American History – A Survey

By Alan Brinkley

Chapter 31

  • The Ordeal of Liberalism
  • Expanding the Liberal State
  • The Rise of John Kennedy
  • 1960 Election
  • Republicans – Richard Nixon
  • Democrats – JFK
  • JFK won
  • Kennedy in the White House
  • Kennedy had campaigned promising a program of domestic legislation more ambitious than any since the New Deal
  • The New Frontier
  • Although Democrats remained in control of both houses, the party’s majorities were dependent on conservative southerners
  • They were more likely to vote for Republicans than JFK
  • JFK found his legislative proposals hopelessly stalled
  • As a result, the president had to look elsewhere for opportunities to display positive leadership
  • Kennedy initiated a series of tariff negotiations with foreign governments in an effort to stimulate American exports
  • The “Kennedy Round”
  • A 1962 proposal for a substantial federal tax cut to stimulate the economy
  • More than any other president of the century, Kennedy made his own personality an integral part of his presidency and a central focus of national attention
  • November 22, 1963 – Kennedy was assassinated
  • Lee Harvey Oswald
  • The death of President Kennedy was one of several traumatic public episodes in national history that have left a permanent mark on all who experience it
  • The Johnson Succession
  • At the time much of the nation took comfort in the personality and perforce of Kennedy’s successor in the White House, Lyndon Johnson
  • Johnson was a man who believed in the active use of power
  • Between 1963 and 1966, he compiled the most impressive legislative record of any president since FDR
  • The Assault on Poverty
  • The domestic programs of Kennedy and Johnson administrations had two basic goals
  • Maintaining the strength of the American economy and expanding the responsibilities of the federal government for the general social welfare
  • For the first time since the 1930s, the federal government took steps in the 1960s to create important new social welfare programs
  • Medicare
  • A program to provide federal aid to the elderly for medical expenses
  • 1965
  • In 1966, Johnson steered to passage the Medicaid program, which extended federal medical assistance to welfare recipients of all ages
  • Medicare and Medicaid were the first steps in a much larger assault on poverty
  • It reflected the view of those who believed that poverty was a result of more than lack of money
  • It was a product to the institutional and cultural deficiencies of poor communities
  • The centerpiece of this “war on poverty” was the Office of Economic Opportunity
  • Created an array of new education, employment, housing, and health-care programs
  • Community action
  • An effort to involve members of poor communities themselves in the planning and administration of the programs designed to help them
  • The community action approach proved impossible to sustain
  • Head Start Program
  • A preschool enrichment program to help the children of poor families prepare for their educations
  • Food stamps
  • Provided cash assistance to allow poor families to buy food
  • Cities, Schools, and Immigration
  • Closely tied to the antipoverty program were federal efforts to promote the revitalization of decaying cities and to strengthen the nation’s schools
  • The Housing Act of 1961
  • Offered $4.9 billion in federal grants to cities for the preservation of open spaces, the development of mass transit systems, and the subsidization of middle-income housing
  • In 1966, the Department of Housing and Urban Development was established
  • Johnson also inaugurated the Model Cities program
  • Offered federal subsidies for urban redevelopment
  • Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and a series of subsequent measures
  • The bills extended aid to both private and parochial schools and based the aid on the economic conditions of their students, not the needs of the schools themselves
  • Total federal expenditures for education and technical training from $7 billion between 1964 and 1967
  • Immigration Reform Act of 1965
  • One of the most important pieced of legislation of the 1960s
  • The law maintained a strict limit on the number of newcomers admitted to the country each year
  • 170,000
  • But it eliminated the “national origins” system established in the 1920s
  • Legacies of the Great Society
  • The great surge of reform of the Kennedy-Johnson years reflected a new awareness of social problems in America
  • It also reflected the confident belief of liberals that America’s resources were virtually limitless and that purposeful public effort could surmount any obstacle
  • In 1964, Johnson managed to win passage of a $11.5 billion tax cut
  • The cut increased the federal deficit, but it helped produce substantial economic growth over the next several years that made up for much of the revenue initially lost
  • The high costs of the Great Society programs and the inability of the government to find the revenues to pay for them contributed to a growing disillusionment in later years with the idea of federal efforts to solve social problems
  • The decade of the 1960s saw the most substantial decrease in poverty in the United Sates of any period in the nation’s history
  • The Battle for Racial Equality
  • Expanding Protests
  • JFK’s administration set out to contain the racial problem by expanding enforcement of existing laws and supporting litigation to overturn existing segregation statutes, hoping to make modest progress without creating politically damaging divisions
  • In February 1960, black college students in Greensboro, NC, staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter
  • Similar demonstrations spread throughout the South
  • Some of those who participated in the sit-ins forced the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee which worked to keep the spirit of resistance alive
  • In 1961, an interracial group of students began what they called “freedom rides”
  • Traveling by bus throughout the South, the freedom riders tried to force the desegregation of bus stations
  • Kennedy ordered the integration of all bus and train stations
  • The Southern Christian Leadership Conference also created citizen-education and other programs to mobilize black workers, farmers, housewives, and others to challenge segregation, disenfranchisement, and discrimination
  • In October 1962, a federal court ordered the University of Mississippi to enroll its first black student
  • President Kennedy sent federal troops to the city to restore order and protect the student’s right to attend the university after protests broke out
  • Events in Alabama in 1963 helped bring the growing movement to something of a climax
  • Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • A National Commitment
  • The events in Alabama and Mississippi were a warning to the president that he could no longer contain or avoid the issue of race
  • Kennedy introduced a series of “public accommodations” barring the discrimination I employment, and increasing the power of the government to file suits on behalf of school integration
  • To generate support for the legislation, and to dramatize the power of the growing movement, more than 200,000 demonstrators marched down the Mall in Washington, D.C., in August 1963
  • They gathered before the Lincoln Memorial for the greatest civil rights demonstration in the nation’s history
  • Martin Luther King, Jr., in one of the greatest speeches of his distinguished oratorical career, roused the crowd with a litany of images prefaced again and again by the phrase, “I have a dream”
  • The assassination of President Kennedy three months later gave new impetus to the battle for civil rights legislation
  • In 1964 the Senate passed the most comprehensive civil rights bill in the nation’s history
  • The Battle for Voting Rights
  • Having won a significant victory in one area, the civil rights movement shifted its focus to another
  • Voting rights
  • “Freedom summer”
  • Thousands of civil rights workers worked on behalf of black voter registration and participation
  • Produced the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
  • In March 1965, King helped organize a major demonstration in Selma, Alabama, to press the demand for the right of blacks to register to vote
  • Civil Rights Act of 1965
  • Voting Rights Act
  • Provided federal protection to blacks attempting to exercise their right to vote
  • The Changing Movement
  • For decades, the nation’s African-American population had been undergoing a major demographic shit
  • Although the economic condition of much of American society was improving, in the poor urban communities in which the black population was concentrated, things were getting significantly worse
  • By the mid-1960s the issue of race was moving out of the South and into the rest of the nation
  • A symbol of the movement’s new direction, and of the problems it would cause, was a major campaign in the summer of 1966 in Chicago, in which King played a prominent role
  • Organizers of the Chicago campaign hoped to direct national attention to housing and employment discrimination in northern industrial cities in much the same way similar campaigns had exposed legal racism in the South
  • The Chicago campaign was, on the whole, an exercise in frustration
  • Urban Violence
  • Well before the Chicago campaign, the problem of urban poverty had thrust itself into national attention when riots broke out in black neighborhoods in major cities
  • Televised reports of the violence alarmed millions of Americans and created both a new sense of urgency and a growing sense of doubt among many of those whites who had embraced the cause of racial justice
  • A special Commission on Civil Disorders issued a celebrated report in the spring of 1968 recommending massive spending to eliminate the abysmal conditions of the ghettoes
  • Black Power
  • Disillusioned with the ideal of peaceful change in cooperation with whites, an increasing number of African Americans were turning to a new approach of the racial issue
  • The philosophy of black power
  • It suggested a move away from interracial cooperation and toward increased awareness of racial distinctiveness
  • Perhaps the most enduring impact of the black-power ideology was a social and psychological one
  • Instilling racial pride in African Americans
  • It encouraged the growth of black studies in schools and universities
  • It helped stimulate important black literary and artistic movements
  • It produced a new interest among many blacks in their African roots
  • It led to a reject by some blacks of certain cultural practices borrowed from white society
  • But black power had political manifestations as well
  • Most notably in creating a deep schism within the civil rights movement
  • Particularly alarming to many whites were organizations that existed entirely outside the mainstream civil rights movement
  • The Black Panther Party
  • The Nation of Islam
  • The most celebrated of the Black Muslims was Malcolm Little
  • Malcolm X
  • Malcolm became one of the movement’s most influential spokesmen
  • Malcolm was assassinated in 1965
  • Malcolm remained an influential figure in many black communities long after his death
  • “Flexible Response” and the Cold War
  • Diversifying Foreign Policy
  • JFK’s forceful inaugural address was a clear indication of how central opposition to communism was to his and the nation’s thinking
  • Kennedy remained committed to the nation’s atomic weapons program
  • Whatever missile gap there was favored the USA
  • Kennedy’s unhappiness with the Eisenhower foreign policy was no that it relied on nuclear weapons; it was that it developed too few other tools and thus had a little capacity to respond to problems for which nuclear weapons were inappropriate solutions
  • JFK gave enthusiastic support to the growth of the Special Forces
  • A small branch of the army created in the 1950s to wage guerilla warfare in limited conflicts
  • The Green Berets
  • JFK also favored expanding American influence through peaceful means
  • Alliance for Progress
  • To repair the badly deteriorating relationship with Latin America
  • A series of projects undertaken cooperatively by the United States and Latin American governments for peaceful development and stabilization of the nations of that region
  • JFK also inaugurated the Agency for International Development
  • To coordinate foreign aid
  • Established the Peace Corps
  • Sent young American volunteers abroad to work in developing areas
  • The Bay of Pigs Fiasco
  • Among the fist foreign policy ventures of the Kennedy administration was a disastrous assault on the Castro government in Cuba
  • The Eisenhower administration had launched the project
  • The CIA had been working for months in Central America to train a small army of anti-Castro Cuban exiles to invade Cuba and overthrow the Castro regime
  • JFK didn’t want to, but he approved the invasion
  • On April 17, 1961, 2,000 of the armed exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, expecting first American air support and then a spontaneous uprising by the Cuban people on their behalf
  • They received neither
  • Well-armed Castro forces easily crushed the invaders and within two days the entire mission had collapsed
  • Confrontations with the Soviet Union
  • In the grim aftermath of the Bay of Pgs, Kennedy traveled to Vienna in June 1961 for his first meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev
  • Their frosty and at times angry exchange of views did little to reduce tensions between the two nations
  • Khrushchev had threatened war if the West did not abandon its defense of West Berlin
  • On August 13, 1961, the Soviet Union stopped the exodus of East Berliners by directing East Germany to construct a wall between East and West Berlin
  • For nearly 30 years, the Berlin Wall stood as the most potent physical symbol of the conflict between the communist and noncommunist worlds
  • The rising tensions culminated the following October in the most dangerous and dramatic crisis of the Cold War
  • Cuban Missile Crisis
  • On October 22, after nearly a week of tense deliberations by a special task force in the White House, JFK ordered a naval and air blockade around Cuba, a “quarantine” against all offensive weapons
  • Khrushchev said that he would remove the missiles if America didn’t invade Cuba
  • JFK agreed and removed the missiles the USA had in Turkey
  • The Cuban missile crisis brought the world closer to nuclear war than at any time since WWII
  • In the summer of 1963, the United States and the Soviet Union concluded years of negotiation by agreeing to a treaty to ban the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere
  • In the longer run the missile crisis had more ominous consequences
  • A Russian buildup of arms
  • Johnson and the World
  • Lyndon Johnson entered the presidency lacking even JFK’s limited prior experience with internal affairs
  • An internal rebellion in the Dominican Republic gave him an early opportunity to show he was a strong and forceful leader
  • A 1961 assassination had topple the repressive dictatorship of General Rafael Trujillo
  • A conservative regime began to collapse in the face of a revolt by a broad range of groups on behalf of the nationalist reformer Juan Bosch
  • Arguing that Bosch planned to establish a pro-Castro, communist regime, Johnson sent in 30,000 American troops to quell the disorder
  • From Johnson’s first moments in office his foreign policy was almost totally dominated by the bitter civil war in Vietnam and by the expanding involvement of the United States there
  • Vietnam
  • The First Indochina War
  • Vietnam became a colony of France
  • It fell under the control of Japan during WWII
  • After the defeat of Japan, the question arose of what was to happen to Vietnam in the postwar world
  • The French wanted to reassert their control over Vietnam
  • The Vietminh were committed to creating an independent nation
  • In the fall of 1945, after the collapse of Japan and before the Western powers had time to return, the Vietminh declared Vietnam an independent nation and set up a nationalist government under Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi
  • Ho had worked closely during the war with American intelligence forces in Indochina in fighting the Japanese
  • The United States did nothing to stop the French as they moved back into Vietnam in 1946 and began a struggle with the Vietminh to reestablish control over the country
  • The French set up a government in Vietnam
  • For the next four years, during what had become known as the First Indochina War, Truman and then Eisenhower continued to support the French military campaign against the Vietminh
  • The First Indochina War had come to an end when the French government had decided the time had come to get out after a long battle
  • Geneva and the Two Vietnams
  • An international conference at Geneva now took up the fate of Vietnam
  • The United States never signed the accords
  • The Geneva Conference produced an agreement to end the Vietnam conflict
  • There would be an immediate cease-fire in the war
  • Vietnam would be temporarily partitioned along the 17th parallel
  • North Vietnam was the heart of traditional Vietnamese society
  • Northern Vietnam was also the poorest region of the country
  • South Vietnam was a much more recently settled area
  • It was a looser, more heterogeneous, more individuality