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John F. Kennedy and the Politics of
Expectation
With his New Frontier program, Kennedy
promised to “get America movingagain”through
vigorous governmental activism at home and
abroad.
Kennedy campaigned on the issues of civil rights legislation,
health care for the elderly, aid to education, urban renewal,
expanded military and space programs, and containment of
communism abroad.
Poised to become the youngest man ever elected to the presidency
and the nation’s first Catholic chief executive, Kennedy practiced
what became known as the “new politics,” an approach that
emphasized youthful charisma, style, and personality more than
issues and platforms.
A series of four televised debates between Kennedy and
Nixon showed how important television was becoming
to political life; voters who listened to the 1960
presidential debates on the radio concluded that Nixon
had won, and those who watched it on TV felt that
Kennedy had won.
Kennedy won only the narrowest of electoral victories,
receiving 49.7 percent of the popular vote to Nixon’s
49.5 percent; a shift of a few thousand votes in key
states would have reversed the outcome.
The Kennedy Administration
A host of trusted advisors and academics – “the
Best and the brightest” – flocked to Washington
to join the New Frontier. Not everyone was
enchanted though, and the new administration
got into hot water.
Fidel Castro overthrew Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista
in 1959; Cuban relations with Washington deteriorated
after Castro nationalized American-owned banks and
industries and the United States declared an embargo on
Cuban exports.
Isolated by the United States, Cuba turned to the Soviet
Union for economic and military support.
In early 1961, Kennedy attempted to foment an antiCastro uprising; the CIA-trained invaders were crushed
by Castro’s troops after landing at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs
on April 17.
Kennedy went before the American people and
took full responsibility.
The Peace Corps, the Agency for International
Development, and the Alliance for Progress
provided food and other aid to Third World
countries, bringing them into the American orbit
and away from Communist influence.
Funding for the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA) and its Mercury
program won support; on May 5 1961, Alan
Shepard became the first American in space, and,
in 1962, John Glenn manned the first U.S. Space
mission to orbit the earth.
Kennedy could not mobilize public or
congressional support for his New Frontier
agenda; he managed to push through legislation
raising the minimum wage and expanding Social
Security benefits, but a conservative coalition of
southern Democrats and western and midwestern
Republicans effectively stalled most liberal
initiatives.
After Kennedy’s assassination, the Tax Reduction Act
(the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut, 1964) marked a
milestone in the use of fiscal policy to encourage
economic growth.
New Tactics for the Civil Rights
Movement
One of the most notable failures of the Kennedy
administration was its reluctance to act on civil rights.
After the Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in, the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) helped to
organize the Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee in order to facilitate sit-ins by blacks
demanding an end to segregation.
The Congress of Racial Equality organized freedom
rides on bus lines in the South to call attention to
segregation on public transportation; the activists were
attacked by white mobs.
Attorney General Robert Kennedy sent federal marshals
to Alabama to restore order; most southern communities
quietly acceded to the Interstate Commerce
Commission’s prohibition of segregated interstate
vehicles and facilities.
When thousands of black demonstrators, organized by
Martin Luther King Jr. marched to picket Birmingham,
Alabama’s department stores, television cameras captured
the severe methods used against them by Bull Connors.
President Kennedy responded to the incident on June 11,
1963, when he went on television to promise major
legislation banning discrimination in public
accommodations and empowering the Justice Department to
enforce desegregation.
Black leaders hailed Kennedy’s speech as the “Second
Emancipation Proclamation,” yet on the evening of the
address,Medgar Evers, the president of the Mississippi
chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP), was shot and killed.
To rouse the conscience of the nation and to marshal
support for Kennedy’s bill, civil rights leaders launched
a massive civil rights march on Washington in 1963,
which culminated in the “I Have a Dream” speech by
Martin Luther King Jr.
King’s eloquence and the sight of blacks and whites
marching together did more than anything else to make
the civil rights movement acceptable to white
Americans; it also marked the highpoint of the civil
rights movement and confirmed King’s position as the
leading speaker for the black cause.
Southern Senators continued to block the civil
rights legislation, and violence by white
extremists shocked the nation when the bombing
of a church in Birmingham, Al. killed four black
Sunday school students.
Kennedy Cold Warrior
A resolute cold warrior, Kennedy proposed a new
policy of flexible response measures designed to
deter direct attacks by the Soviet Union, which
resulted in the defense budget reaching its
highest level as a percentage of total federal
expenditures in the Cold War era and greatly
expanding the military-industrial complex.
U.S.-Soviet relations further deteriorated when the
Soviets built the Berlin Wall in order to stop the
exodus of East Germans; the Berlin Wall remained
a symbol of the Cold War until 1989.
The Cuban missile crisis was the climactic
confrontation of the Cold War, which occurred in
October 1962, when American reconnaissance
planes flying over Cuba photographed Soviet-built
bases for ICBMs, which could reach U.S. targets
as far as 2,200 miles away.
In a televised address, Kennedy confronted the Soviet
Union and announced that the United States would
impose a “quarantineon all offensive military
equipment” intended for Cuba.
After a week of tense negotiations, both Kennedy and
Khrushchev made concessions: the United States
would not invade Cuba, and the Soviets would
dismantle the missile bases.
After the Cuban missile crisis Kennedy softened his
Cold War rhetoric and began to strive for peaceful
coexistence; in 1963 the United States, Great Britain,
and the Soviet Union agreed to stop testing nuclear
weapons in the atmosphere, in space, and underwater;
underground testing would continue.
A new Washington-Moscow
telecommunications “hot line” was
established so that leaders could contact
each other quickly during potential crises.
Despite efforts at peaceful coexistence, the
preoccupation with the Soviet military
threat to American security remained a
cornerstone of U.S. policy; the Cold War,
and the escalating arms race that
accompanied it, would continue for another
twenty-five years.
The Kennedy Assassination
On November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, President
Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald; Lyndon
Johnson was sworn in as president.
Kennedy’s youthful image, the trauma of his assassination,
and the sense that Americans had been robbed of a
promising leader contributed to a powerful mystique that
continues today.
This romantic aura overshadows Kennedy’s mixed record
of accomplishments; he exercised leadership in foreign
affairs, but some remain critical of his belligerent stance
toward the Soviet Union and lack of attention to domestic
issues
Lyndon B. Johnson and the Great
Society
The Momentum for Civil Rights
Johnson won the 1964 election in a landslide and used
his energy and genius for compromise to bring to
fruition many of
Kennedy’s stalled programs as well as many of his own.
Those legislative accomplishments—Johnson’s“Great
Society”—fulfilled and in many cases surpassed the
New Deal liberal agenda of the 1930s.
On assuming the presidency, Lyndon Johnson promptly
pushed the passage of civil rights to appeal to a broad
national audience and to achieve an impressive
legislative accomplishment, which he hoped would
place his mark on the presidency.
The Civil Rights Act passed in June 1964; its keystone,
Title VII, outlawed discrimination in employment on the
basis of race, religion, national origin, or sex.
The Civil Rights Act forced desegregation of public
facilities throughout the South, yet obstacles to black
voting remained.
To meet this challenge, civil rights activists mounted a
major civil rights campaign in Mississippi known as
“Freedom Summer,”which established freedom schools,
conducted a voter registration drive, and organized the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
The reaction of white southerners to Freedom Summer
was swift and violent; fifteen civil rights workers were
murdered, and only 1,200 black voters were registered.
To protest these murders, in March, 1965, King and
other civil rights activists staged a march from Selma to
Montgomery; the marchers were attacked by mounted
state troopers with tear gas and clubs, all of which was
shown on national television that night.
Calling the episode “an American tragedy,” President
Johnson redoubled his efforts to persuade Congress to
pass the pending voting-rights legislation.
On August 6, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of
1965, which suspended the literacy tests and other
measures most southern states used to prevent blacks
from registering to vote.
The Twenty-fourth Amendment’s outlawing of
the federal poll tax, combined with the Voting
Rights Act, allowed millions of blacks to register
to vote for the first time.
In 1960 in the South only 20 percent of blacks of
voting age had been registered to vote; by 1964
the figure had risen to 39 percent, and by 1971 it
was 62 percent.
More than a quarter
of a million
Americans, including
50,000 whites,
gathered on the Mall
in the nation's capital
on August 28, 1963,
to pressure the
government to
support African
Americans' civil
rights. Martin Luther
King Jr. mesmerized
the crowd with his "I
have a dream"
speech.
Enacting the Liberal Agenda
When Johnson beat out Republican senator Barry
Goldwater for the presidency in 1964, he
achieved one of the largest margins in history:
61.1 percent of the popular vote.
Johnson used this mandate not only to promote
the civil rights agenda but also to bring to
fruition what he called “The Great Society.”
Wherever he acted, Johnson pursued an ambitious
goal of putting “an end to poverty in our time”; the
War on Poverty” expanded long-established social
insurance programs, welfare programs (like Aid to
Families with Dependent Children and Food
Stamps), and public works programs.
The Office of Economic Opportunity, established by
the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, created
programs such as Head Start, the Job Corps, Upward
Bound, Volunteers in Service to America, and the
Community Action Program.
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of
1965 authorized $1 billion in federal funds to
benefit impoverished children; the Higher
Education Act provided the first federal
scholarships for college students.
Federal health insurance legislation was enacted;
the result was Medicare for the elderly and
Medicaid for the poor.
The creation of the National Endowment for the
Arts and the National Endowment for the
Humanities in 1965 supported artists and
historians in their efforts to understand and
interpret the nation’s cultural and historical
heritage.
Another aspect of public welfare addressed by
the Great Society was the environment; Johnson
pressed for expansion of the national park
system, improvement of the nation’s air and
water, and increased land-use planning.
At the insistence of his wife, Lady Bird,
President Johnson promoted the Highway
Beautification Act of 1965.
Liberal Democrats brought about significant
changes in immigration policy with the passage
of the Immigration Act of 1965, which
abandoned the quota system of the 1920s.
By the end of 1965, the Johnson administration had
compiled the most impressive legislative record of
liberal reforms since the New Deal; it had put issues of
poverty, justice, and access at the center of national
political life, and it expanded the federal government’s
role in protecting citizens’ welfare.
By the end of the decade, many of its programs were
under attack; limits that confronted it were the political
necessity of bowing to pressure from various interest
groups and limited funding for its programs.
The results of the War on Poverty were that the poor
were better off in an absolute sense, but they remained
far behind the middle class in a relative sense.
Democratic support for further governmental activism
was hampered by a growing conservative backlash
against the expansion of civil rights and social welfare
programs.
After 1965, the Vietnam War siphoned funding away
from domestic programs; in 1966 the government spent
$22 billion on the war and only $1.2 billion on the War
on Poverty. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it, the Great
Society was “shot down on the battlefields of Vietnam.”
America in Vietnam: From Truman to Kennedy
Into the Quagmire, 1945–1968
America in Vietnam: From Truman to
Kennedy
Beginning in the 1940s, the United States
became interested in supporting an anti
Communist government in Vietnam. U.S.
policymakers feared that the loss of any proWestern government would prompt a chain
reaction of losses in the region, termed the
“domino effect.”
President Kennedy increased American involvement in
the region, but after his assassination, top U.S. advisors
argued that a full-scale deployment was needed in order
to prevent the defeat of the South Vietnamese. President
Johnson moved toward the Americanization of the war
with Operation Rolling Thunder, a protracted bombing
campaign that failed to incapacitate the North
Vietnamese.
Vietnam was once a part of a French colony but was occupied by
Japan during World
War II; after the Japanese surrendered in 1945, Ho Chi Minh and
the Vietminh proclaimed Vietnam an independent nation, which
began an eight-year war the Vietnamese called the French War of
resistance.
Ho called on President Truman to support the struggle for
Vietnamese independence,
but Truman ignored his pleas and instead offered covert financial
support to the French.
Truman’s reasons for supporting the French
were concerns that newly independent countries
might align with Communists; maintaining good
relations with France, whose support was crucial
to the success of the new alliance: the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); and the
strategic roles Indochina was seen to play in
reindustrializing Japan.
In 1950, Soviet and Chinese leaders recognized Ho Chi
Minh’s republic in Vietnam; in turn, the United States
recognized the French-installed government of Bao
Dai.
Truman and Eisenhower provided military support to
the French in Vietnam; Eisenhower argued that aid was
necessary in order to prevent non-Communist
governments from collapsing in a domino effect.
The 1954 Geneva accords partitioned Vietnam
temporarily at the seventeenth parallel and committed
France to withdraw its forces from the area north of that
line and provided that voters in the two sectors would
choose a unified government within two years.
To prevent a Communist victory in Vietnam’s
election, Eisenhower saw to it that a proAmerican government took power in South
Vietnam under the leadership of Ngo Dinh
Diem.
Realizing that the popular Ho Chi Minh would
easily win in both the North and South, Diem
called off the reunification elections that had
been scheduled for 1956, a move the United
States supported.
Ngo Dinh Diem
First President of the
Republic of Vietnam
After France removed itself from the region in
1956, America replaced it as the dominant
foreign power in the region.
Though Vietnam was too small a country to
upset the international balance of power,
Eisenhower and subsequent U.S. presidents
viewed Vietnam as a part of the Cold War
struggle to contain the Communist threat to the
free world.
Between 1955 and 1961 the Eisenhower
administration sent Diem an average of $200
million a year in aid and stationed approximately
675 American military advisors there.
In 1960, North Vietnam organized opponents in
South Vietnam into the National Liberation Front
(NLF); Kennedy increased the number of
American military advisors, but sent no line
troops, and also sent economic development
specialists.
Kennedy adopted a new military doctrine of
counterinsurgency; soon the Green Berets of the
U.S. Army’s Special Forces were being trained to
repel guerrilla warfare.
President Kennedy saw Vietnam as an ideal
testing ground for the counterinsurgency
techniques that formed the centerpiece of his
military policy.
President Kennedy saw Vietnam as an ideal
testing ground for the counterinsurgency
techniques that formed the centerpiece of his
military policy.
In 1960, North Vietnam organized opponents in
South Vietnam into the National Liberation Front
(NLF); Kennedy increased the number of
American military advisors, but sent no line
troops, and also sent economic development
specialists.
American economic aid did little good in South
Vietnam, and the NLF’s guerrilla forces
(Vietcong) made considerable headway against
Diem’s regime.
Anti-Diem sentiment flourished among peasants,
who had been alienated by Diem’s “strategic
hamlet” program, and Buddhists, who charged
the government with religious persecution.
As opposition to Diem deepened, Kennedy
decided the leader would have to be removed; in
a November 1963 U.S.-supported coup, Diem
was driven from office and assassinated by South
Vietnamese officers.
When Johnson became president, he continued
and accelerated U.S. involvement in Vietnam to
prevent charges of being soft on communism.
Escalation: The Johnson Years
After the removal of Diem, Secretary of Defense
Robert McNamara and other top advisors argued
that a full-scale deployment of forces was needed
to prevent the defeat of the South Vietnamese.
Johnson knew that he needed congressional
support or a declaration of war to commit U.S.
troops to an offensive strategy, so he told the
nation that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had
fired on American destroyers in international
waters in response to South Vietnamese
amphibious attacks.
On August 7, 1964, Congress authorized the Gulf
of Tonkin Resolution, which allowed Johnson to
“take all necessary measures to repel any armed
attack against the forces of the United States and
to prevent further aggression.”
The Johnson administration moved toward the
Americanization of the war with Operation
Rolling Thunder, a protracted bombing campaign
that by 1968 had dropped a million tons of
bombs on North Vietnam
Operation Rolling Thunder intensified the North
Vietnamese’s will to fight; the flow of their
troops and supplies continued to the south
unabated as the Communists rebuilt roads and
bridges, moved munitions underground, and built
networks of tunnels and shelters.
A week after the launch of Operation Rolling
Thunder, the United States sent its first ground
troops into combat; by 1968, more than 536,000
American soldiers were stationed in Vietnam.
Vietnam’s countryside was threatened with
destruction; the massive bombardment plus a
defoliation campaign seriously damaged
agricultural production and thus the economy.
The dramatically increased American presence in
Vietnam failed to turn the tide of the war; yet,
hoping to win a war of attrition, the Johnson
administration assumed that American
superiority in personnel and weaponry would
ultimately triumph. C. American Soldiers’
Perspectives on the War
Approximately 2.8 million Americans served in
Vietnam, at an average age of only nineteen;
some were volunteers, including 7,000 women
enlistees.
Many soldiers served because they were drafted;
until 1973, when the nation shifted to an allvolunteer force, the draft stood as a concrete
reminder of the government’s impact on the lives
of ordinary Americans.
Blacks were drafted and died roughly in the same
proportion to their share of the draftage
population; black and white sons of the poor and
the working class shouldered a disproportionate
amount of the fighting.
Young men from more affluent backgrounds
were more likely to avoid combat through
student deferments, medical exemptions, and
appointments to the National Guard, thus making
Johnson’s Vietnam policy more acceptable to the
middle class.
Rarely were there large-scale battles, only
skirmishes; rather than front lines and conquered
territory, there were only daytime operations in
the areas the Vietcong controlled at night.
Racism was a fact of everyday life; many
soldiers lumped the South Vietnamese and the
Vietcong together in the term gook.
Lieutenant Colonel John P. Vann (left) shown during his tour of duty in Vietnam in
1963, discussing a tactical decision.
Fighting and surviving under such harsh
conditions took its toll; cynicism and bitterness
were common and the pressure of waging war
under such conditions drove many soldiers to
seek escape in alcohol or drugs.
As Women’s Army Corps (WACs), nurses, and
civilians serving with organizations such as the
United Service Organization (USO), women
volunteers witnessed death and mutilation on a
massive scale.
The Cold War Consensus Unravels
Public Opinion on Vietnam
By the late 1960s, public opinion began to turn against
the war in Vietnam; television had much to do with
these attitudes as Vietnam was the first televised war.
Despite glowing statements made on television, by
1967, many administration officials privately reached a
more pessimistic conclusion regarding the war.
The administration was accused of suffering from a
“credibility gap”; in 1966, televised hearings by the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee raised further
questions about U.S. policy.
Economic developments put Johnson and his advisors
even more on the defensive; the costs of the war became
evident as the growing federal deficit nudged the
inflation rate upward, beginning the inflationary spiral
that plagued the U.S. economy throughout the 1970s.
After the escalation in the spring of 1965, various
antiwar coalitions organized several mass
demonstrations in Washington; participants shared a
common skepticism about the means and aims of U.S.
policy and argued that the war was antithetical to
American ideals.
The button on this fatigue
hat belonging to a veteran
who served two tours of
duty demonstrates veterans'
response to the many
Americans who just wanted
to forget the war that the
United States failed to win.
Because their war was so
different from other
American wars, Vietnam
veterans often returned
home to hostility or
indifference. The POWMIA pin refers to prisoners
of war and those missing in
action. This man was
unusual in serving two
tours of duty in Vietnam;
most soldiers served only
one year.
Soldiers in previous wars had
served "for the duration,” but
Vietnam warriors had one-year
tours of duty; a commander called
it "the worst personnel policy in
history,” because men had less
incentive to fight near the end of
their tour, wanting merely to stay
alive and whole. The U.S. military
inflicted great losses on the
enemy, estimated at more than
200,000 by the end of 1967. Yet it
could claim no more than a
stalemate. In the words of
infantryman Tim O'Brien, who
later became an award-winning
author, "We slay one of them, hit a
mine, kill another, hit another
mine. . . . And each piece of
ground left behind is his [the
enemy's] from the moment we are
gone on our next hunt.”
Abe Fortas, a distinguished lawyer
who had argued a major civil rights
case, Gideon v. Wainwright (1963),
before the Supreme Court, was a
close friend and adviser to
President Lyndon Johnson. This
photograph of the president and
Fortas taken in July 1965 illustrates
how Johnson used his body as well
as his voice to bend people to his
will.
Student Activism
Youth were among the key protestors of the era.
The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), in their
manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, expressed their
disillusionment with the consumer culture and the gulf
between the prosperous and the poor and rejected Cold
War ideology and foreign policy.
The founders of SDS referred to themselves as the “New
Left” to distinguish themselves from the “Old Left” of
Communists and Socialists of the 1930s and 1940s.
At the University of California at Berkeley, the
Free Speech Movement organized a sitin in
response to administrators’ attempts to ban
political activity on campus.
Many protests centered on the draft, especially
after the Selective Service system abolished
automatic student deferments in January 1966; in
public demonstrations of civil disobedience,
opponents of the war burned their draft cards,
closed down induction centers, and broke into
Selective Service offices and destroyed records.
Much of the universities’ research budget came
from Defense Department contracts; students
demanded that the Reserve Officer Training
Corps be removed from college campuses.
The Johnson administration had to face the
reality of large-scale opposition to the war with
protests like “Stop the Draft Week” and the
“siege on the Pentagon.”
The Counterculture
The “hippie” symbolized the new counterculture,
a youthful movement that glorified liberation
from traditional social strictures.
Popular music by Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and
Bob Dylan expressed political idealism, protest,
and loss of patience with the war and was an
important part of the counterculture.
Beatlemania helped to deepen generational
divide and paved the way for the more rebellious,
angrier music of other British groups, notably the
Rolling Stones.
Drugs and sex intertwined with music as a
crucial element of the youth culture as celebrated
at the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair,
which attracted 400,000 young people.
In 1967, at the “world’s first Human Be-In” at
San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, Timothy
Leary, urged gatherers to “turn on, tune in, and
drop out”; the year 1967 was also the “Summer
of Love” in which city neighborhoods swelled
with young dropouts, drifters, and teenage
runaways dubbed “flower children.”
Many young people stayed out of the
counterculture and the antiwar movement, yet
media coverage made it seem that all of
American youth were rejecting political, social,
and cultural norms.
The Widening Struggle for Civil Rights
Once the system of legal, or de jure, segregation
had fallen, the civil rights movement turned to
the more difficult task of eliminating the de facto
segregation, enforced by custom.
Outside the South, racial discrimination was less
flagrant, but it was pervasive, especially in
education, housing, and employment; for
example, Brown outlawed separate schools, but it
did nothing to change the educational system
where schools were all-black or all-white
because of residential segregation.
As civil rights leaders confronted northern racism, the
movement fractured along generational lines; older,
established civil rights activists supported the nonviolent
efforts of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC) and the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), while
younger activists questioned the very goal of integration
into white society and some embraced Black separatism
Black rage had expressed itself historically in
demands for racial separation, espoused in the
late nineteenth century by the Back to Africa
Movement and in the 1920s by Marcus Garvey
Black separatism was revived by a religious group
known as the Black Muslims, an organization that
stressed black pride, unity, and self-help and was hostile
to whites.
The Black Muslims’ most charismatic figure,Malcolm
X, advocated militant protest and separatism, although
he condoned the use of violence only for self-defense.
Malcolm X eventually broke with the Nation of Islam
and was assassinated by three Black Muslims while
delivering a speech in Harlem in 1965.
A more secular black nationalist movement
calling for black self-reliance and racial pride
emerged in 1966 under the banner of “Black
Power”; the same year, the Black Panthers
organization was founded to protect blacks from
police violence.
Among the most significant legacies of black
power was the assertion of racial pride as
exhibited by many blacks insisting on the usage
of Afro-American rather than Negro and the
adoption of African clothing and hairstyles to
awake interest in black history, art, and literature.
Support for civil rights by white Americans
began to erode when blacks began demanding
immediate access to higher-paying jobs, housing,
and education, along with increased political
power, and when a wave of race riots began in
1964, primarily over the issue of police brutality.
The National Advisory Commission on Civil
Disorders (the Kerner Commission) released a
1968 report on the riots and warned that the
nation was moving toward two separate and
unequal societies: one black, one white
On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was
assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, setting off
an explosion of urban rioting in more than 100
cities; with his assassination, the civil rights
movement lost the leader best able to stir the
conscience of white America.
The legacies of the civil rights movement were
that segregation was overturned, federal
legislation ensured protection of black
Americans’ civil rights, southern blacks were
enfranchised, and black candidates entered the
political arena, yet more entrenched forms of
segregation and discrimination persisted.
The Rights Revolution
The black civil rights movement provided an
innovative model for other groups seeking to
expand their rights.
The situation of Mexican Americans changed
when the Mexican American Political
Association (MAPA) mobilized support for
Kennedy and worked with other groups to elect
Mexican American candidates to Congress.
Younger Mexican Americans rejected the
assimilationist approach of their elders; in 1969,
1,500 students met in Denver to hammer out a
new nationalist political and cultural agenda.
They coined the term “Chicano” and organized a
new political party, La Raza Unida (The United
Race), to promote Chicano political interests.
Chicano strategists also pursued economic objectives;
César Chávez organized the United Farm Workers
(UFW), the first union to represent migrant workers
successfully.
North American Indians suffered the highest levels of
unemployment and poverty, the most inadequate
housing, and the least access to education.
Some Indian groups became more assertive, taking the
new label of Native Americans, embracing the concept
of “Red Power,” and organizing protests and
demonstrations. In 1968, the militant American Indian
Movement (AIM) was organized.
As a method of protest, in 1969 Native Americans
seized and occupied Alcatraz for over a year. Later,
protesters occupied the Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs
in Washington.
In February, 1973, AIM activists began an occupation of
Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the site of an army
massacre of the Sioux in 1890. The seventy-one-day
siege, in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) killed one protestor and wounded another,
alienated many whites, but it spurred government action
on tribal issues.
1968: A Year of Shocks
The Johnson administration’s hopes for Vietnam
evaporated when the Vietcong unleashed a
massive assault, known as the Tet offensive, on
major urban areas in South Vietnam.
The attack made a mockery of official
pronouncements that the United States was
winning the war and swung public opinion more
strongly against the conflict.
Launched by the North
Vietnamese in January 1968, the
Tet Offensive took the war to
major cities for the first time.
NLF troops quickly occupied
Hue, the ancient imperial city,
and held it for nearly a month.
Supported by aerial bombing,
U.S. marines finally took back the
city, street by street.
Nonetheless, the Tet Offensive
was considered a psychological
and propaganda victory for the
Viet Cong, as it exposed the
falsities previously set forth by
General William Westmoreland
and the Johnson Administration,
and increased domestic
opposition to the war.
Antiwar Senator Eugene J.McCarthy’s strong
showing in the presidential primaries reflected
profound public dissatisfaction with the course of
the war and propelled Senator Robert Kennedy
into the race on an antiwar platform.
On March 31, 1968, Johnson stunned the nation
by announcing that he would not seek reelection;
he vowed to devote his remaining months in
office to the search for peace, and peace talks
began in May 1968.
The year 1968 also witnessed the assassination of
Martin Luther King Jr. and its ensuing riots;
students occupied several buildings at Columbia
University; a strike by students and labor that
toppled the French government; and the
assassination of Robert Kennedy, which
shattered the dreams of those hoping for social
change through political action.
The Democratic Party never fully recovered from
Johnson’s withdrawal and Robert Kennedy’s
assassination.
At the Democratic convention, the political
divisions generated by the war consumed the
party; outside the convention “yippies”
demonstrated, diverted attention from the more
serious and numerous activists who came to
Chicago as delegates or volunteers.
The Democratic mayor of Chicago, Richard J.
Daley, called out the police to break up the
demonstrations. In what was later described as a
“police riot,” patrolmen attacked protestors at the
convention with Mace, teargas, and clubs as TV
viewers watched, which only cemented a popular
impression of the Democrats as the party of
disorder.
Democrats dispiritedly nominated Hubert H.
Humphrey and his running mate Edmund
S.Muskie and approved a platform that endorsed
continued fighting in Vietnam while diplomatic
means to an end were explored.
Backlash
The turmoil surrounding the civil rights and antiwar
movements strengthened support for “law and order”;
many Americans were fed up with protest and dissent.
George Wallace, a third-party candidate, skillfully
combined attacks on liberal intellectuals and
government elites with denunciations of school
segregation and forced busing.
Richard Nixon tapped the increasingly
conservative mood of the electorate in an
amazing political comeback, winning the 1968
Republican presidential nomination.
On October 31, 1968, Johnson announced a
complete halt to the bombing of North Vietnam;
Nixon countered by intimating that he had a plan
for the end of the war, although he did not.
On election day, Nixon received 43.4 percent of
the vote to Humphrey’s 42.7 percent, defeating
him by only 510,000 votes out of the 73 million
that were cast, and Wallace finished with 13.5
percent of the popular vote.
The closeness of the 1968 election suggested
how polarized American society had become,
and Nixon appealed to the “silent majority.”