Mickey Mantle stood in front of the microphones, his voice flat. “I feel as good as I ever did, but the last two or three years I haven’t been able to run like I used to, or hit and throw,” he told the reporters on March 1st. After 18 years in the majors, he knew the young kids were getting too fast for him. “So I thought it was about time I quit.
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The end of an era came earlier than that for another American institution. On January 10th, the company behind *The Saturday Evening Post* announced that the February 9th issue would be its last in its original run. The magazine, once famous for Norman Rockwell paintings on its covers and hugely influential through the 1940s, had lost five million dollars in 1968 as television and new culture left it behind. Before the month was out, Rupert Murdoch made his move into the British press.
On January 2nd, he outbid Robert Maxwell for ownership of the Fleet Street tabloid *News of the World* by joining forces with the Carr family, which owned 30% of the paper. “The shareholders have judged my record in Australia,” Murdoch said, “and they’re hoping I can do the same in this country. ”
That spring, another kind of takeover was happening on television. On April 4th, CBS abruptly canceled *The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour* and replaced it with *Hee Haw*.
The network officially claimed the brothers had failed to submit an episode in time for review, but the real problem was their politics. The brothers’ frequent commentaries touched on the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement. One episode, a “sermonette” by comedian David Steinberg, was deemed in bad taste. In the brothers’ view, mainstream television was hiding the truth.
“The liberal point of view is not put on television,” Tom Smothers had argued weeks before the cancellation. “It hides all the issues, so that the people in the Midwest who aren’t in urban areas get no reality of the actual facts. ”
Baseball was moving in a more literal direction in 1969. On April 8th, the Montreal Expos, the first Canadian Major League Baseball team, played their first game against the Mets at Shea Stadium.
Jim “Mudcat” Grant started for the Expos and didn’t make it out of the second inning, but the Expos still won 11–10. The team’s fate decades later would be less bright—by 2004, attendance had collapsed, mismanagement had taken its toll, and on September 29th of that year, three hours before what would be their last home game, the world learned the Expos were moving to Washington D. C. and rebranding as the Nationals.
That same month, at a tandoori restaurant in Hampstead, a different kind of institution was born. On May 11th, John Cleese and Graham Chapman met with Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and animator Terry Gilliam. They’d been offered a show by the BBC, and they were fans of their friends’ comedy on *Do Not Adjust Your Set*. They decided to join forces there, naming themselves Monty Python.
Their *Flying Circus* debuted on October 5th. On June 3rd, World Publishing released a simple children’s picture book called *The Very Hungry Caterpillar*, written by former ad agency art director Eric Carle. The 224-word tale followed an insect that eats its way through various foods before turning into a butterfly. It struck a nerve—since its release, it’s been translated into 62 languages and sold over 50 million copies.
On June 8th, President Nixon met with South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu and announced that 25,000 American troops would be withdrawn from Vietnam in August, citing progress in training South Vietnamese replacement forces. Half a decade later, in 1970, US casualties would drop below half of what they were in 1969, and Nixon would announce the withdrawal of 150,000 more troops. In Costa Mesa, California, the Newport 69 Festival on June 20th drew more than double the roughly 100,000 people who’d attended the first Newport Pop Festival the year before. Ike and Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, and Jimi Hendrix all performed.
The show itself was a success, but hundreds of rioters outside the gates did $50,000 in damages to nearby homes and businesses. Two days later, Judy Garland was found dead in the bathroom of her London home, dead from a barbiturate overdose. She was just 47. The child star who’d played Dorothy in *The Wizard of Oz* had been recommended by her mother to take pills for energy at age ten, and MGM had given her amphetamines to liven her up on camera.
She fought that addiction for the rest of her life. On June 28th, at 1:21 a. m. , police raided the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village.
The bar was popular with the LGBT crowd, and raids were usually tipped off and held on slow nights. This time, there was no warning, and the place was packed. Police lost control, and the situation became a riot that carried into a second night. The Stonewall riot is now considered a landmark moment for the gay rights movement; a national monument at the site was installed in 2016.
A little over two weeks later, on July 18th at about 11:15 p. m. , Senator Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne left a party on Chappaquiddick Island off Martha’s Vineyard. Kennedy’s car skidded off a one-lane bridge into a pond.
Kennedy fled the scene and didn’t report the accident until 10 a. m. the next morning. He later claimed he’d tried to free Kopechne but failed.
“I made immediate and repeated effort to save Mary Jo by diving into the strong and murky current,” he said, “succeeding only in increasing my state of utter exhaustion and alarm. ” He pleaded guilty to leaving the scene, and the incident effectively ended his dream of running for president. Three days later, the decade-long space race reached its climax. On July 21st, Neil Armstrong descended from Apollo 11 and became the first human to walk on the moon.
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” he said. The quote has always been a little confusing, since “man” and “mankind” mean the same thing. Armstrong maintained he actually said “a man,” but a static glitch muted the word out of the transmission. That summer, Charles Manson was becoming closer friends with a UCLA music teacher named Gary Hinman.
Manson wrongly believed Hinman had inherited a fortune. Several members of Manson’s informal family held Hinman hostage at his home for three days. Eventually Manson arrived, slashed Hinman with a sword, and ordered Bobby Beausoleil to kill him and use his blood to write “Political Piggy” on the wall. That murder marked the beginning of the Manson family’s killing spree, which would include the infamous Tate–LaBianca murders of August 9th and continue until December 1st, claiming at least nine victims.
The same day as the LaBianca killings, Disneyland finally opened its Haunted Mansion. Plans for it had started as early as 1951; it was originally meant to stand across the street from the Disney studio. After Disneyland opened in 1955, visitors were given handbills in 1961 promising the mansion would open in 1963, but delays from Walt Disney’s work on the New York World’s Fair and his death in 1966 meant only the exterior got done by then. It wasn’t until August 9th, 1969 that the doors opened.
Six days later, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair began in Bethel, New York. Roughly 500,000 people braved massive traffic jams and overcast skies to see Joan Baez, Santana, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and Jimi Hendrix, who closed the show with his now-iconic rendition of the national anthem. Woodstock’s place in culture was so large that someone would try to recreate it later—a 25th-anniversary festival in 1994, and then Woodstock ’99, which suffered from poor sanitation, looting, arson, violence, sexual assault, and three deaths. That final disaster proved to be the death of Woodstock festivals.
On September 1st, a bloodless coup in Libya staged by the Free Officers Movement overthrew King Idris I, whose mismanagement had made him unpopular. The nation’s public embraced the coup—known as the El Fateh Revolution—and the newly installed leader, Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi would remain in power until his execution during an uprising in 2011. That same month, the Beatles were falling apart.
The death of manager Brian Epstein and John Lennon’s heroin addiction left Paul McCartney in charge, and the others found him too pushy. George Harrison felt increasingly stifled by Lennon and McCartney’s dominance, and the band’s business affairs were a mess. Their final recording session with all four members took place on August 20th. A month later, on September 20th, John told Paul and Ringo he was leaving.
The four Beatles never played together again. On September 24th, eight anti-war activists went on trial in Chicago for conspiracy and inciting violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The Chicago Eight became the Chicago Seven after defendant Bobby Seale—who spent days bound, gagged, and chained to a chair by the judge’s order—was granted a mistrial. The seven remaining defendants repeatedly disrupted the proceedings by chanting Hare Krishna and reading poems.
Five were convicted, and all of them, along with lawyer William Kunstler, were held in contempt. An appeals court later reversed those outcomes. On October 8th, the militant student organization the Weathermen called for four days of rage to protest police violence at the 1968 convention. “There’s no way to be committed to non-violence in the middle of the most violent society history’s ever created,” they argued.
Roughly 300 protesters, far fewer than expected, showed up in Chicago’s Lincoln Park that evening and charged south, smashing windows. Police quickly put down the riot. By the time the Days of Rage concluded, nearly 300 Weathermen, including all their leaders, were under arrest. The 1969 World Series began on October 11th, pitting the Baltimore Orioles against the New York Mets.
Led by slugger Frank Robinson, the Orioles had dominated the regular season and looked unbeatable. The Mets, meanwhile, had never finished higher than ninth place since joining the league in 1962. Still, they pulled off what remains one of the biggest upsets in baseball history, beating Baltimore in five games and earning themselves the nickname “the Miracle Mets. ”
That same afternoon, a doctoral student named Paul Stine was driving a cab when a fare asked to be taken to San Francisco’s Presidio Heights.
When the cab arrived, the passenger shot Stine in the head and stole his wallet and keys. Three teenagers got a clear look at the killer, who left two partial fingerprints in the cab before fleeing. Police later linked the crime to a series of letters sent to the *San Francisco Chronicle*, sent with a swatch of bloody cloth torn from Stine’s shirt. The killer, who would call himself the Zodiac, was questioned by police only blocks from the scene but managed to disappear.
It would be his last confirmed murder. True to his reputation, the man known only as the Zodiac made good on his taunts by continuing to write letters to the press, but the California investigation grew cold. For decades afterward, the case remained one of the most famous unsolved crimes in American history, a source of endless speculation and fear. On October 29th at 10:30 p.
m. , UCLA student Charley Kline used a university computer to connect to another computer at the Stanford Research Institute using the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, better known as ARPANET. Kline tried to type the word “login,” but the system crashed after the first two letters. After programmer Bill Duvall made adjustments, Kline tried again and successfully logged in.
Because of that first crash, the first message successfully sent over ARPANET—one of the key forerunners of the internet—was simply “lo. ”
On November 15th, a new fast-food restaurant called Wendy’s opened in Columbus, Ohio. Founded by former KFC executive Dave Thomas and named after his daughter, it quickly became famous for its square hamburgers. Thomas said the angular patty stuck out of the bun, giving the impression of more meat.
It was clever, but it wasn’t his idea—Thomas based the burgers on similar ones made by Kewpie Hamburgers in his hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan. Four days later, Pelé faced Vasco da Gama at Rio’s Maracanã Stadium. The only thing the media and the 100,000 fans cared about was the milestone the legendary Brazilian was likely to hit that night. In the 78th minute, he kicked a penalty shot into the right corner of the net—the thousandth goal of his career.
In December, a Japanese manga called *Doraemon* first appeared, published in six magazines simultaneously. It followed a robot cat from the 22nd century who travels back in time to help a schoolboy named Nobita Nobi. The story became a massive success, spawning a hit anime, a feature film, musicals, dozens of video games, and commercials featuring celebrities like Jean Reno and Bruce Willis. On December 6th, the Rolling Stones headlined the free festival at California’s Altamont Speedway in front of roughly 300,000 people.
The Stones hired the Hells Angels to work security, paying them in beer. As they got drunk, they grew aggressive with fans. Mid-show, Mick Jagger tried to calm the crowd. “You and you and you—what’s happening?
” he pleaded. “I can’t do any more than just ask you, to beg you, just to keep it together. ”
It all came to a head when 18-year-old Meredith Hunter tried to get onto the stage with a revolver while the Stones played “Sympathy for the Devil. ” A Hells Angel named Alan Passaro spotted the gun, drew a knife, and stabbed Hunter sixteen times, killing him instantly.
The stabbing was caught on camera, and the moment became the dark symbol of the end of the 1960s counterculture dream. Finally, on December 21st, the world received a sobering look forward. The *New York Times* published a story called “Scientists Caution on Changes in Climate as Result of Pollution,” reporting on a speech by the RAND Corporation’s J. O.
Fletcher. Fletcher claimed the Earth was warming and substantial environmental changes were already underway. Natural processes were responsible for half the change, he said, but within another generation, man-made carbon dioxide would accelerate the problem. That was 1969.
By the end of it, the Beatles were no more, America’s slow withdrawal from Vietnam had begun, humanity had walked on the moon, the hippie movement had peaked at Woodstock and died at Altamont, and Mickey Mantle had already ridden off into the sunset. Looking back, the sixties turned out to be a chaotic showcase for the best and worst that humanity has to offer. Groovy times, indeed.
