None of it affected me directly, except for the fantastic music on the radio and the interesting television programs I saw, as the world began to open up to me as I became a teenager myself.
I remember the girl who held up the sign that said "Bring Us Together" at a Nixon rally; IIRC, Nixon met with her after seeing the sign.
I wasn't political at all, at that age, but some of my friends were. All very liberal, of course, but I had never heard that word at that time. They were "anti-war hippies," that's all I knew.
I tried to grow my hair long but it just looked bushy and unkempt. I suppose if my mom had let me keep growing it, I would have looked a little like Jerry Garcia, I have that kind of hair.
Not that many boys at my suburban school grew their hair real long, only a few. All the girls did though. At that time, and going into the early '70s, high school girls wore miniskirts that were so short they were virtually one-piece bathing suits. There were so many beautiful girls at my school it was unbelievable. Now they're almost all fat.
My first political thought I remember very well. It happened when I read about some soldiers returning from duty, and going through JFK airport in NYC. Some hippies spat on them and called them baby killers.
I hadn't thought very much about the military, other than that I liked military technology like radar and missiles. Where we lived when I was little, in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, they played the Army PR series called "The Big Picture" on Saturday mornings at about 6:30, and I used to get up real early so I could watch it.
Anyway, the story about the hippies spitting on the soldiers made a real impression on me. My first thought was that the war wasn't their fault, personally, and it was stupid and unfair to spit on them.
But then, as I thought about it more, it really seemed wrong to me. I started to perceive the hippies and the anti-war protestors as more and more silly and self-serving.
I didn't start to become an actual Conservative until about five or six years later, when I found about 50 National Review magazines spilling out of an overfilled dumpster at Clemson University in South Carolina. I was hungry for things to read at that time, so I scooped them all up (without knowing what they were) and took them to my apartment and started reading them. Of course, that was it for me.
A girl I knew in college, a few years before that, had introduced me to Ayn Rand, but I didn't really identify her writings (which I think I read most of, including many issues of The Objectivist) as Conservative, but her words sort of prepared the ground, you might say.
“...I found about 50 National Review magazines spilling out of an overfilled dumpster at Clemson University...”
Same here! I found a stack of National Review’s about to be thrown out. I devoured the contents and that cemented my conservatism to this day. I even read it while in Vietnam.
William F. Buckley Jr. started and sustained the conservative movement in this country from 1955 on. As bad as things are now, it would be much worse without his influence.