THE KENNEDY PRESIDENCY, 1960-1963

John F. Kennedy personified the self-confident liberal who believed that an activist state could
improve life at home and confront the Communist challenge abroad. Esteemed as a war hero, John
Kennedy used his charm and his fathers connections to win election to the House of Representatives in
1946. Despite the obstacle of his Roman Catholic faith, the popular Kennedy won a first-ballot victory
at the 1960 Democratic convention. He sounded the theme of a New Frontier to get America
moving again by liberal activism at home and abroad.

A New Beginning

Most voters, middle aged and middle class, wanted the stability and continuation
of Eisenhowers middle way.Although scorned by liberals for his McCarthyism, Nixon was
better known and more experienced than Kennedy, and a Protestant. Nixon fumbled his
opportunity, agreeing to meet his challenger in televised debates. More than 70 million
tuned in to the first televised debate between presidential candidates. The telegenic
Democrat radiated confidence; Nixon, sweating visibly, appeared insecure. Kennedys
religion cost him millions of popular votes, but his capture of 80 percent of the Catholic
vote in the closely contested midwestern and northeastern states delivered crucial
electoral college votes, enabling him to squeak to victory. Kennedys inauguration set the
tone of a new era. He surrounded himself with liberal intellectuals; and seemed more a
celebrity than a politician. The public knew nothing of his fragile health, frequent use of mood-
altering drugs to alleviate pain, and extramartial affairs.

Kennedy's Domestic Record

The Kennedy years saw little significant social legislation. Lacking the necessary votes,
JFK rarely passed Congress. JFK made economic growth the key to his liberal agenda. To
stimulate the economy, he combined higher defense expenditures with investment
incentives for private enterprise. In 1961 he persuaded Congress to boost the defense
budget by 20 percent. He vastly increased Americas nuclear stockpile, strengthened the
militarys conventional forces, and established the Special Forces (Green Berets) to
engage in guerrilla warfare. To further boost the economy as well as avoid another
Sputnik, Kennedy also persuaded Congress to finance a race to the moon. The effort to
land astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface in 1969 would cost
more than $25 billion. Most importantly, to pay for the federal aid to education, medical
care for the elderly. He called for a huge cut in corporate taxes. Economic growth,
accordingly, was the way for the government to create a better life for all Americans.
When the Kennedy presidency ended suddenly in November 1963, the proposed
tax cut was bottled up in Congress. Military spending, continued technological innovation,
heightened productivity, and low-cost energy, however, had already doubled the 1960
rate of economic growth, decreased unemployment, and held increases in inflation to
1.3 percent a year. The United States was in the midst of its longest uninterrupted
boom ever. The boom would cause further ecological damage. Postwar prosperity made
large numbers of Americans less concerned with increased production and more
concerned with the quality of life.
Kennedy appointed an advisory committee that warned against widespread
pesticide use. In 1963 Congress passed a Clean Air Act, regulating automotive and
industrial emissions.

Cold War Activism

Kennedy launched a major buildup of the military arsenal, made foreign policy his top
priority, and surrounded himself with Cold Warriors who shared his belief that American
security depended on superior force and the willingness to use it. At the same time, he
gained congressional backing for liberal programs of economic assistance to Third World
countries to counter the appeal of communism. The Peace Corps, created in 1961,
exemplified the New Frontiers liberal anticommunism. By 1963 five thousand Peace
Corps volunteers were serving two-year stints as teachers, sanitation engineers, crop
specialists, and health workers in more than forty Third World nations.

Spring 1961 brought Kennedys first major foreign- policy crisis. To eliminate a
communist outpost on Americas doorstep, he approved a CIA plan for anti-Castro exiles,
La Brigada, to invade Cuba. In mid-April fifteen hundred exiles stormed Cubas Bay of
Pigs, assuming that their arrival would trigger a general uprising to overthrow Fidel
Castro. It was a fiasco, the invaders had no chance against Castros superior forces. In July
1961, on the heels of the Bay of Pigs failure, Kennedy met Soviet premier Nikita
Khrushchev in Vienna to try to resolve a peace treaty with Germany. Khrushchev
threatened war unless the West retreated. A shaken Kennedy returned to the United
States and declared the defense of West Berlin essential to the Free World. He doubled
draft calls, mobilized 150,000 reservists, and requested an additional $3 billion defense
appropriation. The threat of nuclear war escalated until mid-August, when the Soviets
constructed a wall to seal off East Berlin and end the exodus of brains and talent to the
West. The Berlin Wall became a concrete symbol of communisms denial of personal
freedom until it fell in 1989.

To the Brink of Nuclear War

In mid-October 1962 aerial photographs revealed that the Soviet Union had built
bases for intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) in Cuba, which could reach U.S.
targets as far as twenty-two hundred miles away. Kennedy responded forcefully. More
than ever before, the two super- powers appeared on a collision course toward nuclear
war. Americans stayed glued to their radios and television sets as 180 U.S. naval ships in
the Caribbean prepared to confront the Soviet freighters. The Cuba-bound Soviet ships
stopped dead in the water, and Kennedy received a message from Khrushchev insisting
that American missiles be withdrawn from Turkey as part of the deal. Hours later an
American U plane was shot down over Cuba.
The president decided to ignore the Soviet message and accept the original offer. That
night, October 27, the presidents brother met secretly with the Soviet ambassador to
inform him that this was the only way to avoid nuclear war. The next morning Khrushchev
pledged to remove the missiles in return for Kennedys noninvasion promise. Less publicly,
Kennedy subsequently removed U.S. missiles from Turkey. The full dimensions of the crisis
became known only after the end of the Cold War, when the Russian military disclosed that
Soviet forces in Cuba had possessed thirty-six nuclear warheads as well as nine tactical
nuclear weapons for battlefield use.
They agreed to install a Kremlin-White House hot line so that the two sides could
communicate instantly in future crises. In June 1963 JFK advocated a relaxation of
superpower tensions, and two months later the two nations agreed to a treaty outlawing
atmospheric and undersea nuclear testing. These efforts signaled a new phase of the Cold
War, later called dtente, in which the superpowers moved from confrontation to
negotiation.

The Thousand-Day Presidency

On November 22, 1963, during a trip to Texas to improve his chances for victory in the 1964
presidential election, John and Jackie Kennedy rode in an open car along Dallas streets,
smiling at the cheering crowds. As the motorcade slowed to turn, shots rang out. The
president slumped, his skull and throat shattered. Secret Service agents rushed Lyndon
Johnson to Air Force One to be sworn in as president. The assassination made a martyr
of JFK. Lee H. Oswals was an accused assassin.
Internationally, Kennedy left a mixed record. His rethoric expressed new liberalism, but
he rarely made liberal ideas as a reality.

LIBERALISM ASCENDANT, 1963-1968

Johnson Takes Over

Johnson declared unconditional war on poverty in America. Unaided or only minimanlly

assisted by a social-welfare bureaucracy, about 40 million lived with little hope in a culture of
poverty. They lacked the education, medical care, and employment opportunities that
most Americans took for granted. LBJ proposed an array of training programs and
support services to bring these internal exiles into the mainstream. The Economic
Opportunity Act (1964) established the Office of Economic Opportunity to wage
unconditional war on poverty. Its arsenal of antipoverty programs included: the Job
Corps to train young people in marketable skills; a domestic peace corps, VISTA ( Volunteers
in Service to America); Project Head Start to provide free compensatory education for
preschoolers from disadvantaged families; the Community Action Program to encourage
the maximum feasible participation of the poor in decisions that affected them; and
public-works and training programs.

The 1964 Election

LBJ won a landslide victory with 43 million votes to Goldwaters 27 million.

Triumphant Liberalism

Johnson flooded Congress with liberal proposalssixty-three of them in 1965 alone. He

got most of what he requested.
The Eighty-ninth Congressthe Congressof Fulfillment enlarged the war on
poverty. It enacted a Medicare program poviding health insurance for the aged
under social security, and a Medicaid health plan for the poor. By 1975 the two
programs would be serving 47 million people at a cost of $28 billion. Legislators
appropriated funds for public education and housing, for redevelopment aid to
Appalachia, and for revitalizing inner-city neighborhoods. They also created new
departments of transportation and of housing and urban development, and the
National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities. Of enormous future
significance, Congress enacted a new immigration law, abolishing the national-
origins quotas of the 1920s. In those five years the population of Chinese,
Koreans, and Filipinos in the United States more than doubled, and twenty years
after the act the number of Asian-Americans had risen from 1 million to 5 million.
In 1964 Congress passed the National Wilderness Preservation Act, setting aside
9.1 million acres of wilderness. It then established the Redwood National Park
and defeated efforts to dam the Colorado River and flood the lower Grand Canyon;
strengthened the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts; protected endangered species;
preserved scenic rivers; and lessened the number of junkyards and billboards.
Congress set the first federal safety standards for auto- mobiles (National Traffic
and Motor Vehicle Safety Act) and required states to establish highway safety
pro- grams (Highway Safety Act).

The Great Society increased opportunity and improved the lives of millions. The
proportion of the poor in the population dropped from 22 percent in 1960 to 13
percent in 1969; infant mortality declined by a third; Head Start reached more than 2
million poor children; and African-American family income rose from 54 percent to 61
percent of white family income. The per- centage of blacks living below the poverty
plummeted from 40 percent to 20 percent.
For many in need, the Great Society remained more a dream than a reality.

The Warren Court in the Sixties

No branch of the federal government did more to support and promote the liberal
agenda than the Supreme Court. A liberal majority on the court, led by Chief Justice
Earl Warren, acted to expand individual rights to a greater extent than ever before in
American history. Kennedys appointment of two liberals to the Court, would result in
rulings that changed the lives of Americans for decades to come.
The Court prohibited Bible reading and prayer in public schoools, limited local power to censor
books and films, and overturned state bans on centraceptives. In Baker v. Carr and related decisions,
the Court ruled that one person, one vote must prevail in both state and national
elections. Criticism of the Supreme Court reached a climax in 1966 when it ruled in
Miranda v. Arizona that police must warn all suspects that anything they say can be used
against them in court and that they can choose to remain silent.

THE STRUGGLE FOR BLACK EQUALITY, 1691-1968

The president balanced his appointment of an unprecedented number of African-

Americans to federal jobs with the nomination of white racists to judgeships.

Nonviolence and Violence

In spring 1961 the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an interracial protest group
founded in 1942, organized a freedom ride through the Deep South. It was designed to
dramatize the widespread violation of a 1960 Supreme Court decision outlawing
segregation in interstate transportation. When the freedom riders were savagely
beaten in Anniston, Alabama, and their bus burned, and when they were mauled by a
white mob in Birmingham, the freedom rides became front-page news. Not until after scores
more freedom rides and the arrest of over three hundred protesters did the president
press the Interstate Commerce Commission to enforce the Supreme Courts ruling.
Clearly, only crisis, not moral responsibility, forced Kennedy to act.
Many of the freedom riders were members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC), formed in April 1960 by participants in the sit-ins. SNCC stressed both the
nonviolent civil disobedience strategy of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the need to
stimulate local, grass-roots activism and leadership. In fall 1961 it chose Albany, Georgia, as
the site of a campaign to desegregate public facilities.
An angry mob rioted in fall 1962 when a federal court ordered the University of
Mississippi to enroll James Meredith, a black air force veteran. The clash left two dead,
hundreds injured.

The African-American Revolution

Civil-rights leaders realized that it would take decades to dismantle segregation; the only
practical remedy would be comprehensive national legislation, backed by the power of the
federal government, guaranteeing full citizenship for African-Americans. To get this they
needed a crisis that would outrage the conscience of the white majority and force
Kennedys hand.
Determined to provoke a confrontation that would expose the violent extremism of
southern white racism, King and his advisers selected Birmingham as the stage for the next
act in the civil-rights drama. Past violence by whites against civil-rights protestors had
earned the city the nick- name Bombingham, and the black neighborhood,
Dynamite Hill.
In early April 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr., initiated a series of marches, sit-ins, and pray-
ins that violated local laws and filled the jails with protestors. While imprisoned, King
penned his eloquent Letter from the Birmingham Jail, detailing the humiliations of racial
discrimination and segregation and defending civil disobedience. In May thousands of
schoolchildren, some only six years old, joined Kings crusade.
 The combination of mounting white support for equal rights and African- American
activism pushed Kennedy to arrange a settlement that ended the demonstrations in
return for the desegregation of Birminghams stores and the upgrading of black workers.
By mid-1963 the rallying cry Freedom Now! reverberated through the land. On June 11
the president went on television to define civil rights as a moral issue A week later
Kennedy proposed the most comprehensive civil-rights measure in American history,
outlawing segregation in public facilities and authorizing the federal government to
withhold funds from programs that discriminated. Although House lib- erals moved to
toughen Kennedys proposal, most mem- bers of Congress did not heed the presidents
plea. To compel Congress to act, African Americans gathered in force in the Capitol.

The March on Washington, 1963

The idea for a March on Washington had originally been proposed by A. Philip Randolph in
1941 to protest discrimination against blacks in the defense mobilization . Twenty-two
years later, Randolph revived the idea and convinced the major civil-rights leaders to
support it.
A quarter of a million people, including some fifty thousand whites, converged on
Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963. It was the largest political assembly to date. After a
long, sweltering day of speeches and songs, Martin Luther King, Jr., took the podium
and held speech about his dream of a day when the sons of former slaves and the sons
of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood...
Kings eloquence that day did not speed the progress of the civil-rights bill through
Congress. It did not end racism or erase poverty and despair.
In 1963 Kings oratory did not quell the rage of the bitterest opponents of civil rights.
Medgar Evers, the head of the Mississippi branch of the NAACP, was murdered by a sniper
in Jackson, Mississippi. In September the Ku Klux Klan bombing of a black church in Bir-
mingham killed four girls attending Sunday School.

The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act

The most significant civil-rights law in U.S. history, the 1964 act banned racial
discrimination and segregation in public accommodations. It also outlawed bias in
federally funded programs; granted the federal government new powers to fight school
segregation; and forbade discrimination in employment, creating the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to enforce the ban on job discrimination by race, religion,
national origin, or sex.
The Civil Rights Act did not address the right to vote in state and local elections. So CORE
and SNCC activists, believing that the ballot box was the key to power for African
Americans in the South, mounted a major campaign to register black voters. They
organized the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964 to focus on the most racially
divided state in the Union, where African Americans constituted 42 percent of the
popula- tion but only 5 percent of the registered voters. About a thousand white
students, from nearly two hundred col- leges and universities, volunteered to help register
black voters and to teach the practices of democracy and black history in Freedom
Schools. Harassed by Mississippi law-enforcement officials and Ku Klux Klansmen, the
activists endured the firebombing of black churches and civil-rights headquarters, as well as
arrests. The civil-rights workers enrolled nearly sixty thousand disfranchised blacks in the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). In August 1964 they took their case to the
national Democratic convention. They insisted that since the MFDP was the only freely
elected party in Mississippi. Johnson forged a compromise that offered two at-large seats
to the MFDP and barred delegations from states that disfranchised blacks from all future
con- ventions. The compromise angered southern segregationists and alienated the
militants in the civil-rights movement. Within SNCC, the failure of the liberals to support
seating the MFDP delegates proved to be a turning point in their disillusionment with the
Democratic party and liberals.
Still, most blacks shared the optimism of Martin Luther King, Jr., and other
mainstream civil-rights leaders, and over 90 percent of African-American voters cast their
ballots for Democrats in 1964, leaving Johnson and the liberals in firm control. Determined
to win a strong voting-rights law, the SCLC organized mass protests in Selma, Alabama,
in March 1965. Blacks were half the population of Dallas County, where Selma was located,
yet only 1 percent were registered to vote. Showcased on TV, the attacks increased support
for a voting-rights bill. But not till SCLC and other activists sought to march from Selma to
Montgomery, to petition Governor George Wallace, and were clubbed and tear-gassed by
lawmen did they provoke national outrage. Many thousands marched in sympathy in
northern cities. Johnson grasped the mood of the country and delivered a televised address
urging Congress to pass a voting-rights bill.
Signed by the president in August 1965, the Voting Rights Act invalidated the use of any
test or device to deny the vote and authorized federal examiners to register voters
in states that had disfranchised blacks. The law dramatically expanded black suffrage,
boosting the number of registered black voters in the South from 1 million in 1964 to 3.1
million in 1968, and transformed southern politics

Fire in the Streets

On August 11, 1965, five days after signing the Voting Rights Act, a confrontation
between white polisce and young blacks in Watts, the largest black district in Los Angeles. For
six days nearly fifty thousand blacks looted shops, firebombed white-owned busi- nesses,
and sniped at police officers and fire fighters.
In the summer of 1966 more than a score of ghetto outbreaks erupted in northern
cities.
The following summer, black rage at oppressive conditions and impatience with
liberal change erupted in 150 racial skirmishes and 40 riotsthe most intense and
destructive period of racial violence in U.S. history. In Newark, New Jersey, twenty-seven
people died and more than eleven hundred were injured. The following week, Detroit
went up in smoke. As the fires spread, so did the looting. Children joined adults in racing
from store to store to fill their arms with liquor and jewelry; cars pulled up to businesses
so they could be stocked with appli- ances. By the time the Michigan National Guard and
U.S. army paratroopers quelled the riot, forty-three people had died, two thousand were
injured, and seven thousand arrested.
 Then in 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. black uprisings
flared in the ghettos of a hundred cities. Overall, the 19641968 riot toll would include some
two hundred dead, seven thousand injured, forty thousand arrested, at least $500 million
in property destroyed, and Kings beloved community ashes in the fires.
The admin- istrations National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (known as the
Kerner Commission) indicted white racism for fostering an explosive mixture of
poverty, slum housing, poor education, and police brutality in Americas cities.

Black Power

Less an ideology than a cry of fury and frustration, Black Power owed much to the
teachings of Malcolm X. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925, the son of a preacher active in
the Garvey movement, Malcolm Little pimped and sold drugs before being arrested and
jailed in 1946. In prison he converted to the Nation of Islam (NOI), the Black Muslim group
founded by Wallace Fard and led by Elijah Muhammad (Elijah Poole). Released in 1952
and renamed Malcolm X, a symbolic repudiation of the white mans name, he quickly
became the Black Mus- lims most dynamic street orator and recruiter.
Malcolm X insisted that blacks wake up, clean up, and stand up to achieve true
independence. He urged blacks to be proud of their blackness and their African roots. He
wanted them to see themselves with their own eyes not the white mans, and to
separate themselves from the white devil. Critical of civil-rights leaders like Kingjust a
twentieth-century Uncle Tomfor emphasizing desegregation instead of building black
institutions, he insisted that blacks seize their free- dom by any means necessary.
Malcolm X was assassi- nated by three gunmen affiliated with the NOI. He was not
silenced. His account of his life and beliefs, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
became the main text of the rising Black Power movement. Two days after winning the
world heavyweight championship in 1964, boxer Cassius Clay shocked the sports world by
announcing his conversion to the NOI and his new name, Muhammad Ali.
Ali was found guilty of draft evasion, stripped of his title, and exiled from boxing for
three and a half years during his athletic prime. Inspired by the examples of Ali and
Malcolm X, young African Americansmore insistent than their parents on immediate
change and less willing to endure discriminationabandoned civil disobedi- ence and
reformist strategies. In 1966 CORE and SNCC changed from interracial organizations
committed to achieving integration nonviolently to all-black groups advocating racial
separatism and Black Power by any means necessary.
The most notorious champion of self-determination for African-American
communities was the Black Panther party. Founded in Oakland, California, in 1966 by Huey
P. Newton and Bobby Seale, it urged black men to become pantherssmiling, cunning,
scientific, striking by night and sparing no one. Although the Panthers also founded
schools and engaged in peaceful community activism, they were mostly known for their
shootouts with the police.
Black Power exerted a significant influence. It helped organize scores of community self-
help groups and institutions that did not depend on whites. It was used to establish
black studies programs at colleges, to mobilize black voters to elect black candidates, and
to encourage greater racial pride and self-esteem. African-Americans rejected skin
bleach- es and hair straighteners, gave their children African names and Kwanzaa gifts
instead of Christmas presents, and gloried in soul music.

VOICES OF PROTEST

The aura of liberalism in the 1960s markedly affected Native Americans, Hispanic-Americans, and
women.

Native American Activism

In 1961 representatives of sixty-seven tribes drew up a Declaration of Purposes criticizing the

termination policy of the 1950s. In 1964 hundreds of Indians lobbied in Washington for the inclusion of
Native Americans in the War on Poverty. Indians suffered the worst poverty, the most inadequate
housing, the highest disease and death rates, and the least access to education of any group in the
United States. President Johnson responded by establishing the National Council on Indian
Opportunity in 1965. It funneled more federal funds onto reservations than any previous program.
Johnson also appointed the first Native American to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) since 1870.

He rejected the termination policy and advocated Indian self-determination. By 1968 younger
Indian activists, calling themselves Native Americans, demanded Red Power. They voiced
dissatisfaction with the accommodationist approach of their elders, the lack of protection for Indian
land and water rights, the desecration of Indian graves and sacred sites, and legal prohibitions against
certain Indian religious practices. They mocked Columbus Day and staged sit-ins against museums that
housed Indian bones. They established reservation cultural programs to reawaken spiritual beliefs and
teach Native languages. The Wampanoag in Massachusetts named Thanksgiving a National Day of
Mourning; the Navajo and Hopi protested strip-mining in the Southwest, etc.

The most militant group, the American Indian Movement (AIM), was founded in 1968 by
Chippewas, Sioux, and Ojibwa from the northern Plains. Its goals were to protect the traditional ways
of Native Americans, prevent police harassment of Indians in urban red ghettos, and establish
survival schools to teach Indian history and values. In late 1969 AIM occupied Alcatraz Island. An
armed AIM contingent held the island for nineteen months before being dispersed. AIMs militancy
aroused other Native-Americans to be proud of their heritage. Many of the eight hundred thousand
who identified themselves as Indians in the 1970 census did so for the first time.

Hispanic-Americans Organize

The Mexican American Political Association and other organizations had been able to do little
to ameliorate the dismal existence of most of the five million Hispanic-Americans. With a median
annual wage half the poverty level, with 40 percent of MexicanAmerican adults functionally illiterate,
and with de facto segregation common throughout the Southwest, Latinos like Csar Chvez turned to
the more militant tactics and strategies of the civil-rights movement. Chvez grew up a migrant farm
worker, joined the U.S. navy in World War II, and then devoted himself to gaining union recognition and
improved working conditions for the mostly MexicanAmerican farm laborers in California.

Chvez led his followers in the Delano vineyards of the San Joaquin valley to strike in 1965.
Chvez and United Farm Worker (UFW) cofounder Dolores Huerta organized consumer boycotts of
table grapes to dramatize the farm workers struggle. For the first time, farm workers gained the right
to unionize to secure better wages. Chvez combined religion, labor militancy, and Mexican heritage to
stimulate ethnic pride and politicization.

Also in the mid-1960s young Hispanic activists began using the formerly pejorative terms
Chicanoand Chicanato express a militant sense of collective identity and solidarity for all those of
Mexican and Latin American descent. They insisted on a self-selected designation to highlight their
insistence on self-determination. They led Chicano high school students in Los Angeles, Denver, and
San Antonio in boycotts of classes (called blowouts) in 1968 to demand bilingual education and more
Latino teachers, and demonstrated at their own colleges these ideas. At the inaugural Chicano Youth
Liberation Conference in 1969 they adopted El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan, a manifesto of cultural and
political nationalism, and, on September 16, Mexican Independence Day, they led high school students
in the First National Chicano Boycott of schools throughout the Southwest.

Similar zeal led poet Rodolfo Corky Gonzales to found the Crusade for Justice in Colorado to
fight police brutality and improve job opportunities for Chicanos. It led Reies Lopez Tijerina to form the
Alianza Federal de Mercedesin New Mexico to reclaim land usurped by whites in the 1848 Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo. It also led Jose Angel Gutierrez and others in Texas to create an alternative political
party in 1967, La Raza Unida. David Sanchez organized the paramilitary Brown Berets in East Los
Angeles. Puerto Ricans in New York City founded the Young Lords, which they modeled on the Brown
Berets. Among the rest, they started drug treatment programs, and hijacked ambulances and occupied
a hospital to demand better medical services in the South Bronx.

Like their counterparts, young activists rejected the term Orientalin favor of Asian-American, to
signify a new ethnic consciousness among people with roots in the Far East. Formed at the University
of California in 1968, the Asian American Political Alliance encouraged Asian-American students to
claim their own cultural identity and to protest against the U.S. war in Vietnam. As did other ethnic
groups, Asian-American students marched, sat-in, and went on strike to promote causes emphasizing
their identity.

A Second Feminist Wave

A revived feminist movement emerged. Several events fanned the embers of discontent into
flames. John Kennedy, who exploited women in fleeting sexual encounters before and after his
marriage, established the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. Its 1963 report
documented that women received less pay than men for comparable work; they had less chance of
moving into professional or managerial careers; only 7 percent of doctors were women, and less than 4
percent of lawyers.

Dismayed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commissions reluctance to enforce the ban
on sex discrimination in employment, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Aileen Hernandez, and others
formed the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966. A civil-rights group for women, NOW
sought liberal change through the political system. It lobbied for equal opportunity, filed lawsuits
against gender discrimination, and mobilized public opinion against the sexism then pervasive in
America. NOWs prominence owed much to the publication of Betty Friedans The Feminine Mystique
(1963). Friedan deplored the narrow view that women should seek fulfillment solely as wives and
mothers. Suburban domesticitythe velvet ghetto left many women with feelings of emptiness.
Friedan wanted women to pursue careers.
 Still another catalyst for feminism came from the involvement of younger women in the civil-
rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. These activists had gained confidence in their own potential.
Their activism made them conscious of their own second-class status, as they were sexually exploited
and relegated to menial jobs by male activists. In 1965 civil-rights activists Mary King and Casey
Hayden drew a parallel between treatment of Negroes and treatment of women in our society as a
whole.

Assumptions of male superiority are as widespread

and deep-rooted and every much as crippling to
the woman as the assumptions of white supremacy
are to the Negro...
By 1967 they had created a womens liberation movement more critical of sexual inequality
thanwas the liberal NOW.

Womens Liberation

Militant feminists in 1968 adopted the technique of consciousness-raising as a recruitment

device and a means of transforming womens perceptions of themselves and society. Tens of thousands
of women assembled in small groups to share experiences and air grievances. Women learned to
regard their personal, individual problems as shared problems with social causes and political
solutions. They came to understand the power dynamics in marriage, the family, and the workplace.
This new consciousness begot a commitment to end sexism and a sense that sisterhood is powerful.

Womens liberation groups sprang up across the nation. In 1968 radical feminists crowned a
sheep Miss America to dramatize that such contests degraded women. They established health
collectives and shelters for abused women, created daycare centers and rape crisis centers, founded
abortion counseling services and womens studies programs. They demanded equality in education and
the workplace. Some feminists claimed patriarchy, the power of men, to be the main cause of all
oppressions and exploitations.

Despite a gulf between radicals and liberals, the quarreling factions set aside their differences
in August 1970 to join in the largest womens rights demonstration ever. Commemorating the fiftieth
anniversary of woman suffrage, the Womens Strike for Equality brought out tens of thousands of
women nationwide to parade for the right to equal employment and safe, legal abortions. By then the
womens movement had already pressured many financial institutions to issue credit to single women
and to married women in their own names. It had filed suit against hundreds of colleges and
universities to secure salary raises for women faculty members.

By 1970 more than 40 percent of all women held full-time jobs outside the home. In 1960 the
Pill came on the market, giving women greater freedom to be sexually active without the risk of
pregnancy. Many women, aware of the dangers of illegal abortions, pushed for their legalization.
Others explored alternatives to hospital births and popularized alternatives to radical mastectomy for
breast cancer. Women had become aware that they belong to a subordinate group; that they have
suffered wrongs as a group; that their condition of subordination is not natural, but societally
determined.
 THE LIBERAL CRUSADE IN VIETNAM, 19611968

The activist liberals who boldly tried to end poverty and uplift the downtrodden also went to
war on the other side of the globe to contain communism and export liberty, democracy, and self-
determination. The war in Vietnam pursued by liberals ended the era of liberalism.

Kennedy and Vietnam

President Kennedy ordered massive shipments of weaponry to South Vietnam and increased
the number of American forces stationed there from less than seven hundred in 1960 to more than
sixteen thousand by the end of 1963. JFK refused to stand by and let Vietnam go communist. Kennedy
viewed international communism as a monolithic force, a single global enemy controlled by Moscow
and Beijing.

To counter the success of the National Liberation Front (NLF), or Vietcong, in the countryside,
the United States uprooted Vietnamese peasants and moved them into fortified villages, or strategic
hamlets. But South Vietnamese president Diem rejected American pressure to gain popular support
through liberal reform measures, instead crushing demonstrations by students and Buddhists.
Frustrated American policy makers concluded that only a new government could prevent a Vietcong
victory. They secretly backed the efforts of Vietnamese army officers planning Diems overthrow. On
November 1 the military leaders captured Diem and his brother, and shot them. The United States
promptly recognized the new government, but it too made little headway against the Vietcong.

JFK would either have to increase the combat involvement of American forces or withdraw and
seek a negotiated settlement. What Kennedy would have done remains unknown. Less than a month
after Diems death, President Kennedy himself fell to an assassins bullet. However, virtually all his
liberal advisers, moreover, held that an American victory in Vietnam was essential to check the advance
of communism in Asia. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk would counsel Kennedys successor accordingly.

Escalation of the War

Now it was Johnson who had to choose between intervening decisively or withdrawing from
Vietnam. Privately, LBJ feared that an all-out American military effort might provoke Chinese or Soviet
entry and lead to World War III. Yet Johnson did not want the United States to appear weak. Only
American strength and resolve, he believed, would prevent a wider war. Trapped between
unacceptable alternatives, Johnson widened Americas limited war, hoping that U.S. firepower would
force Ho Chi Minh to the bargaining table. But the North Vietnamese and NLF calculated that they
could gain more by outlasting the United States than by negotiating. So the war ground on.

In February 1964 Johnson ordered the Pentagon to prepare for air strikes against North
Vietnam. In July the president appointed General Maxwell Taylor, a proponent of greater American
involvement in the war, as ambassador to Saigon. In early August North Vietnamese patrol boats
allegedly clashed with two American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. Johnson condemned the attacks
as unprovoked, never admitting that the U.S. ships had been aiding the South Vietnamese in secret
raids against North Vietnam. He ordered air strikes on North Vietnamese naval bases .Congress
authorized him to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the
United States and to prevent further aggression. The Senate passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution 88
to 2, and the House 416 to 0, assured by the president that this meant no extension of the present
conflict.

The resolution created an eventual credibility problem for Johnson, allowing opponents of the
war to charge that he had misled Congress and lied to the American people. Thus, at the height of LBJs
popularity and power, his political downfall began.

The Endless War

Early in 1965 Johnson ordered Operation Rolling Thunder, the sustained bombing of North
Vietnam. It accomplished none of its purposes. So LBJ escalated Americas air war. Between 1965 and
1968 the U.S. dropped eight hundred tons of bombs a day on North Vietnam. Unable to turn the tide
by bombing, Johnson committed U.S. combat troops to Vietnam. They pursued a meat-grinder or
attrition strategy, trying to force the communists to the peace table by inflicting unacceptable losses on
them. But superiority in numbers and weaponry did not defeat an enemy that could choose when and
where to attack and then melt back into the jungle. Hanoi matched each American troop increase with
its own. No end was in sight.

Doves Versus Hawks

First on college campuses and then in the wider society, a growing number of Americans began
to oppose the war. Some twenty-five thousand people, mainly students, attended a rally in Washington
that spring to demonstrate against the escalation. In 1966 large-scale campus protests against the war
erupted. Students angrily demonstrated against the draft and against university research for the
Pentagon. Intellectuals and clergy joined the chorus of opposition to the war. In 1967 prominent critics
of the war, including Democratic Senators William Fulbright, Robert Kennedy, and George McGovern,
pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, and Martin Luther King, Jr., spurred hundreds of thousands to
participate in antiwar protests. Critics also noted that the wars toll fell most heavily on the poor. About
80 percent of the enlisted men who fought in Vietnam came from poor and working-class families.

TV coverage of the war further eroded support. Scenes of children maimed by U.S. bombs and
of dying Americans, laid bare the horror of the war and undercut the optimistic reports of government
officials. They saw American troops, supposedly winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese,
burn their villages and desecrate their burial grounds. Yet most Americans still either supported the
war or remained undecided. They were not prepared to accept a communist victory over the United
States. Equally disturbing was how polarized the nation had grown. Hawks would accept little short
of total victory, whereas doves insisted on negotiating, not fighting. Civility vanished. A virtual
prisoner in the White House, unable to speak in public without being shouted down, Johnson had
become a casualty of the far-off war. So had an era of hope and liberalism.