In October 1962, the world waited with bated breath. People prayed that a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union did not break out and create a calamity no one would recover from. The presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, discovered through American surveillance, brought conditions to a pass where Washington and Moscow looked eyeball to eyeball. There was every chance that if the Soviet leadership refused to take back their missiles from Cuba, disaster would strike.
But then both Nikita Khrushchev and John F Kennedy calmed down. They showed statesmanship. The Soviets took their missiles back home on condition that America closed down its base facilities in Turkey. The US blockade of Cuba was lifted. Thirteen days after the crisis erupted, the world breathed a sigh of relief.
That was the 1960s, a decade in which geopolitics as well as politics within nations defined the era. October 1962 was also the period when the Chinese launched an unprovoked military assault against India, an act that was to turn friendship between Delhi and Beijing into a state of hostility for decades. Jawaharlal Nehru felt betrayed by his friend Zhou Enlai, never quite recovering from the tragedy. He would die less than two years later.
The 1960s were a time when decolonization in large parts of the globe, especially Africa and Asia, inaugurated a new era of freedom based on nationalistic hope. The French, long believing that Algeria could not but be part of their country, withdrew in the face of an armed struggle waged by nationalists like Ahmed Ben Bella, who took over as Algeria’s leader. Malaya won independence and, together with Singapore, formed Malaysia. Jomo Kenyatta led Kenya to freedom. The winds of freedom blew all over.
But if the 1960s offered hope to nations, they also exposed the vulnerabilities that would soon undermine politics in such nations as Congo, where Patrice Lumumba met a brutal end only months into his country emerging into freedom. Ben Bella was overthrown three years after Algeria gained independence by his defence minister Houari Boumeddiene. Singapore opted out of Malaysia to begin its own journey as an independent city-state under Lee Kwan Yew.
The times were exciting as well as disturbing in the 1960s. Indonesia’s flamboyant leader Ahmed Sukarno lost power to the army and never recovered from the shock engendered by the catastrophe of September 1965. Millions of Indonesians -- including the prominent communist leader DN Aidit -- were shot by the soldiers and mobs supporting them.
In Vietnam, the Johnson administration embarked on an escalation of the war through sending tens of thousands of US troops to South Vietnam in the belief that such a show of force would prevent North Vietnam and the Vietcong from overrunning the south. In 1968, the Tet offensive by the communists, more than anything else, convinced Washington that it could not win the war, that it needed to find an honourable way out of the imbroglio. Averell Harriman jetted off to Paris to talk to Hanoi’s representative Xuan Thuy.
The 1960s had the world live through the assassinations of John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr, and Robert F Kennedy. Harold Holt, the Australian prime minister, was lost to the sea when he went for a swim. A brutal coup in Nigeria in 1966 led to the murder of Prime Minister Abubakar Tawafa Balewa and a worsening of ethnic discontent, compelling Odumegwu Ojukwu to declare eastern Nigeria as the independent republic of Biafra in 1967. Kwame Nkrumah, who led Ghana to independence in 1957, lost power in a coup as he was about to land in Beijing on a state visit. Ian Smith went for a unilateral declaration of independence for Rhodesia in 1965. Nelson Mandela was made invisible by South Africa’s apartheid regime on Robben Island.
The 1960s were a canvas of statesmen on whom rested their people’s hopes for life to be transformed into a happy future. Kenneth Kaunda and Julius Nyerere were part of the canvas. Willy Brandt was Germany’s hope. Medical science advanced a good number of steps when Christiaan Barnard performed the first human heart transplant in history in South Africa. Space science took a giant leap when President Kennedy promised in 1961 to have a man land on the moon and return him to Earth within the decade. His promise was fulfilled when the astronauts of Apollo-11 walked on the moon in July 1969.
In South Asia, Lal Bahadur Shastri succeeded Nehru as India’s leader, to be succeeded in turn by the young Indira Gandhi when he succumbed to a cardiac arrest in Tashkent in January 1966. For the Bengalis of East Pakistan, the door was shrewdly opened to a future sovereign Bangladesh when Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman spelt out his Six Points in February 1966. The long-entrenched regime of Field Marshal Ayub Khan was forced to quit in March 1969, to be replaced by a new martial law administration.
In the 1960s, President Charles de Gaulle pulled France out of the NATO military structure. He would resign in early 1969 after failing to win public support in a referendum. China exploded the atomic bomb and joined the exclusive club of nuclear-powered nations. Khrushchev was overthrown by the troika of Leonid Brezhnev, Nikolai Podgorny, and Alexei Kosygin. In early 1968, Alexander Dubcek launched Prague Spring, his reformist program for communism in Czechoslovakia.
His endeavours were crushed when the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations invaded his country and put an end to his government. In 1964, Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey gave shape to a regional body known as the Regional Cooperation for Development (RCD). In the 1960s, Richard Nixon lost elections for the US presidency and governorship of California, but came back to win the White House in 1968 by defeating Hubert Humphrey. Yasser Arafat formed the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The Middle East was pushed into a deep hole in the 1960s when Israel, in swift military action, left Egypt, Syria, and Jordan biting the dust in the June 1967 war. The Golan Heights and the West Bank were occupied by Israel, which also seized the entirety of Jerusalem. The ramifications are yet being felt.
The 1960s defined life in major areas of the globe. It was a time when new explorations were looked forward to. It was also an age when distress underscored life across large regions of the globe. For nations long under the yoke of colonialism, the decade opened the gateway to freedom. The era also stoked ambition in soldiers keen to seize power and leave their states politically emasculated.
Idealism underpinned the 1960s. In equal measure, disillusion undercut it in a number of ways. For the generation which grew up in the course of the decade, the 1960s have remained a period when history went through convulsions, when men looked anew at the stars and knew that life had changed, that a remarkable decade had redefined perceptions before sliding to its sunset.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.
