Part II the new frontier and the civil conflict

John F. Kennedy, Democratic candidate in the election of 1960, became the first Catholic and at 43 the youngest person ever to win the presidency. On television, in a series of debates with his opponent Richard Nixon, he appeared able, articulate and energetic. In his campaign, he spoke of moving into the new decade, toward a “New Frontier”. Throughout his brief presidency, Kennedy’s special combination of grace, wit and style sustained his popularity and influenced generations of politicians to come. Once he took office, Kennedy made clear his feelings about a President's role. Unlike Eisenhower, he felt a President should play an active part in meeting the country's needs. In his inaugural address, Kennedy told the American people: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”

Kennedy offered a program for government action which he called the New Frontier. Only a few of his plans were passed by the Congress while he was in office, however. The minimum wage was raised from $1.00 to $1.25 an hour over two years. More people were covered by social security. Kennedy also established Peace Corps to send men and women overseas to assist developing countries in meeting their needs.

One area in which Congress was very interested was the space program. Americans began to think more about outer space in 1957. That year the Soviet Union launched the first successful satellite – a small object circling a planet – to orbit the earth. It was called Sputnik I. This was a blow to the United States. It led many Americans to fear that the Soviet Union had more scientific knowledge than the United States. Because of this, the National Defense Education Act was passed in 1958. It gave colleges federal money for studies in science and languages. That same year, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was set up to direct the American space program. When President Kennedy took office, he announced that he wanted Americans to land a person on the moon before 1970. That goal was reached by Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin in 1969. On July 20, Armstrong became the first human to step on the moon. As he did so, he said “That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Millions of people around the world watched the event on live television.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the US remained locked in bitter conflict with communist countries. Cuba became the battlefield in the Kennedy years. When Fidel Castro took over the government of Cuba in 1959, many Cubans fled to the United States. Some wanted to return to overthrow Castro. In March 1960, President Eisenhower told the CIA it could train and supply them for such an invasion. Later President Kennedy decided to go ahead with the plan. In April 1961, Cuban refugees began making air strikes against airfields in Cuba. On April 17, more than 1,000 of them landed at the Bay of Pigs, about 90 miles (144 kilometers) from Havana. They hoped the people of Cuba would rise up against Castro. When this did not happen, the invasion failed. This greatly embarrassed the United States and at the same time helped Castro. Some Latin Americans felt the United States had no right to interfere in Cuba's affairs. They spoke out against the United States.

After the Bay of Pigs, Cuba developed closer ties with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union sent military advisors and supplies to the island and began to set up guided missile sites there. This alarmed President Kennedy and the American military. They felt that to have offensive missiles so close was a threat to the security of the United States. Kennedy warned that if Cuba became a military base for the Soviet Union, the United States would do "whatever must be done" to protect its security. After considering different options, Kennedy imposed a blockade on Cuba to prevent Soviet ships from bringing additional missiles. After several days of tension, during which the world was closer than ever before to nuclear war, the Soviet Union backed down. The two sides finally came to terms. The Soviet Union agreed to remove the missiles in return for the American promise not to invade Cuba.

In addition to the problems over Cuba, the United States and the Soviet Union still did not agree about postwar Germany. A month after the invasion at the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev met in Vienna. Khrushchev told Kennedy that they should come to terms that year on a new government for Berlin. If not, the Soviet Union would sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany. Kennedy believed that the Soviet Union wanted to drive the Western powers out of Berlin. So he asked Congress for more money to buy weapons and equipment. In August, the East Germans, with Soviet support, built a fence to seal off the border between East and West Berlin. Then they replaced the fence with a concrete wall topped with barbed wire. President Kennedy's answer to this was to send more American troops to Berlin. When President Kennedy visited Berlin in 1963, he stood near the wall and told the people of West Berlin gathered there that the United States was prepared to defend their freedom.

The Berlin Wall and the Cuban missile crisis made it clear how far apart the United States and the Soviet Union were on many issues. This led many people to fear that the two powers might be heading for war. Such a war would most likely be a nuclear war. These people were strongly opposed to the A-bomb. They were worried about what nuclear testing was doing to the atmosphere. Many Americans began to favor efforts to stop the nuclear arms race.

On November 22, 1963, an event in Dallas, Texas, captured American attention and shocked the nation. President Kennedy was assassinated while riding in an open car during a visit to Dallas, Texas. Later, Lee Harvey Oswald was caught and accused of killing Kennedy. Before Oswald could be brought to trial, he was shot and killed by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner. There was much debate about whether Oswald had acted alone or had been part of a conspiracy, or group plot, to kill the President. A special commission investigated the case and after much study it decided that Oswald had acted on his own. Over the years, doubts still remained, however.

During this period the USA was dominated by continued struggles for civil rights and justice. Black leaders felt that the people themselves would have to take action to end discrimination and denial of civil rights. An important turning point came in 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled on the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The Court declared that segregation in the public schools denied black students equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment and ordered that blacks should be allowed to attend any school. This order upset many whites, especially in the South where most public schools were segregated by law. Southern leaders tried many ways to prevent desegregation of the schools. In 1957, the Governor of Arkansas used the National Guard to keep black students from entering Central High School in Little Rock. President Eisenhower acted to back up the Court's order by sending federal troops to Little Rock.

Another turning point was the arrest of a woman named Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat in the front of a bus in a section reserved by law and custom for whites. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) helped to persuade a judge to release Mrs. Parks and planned a course of action to end segregation on buses. Led by a young clergyman Martin Luther King, Jr., blacks in Montgomery began to boycott the city's buses. This was costly for the bus company since most of their riders were blacks. The boycott went on for a year. Finally, in November 1956, the Supreme Court declared that segregation on public buses was unconstitutional. The Montgomery bus boycott showed that nonviolent direct action could produce results. It brought blacks from all walks of life together in an almost religious fellowship. And it produced a black leader – Martin Luther King, Jr., who could move millions to action and touch the conscience of the nation.

Moving on from Montgomery, King led direct nonviolent actions for civil rights in all parts of the country. In the spring of 1963, King went to Birmingham, Alabama, a city with a bad record of discrimination. Parks, eating places, drinking fountains and restrooms were segregated. King organized local blacks to march quietly and nonviolently through downtown areas of Birmingham. At first, the police arrested thousands of marchers. When that failed to stop the marches, the police attacked the demonstrators with clubs, dogs and firehoses. This caused such a public outcry against the white authorities of Birmingham that they had to back down and desegregate their public facilities.

A high point of the civil rights movement occurred on August 28, 1963 when 250,000 people of all races marched in Washington, DC, to demand that the nation keep its pledge of "justice for all". In a moving and dramatic speech, Martin Luther King said "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveholders will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." In 1964 Martin Luther King, Jr., received the Nobel Peace Prize.

In 1964 the Civil Rights Act was passed and many Americans hoped that it would mark the beginning of a new age of racial harmony and friendship in the US. But soon they were disappointed as racial difficulties were too deep-rooted to be solved by simple alternations of the law, or by demonstrations and marches. Most black Americans were still worse housed, worse educated, and worse paid than other Americans. Some rejected with contempt the ideas of leaders like Martin Luther King that blacks and whites should learn to live in equality and friendship.

In August 1965, the streets of Watts, a black ghetto in Los Angeles, became a battlefield. For six days police and rioters fought among burning cars and buildings. Thirty four people were killed and over a thousand were injured. The Watts riot was followed by others – in Chicago, Detroit, New York and Washington. By the autumn of 1966 the civil right movement was divided and in disarray.

In April 1968, Martin Luther King was murdered. He was shot dead in Memphis, Tennessee, by a white sniper. Many blacks now turned to the Black Power movement which taught that the only way for blacks to get justice was to fight for it.

The 1960s was a time of troubles and struggles. Between 1960 and 1970 the number of Americans aged 15 to 24 grew by 50 percent – from 24 million to 36 million. They were the product of the "baby boom" – born during and soon after World War II. This new generation was different. They were the first generation to have lived all their lives under the shadow of nuclear weapons. They were the first TV generation and had enjoyed almost continuous prosperity since their childhood. But at the same time they could see that all the wonderful things in American life still did not solve the ancient problems of justice and equality. And on TV they would see their young President assassinated, their cities smoldering in riots, their generation dying on the distant battlefield of Vietnam, and people starving in Africa and Asia. The world seemed confusing and frustrating as never before.

Different young people reacted in different ways. Some of them joined in the so-called "counterculture", which was opposed to the culture accepted by most Americans. They used drugs, they let their hair grow long, wore beads, fringe jackets, and long dresses. They wanted to look as different as possible from other Americans. They called themselves "hippies" (from the slang expression "hip", meaning knowledgeable, worldly-wise). Hippies often reacted to American life by "dropping out" – by refusing to be a part of it. Other young people organized in a New Left to transform America. Students organized many activities, especially sit-ins, to fight for civil rights.

The university became the center of opposition. Its members thought that by attacking the universities – their rules and regulations, their research contracts to help with the war in Vietnam, and their support of American society – they could make students radical, but their revolutionary aims were vague and negative. Soon colleges and universities were in disarray. Students were picketing, occupying buildings, shouting obscenities, and stopping all classes. They demanded “Student Power”. Across the country, people outside universities wondered what had happened to the American love of learning and the Jeffersonian tradition of free debate. Still, most students seemed less concerned with “revolution” than with the war in Vietnam. The New Left became more and more frustrated as the 1960s wore on.

DISCUSSION

1. Who won the presidential election of 1960?

2. What was the program for government John Kennedy initiated?

3. Was the US interested in development of space programs? What is NASA?

4. Who does the quotation “That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” belong to?

5. What do we learn from the text about American military operation at the Bay of Pigs in 1961?

6. Why did Cuban-Soviet relations worry Americans? Speak about the American blockade on Cuba.

7. Speak about the construction of the Berlin Wall.

8. How was President Kennedy assassinated?

9. Why is the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka considered as the turning point in the civil rights movement?

10. What happened in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957? Why did the President send federal troops there?

11. Speak about the boycott of public transport in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955.

12. What was Dr. Martin Luther King awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for?

13. When was the Civil Rights Act passed?

14. How did Baby Boomers differ from the previous generation?

15. How did American university life change in the 1960s?