While Eisenhower, a conservative Republican president, had run the country throughout most of the fifties, in 1960 John F. Kennedy (JFK) was elected president. At the age of fortythree, the handsome and wealthy Kennedy was the youngest person to be elected president. Kennedy's youthful idealism seemed to inspire the entire nation. He established the Peace Corps, in which thousands of young people volunteered to help the poor in third-world countries. The president also promised that Americans would walk on the moon before the end of the decade.

The election of the liberal Kennedy also seemed to awaken the political yearnings of the baby boomers who were just coming of age. Students founded an alphabet soup of political groups, including SDS, or Students for a Democratic Society, which was formed in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1960 and was dedicated to civil rights and other leftwing political...