Here's a chart showing the use of the word "communism" in all the books that Google has scanned for its GoogleBooks collection. As a student of 1960 and of American communism/anticommunism, I'm really not surprised that usage of the word "communism" was still on the rise in 1960--that it peaked around then, just after that year. Maybe this merely says that writers take a while to incorporate words into formal writing ("book writing") and that actual use (orally and in print journalism) peaked during the heyday of McCarthyism (1949-1954) but found its way into books a little later. Such charts are merely suggestive, anyway, and are hardly definitive. The chart is hard to see, so just click on it for a larger view. Look closely and you'll discern a little dip during the several World War II years when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were allies. Perhaps the term "brothers" was more in use then. Another little downward turn at the end of the 1950s and then up up up in the late 50s and early 60s. Another bump up during the Reagan years.Slate's weekly "culture gabfest" discussed this new little feature provided by Google, which Steve Metcalf expressing reasonable doubts about its effect on the humanities. I'm with him, but feel pretty sure that (a) I won't give up nuanced close reading of the words (e.g. each slightly distinct rhetorical use of the word "communism" in 1960) and (b) I won't--because one can't--draw any definitive conclusions from the charting. Nonetheless, the chart above does tell some kind of story. That peak circa '60 does seem significant. Time, then, for more reading....
Is '60 the moment when the end of the end of the Old Left had been reached and the New Left began to emerge? Is it the final ascendancy, in certain scenes at least, of poetic postmodernity? Surely the publication of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry that year suggests this, but then again--once again--we look back on "New" here and see continuity. The rhetoric of the Kennedy-Nixon contest made much less of a dent than everyone (at the time as well as since) claimed, so one wonders why were such great claims made? 
Had we come to expect "1960" to be truly ubiquitously modern in a way that the 1950s really were not--not quite? And what specifically does "modern" mean in the Kennedyesque talk then and now about the torch being passed to a new generation, etc.? The First Lady really meant "modernist" when Camelotians said "modern." What about the others across the new young cultural leadership? I've been surprised by how frequently the 
"Beat movement" was covered in 1960 in the mainstream press. I was expecting a fair measure but I've found tonnage. 1960 was the year when the figure of the beat was beginning to find acceptance, although still 80% of these stories are mocking, rebels-without-cause condescension. For anyone whose analysis made an impact nationally, do these antipolitical adolescents count as part of the "new young cultural leadership"? No, but rather than the two being opposites, they fall along a Continuum of the New American. Now that's a change for '60.
