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Chapter 22
The Kennedy and Johnson
Years
Chapter 22
Sec. 1: The New Frontier
A New Type of Candidate
• John Kennedy was the youngest person ever
to be elected President. However, he was not
the youngest ever to serve. Theodore
Roosevelt became President at age 42 when
William McKinley was assassinated. Also,
Kennedy was a Roman Catholic, and no
Catholic had ever been elected President.
Kennedy’s Domestic Programs
• In a speech early in his presidency, Kennedy said that
the nation was poised at the edge of a “New Frontier.”
The name stuck. It referred to Kennedy’s proposals to
improve the economy, assist the poor, and speed up
the space program.
• To help end the economic slump, in 1963 Kennedy
proposed a large tax cut over three years. At first, the
measure would reduce government income and create
a budget deficit. Kennedy believed, however, that the
extra cash in taxpayers’ wallets would stimulate the
economy and eventually bring in added tax revenues.
Combating Poverty and Inequality
• Kennedy’s ambitious plans for federal education aid
and medical care for the elderly both failed in
Congress. Some measures did make it through
Congress, however. Congress passed both an increase
in the minimum wage and the Housing Act of 1961,
which provided $4.9 billion for urban renewal.
• In June 1963, Congress passed the Equal Pay Act.
Added into the Fair Labor Standards of 1938, a New
Deal program, the Equal Pay Act stated that all
employees doing substantially the same work in the
same work place must be given equal pay.
The Space Program
• Following the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957,
government agencies and private industries had been working
furiously with the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration(NASA) to place a manned spacecraft in orbit around
Earth. Government spending and the future of NASA became
uncertain, however, when a task force appointed by Kennedy
recommended that NASA concentrate on exploratory space
missions without human crews.
• All of that changed in April 1961. The Soviet Union announced that
Yuri Gagarin had circled Earth on board the Soviet spacecraft Vostok
becoming the first human to travel in space. Gagarin’s flight
rekindled Americans’ fears that their technology was falling behind
that of the Soviet Union.
The Space Program cont.
• On May 5, 1961, the United States made its own first
attempt to send a person into space. Astronaut Alan
Shepard made a 15 minute flight that reached an altitude
of 115 miles. Unlike Gagarin’s flight, Shepard’s flight did not
orbit Earth. Nevertheless, its success convinced Kennedy to
move forward. On May 25, Kennedy issued a bold challenge
to the nation. Less than a year later, on February 20, 1962,
John Glenn successfully completed 3 orbits around Earth
and landed in the Atlantic Ocean near the Bahamas. Finally,
on July 20, 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first
person to walk on the moon.
Kennedy is Assassinated
• On November 22, 1963, as Kennedy looked ahead to
the reelection campaign the following year, he traveled
to Texas to mobilize support. The motorcade slowed as
it turned a corner in front of the Texas School Book
Depository. Its employees had been sent to lunch so
they could watch the event outside. Yet one man
stayed behind. From the sixth-floor window, he aimed
his rifle. Bullets struck both Connally and Kennedy.
Connally would recover from his injuries. The
President, slumped over in Jacqueline’s lap, was
mortally wounded.
• The motorcade sped to nearby Parkland Memorial
Hospital. Kennedy was pronounced dead at 1:00 P.M.
Kennedy is Assassinated cont.
• The prime suspect in Kennedy’s assassination was Lee Harvey
Oswald, a former marine and supporter of the Cuban leader Fidel
Castro.
• Two days after Kennedy’s assassination, the TV cameras rolled as
Oswald was being transferred from one jail to another. As the
nation watched,, a Dallas nightclub owner, Jack Ruby, stepped
through the crowd of reporters and fatally shot Oswald.
• On November 29, President Johnson appointed The President’s
Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It
was better known as the Warren Commission, after its chairman,
Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren. After months of
investigation, the Warren Commission determined that Oswald had
acted alone in shooting the President.
Chapter 22
Section 2: The Great Society
Johnson’s Great Society
• Johnson’s Great Society was a series of major
legislative initiatives that continued into his
second term. The Great Society programs
included major poverty relief, education aid,
healthcare, voting rights, conservation, and
beautification projects, urban renewal, and
economic development in depressed areas.
The Election of 1964
• Johnson’s early successes paved the way for his landslide
victory over Republican Barry Goldwater in the election of
1964. Goldwater, a senator from Arizona, held conservative
views that seemed excessive to many Americans, as well as
to many members of his won party.
• For example, he opposed civil rights legislation, and he
believed that military commanders should be allowed to
use nuclear weapons as they saw fit on the battlefield. The
Johnson campaign took advantage of voter’s fears of
nuclear war. It aired a controversial television commercial
in which a little girl’s innocent counting game turned into
the countdown for a nuclear explosion.
The Tax Cut
• To gain conservatives’ support for Kennedy’s taxcut bill, which was likely to bring about a deficit,
Johnson also agreed to cut government spending.
With that agreement, the measure passed and
worked just as planned. When the tax cut went
into effect, the Gross National Product (GNP) rose
by 7.1 percent in 1964, by 8.1 percent in 1965,
and by 9.5 percent in 1966. The deficit, which
many people feared would grow, actually shrank
because the renewed prosperity generated new
tax revenues.
The War on Poverty
• The Economic Opportunity Act, passed in the
summer of 1964 was created to combat several
causes of poverty, including illiteracy and
unemployment.
• Two of the best-known programs created under
the act were Head Start and VISTA. Head Start is
a preschool program for children from lowincome families that also provides healthcare,
nutrition services, and social services.
• Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) sent
volunteers to help people in poor communities.
Aid to Education
• The Elementary and Secondary Education Act
of 1965 provided $1.3 billion in aid to states,
based on the number of children in each state
from low-income homes.
Medicare and Medicaid
• In 1965, Johnson used his leadership skills to
push through Congress two new programs,
Medicare and Medicaid.
• Medicare provides hospital and low-cost medical
insurance to most Americans age 65 and older.
• Medicaid provides low-cost health insurance
coverage to poor Americans of any age who
cannot afford their own private health insurance.
The Immigration Act of 1965
• The Immigration Act of 1965 replaced the varying
quotas with a limit of 20,000 immigrants per year
from any one country outside the Western
Hemisphere. In addition, the act set overall limits
of 170,000 immigrants from the Eastern
Hemisphere and 120,00 from the Western
Hemisphere. Family members of United States
citizens were exempted from the quotas, as were
political refugees. In the 1960’s, some 350,000
immigrants entered the United States each year;
in the 1970’s, the number rose to more than
400,000 a year.
Social Issues and Criminal Procedure
• In an explosive 1962 case, the Court ruled that religious prayer in public
schools was unconstitutional according to the First Amendment principle
of separation of church and state.
• Mapp v. Ohio (1961) established the exclusionary rule, which states that
evidence seized illegally cannot be used in trial. The Court’s decision in
Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) states that suspects in criminal cases who
could not afford a lawyer had the right to free legal aid. In Escobedo v.
Illinois (1964), the justices ruled that accused individuals had to be given
access to an attorney while being questioned.
• The Court’s decision in Miranda v. Arizona (1966) stated that a suspect
must be warned of his or her rights before being questioned. As a result of
this Miranda rule, police must inform accused persons that they have the
right to remain silent; that anything they say can be used against them in
court; that they have a right to an attorney; and that if they cannot afford
an attorney, one will be appointed for them.
Effects Of The Great Society
• For decades following the Great Society, a major
political debate continued over the criticism that
antipoverty programs encouraged poor people to
become dependent on government aid and
created successive generations of families on
welfare instead of in jobs.
• Nevertheless, the number of Americans living in
poverty in the United States was cut in half
during the 1960’s and early 1970’s.
Chapter 22
Section 3: Foreign Policy in the Early 1960’s
The Bay of Pigs Invasion
• Kennedy’s first foreign crisis arose in Cuba, an island
about 90 miles off the Florida coast. After Kennedy
became President, he was informed about a plan that
President Eisenhower had approved in 1960. Under
this plan, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was
training a group of Cubans to invade Cuba and
overthrow Castro. The training took place in
Guatemala, a nearby Central American country.
Kennedy and his advisors expected the Cuban people
to help the invaders defeat Castro.
• Despite such reservations and those of some military
leaders, Kennedy accepted the advice of the CIA and
agreed to push ahead with the invasion plan.
A Military Catastrophe
• The Bay of Pigs invasion, shown on the map on
the bottom of page 752, took place on April 17,
1961. It was a total disaster. An airstrike failed to
destroy Cuba’s air force, and Cuban troops were
more than a match for the 1,500 U.S.-backed
invaders. When Kennedy’s advisors urged him to
use American planes to provide air cover for the
attackers, he refused. Rather than continue a
hopeless effort to overthrow another nation’s
government was exposed to the world.
The Berlin Crisis
• Kennedy feared that the Soviet effort inGermany was part
of a larger plan to take over the rest of Europe. Adding to
his fears, his first meeting with Soviet leader Nikita
Khrushchev, in Vienna, Austria, in June 1961, went poorly.
When Khrushchev made a public ultimatum regarding
Germany, Kennedy felt bullied by the Soviet leader.
• Upon returning home, Kennedy decided to show the
Soviets that the United States would not be intimidated. He
asked Congress for a huge increase of more than $3 billion
for defense. He doubled the number of young men being
drafted into the armed services and called up reserve
forces for active duty. He argued that the United States had
to be prepared if the crisis led to nuclear war.
The Berlin Crisis cont.
• In August 1961, the Soviets responded by
building a wall to separate Communist and
non-Communist Berlin. The Berlin Wall
became a somber symbol of the Cold War.
Still, by stopping the flow of East Germans to
the West, the Soviet Union had found a way to
avoid a showdown over East Berlin.
The Cuban Missile Crisis
• On October 16, 1962, photographs taken from an
American spy plane revealed that the Soviets
were building missile bases on Cuban soil-only
about 90 miles from the island of Key West,
Florida. What followed was the Cuban Missile
Crisis, a terrifying standoff between the United
States and the Soviet Union that brought the
superpowers to the brink of nuclear war. The
Soviets intended their missiles in Cuba to counter
American missiles presented a direct challenge to
which he must respond.
The World Waits
• The naval quarantine went into effect on
Wednesday, October 24. On October 25, a
Soviet ship reached the quarantine line and
was stopped by the navy. Because it was
carrying only oil, it was allowed to proceed.
Meanwhile, a dozen more Soviet cargo ships
were steaming toward the blockade. Then, to
everyone’s relief, the Soviet ships suddenly
reversed direction. Khrushchev had called
them back.
Disaster Avoided
• On October 26, Khrushchev sent Kennedy a long letter in
which he pledged to remove the missiles if Kennedy
promised that the United States would end the quarantine
and stay out of Cuba. A second letter delivered the next day
demanded that the Unites States remove its missiles from
Turkey in exchange for the withdrawal of Soviet missiles in
Cuba. Kennedy publicly accepted the terms of the first
note. He responded to the second note through secret
negotiations and eventually met the demand. With that the
crisis ended.
• The Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world closer than ever
before to nuclear war. Kennedy emerged from the
confrontation as a hero.
The Aftereffects
• The Limited Test Ban Treaty, banned nuclear
testing above the ground. By doing so, it
sought to eliminate the radioactive fall-out
that threatened to contaminate human,
animal, and plant life. The treaty still
permitted underground nuclear testing, and
the United States and the Soviet Union
continued to build bigger and bigger bombs.
The Alliance for Progress
•
•
The Soviet Union and the United States competed not only by building up their
military forces, but also by seeking allies in the developing countries of Latin
America, Asia, and Africa. Many of these countries were terribly poor. Communist
revolutionary movements in some of these countries were gaining support by
promising people a better future. To counter these revolutionary movements,
Kennedy tried to promote “peaceful revolution”-that is, to help build stable
governments that met the needs of their citizens and also were allied with the
democratic countries of the West. Two months after taking office, Kennedy called
on all the people of the Western Hemisphere to join in a new Alliance for
Progress. The Alliance would be a vast cooperative effort to satisfy the basic needs
of people in North, Central and South America for homes, work, land, health, and
schools.
The administration pledged $20 billion over ten years to promote economic
development and social reform and to prevent revolution. Soon, however, Latin
Americans began to question the benefits of the Alliance. Some viewed it simply as
a tool of the United States to stop the spread of Communism. Because of such
doubts, the Alliance for Progress never lived up to Kennedy’s expectations.
The Peace Corps
• The Peace Corps was a program that sent
volunteers abroad as educators, health
workers, and technicians to help developing
nations around the world.