The 1960 Election
In 1960, a young and charismatic John F. Kennedy ran for president. He promised to take America to a New Frontier, a new frontier of hopes and unknown opportunities. He said America was on the edge of something great and he intended to conquer the new frontier of unknowns and get the country moving in the right direction.
John Kennedy had a lot of help when it came to getting elected. His dad, Joseph, was a rich man and had planned for one of his sons to someday become president. The elder Kennedy had two books written by "ghost writers" that would appear to be authored by John Kennedy. The books would inflate his image and experiences to make him appear to be what the people wanted. Joseph Kennedy had the books printed at his cost and then bought thousands of copies in order for the books to be on the top seller list of newly released books. Joseph understood it was about "selling" his sons image to the American people. Kennedy openly campaigned for the increase in black voter registration and even helped to get a jailed Martin Luther King out of prison. For his work, he would receive the vast majority of black votes, while personally he was luke warm about equal rights.
Kennedy and his running mate, Lyndon B. Johnson, won the election by a slight margin. Kennedy became the youngest president and first Roman Catholic elected to lead the country. He managed to get the minimum wage increased, get $5 billion for urban development in poverty stricken inner cities, and even convinced Congress to spend $40 billion to put an American on the moon within ten years.
Bay of Pigs
Kennedy's first brush with the cold war came in Cuba. During the Eisenhower administration, Communist dictator Fidel Castro had taken over the island and instilled harsh Communist policies. Kennedy was uncomfortable having a communist stronghold so close to the U.S. He learned that Eisenhower had started a program where 1,500 anti-Castro Cubans were being trained to invade Cuba by the CIA in Texas. If these 1,500 revolutionaries could start a revolution, thousands of anti-Castro Cubans might rise up and join in the overthrow of the Communist dictator. At dawn on April 17, 1961, American ships dropped off the 1,500 revolutionaries at the Bay of Pigs on Cuba's south shore. Castro's forces were waiting on them, Kennedy panicked and failed to support the invasion with air support. Castro captured 1,200 of the revolutionaries which Kennedy later ransomed their freedom for $53 million. It was a complete failure that humiliated the president.
Kennedy's arch rival in the Soviet Union was the man that took over the Communist regime after the death of Joseph Stalin, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, was as tough as Stalin when it came to communist aggression, but he was smarter than Stalin in political wrangling. Khrushchev believed that Kennedy was weak and that he could push the young president around. Kennedy knew that he needed an opportunity to show the Soviet leader that he was tough. On August 13, 1961, Khrushchev saw another opportunity to show that he was tougher than the Americans thought. After thousands of East Berliners had escaped to the comforts and better life of West Berlin, Khrushchev ordered the construction of the Berlin Wall to separate the two sections of the city and prevent East Berliners from fleeing.
Cuban Missile Crisis
Khrushchev found another opportunity to test Kennedy when he placed forty missile sites on Cuba and stationed forty MIG jet fighters on the island. Kennedy believed that he had to have a tough response to the missiles which directly threatened the safety of the U.S. He ordered a blockade or complete surrounding of Cuba by the U.S. Navy in order to search any Soviet ships that attempted to bring missiles to Cuba. The Soviets at first threatened to ignore the U.S. naval blockade, then realizing that the U.S. had 5 nuclear missiles to every one Soviet missile, he proposed an agreement with Kennedy that he would remove all missile bases in Cuba if the U.S. agreed to publicly announce they would never invade Cuba. He also secretly said that the U.S. must remove nuclear missile sites in Turkey that were put there to threaten the Soviet Union. Kennedy agreed to the deal. The Cuban missile crises eased tensions between the U.S. and Soviets because the U.S. also promised to sell surplus wheat to the Soviets (the Soviets needed more food to feed their huge population), a direct Washington D.C. to Moscow telephone line was added in order to be able for the two leaders to instantly speak to one another, the U.S. removed missile sites at most of its European locations.
While Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union cooled down, the communist threat in Vietnam escalated mostly because of the actions of the man the Americans installed to lead South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem. Diem failed to use the billions of dollars the U.S. provided to him to install social and economic reforms. That and the fact that Diem, a Catholic, imposed restrictions against the Buddhist population (the majority of South Vietnamese citizens were Buddhist). Many South Vietnamese saw Diem as nothing more than an American puppet, just another imperialist nation trying to control them. This played into the hands of the communists from North Vietnam who funded a communist movement by those in the South called the National Liberation Front. Members of NLF fought a guerrilla war against the government forces of South Vietnam. These fighters, called Viet Cong, caused enough problems in South Vietnam that Kennedy sent the newly created special forces to the country in 1963 to "advise" South Vietnamese army leaders on how to fight the Viet Cong (VC).
With Diem continuing to ignore U.S. advice, and continuing to make matters worse in Vietnam. Kennedy supported a group of South Vietnamese generals to overthrow and take over power in the capital city of Saigon, which they did. What he didn't know was the the generals would kill Diem and then begin fighting one another for power of the country which further put the country in danger of a communist takeover.
What Kennedy would have done remains a mystery because on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas he was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24 year old ex-Marine turned Communist. Oswald had lived in the Soviet Union for a short time and idolized Fidel Castro, and hated the U.S. and its capitalistic system. Debate still swirls around whether Oswald worked alone in the plot to kill Kennedy, but those answers died when a local nightclub owner, Jack Ruby, shot a handcuffed Oswald as he was being moved from a Dallas jail. The country mourned and looked on in disbelief as the young president was buried. The country and world watched with curiosity as a new president, Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in to lead the country.
The Civil Rights Movement
The Civil Rights Movement got a jumpstart with the success of the Montgomery Bus boycott of 1955 - 1956. In 1960, four college students staged a sit-in at a Greensboro, North Carolina restaurant that was located in a Woolworth's department store. Sit-ins were a tactic used for years by labor unions where the protestors simply sit down where they are protesting and refuse to leave. Because the restaurant was a segregated eating establishment, the college students (all black), sat at the lunch counter and refused to leave until they were served. Each day they returned with more students to participate in the sit-in. Inspired by the Greensboro sit-ins, thousands of people across the South began participating in sit-ins to protest desegregation. Five months after the Greensboro sit-in began, city officials lifted the "whites only" policy. This became another huge victory for the Movement.
In April of 1960, 200 college students formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), whose goal was to turn up the heat on desegregating public places. They performed sit-ins at restaurants, kneel ins at churches, and wade-ins at public pools across the country.
In the fall of 1962, James Meredith, an African-American student and air force veteran tried to enroll in the all white University of Mississippi in Oxford. Ross Barnett, the racist governor of Mississippi refused to let Meredith sign up for classes. Attorney General Robert Kennedy dispatched federal marshals to enforce the law. Federal marshals were attacked by local whites so President Kennedy sent in the national guard which caused more riots to occur. After the dust settled, Meredith was allowed to enter the university.
In 1963, Martin Luther King began a series of demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama. The Birmingham campaign began with sit-ins, and picket lines protesting segregated restaurants in downtown Birmingham. More and more activists showed up in Birmingham and they began to march to protest. Police chief, Bull Conner unleashed water hoses and police dogs on the marchers. After more than 3,000 protestors were jailed (many were school aged children), officials in Birmingham relented and desegregated their restaurants.
Frustrated with all of the violence, in the summer of 1963, President Kennedy announced that he would introducing a new civil rights bill to Congress to help with breaking down the segregationist laws of the South. The same night that he made his speech, Medgar Evers, the president of the NAACP in Mississippi was shot as he got out of his car in front of his house. His killer would walk free until thirty years later when the case was brought back up and he was convicted of murder.
Democrats blocked President Kennedy's civil rights bill, in response, over one million African Americans and whites, including Martin Luther King, marched through Washington to the Lincoln Memorial. The March on Washington was the largest political demonstration in American history. At the end of the day, King walked up to the podium and delivered his "I have a dream" speech.
The Supreme Court under Supreme Court Chief Justice, Earl Warren issued two landmark decisions that impacted American life. The first was in 1962, in Gideon v. Wainwright, the Court said that regardless of economical status or color, anyone who was charged with a crime had a right to fair trial and the right to receive council if they could not afford a lawyer. The decision said that a lawyer must be made available before a suspect is questioned. Another major case was Miranda v. Arizona, the decision said that anyone who was arrested MUSt be informed of their rights, the right to remain silent, and the right to an attorney. Today these are called Miranda rights.
In 1964, Mississippi was still very much like it had been for last 90 years, very little of the Civil Rights Movement had been able to get a foothold there due to such staunch and violent resistance of whites. Bob Moses, formally a New Yorker, resigned his position with SCLC and took a position as the head of the SNCC office in Mississippi, considered a very dangerous job. Moses realized that it would take an "army" to force the state to give to SNCC's number one goal in Mississippi, voter registration. Moses developed an ingenious plan that involved recruiting young idealistic white college students from the North, to come to Mississippi and work as advisors to get local Mississippi blacks to the courthouses to register to vote. He chose them because he knew that the job would be and dangerous and that more than likely people were going to get hurt, or worse, killed. When blacks were killed in Mississippi, it barely made the local papers, but if wealthy young whites from prominent families were injured or heaven forbid, killed, the media would be all over it which would give them the national attention they needed in order to get more support and the attention of the President.
Freedom Summer was Moses' plan, in the summer of 1964, to get local rural Mississippi blacks the education and courage to go to the county courthouses and register to vote. Northern white students would help the locals every step of the way. They would be dropped off in communities around Mississippi where they would learn to live and gain the trust of local blacks.
Students that were to participate in Moses' "summer project" attended schools in Ohio where they learned how to talk to Southern whites and communicate with blacks. They received instruction on such things as how to organize meetings, create committees, and even how to take a beating should they be attacked by angry whites. Moses made no mistake about emphasizing the danger they would be inserting themselves into. Moses knew they needed the help from local blacks in order to be able to convince other locals the importance of voting. Fannie Lou Hamer seemed like an unlikely candidate for one of the Civil Rights Movement's most influential leaders. She'd spent her whole life living in sharecropper shacks and working in the cotton fields. She was immediately drawn to Moses and the idea of suffrage. Hamer was among the first to try and register to vote in Sunflower County, Mississippi. For her efforts she was humiliated and beaten by whites, which only made her more determined to vote and get other locals to turn out to register as well.
On June 21, 1964, the violence that Moses feared finally occurred. Three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner (Goodman and Schwerner were white), went missing after they were last heard from when they called from a Philadelphia, Mississippi jail where they had been arrested. The media came from across the country to investigate the disappearance. President Johnson dispatched the FBI to use every resource available to find the missing workers. In the process of looking they found eight dead black men in rivers and swamps in the Mississippi Delta, which revealed just how dangerous it was to be black in Mississippi. Eventually the bodies of the workers were found and suspects were arrested, but no state jury in Mississippi was going to convict whites of killing blacks or white civil rights workers. It wasn't until forty years later that the mastermind of the killings was arrested and convicted of the crime, he died in prison.
In the mid-sixties there was a growing movement within the Civil Rights Movement itself that urged that more aggressive and even physical violence was needed to convince others that change had to come to the way blacks were treated in the U.S. Between 1965 and 1968, over 300 black uprisings occurred throughout the U.S., many of which became violent. The most we known of the leaders of what became known as the black power movement, was Malcolm X. Born in 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska, as Malcolm Little, to parents that preached for black nationalism (a black independent movement in the U.S. in the 1920s), experienced his first taste of racism when his family home was burned down. When he was six, his father was killed by white supremacists and his mother had to be institutionalized due to a mental breakdown she had after his death. Malcolm drifted from foster home to foster home and began getting in trouble. In Detroit, he became known as Detroit Red, and had become a thief and a drug dealer. While spending time in jail, he made a life changing conversion to a small religious sect known as the Nation of Islam, whose members were called black Muslims. Nation of Islam's leader, Elijah Muhammad, preached that whites were devils and emphasized black nationalism, racial pride, self-respect, and self-discipline. Malcolm changed his name from Little to X to illustrate his lost African surname. Malcolm did not agree with the teachings and nonviolent movement led by Martin Luther King. Malcolm X was later assassinated by a jealous members of the Nation of Islam.
Lyndon B. Johnson and the Great Society
Lyndon B. Johnson took the oath of office on Air Force One, he was the first Southern president since Woodrow Wilson, but would do more for civil rights than another president. President Johnson was a complex person that was vain and at times bullying. He believed people were either against him or with him, there was no middle ground. He wanted to be the greatest U.S. president, he wanted to expand rights for all Americans and do more to help people than FDR had during the Great Depression. Johnson was determined to especially help the poor no matter what their ethnicity was. As school teacher right out of college, he taught in an elementary school with mainly Mexican children, he later said that seeing the poverty there and the hunger in the eyes of the children, became a driving force for him to eliminate poverty.
On July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This made equal treatment a law for anyone regardless of race, gender, or national origin. It also prohibited discrimination in the buying, selling, and renting of housing, as well as the hiring and firing of employees. Johnson next went after what he called his Great Society plan. The Great Society would end poverty and racial injustice and provide liberty for all. Johnson created a bill for healthcare for citizens over the age of 65, called Medicare. Johnson didn't stop there, he also created a program called Medicaid, that helped states cover the costs of medical expenses for the poor of all ages. He created the Higher Education Act of 1965 which increased federal grants to universities and created scholarships for lower income students. President Johnson would eventually get over 400 Great Society bills through Congress providing billions in aid to people across the country. Johnson's Great Society programs far exceeded the New Deal programs of the 1930s under FDR.
Voting Rights Act of 1965
President Johnson urged Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which ensured all citizens the right to vote. It also contained the teeth to enforce the law where prior voting acts had failed. It authorized the attorney general to send federal officials to register voters in areas that had long experienced racial discrimination. By the end of 1965, over 250,000 blacks were newly registered voters.
Johnson inherited Kennedy's plan of involvement in Vietnam. Johnson was unsure what to do about Vietnam. On the one hand he did not want to send more troops there, but on the other he did not want to appear weak against communism. In August of 1964, a report said that the USS Maddox, a US warship off the coast of North Vietnam was fired on by the North Vietnamese navy in the Gulf of Tonkin. This was Johnson's spark he needed to ask Congress for additional troops to send to Vietnam which they did when they passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which gave the president all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against U.S. forces and to prevent further aggression. In 1965, Viet Cong guerrillas attacked us forces in Pleiku, killing and wounded 100 U.S. soldiers. In response, Johnson dispatched thousands of U.S. marines and soldiers under the command of General William Westmoreland.
Hundreds of thousands of U.S. service men and women were sent to Vietnam from 1965 to 1968. The fighting in Vietnam was unlike anything the military had fought against on a large scale. The North Vietnamese Army and their allies, the Viet Cong, rarely attempted to fight in open large scale pitched battles, preferring instead to fight in smaller units that used guerrilla tacts to hit and run against the enemy in order to not be put under the sites of the artillery and air power the U.S. held over the enemy.
By 1967, many in the U.S. were becoming war weary and questioned why we were in Vietnam at all. College campuses began to protest the war, Martin Luther King and many civil rights leaders also questioned the war in Vietnam. President Johnson felt that he could not just pack up leave, especially since according to General Westmoreland, the North Vietnamese were on the verge of breaking. That turned out to not be the case, the U.S. had not yet broken the will of the NVA (North Vietnamese Army) because international politics and rules largely kept the U.S. government's hands tied. The U.S. was bound not to enter nearby Laos and Cambodia by international treaties, yet the NVA violated the rule so much that they created their entire supply road from North Vietnam to South Vietnam in those two countries, safely out of reach of the U.S. military. Fearing Chinese involvement, Johnson would not allow the U.S. military to invade or occupy, or even attack in North Vietnam. Only U.S. bombers dropped bombs on North Vietnamese cities, but no ground or sea troops ever threatened the north. This allow Ho Chi Minh to dedicate his entire military in the south.
On January 31, 1968, the Vietnamese New Year, called TET, the NVA launched the largest combined offensive in the history of the war. At military bases throughout South Vietnam battles erupted. From the border of North and South Vietnam, all of the way to the Mekong Delta at the bottom of South Vietnam, violent battles raged. General Westmoreland proclaimed that the TET Offensive was the greatest U.S. victory of the war because in nearly every battle the NVA had been defeated, the the POLITICAL impact of the offensive was a landslide defeat for the US. Realizing that upbeat reports from U.S. commanders in Vietnam were completely inaccurate, many lost faith in the ability to trust the U.S. military and the U.S. government. President Johnson's popularity plummeted after TET and even the president questioned his policies in Vietnam.
Because the president was spending all of his day to day time dealing with the war in Vietnam, he had very little time to oversee his Great Society legislation. He knew that the public sentiment was against the war, and feeling that he couldn't rally the U.S. military or public opinion, and worn down from years of overworking, President Johnson chose not to run for reelection in 1968.
1968 - A Traumatic Year - On April 4, 1968, James Earl Ray, an unknown petty thief and drifter, but also a devout white supremacist, shot and killed Martin Luther King as he stood outside his hotel room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. King's murder started a wave of violence with riots erupting in more than 100 cities across the country. Two months after the death of King, former President John F. Kennedy's brother, Robert Kennedy (then the attorney general) who was running for president under the Democratic Party. After winning the California presidential primary, Robert Kennedy made a speech at the Ambassador Hotel in LA. After the speech he walked through the hotel kitchen on his way to take questions from reporters, along the way, a Jordanian Arab named Sirhan Sirhan, resentful of Kennedy's support for Israel, shot and killed Robert and wounded three others. The young attorney general and presidential candidate was laid to rest next to his brother at Arlington National Cemetery.
The 1968 Election
During the 1968 election, the two front runners were Robert Kennedy (democrat) and President Eisenhower's former vice president, Richard M. Nixon (republican). Hubert Humphrey gained the democratic nomination to run after Kennedy's death. Humphrey was known as a big advocate for civil rights. After the death of Kennedy, another candidate emerged running on a third, independent ticket, Governor George Wallace of Alabama. Wallace was a well known segregationist who believed that both the democrats and the republicans were too weak to protect the interests of the Southern states. Wallace believed in segregation and repealing much of the civil rights legislation passed during the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies. In the end Richard Nixon became president with a narrow victory over Humphrey. Nixon received 302 electoral votes, Humphrey received 191, and Wallace received 46.
George Wallace (Independent) Richard M. Nixon (Republican) Hubert Humphrey (Democrat)