The hippie movement, an assertive youth subculture, turned the 1960s into an age of counter-culture defined by the quest for harmony with nature, communal living, artistic experimentation not least in music, sexual experimentation, and the widespread use of recreational drugs. While these ideas were ideologically disparate, they were given a degree of political credibility and respectability by their association with the peace movement.
The death of Dr Henry Kissinger at 100 marks the passing of a global era in general and an American one in particular. For the world, he personified the existential division of the earth into the realms of war and peace by the Cold War. For America, he was an icon at a difficult time when the challenge from the Soviet Union threatened the economic and political values that the US stood for. His controversial place in world history is rooted in American times.
What were those times? Kissinger served as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor in the administrations of President Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford between 1969 and 1977. Throughout the 1960s and well into the 1970s, the US was wracked by what was essentially a civil war. This was not just the internal war produced by the Civil Rights Movement that had begun in the late 1940s and had ended in the late 1960s, but also the anti-Vietnam War Movement of 1964 to 1973.
