It had been a long dark decade, marked by soaring hopes and shattering disappointments.

The Russians had beaten us over and over again to space. Their rockets were bigger and more reliable than ours.

The history of the decade was a history of assassinations: Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert, Martin Luther King Jr.

Cities were burning with discontent over the war in Vietnam.

The culture was blossoming and fragmenting at the same time.

The Beatles were breaking up.