Expanding the Liberal State

1. Expanding the Liberal State • Campaign of 1960 produced two young candidates who claimed to offer the nation active leadership, Republican nomination went to Vice President Richard Nixon and Democrats choose John F. Kennedy, Kennedy premised his campaign on the assumption that “the American people are uneasy at the present drift in our nation’s course”, he was able to overcome doubts about his young age of 43 and his Catholic religion to win the popular and electoral vote

2. Election of 1960

3. Expanding the Liberal State • Kennedy campaigned on his program called the “New Frontier”, but a Congress dominated by a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats frustrated many of his hopes, did mange to win approval if a tariff reductions and began to build an ambitious legislative agenda, Kennedy made his own personality an integral part of his presidency and a central focus of national attention

4. Expanding the Liberal State • On November 22,1963 Kennedy was shot in twice and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, Oswald was murdered two days later by a nightclub owner John Ruby while he was being moved from one jail cell to another, Chief Justice Earl Warren was appointed to investigate the assassination and found that Oswald and Ruby had acted alone and there was no larger conspiracy

5. Expanding the Liberal State • Johnson believed in the active use of power, between 1963 and 1966 he complied the most impressive legislative record of any president since Franklin Roosevelt, aided by the large amount of emotion that followed the death of Kennedy, he was able to win support of many of the New Frontier proposals

6. Expanding the Liberal State • Johnson made his own reform program, which he called the “Great Society” Johnson considered himself as the “coalition builder” he wanted the support of everyone and for a time he nearly got it, in the 1964 election Johnson received a larger plurality (over 61%) than any candidate before or since

7. Expanding the Liberal State • For the first time since the 1930s the federal government took steps to create important new social welfare programs, the most important being Medicare a program to help aid the elderly for medical expenses, it shifted responsibility for paying fees from the patient to the government

8. Expanding the Liberal State • Medicaid was a program that extended federal medical assistance to welfare recipients and other indigent people of all ages

9. Expanding the Liberal State • The centerpiece of the “war on poverty” was the Office of Economic Opportunity that created an array of new educational, employment, housing and health care programs, but the OEO was controversial because of its commitment to the idea of Community Action which was an effort to involve members of poor communities in the planning and administration of the programs designed to help them.

10. Expanding the Liberal State • The programs provided jobs and gave them valuable experience in administrative and political work, but funding was inadequate from the beginning and the weaknesses in the programs helped the program to dwindle as the years passed

11. Expanding the Liberal State • Housing Act of 1961 offered $4.9 billion in federal grants to cites for the preservations of open spaces, development of mass-transit systems and the subsidization of middle-income housing

12. Expanding the Liberal State • Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and a series of subsequent measures extended aid to both private and parochial schools and based the aid on the economic needs of the students, not the schools

13. Expanding the Liberal State • Immigration Act of 1965 maintained a strict limit on the number of newcomers admitted to the country each year (170,000) but eliminated the national origins system established in the 1920s

14. Expanding the Liberal State • In 1962 Johnson won passage of the $11.5 billion tax cut that Kennedy first proposed in 1962, the tax cut increased the federal deficit but substantial economic growth over the next several years made up for much of the revenue initially lost

15. Expanding the Liberal State • The high costs of the Great Society programs, deficiencies and failures of many of them and the inability of the government to find revenues to pay for them contributed to the growing disillusionment in the later years with the federal efforts to help social problems

16. Expanding the Liberal State • But despites its many failures the Great Society significantly reduced hunger in the US, made medical care available to millions of elderly and poor people and contributed to the greatest reduction in poverty in American history

17. The Battle for Racial Equality • The nation’s most important domestic initiative in the 1960s was the effort to provide justice and equality to African Americans

18. The Battle for Racial Equality • Kennedy’s intervention in the 1960 campaign to get MLK out of jail helped him win a large majority of the black vote, but he feared alienating southern Democratic voters and powerful southern Democrats in Congress

19. The Battle for Racial Equality • In February 1960, black college students in Greensboro, NC staged a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter and in the similar demonstrations spread throughout the South

20. The Battle for Racial Equality • Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) began freedom rides, traveling by bus throughout the South, the freedom riders tried to force the desegregation of bus stations, Kennedy ordered the integration of all bus and train stations

21. The Battle for Racial Equality • In October 19062, a federal court ordered the University of Mississippi to enroll its first black student, James Meredith, but Governor Ross Barnett, a strident segregationist, refused to enforce the order, Kennedy sent federal troops over to protect Meredith’s right to go to University

22. The Battle for Racial Equality • In April MLK helped launch a series of non violent demonstrations in Birmingham, Police Commissioner Connor personally supervised a brutal attack to break up the peaceful marches, arresting hundreds of demonstrators and using attack dogs, tear gas, electric cattle, and fire hoses as much of the nation watched on TV

23. The Battle for Racial Equality • Governor George Wallace pledged to stand in the doorway of a building at the University of Alabama to prevent the court ordered enrollment of several blacks, only after the arrival of federal marshals and a visit from the Attorney General did Wallace give away

24. The Battle for Racial Equality • Kennedy introduced a series of new legislative proposals prohibiting segregation in public accommodations, barring discrimination in employment, increase the power of the government to file suits on behalf of school segregation

25. The Battle for Racial Equality • March on Washington 200, 000 demonstrators greatest civil rights demonstration in the nation’s history, MLK gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, the march was the high mark of the peaceful, interracial civil rights movement

26. The Battle for Racial Equality • 1964 after Johnson applied both public and private pressure, Senate finally passed the most comprehensive civil rights bill history

27. The Battle for Racial Equality • Freedom Summer was a campaign on behalf of black voter registration and participation, produced a violent response from the southern whites, three of the first freedom workers to arrive in the South were brutally murdered by the Ku Klux Klan with the support of the local police officers and others

28. The Battle for Racial Equality • Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was an integrated alternative to the regular state party organization, Fannie Lou Hammer challenged the regular party’s right to its seats at the Democratic Convention, but the regular party retained its official standing

29. The Battle for Racial Equality • In Selma, Alabama Jim Clark led local police in a brutal attack on demonstrators, the national coverage of the events helped push Lyndon Johnson to propose and win the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 which provided federal protection to blacks attempting to vote

30. The Battle for Racial Equality • By the 1960s the problem of racial injustice was no longer primarily in the south, by 1966, 69% of American blacks were living in metropolitan areas and 45% outside the south, poor urban communities in which the black population was concentrated things were getting significantly worse.

31. The Battle for Racial Equality • Half of all American nonwhites lived in poverty, and black unemployment was twice that of whites, de jure segregation was segregation by law while de facto segregation was segregation in practice, through residential patterns

32. The Battle for Racial Equality • Affirmative Action: employers should not only abandon negative measure to deny jobs to blacks, they should adopt positive measures to recruit minorities, in the Chicago Campaign they hoped to direct national attention to housing and employment discrimination in northern industrial cities, but it was a failure

33. The Battle for Racial Equality • Watts Los Angeles Race Riot: storm of anger and a week of violence triggered by a police officer striking a protesting black bystander, eventually National Guard was called in, in the end 34 people died and as many as 10,000 people were thought to be involved

34. The Battle for Racial Equality • In the summer of 1966, there were 43 additional outbreaks, the most serious of them in Cleveland and Chicago, Commission on Civil Disorders: created by the president in response to the disturbances, recommended massive spending to eliminate the abysmal conditions of the ghettos

35. The Battle for Racial Equality • Black Power: moving away from interracial cooperation toward increased awareness of racial distinctiveness, instilling racial pride in African Americans, encouraged education, literary and artistic movements, new interest in roots, led to rejection by some blacks of certain cultural practices borrowed from white society, traditional black organizations that emphasized cooperation with sympathetic whites were facing competition from more radical groups

36. The Battle for Racial Equality • The Black Panther Party promised to defend black rights even if that required violence, wore weapons openly, the Nation of Islam taught blacks to take responsibility for their own lives, to be disciplined, live by strict codes of behavior, reject dependence on whites.

37. The Battle for Racial Equality • Malcolm X was the most celebrated black Muslim, opposed all forms of racism and oppression, blacks had the right to defend themselves, Malcolm died in 1965 when black gunman, presumably under orders from rivals within the Nation of Islam, assassinated him in New York

38. “Flexible Response” and the Cold War • The Kennedy administration entered office convinced the US needed to be able to counter communist in other ways than atomic weapons, Kennedy supported expansion of Special Forces (green berets) who were soldiers trained specifically to fight guerrilla conflicts and other limited wars “Communist domination in this hemisphere can never be negotiated” John F. Kennedy

39. “Flexible Response” and the Cold War • Alliance for Progress was a series of projects for peaceful development and stabilization of the nations in Latin America, the Agency for International Development (AID) was to coordinate foreign aid, Kennedy established the Peace Corps, which was young American volunteers aboard to work in developing countries

40. “Flexible Response” and the Cold War • The Eisenhower administration had started the project and by the time Kennedy took office, the CIA had been working for months to train a small army of anti-Castro Cuban exiles Central America

41. “Flexible Response” and the Cold War • 1961: 2,000 armed exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba expecting American air support and than a spontaneous uprising by the Cuban people-at the last minute Kennedy withdrew air support and within 2 days the entire mission collapsed

42. “Flexible Response” and the Cold War • Khrushchev was unhappy about the mass exodus of residents of East Germany to the West- constructed a wall between East and West Berlin, for nearly 30 years the Berlin Wall served as the most potent physical symbol of the conflict between the communist and noncommunist worlds

43. “Flexible Response” and the Cold War • Aerial reconnaissance photos produced evidence that the Soviet Union was constructing sites on the island of Cuba for offensive nuclear weapons, Kennedy ordered a naval and air blockade around Cuba, Crisis ended when soviets agreed to remove the missiles

44. “Flexible Response” and the Cold War • Lyndon Johnson entered the presidency lacking even Kennedy’s limited prior experience with international affairs, he wanted to prove quickly that he too was a strong and forceful leader

45. “Flexible Response” and the Cold War • Internal rebellion in the Dominican Republic was caused by an assassination of repressive dictatorship of Trujillo, Johnson argued that Bosch planned to establish a pro-Castro communist regime, troops sent to quell the disorder

46. The Agony of Vietnam • George Kennan who helped write the document that who send the US into the war with Vietnam once called the conflict “the most disastrous of all American’s undertakings over the whole 200 years of its history”

47. The War in Vietnam and Indochina

48. The Agony of Vietnam • After WWII French wanted to reassert their control over Vietnam, powerful nationalist movement within Vietnam committed to creating independent nation challenged them, Vietminh was a nationalist political party led by Ho Chi Minh, had fought against Japan throughout World War II, Ho Chi Minh began asking Truman for support in his struggle against the French- the US did nothing to stop the French

49. The Agony of Vietnam • At first the French had little difficulty reestablishing control, but the Vietminh continued to challenge the French dominated regime and slowly increased its control over large areas of the countryside, in 1950 Truman administration formally recognized the Bao Dai regime, agreed to provide it with direct military economic aid

50. The Agony of Vietnam • First Indochina war- the US continued to support the French military, the US was paying 80% of France’s war costs, French lost at Dien Bien Phu, at the Geneva Conference an agreement was produced to end the Vietnam conflict, cease-fire in the war, Vietnam partitioned along the 17th parallel, Vietminh in control of North Vietnam, pro-Western regime in control of the South