To begin: The year 1968 was a turbulent one, and   2001   was released right in the middle of that chaos.  The Vietnam War intensified, the US military stunned by the ferocity of the Tet Offensive earlier in the year.  Fervent opposition to the war led to widespread and often violent demonstrations and police responses across the country.  The Civil Rights movement was painfully gaining momentum through the 1960’s; Martin Luther King would be assassinated just two days after the world premiere of   2001 .  The Space Race was still very real.  The Apollo fire that killed three American astronauts occurred only a little more than a year before the film’s release and the US was still trying to recover from that loss and still meet President John F. Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the Moon before the end of the decade.  No American had yet flown in an Apollo capsule, the giant Saturn 5 rocket had flown only once and without a crew (its second ...

After I posted my blog yesterday, I thought I'd watch that classic 1964 anti-nuclear war black comedy,  Dr. Strangelove , which got 98/94 ratings from  Rotten Tomatoes .  Conveniently, I had recorded it some time ago off TCM.  Of course I had seen it a long time ago, but forgot all the details.  A timetable of what was happening during that period: There was a half-hearted  Bay of Pigs invasion  in April of 1961.  Incredibly, there is a true story of how five of us as Stanford juniors actually had planned to swing through the Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for the spring break, then join this attack.  Good thing we chickened out. The  Berlin Crisis  came in August of 1961 when the wall was built between East and West Berlin. I graduated and in June of 1962 moved to the Hutchinson Sugar Company in Naalehu on the Big Island of Hawaii, a location where I could not receive radio or television. Came the  Cuban Missile Crisis  from 1...

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