The 1960 presidential election between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy was a close race.
Kennedy promised federal programs to strengthen the economy and address poverty.
Nixon advocated for private enterprise and reduced government spending.
Kennedy had to address concerns about his Catholic faith and experience.
The televised debate between Nixon and Kennedy was a notable event.
Radio listeners thought both men performed equally well.
TV audience was more impressed by Kennedy.
Kennedy won the election by less than one percentage point.
Kennedy: 34,227,096 votes.
Nixon: 34,107,646 votes.
Kennedy entered office in 1961 without a strong mandate.
The United States faced foreign policy challenges in Cuba and Vietnam.
Fidel Castro and his revolutionary army initiated a new era of Cuban history on January 8, 1959.
Castro ousted the corrupt Cuban president Fulgencio Batista.
The United States initially expressed sympathy for Castro's government, which was immediately granted diplomatic recognition.
The Castro government instituted leftist economic policies.
Agrarian reform, land redistribution, and nationalization of private enterprises.
Cuban citizens fled the island in droves and settled in Miami, Florida, and other U.S. cities.
The United States instituted a near-total trade embargo on October 19, 1960, to economically isolate the Cuban regime, and in January 1961, the two nations broke off formal diplomatic relations.
The CIA recruited Cuban exiles for an invasion of the island, believing that the Castro government lacked popular support.
On April 16, 1961, the Bay of Pigs invasion occurred, consisting primarily of Cuban émigrés landing on Girón Beach.
Cuban soldiers and civilians quickly overwhelmed the exiles, many of whom were taken prisoner.
The Cuban government's success at thwarting the Bay of Pigs invasion legitimized the new regime and was a tremendous embarrassment for the Kennedy administration.
In 1962, the Soviet Union deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba in response to the United States’ longtime maintenance of a nuclear arsenal in Turkey and at the invitation of the Cuban government, leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
American spy planes detected the construction of missile launch sites on October 14, 1962.
President Kennedy addressed the American people on October 22 to alert them to this threat.
On October 28, the Soviet Union agreed to remove its missiles from Cuba in exchange for a U.S. agreement to remove its missiles from Turkey and a formal pledge that the United States would not invade Cuba.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a time of great anxiety in America.
Emigration began again in earnest in the mid-1960s after the Cuban Missile Crisis temporarily halted the flow of Cuban refugees into the United States.
In 1965, the Johnson administration and the Castro government brokered a deal that facilitated the reunion of families that had been separated by earlier waves of migration, opening the door for thousands to leave the island.
In 1966 President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Cuban Adjustment Act, a law allowing Cuban refugees to become permanent residents.
Over the course of the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Cubans left their homeland and built new lives in America.
The Civil Rights Movement Continues
The civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1960s.
A new student movement arose, pushing for swifter changes in the segregated South.
Confrontational protests, marches, boycotts, and sit-ins accelerated.
In 1960, four African American students participated in a sit-in at a whites-only lunch counter in a North Carolina department store, which was typical of the Greensboro sit-ins.
Activists sat at segregated lunch counters, refusing to leave until served, willing to be ridiculed, attacked, and arrested.
This tactic led to the desegregation of Woolworth’s department stores and prompted copycat demonstrations across the South.
The protests demonstrated that student-led direct action could enact social change.
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was organized and embraced direct, grassroots action.
In 1961, civil rights advocates participated in the Freedom Rides.
Activists in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized interstate bus rides following a Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on public buses and trains.
The rides intended to test the court’s ruling, which many southern states had ignored.
Freedom Riders boarded buses in Washington, D.C., with the intention of sitting in integrated patterns on the buses as they traveled through the Deep South.
The riders encountered fierce resistance in Alabama. Angry mobs composed of KKK members attacked riders in Birmingham, burning one of the buses and beating the activists who escaped.
The Interstate Commerce Commission enforced integrated interstate buses and trains in November 1961.
In the fall of 1961, civil rights activists descended on Albany, a small city in southwest Georgia, to form the Albany Movement.
The Albany Movement was stymied by Albany police chief Laurie Pritchett, who launched mass arrests but refused to engage in police brutality and bailed out leading officials to avoid negative media attention.
The Albany Movement included elements of a Christian commitment to social justice in its platform.
Activists stated that all people were “of equal worth” in God’s family and that “no man may discriminate against or exploit another.”
Black Christianity propelled civil rights advocates to action and demonstrated the significance of religion to the broader civil rights movement.
Protesters sang hymns and spirituals as they marched.
Preachers rallied the people with messages of justice and hope.
Churches hosted meetings, prayer vigils, and conferences on nonviolent resistance.
The moral thrust of the movement strengthened African American activists and confronted white society by framing segregation as a moral evil.
In October 1962, James Meredith became the first African American student to enroll at the University of Mississippi.
Meredith’s enrollment sparked riots on the Oxford campus, prompting President John F. Kennedy to send in U.S. Marshals and National Guardsmen to maintain order.
Violence served as a reminder of the strength of white resistance to the civil rights movement, particularly in the realm of education.
In April and May 1963, the SCLC organized the Birmingham Campaign.
Activists used business boycotts, sit-ins, and peaceful marches.
Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed, prompting his famous letter urging not only his nonviolent approach but active confrontation to directly challenge injustice.
The campaign featured footage of white police officers using fire hoses and attack dogs on young African American protesters.
It also yielded an agreement to desegregate public accommodations in the city.
George Wallace became the champion of the many white southerners opposed to the civil rights movement.
Wallace's vocal stance on segregation was immortalized in his 1963 inaugural address as Alabama governor with the phrase: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”
In June 1963, Wallace stood in the door of Foster Auditorium to protest integration at the University of Alabama.
President Kennedy addressed the nation that evening, criticizing Wallace and calling for a comprehensive civil rights bill.
A day later, civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated at his home in Jackson, Mississippi.
Civil rights leaders organized the August 1963 March on Washington.
The march called for civil rights legislation, school integration, an end to discrimination, job training, and a raise in the minimum wage.
King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
President Lyndon Johnson embraced the civil rights movement and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The act barred segregation in public accommodations and outlawed discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, and national or religious origin.
Direct action continued through the summer of 1964, as student-run organizations like SNCC and CORE helped with the Freedom Summer in Mississippi.
Freedom Summer campaigners set up schools for African American children.
James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were murdered by local law enforcement officers and Klan members in Neshoba County, Mississippi.
In August, over 2,000 Black Mississippians assembled in Jackson and formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
“I question America, ” co-founder Fannie Lou Hamer said in a nationally televised address. “Is this America?” she asked.
In March 1965, activists attempted to march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, on behalf of local African American voting rights.
“Bloody Sunday” featured peaceful protesters attacked by white law enforcement.
Coverage of the first march prompted President Johnson to present the bill that became the Voting Rights Act of 1965, an act that abolished voting discrimination in federal, state, and local elections.
Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society
President Johnson laid out a vision for the Great Society in 1964, calling for an end to poverty and racial injustice.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 codified federal support for many of the civil rights movement’s goals.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act) abolished the quota regime established by the 1924 Reed-Johnson Act.
The Great Society’s legislation was breathtaking in scope, and many of its programs and agencies are still with us today.
It established the first federal food stamp program.
Medicare and Medicaid would ensure access to quality medical care for the aged and poor.
In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was the first sustained and significant federal investment in public education, totaling more than 1billion.
Significant funds were poured into colleges and universities.
The Great Society also established the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
No EOA program was more controversial than Community Action, considered the cornerstone antipoverty program.
Johnson’s antipoverty planners felt that the key to uplifting disfranchised and impoverished Americans was involving poor and marginalized citizens in the actual administration of poverty programs, what they called “maximum feasible participation.”
Despite widespread support for most Great Society programs, the War on Poverty increasingly became the focal point of domestic criticisms from the left and right.
Days after the ratification of the Voting Rights Act, race riots broke out in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, stemming from frustrations with residential segregation, police brutality, and racial profiling.
Rioting in Watts stemmed from local African American frustrations with residential segregation, police brutality, and racial profiling.
The riots reinforced the notion that the struggle did not occur solely in the South and were viewed as an indictment of the Great Society.
The Civil Rights Acts, the Voting Rights Acts, and the War on Poverty provoked conservative resistance and were catalysts for the rise of Republicans in the South and West.
The Origins of the Vietnam War
American involvement in the Vietnam War began during the postwar period of decolonization.
The Domino Theory—the idea that if a country fell to communism, then neighboring states would soon follow—governed American foreign policy.
After the communist takeover of China in 1949, the United States financially supported the French military’s effort to retain control over its colonies in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
The United States assisted the French war effort with funds, arms, and advisors, but it was not enough. On the eve of the Geneva Peace Conference in 1954, Viet Minh forces defeated the French army at Dien Bien Phu.
The conference temporarily divided Vietnam into two separate states until UN-monitored elections occurred, but the United States blocked the elections.
The temporary partition became permanent.
The United States established the Republic of Vietnam, or South Vietnam, with the U.S.-backed Ngo Dinh Diem as prime minister.
The Americans provided weapons and support, but despite a clear numerical and technological advantage, South Vietnam stumbled before insurgent Vietcong (VC) units.
Diem was assassinated in 1963. A merry-go-round of military dictators followed as the situation in South Vietnam continued to deteriorate.
On August 2, 1964, the USS Maddox reported incoming fire from North Vietnamese ships in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, granting President Johnson the authority to deploy the American military to defend South Vietnam.
U.S. Marines landed in Vietnam in March 1965, and the American ground war began.
American forces were tasked with defending South Vietnam against the insurgent VC and the regular North Vietnamese Army (NVA).
By 1968 half a million American troops were stationed in Vietnam, nearly twenty thousand had been killed, and the war was still no closer to being won.
Protests erupted across the country.
Culture and Activism
The 1960s wrought enormous cultural change, with the youth counterculture becoming mainstream.
Native Americans, Chicanos, women, and environmentalists participated in movements demonstrating that rights activism could be applied to ethnicity, gender, and nature.
Much of the counterculture was filtered through popular culture and consumption.
Advertisers commercialized young people’s resistance to commercialism.
Conservative cultural norms were falling everywhere.
The 1960s ushered in an era of much less restrictive clothing.
The hippies’ more androgynous look became trendy.
The American counterculture also sought psychedelic drugs as its remedy for alienation.
Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) began its life as a drug used primarily in psychological research before trickling down into college campuses and out into society at large.
The counterculture conquered popular culture.
Rock ’n’ roll, liberalized sexuality, an embrace of diversity, recreational drug use, unalloyed idealism, and pure earnestness marked a new generation.
While the ascendance of the hippies would be both exaggerated and short-lived, and while Vietnam and Richard Nixon shattered much of its idealism, the counterculture’s liberated social norms and its embrace of personal fulfillment still define much of American culture.
Beyond Civil Rights
Frustrations with the slow pace of change grew.
Activists became less conciliatory in their calls for progress.
Many embraced the more militant message of the burgeoning Black Power Movement and Malcolm X.
Malcolm advocated armed resistance in defense of the safety and well-being of Black Americans, stating, “I don’t call it violence when it’s self-defense, I call it intelligence.”
By the late 1960s, SNCC had expelled its white members and shunned the interracial effort in the rural South, focusing instead on injustices in northern urban areas.
The evolving movement called for African Americans to play a dominant role in cultivating Black institutions and articulating Black interests rather than relying on interracial, moderate approaches.
Carmichael asserted that “black power means black people coming together to form a political force.”
In 1966, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.
The Black Panthers used the concept of decolonization in their drive to liberate Black communities from white power structures.
The Black Panthers aligned themselves with the “other people of color in the world” against whom America was fighting abroad.
The party’s 10-Point Plan also included employment, housing, and education.
In the summer of 1961, frustrated Native American university students founded the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) to draw attention to the plight of Indigenous Americans.
Meanwhile, the Chicano movement in the 1960s emerged out of the broader Mexican American civil rights movement of the post–World War II era.
The word Chicano was initially considered a derogatory term for Mexican immigrants, until activists in the 1960s reclaimed the term and used it as a catalyst to campaign for political and social change among Mexican Americans.
The Chicano movement confronted discrimination in schools, politics, agriculture, and other formal and informal institutions.
The UFWA fused the causes of Chicano and Filipino activists protesting the subpar working conditions of California farmers on American soil.
Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales founded the Crusade for Justice in 1966.
The feminist movement also grew in the 1960s.
Women were active in both the civil rights movement and the labor movement, but their increasing awareness of gender inequality did not find a receptive audience among male leaders in those movements.
The commission’s official report, a self-declared “invitation to action, ” was released in 1963. Finding discriminatory provisions in the law and practices of industrial, labor, and governmental organizations, the commission advocated for “changes, many of them long overdue, in the conditions of women’s opportunity in the United States.”
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique hit bookshelves the same year the commission released its report.
The 1960s also saw a different group of women pushing for change in government policy. Mothers on welfare began to form local advocacy groups in addition to the National Welfare Rights Organization, founded in 1966.
Yet another mode of feminist activism was the formation of consciousness-raising groups.
The end of the decade was marked by the Women’s Strike for Equality, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of women’s right to vote.
American environmentalism’s significant gains during the 1960s emerged in part from Americans’ recreational use of nature.
Silent Spring stood out as an unparalleled argument for the interconnectedness of ecological and human health.
President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act into law in 1970, requiring environmental impact statements for any project directed or funded by the federal government. He also created the Environmental Protection Agency, the first agency charged with studying, regulating, and disseminating knowledge about the environment.
The Second Vatican Council, called by Pope John XXIII to modernize the church and bring it in closer dialogue with the non-Catholic world, operated from 1962 to 1965.
Conclusion
In 1969, Americans hailed the moon landing as a profound victory in the space race against the Soviet Union.
The Vietnam War disillusioned a generation, riots rocked cities, protests hit campuses, and assassinations robbed the nation of many of its leaders.
The forward-thinking spirit of a complex decade had waned.