Reply #38: U2 incident, 1960 and Bay of Pigs, 1961 [View All]

[starroute]

Kennedy's assassination was traumatic -- but it intially seemed to be "them," not "us." (Whoever "them" was -- early on, right-wing Texas oilmen seemed to be the likeliest culprits.) I certainly don't recall feeling any loss of collective innocence as a result. What was shaken was more the naive faith that America was invulnerable, similar to the disillusionment when the first Space Shuttle exploded.

On the other hand, the U2 incident was "us" from the start. I was 13, and for me, it was the first clear indication that the US wasn't necessarily the good guys.

Even before that, I'd known that much of the world seemed to be permanently pissed at us, but I put that down to Republican bumbling and heavy-handedness. The U2 incident ripped a veil away and exposed a lot of things about how the United States operated that were never meant to see the light of day.

Following U2, the Bay of Pigs was the nail in the coffin, which showed that things weren't necessarily going to be different even in a Democratic administration. The general cynicism level among people my age after that was amazingly high. By the spring of 1963, when my high school's advanced placement social studies classes visited Washington, we were astonished to discover that government officials and politicians weren't all blatant crooks and scoundrels but actually seemed to be well-intentioned.

When Kennedy was shot, I vowed to myself that I would *not* let this make me forget how disillusioned I'd become with his administration. But it seems like the nation as a whole really did undergo a collective forgetting.