I. The
Great Society: Liberalism at High Tide |
|
A. |
John F. Kennedy’s Promise |
|
|
1. |
President
Kennedy practiced what became known as the “new politics,” an approach that
emphasized youthful charisma, style, and personality more than issues and
platforms. His youthful enthusiasm inspired a younger generation and laid the
groundwork for an era of liberal reform. |
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|
2. |
On
November 22, 1963, in
Dallas,
Texas, President Kennedy was
assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald; Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as president. |
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|
3. |
Kennedy’s youthful image, the trauma of his assassination, and the sense that
Americans had been robbed of a promising leader contributed to a powerful
mystique that continues today. |
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B. |
Lyndon B. Johnson and the Liberal Resurgence |
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|
1. |
Lyndon Johnson was
the opposite of Kennedy. A seasoned
Texas
politician and longtime Senate leader, Johnson was most at home in the back
rooms of power. He was a rough-edged character who had scrambled his way up,
without too many scruples, to wealth and political eminence. But he never
forgot his modest, hill-country origins or lost his sympathy for the
downtrodden. |
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|
2. |
Johnson lacked the
Kennedy style, but he capitalized on Kennedy’s assassination, applying his
astonishing energy and negotiating skills to bring to fruition several of
Kennedy’s stalled programs and many more of his own, in the ambitious “Great
Society.” |
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|
3. |
On
assuming the presidency, Johnson promptly pushed for civil rights legislation
as a memorial to his slain predecessor (see Chapter 27). His motives were
complex. As a southerner who had previously opposed civil rights for African
Americans, Johnson wished to prove that he was more than a regional figure—he
would be the president of all the people. |
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4. |
Wherever he acted, Johnson pursued an ambitious goal of putting “an end to
poverty in our time”; the “War on Poverty” expanded long-established social
insurance programs, welfare programs, and public works programs. |
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5. |
The
Office of Economic Opportunity, established by the Economic Opportunity Act of
1964, created programs such as Head Start, the Job Corps, Upward Bound,
Volunteers in Service to America, and the Community Action Program. |
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|
6. |
When
Johnson defeated Republican senator Barry Goldwater for the presidency in 1964,
he won in a landslide, providing a mandate for his administration. |
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7. |
The
Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 authorized $1 billion in federal
funds to benefit impoverished children; the Higher Education Act provided the
first federal scholarships for college students. |
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8. |
Another aspect of public welfare addressed by the Great Society was the
environment; Johnson pressed for expansion of the national parks system,
improvement of the nation’s air and water, and increased land-use planning. |
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|
9. |
Liberal Democrats brought about significant changes in immigration policy with
the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965, which abandoned the quota system of
the 1920s. |
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10. |
By
the end of 1965, the Johnson administration had compiled the most impressive
legislative record of liberal reforms since the New Deal; it had put issues of
poverty, justice, and access at the center of national political life, and it
expanded the federal government’s role in protecting citizens’ welfare. |
|
|
11. |
The
results of the War on Poverty were that the poor were better off in an absolute
sense, but they remained far behind the middle class in a relative sense. The
proportion of Americans living below the poverty line dropped from 20 percent
to 13 percent between 1963 and 1968. |
|
C. |
The Women’s Movement Reborn |
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|
1. |
Feminist
concerns were kept alive in the 1950s and 1960s by working women, who
campaigned for such things as maternity leave and equal pay for equal work. |
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|
2. |
As the
women’s movement grew from influences such as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine
Mystique, it generated an array of women-oriented services and
organizations led by the white middle class, such as the National Organization for Women (
NOW). |
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|
3. |
After the postwar baby boom, women were again having
fewer children, aided by the birth control pill, first marketed in 1960. And as
states liberalized divorce laws, more women were divorcing. |
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|
4. |
Ironically, the calls by white middle-class women for
reform helped to further fracture the fragile New Deal coalition. |
II. The
War in
Vietnam,
1963–1968 |
|
A. |
Escalation under Johnson |
|
|
1. |
When
Johnson became president, he continued and accelerated
U.S.
involvement in
Vietnam
based on the policy of
containing communism. |
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|
2. |
Johnson
in the summer of 1964 heard reports that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had
fired on American destroyers in international waters. |
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|
3. |
On
August 7, 1964, Congress authorized the
Gulf
of
Tonkin Resolution, which allowed
Johnson to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the
forces of the
United States
and to prevent further aggression.” |
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|
4. |
The
Johnson administration moved toward the Americanization of the war with
Operation Rolling Thunder, a protracted bombing campaign that by 1968 had
dropped a million tons of bombs on
North Vietnam. |
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|
5. |
Operation Rolling Thunder intensified the North Vietnamese’s will to fight; the
flow of their troops and supplies continued to the south unabated as the
Communists rebuilt roads and bridges, moved munitions underground, and built
networks of tunnels and shelters. |
|
|
6. |
Simultaneously
with the launch of Operation Rolling Thunder, the
United
States
sent its first ground troops into combat in 1965;
by 1966, more than 380,000 American soldiers were present in
Vietnam; by 1968, more than 536,000 American
soldiers were stationed in
Vietnam. |
|
|
7. |
Hoping
to win a war of attrition, the Johnson administration assumed that American
superiority in personnel and weaponry would ultimately triumph. |
|
B. |
Public Opinion and the War |
|
|
1. |
By
the late 1960s, public opinion began to turn against the war in
Vietnam; television had much to do with these
attitudes as
Vietnam
was the first televised war. |
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|
2. |
Despite glowing statements made on television, by 1967, many administration
officials privately reached a more pessimistic conclusion regarding the war. |
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|
3. |
The
administration was accused of suffering from a “credibility gap”; 1966
televised hearings by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee raised further
questions about
U.S.
policy. |
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|
4. |
Economic developments put Johnson and his advisors even more on the defensive;
the costs of the war became evident as the growing federal deficit nudged the
inflation rate upward, beginning the inflationary spiral that plagued the U.S.
economy throughout the 1970s. |
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|
5. |
After the escalation in the spring of 1965, various antiwar coalitions
organized several mass demonstrations in
Washington;
participants shared a common skepticism about the means and aims of
U.S.
policy and
argued that the war was antithetical to American ideals. |
|
C. |
Rise of the Student Movement |
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|
1. |
Youth were among the key protestors of the era. |
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|
2. |
In
their manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, the Students for a Democratic
Society (
SDS) expressed their
disillusionment with the consumer culture and the gulf between the prosperous
and the poor and rejected Cold War ideology and foreign policy. |
|
|
3. |
The
founders of
SDS referred to
themselves as the “New Left” to distinguish themselves from the “Old Left” of
Communists and socialists of the 1930s and 1940s. |
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|
4. |
At
the
University of
California at
Berkeley,
the Free Speech Movement organized a sit-in in response to administrators’ attempts to ban political activity on campus. |
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|
5. |
Many
protests centered on the draft, especially after the Selective Service system
abolished automatic student deferments in January 1966; in public demonstrations
of civil disobedience, opponents of the war burned their draft cards, closed
down induction centers, and broke into Selective Service offices and destroyed
records. |
|
|
6. |
Much
of the universities’ research budgets came from Defense Department contracts; students
demanded that the Reserve Officer Training Corps be removed from college
campuses. |
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|
7. |
The
Johnson administration had to face the reality of large-scale opposition to the
war. The 1967 Mobilization to End the War brought 100,000 protestors into the
streets of
San Francisco and over 250,000 in
New York. |
|
|
8. |
The
“hippie” symbolized the new counterculture, a youthful movement that glorified
liberation from traditional social strictures. |
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|
9. |
Popular music by Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan expressed political
idealism, protest, and loss of patience with the war and was an important part
of the counterculture. |
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|
10. |
Beatlemania helped to deepen the generational divide and
paved the way for the more rebellious, angrier music of other British groups,
notably the Rolling Stones. |
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|
11. |
Drugs and sex intertwined with music as a crucial element of the youth culture
as celebrated at rock concerts attended by hundreds of thousands of people. |
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|
12. |
In
1967, at the “world’s first Human Be-In” at
San Francisco’s
Golden Gate
Park, Timothy Leary urged gatherers to
“turn on, tune in, and drop out”; 1967 was also the “Summer of Love,” in which
city neighborhoods swelled with young dropouts, drifters, and teenage runaways
dubbed “flower children.” |
|
|
13. |
Many young people stayed out of the counterculture and the antiwar movement,
yet media coverage made it seem that all of
America
’s youth were rejecting
political, social, and cultural norms. |
III. Days of Rage, 1968–1972 |
|
A. |
Blood in the Streets |
|
|
1. |
The
Johnson administration’s hopes for
Vietnam
evaporated when the Viet Cong unleashed a massive assault, known as the Tet
offensive, on major urban areas in
South Vietnam. |
|
|
2. |
The
attack made a mockery of official pronouncements that the
United States
was winning the war and swung public opinion more strongly against the
conflict. |
|
|
3. |
Antiwar Senator
Eugene
J. McCarthy’s strong showing in the presidential primaries reflected profound
public dissatisfaction with the course of the war and propelled Senator Robert
F. Kennedy into the race on an antiwar platform. |
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|
4. |
On
March 31, 1968, Johnson stunned the nation by announcing that he would not seek
reelection; he vowed to devote his remaining months in office to the search for
peace, and peace talks began in May 1968. |
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|
5. |
1968
also witnessed the assassination of Martin Luther King and its ensuing riots;
student occupation of several buildings at
Columbia
University;
a strike by students and labor that toppled the French government; and the
assassination of Robert Kennedy, which shattered the dreams of those hoping for
social change through political action. |
|
|
6. |
The
Democratic Party never fully recovered from Johnson’s withdrawal and Robert
Kennedy’s assassination. |
|
B. |
The Antiwar Movement and the 1968
Election |
|
|
1. |
At
the Democratic Convention, the political divisions generated by the war
consumed the party; outside the convention “yippies”
demonstrated, diverting attention from the more serious and numerous activists
who came to
Chicago
as delegates or volunteers. |
|
|
2. |
The
Democratic mayor of Chicago, Richard J. Daley, called out the police to break
up the demonstrations. In what was later described as a “police riot,”
patrolmen attacked protestors at the convention with mace, tear gas, and clubs
as TV viewers watched, which only cemented a popular impression of the
Democrats as the party of disorder. |
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|
3. |
Democrats dispiritedly nominated Hubert H. Humphrey and approved a platform
that endorsed continued fighting in
Vietnam
while diplomatic means to
an end were explored. |
|
|
4. |
Richard Nixon, after losing the presidential campaign in 1960 and the
California gubernatorial
race in 1962, tapped the increasingly conservative mood of the electorate in an
amazing political comeback, winning the 1968 Republican presidential nomination
and courting the “silent majority” of law-abiding Americans. |
|
|
5. |
George Wallace, a third-party candidate, skillfully combined attacks on liberal
intellectuals and government elites with denunciations of school segregation
and forced busing. |
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|
6. |
Nixon offered a subtler version of Wallace’s populism,
adopting what his advisers called the “southern strategy” of courting
disaffected southern white voters tired of the civil rights agenda of the
Democratic Party. |
|
|
7. |
Nixon received 43.4 percent of the vote to Humphrey’s 42.7 percent, defeating
him by only 510,000 votes out of the 73 million that were cast. The New Deal
coalition of the past thirty years was now broken for the Democratic Party. |
|
C. |
The Nationalist Turn |
|
|
1. |
Vietnam
and the increasingly radical youth rebellion intersected with the turn toward
nationalism by young African American and Chicano activists. |
|
|
2. |
Mexican Americans including Cesar Chavez marched in
Los Angeles in 1970
against the war. |
|
|
3. |
The Black Panther Party and the National Black Antiwar Antidraft League spoke out against the war as well.
Muhammad Ali, the most famous boxer in the world, refused to be inducted in the
army. |
|
D. |
Women’s Liberation |
|
|
1. |
The
late 1960s spawned a new brand of feminism: women’s liberation. |
|
|
2. |
Women’s liberation was loosely structured. The movement
went public by protesting at the Miss America pageant in 1968. |
|
|
3. |
A national Women’s Strike for Equality in August of 1970
brought hundreds of thousands of women into the streets demanding women’s
equality with men. The terms sexism and chauvinism became new words in
American culture. |
|
|
4. |
“Sisterhood” often did not include women of color because
they were more focused on the shared struggle of the civil rights movement. |
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|
5. |
Women’s political mobilization
resulted in significant legislative and administrative gains, such as Title IX
of the 1972 Educational Amendments Act, which prohibited colleges and
universities that received federal funds from discriminating on the basis of
sex. |
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|
6. |
Founded by Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug in 1971, the National
Women’s Political Caucus promoted the election of women to public office. |
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7. |
In 1972,
Congress authorized child-care deductions for working parents; in 1974, the
Equal Credit Opportunity Act improved women’s access to credit. |
|
E. |
Stonewall and Gay Liberation |
|
|
1. |
The
vast majority of gay men and lesbians remained “in the closet.” Homosexuality
was illegal in the vast majority of states—sodomy statutes outlawed same-sex
relations, and police used other morals laws to harass and arrest gay men and
lesbians. |
|
|
2. |
In the late 1960s
inspired by Black Power and the women’s movement, gay activists increasingly
demanded unconditional recognition of their rights and encouraged people to
“Come Out!” |
|
|
3. |
The new gay
liberation found multiple expressions in major cities across the country, but a
defining event occurred in
New York’s
Greenwich Village when a local gay bar called the
Stonewall Inn was raided by police in the summer of 1969. Its patrons,
including gay men, lesbians, transvestites, and transsexuals, rioted for two
days. |
|
|
4. |
The gay liberation
movement grew quickly after Stonewall. Local gay and lesbian organizations
proliferated, and activists began pushing for non-discrimination ordinances and
consensual sex laws at the state level. |
|
|
5. |
By 1975, the National
Gay Task Force and several other national organizations lobbied Congress,
served as media watchdogs, and advanced suits in the courts. |
IV. Richard
Nixon and the Politics of the Silent Majority |
|
A. |
Nixon’s War in
Vietnam |
|
|
1. |
When
it came to
Vietnam
,
Nixon picked up where Johnson had left off. Abandoning
Vietnam
, Nixon insisted, would damage
America
’s
“credibility” and make the country seem “a pitiful, helpless giant.” Nixon
wanted peace, but only “peace with honor.” |
|
|
2. |
To
neutralize criticism at home, Nixon began delegating the ground fighting to the
South Vietnamese. Under this new policy of “Vietnamization,” American troop
levels dropped from 543,000 in 1968 to 334,000 in 1971 to barely 24,000 by
early 1973. |
|
|
3. |
Far
from abating, however, the antiwar movement intensified. In November 1969, half
a million demonstrators staged a huge protest in
Washington. |
|
|
4. |
On
April 30, 1970, as part of a secret bombing campaign against Vietminh
(Vietnamese liberation army) supply lines operating in neutral
Cambodia
,
American troops destroyed enemy bases there. When news of the invasion of
Cambodia
came
out, American campuses exploded in outrage. |
|
|
5. |
On
May 4, 1970, at
Kent
State
University
in
Ohio,
panicky National Guardsmen fired into an antiwar rally, killing four students
and wounding eleven. At Jackson State College in
Mississippi, Guardsmen stormed a dormitory,
killing two black students. |
|
|
6. |
Nixon’s policy of détente was
to seek peaceful coexistence with the
Soviet Union
and Communist China and to link these overtures of friendship with a plan to
end the Vietnam War, a war fought ostensibly to halt the spread of communism. |
|
|
7. |
He
traveled to
Moscow to sign the first Strategic
Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) between the
United
States
and the
Soviet Union. |
|
|
8. |
The
treaty limited the production and deployment of ICBMs and ABMs and signified
that the
United States
could no longer afford massive military spending to regain the nuclear and
military superiority it had enjoyed after World War II. |
|
|
9. |
Nixon traveled to
China
in
1972, the first sitting
U.S.
president to do so, in a symbolic visit that set the stage for the
establishment of formal diplomatic relations. |
|
|
10. |
To
strengthen his negotiating position at the Paris Peace Talks with
North Vietnam,
Nixon stepped up military action with a series of B-52 bombings; the Paris
Peace Accords were signed on January 27, 1973. |
|
|
11. |
The
South Vietnamese government soon fell to Communist forces; horrified Americans
watched as American embassy personnel and Vietnamese citizens struggled to
board helicopters leaving
Saigon before North
Vietnamese troops entered the city. |
|
|
12. |
On
April 29, 1975,
Vietnam
was
reunited, and Saigon was renamed
Ho
Chi Minh City in honor of the Communist leader who had
died in 1969. |
|
|
13. |
More than 58,000 Americans died and over 300,000 were
wounded during a war that cost over $150 billion and decreased Americans’
confidence in their government system. |
|
B. |
The 1972 Election |
|
|
1. |
The disarray
within the Democratic Party over
Vietnam
and civil rights gave
Nixon’s campaign a decisive edge. |
|
|
2. |
Nixon’s advantages against his weak opponent, Senator George McGovern, and a
short-term upturn in the economy favored the Republicans. |
|
|
3. |
Nixon appealed to the “silent majority” of non-protesters and easily won
reelection with 61 percent of the popular vote, carrying every state except
Massachusetts and the
District of Columbia, although Democrats
maintained control of both houses of Congress. |
|
C. |
Watergate and the Fall of a President |
|
|
1. |
In
June 1972, five men with connections to the Nixon administration were arrested
for breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the
Watergate apartment complex in
Washington. |
|
|
2. |
In an
abuse of presidential power, the White House had established a clandestine
intelligence group known as the “plumbers” to plug government information leaks
and implement tactics to harass the administration’s opponents. |
|
|
3. |
The
activities of the “plumbers” were financed by massive illegal fundraising
efforts by Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (known as CREEP). |
|
|
4. |
The
White House denied any involvement in the break-in, but investigations revealed
that Nixon ordered his chief of staff to instruct the
CIA
to tell the FBI not to probe too deeply into connections between the White
House and the burglars. |
|
|
5. |
In
February 1973, the Senate established an investigative committee that began
holding nationally televised hearings in May, during which Jeb Magruder confessed his guilt and implicated former Attorney
General John Mitchell, White House counsel John Dean, and others. Dean, in
turn, implicated Nixon in the plot, and another Nixon aide revealed that Nixon
had installed a secret taping system in the Oval Office. |
|
|
6. |
Nixon stonewalled the committee’s demand that he surrender the tapes, citing
executive privilege and national security. He finally released them, but a
suspicious eighteen-minute gap remained. |
|
|
7. |
On
June 30, 1974, the House of Representatives voted on three articles of
impeachment against Nixon: obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and subverting
the Constitution. |
|
|
8. |
Facing
certain conviction if impeached, on August 9, 1974, Nixon became the first
U.S.
president
to resign. |
|
|
9. |
Vice President Gerald Ford was sworn in as president; a month later, he granted
Nixon a “full, free, and absolute” pardon. |
|
|
10. |
Congress adopted several reforms in response to the abuses of the Nixon
administration, such as the War Powers Act, which reined in the president’s ability
to deploy
U.S.
forces without congressional approval. |
|
|
11. |
In
1974, a strengthened Freedom of Information Act gave citizens greater access to
files that federal government agencies had amassed on them. |
|
|
12. |
The
Fair Campaign Practices Act of 1974 limited campaign contributions and provided
for stricter accountability and public financing of presidential campaigns, but
it contained a loophole for contributions from political action committees
(PACs). |