In 1960 John F. Kennedy took over the presidency of a nation that was on the verge of chaos. Abroad, the United States’ relationship with the nations of the Eastern Bloc was quickly deteriorating. Closer to home, Kennedy had to address the threat of Communism spreading in the Western Hemisphere. His desire to remove Fidel Castro from power in Cuba led to a crucial misstep in the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Tensions between America and Communist countries mounted, and the threat of nuclear war became increasingly real. Only through swift diplomatic measures was all-out war avoided in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Kennedy faced equally monumental challenges domestically. The seeds of the Civil Rights movement that had been planted in the late 50s began to blossom, and created hostilities that threatened to tear the country apart. In 1962, Attorney General Robert Kennedy had to send the National Guard to Mississippi to intervene on behalf of a black man trying to enroll in classes at Ole' Miss.

When Lyndon Baines Johnson took the presidency after Kennedy’s assassination, he used the political marksmanship he had honed in the Senate to secure the passage of the Civil Right Act. But growing dissent for the nation’s involvement in Vietnam brought LBJ’s political career to an end, and paved the way for the re-emergence of Richard M. Nixon.

The social climate of the 1960s can be viewed largely as a systematic rejection of the conformity of the 1950s. A generation of young Americans dismissed the mores of their parents and instead embraced the hedonistic values of the church of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. The hippie movement culminated with the Woodstock music fesival in the summer of 1969, a symbolic end to the innocence of the era of free love and psychedelic drugs.

The counter-culture also manifested itself in the political arena, where college students and Civil Rights activists took on what they perceived as an oppressive and unjust political system. In the early- and mid-60s, Civil Rights activists organized marches and protests around the country. In 1963, against the wishes of the Kennedy administration, Martin Luther King, Jr., led a 200,000 man march on Washington. The Civil Rights Act was signed the next year.

As the nation's involvement in Vietnam escalated, and involved more of the nation's youth, college students protested the war and the draft. Their dissatisfaction boiled over outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention, where protests turned into riots. The atmosphere inside the convention was tense as well.

By the 1960s, it had become pracitcal to get fresh images of events from abroad onto the news every evening. The broadcast of disturbing footage from Vietnam on television gave the public a taste of the horrors of war, and swayed public opinion. The press's focus on Vietnam eventually brought the Johnson administration to its knees.

As television became increasingly popular, writers reacted with the creation of a "new journalism" based largely on literary technique and first-person accounts. Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test), Truman Capote (In Cold Blood) and Hunter S. Thompson (Hell's Angels) all published works that straddled the line between literature and journalism.

The 1960s also bore witness to widespread scrutiny of the press. Scholars like Marshall McLuhan founded an academic movement which sought to explain the media's relationship to culture. And the administration of Richard Nixon, who had developed a profound distaste for the press by the time of his election in 1968, publicly ridiculed the media for what it viewed as subversive practices. Vice President Spiro Agnew, in particular, lambasted the press for its supposedly pro-Democrat leanings.