Tariq Ali - 1963: from the Stones to Dr Strangelove, a year of social and cultural upheaval
Harvard maths professor, Tom Lehrer, was entertaining the liberal middle classes with his mocking songs (he stopped singing when Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize because "satire was no longer possible").
Was it a prefigurative year? I think so. Not that one thought of it as such at the time or even a few years later, when it was totally forgotten in the turbulence that engulfed the world. I am trying to recall that year, to find deep down some memories, even a few impressions on the basis of which I could reconstruct a misted-up past without too many distortions.
John F Kennedy in Dallas in 1963. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
When I arrived to study at Oxford in October 1963, the bohemian style was black plastic or leather jackets for women and black leather or navy donkey jackets for men. I stuck to cavalry twills and a duffle coat, at least for a few months. The Cuban missile crisis had temporarily boosted CND: the Labour party conference had actually voted for unilateral nuclear disarmament in 1960, before changing its mind again the following year, influenced strongly by leftwing icon Aneurin Bevan's deathbed refusal to "go naked into the conference chamber". Bertrand Russell thought CND was too moderate and resigned to create its direct action offspring, the Committee of 100.
Talk was of the Beatles. Those who had been at the Carfax assembly rooms that February to hear them were bewitched. Even so, there were huge arguments at parties between the Beatles partisans and those of us who thought the Rolling Stones were simply superior, certainly more exciting, more sensual and better to dance to. At one such party we voted on who we would dance to and the women, with a few exceptions, preferred the Fab Four. The "real men" demanded the Stones.
Bob Dylan was in the air too. His album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan had just been released and Mr Tambourine Man provided the backdrop for myriad eye contacts, a prelude to seduction or not, as was often the case. The pill had changed attitudes and given women much more freedom, but the discrimination was appalling. It was Judith Okely (Jude the Baptist), fresh from the Sorbonne, who argued the case for feminism and introduced some of us to the work of Simone de Beauvoir.
That same year Dylan moved in with Suze Rotolo in the Village. Her parents were communists who had survived McCarthy. Together they radicalised Dylan. The Times they are a-Changin' (1964) was the result, helping to fuel the civil rights movement and radicalise students who had expected a great deal from President Kennedy, but had got the Bay of Pigs invasion and Vietnam instead, and later Lyndon B Johnson. In August, Martin Luther King's "I had a dream" speech electrified a whole generation. Almost a century after the civil war, African Americans were being lynched, denied basic human rights, not allowed to register for the vote in most southern states, and discriminated against in the north. The Ku Klux Klan had supporters in both Republican and Democrat parties. They had decided to fight back: peacefully if we may, said Dr King; violently if we must, replied Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X.
One memory is very clear – 22 November 1963. I'm sitting in the Oxford Union TV room watching the early news with a whole gang of friends. Suddenly everything goes sombre. We watch the footage in silence.John F Kennedy has been assassinated. None of us speaks. We walk to the bar. The first person I meet is a pretty, petite, pale-faced, curly-haired Judith G, a stalwart of the communist club. "Kennedy's been assassinated." She looks at me expressionlessly. "Ah, I see. Did they get Lyndon Johnson too?" She was always very good at striking a pose.
The debate as to who ordered the hit started the very next day and the issue remains unresolved. Three months later, Stanley Kubrick's savage masterpiece Dr Strangelove hit the screens, depicting the Pentagon under the control of crazies preparing a nuclear holocaust, with Peter Sellers as a worried president. Earlier this year, the American economist James Galbraith, whose father, JK Galbraith, was a close friend of Kennedy, told me that "in our household Dr Strangelove was always viewed as a documentary". Some of the generals were supremely insolent, some plain paranoid.
Elsewhere, other leaders were crumbling: Harold Macmillan (Britain), Konrad Adenauer (West Germany), David Ben-Gurion (Israel) were all brought down by scandals of one sort or another, usually involving sex and/or state security. Nothing much has changed on this front. Despite the spirit of 1945, Britain remained a sharply divided class society where deference to one's "superiors" dominated the political culture. The new Labour leader, Harold Wilson, turned out to be an excellent leader of the opposition, challenging, mocking and puncturing Tory pretensions on every front.
It was film-makers, dramatists and satirists, however, who were leading the race towards modernity. Television, a relatively new medium, was often watched collectively since not every home possessed one. In the US, a Harvard maths professor, Tom Lehrer, was entertaining the liberal middle classes with his mocking songs (he stopped singing when Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize because "satire was no longer possible"). He was flanked by Lenny Bruce, one of the most brilliant and savage standup comics ever seen on stage: his deliriously incoherent stream of consciousness was considered subversive and he was arrested for "obscenity" in San Francisco and permanently denied entry to Britain after a successful gig at Peter Cook's Establishment Club in 1962.. read more:
