The sexual revolution of the 60's had begun with the use of birth control pills and Hugh Hefner opening the first of his Playboy clubs in Chicago.
In 1960 the US sent the first troops to Vietnam following the French withdrawal in 1954 in the fight against communist North Vietnam. Being 15 years old at the time, it didn’t mean anything, but in a few short years it turned out to have been a big deal.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act into law. Its purpose was to close loopholes in the Civil Rights Act of 1957 that involved voter rights. I don’t think it made much difference because when I got to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina a few years later, when you got a few miles away from the base everything was segregated; when I got out in 1967 civil rights marches were in full swing.
The really big news of 1960 happened when the Soviet Union shot down a Lockheed U-2, a very high flying (70,000 feet or over 13 miles) reconnaissance aircraft operated by the United States Air Force that was piloted by Francis Gary Powers.
Initially President Eisenhower lied and said we we not making flights over Russia. When it was shot down he modified the lie to say that the plane was a weather surveillance aircraft. But, when the Russians produced the plane’s wreckage, the pilot and photos of military bases in Russia, there was no denying it was a spy plane. Powers was sentenced to 3 years imprisonment and 7 years of hard labor for espionage, but in 1962, he and an American student were exchanged for KGB spy, Colonel Vilyam Fisher.
Powers died at the age of 47 on August 1, 1977 in Los Angeles, along with a cameraman, when the helicopter he was piloting for a TV station crashed. It had run out of fuel. Reportedly the faulty fuel gauge had been repaired, but Powers was not informed leading him to misread it. At the last moment Powers saw children playing near his intended landing site and tried to divert his helicopter, but in doing so lost air speed in an auto-rotation descent. The NTSB called the probable cause pilot error.
On Tuesday, November 8, 1960, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson won the Presidency with one of the smallest margins in history. In other news Chubby Checker started a new dance craze called the twist. Aluminum Cans were used for the first time.
Fidel Castro nationalized American oil, sugar and other US interests in Cuba. In late 1966, I found myself in Guantanamo Bay where we we guarding the fence line.
Hurricane Donna formed on August 31st and battered the east coast of the United States until mid-September. In Louisville, Kentucky, Cassius Clay (later known as Muhammad Ali) won his first professional fight after having won the Gold Medal in Rome in the Olympic games.
In January, for the third year in a row, Bobby Fischer won the US Championship without a loss and pocketed $1,000. In April he tied for first with Boris Spassky at Mar del Plata. Fischer lost to Spassky, drew with Bronstein and won all his other games.
On May 7, 1960, Mikhail Tal defeated Mikhail Botvinnik to become world champion.
The 14th Olympiad was held in Leipzig, Germany in October and there were a couple of incidents of note. World Champion Mikhail Tal was driving to the event when he got banged up in a car accident and was unable to play the first 3 rounds. Tal scored +8 -1 =6. His only loss was to the English player Jonathan Penrose and it cost Tal the gold medal for board 1. Former World Champion Max Euwe had a disastrous result when he only scored +3 -6 =7 which turned out to be the worst score by a GM in Olympiad history.
Of course the Soviet team (Tal, Botvinnik, Keres, Korchnoi, Smyslov and Petrosian) won. The US team (Fischer, Lombardy, Byrne, Bisguier, Rossolimo and Weinstein) finished a distant second. Reshevsky got in a snit when he was assigned second board behind Fischer and refused to play on the team.
Below is Penrose’s historic defeat of the new World Champion. Here’s the way Tal described his defeat in The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal:
The Olympiad ended on the day before my birthday and I wanted to be free at the finish. Therefore I agreed with my fellow team members to play through the “middlegame” of the Olympiad without a break. However, the day before the last round, for strictly private reasons, the captain of our team asked me to play. I “threatened” him that I would lose, and I carried out my threat, although God knows, I didn't want to. It was just that the English master Penrose played the whole game very well.
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| Penrose and Tal at play |
Penrose’s play was based on ideas he got from the notes by Kaarle Ojanen and E.E. Book to Ojanen’s game against Paul Keres in a match between Finland and Estonia that was played in Helsinki earlier in the year. Tal was not familiar with the game and was upset with Keres for not showing it to him.
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