chapter 35 american history people

Richard M. Nixon

(1913-1994) Thirty-seventh president of the United States, 1969-1974. Nixon rose to national prominence as a "communist hunter" and member of HUAC in the 1950s. He was vice president under Eisenhower from 1953 to 1961 and defended American capitalism in the 1959 kitchen debate with Khrushchev. Nixon ran unsuccessfully for president against John F. Kennedy in 1960 but was elected to the presidency in 1968 and 1972. He resigned the presidency amid the Watergate scandal in 1974.

Betty Friedan

(1921-2006) Feminist author of The Feminine Mystique in 1960. Friedan's book sparked a new consciousness among suburban women and helped launch the second-wave feminist movement.

Elvis Presley

(1935-1977) Memphis-born singer whose youth, voice, and sex appeal helped popularize rock 'n' roll in the mid-1950s. Commonly known by only his first name, Elvis was an icon of popular culture, in both music and film.

Rosa Parks

(1913-2005) NAACP leader in Montgomery, Alabama, who inaugurated that city's famous bus boycott in 1955 by refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white passenger. Parks remained a living symbol of the spirit of the civil rights movement and the cause of racial equality throughout her long life.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

(1929-1968) Civil rights leader and Baptist preacher who rose to prominence with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. King was an outspoken advocate for black rights throughout the 1960s, most famously during the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered the "I Have a Dream" speech. He was assassinated in Memphis in 1968 while supporting a sanitation workers' strike.

Ella Baker

Ella Josephine Baker was an African-American civil rights and human rights activist. She was a largely behind-the-scenes organizer whose career spanned more than five decades. In New York City and the South, she worked alongside some of the most noted civil rights leaders of the 20th century, including W. E. B

Earl Warren

(1891-1974) Liberal California politician appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court by Dwight Eisenhower in 1953, serving until 1969. Warren was principally known for moving the Court to the left in defense of civil and individual rights in such cases as Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), and Miranda v. Arizona (1966).

John Foster Dulles

(1888-1959) American politician principally known for serving as Eisenhower's secretary of state. An ardent cold warrior, he drafted the "policy of boldness" designed to confront Soviet aggression with the threat of "massive retaliation" via thermonuclear weapons, and he supported American intervention in Vietnam.

Nikita Khrushchev

(1894-1971) Premier of the Soviet Union from 1958 to 1964. Khrushchev was a Communist party official who emerged from the power struggle after Stalin's death in 1953 to lead the USSR. As Soviet premier, he notably renounced Stalin's brutality in 1956, the same year that he crushed a pro-Western uprising in Hungary. In 1958, he issued an ultimatum for Western evacuation of Berlin, from which he backed down a year later. Khrushchev defended Soviet-style economic planning in the kitchen debate with American vice president Richard Nixon in 1959, and he attempted to send missiles to Cuba in 1962 but backed down when confronted by President Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis.

Ho Chi Minh

(1890-1969) Vietnamese revolutionary nationalist leader. Beginning in 1941, Ho organized Vietnamese opposition to foreign occupation, first against the Japanese and then, after World War II, against the French. His Viet Minh forces were victorious against French colonialists in 1954, after which Ho became the leader of North Vietnam. He led the war to unify the country in the face of increased military opposition from the United States.

Gamal Abdel Nasser

1918-1970) President of Egypt from 1956 to 1970. Nasser was known for his pan-Arab nationalism and opposition to colonialism, specifically in his decision to nationalize the Suez Canal in 1956. Although his reputation was tarnished somewhat by his country's military failure against Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967, he remained a popular leader in Egypt and throughout the Arab world.

Fidel Castro

(1926-) Cuban revolutionary who overthrew the Batista dictatorship in 1958 and assumed control of the island country. Castro's connections with the Soviet Union led to a cessation of diplomatic relations with the United States and such international affairs as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis. A controversial figure, Castro oversaw his country through the end of the Cold War, when financial and military support from the Soviet Union dissipated, and through nearly a half-century of a trade embargo with the United States. He remained the head of Cuba's government until his retirement in February 2008.

John F. Kennedy

(1917-1963) Thirty-fifth president of the United States, 1961-1963. A navy hero from World War II and son of a prominent Boston businessman, Kennedy won election to the House of Representatives in 1946 and to the Senate in 1952. In 1960, he narrowly defeated incumbent vice president Richard Nixon in 1960 to become the youngest person ever elected president. As president, he launched New Frontier programs and urged legislation to improve civil rights. He assumed blame for the Bay of Pigs invasion and was credited for impressively handling the Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, by Lee Harvey Oswald.

Lyndon Baines Johnson

(1908-1973) Thirty-sixth president of the United States, 1963-1969. A Texas Democrat who rose to tremendous power in the Senate during the New Deal, Johnson was tapped to be John F. Kennedy's running mate in 1960. Chosen largely to help solidify support for the Democratic ticket in the anti-Catholic South, he assumed the presidency after Kennedy's assassination in 1963. As president, he was responsible for liberal programs such as the Great Society, War on Poverty, and civil rights legislation, as well as the escalation of the Vietnam War. After a series of challenges from within his party, he chose not to run for reelection in 1968.

Jackson Pollock

(1912-1956) New York-based painter who became the father of abstract expressionism with his spontaneous "action paintings."

Andy Warhol

(1928-1987) Pioneering "pop" artist known for his iconic portraits of Cold War America's material objects, including soup cans and soda bottles.

Jack Kerouac

(1922-1969) Frenetic novelist and progenitor of the bohemian Beat Generation (a term he coined). He gained celebrity after publishing the group's unofficial bible, On the Road.

Allen Ginsberg

(1926-1997) New Jersey-born poet who served as spokesman of the Beat Generation. The 1956 publication of his Howl and Other Poems sparked a San Francisco literary renaissance and a local obscenity trial that brought nationwide publicity to the bohemian Beat movement.

Arthur Miller

(1915-2005) New York-born playwright who dramatized the pitfalls of postwar American materialism in Death of a Salesman and Cold War hysteria in The Crucible, among other plays.

Ralph Ellison

(1914-1994) Oklahoma-born and Tuskegee-educated novelist best known for writing Invisible Man, one of the great novels of the twentieth-century African American experience.

Robert F. Kennedy

(1925-1968) Younger brother of John F. Kennedy who entered public life as U.S. attorney general during the Kennedy administration. Later elected senator from New York, he became an antiwar, pro-civil rights presidential candidate in 1968, launching a popular challenge to incumbent President Johnson. Amid that campaign, he was assassinated in California on June 6, 1968.

Robert S. McNamara

(1916-2009) Businessman turned secretary of defense from 1961 to 1968. McNamara was the author of the "flexible response" doctrine, which created a variety of military options and avoided a stark choice between nuclear warfare and none at all. As defense secretary, he was the chief architect of the Vietnam War.

Ngo Dinh Diem

(1901-1963) First president of South Vietnam, where he took power following the Geneva Accords in 1954. Diem was propped up by the United States until he was overthrown and assassinated by a coup in 1963

James Meredith

(1933-) In 1962 he became the first black American to attend the University of Mississippi after being blocked several times by segregationist politicians. An icon of the civil rights movement, Meredith receded from public view following his brave steps toward educational integration.