Pushed by the “younger generation “ at the time. Civil rights, women’s movement, sexual norms, drugs, clothing, etc. TV both drove change and reflected the changing times. I can clearly recall daytime TV filled with reruns from the 50s and early 60s, with much different visuals in prime Time and on the news. Barbara Billingsley went from leave it to Beaver to jive Talkin in the R rated Airplane movie.
The country just plain changed more radically than any other period in my lifetime. The war certainly was a driver, but so was TV, the pill, and mostly just a generation of kids with probably the easiest upbringing of any generation ever who through the power of TV could see beyond their own neighborhood, including the good and exciting and the bad and unfair… and once they saw what was out there they wanted to fully enjoy the good and make the bad better.
And there were a lot of us.too many to be denied. I always thought that the announcement at Woodstock, “from now on this is a free concert”, acknowledging that the barriers they had put up we’re not stopping anyone from coming in, was a really good analogy for the baby boomer generation in general at that time.