Chapter 38
The Stormy Sixties,
1960–1968
I. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” Spirit
• John F. Kennedy:
– Inaugural address on January 20, 1961
– Personified the glamour and vitality of the new
administration
• The youngest president ever elected
• He assembled one of the youngest cabinets, including
35 year-old brother, Robert F. Kennedy
– He set out to recast the priorities of the FBI
– His efforts were stoutly resisted by J. Edgar Hoover, who had
served as FBI director longer than the new attorney general
had lived.
I. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” Spirit
(cont.)
• Robert S. McNamara left the presidency of the Ford
Motor Company to head the Defense Department
• Made up an inner circle of “the best and the
brightest” men around the president
– Kennedy inspired high expectations:
• New Frontier quickened patriotic pulses
• Peace Corps an army of idealists and mostly youthful
volunteers to bring American skills to undeveloped
countries
• He invited Robert Frost to speak at his inaugural
ceremonies.
II. The New Frontier at Home
• Kennedy and Congress:
• They threatened to ax New Frontier proposals:
– Medical assistance to the aged
– Increased federal aid to education
• Won a first round in his campaign:
– Forced Congress to expand the all-important House Rules
Committee:
» Dominated by conservatives
• The New Frontier did not expand swiftly:
– Key medical and education bills remained stalled in
Congress
II. The New Frontier at Home
(cont.)
– Vexing problem—the economy:
• Campaigned on the theme of revitalizing the
economy
• Helped negotiate a noninflationary wage agreement
in the steel industry in early 1962
• The steel episode provoked fiery attacks on the New
Frontier:
– Announced support for a general tax-cut bill
– Chose to stimulate the economy by slashing taxes and
putting money directly into private hands
II. The New Frontier at Home
(cont.)
– The New Frontier extended to the “final
frontier”
• Promoted a multibillion-dollar project dedicated to
“landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely
to earth”
• The moon shot was a calculated plan to restore
America’s prestige in the space race
– Severely damaged by the Soviet Sputnik successes (see p.
877)
• $24 billion later, in July 1969, two NASA astronauts
triumphantly planted their footprints—and the
American flag—on the moon’s dusty surface
• The Apollo mission was seen on television
III. Rumblings in Europe
• Kennedy and Khrushchev:
– First met in Vienna in June 1961
– Soviets begin to build the Berlin Wall August
1961
• Designed to plug the heavy population drain from
East Germany to West Germany
• Stood for almost three decades as a symbol of postWorld War II division of Europe into two hostile
camps
Rumblings in Europe
(cont.)
– European Economic Community (EEC):
• The free trade area that later evolved into the
European Union
• Secured passage of the Trade Expansion Act 1962
– Authorizing tariff cuts of up to 50% to promote trade with
EEC countries
– Led to the so-called Kennedy Round of tariff negotiations,
concluded in 1967
– And to a significant expansion of European-American trade.
• Globalization—a new era of robustly invigorated
international commerce
Rumblings in Europe
(cont.)
• Kennedy’s ambitious design for Europe:
– Not all plans were realized
• “Atlantic Community” of economically and militarily
united countries, with the United States the dominant
partner:
– Idea blocked by Charles de Gaulle, president of France
– He vetoed British application for Common Market
membership in 1963
– He deemed the Americans unreliable in a crisis
– So he tried to preserve French freedom of action by
developing his own small atomic force
– de Gaulle demanded an independent Europe, free of Yankee
influence.
p892
IV. Foreign Flare-ups and “Flexible
Response”
• U.S. foreign policy:
– Emerged from the worldwide decolonization of
European overseas possessions
– Laos
• Freed from its French colonial overlords in 1954
• United States failed to cleanse the country of
aggressive communist elements
• Laotian civil war raged
• Kennedy sought a diplomatic escape hatch in the
fourteen-power Geneva conference:
– Which imposed a shaky peace on Laos in 1962
IV. Foreign Flare-ups and “Flexible
Response” (cont.)
• Kennedy moved from the Eisenhower/Dulles doctrine
of “massive retaliation” to Defense Secretary
McNamara’s strategy of “flexible response”—
– Developing an array of military “options” that could be precisely matched to the gravity of the crisis at hand
– Kennedy increased spending on conventional military forces
and bolstered the Special Forces (Green Berets)
V. Stepping into the Vietnam
Quagmire
• Doctrine of “flexible response”:
– Potentially lower the level at which diplomacy
would give way to shooting
– Provided a mechanism for a progressive, and
possibly endless, stepping-up of the use of force
– Vietnam presented proof of these pitfalls
• Corrupt, right-wing government of Ngo Dinh Diem in
Saigon ruled shakily since the partition in 1954 (see p.
875)
• Late in 1961, Kennedy ordered a sharp increase in the
number of “military advisers” (U.S. troops) in South
Vietnam.
V. Stepping into the Vietnam
(cont.)
– American forces entered Vietnam to foster
political stability:
• To help protect Diem from the communists
• Kennedy administration encouraged a coup against
him in November 1963
• Kennedy told the South Vietnamese that it was “their
war,” but made dangerously deep political commitments
• He had ordered more than 15,000 American men into
the far-off slaughter pen
• A graceful pullout was becoming difficult (see Map
38.1)
V. Stepping into the Vietnam
(cont.)
– “Modernization theory”:
• The theoretical underpinnings for an activist U.S.
foreign policy in the “underdeveloped” world
– The traditional societies of Asia, Africa, and Latin America
could develop into modern industrial and democratic
nations following the West’s own path
• Walt Whitman Rostow in The Stages of Economic
Growth (1960):
– Charted the route from traditional society to “the age of
high mass-consumption”
– Later this theory would come under attack for its European
bias
• Modernization served as a powerful intellectual
framework for policymakers ensnared in Cold War.
p893
VI. Cuban Confrontations
• Kennedy and Cuba:
– Alliance for Progress (Alianza para el Progreso):
• Hailed as a Marshall Plan for Latin America
• Primary goal to help the Good Neighbors close the
gap between the callous rich and the wretched poor
– Thus quieting communist agitation
• Results were disappointing:
– There was little alliance
– There was less progress
– American handouts had little positive impact on Latin
America’s immense social problems.
VI. Cuban Confrontations
(cont.)
– Inherited from Eisenhower administration a CIAbacked scheme to topple Fidel Castro:
• By invading Cuba with anti-communist exiles
• On April 17, 1961 the Bay of Pigs invasion bogged
down
• These events pushed Castro further into Soviet hands
• By October, 1962 American spy plan revealed that the
Soviets were secretly and speedily installing nucleartipped missiles in Cuba
• Kennedy and Khrushchev began a nerve-racking game
of “nuclear chicken”
• On October 22, 1962, he ordered a naval “quarantine”
of Cuba
VI. Cuban Confrontations
(cont.)
• And demanded immediate removal of the
threatening weapons
• Any attack on the United States from Cuba:
– Would be regarded as coming from the Soviet Union
– Would trigger nuclear retaliation against the Russian
heartland.
• On October 28 Khrushchev agreed to a partial
compromise:
– He would pull the missiles out of Cuba
– The United States agreed to end the quarantine and not
invade the island
– The United States agreed to remove from Turkey some of its
missiles targeted at the Soviet Union
VI. Cuban Confrontations
(cont.)
• Fallout from the Cuban missiles crisis:
– A disgraced Khrushchev was ultimately hounded
out of office, became an “unperson”
– Soviets launched an enormous program of
military expansion
– This stimulated a vast American effort to “catch
up with the Russians”
– Kennedy pushed harder for a nuclear test-ban
treaty with the Soviet Union
– Finally a pact prohibiting trial nuclear explosions
in the atmosphere was signed late 1963.
VI. Cuban Confrontations
(cont.)
– A thaw—the installation (August 1963) of a
Moscow-Washington “hot line:”
• Permitting immediate teletype communication
• Most significant was Kennedy’s speech at American
University in Washington, D.C., June 1963:
– He urged Americans to abandon a view of the Soviet Union
as a Devil-ridden land filled with fanatics:
– And to deal with the world “as it is, not as it might have
been had the history of the last eighteen years had been
different.”
– Tried to lay the foundation for a realistic policy of peaceful
coexistence with the Soviet Union
– The modern origins of the policy known as “détente”
(French for “relaxation of tension”).
Map 38-1 p894
p895
VII. The Struggle for Civil Rights
• Kennedy and Civil Rights:
• Pledged to eliminate racial discrimination in housing
• Bold moves for racial justice had to wait
– Freedom Riders:
• They fanned out to end segregation in facilities
serving bus passengers
– A white mob torched a Freedom Ride bus near Anniston,
Alabama, May 1961
– Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s personal representative
was beaten unconscious in another anti-Freedom Ride riot
in Montgomery
– When local government couldn’t stop violence, Washington
dispatched federal marshals to protect the Freedom Riders.
VII. The Struggle for Civil Rights
(cont.)
• The Kennedy administration had joined
hands with the civil rights movement:
– The Kennedy became ultrawary about the
political association of Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Some thought King’s advisers had communist
affiliations, so Robert Kennedy ordered FBI director
Hoover to wiretap King’s phone in late 1963
• The relationship between King and the Kennedys was
a fruitful one
• The Voter Education Project was inaugurated to
register the South’s historically disfranchised blacks.
VII. The Struggle for Civil Rights
(cont.)
• Integration of southern universities:
– Threatened to provoke wholesale slaughter
• The University of Mississippi (“Ole Miss”) became a
volcano
– James Meredith encountered violent opposition when he
attempted to register in October 1962
– President Kennedy was forced to send in 400 federal
marshals and 3,000 troops to enroll Meredith in his first
class.
– In spring 1963 King launched a campaign against
discrimination in Birmingham, Alabama
• The most segregated big city in America
VI. The Struggle for Civil Rights
(cont.)
• Blacks ½ of the population, fewer than 15% of the
voters
• Previous attempts to crack the racial barriers
produced more than 50 cross burnings and 18 bomb
attacks since 1957
• Violence occurred, even portrayed on television
• Causing President to deliver a memorable televised
speech to the nation on June 11, 1963
– He called the situation a “moral issue” and committed his
personal and presidential prestige to finding a solution
– He declared that the principle at stake “is as old as the
Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution”
– He called for new civil rights legislation to protect black
citizens.
VI. The Struggle for Civil Rights
(cont.)
• March on Washington: August 1963:
– King led more than 200,000 blacks and white
demonstrators on a peaceful march
• In an electrifying speech at the Lincoln Memorial,
King declared, “I have a dream…”
• Still violence continued
• On the night of Kennedy’s television address:
– A white gunman shot down Medgar Evers, a black
Mississippi civil rights worker
– In September 1963 an explosion blasted a Baptist church in
Birmingham, killing four black girls
– By the time of Kennedy’s death, his civil rights bill was
making little headway; blacks were increasingly impatient.
p897
VIII. The Killing of Kennedy
• Violence stalked center stage on November
22, 1963, Dallas, Texas:
– President Kennedy had been shot and died
within seconds
– The alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was
himself shot to death in front of television
cameras by a self-appointed avenger, Jack Ruby
– An elaborate investigation by Chief Justice
Warren could not quiet all doubts and theories
about what had really happened
– Johnson was sworn in on a waiting airplane.
VIII. The Killing of Kennedy
(cont.)
• Johnson retained most of Kennedy’s team
• He managed a dignified and efficient transition.
– Kennedy had gone slightly more than a thousand
days in the White House
•
•
•
•
Acclaimed more for his ideals that he enunciated,
And the spirit he had kindled,
Than for the concrete goals he had achieved.
He had laid to rest forever the notion that a Catholic
could not be trusted with the presidency of the
United States
– In later years, revelations about his womanizing and
allegations about his involvement with organized crime
figures tarnished his reputation.
IX. The LBJ Brand on the
Presidency
• Lyndon Baines Johnson:
– Torch passed to him:
– Sent to Congress at the age of 29 in 1937
• Franklin D. Roosevelt was his political “Daddy,”
Johnson claimed, and he supported New Deal
measures down the line
• When he lost in 1941, he learned that liberal political
beliefs did not necessary win elections in Texas
• With some trimming sails to the right he returned to
Congress in 1948, with a questionable eighty-sevenvote margin—hence the ironic nickname “Landside
Lyndon.”
IX. The LBJ Brand on the
Presidency (cont.)
• In the Senate, Johnson developed into a
masterful wheeler-dealer:
– Became the Democratic majority leader 1954
• Wielding power only next to Eisenhower in the White
House
• Used what was called the “Johnson treatment”—a
flashing display of backslapping, flesh-pressing, and
arm-twisting that overbore friends and foes alike
• His ego and vanity were legendary
• He shredded the conservative coloration of his Senate
years to reveal the latent liberal underneath
IX. The LBJ Brand on the
Presidency (cont.)
• Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights
Act of 1964:
– It banned racial discrimination in most private
facilities open to the public
• Including theaters, hospitals and restaurants
– It strengthened the federal government’s power
to end segregation in schools and public places
– Title VII barred employers from discriminating on
race or national origin in hiring
– Empowered the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission (EEOC) to enforce the law
IX. The LBJ Brand on the
Presidency (cont.)
– Title VII passed with the sexual clause intact
– Proved to be a powerful instrument of federallyenforced gender equality
– Johnson in 1965 issued an executive order
requiring all federal contractors to take
affirmative action against discrimination
• Johnson rammed Kennedy’s stalled tax bill:
– A billion-dollar “War on Poverty”
– Johnson voiced special concern for Appalachia
• Where thousands of humans were suffering because
of the coal industry.
IX. The LBJ Brand on the
Presidency (cont.)
• The Great Society:
– Johnson’s domestic program—a sweeping New
Dealish economic and welfare measure
• Aimed at transforming the American way of life
• Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1962):
– Showed public support for LBJ’s antipoverty war
– And revealed that in affluent America 20% of the
population, and over 40% of the black population, suffered
in poverty.
X. Johnson Battles Goldwater in 1964
• Election of 1964:
– Johnson’s nomination was a foregone conclusion
• He was chosen by acclamation in Atlantic City as his
birthday present
• Democrats stood foursquare on their most liberal
platform since Truman’s Fair Deal days
– Republicans
• Meet in San Francisco’s Cow Palace, nominated
Senator Barry Goldwater, a rock-ribbed conservative
• The American stage was set for a historic clash of
political principles
X. Johnson Battles Goldwater in
1964 (cont.)
• Goldwater’s forces galloped over the moderate
Republican “eastern establishment”
• Goldwater attacked:
–
–
–
–
–
–
Federal income tax
The Social Security system
The Tennessee Valley Authority
Civil rights legislation
The nuclear test-ban treaty
Most loudly, the Great Society
• Democrats’ attack on Goldwater:
– Exploited the image of Goldwater as a trigger-happy cowboy
X. Johnson Battles Goldwater in
1964 (cont.)
– Johnson’s image:
• A resolute statesman by seizing upon the Tonkin Gulf
episode early in August 1964
– He called the attack “unprovoked” and moved swiftly to
make political hay out of this episode
– He ordered a “limited” retaliatory air raid against the North
Vietnamese bases, saying “no wider war”
– Spurred the Congress to pass the all-purpose Tonkin Gulf
Resolution:
» Congress abdicated their war-declaring powers
» Handed the president a blank check to use further force
in Southeast Asia
X. Johnson Battles Goldwater in
1964 (cont.)
• Election results:
– Voters were herded into Johnson’s column
• By fondness for the Kennedy legacy
• Faith in the Great Society promises
• Fear of Goldwater
– Count:
• Popular vote: Johnson—43,129, 566; Goldwater—
27,178,188
• Electoral count: Johnson 486 to 52 Goldwater (see
Map 38.2)
X. Johnson Battles Goldwater in
1964 (cont.)
• Goldwater:
• Carried only his native Arizona and five other states
• All of them, significantly, in the traditionally
Democratic but now racially restless South
• Johnson:
• Record breaking 61% of the popular vote swept
lopsided Democratic majorities into both houses of
Congress
Map 38-2 p901
XI. The Great Society Congress
– Johnson’s victory temporarily smashed the
conservative congressional coalition of southern
Democrats and northern Republicans
– A wide-open road for the Great Society programs
• Escalating the War on Poverty:
– Doubled the appropriation of the Office of Economic
Opportunity to $2 billion
– Granted more than $1 billion to redevelop the gutted hills
and hollows of Appalachia
• Created two new departments:
– The Department of Transportation
– The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)
XI. The Great Society Congress
(cont.)
– Named the first black cabinet secretary in the nation’s
history—the respected economist Robert C. Weaver
• Established the National Endowments for the Arts
and the Humanities:
– Designed to lift the level of American cultural life
– The Big Four legislative achievements that
crowned LBJ’s Great Society programs:
• Aid to education
– Avoiding the separation of church and state issue, he
awarded aid directly to students
– He signed the bill in the humble one-room Texas schoolhouse he had attended as a boy.
XI. The Great Society Congress
(cont.)
• Medicare for the elderly
– Accompanied by Medicaid
– Created “entitlements”
» They conferred rights on certain categories of
Americans virtually in perpetuity
» Without the need for repeated congressional approval
– Part of a spreading “rights revolution.”
• Immigration reform:
– The Immigration and Nationality Act 1965 abolished at last
the “national-origins” quota system that had been in place
since 1921 (see p.703)
– It doubled (to 250,000) the number of immigrants allowed
to enter annually
– For the first time setting limits on immigrants from the
Western Hemisphere (120,000)
XI. The Great Society Congress
(cont.)
– Provided for the admission of close relatives of United
States citizens, outside those numerical limits
» 100,000 people per year took advantage of this “family
unification” provision in the decades after 1965
» The source of immigration soon shifted heavily from
Europe to Latin America and Asia
– Great Society programs came in for political
attacks in later years:
• Conservatives charged the billions spent for “social
engineering” was too much
• Yet the poverty level declined measurably in the
ensuring decade (see Figure 38.1)
XI. The Great Society Congress
(cont.)
• Medicare dramatic reductions for the elderly
• Antipoverty programs:
– Project Head Start—sharply improved the educational
performance of underprivileged youth
– Infant mortality rates fell in minority communities
– Johnson was not fully victorious in the war on
poverty, but he did win several noteworthy
battles.
Figure 38-1 p903
XII. Battling for Black Rights
• The Voting Rights Act of 1965:
– One of America’s most persistent evils—racial
discrimination
• The Civil Rights Act of 1964
– Gave the federal government more muscle to enforce
school-desegregation orders
– And to prohibit racial discrimination in all kinds of public
accommodations and employment
– But the problem of voting still remained
– Mississippi: only 5% of eligible blacks were registered to
vote
– Similar throughout the South
XII. Battling for Black Rights
(cont.)
– Ballot-denying devices: poll tax, literacy tests, barefaced
intimidation
– Mississippi law required the names of prospective black
registrants to be published for two weeks in local newspapers– a device that virtually guaranteed economic
reprisals, or worse.
• 1964 goals to open up the polling booths:
– The Twenty-fourth Amendment, ratified in January 1964,
abolished the poll tax in federal elections (see Appendix)
– Freedom Summer 1964: blacks joined hands with whites in
a massive voter-registration drive in Mississippi
– In June one black and two white civil rights workers
disappeared in Mississippi.
XII. Battling for Black Rights
(cont.)
• In August an integrated Mississippi Freedom
Democratic party delegation was denied its seats in
the Democratic convention
• Early 1965 Martin Luther King, Jr., resumed the voterregistration campaign in Selma, Alabama:
– 50% of the population was black but only 1% voters
– A Unitarian minister was killed, and a few days later a white
Detroit woman was shotgunned to death by Klansmen.
– Johnson speedily shepherded through Congress
the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965; signed
into law August 6
• It outlawed literacy tests and sent federal voter
registrars into several southern states.
p904
XIII. Black Power
• The Voting Rights Act of 1965:
– Marked the end of an era in civil rights
movement
• The era of nonviolent demonstrations
• 5 days after Johnson signed the law, a bloody riot
erupted in Watts, a black ghetto in Los Angeles
• 31 blacks and 3 whites were killed; more than a
thousand people were injured; hundreds of buildings
charred and gutted.
XIII. Black Power
(cont.)
• Leadership of Malcolm X:
– Born Malcolm Little, he was inspired by the
militant black nationalists in the Nation of Islam
• Nation’s founder—Elijah Muhammed (born Elijah
Poole) changed names to advertise his lost African
identity in white America
• Malcolm X trumpeted black separatism
• Later separated from Elijah Muhammed and moved
toward mainstream Islam
• Early 1965 he was cut down by rival Nation of Islam.
XIII. Black Power
(cont.)
• The militant Black Panther party
– In 1966 Trinidad-born Stokely Carmichael, a
leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC):
• Began to preach the doctrine of Black Power
• Marcus Garvey (see pp. 719-720)
• These breathed a vibrant separatist meaning into the
concept of Black Power
• They emphasized African American distinctiveness
• Promoted “Afro” hairstyles and dress
• Shed their “white” names for new African identities
• Demanded black studies programs in education.
XIII. Black Power
(cont.)
• More city-shaking riots erupted in the black
ghettos of several American cities
– Newark, New Jersey:
• A bloody outburst killing 25 people, summer of 1965
– Detroit, Michigan:
• 43 peoples killed
– Los Angeles:
• Black rioters torched their own neighborhoods
• Attacked police officers and even firefighters
– These riots angered many white Americans, who
threatened to retaliate.
XIII. Black Power
(cont.)
– Many had considered racial problems a purely
“southern” question:
• Black concerns had moved north
• Nearly half of the nation’s black people
• In the North the Black Power movement focused less
on civil rights and more on economic demands
• Black unemployment was nearly double that for
whites
• Despair deepened when the voice of Martin Luther
King, Jr., was silenced April 4, 1968
• Rioters noisily made news, but thousands of other
blacks quietly made history.
XIII. Black Power
(cont.)
– Black voter registration in the South shot upward
– By late 1960s several hundred blacks held elected office in
the Old South
– Cleveland, Ohio, and Gary, Indiana, elected black mayors
– By 1972 nearly half of southern black children sat in
integrated schools; more schools integrated in South than
North
– About a third of blacks had risen economically into the ranks
of the middle class
– King left a shining legacy of racial progress, but he was cut
down when the job was far from completed.
XIV. Combating Communism in Two
Hemispheres
• Foreign flare-ups threatened Johnson’s
political life:
– Dominican Republic:
• People revolted against their military government in
April of 1965
• Johnson called it the target of a Castro-like coup by
“Communist conspirators”
• He dispatched 25,000 American troops to restore
order
• Johnson was condemned for his temporary reversion
to the officially abandoned “gunboat diplomacy.”
XIV. Combating Communism in
Two Hemispheres (cont.)
– Vietnam:
• Guerillas loyal to the North Vietnamese communists,
called Viet Cong, attacked an American air base at
Pleiku, South Vietnam, February 1965
• Johnson immediately ordered retaliatory bombing
raids against military installations in North Vietnam
• For the first time ordered attacking U.S. troops to land
• By the middle of March, 1965, the Americans had
“Operation Rolling Thunder” in full swing—regular
full-scale bombing against North Vietnam.
XIV. Combating Communism in
Two Hemispheres (cont.)
• Before 1965 ended, some 184,000 American troops
were involved
• Johnson had now taken the slippery path toward
“escalation” of American troops
• The enemies matched every American increase
• South Vietnamese became spectators in their own
war as it became more Americanized
• Corrupt and collapsible governments in Saigon
succeeded each other
• Johnson steadily raised the military stakes in Vietnam
• By 1968 there were half a million troops there and
the annual bill for the war was exceeding $30 billion
• Yet the end was nowhere in sight.
XV. Vietnam Vexations
• America could not defeat the enemy in
Vietnam, but it seemed to be defeating itself
– World reactions:
• Several nations expelled American Peace Corps
volunteers
• de Gaulle withdrew France from NATO in 1966
• He ordered all American troops out of France
• Overcommitment tied America’s hands elsewhere
XV. Vietnam Vexations
(cont.)
– Six-Day War:
• Israel, attacked by Soviet-backed Egypt, Jordan, and
Syria, stunned the world with a military triumph June,
1967
• Israel expanded to control new territories in the Sinai
Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and the
West Bank of the Jordan River, including Jerusalem
(see Map 40.2)
• The victory brought some 1 million resentful
Palestinian Arabs under direct Israeli control, while
another 350,000 Palestinian refugees fled to
neighboring Jordan
XV. Vietnam Vexations
(cont.)
• The Israelis agreed to withdraw from Syria after
signing a peace treaty with Egypt
• But they refused to relinquish the other areas without
a treaty and began moving Jewish settlers into the
heavily Arab district of the West Bank
– The Six-Day War markedly intensified the
problems of the already volatile Middle East
• Now a tractable standoff between the Israelis and
Palestinians, led by Yasir Arafat (1929-2004), head of
the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)
– The Middle East became an ever more dangerously packed
powder keg that the war-plagued United States proved
powerless to defuse.
XV. Vietnam Vexations
(cont.)
– Domestic discontent over Vietnam:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Anti-demonstrations, campus “teach-ins,” 1965
Gradually protests mounted to tidal-wave proportions
Military draft dragged in more and more young men
Thousands of draft registrants fled to Canada
Other publicly burned their draft cards
Hundreds of thousands marched the streets in
protest
• Many Americans felt pangs of conscience at burning
peasant huts
XV. Vietnam Vexations
(cont.)
– Congress’s opposition to Vietnam involvement:
• Centered in the influential Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, headed by Senator William Fulbright
• Thorn to the president, he staged a series of televised
hearings in 1966 and 1967
• Public came to feel that they had been deceived
about the causes and “winnability” of the war
• A yawning “credibility gap” opened between the
government and the people
– Within the administration itself:
• Doubts were deepening about the wisdom of the war
in Vietnam
XV. Vietnam Vexations
(cont.)
• Defense Secretary McNamara expressed increasing
discomfiture at the course of events (he was quietly
eased out of the office)
• By 1968 the brutal and futile struggle had become the
longest and most unpopular foreign war in the
nation’s history
• The government had failed to explain to the people
what was supposed to be at stake in Vietnam
• Casualties, killed and wounded, already exceeded
100,000
XV. Vietnam Vexations
(cont.)
• Johnson’s actions:
• 1967 he ordered the CIA, in clear violation of its
charter as a foreign intelligence agency, to spy on
domestic antiwar activists
• He encouraged the FBI to turn its counterintelligence
program, code-named “Cointelpro,” against the
people’s movement
– “Cointelpro” subverted leading “doves” with false
accusations that they were communist sympathizers
– These clandestine tactics made the FBI look like a totalitarian state’s secret police rather than a guardian of
American democracy.
XV. Vietnam Vexations
(cont.)
• Evidence mounted that America had been
trapped in an Asian civil war:
– Johnson kept to his basic strategy of ratcheting
up the pressure bit by bit
– He stubbornly assured doubting Americans that
he could see “the light at the end of the tunnel.”
– But to growing numbers of Americans, it seemed
that Johnson was bent on “saving” Vietnam by
destroying it.
XVI. Vietnam Topples Johnson
• The January 1968 communist offensive
launched on Tet, the Vietnamese New Year
• Viet Cong launched attacks on 27 key South
Vietnamese cities, including the capital, Saigon
• Again it showed that Johnson’s strategy of gradual
escalation was not working
• The Tet offensive ended in a military defeat but a
political victory for the Viet Cong
• The toll was wearing on Johnson, especially the
personal agony over American casualties.
XVI. Vietnam Topples Johnson
(cont.)
– American military leaders responded to the Tet
attacks with a request of 200,000 troops
– The president was being challenged within his
own party, especially by Eugene McCarthy
• McCarthy received 41.4% of the Democratic vote in
New Hampshire on March 12, 1968
• Johnson’s star fell four days later when Robert F.
Kennedy threw his hat into the ring
• Kennedy stirred a passionate response among
workers, African Americans, Latinos, and young
people.
XVI. Vietnam Topples Johnson
(cont.)
– On March 31, 1968, Johnson announced on
nationwide television he would freeze American
troops levels and scale back the bombing
• Then he declared that he would not be a candidate
for the presidency in 1968
– Johnson’s “abdication” had the effect of
preserving the military status quo
• He had held the “hawks” in check, while offering
himself to the militant “doves”
• The United States could thus maintain the maximum
acceptable level of military activity in Vietnam , while
trying to negotiate a settlement
XVII. The Presidential Sweepstakes of
1968
– Summer of 1968 was one of the hottest political
seasons in the nation’s history
• Democratic candidate was vice-president Hubert H.
Humphrey
• Meanwhile Senators McCarthy and Kennedy dueled
in several state primaries
• On June 5, 1968, the night of an exciting victory in the
California primary, Kennedy was shot to death by a
young Arab immigrant resentful of the candidate’s
pro-Israel views
• Democratic convention in Chicago, August 1968
• “Peace officers” broke into a “police riot”
XVII. The Presidential Sweepstakes
of 1968 (cont.)
• Humphrey steamrollered to the nomination on the
first ballot
– Republican convention, Miami Beach
• Richard M. Nixon became the candidate who
appealed to all party sides
• Tapped for his running mate Maryland’s Governor
Spiro T. Agnew
• Platform called for victory in Vietnam and a strong
anticrime policy
• A “spoiler” third party ticket—the American Independent party—headed by George C. Wallace
XVII. The Presidential Sweepstakes
of 1968 (cont.)
– Between the positions of the Republicans and
the Democrats on Vietnam, there was little
choice:
• Both candidates were committed to carrying on the
war until the enemy settled for an “honorable peace”
• Millions of “doves” had no place to roost, and many
refused to vote at all
• Humphrey, scorched by the LBJ brand, went down to
defeat as a loyal prisoner of his chief’s policies.
XVI. The Presidential Sweepstakes
of 1968 (cont.)
– Nixon won the election of 1968:
• 301 electoral votes, 43.4 % of the popular tally;
31,785,480
• Humphrey: 191 electoral votes, 42.7 of the popular
votes; 31,275,166 (see Map 38.3)
• Nixon faced congressional majorities of the opposing
party in both houses
• He carried not a single major city
• He received no clear mandate to do anything
• He was a minority president who owed his election to
divisions over the war and protest against the unfair
draft, crime and rioting.
XVI. The Presidential Sweepstakes
of 1968 (cont.)
– Wallace:
• Won an impressive 9,906,473 popular votes
• 46 electoral votes, all from five states of the Deep
South, four of which Goldwater had carried in 1964
• Wallace remained a formidable force, for he had
amassed the largest third-party popular vote in
American history to that point
• And was the last third-party candidate to win any
electoral votes
• Ross Perot enjoyed a greater popular vote margin but
won no states (see p. 996).
Map 38-3 p910
XVIII. The Obituary of Lyndon Johnson
– Johnson returned to his ranch in Texas in January
1969, only to die four years later:
• His party was defeated
• His “me-too” Humphrey was repudiated
• By 1966 Johnson was sinking into his Vietnam
quicksands
• Great Society programs began to wither
• Soaring war costs sucked tax dollars into the military
machine
• The War on Poverty met resistance and would
eventually go down in defeat.
XVIII. The Obituary of Lyndon
Johnson (cont.)
• Johnson had crucified himself on the cross of Vietnam
• The Southern Asian quagmire engulfed his noblest
intentions
• He was convinced by his advisers that massive aerial
bombing and limited troop commitments would make
a “cheap” victory
• His decision not to escalate the fighting further
offended the “hawks,” and his refusal to back off
altogether antagonized the “doves.”
XVIII. The Cultural Upheaval of the
1960s
– The struggles of the 1960s against racism,
poverty, and the war in Vietnam had momentous
cultural consequences:
• In the 1960s a newly negative attitude toward all
kinds of authority took hold
• Many young people lost their traditional moral
rudders
– The nation’s mainline Protestant denominations
lost their grip in the 1960s
• Churchgoing declined from 48% in the late 1950s to
41% in the 1970s.
XVIII. The Cultural Upheaval of the
1960s (cont.)
• The liberal Protestant churches suffered the most
– Increasingly ceded religious authority to the conservative
evangelicals
– While surrendering cultural authority to secular
professionals and academic social scientists
– As educated Americans became increasingly secular, the
less educated became more religious
– Religious upheaval occurred in the tradition-bound Roman
Catholic Church
– Skepticism about authority had deep historical roots in
American culture
– In movies like Rebel Without a Cause (1955) the attractive
young actor James Dean expressed the restless frustration
of many young people.
XIII. The Cultural Upheaval of the
1960s (cont.)
– The disaffection of the young reached crisis
proportions in the tumultuous 60s:
• Protests against established authority broke out at
the University of California at Berkeley in 1964
– Free Speech Movement—students objected to an administrative ban on the use of space for political debate
• Rise of a self-conscious “counterculture” stridently
opposed to traditional American ways
• Social upheaval in the 1960s was far from an
American-only phenomenon
– It was across the world, as people questioned established
authority everywhere.
XIII. The Cultural Upheaval of the
1960s (cont.)
• The global spirit of protest—against the Vietnam War,
racial injustice, and the strictures of bourgeois society
– Spread from Berkeley, California, to Columbia University in
New York, to West Berlin, and even to Communist China
– Czechoslovakia had the “Prague Spring” in January, 1968
• The 60s witnessed a “sexual revolution”:
– Introduction of the birth control pill in 1960 made unwanted
pregnancies much easier to avoid and sexual appetites
easier to satisfy
– The Mattachine Society, founded in Los Angeles in 1951,
was a pioneering society for gay rights
– Stonewall Revolution at New York’s Stonewall Inn in 1969
proved a turning point
XIII. The Cultural Upheaval of the
1960s (cont.)
– 1980s worries about sexually transmitted diseases like
genital herpes and AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) finally slowed, but did not reverse, the sexual
revolution.
• Students for a Democratic Society (SDS):
– Once at the forefront of the antipoverty and antiwar
campaigns; spawned into an underground terrorist group
called the Weathermen
– Peaceful civil rights demonstrations had given way to
blockbusting urban riots
– An underworld of drug lords and addicts.
XIII. The Culture Upheaval of the
1960s (cont.)
– Conclusion:
• There was the denouncement of the self-indulgent
romanticism of the “flower children.”
• Sympathetic observers hailed the “greening” of America—the replacement of materialism and imperialism
by a new consciousness of human values
• The upheaval of the 1960s attributed to the three P’s:
– The youthful population bulge
– Protest against racism and the Vietnam War
– The apparent permanence of prosperity
• If the “counterculture” had not managed fully to
replace older values, it had weakened their grip,
perhaps permanently.
p915