"This book explores life in America during that brief promising moment in the early sixties when John F. Kennedywas president. Kennedy's Cold War frustrations in Cuba andVietnam worried Americans. The 1962 Missile Crisis narrowly avoided a nuclear disaster. The civil rights movement gained momentum with student sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and crises in Mississippi and Alabama. Martin Luther King, Jr., emerged as a spokesman for nonviolent social change. The American family was undergoing rapid change. Betty Friedan launched the Women's Movement. The Beat authors Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg gained respectability. Joan Baez and Bob Dylan revived folk music. Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol produced Pop Art. Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, and Ken Kesey began to promote psychedelic drugs." "The early sixties were a period of marked political, social, and cultural change. The old was swept away, and the United States began to become the country that it is today."--BOOK JACKET