NEW FRONTIER AND GREAT SOCIETY

In 1960, Democrat John F. Kennedy was elected president. Young, energetic and handsome, Kennedy promised to "get the country moving again", to forge ahead toward a "New Frontier." But one of Kennedy's first foreign policy ventures was a disaster. In an effort to overthrow the Communist dictatorship of Fidel Castro in Cuba, Kennedy supported an invasion of the island nation by a group of Cuban exiles who had been trained by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In April 1961 the exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs and were almost immediately captured.

In October 1962, observation planes discovered that the Soviet Union was installing nuclear missiles in Cuba, close enough to strike American cities in a matter of minutes. Kennedy imposed a blockade on Cuba. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev finally agreed to remove the missiles, in return for an American promise not to invade Cuba.

In April 1961, the Soviets scored another triumph in space: Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the Earth. President Kennedy responded with a pledge that the United States would land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. In February 1962, John Glenn made the first American orbital flight, and he was welcomed home as a hero-much as Charles Lindbergh had been celebrated 35 years earlier after he made the first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic. It took $24 thousand million and years of research but Kennedy's pledge was fulfilled in July 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped out of the Apollo 11 spacecraft onto the surface of the moon.

In the 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr. led a nonviolent campaign to desegregate southern restaurants, interstate buses theaters and hotels. His followers were met by hostile police, violent mobs, tear gas, fire hoses and electric cattle prods. The Kennedy administration tried to protect civil rights workers and secure voting rights for southern blacks.

In 1963 Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Kennedy was not a universally popular president, but his death was a terrible shock to the American people.

The new president was Lyndon Johnson, who had been vice president under Kennedy and succeeded to the office on the death of the president. He persuaded Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial discrimination in public accommodations and in any business or institution receiving federal money. Johnson was elected to a new term with widespread popular support in 1964. Encouraged by a great election victory, Johnson pushed through Congress many social programs: federal aid to education, the arts and the humanities; health insurance for the elderly (Medicare) and for the poor (Medicaid); low-cost housing and urban renewal. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally enabled all black Americans to vote. Discrimination in immigration was also ended: national origins quotas were abolished allowing a great increase in entry visas for Asians.

Although most Americans had by now achieved affluence, Michael Harrington's book The Other America (1962) identified persistent pockets of poverty - in urban slums, in most black neighborhoods and among the poor whites of the eastern Appalachian mountains. President Johnson responded with his "War on Poverty," which included special preschool education for poor children, vocational training for school dropouts and community service jobs for slum youths.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 941