Meanwhile another event occurring at almost the same time would come to have a major impact on the shaping of American politics.

Chappaquiddick was a small island off the Massachusetts coast where two days before the moon landing, on the night of July 18 (1969), the car of Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy¹ drove off a small wooden bridge leading to the island, turning over in the water and trapping Patty Jo Kopechne, a very pretty young "Boiler Room Girl" (a member of one of deceased brother Bobby's campaign groups) who was with him in the car.  Patty Jo drowned (or possibly simply suffocated after having been trapped in the car for some time).

Kennedy's explanations of the whats and whys didn't make much sense (why he got out and she didn't; why she was in the car in the first place; why they were headed in the direction they were going; why he didn't go immediately for help; why he didn't report the incident to the police until the next morning, when they had already discovered her body).

Kennedy soon pled guilty and was issued a two-month prison sentence for "having left the scene of the accident," a sentence which the judge suspended anyway. Then an inquest into the accident was initiated the following January (1970) and in May a Massachusetts grand jury found that Kennedy had not committed any punishable offense (not even for leaving the scene of an accident!).

Politically speaking, Kennedy laid low... well, sort of that is, because he was one of the forces trying to have the country led from the "democratic" Congress rather than the "imperialist" White House.  Indeed, if he, as a typically ambitious Kennedy, still had any plans to direct the country after the shame of Chappaquiddick, he really had no other option anyway.

At the same time, what was also truly amazing was how quickly the Democratic Party gave him a moral "pass" on this event.  The Kennedy name had real power, like the European royal dynasties of Habsburgs, Valois, Bourbons, Tudors, Stuarts, Romanovs, etc.  Even in democratic America names like Adams and Roosevelt (and eventually Bush) had a special power.  And in Massachusetts, the name Kennedy would continue to have unchallenged power, all the way up until Senator Ted Kennedy's death forty years later in 2009 (still in office as Senator at the time).

¹The always-problematic younger brother of John and Bobby Kennedy.

In mid-August of 1969 nearly a half-million Boomer youth congregated at a 600-acre farm in Upstate New York (Woodstock) to enjoy a three-day-long rock concert featuring a huge number of the major music stars of the day.  But the event was more than just a music festival, it was the very clear expression of the emerging Boomer culture in all its ways, especially its idealization of both social harmony and social action, supposedly all about "love and peace" – love, which often took on a distinctly sexual character, and peace, which frequently involved drug use in order to accentuate the spiritual "coming together" of the very self-focused Boomers.

Above all, it helped to give precise definition as to what it meant to be a Boomer, in dramatic distinction to the Middle-Class ways of the Boomers' parents, which in so many ways the Boomers departed from as far as possible – as a testimony as to how far they had come in securing a new freedom for themselves as a rising generation.

In 1969 the radical Boomer group, the "Weathermen,"² called for "Days of Rage" (October 8-11) in Chicago, in protest against the Vietnam war, and in part in protest against the trial then underway in Chicago of the Chicago Eight (reduced ultimately to the Chicago Seven).³

Only about 800 protesters showed up on the first day, as opposed to about 2,000 Chicago police confronting them.  There was much brave talk about confronting the Fascist police, even the readiness to lose some of the lives of the protesters in order to advance the cause of freedom.  Then the group began their march, smashing store and car windows, overturning cars and attacking bystanders (breaking the neck of a Chicago lawyer who had been watching the event) as they went, until they ran into a cordon of police officers and the two groups clashed. Sixty-eight Weathermen were arrested, a number injured, including twenty-eight policemen, and six of the protesters were shot.

The next day the protest continued, and then the next day and the next. The number of participants dwindled to less than half the original numbers in those next days.  Of the total number of participants, 280 weathermen ended up being arrested for participation in the Days of Rage.

What this all had achieved was unclear. But it spoke volumes about the way Boomer youth were so easily mobilized for action, violent action if necessary, in pursuit of some social ideal, any social ideal, as long as it was indeed "ideal" (meaning: more of the nature of a slogan demanding a strong show of support rather than any well thought-through social policy).

And even though the street-based protest movements would decline in number in the 1970s (although there would still remain a number of the more "professional" of the Boomer protesters who would continue to show up for almost any kind of a demonstration, anywhere and for any cause), the crusading spirit of the Boomers would in general continue to impact Boomer ideas of how American politics ought to proceed.  This would even show up in the new social-political and even cultural attitudes that would find their way into Congress, where politics would become more and more a matter of bringing ideological opponents down to humiliating public defeat, rather than undertaking the art of political compromise as the foundation of real social progress.  This latter and well-proven but old-fashioned political style would somehow get lost in the new political atmosphere.

²The Weathermen were a faction of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) created to spark revolution or even, as they claimed, a state of war against "U.S. imperialism" – their name Weathermen taken from a 1965 Bob Dylan song in which appears the phrase "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."  During the first half of the 1970s they would conduct a bombing campaign on various government buildings and banks in protest against the Vietnam war – and American "imperialist" culture in general.

³These were the "Yippie" leaders who inspired the Boomer riots at the 1968 Chicago National Convention – who were convicted of the crimes of disturbing the peace, but who however on appeal had the convictions overturned.

Another event to rock the country at about the same time was the revelation by the nation's press in November concerning what American soldiers had done to an entire Vietnamese village (My Lai) when in March of the previous year, as part of the American retaliatory response to the Tet offensive, American soldiers entered a village where the villagers were getting ready for market day, and, under the orders of their officers, while encountering no enemy action, proceeded nonetheless over the period of a full morning to execute the villagers, men, women and children (from 350 to 500 as the best estimate of those killed), based solely on the suspicion that they had been harboring Viet Cong units.

Previously the military had attempted a coverup of the tragedy, originally announcing the action as another victory against the Viet Cong.  But because of the complaints and letters of some of the American soldiers shocked at the behavior of their fellow soldiers, the story eventually became public, in fact by November (1969) becoming front page news in America (complete with horrifying pictures of the wholesale killing).

And thus it was that the chaotic 1960s came to a brutal close.