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Question 1
a. President Kennedy did not launch a massive foreign aid program when he
assumed office in 1961. In 1961, President Kennedy implemented the
Alliance for Progress, which was a modest economic assistance and
development program for Latin America that ultimately produced
disappointing results for the region.
b. In 1961, President Kennedy did not propose large-scale public works
government spending programs to stimulate the economy. He did seek
Congressional approval of moderate increases in medical assistance for the
aged and enhanced federal aid to education, but these proposals were blocked
in Congress.
c. Correct answer. Upon entering office in 1961, President Kennedy proposed to
Congress a general tax-cut to stimulate the sluggish economy. Kennedy
accepted the argument of big business groups and his more conservative
advisers that by slashing individual tax rates, he would be putting more money
directly into the hands of individual Americans that would, in turn, be used for
increased domestic consumer spending and investment in producing
additional goods and services. The tax cut was ultimately passed in 1964
under President Johnson.
d. President Kennedy promoted and won approval for multibillion-dollar
government project to land an American on the moon and substantially
expand the breadth of the American space program. In 1969, this multi-billion
dollar government investment in the American space program resulted in two
Americans triumphantly planting the U.S. flag and their own footprints on the
moon’s surface.
e. President Kennedy sought and secured Congressional passage of the Trade
Expansion Act of 1962 that authorized tariff cuts of up to 50 percent on
imported goods from European Common Market countries.
Question 2
a. President Kennedy faced daunting political challenges and cloudy re-election
prospects as the 1964 presidential election approached. He feared that even
the tepid steps he had taken to advance social reform and civil rights
legislation in Congress would endanger his re-election prospects and those of
his Democratic Congressional colleagues, particularly those representing
traditionally Democratic districts in the South.
b. Leaders of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s requested that
Kennedy submit and make a presidential push for civil rights legislation in
Congress and to secure the safety of civil rights organizers, volunteers, and
leaders working in the increasingly violent South. These moderate political
demands by mainstream, centrist leaders of the civil rights movement cannot
reasonably be described as militant or extremist. In fact, public support for
federal civil rights laws and federal police protection of civil rights organizers
and volunteers increased after millions of Americans witnessed the televised
violent responses of Southern white political authorities and individual white
Southerners to civil rights demonstrations and activities in the South.
c. Vice President Lyndon Johnson did not lobby against civil rights and social
reform legislation behind President Kennedy’s back during his tenure as
Kennedy’s vice president. Indeed, after assuming the presidency, following
Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson persuaded Congress to pass the
Civil Rights Act of 1964, government health insurance for the elderly and for
the poor, and increased federal aid to education.
d. Correct answer. Conservative Southern Democrats, who were generally
opposed to all federal civil rights legislation, controlled key Congressional
committees and leadership positions. Kennedy feared that if he confronted
these influential Southern Democratic Congressional leaders over civil rights
legislation, his social and economic reform legislation, particularly his
medical and educational assistance bills, would never win Congressional
approval.
e. The Democrats controlled the Senate during Kennedy’s tenure as president. It
was the obstructionist tactics and active opposition of Southern Democrats in
the Senate and House that were largely responsible for blocking many of
Kennedy’s legislative civil rights and social reform proposals.
Question 3
a. Neither the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, nor the Cuban
Missile Crisis of 1962, represented the first test of the Kennedy
administration’s new national security strategy of flexible response. The failed
Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was an inherited scheme from the Eisenhower
administration to launch a CIA-backed covert operation to topple Fidel Castro
from power by invading Cuba with anti-communist exiles. The high-stakes
nuclear and diplomatic confrontation between the United States and the Soviet
Union in 1962, over the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba, placed the
world on the brink of nuclear annihilation and left the United States without
any flexible response military options if the Soviets had refused to withdraw
their missiles from Cuba.
b. President Kennedy confronted very limited and inflexible military options as
he deliberated about the proper American response to the Laotian civil war in
1961. Kennedy’s frustration in learning that he had insufficient American
military forces to extinguish this communist insurrection in Laos led to the
subsequent development of the Kennedy administration strategy of flexible
response—that is, producing an array of flexible military options that could be
matched to address the precise severity of the current foreign crisis.
c. Correct answer. President Kennedy’s decision, late in 1961, to order a sharp
increase in the number of American military advisers (U.S. troops) in South
Vietnam represented the first pivotal test of President Kennedy’s new national
strategy of flexible response. The Kennedy administration expected that the
introduction of a substantial number of American military troops would
stabilize the faltering, authoritarian, corrupt, pro-American Diem government
in South Vietnam and provide President Diem with the maneuverability
necessary to institute needed political reforms. The Kennedy administration
shortly thereafter became increasingly disenchanted with the repressive Diem
regime and supported a successful military coup against Diem to try to stave
off a growing communist insurrection in South Vietnam.
d. The political instability and armed conflict that plagued Southeast Asia during
the Kennedy administration did not include the pro-American nation of
Thailand, where America enjoyed substantial support from its succession of
military leaders.
e. The political instability and armed conflict in Cambodia did not erupt until the
Vietnam War intensified and spilled over into Cambodia during the late 1960s
(following the Kennedy administration), and it continued through the 1970s
with genocidal consequences for the victimized Cambodian people.
Question 4
a. Correct answer. The negotiated agreement to end the Cuban missile crisis in
1962 failed to include any American agreement to abandon the American
military base at Guantanamo Bay and return this property to Cuba.
b. The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was ousted from power in 1964 by hardline communist political colleagues in the Soviet Union who believed
Khrushchev’s decision to remove the Soviet missiles from Cuba represented
an abject political humiliation of the Soviet Union during the Cold War with
the United States.
c. As part of the diplomatic settlement of the Cuban missile crisis, the United
States agreed not to invade Cuba.
d. Following the Cuban missile crisis, the Soviet Union launched a massive
military expansion program of its conventional and nuclear forces in order to
increase its future military and political leverage with the United States in the
event that a future geopolitical conflict deteriorated into another nuclear standoff.
e. Following the withdrawal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba, the United States
removed from Turkey its own missiles which had been targeted on the Soviet
Union.
Question 5
a. Correct answer. The Freedom Riders were groups of African American and
white volunteers of the civil rights movement who, starting in 1960, organized
efforts throughout the South to end segregation in interstate bus
transportation. Their desegregation efforts were met with violent resistance
from white Southerners throughout the South. Leaders of the civil rights
movement welcomed and supported the decision of the Kennedy
administration, in the summer of 1961, to send federal marshals to protect the
Freedom Riders.
b. Attorney General Robert Kennedy actually ordered the FBI to wiretap Martin
Luther King, Jr.’s telephone in 1963 because he feared Dr. King had
communist affiliations that would be politically embarrassing if they had been
revealed. Robert Kennedy never ordered the wiretap to be removed during the
Kennedy administration.
c. The Voting Rights Act was passed by Congress in 1965 and signed into law
by President Lyndon Johnson.
d. Attorney General Robert Kennedy and President John F. Kennedy never
traveled to the South during the Kennedy administration to demonstrate their
support for the efforts of civil rights advocates to register black voters.
e. President Kennedy never issued an executive order desegregating all public
schools in the United States.
Question 6
a. While Martin Luther King, Jr. strongly supported Congressional passage of
subsequent voting rights legislation in 1965, the immediate political goal of
the March on Washington in 1963 was to mobilize popular support to
persuade Congress to pass the pending, stalled civil rights bill that would end
segregation and eliminate racial discrimination in public facilities and
employment.
b. Correct answer. The political objective of the 1963 March on Washington, led
by Martin Luther King, Jr., was to mobilize popular support behind the
pending, stalled civil rights bill in Congress that would end legal segregation
and eliminate racial discrimination in public facilities and employment. The
Civil Rights Act of 1964 represented the legislative realization of this political
objective by Dr. King and his supporters in the civil rights movement.
c. While the Kennedy administration had increased U.S. involvement in
Vietnam by the summer of 1963, American military and political involvement
in Vietnam had yet to reach a level of deadly intensity and exorbitant cost to
spur Dr. King to organize a massive public demonstration against it. In 1963,
Dr. King’s overriding political objective was Congressional passage of the
civil rights bill, and he did not want to imperil this objective by publicly
confronting the Kennedy administration over its policy in Vietnam.
d. The Kennedy administration did not support such a substantial governmentfinanced public works employment program, and Dr. King believed it would
be politically advisable to make Congressional passage of the stalled civil
rights bill the central political goal of the March on Washington in August
1963.
e. The effort to mobilize popular support behind federal fair housing legislation
represented the last Congressional civil rights legislative priority advanced by
Dr. King and civil rights leaders during the 1960s. It culminated with passage
of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which prohibited discrimination concerning
the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, national
origin.
Question 7
a. Correct answer. President Lyndon Johnson’s experience as the Democratic
Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate provided him with masterful experience in
coaxing, cajoling, and bargaining with his former Democratic Senatorial
colleagues to overcome their obstructionist political strategies and gain
passage of stalled civil rights and tax reform legislation.
b. While Lyndon Johnson served as a young Democratic member of the House
of Representatives in the late 1930s and 1940s, it was as Democratic Majority
Leader of the U.S. Senate from 1954 to 1960 that he learned how to wield and
exercise political power, establish useful long-term political relationships with
his Senate colleagues, and effectively display his powerful abilities of political
persuasion.
c. Lyndon Johnson never served as Governor of Texas.
d. President Johnson’s frustrating and powerless experience as Vice President of
United States under President Kennedy was irrelevant to developing the
political skills that enabled President Johnson to secure passage of Kennedy’s
stalled civil rights and tax reform legislation.
e. President Johnson never worked as a wealthy Texas businessman. He worked
as a teacher early in his professional career.
Question 8
a. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964 was not the political equivalent of a
formal Congressional declaration of war against North Vietnam. Instead,
Congress provided President Johnson with unchecked, enormous discretion to
respond militarily to two allegedly unprovoked North Vietnamese attacks on
two U.S. naval destroyers operating in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution amounted to an abdication of Congress’s war-making powers and
gave President Johnson a blank check to use unlimited future force in
Southeast Asia.
b. Correct answer. By passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, Congress
gave President Johnson unlimited and unchecked discretion to use further
military force in Vietnam without having to seek a formal declaration of war
from Congress. Over the next four years, President Johnson used this
Congressional blank check to expand gradually and progressively American
military, political, and economic participation in the Vietnam War.
c. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964 did not include a provision giving the
U.S. military the authority to use tactical nuclear weapons in response to this
dubious U.S.-North Vietnamese naval incident.
d. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964 amounted to an unprecedented
granting of constitutional war-declaring authority by Congress to President
Johnson because the open-ended Resolution permitted President Johnson to
determine unilaterally the intensity, duration, and scope of American military
involvement in Vietnam. Congress never declared war on North Vietnam
throughout the entire duration of American military involvement in Vietnam.
e. The open-ended and all-purpose text of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964
left the specific long-term political goals of American military involvement in
Vietnam to be determined exclusively by President Johnson and permitted the
president to escalate American military involvement in Vietnam without the
requirement he seek additional specific Congressional authorization.
Question 9
a. In the decade following the passage of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society
programs, the overall poverty rate declined, Medicare reduced substantially
the incidence of poverty among America’s elderly, Medicaid provided health
insurance coverage for the indigent, and Project Head Start significantly
improved the educational achievement of underprivileged children.
b. The significant reductions in poverty rates among the elderly, youths, and in
minority communities, achieved over the decade after the implementation of
Great Society programs, demonstrated that the Johnson administration’s
massive expenditure of public funds had made a significant positive impact on
poverty in America.
c. Correct answer. Medicare made substantial improvements in the health and
long-term quality of life of elders in America. Medicaid extended government
health insurance for the poor. Project Head Start and significant increases in
federal aid to education materially improved the educational performances of
underprivileged children and youth.
d. The above-described achievements in improving health care coverage for the
elderly and the poor, upgrading educational achievement for underprivileged
children youth, and reducing overall poverty rates in the ensuing decade in
America can be attributed to the successful implementation of several Great
Society health insurance, educational assistance, and economic development
government programs. The conservative critique of rampant waste, fraud, and
abuse undermining the effectiveness of all Great Society programs is
overstated.
e. The Great Society programs actually helped produce a statistically significant
drop in the overall poverty rate over the ensuing decade.
Question 10
a. Correct answer. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 included a provision
that prohibited sexual discrimination in public facilities and employment that
proved to be a useful legal instrument in women’s subsequent legal battles
against sexual discrimination in employment, government-funded education,
and public accommodations.
b. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited states and localities from instituting
election devices, coercive actions, and discriminatory procedures that were
designed to deny or abridge voting rights on the basis of race. The Act was
targeted to halt the widespread electoral disenfranchisement of AfricanAmericans who lived in the South by states and municipalities that used
ballot-denying procedures, such as the poll tax, literacy tests, and physical
intimidation and violence against African American voters.
c. The Violence Against Women Act was passed by Congress in 1994 and
signed into law by President Clinton.
d. Title IX of the Education Amendments was passed in 1972 by Congress and
signed into law by President Richard Nixon.
e. The educational and employment gains made by women, as a result of federal
and state government-sponsored affirmative action policies, actually occurred
during the 1970s, following the conclusion of the Johnson administration.
Question 11
a. Immediately following the Watts riot in 1965, advocates of the revolutionary
Black Power movement and proponents of black separatism and violent
struggle became increasingly influential in the civil rights movement. This
period of the mid-late 1960s also witnessed the outbreak of violent and
destructive riots in the African-American ghettos of several U.S. cities and
confrontational demands issued by more militant civil rights leaders for
economic justice and the creation of jobs for unemployed African-Americans.
b. The Watts riot in 1965 did signal the start of a shift of geographical and
strategic focus by African-American civil rights leaders and advocates. The
focus of these African American civil rights leaders and advocates evolved
from concentrating their efforts on guaranteeing the political civil rights of
disenfranchised African Americans in the South to addressing the economic
demands and police brutality experienced by unemployed, poor, and frustrated
African Americans residing in northern, Midwestern, and western cities.
c. The emergence of radical Black Nationalist organizations, such as the Nation
of Islam; the creation of the violent Black Panther political party; and the
transformation of the Black Power movement into a black separatist
movement, during the mid-late 1960s, signaled the development of a
radicalized, black separatist wing of civil rights movement around the time of
the Watts riot.
d. Police brutality and decades of economic deprivations experienced by
African-Americans living in the inner-city black neighborhood of Watts in
Los Angeles precipitated the outbreak of the Watts riot in 1965.
e. Correct answer. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his fellow moderate civil rights
leaders never abandoned their commitment to non-violent civil disobedience,
economic boycotts, and other peaceful means of political advocacy to achieve
civil rights for African-Americans. Radical civil rights leaders, such as
Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, criticized Dr. King and his fellow
mainstream civil rights leaders for failing to adopting violent tactics and
revolutionary goals to achieve civil rights and economic opportunities for
African-Americans.
Question 12
a. Correct answer. The widely viewed televised hearings conducted by Senator
William Fulbright before his Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1966
and 1967 featured the testimony of many prominent critics of the Johnson
Vietnam war policy. The revelations of the Fulbright Senate hearings
generated increased public skepticism about the Johnson administration’s
claims of political and military progress in Vietnam and helped spur growing
opposition by Americans to continued U.S. military and political involvement
in Vietnam.
b. Vice President Hubert Humphrey refused to break publicly with President
Johnson’s war policy in Vietnam during the entire second term of Johnson’s
presidency, and he blocked the adoption of an antiwar platform plank at the
Democratic National Convention of 1968.
c. The Senate Armed Services Committee, led by Georgia Sen. Richard Russell,
did not hold a series of televised Senate hearings in 1966 and 1967 designed
to educate the public about the history of American involvement in Vietnam
and spark public skepticism about the veracity of Johnson administration
claims concerning American political and military progress in Vietnam.
d. Senator Eugene McCarthy’s insurgent antiwar political campaign for the
Democratic presidential nomination in 1968 capitalized on the existence of an
already highly educated and fully mobilized antiwar movement, led by young
men and women who drew their intellectual sustenance, in part, from the
Vietnam war policy revelations of the Senate Armed Services Committee
hearings held by Senator Fulbright in 1966 and 1967.
e. Senator Robert Kennedy entered the Democratic contest for the presidential
nomination in March 1968. By March 1968, a majority of Americans had
already developed a profound skepticism and lack of confidence in the
Vietnam War policies of the Johnson administration because of increasing and
unsustainable American war casualties, negligible political progress towards a
peace settlement in Vietnam, and the politically demoralizing and militarily
shocking Tet offensive launched by the Viet Cong in January 1968.
Question 13
a. Correct answer. The Tet offensive involved the launching of wave of highly
coordinated, startling, and bloody armed attacks by the Viet Cong and their
communist North Vietnamese allies against twenty-seven South Vietnamese
cities, including the capital, Saigon, in late January 1968. While American and
South Vietnamese eventually repelled the Viet Cong and their North
Vietnamese allies, the Tet offensive represented an enormous political defeat
for the Johnson administration because it galvanized vehement public
opposition to the gradual escalation policies of President Johnson and caused
American public opinion to demand a swift conclusion to the war.
b. The revelation of the secret bombing of Cambodia by the Nixon
administration did not occur until July 1973.
c. U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had expressed private
skepticism and unease within the Johnson administration about the wisdom
and effectiveness of the administration’s military and political strategy in
Vietnam prior to his resignation early in 1968. The quiet easing out of the
agonized McNamara as Secretary of Defense by President Johnson did not
contribute significantly to galvanizing public opinion against President
Johnson’s Vietnam War policies because McNamara chose not to make a
contemporaneous public break with President Johnson over the conduct of the
war.
d. The historical evidence strongly suggesting that North Vietnamese military
forces had acted in self-defense in response to the first August 1964 Gulf of
Tonkin attack by North Vietnamese forces on two U.S. destroyers and that the
second attack never happened was not uncovered and publicized until well
after the Johnson administration had left office.
e. The existence of a domestic counterintelligence campaign conducted by the
FBI against the element of the domestic peace movement was not revealed
until the late 1970s, after the conclusion of the Vietnam War.
Question 14
a. Women and men believed they had greater freedom to satisfy their sexual
desires with multiple, uncommitted sexual partners because the introduction
and availability of the birth control pill during the 1960s removed the
inhibition of likely procreation as a restraint on the complete unleashing of
male and female sexual desire during this period of cultural upheaval.
b. The development of the gay and lesbian liberation movement in the 1960s can
be attributed, in part, to the demand of gays and lesbians for equal rights and
protection of the laws in the wake of widespread police misconduct, legal
prosecutions, and employment and educational discrimination practiced
against them during this period.
c. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) emerged in the early 1960s as a
prominent and peaceful leftist student organization advocating economic and
social policies to reduce poverty, redistribute wealth equitably in America,
and immediately end the Vietnam War. By the end of the 1960s, the SDS had
splintered and devolved into competing factions including the underground
violent political revolutionary organization called the Weathermen.
d. The Free Speech Movement that emerged at the University of California at
Berkeley in 1964 marked the onset of mass student mobilizations on college
campuses during the 1960s dedicated to opening up campus space for political
debate, reducing the influence of corporate interests and enhancing humane
values in university operations, and ending the war in Vietnam.
e. Correct answer. The religious authority and cultural influence of liberal
Protestant churches waned during the 1960s as conservative evangelical
churches experienced a concurrent rise in religious authority and secular
professionals and academic professionals replaced these liberal Protestant
churches as the arbiters of cultural authority.