The 1960's were turbulent and often reprehensible. The unpopular Vietnam war raged; bloody riots on U.S. college campuses and urban streets dominated headlines; Pres. John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert, and civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated. Other abhorrent events of the decade include:

February 1961: Twenty-nine major electrical firms, including General Electric and Westinghouse and 44 of their executives, were convicted of rigging bids and fixing pieces in the sale of $1.75 billion of heavy electrical equipment per year. The corporations were fined $1,787,000. GE was successfully sued for nearly $8 million by the U.S. Federal Government and New York State.

April 1962: The British liner Dara exploded and sank in the Persian Gulf, killing 236 people. An investigation exposed that the explosion was caused by a time bomb.

March 1964: Kitty Genovese died in the street in Queens, New York, after being stabbed repeatedly in front of thirty-seven witnesses. None of them did anything to stop her attacker, despite her desperate screams for help. Genovese was 28 years old.

May 1964: In Lima, Peru, more than 300 soccer fans were killed and more than 500 others were injured during a riot and panic following an unpopular ruling by a referee in a Peru vs. Argentina soccer game. It was the worst soccer-related disaster on record.

September 1964: Walter Jenkins, Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson's White House chief of staff, was arrested in the men's room of the YMCA, where he was caught engaging in homosexual activities with another man. He had been arrested on the same charge in the same men's room five years earlier. Public tolerance of homosexuality in politics was virtually non-existent at that time, and a huge scandal detonated. Johnson came close to losing his chance for election the following month. Jenkins was admitted into the hospital, and submitted his resignation, but Republicans continued to keep the Jenkins exposé in the headlines. Had a diversion not occurred, that of China exploding its first nuclear bomb, Johnson's presidential defeat would have been inescapable.

August 1966: Charles Whitman, a Boy Scout leader and ex-Marine, terrorized students, teachers, and passersby at the University of Texas in Austin. Located at the top of the clocktower for 80 minutes, he shot 44 people, killing 14 of them, before he himself was killed. Earlier that day, Whitman had killed his wife and his mother.

January 1967: What would have marked the first flight of an Apollo lunar spacecraft in earth's orbit concluded in tragedy. The Apollo I spacecraft burst into flames during the ground-test and swept through the cabin, killing all three astronauts aboard. The astronauts were Col. Virgil Grissom, Col. Edward White II, and Lt. Cmdr. Roger Chaffee.

January 1968: At a White House luncheon hostessed by First Lady Johnson, with 50 white and black women present to discuss urban crime, entertainer Eartha Kitt set nerves on edge when she spoke out passionately against the Vietnam War. She linked the rising crime rate with the escalation of the war. Reportedly, Mrs. Johnson was visibly upset by Kitt's allegations; unsurprisingly, Kitt's show business career in the U.S. disintegrated after the luncheon.

March 1968: The infamous My Lai Massacre, led by 1st Lt. William L. Calley, occurred. During a raid on the small village, 109 Vietnamese old men, women, and children were shot and killed by the U.S. Army's Charlie Company. This civilian massacre was covered up by the U.S. Army until November, 1969.

Author: Vicki McClure Davidson

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