Kennedy and Cuba

• Americans were captivated by the 1960 race between Republican vice president Richard Nixon and Democratic senator John F. Kennedy, two candidates who pledged to move the nation forward and invigorate the economy

  • Kennedy promised to use federal programs to strengthen the economy and address pockets of longstanding poverty, while Nixon called for a reliance on private enterprise and a reduction of government spending

• The United States entered the 1960s unaccustomed to stark foreign policy failures, having emerged from World War II as a global superpower before waging a Cold War against the Soviet Union in the 1950s

• In the years after Fidel Castro and his revolutionary army ousted the corrupt Cuban president in 1959, the relationship between Cuba and the United States deteriorated rapidly

  • On October 19, 1960, the United States instituted a near-total trade embargo to economically isolate the Cuban regime, and in January 1961, the two nations broke off formal diplomatic relations

  • The CIA began to recruit members of the exile community to participate in an invasion of the island that would later be known as the Bay of Pigs invasion

    • The invasion failed and the Cuban government’s success helped legitimize the new regime and embarrassed the Kennedy administration

  • As the political relationship between Cuba and the United States disintegrated, the Castro government became more closely aligned with the Soviet Union, leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis

Cuban Missile Crisis

• The Cuban Missile Crisis was perhaps the most dramatic foreign policy crisis in the history of the United States

• In 1962, in response to the United States’ long time maintenance of a nuclear arsenal in Turkey and at the invitation of the Cuban government, the Soviet Union deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba

• On October 14, 1962, American spy planes detected the construction of missile launch sites, and on October 22, President Kennedy addressed the American people to alert them to the threat

• Over the course of the next several days, the world watched in horror as the United States and the Soviet Union hovered on the brink of nuclear war until, on October 28, the Soviet Union agreed to remove its missiles from Cuba

  • This was 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, and the crisis was resolved peacefully

The Civil Rights Movement Continues

• In the 1960s, a new student movement arose whose members wanted swifter changes in the segregated South. Confrontational protests, marches, boycotts, and sit-ins accelerated

  • The tone of the modern U.S. civil rights movement changed at a North Carolina department store in 1960, when four African American students participated in a sit-in at a whites-only lunch counter

  • In the following year, 1961, civil rights advocates attempted a bolder variation of a sit-in when they 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

• As the civil rights movement garnered more followers and more attention, white resistance stiffened

  • In October 1962, James Meredith became the first African American student to enroll at the University of Mississippi and the backlash prompted JFK to send it US Marshals and the National Guard

    • On an evening known infamously as the Battle of Ole Miss, segregationists clashed with troops in the middle of campus, resulting in two deaths and hundreds of injuries

• The following year, 1963, was perhaps the decade’s most eventful year for civil rights

  • In April and May, the SCLC organized the Birmingham Campaign, a broad campaign of direct action aiming to topple segregation in Alabama’s largest city

    • Activists used business boycotts, sit-ins, and peaceful marches as part of the campaign

    • SCLC leader Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed, prompting his famous handwritten letter urging not only his nonviolent approach but active confrontation to directly challenge injustice, which added to his national reputation

• Few political figures in the decade embodied the working-class, conservative views held by millions of white Americans quite like governor George Wallace (AL)

  • Just as the civil rights movement began to gain unprecedented strength, Wallace became the champion of the many white southerners opposed to the movement

  • In June 1963, just five months after becoming governor, in his “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door,” Wallace famously stood in the door of Foster Auditorium to protest integration at the University of Alabama

• In August 1963, civil rights leaders organized the March on Washington

  • The march called for:

    • Civil rights legislation

    • School integration

    • An end to discrimination by public and private employers

    • Job training for the unemployed

    • A raise in the minimum wage

  • On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, an internationally renowned call for civil rights that raised the movement’s profile to new heights and put unprecedented pressure on politicians to pass meaningful civil rights legislation

• Then, on November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas

  • Vice President Lyndon Johnson lacked Kennedy’s youth, his charisma, his popularity, and his aristocratic upbringing, but no one knew Washington better and no one before or since fought harder and more successfully to pass meaningful civil rights legislation

    • He took Kennedy’s stalled civil rights bill, ensured that it would have teeth, and navigated it through Congress

  • He signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which widely considered to be among the most important pieces of civil rights legislation in American history

    • The comprehensive act barred segregation in public accommodations and outlawed discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, and national or religious origin

• 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 with batons and tear gas

  • After they were turned away violently a second time, marchers finally made the fifty-mile trek to the state capitol later in the month

  • 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

• In 1964, President Johnson laid out a sweeping vision for a package of domestic reforms known as the Great Society

  • At its heart the Great Society would uplift racially and economically disfranchised Americans, too long denied access to federal guarantees of equal democratic and economic opportunity, while simultaneously raising all Americans’ standards and quality of life

  • Many of its programs and agencies are still with us today

    • 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 (or the Hart-Celler Act) abolished the quota regime established by the 1924 Reed-Johnson Act

    • 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

    • The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities were also established

• In the years immediately following this flurry of legislative activity, the national conversation surrounding Johnson’s domestic agenda largely focused on the $3 billion spent on War on Poverty programming within the Great Society’s Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) of 1964

  • Critics from the right lambasted federal spending for “unworthy” citizens

• Johnson had secured a series of meaningful civil rights laws, but then things began to stall

  • Waves of race riots rocked American cities every summer

  • The phenomenon of “white flight” (when whites in metropolitan areas fled city centers for the suburbs) often resulted in resegregated residential patterns

• 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 Soviet Union backed many nationalist movements across the globe, but the United States feared the expansion of communist influence and pledged to confront any revolutions aligned against Western capitalism

  • 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

• Between 1946 and 1954, France fought a counterinsurgency campaign against the nationalist Viet Minh forces led by Ho Chi Minh

  • Initially, the US only supported the French war effort with funds, arms, and advisors but eventually, that was not enough

  • On the eve of the Geneva Peace Conference in 1954, Viet Minh forces defeated the French army at Dien Bien Phu, temporarily dividing Vietnam into two separate states until UN-monitored elections occurred

    • But the United States feared a communist electoral victory and blocked the elections

    • The United States established the Republic of Vietnam, or South Vietnam, with the U.S.-backed Ngo Dinh Diem as prime minister

• In 1964, the USS Maddox reported incoming fire from North Vietnamese ships in the Gulf of Tonkin

  • The Johnson administration used the event to provide a pretext for escalating American involvement in Vietnam

  • 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

  • No matter how many troops the Americans sent or how many bombs they dropped, they could not win

  • Progress was not measured by cities won or territory taken but by body counts and kill ratios

Culture and Activism

• The United States that entered the 1960s looked and sounded little like the one that left it

  • 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

  • The fifties consumer culture still saturated the country, and advertisers continued to appeal to teenagers and the expanding youth market

• Conservative cultural norms were falling everywhere

  • The 1960s ushered in an era of much less restrictive clothing

• In a decade plagued by social and political instability, the American counterculture also sought psychedelic drugs as its remedy for alienation

  • For middle-class white teenagers, society had become stagnant and bureaucratic

    • The New Left, arose on college campuses frustrated with the lifeless bureaucracies that they believed strangled true freedom

  • The popularity of these drugs also spurred a political backlash

• Rock ’n’ roll, liberalized sexuality, an embrace of diversity, recreational drug use, unalloyed idealism, and pure earnestness marked a new generation

  • Criticized by conservatives as culturally dangerous and by leftists as empty narcissism, the youth culture nevertheless dominated headlines and steered American culture

Beyond Civil Rights

• Despite substantial legislative achievements, frustrations with the slow pace of change grew and tensions began to mount

• Many embraced the more militant message of the burgeoning Black Power Movement and Malcolm X, a Nation of Islam (NOI) minister who encouraged African Americans to pursue freedom, equality, and justice by “any means necessary”

  • Prior to his death in 1965, Malcolm X and the NOI emerged as the radical alternative to the racially integrated, largely Protestant approach of Martin Luther King Jr.

  • Malcolm advocated armed resistance in defense of the safety and well-being of Black Americans

• The differences between King and Malcolm X represented a core ideological tension that would inhabit Black political thought throughout the 1960s and 1970s

• After President Johnson refused to take up the cause of the Black delegates in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, SNCC activists became frustrated with institutional tactics and turned away from the organization’s founding principle of nonviolence

• In 1966, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California

  • The Black Panthers became the standard-bearers for direct action and self-defense, using the concept of decolonization in their drive to liberate Black communities from white power structures

• The successes of the civil rights movement and growing grassroots activism inspired countless new movements

  • In the summer of 1961, for instance, frustrated Native American university students founded the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) to draw attention to the plight of Indigenous Americans

  • The Chicano movement in the 1960s emerged out of the broader Mexican American civil rights movement of the post–World War II era

    • The Chicano movement confronted discrimination in schools, politics, agriculture, and other formal and informal institutions against those of Mexican descent

  • 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 end of the decade was marked by the Women’s Strike for Equality, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of women’s right to vote

      • The 1970 protest focused on employment discrimination, political equality, abortion, free childcare, and equality in marriage