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An ideal post would be two solid paragraphs (that includes a thesis statement, a body of supporting evidence, and a conclusion that summarizes the main points). The post should be well constructed and free of grammatical errors, and be between 250 and 300 words. You do not need to undertake outside research in order to answer the question; although you may, if you like. It is a wise strategy to create your response as a Word document (that way, you have a copy for yourself). You must cite your sources both in your response and below it (Bibliography), using the Chicago Style citation format. Students who do not cite their work can expect to receive only a minimum grade of 60% for this assignment. It is expected that our textbook by Shi and Tindall will be a source and should likewise be accessed and cited. Late responses will be penalized at 5% per day.

Choose one (1) question.

1. What were President John F. Kennedy's efforts to contain communism abroad and pursue civil rights and other social programs at home?

2. What were the strategies and achievements of the civil rights movement in the 1960s? What divisions emerged among its activists during the decade?

3. What were President Lyndon B. Johnson's major war on poverty and Great Society initiatives? How did they impact American society?

4. What were Presidents Kennedy and Johnson's motivations for deepening America's military involvement in the Vietnam War?

5. What were the origins of the youth revolt? How did it manifest in the New Left and the counterculture?

6. How did the youth revolt and the early civil rights movement influence other protest movements? How did new protest movements affect social attitudes and public policy?

7. How did the political environment of the late sixties shape President Richard M. Nixon's election strategy and domestic policy?

8. How and why did Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger change military and political strategies to end America's involvement in the Vietnam War?

9. How did the Watergate scandal unfold? What was its political significance?

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The Containment Policy 1225 Through the iron curtain German children greet a U.S. cargo plane as it flies into West Berlin to drop off much-needed food and supplies. At times it seemed that the two superpowers were on the verge of war. For all the threats and harsh words, however, the Berlin airlift went on for eleven months without any shots being fired. Finally, on May 12, 1949, the Soviets lifted their blockade, in part because bad Russian harvests had made them desperate for food grown in western Germany. The Berlin airlift was the first major “victory” for the West in the cold war, and the unprecedented efforts of the United States and Great Britain to supply West Berliners transformed most of them from defeated adversaries into devoted allies. In May 1949, as the Soviet blockade was ending, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) was founded. In October, the Soviet-controlled German Democratic Republic (East Germany) came into being. forming alliances The Soviet blockade of Berlin convinced the United States and its allies that they needed to act together to stop further Communist expansion into Western Europe. On April 4, 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty was signed by twelve nations: the United States, Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Italy, Norway, and Portugal. Greece and Turkey joined the alliance in 1952, West Germany in 1955, and Spain in 1982. 29 A New Frontier and a Great Society 1960–1968 The Dove (1964) African American artist Romare Bearden’s collage presents a disjointed vision of a contemporary urban street scene: fragments of black bodies appear in a surreal clash of flesh and pavement, reflecting the upheaval and violence of African American life in the 1960s. At the same time, though, the titular dove presides over the scene, suggesting that a life of peace could still be in reach. F or those who considered the social and political climate of the fifties dull, the following decade provided a striking contrast. The sixties were years of extraordinary social turbulence and liberal activism, tragic assassinations and painful trauma, cultural conflict and youth rebellion. Assassins killed four of the most important leaders of the time: John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. The “politics of expectation” that a British journalist said shone brightly in Kennedy’s short tenure as president did not die with him in November 1963. Instead, Kennedy’s idealistic commitment to improving America’s quality of life—for everyone—was given new meaning and momentum by his successor, Texan Lyndon B. Johnson, whose war on poverty and Great Society programs outstripped Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in their scope and promises. Johnson’s energy and legislative savvy resulted in a blizzard of new federal programs as many social issues that had been ignored or postponed for decades—civil rights for minorities, equality for women, gay rights, medical insurance, federal aid to the poor—forced their way to the forefront of national concerns. In the end, however, Johnson promised too much. The Great Society programs fell victim to unrealistic hopes, poor execution, and the nation’s deepening involvement in Vietnam. The deeply entrenched assumptions of the cold war led the nation into the longest, most controversial, and least successful war in its history to that point. focus questions 1. What were President John F. Kennedy’s efforts to contain communism abroad and pursue civil rights and other social programs at home? 2. What were the strategies and achievements of the civil rights movement in the 1960s? What divisions emerged among its activists during the decade? 3. What were Lyndon B. Johnson’s major war on poverty and Great Society initiatives? How did they impact American society? 4. What were Presidents Kennedy and Johnson’s motivations for deepening America’s military involvement in the Vietnam War? 5. What were the issues that propelled Richard Nixon to victory in the 1968 presidential election? 1309 1310 CHAPTER 29 A New Frontier and a Great Society 1960–1968 The New Frontier In his 1960 speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, John F. Kennedy showcased the muscular language that would characterize his campaign and his presidency: “We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier— the frontier of unknown opportunities and perils—a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.” Kennedy and his staff fastened upon the frontier metaphor as the label for their proposed domestic program because they believed that Americans had always been adventurers, eager to conquer and exploit new frontiers. Kennedy promised that if elected he would get the country “moving again” and be a more aggressive cold warrior than Dwight Eisenhower. kennedy versus nixon In 1960, the presidential election featured two candidates—Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy (JFK)—of similar ages but contrasting personalities and backgrounds. As Eisenhower’s partner over successive terms, Nixon was assured the Republican nomination in 1960, although President Eisenhower himself had grave misgivings. When asked by reporters to name a single major accomplishment of his vice president, Ike replied: “If you give me a week, I might think of one.” The president’s snide comment undercut Nixon’s claim of significant executive experience as vice president. The two Republicans had long had a testy relationship. Nixon once called his presidential boss “a goddamned old fool,” while Eisenhower dismissed his fiercely ambitious vice president as a man who couldn’t “think of anything but politics.” On more than one occasion, Eisenhower clumsily sought to dump his vice president in favor of other Republicans whom he respected. A native of California, the forty-seven-year-old Nixon had come to Washington after the Second World War eager to reverse the tide of New Deal liberalism. His visibility among Republicans benefited from his leadership of the anti-Communist hearings in Congress during the McCarthy hysteria. All his life, Nixon had clawed and struggled to reach the top. Now he had the presidency within his grasp. But Nixon, graceless, awkward, and stiff, proved to be one of the most complicated and most interesting political figures in American history. Kennedy told an aide that “Nixon doesn’t know who he is . . . so every time he makes a speech he has to decide which Nixon he is, and that will be very exhausting.” Forty-three-year-old John Kennedy had not distinguished himself in the House or the Senate. More pragmatic than principled, he was handsome, articulate, and blessed with energy and wit. Friends said his charisma was magical. The New Frontier 1311 The Kennedy– Nixon debates Nixon’s decision to debate his less prominent opponent on television backfired. “One of life’s great pleasures,” his brother-in-law said, “was spending time with that man.” Kennedy lit up a room with his inviting smile, athletic presence, and infectious zest for life. Coolly analytical and dangerously self-absorbed, he was a contradictory and elusive personality. Even his wife Jacqueline was unsure about him. “He may be a fine politician,” she told a dinner guest, “but do we know if he’s a fine person?” This much is certain: Kennedy had a bright, agile mind, a quick wit, a Harvard education, a record of heroism in the Second World War, a rich and powerful Roman Catholic family, and a beautiful and accomplished young wife. In the words of a southern senator, Kennedy combined “the best qualities of Elvis Presley and Franklin D. Roosevelt”—a combination that played well in the first-ever televised presidential debate, as he began the process of seducing a nation. Some 70 million people tuned in to the debate and saw an obviously uncomfortable Nixon perspiring heavily and looking pale. By contrast, Kennedy looked 1312 CHAPTER 29 A New Frontier and a Great Society 1960–1968 tanned and confident. He offered crisp answers that made him appear to be qualified for the nation’s highest office. The morning after the debate, his approval ratings skyrocketed. Kennedy’s political rise owed much to the public relations campaign engineered by his father, Joseph, a self-made tycoon with a genius for promotion. In Joseph Kennedy’s view, image was much more important than substance. “Can’t you get it into your head,” he told John, “that it’s not important what you really are? The only important thing is what people think you are.” He assured family and friends that he would “sell Jack like soap flakes” to jump-start his political career. The elder Kennedy hired talented writers to produce his son’s two books, paid a publisher to print them, purchased tens of thousands of copies to make them “best sellers,” and helped engineer his son’s elections to the House and Senate. John Kennedy was a relentless presidential campaigner, traveling 65,000 miles, visiting twenty-five states, and making more than 350 speeches, including an address to Protestant ministers in Texas in which he neutralized concerns about his being a Roman Catholic by stressing that the pope in Rome would never “tell the President—should he be a Catholic—how to act.” In speech after speech, Kennedy said he was tired of waking up and reading about what Soviet and Cuban leaders were doing. Instead, he wanted to read about what the U.S. president was doing to combat communism. He wanted to develop a foreign policy that would break out of the confining assumptions of the Cold War, but as yet had no clear plan for doing so. Kennedy also worked to increase the registration of African American voters across the nation. His response to the growing civil rights movement was ambivalent, however. Like Eisenhower, Kennedy believed racial unrest needed to be handled with caution rather than boldness. To him, racial justice was less an urgent moral crusade than a potential barrier to his election. He understood the injustices of bigotry and segregation, but he needed the votes of southern whites to win the presidency. During the campaign, Kennedy won the hearts of many black voters by helping to get Martin Luther King Jr. out of a Georgia jail after King had been unjustly convicted of “trespassing” in an all-white restaurant. “I’ve got a suitcase of votes,” said King’s appreciative father, “and I’m going to take them to Mr. Kennedy and dump them in his lap.” On the Sunday before Election Day, a million leaflets describing Kennedy’s effort to release King from prison were distributed in African American churches across the nation. In November, Kennedy and his running mate, powerful Texas senator Lyndon B. Johnson, won one of the closest presidential elections in history. Their The New Frontier 1313 THE ELECTION OF 1960 WA 9 OR 6 CA 32 MT 4 ID 4 NV 3 ND 4 WY 3 UT 4 AZ 4 CO 6 NM 4 HI 3 AK 3 ■ SD 4 MN 11 NH 4 VT 3 WI 12 MI 20 IA 10 NY 45 PA 32 OH IL IN 25 WV 27 13 VA KS MO 8 12 KY 10 8 13 NC TN 11 14 OK AR SC 7 1 8 AL GA 8 MS 6 5 12 8 TX LA 24 10 FL 10 NE 6 ME 5 MA 16 RI 4 CT 8 NJ 16 DE 3 MD 9 Electoral Vote Popular Vote John F. Kennedy (Democrat) 303 34,200,000 Richard M. Nixon (Republican) 219 34,100,000 Harry F. Byrd 15 How did the election of 1960 represent a sea change in American presidential WWN64 Figurepolitics? M29_1 ■ proof How did John F. Kennedy win the election in spite of winning fewer states First than Richard M. Nixon? margin was only 118,574 votes out of more than 68 million cast. Nixon won more states than Kennedy, but the Democrat captured 70 percent of the black vote, which proved decisive in at least three key states. a vigorous new administration John F. Kennedy was the youngest person and first Roman Catholic elected president. He had promised “to get America moving again,” and he was eager to begin that effort. At times, he seemed self-assured to the point of cockiness. “Sure it’s a big job,” he told a reporter. “But I don’t know anybody who can do it any better than I can.” That he had been elected by the narrowest of margins and had no working majority in Congress did not faze him. In his mind, he was destined to be a great president. 1314 CHAPTER 29 A New Frontier and a Great Society 1960–1968 Kennedy’s inauguration ceremony on a cold, sunny, blustery January day introduced the nation to his distinctive elegance and flair. In his speech, the new president focused almost entirely on foreign affairs. He accepted the responsibility of “defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger” and promised to keep America strong while seeking to reduce friction with the Soviet Union: “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.” Kennedy claimed “that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace,” and he dazzled listeners with uplifting words: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty. . . . And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Such steely optimism heralded a presidency of fresh promise and new beginnings. Yet much of the glamour surrounding Kennedy was cosmetic. Despite his athletic interests and robust appearance, he suffered from serious medical problems: Addison’s disease (a withering of the adrenal glands), venereal disease, chronic back pain resulting from a birth defect, and fierce fevers. He took powerful prescription medicines or injections daily, sometimes hourly, to manage a degenerative bone disease, to deal with anxiety, to help him sleep, and to control his allergies. Like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Kennedy and his associates hid his physical ailments—as well as his often reckless sexual dalliances in the White House with a galaxy of women, including actress Marilyn Monroe and Judith Campbell Exner, the girlfriend of a Chicago mob boss. When Kennedy met British prime minister Harold Macmillan, he told him that “I don’t know about you, Harold, but if I don’t have a woman every three days, I get these terrible headaches. How about you?” Kennedy was determined to bring together the “best and the brightest” minds to fashion a “vigorous” new era in political achievement. He represented a new generation of political figures who had fought in the Second World War. Known as the “pragmatic generation,” they were decisive and bold and prized the “manly” virtues, especially courage and conviction in the face of the Cold War and the threat of nuclear conflict. The new secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, the whiz-kid president of Ford Motor Company, displayed the cult of activism surrounding the Kennedy administration when he stressed that it was better to “have a wrong decision made than no decision at all.” With at times an almost dismissive arrogance, Kennedy frequently complained about “academics” who spent all their time criticizing statesmen without exercising responsibility themselves. In the White House, he observed, he and others could not afford to be professorial. The Oval Office was “where decisions have to be made.” The New Frontier 1315 Jack and Jackie Young, dashing, wealthy, and culturally sophisticated, the Kennedys were instant celebrities. Women imitated the First Lady’s famous hairdo, while men craved JFK’s effortless “cool” and youthful energy. Yet Kennedy had a difficult time launching his New Frontier domestic program. His narrow election victory gave him no mandate, and he faced a congressional roadblock in the form of conservative southern Democrats who joined with Republicans to oppose his efforts to increase federal aid to education, provide medical insurance for the aged, and create a cabinet-level department of urban affairs and housing to address inner-city poverty. In his first year, Kennedy submitted 355 legislative requests; Congress approved only half of them. He suffered so many defeats that he complained he “couldn’t get a Mother’s Day resolution through the goddamned Congress.” Legislators did approve increasing the minimum wage, a Housing Act that earmarked nearly $5 billion for new public housing projects in povertystricken inner-city areas, the Peace Corps, created in 1961 to recruit idealistic young volunteers who would provide educational and technical service abroad, and the Alliance for Progress, a financial assistance program to Latin American countries intended to blunt the appeal of communism in those nations. But the president’s efforts to provide more assistance for educational programs and medical care for the elderly never got out of committees. Perhaps Kennedy’s greatest legislative success was in convincing Congress to commit $40 billion to put an American on the moon within ten years. 1316 CHAPTER 29 A New Frontier and a Great Society 1960–1968 (It would happen in 1969.) What spurred the start of the program was the news that the Soviets had launched the first manned space flight in 1961. Former president Eisenhower said that Kennedy’s “race to the moon for national prestige is nuts.” But Vice President Lyndon Johnson assured the president that “dramatic accomplishments in space are being increasingly identified as a major indicator of world leadership.” Kennedy explained that he had decided to shoot for the moon not because it is “easy, but because it is hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” civil rights The most important developments in domestic life during the sixties occurred in civil rights. Throughout the South, racial segregation remained firmly in place. Signs outside public restrooms distinguished between “whites” and “colored”; restaurants declared “Colored Not Allowed,” or “Colored Served Only in Rear.” Stores prohibited African Americans from trying on clothes before buying them. Despite the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, many public schools across the South remained segregated and unequal in quality. Like Franklin D. Roosevelt, President Kennedy celebrated racial equality but did little to promote it until forced to do so. His caution reflected his narrow election margin in 1960. He was reluctant to challenge conservative southern Democrats on the explosive issue of segregation. Both he and his brother Robert (“Bobby”), the attorney general and his closest adviser, had to be dragged into actively supporting the civil rights movement. After appointing Harris Wofford, a white law professor and experienced campaigner for racial equality, as the special presidential assistant for civil rights, President Kennedy told him “to make substantial headway against . . . the nonsense of racial discrimination,” but to do so with “minimum civil rights legislation [and] maximum Executive action.” Such actions led Martin Luther King Jr. to comment that Kennedy had great political skill but no “moral passion” about the need to end racial injustice. catastrophe in cuba Kennedy’s performance in foreign relations was spectacularly mixed. Although he had told a reporter that he wanted to “break out of the confines of the Cold War,” he quickly found himself reinforcing its confining assumptions. While still a senator, Kennedy had blasted President Eisenhower for not being tough enough with the Soviets and for allowing Fidel Castro and his Communist followers to take over Cuba, just ninety miles from the southern tip of Florida. Soon after his inauguration, Kennedy learned that a secret CIA operation, which had been approved by Eisenhower, was training 1,500 anti-Castro Cubans in Guatemala, Texas, and Florida to invade their homeland in hopes The New Frontier 1317 Walk of shame Captured anti-Castro Cubans after the failed invasion at the Bay of Pigs. of triggering a mass uprising against Castro. U.S. military leaders assured Kennedy that the invasion plan (Operation Trinidad) was feasible; CIA analysts predicted that news of the invasion would inspire anti-Castro Cubans to rebel against their Communist dictator. In reality, the covert operation had little chance of succeeding. Its assumptions were flawed, its strategy faulty, its tactics bungled, and the forces and weapons used inadequate. Kennedy seemed to realize it might fail when he callously said, “If we have to get rid of those 800 men [actually 1,400], it is much better to dump them in Cuba than in the United States.” When the ragtag force of right-wing Cubans, transported on American ships, landed before dawn at the Bay of Pigs on Cuba’s south shore on April 17, 1961, Castro’s forces were waiting for them. Kennedy panicked when he realized the operation was failing and refused desperate pleas from the rebels for “promised” support from U.S. warplanes. General Lyman Lemnitzer, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that Kennedy’s “pulling out the rug [on the Cuban invaders] was . . . absolutely reprehensible, almost criminal.” Some 1,200 rebels were captured; the rest were killed. (Kennedy later paid $53 million to ransom the captured rebels). 1318 CHAPTER 29 A New Frontier and a Great Society 1960–1968 The clumsy effort to overthrow the Cuban government was a complete failure. It humiliated Kennedy and elevated Castro in the eyes of the world. To his credit, Kennedy admitted that the Bay of Pigs invasion was a “colossal mistake.” Only later did he learn that the planners of the operation had assumed that he would commit American forces once the invasion effort had failed. He said that after the initial disastrous reports from the Bay of Pigs, “we all looked at each other and asked, ‘How could we have been so stupid?’” After the failed invasion, Kennedy never again trusted his trigger-happy military and intelligence leaders. the vienna summit Just weeks after the Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy met Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev at a summit conference in Vienna, Austria. Khrushchev badgered and bullied the young president, bragged about the superiority of communism, and threatened to take control of all of Berlin, the divided city inside Communist East Germany. A stunned Kennedy told the British prime minister that Khrushchev was “much more of a barbarian” than he had expected. He confided to a journalist that the summit “was awful. Worst thing of my life. He rolled right over me—he thinks I’m a fool—he thinks I’m weak.” When asked what he planned to do next, Kennedy replied: “I have to confront them [the Soviets] someplace to show that we’re tough.” The first thing Kennedy did upon returning to the White House was to request an estimate of how many Americans might be killed in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The answer was chilling: 70 million. Kennedy, desperate not to appear weak in the face of Khrushchev’s aggressive actions in Germany, asked Congress for additional spending on defense and called up 156,000 members of the Army Reserve and National Guard to protect West Berlin. He also ordered an armed military convoy to travel from West Germany across East Germany to West Berlin to show the Soviets that he would protect the city with force. The Soviets responded on August 13, 1961. They stopped all traffic between East and West Berlin and began erecting the twenty-seven-mile-long Berlin Wall to separate East Berlin from West Berlin, where thousands of refugees were fleeing communism each week, many of them the best and the brightest: engineers, doctors, scientists, and writers. For the United States, the wall became a powerful propaganda weapon in the Cold War. As Kennedy said, “Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put up a wall to keep our people in.” The Berlin Wall demonstrated the Soviets’ willingness to challenge American resolve in Europe. In response, Kennedy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara embarked upon the most intensive arms race in history, increasing the number of nuclear missiles fivefold, adding 300,000 men to the armed The New Frontier 1319 Severed ties Two West Berliners climb the newly constructed Berlin Wall to talk with a family member at an open window. forces, and creating the U.S. Special Forces (Green Berets), an elite group of commandos who specialized in guerrilla warfare and could provide a “more flexible response” than nuclear weapons to “hot spots” around the world. the cuban missile crisis Soon after taking office, President Kennedy predicted that “we shall have to test anew” whether a nation “such as ours can endure.” It was an accurate prediction. In the fall of 1962, Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviets decided to challenge Kennedy again. To protect Communist Cuba from another American-backed invasion and to show critics at home that he was not afraid of the Americans, Khrushchev approved the secret installation of Soviet missiles on the island nation. The Soviets felt they were justified in doing so because Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs invasion, had ordered that U.S. missiles with nuclear warheads be installed in Turkey, along the Soviet border. On October 16, 1962, Kennedy learned that photos taken two days earlier by U.S. spy planes showed some forty Soviet missile sites and twenty-five jet bombers in Cuba. “We have some big trouble,” he alerted his brother Bobby by phone. Over the next thirteen days, perhaps the most dangerous two weeks in history, Kennedy and the National Security Council (NSC) considered several 1320 CHAPTER 29 A New Frontier and a Great Society 1960–1968 possible responses, ranging from doing nothing to invading Cuba. The world held its breath as the NSC discussed the unthinkable possibility of a nuclear exchange with the Soviets. The commander of the U.S. Marines at one point reminded the group that the missiles in Cuba were not a true strategic threat; the Soviet Union, he said, “has a hell of a lot better way to attack us than to attack us from Cuba.” Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara agreed, noting that “it makes no difference whether you are killed by a missile fired from the Soviet Union or from Cuba.” Yet the group insisted that the missiles be removed for symbolic reasons. Eventually, the NSC fastened on two options: (1) a “surgical” air strike on the missiles, followed, if necessary, by an invasion, or (2) a naval blockade of Cuba in which U.S. warships would stop Soviet vessels and search them for missiles. Although most of the military advisers supported the first option, Kennedy chose the blockade, prompting a general to shout, “You’re screwed! You’re screwed!” Kennedy, however, had been burned by overconfident military advisers during the Bay of Pigs operation and was not going to let it happen again. He also feared that an American attack on Cuba would give the Soviets an excuse to take control of West Berlin. On Monday night, October 22, a grim Kennedy delivered a televised speech of the “highest national urgency” to the world, announcing that the U.S. Navy was establishing a “quarantine” of Cuba to prevent Soviet ships from delivering more weapons to the island nation. Kennedy added that he had “directed the armed forces to prepare for any eventuality.” He closed by urging the Soviets to “move the world back from the abyss of destruction.” The world watched as tensions grew, and some 200,000 U.S. soldiers made their way to southern Florida. Khrushchev replied that Soviet ships would ignore the quarantine and accused Kennedy of “an act of aggression propelling humankind into the abyss of a world nuclear-missile war.” Despite such rhetoric, however, on Wednesday, October 24, five Soviet ships, presumably with more missiles aboard, stopped well short of the quarantine line. Two days later, Khrushchev, knowing that the United States still enjoyed a 5 to 1 advantage in nuclear weapons, offered a deal. The Soviets would agree to remove the missiles already in Cuba in return for a public pledge by the United States never to invade Cuba—and a secret agreement to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey. Kennedy agreed. Secretary of State Dean Rusk stressed to a newscaster, “Remember, when you report this, [say] that eyeball to eyeball, they [the Soviets] blinked first.” The air force chief of staff, General Curtis Lemay, The New Frontier 1321 who had urged an air attack on Cuba, called the deal “the greatest defeat in our history.” In the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union subsided, in part because of several symbolic steps: an agreement to sell the Soviet Union surplus American wheat, the installation of a “hotline” telephone between Washington and Moscow to provide instant contact between the heads of government, and the removal of U.S. missiles from Turkey, Italy, and Britain. “peace for all time” Going to the edge of nuclear war led Kennedy and others in the administration to soften their Cold War rhetoric and pursue other ways to reduce the threat of atomic warfare. As Kennedy told his advisers, “It is insane that two men, sitting on opposite sides of the world, should be able to decide to bring an end to civilization.” He told an audience at American University on June 10, 1963, that his new goal was “not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time,” which would require reducing the risk of nuclear warfare. “We all inhabit this small planet,” he explained. “We all breathe the same air.” What kind of peace did he seek? “Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about . . . the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, The Cuban missile crisis Photographs taken from a U.S. surveillance plane on October 14, 1962, revealed both Soviet missile launchers and missile shelters near San Cristóbal, Cuba. 1322 CHAPTER 29 A New Frontier and a Great Society 1960–1968 and build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.” Soon after delivering this speech, the president began discussions with Soviet and British leaders to reduce the risk of nuclear war. The discussions resulted in the Test Ban Treaty, ratified in September 1963, which banned the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. It was the first joint agreement of the Cold War and an important move toward improved relations with the Soviet Union. As Kennedy put it, using an ancient Chinese proverb, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” vietnam As tensions with the Soviet Union eased, a new crisis was growing in Southeast Asia, where events were moving toward what would eventually become the greatest American foreign-policy calamity of the century. Throughout the fifties, U.S. officials increasingly came to view the preservation of South Vietnam as the critical test of American willpower in the Cold War. In 1956, then senator John F. Kennedy described South Vietnam as the “cornerstone of the free world in Southeast Asia.” Yet the situation in South Vietnam had worsened under the corrupt leadership of Premier Ngo Dinh Diem and his family. Diem had backed away from promised social and economic reforms, and his repressive tactics, directed not only against Communists but also against the Buddhist majority and other critics, played into the hands of his enemies. President Eisenhower had provided over $1 billion in aid to Diem’s government during the late fifties. Kennedy sent even more weapons, money, and some 16,000 military advisers to South Vietnam to help shore up the government. (They were called “advisers” to avoid the impression that U.S. soldiers were doing the fighting.) In the countryside of South Vietnam, the National Liberation Front (NLF), a left-wing nationalist movement backed by Communist Vietnam, had launched a violent insurgency in which guerrilla fighters known as the Viet Cong (VC), were winning the fight against the South Vietnamese government. American military advisers began relocating Vietnamese peasants to “strategic hamlets”—new villages ringed by barbed wire—where the VC could not receive assistance. By the fall of 1963, Kennedy agreed with his top advisers that Diem was “out of touch with his people” and had to be removed—in large part because he refused to follow American orders. On November 1, Vietnamese generals, with the approval of U.S. officials, took control of the Saigon government. They then took a step that Kennedy had neither intended nor expected: they murdered Diem and his brother. The rebel generals, however, soon fell to fighting The New Frontier 1323 one another, leaving Vietnam even more vulnerable to the Communist insurgency. Thereafter, unstable South Vietnam essentially became an American colony. The United States put the generals in power, gave the orders, and provided massive financial support, much of which was diverted into the hands of corrupt politicians. By September 1963, Kennedy had developed doubts about the ability of the United States to defend the South Vietnamese. “In the final analysis,” he told aides, “it’s their war. They’re the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them as advisers but they have to win it.” Yet only a week later, in a televised interview, Kennedy reiterated the domino theory endorsed by Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, saying that if South Vietnam fell to communism, the rest of Southeast Asia would soon follow. He stressed that “we should stay [in South Vietnam]. We should use our influence in as effective a way as we can, but we should not withdraw.” kennedy’s assassination What Kennedy would have done in Vietnam has remained a matter of endless discussion, because on November 22, 1963, while riding in an open car through Dallas, Texas, he was shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a twenty-four-year-old ex-Marine turned Communist. Oswald, who had lived for a time in the Soviet Union, idolized Fidel Castro and hated the United States and its capitalist system. As he fled the scene after shooting Kennedy, he also shot and killed a Dallas policeman. Debate still swirls about whether Oswald acted alone or as part of a conspiracy because he did not live long enough to tell his story. As he was being transported to a court hearing, Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner distraught over Kennedy’s death, shot and killed the handcuffed Oswald as a nationwide television audience watched. Kennedy’s shocking assassination and heartrending funeral enshrined the president in the public imagination as a martyred leader cut down in the prime of his life. He came to have a stronger reputation after his death than he enjoyed in life. “That debonair touch, that shock of chestnut hair, that beguiling grin, that shattering understatement—these are what we shall remember,” wrote newspaper columnist Mary McGrory. Kennedy’s dramafilled, thousand-day presidency had flamed up and out like a comet hitting the earth’s atmosphere. Americans wept in the streets, and the world was on edge as the wounded nation buried its fallen president. Roy Wilkins, a prominent civil rights leader, noted that “the bullet that killed Kennedy paralyzed the civil rights movement” as the world welcomed a new and very different president, Lyndon Johnson. 1324 CHAPTER 29 A New Frontier and a Great Society 1960–1968 “President Shot Dead” Commuters react to the news of President Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963. Civil Rights After the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–1956, Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of militant nonviolence stirred others to challenge the deeply entrenched patterns of racial segregation in the South. During the sixties, King became the face and heart of the civil rights movement. His goal was integration and equality, and he was an uplifting example of fortitude and dignity in confronting brutality and oppression. By nature, he was inspirational and courageous, with an astonishing capacity for forgiveness and a deep understanding of the dynamics of political power and social change. Yet he was also immensely complicated and contradictory, even hypocritical, as the FBI discovered by subjecting him to relentless electronic surveillance and even blackmail. King was neither a genius nor a saint, but his shortcomings pale into insignificance when compared to his achievements. He was one of the world’s most inspiring examples of courage, conviction, and dignity in the face of often violent prejudice and persecution. With the help of those he led and inspired, Civil Rights 1325 King changed the trajectory of American history—for the better. Alas, he did not live to see the promised land made possible by his actions. sit-ins The civil rights movement gained momentum when four brave African American college students sat down and ordered coffee and doughnuts at an “all-white” Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960. The clerk refused to serve them, explaining that blacks had to eat standing up or take their food outside. The Greensboro Four, as the students came to be called, waited forty-five minutes and then returned the next day with two dozen more students. As they sat for hours, fruitlessly waiting to be served, some read Bibles; others read Henry David Thoreau’s famous essay on civil disobedience. They returned every day for a week, patiently tolerating being jeered at, jostled, and spat upon by white hooligans. Within two months, similar sit-ins—involving 50,000 blacks and whites, men and women, young and old—had occurred in more than 100 cities. Black comedian Dick Gregory participated in several sit-ins at whites-only restaurants. When the managers told him, “We don’t serve Negroes,” he replied: “No problem, I don’t eat Negroes.” Some 3,600 people were arrested nationwide, but the sit-ins worked. By the end of July 1960, officials in Greensboro lifted the whites-only policy. The civil rights movement had found an effective new, nonviolent tactic against segregation. In April 1960, some 200 student activists, black and white, converged in Raleigh, North Carolina, to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC—pronounced “snick”). The goal of what they called “the movement” was to intensify the effort to dismantle segregation. SNCC expanded the sit-ins to include “kneel-ins” at all-white churches and “wadeins” at segregated public swimming pools. In many communities, demonstrators were pelted with rocks, burned with cigarettes, and even killed by white racists. As a Florida hog farmer named Holstead “Hoss” Manucy told a journalist, “I ain’t got no bad habits. Don’t smoke. Don’t cuss. My only bad habit is fightin’ niggahs.” freedom rides In 1961, civil rights leaders decided to focus on integrating public transportation: buses and trains. Their larger goal was to force the Kennedy administration to engage the cause of civil rights in the South. On May 4, the New York–based Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), led by James Farmer, decided to put “the civil rights movement on wheels” when a courageous group of eighteen black and white Freedom Riders, as they were 1326 CHAPTER 29 A New Frontier and a Great Society 1960–1968 Civil rights and its peaceful warriors The Greensboro Four—(listed from left) Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Billy Smith, and Clarence Henderson— await service on day two of their sit-in at the Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina. called, boarded two public buses traveling from Washington, D.C., through the Lower South to New Orleans. They wanted to test a federal court ruling that banned racial segregation on buses and trains, and in terminals. On May 14, a mob of white racists in rural Alabama, many of them members of the Ku Klux Klan, surrounded the Greyhound bus carrying the “Freedom Riders.” After throwing a firebomb into the bus, the Klan members barricaded its door. “Burn them alive,” one of them yelled. “Fry the damned niggers.” The riders were able to escape, only to be battered with metal pipes, chains, and clubs. A few hours later, Freedom Riders on a second bus were beaten after entering whites-only waiting rooms at the bus terminal in Birmingham, Alabama. The police, as it turned out, had encouraged the beatings. Alabama’s governor complained that the Freedom Riders were violating “our law and customs,” but the brutality displayed on television caused national outrage. The next day, the Freedom Riders wanted to continue their trip, but the bus drivers refused. Civil Rights 1327 Freedom Riders On May 14, 1961, a white mob in Alabama assaulted a Freedom Bus, flinging fire bombs into its windows and beating the activists as they emerged. Here, the surviving Freedom Riders sit outside the burnt shell of their bus. When Diane Nash, a fearless black college student and SNCC leader in Nashville, Tennessee, heard about the violence in Birmingham, she recruited new riders. President Kennedy called her, warning that she would “get killed if you do this,” but she refused to back down. “It doesn’t matter if we’re killed,” she told the president. “Others will come—others will come.” On May 17, Nash and ten other students took a bus to Birmingham, where they were arrested. While in jail, they sang “freedom songs”: “We’ll Never Turn Back,” “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” “We Shall Overcome.” Eugene “Bull” Connor, the city’s notoriously racist police chief, grew so frustrated at their joyous rebelliousness that he drove them in the middle of the night to the Tennessee state line and dropped them off to walk. Instead of going back to Nashville, however, the gutsy students returned to Birmingham. President Kennedy was not inspired by the Freedom Riders. To him, they were a “pain in the ass” threatening to embarrass him and the United States on the eve of his summit meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. After dismissing them as “publicity seekers” who were putting the administration in “a politically painful spot,” he grabbed a telephone and ordered Harris Wofford, 1328 CHAPTER 29 A New Frontier and a Great Society 1960–1968 his special assistant on civil rights, to end the freedom rides. “Can’t you get your goddamned friends off those buses? Stop them!” When Kennedy suggested to several civil rights leaders that they allow things to “cool off,” James Farmer replied that blacks had been “cooling off for a hundred years. . . . If we got any cooler, we’d be in the deep freeze.” Louis Martin, an influential black newspaper publisher, explained that “Negroes are getting ideas [about securing equal rights] they didn’t have before.” Kennedy asked where they were getting such ideas. Martin replied: “From you!” The activists finally forced the president to provide another bus, which enabled them to renew the journey to New Orleans. When the new group of riders reached Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, they too were attacked. The next night, civil rights activists, including Martin Luther King Jr., gathered at a Montgomery church to honor the Freedom Riders. But their meeting was interrupted by a rampaging mob of whites armed with rocks and firebombs. Ministers made frantic appeals to the White House. Kennedy responded by urging the Alabama governor to intervene. After midnight, national guardsmen arrived to disperse the mob. The Freedom Riders continued into Mississippi, where they were jailed. They never made it to New Orleans. Still, the courage and principled resistance of the Freedom Riders—and of federal judges whose rulings supported integration efforts—prompted the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) in September 1961 to order that all interstate transportation facilities be integrated. Equally important, the Freedom Riders kindled the growth of civil rights groups. The experience of being assaulted and jailed galvanized the participants to become full-time members while attracting more recruits. The freedom rides were thus a crucial turning point in the civil rights movement. White segregationists, however, remained violently opposed to racial equality. In Birmingham in September 1962, Dr. King was speaking at the annual meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference when a white member of the American Nazi party jumped to the stage and punched him in the face. King simply dropped his hands and allowed the man to punch him again. “Don’t touch him,” King yelled. “We have to pray for him.” His self-control and composure were as remarkable as his bravery. King was determined, as an aide said, to “love segregation to death.” His home was bombed three times, and he was arrested fourteen times, yet he kept telling people to use “the weapon of nonviolence, the breastplate of righteousness, the armor of truth, and just keep marching” toward justice. james meredith In the fall of 1962, James Meredith, an African American student and air force veteran whose grandfather had been a slave, Civil Rights 1329 tried to enroll at the all-white University of Mississippi in Oxford. Ross Barnett, the governor of Mississippi, described by Time magazine as “bitter a racist as inhabits the nation,” refused to allow Meredith to register for classes. The militantly stubborn Barnett breathed scorching defiance: he vowed “to rot in jail before he will let one Negro ever darken the sacred threshold of our white schools.” Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy then dispatched federal marshals to enforce the law. When the marshals were assaulted with bricks, bottles, and steel pipes by a white mob shouting “Go to Hell, JFK,” President Kennedy sent National Guard troops. Their arrival ignited rioting that left two dead and dozens injured. Once the violence subsided, however, Meredith was registered at the university. “Only in America,” a reporter noted, “would the federal government send thousands of troops to enforce the right of an otherwise obscure citizen to attend a particular university.” birmingham In early 1963, in conjunction with the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Martin Luther King Jr. defied President Kennedy’s wishes by organizing a Bull’s dogs Eugene “Bull” Connor ordered Birmingham police to unleash their dogs and clubs on civil rights demonstrators in May 1963. 1330 CHAPTER 29 A New Frontier and a Great Society 1960–1968 massive series of demonstrations in Birmingham. Alabama was now led by George Wallace, a feisty racist governor who had vowed to protect “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” King knew that weeks of public demonstrations would result in thousands of arrests and would likely provoke violence, but a hard-won victory, he felt, would “break the back of segregation all over the nation” by revealing southern “brutality openly—in the light of day—with the rest of the world looking on” through television cameras. The Birmingham campaign began with sit-ins at restaurants, picket lines at segregated businesses, and a march on city hall. The police arrested and jailed hundreds of activists. Each day, however, more demonstrators, black and white, joined in the efforts. As King and others led 2,500 demonstrators through Birmingham streets on May 7, the all-white police force led by “Bull” Connor used snarling dogs, tear gas, electric cattle prods, and high-pressure fire hoses on the protesters. Millions of Americans were outraged when they saw the ugly confrontations on television. “The civil rights movement,” President Kennedy observed, “owes Bull Connor as much as it owes Abraham Lincoln.” It also owed a lot to the power of television. More than 3,000 demonstrators were arrested, including Dr. King and several white ministers, both men and women, who were rushing to the cause of civil rights. While in jail, King was inspired to write a “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” a stirring defense of “nonviolent civil disobedience” that has become a classic document of the civil rights movement. “One who breaks an unjust law,” King stressed, “must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.” In a reference to President Kennedy’s timid support, King wrote that the most perplexing foe of equal justice was not the southern white bigot but “the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice . . . who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods.’” King’s efforts prevailed when Birmingham officials finally agreed to end their segregationist practices. White racists did not change overnight, however. One angry Alabaman sent a letter to King: “This isn’t a threat but a promise— your head will be blown off as sure as Christ made green apples.” Throughout 1963, whites in the Lower South continued to defy efforts at racial integration, while blacks and white liberals organized demonstrations in cities and towns across the nation. On June 11, 1963, Alabama governor George Wallace theatrically blocked the door at the University of Alabama as African American students tried to register for classes. Wallace finally stepped aside in the face of insistent federal marshals. Civil Rights 1331 That night, President Kennedy finally decided he needed to lead. In a hastily arranged televised speech, he announced that he would soon submit to Congress a major new civil rights bill that would remove race as a consideration “in American life or law.” He stressed that “a great change is at hand,” and he was determined to make “that change, that [civil rights] revolution” peaceful and constructive. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” the president said. “It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities.” He asked “every American, regardless of where he lives,” to “stop and examine his conscience,” for America, “for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.” That night, in Mississippi, a 37-year-old African American civil rights activist, Medgar Evers, listened to the president’s speech in his car. He was so excited by Kennedy’s new commitment to civil rights that he turned the car around and went home so that he could discuss the speech with his children. When Evers arrived at his house in Jackson at midnight, he was shot in his driveway by a white racist lying in ambush. He staggered to the carport and collapsed in front of his horrified wife and children. He died before reaching a hospital. Such violence aroused the nation’s indignation and reinforced Kennedy’s commitment to make civil rights America’s most pressing social issue. The killing of Medgar Evers led the president to host his first meeting of civil rights leaders in the White House and helped spur plans for a massive demonstration on the Mall in Washington, D.C. “i have a dream!” For weeks, southern Democrats in the House of Representatives blocked Kennedy’s civil rights bill. The standoff in Congress led African American leaders to take a bold step. On August 28, some 250,000 blacks and whites, many of them schoolchildren brought in on buses, marched arm-in-arm down the Mall in Washington, D.C., chanting “Equality Now!” and singing “We Shall Overcome.” The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was the largest political demonstration in American history. “When you looked at the crowd,” remembered a U.S. Park Service ranger, “you didn’t see blacks or whites. You saw America.” For almost six hours, prominent entertainers sang protest songs, and civil rights activists gave speeches calling for racial justice. Then something remarkable happened. Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, thirty-four-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. came to the podium, the tenth and last speaker of the day. The crowd roared as he prepared 1332 CHAPTER 29 A New Frontier and a Great Society 1960–1968 “I Have a Dream,” August 28, 1963 Protesters in the massive March on Washington make their way to the Lincoln Memorial, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his nowfamous speech. to speak. He started awkwardly. Noticing his nervousness, someone urged him to “tell ’em about the dream, Martin.” As if suddenly inspired, King set aside his prepared remarks and delivered an extraordinary improvised speech that resonated around the world. He started slowly and picked up speed, as if he were speaking at a revival, giving poetic voice to the hopes of millions as he stressed the “fierce urgency of now” and the unstoppable power of “meeting physical force with soul force.” King then shared his dream for America: In spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.’ I have a dream that one day . . . the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood. As if at a massive church service, many in the crowd began shouting “Amen!” as King summoned a flawed nation to justice: “So let freedom ring!” he shouted, for “when we allow freedom to ring from every town and every ham- Civil Rights 1333 let, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up the day when all God’s children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” As King finished, there was a startling hush, then a deafening ovation. The crowd spontaneously joined hands and began singing “We Shall Overcome.” “I have never been so proud to be a Negro,” said baseball superstar Jackie Robinson. “I have never been so proud to be an American.” President Kennedy, who had tried to convince organizers to call off the march, was watching on TV at the White House, just a mile away. As King spoke, the president told an aide that “he’s damn good.” But King’s dream remained just that—a dream. Eighteen days later, four Klansmen in Birmingham detonated a bomb in a black church, killing four young girls. The murders sparked a new wave of indignation across the country and the world. The editors of the Milwaukee Sentinel stressed that the bombing “should serve to goad the conscience. The deaths . . . in a sense are on the hands of each of us.” the warren court The civil rights movement depended as much on the courts as it did on the leadership of Dr. King and others, and federal judges kept forcing states and localities to integrate schools and other public places. Under Chief Justice Earl Warren, the U.S. Supreme Court also made landmark decisions in other areas of American life. In 1962, the Court ruled that a school prayer adopted by the New York State Board of Regents violated the constitutional prohibition against governmentsupported religion. In Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), the Court required that every felony defendant be provided a lawyer regardless of the defendant’s ability to pay. In 1964, the Court ruled in Escobedo v. Illinois that a person accused of a crime must be allowed to consult a lawyer before being interrogated by police. Two years later, in Miranda v. Arizona (1966), the Court issued a bitterly criticized ruling when it ordered that an accused person in police custody be informed of certain basic rights: the right to remain silent; the right to know that anything said to authorities can be used against the individual in court; and the right to have a defense attorney present during interrogation; since then, these requirements have been known as “Miranda rights.” In addition, the Court established rules for police to follow in informing suspects of their legal rights before questioning could begin. freedom summer During late 1963 and throughout 1964, the civil rights movement grew in scope, visibility, and power. Racism, however, 1334 CHAPTER 29 A New Frontier and a Great Society 1960–1968 remained entrenched in the Lower South, as blacks continued to be excluded from the political process. White officials kept African Americans from voting by charging them expensive poll taxes, forcing them to take difficult literacy tests, making the application process inconvenient, and intimidating them through the use of arson, beatings, and lynchings. In early 1964, Harvard-educated Robert “Bob” Moses, a black New Yorker who had resigned from the SCLC to head the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) office in Mississippi, decided it would take “an army” to force the state to give voting rights to blacks. So he set about recruiting an army of black and white volunteers who would live with rural African Americans, teach them in “freedom schools,” and help them register to vote. Most of the recruits for what came to be called “Freedom Summer” were idealistic white college students, many of whom were Jewish. Mississippi’s white leaders prepared for “the nigger-communist invasion” by doubling the state police force and stockpiling tear gas, electric cattle prods, and shotguns. Writer Eudora Welty reported from her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, that she had heard that “this summer all hell is going to break loose.” It did. In mid-June, the volunteer activists met at an Ohio college to learn about southern racial history, nonviolent civil disobedience, and the likely abuses they would suffer. On the final evening of the training session, Moses A freedom school in Jackson, Mississippi A volunteer from Brooklyn, New York, instructs young black students on the arts, African American history, and civil rights at a freedom school as part of the “Mississippi Summer Project” in August 1964. Civil Rights 1335 pleaded with anyone who feared heading to Mississippi to go home; several did. The next day, the remaining volunteers boarded buses and headed south, fanning out across the state. In all, forty-one “freedom schools” taught thousands of children math, writing, and history. They also tutored black adults about the complicated process of voter registration. Stokely Carmichael, an African American student from Howard University, wrote that black Mississippians “took us in, fed us, instructed and protected us, and ultimately civilized, educated, and inspired the smartassed college students.” Forty-six-year-old Fannie Lou Hamer was one of the local blacks who worked with the SNCC volunteers during Freedom Summer. The youngest in a household of twenty children, she had spent most of her life working on local cotton plantations. During the Freedom Summer of 1963 and after, she led gatherings of volunteers in freedom songs and excelled as a lay preacher. “God is not pleased,” she said, “at all the murdering, and all of the brutality, and all the killings for no reason at all. God is not pleased at the Negro children in the State of Mississippi, suffering from malnutrition. God is not pleased because we have to go raggedy each day. God is not pleased because we have to go to the field and work from ten to eleven hours for three lousy dollars.” In response, the Ku Klux Klan, local police, and other white racists harassed, arrested, and assaulted many of the volunteers. On June 21, 1964, just two days after Congress approved the Civil Rights Act, three young SNCC workers— James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael “Mickey” Schwerner— disappeared after going to investigate the burning of an African American church. Their decomposed, bulletriddled bodies were found two months later buried in a dam at a cattle pond. They had been abducted and murdered by Klan members. While searching for the missing men, authorities found the bodies of eight black males in rivers White terror Young men cruise and swamps who also had been killed. through a riot zone in Chicago in 1966, brandishing a Confederate flag and The murders, said one volunteer, were racist signs. “the end of innocence,” after which 1336 CHAPTER 29 A New Frontier and a Great Society 1960–1968 “things could never be the same.” A growing number of blacks began to call into question Martin Luther King’s nonviolent strategy. black power Racism in America was not limited to the South. By the mid-sixties, about 70 percent of the nation’s African Americans were living in blighted urban areas, and many young blacks in the large cities were losing faith in the strategy of Christian nonviolence employed by King and others in the South. Inner-city poverty and frustration cried out for its own social justice movement. The fragmentation of the civil rights movement was tragically evident on August 11, 1965, when Watts, the largest black ghetto in Los Angeles, exploded in rioting and looting that left thirty-four dead, almost 4,000 in jail, and widespread property damage. Dozens of other large cities experienced similar riots in the summer of 1966. Between 1965 and 1968, nearly 300 racial uprisings shattered the peace of urban America. The violence revealed the growing civil war within the civil rights movement. As Gil Scott-Heron, a black musician, sang: “We are tired of praying and marching and thinking and learning / Brothers want to start cutting and shooting and stealing and burning.” What came to be called “black power” began to compete with the integrationist, nonviolent philosophy espoused by Dr. King and the SCLC. Malcolm X The black power movement’s most influential spokesman. malcolm x The most visible spokesman for the black power movement was Malcolm X, born in 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska, as Malcolm Little. His father, a Baptist minister, and his mother, a West Indian, were supporters of Marcus Garvey’s crusade for black nationalism in the 1920s, and his childhood home was burned to the ground by white racists. His father was killed when Malcolm was six, perhaps the victim of white supremacists. After her husband’s death, Louise Little suffered a breakdown and was institutionalized for the rest of her life. Young Civil Rights 1337 Malcolm was placed in foster care but became an unruly rebel. After being expelled from school in the ninth grade, he drifted from Detroit to New York City to Boston. By age nineteen, Malcolm, now known as Detroit Red, had become a thief, drug dealer, and pimp. He spent seven years in Massachusetts prisons, where he experienced a conversion and joined a small Chicago-based religious sect, the Nation of Islam (NOI), whose members were called Black Muslims. The organization had little to do with Islam and everything to do with its domineering leader, Elijah Muhammad, and the cultlike devotion he required. Muhammad dismissed whites as “devils” and championed black nationalism, racial pride, self-respect, and self-discipline. By 1953, a year after leaving prison, Malcolm Little was calling himself Malcolm X in tribute to his lost African name, and he had become a full-time NOI minister famous for electrifying speeches attacking white racism and black powerlessness. Malcolm X dismissed Martin Luther King and other mainstream civil rights leaders as “nothing but modern Uncle Toms” who “keep you and me in check, keep us under control, keep us passive and peaceful and nonviolent.” He insisted that there “was no such thing as a nonviolent revolution.” His militant speeches inspired thousands of mostly urban blacks to join the Nation of Islam. More than most black leaders, Malcolm X expressed the emotions and frustrations of the inner-city African American working poor. Yet at the peak of his influence, and just as he was moderating his militant message, he became embroiled in a conflict with Elijah Muhammad that proved fatal. NOI assassins killed Malcolm X in Manhattan on February 21, 1965. Black militancy did not end with Malcolm X, however. By 1966, “black power” had become a rallying cry for many young militants. When Stokely Carmichael became head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he ousted whites from the organization. “When you talk of black power,” Carmichael shouted, “you talk of bringing this country to its knees, of building a movement that will smash everything Western civilization has created.” Having been beaten by whites and having seen fellow volunteers killed, Carmichael rejected the nonviolent philosophy of the mainstream civil rights movement and urged blacks to defend themselves. Where Martin Luther King spoke to white America’s moral conscience, Carmichael and other firebrands spoke to the seething rage of the young black underclass. Soon Carmichael would move on to the Black Panther party, a group of leather-jacketed black revolutionaries founded in Oakland, California, that promoted incendiary strategies and cultural pride. H. Rap Brown, who succeeded Carmichael as head of SNCC in 1967, urged blacks to “get you some guns” and “kill the honkies [whites].” 1338 CHAPTER 29 A New Frontier and a Great Society 1960–1968 the effect of black power Although widely covered in the media, the black power movement never attracted more than a small minority of African Americans. Still, it forced King and other mainstream black leaders and organizations to shift their focus from the rural South to inner-city ghettos in the North and West. Legal access to restaurants, schools, and other public accommodations, King pointed out, meant little to people mired in chronic poverty. They needed jobs and decent housing. The time had come, King declared while launching his “Poor People’s Campaign” in December 1967, for radical new measures “to provide jobs and income for the poor.” Yet as he and others stressed, the war in Vietnam was taking funds away from federal programs serving the poor, and black soldiers were dying in disproportionate numbers in Southeast Asia. The black power movement also motivated African Americans to take greater pride in their racial heritage by pushing for black studies programs in schools and colleges, the celebration of African cultural and artistic traditions, the organizing of inner-city voters to elect black mayors, laws forcing landlords to treat blacks fairly, and the creation of grassroots organizations and Panther power Black Panthers issue a black power salute outside a San Francisco Liberation School, where activists raised awareness and appreciation of African American history, a topic ignored by white, mainstream curriculum. The Great Society 1339 community centers in black neighborhoods. It was Malcolm X who insisted that blacks call themselves African Americans as a symbol of pride in their roots and as a spur to learn more about their history. As the popular singer James Brown urged, “Say it loud—I’m black and I’m proud.” The Great Society Growing federal support for civil rights came from an unlikely source: a drawling white southerner who succeeded John F. Kennedy in the White House. A stunned Lyndon Baines Johnson, the towering Texan known as LBJ, took the presidential oath of office on board the plane that brought Kennedy’s body back to Washington from Dallas. The fifty-five-year-old Johnson, the first southern president since Woodrow Wilson, had excelled as Senate majority leader before becoming vice president. His transition to the presidency was not easy, however. He inherited a The oath of office Less than 90 minutes after Kennedy’s death, Johnson took the presidential oath aboard Air Force One between his wife, Lady Bird (left), and Jacqueline Kennedy (right), before flying out of Dallas for Washington, D.C. 1340 CHAPTER 29 A New Frontier and a Great Society 1960–1968 political deadlock between the White House and a congressional alliance of Democratic and Republican conservatives that had blocked most of Kennedy’s legislative proposals. Johnson had also been kept out of the inner circle of power in the Kennedy White House. The Kennedy brothers despised Johnson and excluded him from key decisions. Robert Kennedy described Johnson as “vicious, an animal in many ways.” Johnson, in turn, dismissed “all those Bostons and Harvards” who knew less about the legislative process “than an old maid does about fucking.” Like Kennedy, Johnson was one of the most complex and inexplicable men to occupy the White House. Unlike the wealthy, aristocratic Kennedy, however, Johnson was a rags-to-riches story. With almost superhuman effort and ambition, he had worked his way out of rural Texas poverty during the Great Depression to become one of the Senate’s dominant figures. LBJ’s ego and insecurities were as massive as his vanity and ambition; he could not stand being alone; he insisted on being the center of attention wherever he went. Johnson personalized the presidency; in press conferences, he referred to “my Vietnam policy,” “my Security Council,” “my Cabinet,” “my legislation,” and “my boys” fighting in Southeast Asia. George Reedy, the president’s press secretary, said that Johnson was a “man of too many paradoxes.” Ruthless and often bullying, needy and warmhearted, he was a contradictory whirlwind of workaholic energy and inspiring hopes, a crude idealist and a brutal optimist so thin-skinned that he took all criticism personally. In his view, people were either with him or against him. There was no middle ground. Johnson yearned to be loved and respected as a transformational leader. And, like Kennedy, he had a weakness for both political power and attractive women. (His wife, Lady Bird, acknowledged that “Lyndon loved the human race, and half of the human race are women.”) Few leaders had ever dreamed as big as Lyndon Johnson. His outlook was grandiose. He wanted to be the greatest American president, the one who did the most good for the most people by creating the most new programs and agencies. He promised to “help every child get an education, to help every Negro and every American citizen have an equal opportunity, to help every family get a decent home, and to help bring healing to the sick and dignity to the old.” Those who dismissed Johnson as a traditional southern conservative failed to appreciate his genuine concern for the poor and his embrace of civil rights. “I’m going to be the best friend the Negro ever had,” Johnson bragged to a member of the White House staff. His commitment to civil rights was in part motivated by politics, in part by his desire to bring the South into the mainstream of American life, and in part by his life experiences. His first teaching job The Great Society 1341 after college was at an elementary school in Texas serving Mexican-American children. They created in him a lifelong desire to help “those poor little kids. I saw hunger in their eyes and pain in their bodies. Those little brown bodies had so little and needed so much.” He grew determined to “fill their souls with ambition and interest and belief in the future.” Politics and Poverty Johnson managed legislation through Congress better than any president in history. As a woman in Hawaii said, “Johnson is a mover of men. Kennedy could inspire men, but he couldn’t move them.” LBJ was the consummate wheeler-dealer on Capitol Hill. “It is the politician’s task,” he asserted, “to pass legislation, not to sit around saying principled things.” In 1964, he set about doing just that, taking advantage of widespread public support to push through Congress Kennedy’s stalled measures for tax reductions and civil rights. He later said that he wanted to take Kennedy’s incomplete program “and turn it into a martyr’s cause.” The Revenue Act of 1964 provided a 20 percent reduction in tax rates. (The top rate was then a whopping 91 percent, compared to 39.6 today.) It was intended to give consumers more money to spend so as to boost economic growth and create new jobs, and it worked. Unemployment fell from 5.2 percent in 1964 to 4.5 percent in 1965 and 3.8 percent in 1966. the civil rights act Long thwarted by southern Democrats in Congress, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 finally became law on July 2. It guaranteed equal treatment under the law for all Americans and outlawed discrimination in public places on the basis of race, sex, or national origin. It also prohibited discrimination in the buying, selling, and renting of housing, as well as the hiring and firing of employees. The civil rights movement set the stage and provided the momentum for the new law, but Johnson pursued its passage with an urgent sense of purpose. He lobbied key legislators one-on-one; one senator who survived the “Johnson treatment,” as it came to be called, said that the president would “twist your arm off at the shoulder and beat your head with it” if you did not agree to vote as he wanted. Soon after becoming president, Johnson hosted Georgia senator Richard Russell, his close friend and an arch-segregationist. Over lunch, the president warned Russell that “you’ve got to get out of my way. I’m going to run over you” to pass the Civil Rights Act. “You may do that,” Russell replied. “But by God, it’s going to cost you the South and cost you the election of 1964.” Johnson answered: “If that’s the price I’ve got to pay, I’ll pay it gladly.” Soon 1342 CHAPTER 29 A New Frontier and a Great Society 1960–1968 thereafter, Johnson told Congress that “we have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. . . . It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the book of law.” He added that it would be the best way to honor Kennedy’s memory. Many others helped Johnson convince Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act—Senator Hubert Humphrey, congressional committee chairs (both Republicans and Democrats), labor unions, church leaders, and civil rights organizations. Their collective efforts produced what is arguably the single most important piece of legislation in the twentieth century. The passage of the Civil Rights Act after more than a year of congressional delays marked one of those extraordinary moments when the ideals of democracy, equal opportunity, and human dignity are affirmed by action. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 dealt a major blow to the deeply entrenched system of racial segregation while giving the federal government new powers to bring lawsuits against organizations or businesses that violated constitutional rights. It also established the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission to ensure that employers treated job applicants equally, regardless of race, gender, or national origin. Down with segregation A worker removes a sign from a Greensboro, North Carolina, bus that reads: “White Patrons Please Seat from Front. Colored Patrons Please Seat from Rear.” The Great Society 1343 On the night after signing the bill, Johnson knew that conservative white southerners would be furious. He correctly predicted that “we have just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come.” a war on poverty In addition to fulfilling President Kennedy’s legislative priorities that had been stalled in Congress, Lyndon Johnson launched an elaborate legislative program of his own by declaring “unconditional war on poverty in America.” Americans had “rediscovered” poverty in 1962 when social critic Michael Harrington published a powerful exposé, The Other America, in which he revealed that more than 40 million people were mired in an invisible “culture of poverty.” Poverty led to poor housing conditions, which in turn led to such problems as poor health, poor attendance at school or work, alcohol and drug abuse, unwanted pregnancies, and single-parent families. Harrington added that poverty was much more extensive than people realized because much of it was hidden from view in isolated rural areas or inner-city slums. He urged the United States to launch a “comprehensive assault on poverty.” President Kennedy had read Harrington’s book and asked his advisers in the fall of 1963, just before his assassination, to investigate the problem and suggest solutions. Upon becoming president, Johnson announced that he wanted an anti-poverty legislative package “that would hit the nation with real impact.” He was determined to help the “one-fifth of all American families with incomes too small to even meet their basic needs.” They needed better homes, better schools, better medical care, and better job training. Money for the program would come from the tax revenues generated by corporate profits made possible by the tax reduction of 1964, which had led to one of the longest sustained economic booms in history. Johnson knew that the “war” on poverty would be long and costly. He said he did not expect to “wipe out poverty” in “my lifetime. But we can minimize it, moderate it, and in time eliminate it.” And he pledged that his war on poverty would not be “a struggle to support people” by giving them handouts but by opening “the door of opportunity” for them. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 was the primary weapon in the “War on Poverty.” It created an Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to administer eleven new community-based programs, many of which still exist. They included a Job Corps training program for inner-city youths ages sixteen to twenty-one; a Head Start educational program for disadvantaged preschoolers; a Legal Services Corporation to provide legal assistance for low-income Americans; financial-aid programs for low-income college students; grants to small farmers and rural businesses; loans to businesses that hired the chronically unemployed; the Volunteers in Service to America program (VISTA) 1344 CHAPTER 29 A New Frontier and a Great Society 1960–1968 to combat inner-city poverty; and the Community Action Program, which would allow the poor “maximum feasible participation” in organizing and directing their own neighborhood programs. In 1964, Congress also approved the Food Stamp Act, a program to help poor people afford to buy groceries. the election of 1964 Johnson’s successes aroused a conservative Republican counterattack. Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, a wealthy department-store owner, emerged as the blunt-talking leader of the growing right wing of the Republican party. He was one of only six Republican senators to vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and warned that the bill would lead to a “federal police state.” In his best-selling book The Conscience of a Conservative (1960), Goldwater had called for ending the income tax and drastically reducing federal entitlement programs such as Social Security. Conservatives controlled the Republican Convention when it gathered in San Francisco in the early summer of 1964, and they ensured Goldwater’s nomination. “I would remind you,” Goldwater told the delegates, “that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” He later explained that his objective was like that of Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s: “to reduce the size of government. Not to pass laws, but repeal them.” As a candidate, Goldwater frightened many voters when he urged wholesale bombing of North Vietnam and even suggested using atomic weapons. He criticized Johnson’s war on poverty as a waste of money, told students that the federal government should not provide any assistance for education, and opposed the nuclear test ban treaty. To Republican campaign buttons that claimed, “In your heart, you know he’s right,” Democrats responded, “In your guts, you know he’s nuts.” Johnson, by comparison, portrayed himself as a responsible centrist. He chose as his running mate Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, a prominent liberal senator who had long promoted civil rights. In contrast to Goldwater’s aggressive rhetoric, Johnson pledged that he was “not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” The election was not close. Johnson won 61 percent of the popular vote and dominated the electoral vote by 486 to 52. Goldwater captured only Arizona and five states in the Lower South. In the Senate, the Democrats increased their majority by two (68 to 32) and in the House by thirty-seven (295 to 140). But Goldwater’s success in the Lower South accelerated the region’s shift to the Republican party, and his candidacy proved to be a turning point in the development of the national conservative movement by inspiring a generation of young activists and the formation of conservative organizations that would transform the dynamics of American politics during the 1970s and 1980s. The Great Society 1345 Their success would culminate in the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the Hollywood actor who co-chaired the California for Goldwater campaign in 1964. The Great Society Lyndon Johnson misread his lopsided victory in 1964 as a mandate for massive changes. He knew, however, that his popularity could quickly fade. “Every day I’m in office,” he told his aides, “I’m going to lose votes. I’m going to alienate somebody. . . . We’ve got to get this legislation fast. You’ve got to get it during my honeymoon.” As Johnson’s war on poverty gathered momentum, his already-outsized ambitions grew even larger. In May 1964, he announced his intention to develop an array of programs intended to “move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society” which would end poverty and racial injustice and provide “abundance and liberty for all.” It soon became clear that Johnson viewed the federal government as the magical lever for raising the quality of life for all Americans—rich and poor. He would surpass Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in expanding the goals and scope of the federal government to ensure that Americans were a people of plenty. “Hell, we’re the richest country in the world, the most powerful,” Johnson told an aide. “We can do it all.” Soon, Johnson was working full-time to gain congressional approval for dozens of new bills and federal programs. LBJ, said an aide, became a “great, hurtling locomotive running down the track.” health insurance, housing, and higher education Johnson’s first priorities among his “Great Society” programs were federal health insurance and aid for young people to pursue higher education—“liberal” proposals that had first been suggested by President Truman in 1945. For twenty years, the steadfast opposition of the physicians making up the American Medical Association (AMA) had stalled a comprehensive medical-insurance program. Now that Johnson and the Democrats had the votes to pass the measure, however, the AMA joined Republicans in supporting a bill serving those over age sixty-five. The act that finally emerged created not just a Medicare health insurance program for the elderly but also a Medicaid program of federal grants to states to help cover medical expenses for the poor of all ages. Johnson signed the bill on July 30, 1965, in Independence, Missouri, with eighty-one-year-old Harry Truman looking on. The Higher Education Act of 1965 increased federal grants to universities, created scholarships for low-income students, provided low-interest loans for students, and established a National Teachers Corps. “Every child,” Johnson 1346 CHAPTER 29 A New Frontier and a Great Society 1960–1968 War on Poverty In 1964, President Johnson visited Tom Fletcher, a father of eight children living in a tar-paper shack in rural Kentucky. Fletcher became a “poster father” for the War on Poverty, though, as it turned out, his life benefited little from its programs. asserted, “must be encouraged to get as much education as he has the ability to take.” The momentum generated by the Higher Education and Medicare acts helped carry 435 more Great Society bills through Congress. Among them was the Appalachian Regional Development Act of 1966, which allocated $1 billion for programs in impoverished mountain areas. The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965 provided $3 billion for urban renewal projects in inner-city ghettoes. Funds to help low-income families pay their rent followed in 1966, and the same year a new Department of Housing and Urban Development appeared, headed by Robert C. Weaver, the first African American cabinet member. In implementing the many different Great Society programs, Lyndon Johnson had, in the words of one Washington reporter, “brought to harvest a generation’s backlog of ideas and social legislation.” No president, reported Time magazine, was “more passionately, earnestly, and all-encompassingly dedicated to and consumed by his work.” the immigration act Little noticed in the stream of Great Society legislation was the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965, The Great Society 1347 which Johnson signed in a ceremony on Liberty Island in New York Harbor. It abolished the discriminatory annual quotas based upon an immigrant’s national origin and treated all nationalities and races equally. The old system greatly favored immigrants from Great Britain and the countries of western and northern Europe over those from southern and eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. In place of quotas, it created hemispheric ceilings on visas issued: 170,000 for persons from outside the Western Hemisphere, 120,000 for persons from within. It also stipulated that no more than 20,000 people could come from any one country each year. voting rights legislation Building upon the successes of “Freedom Summer,” Martin Luther King Jr. organized an effort in early 1965 to register the 3 million unregistered African American voters in the South. On February 6, the White House announced that it would urge Congress to enact a voting rights bill. To keep the pressure on the president and Congress, activists converged on Selma, Alabama, where only 250 of the 15,000 blacks of voting age were registered voters. King told his staff on February 10 that to get the voting rights bill passed, “we need to make a dramatic” statement. That drama occurred three weeks later. On Sunday, March 7, some 600 black and white civil rights protesters assembled near the Edmund Pettus Bridge to begin a fifty-four-mile march to the state capitol in Montgomery. Before reaching the bridge, however, the marchers were assaulted by 500 state troopers and local police using billy clubs, tear gas, and bullwhips. In what came to be called “Bloody Sunday,” the violence was televised for all to see. Fifty injured marchers were hospitalized. “The news from Selma,” reported the Washington Post, “will shock and alarm the whole nation.” It did. Dr. King, torn between congressional appeals to call off the march and the demands of militants that it continue, announced that a second march would be held. A federal judge agreed to allow the marchers to continue once President Johnson agreed to provide soldiers and federal marshals for their protection. By March 25, when the demonstrators reached Montgomery, some 25,000 people were with them, and King delivered a rousing address in which he said, “the battle is in our hands. And we can answer with creative nonviolence the call to higher ground to which the new directions of our struggle summons us.” Several days earlier, on March 15, Johnson had urged Congress to “overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice” by making the cause of civil rights “our cause too.” He concluded by slowly speaking the words of the movement’s hymn: “And we shall overcome.” 1348 CHAPTER 29 A New Frontier and a Great Society 1960–1968 The resulting Voting Rights Act of 1965 was one of the most momentous legislative accomplishments of the twentieth century. It ensured all citizens the right to vote. It authorized the attorney general to send federal officials to register voters in areas that had long experienced racial discrimination. In states or counties where fewer than half the adults had voted in 1964, the act banned the various ways, like literacy tests, that local officials used to keep blacks and Hispanics from voting. By the end of the year, some 250,000 African Americans were newly registered to vote in several southern states. By 1968, an estimated 53 percent of blacks in Alabama were registered to vote, compared to 14 percent in 1960. In this respect, the Voting Rights Act was even more important than the Civil Rights Act because it empowered black voters in the South, thereby transforming the whitedominated politics in the region and making possible the election of black public officials. Yet by enabling southern blacks—most of whom preferred Democratic candidates—to vote, it also helped turn the once-solidly Democratic South into a Republican stronghold, as many white voters switched parties. the great society in practice Lyndon B. Johnson sought to give Americans a sense of forward movement in troubled times and show them that he could create a “great society” whereby people would be “more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.” Franklin Roosevelt passed fifteen major bills in his First Hundred Days, Johnson told an aide in 1966, whereas he had “passed two hundred in the last two years.” A New York Times columnist joked that LBJ was “getting everything through the Congress but the abolition of the Republican party, and he hasn’t tried that yet.” The scope of Johnson’s Great Society programs exceeded Roosevelt’s New Deal in part because of the nation’s booming prosperity during the mid-1960s. “This country,” Johnson proclaimed, “is rich enough to do anything it has the guts to do and the vision to do and the will to do.” That proved not to be the case, however. As Time magazine reported, “No matter how much Lyndon gets, he asks for more.” Yet soon there was no more money to spend. In 1966, Johnson warned Congress that if taxes were not raised, the economy would suffer a “ruinous spiral of inflation” and “brutally higher interest rates.” The Great Society and war on poverty never lived up to Johnson’s grandiose goals, in part because the Vietnam War soon took priority and siphoned away funding, and in part because neither Johnson nor his congressional supporters understood the stubborn complexity of chronic poverty. In many respects, the Great Society generated its own downfall by inspiring a conservative Republican backlash that would gain political control during the eighties. In the con- The Tragedy of Vietnam 1349 gressional elections of 1966, only 38 of the 71 Democrats elected to the House in 1964 won reelection. The political tide was running against Johnson. The Great Society programs did, however, include several triumphs. Infant mortality has dropped, college completion rates have soared, malnutrition has virtually disappeared, and far fewer elderly Americans live below the poverty line and without access to health care. The federal guarantee of civil rights and voting rights remains in place. Medicare and Medicaid have become two of the most appreciated government programs. Consumers now have a federal agency protecting them. Head Start programs providing preschool enrichment activities for poor students have produced long-term benefits. The federal food stamp program has improved the nutrition and health of children living in poverty. Finally, scholarships for low-income college students have been immensely valuable providing access to higher education. Several of Johnson’s most ambitious programs, however, were ill-conceived, others were vastly underfunded, and many were mismanaged and even corrupt. Some of the problems they were meant to address actually worsened. Medicare, for example, removed incentives for hospitals to control costs, so medical bills skyrocketed—for everyone. In addition, food stamp fraud occurred as people took selfish advantage of a program intended to ensure healthy nutrition. Overall, Great Society programs helped reduce the population living in poverty from 19 percent in 1964 to 10 percent in 1973, but it did so largely by providing federal welfare payments, not by finding people decent jobs. In 1966, middle-class resentment over the cost and excesses of the Great Society programs generated a conservative backlash that fueled the Republican resurgence in Congress. By then, however, the Great Society had transformed public expectations of the power and role of the federal government. The Tragedy of Vietnam In foreign affairs, Lyndon Johnson was, like Woodrow Wilson, a novice. And, again like Wilson, his presidency would become a victim of his crusading idealism. As racial violence erupted in America’s cities, the war in Vietnam reached new levels of intensity and destruction. With weapons and supplies from China and the Soviet Union, North Vietnam provided massive support to the Viet Cong (VC), the guerrillas fighting in South Vietnam to overthrow the U.S.backed government and unify the divided nation under Communist control. Johnson inherited a long-standing U.S. commitment to prevent a Communist takeover in Vietnam. Beginning with Harry S. Truman, U.S. presidents 1350 CHAPTER 29 A New Frontier and a Great Society 1960–1968 had done just enough to avoid being charged with having “lost” Vietnam. Johnson initially sought to do the same, fearing that any other course of action would jeopardize his Great Society programs in Congress. His path, however, took the United States into a deeper military commitment. In November 1963, when President Kennedy was assassinated, there were 16,000 U.S. military “advisers” in South Vietnam. Early in his presidency, Johnson doubted that Vietnam was worth a more extensive military involvement. In May 1964, he told his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, that he had spent a sleepless night worrying about Vietnam: “It looks to me like we are getting into another Korea. . . . I don’t think it’s worth fighting for. And I don’t think we can get out. It’s just the U.S. air strikes Sustained bombing of biggest damned mess that I ever saw.” Vietnam left 30- to 50-foot-wide craters Yet Johnson’s fear of appearing that can still be seen today. weak abroad outweighed his misgivings. By the end of 1965, there were 184,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam; in 1966, there were 385,000; and by 1969, at the height of the war effort, 542,000. escalation in vietnam The official justification for the military escalation—a Defense Department term favored in the Vietnam era—was the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, passed by the Senate on August 7, 1964. On that day, President Johnson, unknowingly acting on false information provided by the secretary of defense, reported that on August 2 and 4, North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked two U.S. warships in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of North Vietnam. As it turned out, the American vessels had actually fired first in support of South Vietnamese attacks against two North Vietnamese islands—attacks planned by American advisers. (Whether the American warships were actually fired upon remains in dispute). The Tonkin Gulf Resolution empowered the president to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States The Tragedy of Vietnam 1351 and to prevent further aggression.” Only two senators voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which Johnson interpreted as equivalent to a congressional declaration of war, since it allowed him to wage war as he saw fit. In early 1965, Johnson made the crucial decisions that committed America to full-scale war in Vietnam. On February 5, 1965, Viet Cong (VC) guerrillas attacked a U.S. base near Pleiku, in South Vietnam, killing and wounding more than 100 Americans. More attacks that week led Johnson to approve Operation Rolling Thunder, the first sustained U.S. bombing of North Vietnam. Thereafter, there were essentially two fronts in the war: one, in North Vietnam, where U.S. warplanes continued a massive bombing campaign, and the other, in South Vietnam, where nearly all the ground combat occurred. In March 1965, the U.S. commander, General William C. Westmoreland, greeted the first American combat troops in Vietnam. His strategy was focused not on capturing territory but on waging a war of attrition, using overwhelming U.S. firepower to cause so many casualties that the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese would give up their effort to undermine the South Vietnamese government. Soon, U.S. forces launched “search and destroy” operations against VC guerrillas throughout South Vietnam, reporting the “body count” on the evening newscasts. But the Viet Cong, made up of both men and women, wore no uniforms and dissolved by day into the villages, hiding among civilians. Their elusiveness exasperated American soldiers, most of whom were not trained for such unconventional warfare in Vietnam’s dense jungles and intense heat and humidity. The escalating war brought rising U.S. casualties (the number of killed, wounded, and missing), which were announced each week on the television news. Criticism of the war grew, but LBJ stood firm. “We will not be defeated,” he told the nation. “We will not grow tired. We will not withdraw.” the context for policy President Johnson’s decision to “Americanize” the war flowed directly from the assumptions that had long guided U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. The commitment to “contain” the spread of communism, initiated by Harry Truman and continued by Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy, guided Johnson as well. “Why are we in Vietnam?” the president asked during a speech in 1965. “We are there because we have a promise to keep. . . . To leave Vietnam to its fate would shake the confidence of all these people in the value of American commitment.” What Johnson did not say was that he dreaded being blamed for “losing Vietnam” to communism as Truman had been accused by Republicans of “losing China” to Communists led by Mao Zedong. 1352 CHAPTER 29 A New Frontier and a Great Society 1960–1968 Johnson and his advisers also believed that U.S. military force would defeat the Viet Cong fighting in South Vietnam. Yet the president...
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CONTAINING COMMUNISM

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CONTAINING COMMUNISM

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What were President John F. Kennedy's efforts to contain communism abroad and pursue civil
rights and other social programs at home?
After the halt of World War II, the cold war was on the r...


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