GREENWICH VILLAGE 1960’S

Yoichi R. Okamoto. President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the White House Cabinet Room, 18 March 1966.

Bob Dylan in New York

[Image via Vogue]

When seeking to romanticize or humanize the turbulent lives of the Kennedys, few photographers came as far as Mark Shaw, who toured with then-Senator Kennedy during the 1959 presidential campaign, and eventually followed them to their home in Cape Cod. The President liked the pictures so much that Shaw eventually became the family’s de facto portraitist.

Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick

[Image via Christie’s]

Many photographers besides Warhol himself tried to capture the copacetic energies of Warhol and the heiress and model Edie Sedgwick. Among the few successes was this three-part portrait by David McCabe, which echoes Warhol’s fascination with the New York tower as a metaphor for fame.

Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick

[Image via Christie’s]

Many photographers besides Warhol himself tried to capture the copacetic energies of Warhol and the heiress and model Edie Sedgwick. Among the few successes was this three-part portrait by David McCabe, which echoes Warhol’s fascination with the New York tower as a metaphor for fame.

Nikita Khrushchev at the UN

[Image via AP]

According to Khrushchev’s granddaughter, Nina L. Khrushcheva, this source of decades-long parody and embarrassment began when the Secretary General decided he was uncomfortable with a new pair of shoes. Railing in response to speeches by Philippines delegate Lorenzo Sumulong and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, he decided to take them off, and on his way back up to the lectern, decided to pick one up and bang it against the podium for effect. Though it is reproduced most of the time with a shoe inserted artificially into the Soviet premier’s hand, details about the notorious “Khrushchev shoe-banging incident” remain disputed.

The execution of Nguyen Van Lem

[Image via Wikipedia]

Optimism about the progress of the Vietnam War reached a turning point following the Tet Offensive, during which Nguyen Van Lem, a soldier for the Viet Cong, was executed on the streets of Saigon by a South Vietnamese officer named Nguyen Ngoc Loan. The offensive, which interrupted a truce during the Tet lunar new year celebrations, jolted global perceptions of what Communist guerrillas in Vietnam were capable of, and gave ample fuel to the anti-war movement in America. UPDATE: Readers have rightly pointed out that noted photojournalist Eddie Adams (1933 – 2004) won a Pulitzer Prize for this image.

John and Yoko’s Bed-In

[Image via Time]

John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s mostly jesting protest against the Vietnam War took place shortly after the couple exchanged their vows on March 20, 1969 and took up residence in Room 902 at the Amsterdam Hilton. Knowing their new marriage would attract attention, Lennon and Ono deliberately sought friends in television and print media to announce that they would stay in bed for two weeks, in a variation on the popular “sit-in” strategy of peace activism. The following month, John and Yoko reportedly sent acorns, symbols of peace and rebirth, to heads of state around the world, hoping that they would be ceremonially replanted. They received no response.

Some find it heartening that the Sixties still resonate at all, with men and women who lived through those years and millions more who were born long after the decade ended; others decry the fact (or what they see as the fact) that the ideals of the era have been irretrievably co-opted by the triumph of turbocharged consumerism; still others find the entire mythology of the Age of Aquarius utterly obnoxious and tiresome, and can not wait for the Woodstock Generation to, quite frankly, die off.

But even the most ardent Sixties-bashers can sometimes find themselves inexorably drawn to the era — or, as the case may be, to one specific, pivotal year.

Take 1967. There was an awful lot going on in the U.S. and around the world at the time. The war in Vietnam was only getting bloodier. Race riots rocked American cities. Baseball fans reveled in one of the most exciting pennant races in history. A young comedian named Woody Allen was killing in Vegas. Iran crowned a new Shah. The “counterculture,” in all its protean forms, was in full bloom. Hippies were flooding to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury — soon to be followed by far more toxic forces (meth and heroin, for example, and the casualties that customarily follow in their wake) that would effectively bring an ugly end to the “Summer of Love” almost before it began.

The photos in this gallery are not meant to represent “the best” pictures made by LIFE’s photographers in 1967. Instead, in their variety of style and theme, they illustrate the fluid, volatile new world that millions were struggling to come to grips with, and to somehow safely navigate, throughout the charged weeks and months of that long, strange year.
Read more: 1967: Vietnam, Hippies, Race Riots, and More, Pictured by LIFE Magazine Photographers | LIFE.com http://life.time.com/culture/1967-pictures-from-a-pivotal-year/#ixzz3TB60ewjf