I'd like to see an academic source that says that the counterculture movement had the kind of relationship with the Kennedy assassination that Wikipedia contests. In the body of the text (i.e., not the intro), Wikipedia cites three sources in making this claim: a timeline of polls regarding American trust in the government, a weird PBS page that contains an assortment of quotes (none of which mention counterculture or protests), and the Warren Commission Report, which was presented in 1964 and which did not analyze the then very nascent counterculture movement.

But the graph they use (that I just mentioned) actually seems to contradict their argument. Check it our for yourself. They argue that trust in the government fell as a result of the assassination, and cite this graph, but it actually shows trust in the government increasing between 1958 and 1964, the period in which Kennedy was assassinated! Folks, this is why you don't cite Wikipedia as an academic source.

Anyway, the standard narrative holds that the Civil Rights Movement, disaffection with the Cold War status quo, and the Anti War Movement were the driving forces behind the counterculture movement. The Civil Rights Movement began in earnest in the 1950s (this was the era of the Emmett Till, of the Little Rock Nine, of Rosa Parks, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and Martin Luther King's rise to fame) and only gained steam in the 1960s. These protests subsequently helped to spawn young white America to protest against the war after Lyndon Johnson escalated American involvement in Vietnam in 1965. Note that, in the chart cited above, this is the period when people started to lose faith in the government.

Of course, this is only part of the story, and scholars have already begun to contextualize the American counterculture movement within broader historical trends of the 1960s. During this period, an entire generation that had come of age during the early period of the Cold War and found the geopolitics of the age dissatisfying. Protests movements developed not only in America, but in France, Germany, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and other parts of the "first" and "second" worlds (with Czechoslovak developments proving the most interesting, of course). This culminated with the tumultuous year of 1968. The Prague Spring, the May protests in France, the Tet Offensive and the subsequent mass anti-war protests, the assassination of Martin Luther King and the subsequent riots: all of these events occurred that year, which compelled the Soviet Union and the United States to begin to work together to stabilize international politics, thus ushering in the period of the Cold War known as "Detente" (or so Jeremi Suri argues in his influential Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente (Harvard University Press, 2005)).

I have to admit, however, that my familiarity with the counterculture movement stems from this kind of international analysis. I could not say, for example, whether rock-n'-roll, drugged influenced adventures of the hippies primarily represented a cause or a symptom of the counterculture movement. Does the assassination of JFK appear in the early rhetoric of the counterculture movement (the Vietnam War does by the late 1960s, to be sure)? The Wikipedia article fails to cite anything indicating as much. Maybe an enthusiast of American cultural history could cite an example, but I have to say from my own research that it seems like it will be insignificant in comparison to the Civil Rights Movement, systemic youth disaffection with the Cold War (which would include the assassination of JFK), and the Vietnam War.