Here’s an excerpt of an article about 1968. I was only 8, but remember watching the moon landings, and knowing a bit about the war and the protests. That greater interest didn’t happen until later though. The war and protests that is - of course I wanted to be an astronaut! The closest I ever got was a few dates in college with a gal that ended up working on the Mars rover!
https://whyy.org/articles/take-a-breath-folks-2016-is-not-1968/
In the time between the King and Kennedy assassinations, huge swaths of our nation’s capital went up in flames. The U.S. attorney general watched it from the air, as recounted by author Hampton Sides:
“Smoke engulfed all of downtown and the Mall. Only the great illuminated dome of the Capitol and the sharp white obelisk of the Washington Monument punctured the seething blankets …. the pilot thought it looked like Dresden. All told, more than 500 fires had been set throughout the city. At President Johnson’s behest, much of the District was now occupied by federal troops, spearheaded by the Third Infantry Regiment …. The White House was reinforced with sandbags and ringed with troops …. Machine gun nests were erected all around the Mall and the Capitol building, where soldiers, some fresh from Vietnam, stood in nervous vigil, their rifles fixed with bayonets.”
Twelve people died in the D.C. riots, and 1,600 were injured. And the death toll was higher in the two most serious riots that raged a year earlier — in Detroit (43 dead, more than 1,000 injured) and in Newark (27 dead, roughly 1,000 injured). Chuck Todd also mentioned Watts, the L.A. neighborhood that burned in 1965, but the toll there — 34 dead, another 1,000 injured — was far more dire than any of the disturbances today. The U.S. Army was sent to Detroit as well. Imagine the hysteria today, fanned by social media and the 24/7 cable cycle, if the U.S. Army was fighting in our streets.
Uh, that’s exactly what they want today if you hadn’t noticed. A whole passle of those bastards have embedded themselves like ticks in the .gov, obviously. I can think of a dozen people right off the top of my head that objectively should just be getting out of jail about now, but instead had a long career in government “service”. While July 1969 was the actual landing of course it could be argued that the high point for America was in fact this Apollo 8 mission, and it’s been downhill in many, many ways ever since. Very sad.