Invasion Films in the 1960s Post-Camelot Security State

Abstract

After the criticism of H.W. Brands and others regarding the disappointing reversal of John F. Kennedy from being a critic of America’s imperialistic tendencies in his 1957 speech on Algiers to becoming a President who would pursue the Truman Doctrine’s vindicator tendencies to the fullest in the early 1960s, it is too easy to forget the optimistic quality of the time that would indeed enable America to pursue and instantiate the egalitarian philosophy that would eventually result in the Civil Rights movement. After our brush with McCarthyism, there was hope that under the reign of the intellectually and technologically more sophisticated youthful President, and his successor Lyndon Baines Johnson, that alternatives to the horror and paranoia of the 1950s could be found. Such optimism was certainly evident in science fiction television programs like Star Trek, and it is apparent in at least some of the science fiction films of the time as well, even as a sense of caution and suspicion sets in with the escalation of the Vietnam War.