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How Did President Kennedy Make The Baby Boom '60s Generation Feel?

3,531 views · Published 16 November 2017 · 5:02 · Indexed 21 October 2026

Channel: David Hoffman · 2017 · Film & Animation

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President John Kennedy was and wasn't many things. But one of the things he gave most Americans was a feeling of hope, optimism, positive changes, and an even greater American future.

It wasn't just the space program and so many others that he preached, it was a feeling of youth and energy and goodness in the world.

Today we know a good deal more about his presidency both positive and not so positive. But back then the feeling that the 1960s baby boom generation had was electric as some of the commentators say in this clip.

The clip is from my six part primetime television series titled Making Sense Of The Sixties which aired in 1991. it was designed to reach the children of the baby boomers, who were in their late teens and early 20s and who were asking questions about their parents and what they had done and why. I designed the series to be largely not political but more express the social changes going on, the new ways people felt, the hope and idealism of 1963. Many would say that that idealism ended to some extent when President John Kennedy was assassinated and President Lyndon Johnson took over as our country's leader.

My team and I interviewed 200 ordinary citizens for this series was selected because they represented groups in America who felt as they are articulating. Remember that the interviews were conducted in 1989 and therefore present people looking back at those earlier times.

You are also seeing in this clip the comments and analysis of dozen historians - experts on the 1950s and 1960s. The series aired in the prime time and was popular although it was released on the very night with the Iraq war began and many Americans were watching CNN which presented what was happening, live! But hundreds of colleges and universities and thousands of high schools present DVDs to their students (many still do after all these years) to help them to understand the 1950s and 1960s and how the baby boom generation felt looking back on that time.

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