Consequences you can trace
Calling any year “the year that changed everything” is a safe way to say very little. A more useful approach is to pick specific events of 1967 and follow what they led to. This article does that for a handful of cases: territory in the Middle East, American trust in the government on Vietnam, and a few changes in music and law. The broader story of how the generation of the 1960s remembered the year is told elsewhere on the site.
The occupied territories
The most durable consequence of 1967 is probably geographic. In the Six-Day War of June, Israel captured the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Overnight, Israel controlled land with a large Palestinian population and holy sites of great importance to three religions.
Diplomacy began almost at once. At a summit in Khartoum in late summer, Arab leaders adopted a position often summarised as refusing recognition, negotiation or peace with Israel for the time being. In November the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242, which spoke of Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in the conflict and of the right of every state in the area to live in peace. The text was deliberately ambiguous about how much territory and under what conditions, and the dispute over its meaning has continued ever since.
The long-term results are mixed and still contested. Israel and Egypt made peace in 1979, and Sinai was returned to Egypt in stages ending in 1982. Israel withdrew its settlers and forces from Gaza in 2005. Israeli settlements in the West Bank, begun in the years following the war, and the status of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights remain central to the conflict. The situation of Palestinian refugees, many of them displaced in 1948 and some again in 1967, was also made more complicated by the war.
The credibility gap on Vietnam
In the United States, the lasting effect of 1967 was less about territory than about trust. Throughout the year, officials described the war as moving in the right direction. In November, General William Westmoreland, the commander in Vietnam, returned to Washington and gave a speech suggesting that the end was beginning to come into view. Meanwhile, newspapers and television reports from Vietnam told a more mixed story, and the phrase “credibility gap” was already in use for the difference between official statements and what reporters saw.
The sense of gap did not cause the Tet Offensive, which was a decision by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong leaders, but it shaped how Tet was received. When large-scale attacks hit cities across South Vietnam at the end of January 1968, many Americans took them as proof that the optimism had been misleading. Even though the attackers suffered heavy losses militarily, the political effect at home was severe.
Other developments of late 1967 point the same direction. Defence Secretary McNamara, who had come to doubt the war, was announced as leaving the Pentagon in late November. Eugene McCarthy declared his challenge to Johnson for the Democratic nomination at the end of that month, and Johnson said he would not seek re-election on 31 March 1968. The line from the Westmoreland speech to the withdrawal is not a straight one, and many events came between, but 1967 is where the gap between claims and doubts became an open political problem.
Music
In music, the most durable change was the status of the album. Records such as Sgt. Pepper made the LP a form that artists could use to say something whole, and many acts of the 1970s and later built careers on that model. The expectation of studio experimentation, the arrival of serious rock criticism, and the growth of rock-oriented radio on the FM band all trace back to this period. These are tied to a wider shift in the industry rather than to a single decision, and the pace of each varied from country to country.
Law and institutions
Several legal changes of 1967 endured. The Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia ended bans on interracial marriage across the United States. The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 laid the groundwork for public television and radio networks established in the following years. The 25th Amendment, ratified in February, set out how to handle presidential disability and vacancies; it was first used in 1973, when Gerald Ford was chosen as vice president after Spiro Agnew resigned. The Outer Space Treaty, signed in January, set out basic principles for activity beyond Earth, including a ban on placing nuclear weapons in orbit, and it remains a foundation of space law. In Britain, two acts of Parliament changed the legal position on homosexuality and on abortion, both contentious issues.
Limits of the claim
None of these consequences was inevitable, and historians weigh them differently. What can be said with reasonable confidence is that decisions and events of 1967 set the terms of arguments that were still running decades later.