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Jon-Medina
period 4
•John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the son of the wealthy powerful, and
highly controversial Joseph P. Kennedy, former American
ambassador to Britain.
•He premised his campaign, he said, “on the single assumption that
the American people are uneasy at the present drift in our
national course”.
•Kennedy had traveled to Texas with his wife and Vice President Lyndon
Johnson for a series of=2 0political appearances.
•He got shot in the throat and head, he was rushed to a hospital, where
minutes later he was pronounced dead.
•Lee Harvey Oswald, was arrested for the crime later that day, and
then mysteriously murdered by a Dallas nightclub owner, Jack
Ruby, 2 days later as he was being moved from one jail to
another.
•In years later years many Americans came to believe that the Warren
Commission report had ignored evidence of a wider conspiracy
behind the murders.
Lyndon Johnson
•The Kennedy assassination was a national trauma-a defining event for
almost everyone old enough to be aware of it.
•Johnson was a native of the poor “hill country” of west Texas and had
risen to become majority leader of the U.S. Senate by dint of
extraordinary, even obsessive, effort and ambition.
•Medicare simply shifted responsibility for paying those fees from the
patient to the government.
•The centerpiece of this “war on poverty”, as Johnson called it, was the
Office of economic Opportunity, which created an array of new
educational, employment, housing, and health-care programs.
•The Community Action programs provided jobs for many poor people
and gave them valuable experience in administrative and
political work.
•The OEO spent nearly $3 billion during its first two years of existence,
and it helped reduce poverty in some areas.
Cities, Schools, and Immigration
•The Housing Act of 1961 offered $4.9 billion in federal grants to cities
for the preservation of open spaces, the development of mass
transit systems, and the subsidization of middle income housing.
•The cut increased the federal deficit, but substantial economic growth
over the next several years made up for much of the revenue
initially lost.
•The high costs of the Great Society programs, the deficiencies and
failures of many of them, and the inability of the government to
find the revenues to pay for them contributed to a growing
disillusionment in later years with the idea of federal efforts to
solve social problems.
•SNCC workers began fanning out through black communities and even
into remote rural areas to encourage blacks to challenge the
obstacles to voting that the Jim Crow laws had created and that
powerful social custom sustained.
•In April, Martin Luther King, Jr., helped launch a series of nonviolent
demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, a city unsurpassed in
the strength of its commitment to segregation.
•Early in 1964, after Johnson applied both public and private pressure,
supporters of the measure finally mustered the two-thirds
majority necessary to close debate and end a filibuster by
southern senators; and the Senate passed the most
comprehensive civil rights bill in the nation’s history.
The Battle for Voting Rights
•During the summer of 1964, thousands of civil rights workers, black
and white, northern and southern, spread out through the South,
but primarily in Mississippi.
•The Civil Rights Act of 1965, better known as the Voting Rights Act,
which provided federal protection to blacks attempting to
exercise their right to vote.
The Changing Movement
•By 1966, 69 percent of American blacks were living in metropolitan
areas and 45 percent outside the South.
•The first large race riot since the end of World War II occurred the
following summer in the Watts section of Los Angeles.
•34 people died during the Watts uprising, which was eventually
quelled by the National Guard; 28 of the dead were black.
•Founded in 1931 by Wali Farad and Elijah Poole, the movement taught
blacks to take responsibility for their own lives, to be disciplined,
to live by strict codes of behavior, and to reject any dependence
on whites.
•He did not advocate violence, but he insisted that black people had
the right to defend themselves, violently if necessary from those
who assaulted them.
•On April 17, 1961, with the approval of the new president, 2,000 of
the armed exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, expecting
first American air support and then a spontaneous uprising by
the Cuban people on their behalf.
Confrontations with the Soviet Union
•In the grim aft ermath of the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy traveled to Vienna
in June 1961 for his first meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita
Khrushchev.
•For nearly 30 years the Berlin Wall served as the most potent physical
symbol of the conflict between the communist and
noncommunist worlds.
•On October 22, he ordered a naval and air blockade around Cuba, a
“quarantine” against all offensive weapons.
Johnson and the World
•Lyndon Johnson entered the presidency lacking even John Kennedy’s
limited prior experience with international affairs.
•In the fall of 1945, after the collapse of Japan and before the western
powers had time to return, the Vietminh declared Vietnam an
independent nation and set up a nationalist government under
Ho Chi Mihn in Hanoi.
•For the next 4 years, during what has become known as the First
Indochina War, Truman and then Eisenhower continued to
support the French military campaign against the Vietminh; by
1954, by some calculations, the United States was paying 80
percent of France’s war costs.
Geneva and the Two Vietnams
•An international conference at Geneva, planned many months before
to settle the Korean dispute and other controversies, now took up
the fate of Vietnam as well.
•Secretary of State Dulles, who reluctantly attended but left early; the
United States was not a party to the accords.
•The “attrition” was a strategy premised on the belief that the Unites
States could inflict so many causalities and so much damage on
the enemy that eventually they would be unable and unwilling to
continue the struggle.
•By the end of 1967, virtually every identifiable target of any strategic
importance in North Vietnam had been destroyed.
•In the days after the assassination, major riots broke out in more than
60 American cities.
•Rober t Kennedy shaped what some would later call the “Kennedy
Legacy”, a set of ideas that would for a time become central to
American liberalism.