Chapter 29: Civil Right, Vietnam, and the Ordeal of Liberalism

Chapter 29: Civil Right, Vietnam, and the Ordeal of Liberalism

• Expanding the liberal state

• The presidential campaign of 1960 produced two young candidates who claimed to offer the nation active leadership. 

• The Republican nomination went almost uncontested to Vice President Richard Nixon, who promised moderate reform. 

• The Democrats, in the meantime, emerged from a spirited primary campaign united, somewhat uneasily, behind John Fitzgerald Kennedy, an attractive and articulate senator from Massachusetts who had narrowly missed being the party’s vice presidential candidate in 1956.

• John Kennedy was the son of the wealthy, powerful, and highly controversial Joseph P. Kennedy, former American ambassador to Britain

• Kennedy had campaigned promising a set of domestic reforms more ambitious than any since the New Deal, a program he described as the “New Frontier.” 

• But his thin popular mandate and a Congress dominated by a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats frustrated many of his hopes. 

• Kennedy did manage to win approval of tariff reductions his administration had negotiated, and he began to build an ambitious legislative agenda that he hoped he might eventually see enacted—including a call for a significant tax cut to promote economic growth.

• Kennedy had traveled to Texas with his wife and Vice President Lyndon Johnson for a series of political appearances. 

• While the presidential motorcade rode slowly through the streets of Dallas, shots rang out. Two bullets struck the president—one in the throat, the other in the head. 

• He was sped to a nearby hospital, where minutes after arriving he was pronounced dead.

• Lee Harvey Oswald, who appeared to be a confused and embittered Marxist, was arrested for the crime later that day, and then mysteriously murdered by a Dallas nightclub owner, Jack Ruby, two days later. 

• Most Americans at the time accepted the conclusions of a federal commission, appointed by President Johnson and chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren, which found that both Oswald and Ruby had acted alone, that there was no conspiracy

• Lyndon Johnson

• The Kennedy assassination was a national trauma—a defi ning event for almost everyone old enough to be aware of it. 

• At the time, however, much of the nation took comfort in the personality and performance of Kennedy’s successor in the White House, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Johnson was a native of the poor “hill country” of west Texas and had risen to become majority leader of the U.S. Senate by dint of extraordinary, even obsessive, effort and ambition

• Johnson’s rough-edged, even crude personality could hardly have been more different from Kennedy’s. 

• Johnson was a man who believed in the active use of power. 

• Between 1963 and 1966, he compiled the most impressive legislative record of any president since Franklin Roosevelt. 

• He was aided by the tidal wave of emotion that followed the death of President Kennedy, which helped win support for many New Frontier proposals. 

• But Johnson also constructed a remarkable reform program of his own, one that he ultimately labeled the “Great Society.”

• Johnson envisioned himself as a great “coalition builder.” 

• He wanted the support of everyone, and for a time he nearly got it. 

• His first year in office was, by necessity, dominated by the campaign for reelection.

• The assault on poverty

• For the first time since the 1930s, the federal government took steps in the 1960s to create important new social welfare programs.

• The most important of these, perhaps, was Medicare: a program to provide federal aid to the elderly for medical expenses. 

• Medicare and Medicaid were early steps in a much larger assault on poverty

• Community Action was an effort to involve members of poor communities themselves in the planning and administration of the programs designed to help them. 

• The Community Action programs provided jobs for many poor people and gave them valuable experience in administrative and political work. 

• Many men and women who went on to significant careers in politics or community organizing, including many black and Hispanic politicians, as well as many Indians, got their start in Community Action programs. 

• But despite its achievements, the Community Action approach proved impossible to sustain, both because of administrative failures and because the apparent excesses of a few agencies damaged the popular image of the Community Action programs and, indeed, the war on poverty as a whole. 

• Cities, schools, and immigration

• The Housing Act of 1961 offered $4.9 billion in federal grants to cities for the preservation of open spaces, the development of mass-transit systems, and the subsidization of middle-income housing. 

• The Johnson administration also supported the Immigration Act of 1965, one of the most important pieces of legislation of the 1960s.

• It continued to restrict immigration from some parts of Latin America, but it allowed people from all parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa to enter the United States on an equal basis.

• By the early 1970s, the character of American immigration had changed, with members of new national groups

• Legacies of the great society

• Taken together, the Great Society reforms meant a significant increase in federal spending. 

•  By the 1980s, many Americans had become convinced that the Great Society experiments had not worked and that, indeed, government programs to solve social problems could not work. 

• But the Great Society, despite many failures, was also responsible for some significant achievements. 

• It substantially reduced hunger in America. 

• It made medical care available to millions of elderly and poor people who would otherwise have had great difficulty affording it. 

• It contributed to the greatest reduction in poverty in American history

Chapter 29.1: the battle for racial equality

• Expanding protests

• John Kennedy had long been sympathetic to the cause of racial justice, but he was hardly a committed crusader. 

• His intervention during the 1960 campaign to help win the release of Martin Luther King Jr. from a Georgia prison won him a large plurality of the black vote. 

• But like many presidents before him, he feared alienating southern Democratic voters and members of Congress. 

• His administration set out to contain the racial problem by expanding enforcement of existing laws and supporting litigation to overturn existing segregation statutes, hoping to make modest progress without creating politically damaging divisions.

• In 1961, an interracial group of students, working with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), began what they called “freedom rides” (reviving a tactic CORE had tried, without much success, in the 1940s). 

• Traveling by bus throughout the South, the freedom riders tried to force the desegregation of bus stations. 

• A national commitment

• To generate support for the legislation, and to dramatize the power of the growing movement, more than 200,000 demonstrators marched down the Mall in Washington, D.C., in August 1963 and gathered before the Lincoln Memorial for the greatest civil rights demonstration in the nation’s history. 

• President Kennedy, who had at first opposed the idea of the march, in the end gave it his open support after receiving pledges from organizers that speakers would not criticize the administration. 

• Martin Luther King Jr., in one of the greatest speeches of his distinguished oratorical career, roused the crowd with a litany of images prefaced again and again by the phrase “I have a dream.” 

• The march was the high-water mark of the peaceful, interracial civil rights movement. 

• The assassination of President Kennedy three months later gave new impetus to the battle for civil rights legislation.

• supporters of the measure finally mustered the two-thirds majority necessary to close debate and end a filibuster by southern senators; and the Senate passed the most comprehensive civil rights bill in the nation’s history. 

• The battle for voting rights

• Having won a significant victory in one area, the civil rights movement shifted its focus to another: voting rights. 

• During the summer of 1964, thousands of civil rights workers, black and white, northern and southern, spread out through the South, but primarily in Mississippi, to work on behalf of black voter registration and participation. 

• The campaign was known as “freedom summer,” and it produced a violent response from some southern whites. 

• Civil Rights Act of 1965, better known as the Voting Rights Act, which provided federal protection to blacks attempting to exercise their right to vote.

• The changing movement

• For decades, the nation’s African American population had been undergoing a major demographic shift; and by the 1960s, the problem of racial injustice was no longer primarily southern and rural, as it had been earlier in the century

• Although the economic condition of much of American society was improving, in the poor urban communities in which the black population was concentrated, things were getting significantly worse. 

• Well over half of all American nonwhites lived in poverty at the beginning of the 1960s; black unemployment was twice that of whites. 

• By the mid-1960s, therefore, the issue of race was moving out of the South and into the rest of the nation

• Urban violence

• Well before the Chicago campaign, the problem of urban poverty was thrust into national attention when violence broke out in black neighborhoods in major cities

•  The first large race riot since the end of World War II occurred the following summer in the Watts section of Los Angeles.

•  To many white Americans, however, the lesson of the riots was the need for stern measures to stop violence and lawlessness. 

• Black power

• Disillusioned with the ideal of peaceful change in cooperation with whites, an increasing number of African Americans were turning to a new approach to the racial issue: the philosophy of “black power.” 

• Black power could mean many different things.

• Perhaps the most enduring impact of the black-power ideology was a social and psychological one: instilling racial pride in African Americans, who lived in a society whose dominant culture generally portrayed African Americans as inferior to whites. 

• It encouraged the growth of black studies in schools and universities. 

• It helped stimulate important black literary and artistic movements. 

• It produced a new interest among many African Americans in their African roots. 

• It led to a rejection by some blacks of certain cultural practices borrowed from white society: “Afro” hairstyles began to replace artificially straightened hair; some blacks began to adopt African styles of dress and new, African names

• Malcolm X

• In Detroit, a once-obscure black nationalist group, the Nation of Islam, gained new prominence. 

•  The most celebrated of the Black Muslims, as whites often termed them, was Malcolm Little, a former drug addict and pimp who had spent time in prison and had rebuilt his life after joining the movement

• Malcolm became one of the movement’s most influential spokesmen, particularly among younger blacks, as a result of his intelligence, his oratorical skills, and his harsh, uncompromising opposition to all forms of racism and oppression.

Chapter 29.2: flexible response and the cold war

• Diversifying foreign policy

• The Kennedy administration entered office convinced that the United States needed to be able to counter communist aggression in more-flexible ways than the atomic-weapons-oriented defense strategy of the Eisenhower years had permitted.

• Among the first foreign policy ventures of the Kennedy administration was a disastrous assault on the Castro government in Cuba

• Confrontations with the soviet union

• The rising tensions culminated the following October in the most dangerous and dramatic crisis of the Cold War

• On October 22, he ordered a naval and air blockade around Cuba, a “quarantine” against all offensive weapons. 

• Preparations were under way for an American air attack on the missile sites when, late in the evening of October 26, Kennedy received a message from Khrushchev implying that the Soviet Union would remove the missile bases in exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba. 

• Ignoring other, tougher Soviet messages, the president agreed. 

• The crisis was over.

• Johnson and the world

• Lyndon Johnson entered the presidency lacking John Kennedy’s prior, albeit limited, experience with international affairs. 

• He was eager, therefore, not only to continue the policies of his predecessor but also to prove quickly that he too was a strong and forceful leader. 

• From Johnson’s first moments in office, however, his foreign policy was almost totally dominated by the bitter civil war in Vietnam and by the expanding involvement of the United States there. 

Chapter 29.3: the agony of vietnam

• The first indochina war

• Vietnam had a long history both as an independent kingdom and a major power in its region, and as a subjugated province of China. 

• In the mid-nineteenth century, Vietnam became a colony of France

• President Truman was under heavy pressure from both the British and the French to support France in its effort to reassert its control over Vietnam. 

• The French argued that without Vietnam, their domestic economy would collapse.

• For the next four years, during what has become known as the First Indochina War, Truman and then Eisenhower supported the French military campaign against the Vietminh; by 1954, by some calculations, the United States was paying 80 percent of France’s war costs. 

• But the war went badly for the French in spite of the American support. 

• Finally, late in 1953, Vietminh forces engaged the French in a major battle in the far northwest corner of the country, at Dien Bien Phu, an isolated and almost indefensible site

• Geneva and the two vietnams

• An international conference at Geneva, planned many months before to settle the Korean dispute and other controversies, now took up the fate of Vietnam as well. 

• The Geneva Conference produced an agreement to end the Vietnam conflict without American participation

• America and diem

• The U.S. government supported South Vietnamese President Diem’s refusal in 1956 to permit the elections called for by the Geneva accords (see above), reasoning, correctly, that Ho Chi Minh would easily win any such election

• From aid to intervention

• Lyndon Johnson thus inherited what was already a substantial American commitment to the survival of an anticommunist South Vietnam. 

• During his first two years in office, he expanded that commitment into a full-scale American war.

• Above all, intervention in South Vietnam was fully consistent with nearly twenty years of American foreign policy

• The quagmire

• the attrition strategy failed because the North Vietnamese proved willing to commit many more soldiers to the conflict than the United States had expected. 

• The United States relied heavily on its bombing of the north to eliminate the communists’ war-making capacity.

• The war at home

• a growing number of journalists, particularly reporters who had spent time in Vietnam, helped sustain the antiwar movement with their frank revelations about the brutality and apparent futility of the war. 

• The growing chorus of popular protest soon began to stimulate opposition to the war from within the government. 

• In the meantime, the American economy was beginning to suffer. Johnson’s commitment to fighting the war while continuing his Great Society reforms—his promise of “guns and butter”—proved impossible to maintain. 

Chapter 29.4: the traumas of 1968

• The tet offensive

• Within weeks of the Tet offensive, public opposition to the war had almost doubled. And Johnson’s personal popularity rating had slid to 35 percent, the lowest of any president since Harry Truman.

• The political challenge

• On March 31, Johnson went on television to announce a limited halt in the bombing of North Vietnam—his first major concession to the antiwar forces—and, more surprising, his withdrawal from the presidential contest. 

• The king and kennedy assassinations

• In the midst of this bitter political battle, in which the war had been the dominant issue, attention suddenly turned back to the nation’s bitter racial conflicts. 

• On April 4, Martin Luther King Jr., who had traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, to lend his support to striking black sanitation workers in the city, was shot and killed while standing on the balcony of his motel

• For two months following the death of King, Robert Kennedy continued his campaign for the presidential nomination

• Robert Kennedy, much more than John, shaped what some would later call the “Kennedy legacy,” a set of ideas that would for a  time become central to American liberalism

• The conservative response

• A more effective effort to mobilize the “silent majority” in favor of order and stability was under way within the Republican Party

•  Nixon recognized that many Americans were tired of hearing about their obligations to the poor, tired of hearing about the sacrifices necessary to achieve racial justice, tired of judicial reforms that seemed designed to help criminals. 

• By offering a vision of stability, law and order, government retrenchment, and “peace with honor” in Vietnam, he easily captured the Republican presidential nomination