The Containment Policy
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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?
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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
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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.
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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.
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(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).
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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
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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.
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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.
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“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
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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,
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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.
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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
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“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,
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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
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“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].”
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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.
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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
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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)
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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
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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.”
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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
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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.
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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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