take their air crews captive. Those men paid America's price for the horrors inflicted on the targets of American bombs.

The given rationale for the bombing was to "degrade" Vietnam's ability to prosecute the war. As such, it was an utter failure. It was just another failure of "strategic bombing." Germany's destruction of British cities, America's flattening of German cities and Japanese cities contributed little to defeating the target countries. Same with America's flattening of Vietnam. What they did do was kill millions of people and inflict enormous damage. It is estimated that American bombing between 1965 and 1973 killed over two million Vietnamese.

Two million people.

But it wasn't just bombs that LBJ carpeted Vietnam with beginning in 1965. It was also toxic chemicals.

The NLF fighters and their supply train from the north (the so-called "Ho Chi Minh Trail") used the cover of Vietnam's dense jungle foliage to conceal themselves from American forces. Hence, LBJ and the wizards working for him in Washington came up with the brilliant idea of "defoliating" those jungles with wonder chemicals manufactured by the likes of DOW, Monsanto and Hercules. American planes sprayed 71 million liters of "Monsanto Rain" on Vietnam during the war, with the famous "Operation Ranch Hand" beginning in 1965. It is estimated that this sustained toxic spray stripped away 50% of Vietnam's jungle.

As with the carpet bombing that was going on at the same time, Monsanto Rain did fuck-all to win the war, but it sure did demonstrate America's ability to make brown people suffer.

The year 1965 was just the beginning. What America began in 1965, it would intensify in 1966, 1967 and 1968. It would then be five more horrifying years before the American occupation would end and the Vietnamese people could begin to rebuild their country and obtain normalcy.

Most Americans today are vaguely aware that the United States fought a war in Vietnam in the Sixties, and they might even know the basic outlines of what happened. Very few Americans, I would wager, have any idea at all that the United States was also active in another Southeast Asian former European colony, where a million brown people died in the noble fight against Communism.

In September 1965, Communist forces attempted to stage a coup in Indonesia and seize power from the democratically elected president Sukarno, killing a top general in the process. Shocked to its core by this brazen act of terrorism, the Indonesian government reacted swiftly, banning the Communist party and rounding up known participants in the plot and their supporters. Democracy was protected and order restored. The United States gave its full support to this Defense of Democracy and reveled in another Victory over Communism.

At least, that was the story we were told at the time. That was the official story of the Indonesian government, vouched for by the United States government and media.

Total bullshit. Not a single sentence of that paragraph above was even remotely true. Well, ok, a top general of the Indonesian Army was murdered in September 1965, but it wasn't by Communists. And, ok, well, the Indonesian government did react swiftly, and yes, the United States gave its full support to President Sukarno and the Indonesian Army. But there was no Communist coup attempt, and there was no Communist plot, and it was just ordinary Indonesian citizens who were rounded up and massacred.

Low end estimate is that 500,000 Indonesians were murdered by their government. More accurate number is probably closer to a million. That the official justification was complete horseshit was known at the time and is not in doubt. Recently declassified United States documents prove that the Americans knew at the time that the official story was bullshit, but provided assistance, support and cover anyway. All in the name of fighting Communism and "protecting the world for Democracy."

The situation was a little complicated. Sukarno had been a leader of the independence movement against the Dutch and was Indonesia's first President. He was nominally Marxist and a believer in representative government, but Indonesia was an ungovernable mess of different population groups thrown together in a political unit by European imperialists. It's a very common story that we will see repeated throughout this journal. Sukarno became increasingly autocratic, and by 1965 there was little democracy remaining in his rule.

In September of 1965 is when things get interesting. Under Sukarno, Indonesia was officially "non-aligned" and navigated a middle course between allegiance to the United States or Soviet Union. Sukarno called himself a Marxist and had fought against Western Capitalists in gaining independence, but he was friendly enough with the United States. As Indonesia's economy tanked, however, Sukarno decided to make changes. He tossed the IMF and World Bank out of the country and on September 25, gave a speech in which he announced that "Indonesia was entering 'the second phase of the revolution', which would be the 'implementation of socialism'."

Five days later a "Communist coup" attempted to remove him from power. Hmmm. We now know that it was in fact a coup led by "anti-Communist" General Suharto (Sukarno, Suharto, who can keep these Indonesians straight?) who ended up in power a month later and would rule the country for thirty years, brutally repressing the populace, murdering hundreds of thousands, and stealing billions of dollars from the economy. Oh, but he "brought order."

You guessed it, the IMF and World Bank were invited back into the country, where they had a cozy relationship with the Suharto kleptocracy.

All of this took place with the active involvement of the CIA. If you are keeping track of the number of brown people around the world who would be killed for the sake of "freedom", we are now up to three million. Mind you, the killing did not start in 1965, but our story does.

Every action produces an opposite and equal reaction, they say, and LBJ's escalation of the War on Vietnam did just that. Prior to the Marines splashing ashore in March 1965, opposition to the war had been a niche occupation, but the deployment of actual troops to do actual fighting - American "advisors" had been doing plenty of fighting - made a lot more people say, "Hold on now." Americans were plenty willing to "fight Communism" and stop the dominoes from falling, but not if it meant their sons coming home from a distant land in body bags. Or, to be more accurate, not if it meant derailing their futures to go to a distant land and fight people about whom they knew nothing, then coming home in a body bag. For, it was on college campuses that opposition to the War got serious in the spring of 1965.

We have to remember that this was still the age of the draft and that being in college was no guarantee of avoiding induction. It was American boys between the ages of 18 and 25 who were going to be sent off to kill and die for the cause of global capitalism. That April, an estimated 15,000 people gathered at the Washington Monument in a protest called by the Students for a Democratic Society. The protest caught the attention of the New York Times. In June, an antiwar rally at Madison Square Garden drew several prominent speakers from government and the civil rights movement and 15,000 paid attendees. Whereas, before the introduction of American troops into combat anti-war protests were a few idealists or radicals picketing the White House and handing out leaflets on campus, now they were newsworthy events attended by thousands.

While LBJ tried to ignore the protests, then dismissed them in a speech to Congress in the summer of 1965, they would only grow along with the investment of American blood and eventually topple the Johnson Regime.

The year 1965 marked a bit of an unrecognized turning point in domestic opposition to the socio-political status quo. It saw the high water mark of the "Civil Rights Movement" with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in the wake of the Selma to Montgomery marches of the spring and the "Bloody Sunday" tragedy. No, not that Sunday, Bloody Sunday. More on that one in later chapters.

The American "Bloody Sunday" was when a few hundred nonviolent protestors attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where they were attacked by Alabama State Troopers and the entire White male population of Selma. Dozens were beaten and the images were flashed on televisions across the globe. As "bloody" as that Sunday was, nobody died in the attack, unlike several other peaceful marches where White authority murdered defenseless Black citizens pleading for basic rights.

The slaughter of innocents by White Alabamans in February and March of 1965 galvanized LBJ into introducing the Voting Rights Act and meaningfully supporting its passage. The President signed it into law on August 6, 1965. Ironically, it was a few days later that the end of a meaningful civil rights "movement" began with the Watts Riots in Los Angeles. On August 11, a crowd of people on the street watched an LAPD officer beat a Black man and his mother after a traffic stop. It touched off six days and nights of battles with the police and National Guard that left 34 people dead, over a thousand injured, and a whole lot of property damaged. It led to White flight from the LA core to the suburbs, and shocked White TV audiences who saw all their fears and prejudices about "the Negro" validated - in their minds. The power structure successfully convinced White Middle Class America - MLK's "moderate White" - that "Communist agitators and gangsters" were behind the riots, instead of justifiable anger from an oppressed people.

The Watts Riots were devastating to the Civil Rights Movement. Let's be honest: Blacks can never gain meaningful advances without strong support from White Americans, because they simply lack the native political power from numbers, wealth or position. The Civil Rights Act of 1960, the CRA of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act were all made possible by the stark contrast on White TVs between the peaceful marchers - Black and White - and the brutally violent KKK and Alabama police apparatus. The moral power was clear - and it had to be. Any blurring or graying and White support bleeds away. When Black protest becomes seen as a threat to "law and order", White fears are ignited and they turn away. We will come back to this in 2020.

Also devastating to the cause of Black liberation was the assassination of Malcolm X on February 21, 1965, ostensibly by members of the Nation of Islam. We don't know for sure who was responsible, but we do know that two of the three men convicted of the murder in 1966 were officially exonerated in 2021, that a known FBI agent within the Nation of Islam met with someone involved in the assassination the night before, and that the FBI and NYPD withheld evidence. We also know that the Federal Bureau of Intimidation targets Black leaders and has been involved in other assassinations (we will discuss this more in 1969).

We also know that Malcolm X was a man of deep integrity who spoke truth and who was a powerful potential leader. Martin Luther King, who would himself later be assassinated amid highly suspect circumstances (more on this in 1968), recognized Malcolm's "personal depth and integrity" and "a capacity for leadership."

Whatever the truth of the official story of Malcolm X's assassination, it reinforced the image of violence and anarchy White Americans held of the Nation of Islam and Black activists in general and played on White fears.

The softening of support for the Civil Rights Movement was not solely from negative causes. I would argue that the rise in the anti-war movement coincided with two other 60s protest movements that more directly impacted White interests: feminism and the environment. As we will see, both of these issues thrust themselves into the forefront in 1965.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 didn't just promote the voting rights of Black Americans; it also impacted women. Even after women technically gained the vote thanks to the bravery of the Suffragettes, their ability to actually vote was curtailed by discriminatory practices. The Voting Rights Act outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex as well as race. While Black progress stalled, women's progress was just kicking off.

We also saw landmark legislation on the environment, publication of a seminal work that dramatically raised awareness of corporate malfeasance, and a chillingly prescient address to the public by our old friend President Johnson. A decade of publicity about the terrifying state of America's rivers and lakes - it was unsafe to eat the fish or even to swim in most lakes - led to Congress passing the Water Quality Act and the connected Solid Waste Disposal Act in 1965. America was finally awake to the dangers of pollution, and the WQA/SWDA would kick off a decade of environmental legislation before the Counterrevolution of 1980 put an end to government's environmental activism.

It was in 1965 that Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed about the Chevrolet Corsair. His book is credited with launching the consumer rights movement and bringing awareness to the widespread corporate practice of externalizing costs to the public.

This whole Prologue has been intended to show how 1965 was a watershed year that set the stage and painted the backdrop for the story of our times. It is appropriate, therefore, to bring it to a close with a warning issued to the American people by good old LBJ in February of 1965.

In a "Special Message to Congress" on February 8, 1965, Johnson told America:

This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.

Wait. What? The American President knew IN 1965 that climate change was happening?

It gets worse. In November 1965, when your writer was but a tadpole swimming around an amniotic pond, President Johnson's released to the public a report from the President's Science Advisory Committee in which the scientists concluded:

Through his worldwide industrial civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment. Within a few generations he is burning the fossil fuels that slowly accumulated in the earth over the past 500 million years.

By the year 2000 the increase in atmospheric CO2 will be close to 25%. This may be sufficient to produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate, and will almost certainly cause significant changes in the temperature and other properties of the stratosphere.

They predicted that the oceans and atmosphere would warm, the Antarctic ice cap would melt, sea levels would rise, and freshwater sources acidify.

They knew. The government, industry, the public, they all knew. They were warned. Generation X was the first generation to be born into a world where the adults knew that they were poisoning the world, endangering their children's future, and chose to do nothing about it.

Economic Statistics

We will wrap up this look at the world into which I and my generation were born with some basic economic statistics.

In 1965, household income was $6,900 - and that was mostly with just one person working.

The average cost of a new home was $21,500. The brand new Ford Mustang went for $2,734, but a VW Bug could be gotten for $1595. A dozen eggs were 53 cents and a gallon of gasoline would set you back 31 cents.

A public university would set you back $1,051 for tuition, room and board, while the average private university was about twice that at $2,202.

"National Health Expenditures" per person in the United States were $975.60 expressed in "constant 1995 dollars." The total spent in 1965 dollars was $41.1 billion.

Next Up: 1966

The world was a turbulent place in 1965. It would only get more so in 1966. This was the world into which your favorite Gen X Nobody would be born.

The featured image was published by United Press International, February 22, 1965. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=120970824