American History - Part 2 15981 20231109200920

American History: Part 2 / Lesson 7: The 1960s to the Present
Lesson 7 Overview
The 1960s were a time of political turmoil and change in America. This lesson begins with
an examination of the Civil Rights movement and you’ll review other equal rights
movements of the time. You’ll study the Cold War. You’ll learn about America’s role in the
Vietnam War and its impact on political policy. The lesson reviews other international
events and their impact on American politics. You’ll examine life in America during these
conflicts and their influence on everyday life. Finally, you’ll review the presidencies of the
1960s to the present day and examine the political divisions that have arisen and persist to
this day.
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Lesson Objectives
Explain the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s
Analyze causes for America's inability to win the Vietnam War
Examine the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson
Recognize the movement for equal rights during the 1960s and 1970s
Recognize why the 1970s is considered a time of malaise
Describe major domestic and international events during the Reagan presidency
Recognize how technological innovations led to societal changes at the end of the 20th century
Summarize America's role in ghting terrorism after the September 11th attacks
Describe successes and failures of the Bush and Obama presidencies
Recognize political divisions in America by examining recent election patterns

The Civil Rights Movement
Content in this assignment is from American History: From Pre-Columbian to the New
Millennium(http://ushistory.org/us) by the Independence Hall Association, used under
a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
A New Civil Rights Movement
Although the Civil War did bring an official end to slavery in the United States, it didn’t
erase the social barriers built by that “peculiar institution.”
Despite the efforts of Radical Reconstructionists, the American South emerged from the
Civil War with a system of laws that undermined the freedom of African Americans and
preserved many elements of white privilege. No major successful attack was launched on
the segregation system until the 1950s.
Beginning with the Supreme Court’s school integration ruling of 1954, the American legal
system seemed sympathetic to African American demands that their Fourteenth
Amendment civil rights be protected. Soon, a peaceful equality movement began under the
unofficial leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Public opinion polls across the nation and the world revealed a great deal of sympathy for
African Americans as part of the Civil Rights Movement. Although many obstacles to
complete racial equity remained, by 1965 most legal forms of discrimination had been
abolished.
Gains made by civil rights activists didn’t bring greater unity in the movement. On the
contrary, as the 1960s progressed, a radical wing of the movement grew stronger and
stronger. Influenced by Malcolm X, the Black Power Movement rejected the policy of
nonviolence at all costs and even believed integration wasn’t a desirable short-term goal.
Black nationalists called for the establishment of a nation of African Americans dependent
on each other for support without the interference or help of whites.
Race-related violence began to spread across the country. Beginning in 1964, a series of
“long, hot summers” of rioting plagued urban centers. More and more individuals dedicated
to African American causes became victims of assassination. Medgar Evers, Malcolm X,
and Martin Luther King, Jr. were a few of the more famous casualties of the tempest.
Hope and optimism gave way to alienation and despair as the 1970s began. Many realized
that although changing racist laws was actually relatively simple, changing racist attitudes
was a much more difficult task.
Separate No Longer?

During the first half of the twentieth century, the United States existed as two nations in
one.
The Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decreed that the legislation of two
separate societies—one black and one white—was permitted as long as the two were seen
as equal.
States across the North and South passed laws creating schools and public facilities for
each race. These regulations, known as Jim Crow laws, reestablished white supremacy
after it had diminished during the Reconstruction Era. Across the land, blacks and whites
dined at separate restaurants, swam in separate swimming pools, and drank from separate
water fountains.
These laws established an American brand of apartheid. Blacks weren't treated equally as
whites under the law. Many states in the South established voting restrictions, such as poll
taxes and literacy tests, to keep former slaves away from the polls despite the Fourteenth
Amendment. Law and order often was left in the hands of the public, when mobs could rule
by fear on the streets of black neighborhoods. Lynching of African Americans was a horrific
reality and would remain so for many years to come.
In the aftermath of World War II, America sought to demonstrate to the world the merit of
free democracies over communist dictatorships. But its segregation system exposed
fundamental hypocrisy. Change began brewing in the late 1940s. President Harry Truman
ordered the end of segregation in the armed services, and Jackie Robinson became the
first African American to play Major League Baseball. But the wall built by Jim Crow
legislation seemed insurmountable.
The first major battleground was in the schools. It was very clear by midcentury that
southern states had expertly enacted separate educational systems. These schools,
however, were never equal. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP), led by attorney Thurgood Marshall, sued public schools across the
South, insisting that the “Separate but Equal” Clause had been violated.
In no state where distinct racial education laws existed was there equality in public
spending. Teachers in white schools were paid better wages, school buildings for white
students were maintained more carefully, and funds for educational materials flowed more
liberally into white schools. States normally spent 10 to 20 times on the education of white
students as they spent on African American students.
The Supreme Court finally decided to rule on this subject in 1954 in the landmark Brown v.
Board of Education of Topeka case.
The verdict was unanimous against segregation. “Separate facilities are inherently
unequal,” read Chief Justice Earl Warren’s opinion. Warren worked tirelessly to achieve a
9–0 ruling. He feared any dissent might provide a legal argument for the forces against
integration. The united Supreme Court sent a clear message: schools had to integrate.
The North and the border states quickly complied with the ruling, but the Brown decision
fell on deaf ears in the South. The Court had stopped short of insisting on immediate
integration, instead asking local governments to proceed “with all deliberate speed” in
complying.

Ten years after Brown, fewer than ten percent of Southern public schools had integrated.
Some areas achieved a zero percent compliance rate. The ruling didn’t address separate
restrooms, bus seats, or hotel rooms, so Jim Crow laws remained intact. But cautious first
steps toward an equal society had been taken.
It would take a decade of protest, legislation, and bloodshed before America neared a truer
equality.
Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott
On a cold December evening in 1955, Rosa Parks quietly incited a revolution—by just
sitting down.
She was tired after spending the day at work as a department store seamstress. She
stepped onto the bus for the ride home and sat in the fifth row—the first row of the “colored
section.”
In Montgomery, Alabama, when a bus became full, the seats nearer the front were given to
white passengers.
Montgomery bus driver James Blake ordered Parks and three other African Americans
seated nearby to move to the back of the bus by saying: “Move y’all, I want those two
seats.”
Three riders complied, Parks didn’t.
The following excerpt of what happened next is from Douglas Brinkley’s 2000 Rosa Parks'
biography.
“Are you going to stand up?” the driver demanded. Rosa Parks looked
straight at him and said: “No.” Flustered, and not quite sure what to do,
Blake retorted, “Well, I’m going to have you arrested.” And Parks, still sitting
next to the window, replied softly, “You may do that.”
After Parks refused to move, she was arrested and fined $10. The chain of events
triggered by her arrest changed the United States.
King, Abernathy, Boycott, and the SCLC
In 1955, a little-known minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. led the Dexter Avenue
Baptist Church in Montgomery.

King studied the writings and practices of Henry David Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi.
Their teaching advocated civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance to social injustice.
While it was peaceful, King believed that unjust laws had to be broken before they could be
recognized as unjust and corrected by society.
A staunch devotee of nonviolence, King and his colleague, Ralph Abernathy, were a part of
a community organization, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), which
organized a boycott of Montgomery’s buses.
The demands they made were simple: black passengers should be treated with courtesy;
seating should be allotted on a first-come-first-served basis, with white passengers sitting
from front to back and black passengers sitting from back to front; and African American
drivers should drive routes that primarily serviced African Americans. On Monday,
December 5, 1955, the boycott went into effect.
Don’t Ride the Bus
In 1955, the Women’s Political Council issued a leaflet calling for a boycott
of Montgomery buses.
Don’t ride the bus to work, to town, to school, or any place on Monday,
December 5.
Another Negro Woman has been arrested and put in jail because she
refused to give up her bus seat.
Don’t ride the buses to work to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday. If

you work, take a cab, or share a ride, or walk.
Come to a mass meeting, Monday at 7:00 P.M. at the Holt Street Baptist
Church for further instruction.
Montgomery officials stopped at nothing in attempting to sabotage the boycott. King and
Abernathy were arrested. Violence began during the action and continued after its
conclusion. Four churches—as well as the homes of King and Abernathy—were bombed.
But the boycott continued.
The MIA had hoped for a 50 percent support rate among African Americans. To their
surprise and delight, 99 percent of the city’s African Americans refused to ride the buses.
People walked to work or rode their bikes, and carpools were established to help the
elderly. The bus company suffered thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
Finally, on November 23, 1956, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the MIA. Segregated
busing was declared unconstitutional. City officials reluctantly agreed to comply with the
Court Ruling. The black community of Montgomery had held firm in their resolve.

The Montgomery bus boycott triggered a firestorm in the South. Across the region, blacks
resisted “moving to the back of the bus.” Similar actions flared up in other cities. The
boycott put Martin Luther King, Jr. in the national spotlight. He became the acknowledged
leader of the new civil rights movement.
With Ralph Abernathy, King formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC).
This organization was dedicated to fighting Jim Crow segregation. African Americans
boldly declared to the rest of the country that their movement would be peaceful,
organized, and determined.
To modern eyes, getting a seat on a bus may not seem like a great feat. But in 1955, sitting
down marked the first step in a revolution.
Showdown in Little Rock
Three years after the Supreme Court declared race-based segregation illegal, a military
showdown took place in Little Rock, Arkansas. On September 3, 1957, nine black students
attempted to attend the all-white Central High School.
Under the pretext of maintaining order, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus mobilized the
Arkansas National Guard to prevent the students, known as the Little Rock Nine, from
entering the school. After a federal judge declared the action illegal, Faubus removed the
troops. When the students tried to enter again on September 24, they were taken into the
school through a back door. Word of this spread throughout the community, and a
thousand irate citizens stormed the school grounds. The police desperately tried to keep
the angry crowd under control as concerned onlookers whisked the students to safety.
The nation watched all of this on television. President Eisenhower was compelled to act.
Eisenhower wasn’t a strong proponent of civil rights. He feared that the Brown decision
could lead to an impasse between the federal government and the states. Now that very
stalemate had come. The rest of the country seemed to side with the black students, and
the Arkansas state government was defying a federal decree. The situation hearkened
back to the dangerous federal-state conflicts of the nineteenth century that followed the
end of the Civil War.
On September 25, Eisenhower ordered the troops of the 101st Airborne Division into Little
Rock, marking the first time US troops were dispatched to the South since Reconstruction.
He federalized the Arkansas National Guard in order to remove the soldiers from Faubus’s
control. For the next few months, the African American students attended school under
armed supervision.
Can You Meet the Challenge?

This editorial by JANE EMERY appeared in Central High student

newspaper, The Tiger, on September 19, 1957.
You are being watched! Today the world is watching you, the students of
Central High. They want to know what your reactions, behavior, and
impulses will be concerning a matter now before us. After all, as we see it, it
settles now to a matter of interpretation of law and order.
Will you be stubborn, obstinate, or refuse to listen to both sides of the

question? Will your knowledge of science help you determine your action or
will you let customs, superstition, or tradition determine the decision for
you?
This is the chance that the youth of America has been waiting for. Through
an open mind, broad outlook, wise thinking, and a careful choice you can
prove that America’s youth has not “gone to the dogs,” that their moral,
spiritual, and educational standards are not being lowered.
This is the opportunity for you as citizens of Arkansas and students of Little
Rock Central High to show the world that Arkansas is a progressive thriving
state of wide-awake alert people. It is a state that is rapidly growing and
improving its social, health, and educational facilities. That it is a state with
friendly, happy, and conscientious citizens who love and cherish their
freedom.
It has been said that life is just a chain of problems. If this is true, then this
experience in making up your own mind and determining right from wrong
will be of great value to you in life.
The challenge is yours, as future adults of America, to prove your maturity,

intelligence, and ability to make decisions by how you react, behave, and
conduct yourself in this controversial question. What is your answer to this
challenge?
The following year, Little Rock officials closed the schools to prevent integration. But in
1959, the schools were open again. Both black and white children were in attendance.
The tide was slowly turning in favor of those advocating civil rights for African Americans.
An astonished America watched footage of brutish, white southerners mercilessly
harassing clean-cut, respectful African American children trying to get an education.
Television swayed public opinion toward integration.
In 1959, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, the first such measure since
Reconstruction. The law created a permanent civil rights commission to assist black
suffrage. The measure had little teeth and proved ineffective, but it paved the way for more
powerful legislation in the years to come.
Buses and schools had come under attack. Next on the menu: a luncheonette counter.

The Sit-In Movement
By 1960, the civil rights movement had gained strong momentum. The nonviolent
measures employed by Martin Luther King, Jr. helped African American activists win
supporters across the country and throughout the world.
On February 1, 1960, a new tactic was added to the peaceful activists’ strategy. Four
African American college students walked up to a whites-only lunch counter at the local
Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and asked for coffee. When service was
refused, the students sat patiently. Despite threats and intimidation, the students sat quietly
and waited to be served.
The civil rights sit-in was born.
The instructions were simple: sit quietly and wait to be served. Often, the participants
would be jeered and threatened by local customers. Sometimes they would be pelted with
food or ketchup. Angry onlookers tried to provoke fights that never came. In the event of a
physical attack, the student would curl up into a ball on the floor and take the punishment.
Any violent reprisal would undermine the spirit of the sit-in. When the local police came to
arrest the demonstrators, another line of students would take the vacated seats.
Sit-in organizers believed that if the violence were only on the part of the white community,
the world would see the righteousness of their cause. Before the end of the school year,
over 1,500 black demonstrators were arrested. But their sacrifice brought results. Slowly,
but surely, restaurants throughout the South began to abandon their policies of
segregation.
In April 1960, Martin Luther King, Jr. sponsored a conference to discuss strategy. Students
from the North and the South came together and formed the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Early leaders included Stokely Carmichael and Fannie
Lou Hamer. The Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) was a northern group of students
led by James Farmer, which also endorsed direct action. These groups became the
grassroots organizers of future sit-ins at lunch counters, wade-ins at segregated swimming
pools, and pray-ins at white-only churches.
Bolstered by the success of direct action, CORE activists planned the first freedom ride in
1961. To challenge laws mandating segregated interstate transportation, busloads of
integrated black and white students rode through the South. The first freedom riders left
Washington, DC, in May 1961 en route to New Orleans. Several participants were arrested
in bus stations. When the buses reached Anniston, Alabama, an angry mob slashed the
tires on one bus and set it aflame. The riders on the other bus were violently attacked, and
the freedom riders had to complete their journey by plane.
New Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered federal marshals to protect future freedom
rides. Bowing to political and public pressure, the Interstate Commerce Commission soon
banned segregation on interstate travel. Progress was slow indeed, but the wall between
the races was gradually being eroded.
Gains and Pains

Civil rights activists in the early 1960s teemed with enthusiasm. The courts and the federal
government seemed to be on their side, and the movement was winning the battle for
public opinion. Under the protection of federal troops, in 1962, James Meredith became the
first African American to attend the University of Mississippi.
As sit-ins and freedom rides spread across the South, African American leaders set a new,
ambitious goal: a federal law banning racial discrimination in all public accommodations
and in employment. In the summer of 1963, President Kennedy indicated he would support
such a measure, and thousands marched on Washington to support the bill.
Blacks and whites sang “we shall overcome” and listened to Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver
his “I Have a Dream” speech. The civil rights movement seemed on the brink of triumph.
As equality advocates notched more and more successes, the forces against change grew
more active as well. Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan increased hate crimes.
Earlier in 1963, the nation watched the Birmingham police force, under the direction of Bull
Connor, unleash dogs, tear gas, and fire hoses on peaceful demonstrators.
NAACP leader, Medgar Evers, was murdered in cold blood that summer in Mississippi as
he tried to enter his home.
Church burnings and bombings increased. Four young girls were killed in one such
bombing in Birmingham as they attended Sunday school lessons.
Many who had looked to John F. Kennedy as a sympathetic leader were crushed when he
fell victim to assassination in November, 1963. But Kennedy’s death didn’t derail the Civil
Rights Act.
President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill into law in July, 1964. As of that day, it became
illegal to refuse employment to an individual on the basis of race. Segregation at any public
facility in America was now against the law.
The passage of that act led to a new focus. Many African Americans had been robbed of
the right to vote since Southern states enacted discriminatory poll taxes and literacy tests.
Only five percent of African Americans eligible to vote were registered in Mississippi in
1965. The Twenty-fourth Amendment banned the poll tax in 1964. A new landmark law, the
Voting Rights Act of 1965, banned the literacy test and other such measures designed to
keep blacks from voting. It also placed federal registrars in the South to ensure black
suffrage. By 1965, few legal barriers to racial equality remained.
But centuries of racism couldn’t be erased with the pen. Many African Americans continued
to languish in the bottom economic strata. Civil rights activists fought on to achieve
economic as well as legal equality. It’s a fight that continues to this day.
In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true
meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men
are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former
slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together
at a table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, a
state sweltering with the heat of injustice, a state sweltering with the heat of
oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four 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. I have a dream today.
Full text of “I Have a Dream”
On August 28, 1963, over 250,000 people gathered in Washington, DC

hoping to turn the nation’s eyes to the problems of racial injustice and
inequality. It was at this massive rally that Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his
best-known address. It has become known as the “I Have a Dream”
speech.
I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the
greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we

stand signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree
came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had
been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous
daybreak to end the long night of captivity.
But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is
still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly
crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.
One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the
midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the
Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds
himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize
a shameful condition.

In a sense, we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the
architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution
and the declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note
to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all
men would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights of Life, Liberty, and the
pursuit of Happiness.” It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this
promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of
honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad
check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”
But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to

believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of
this nation. And we have come to cash this check, a check that will give us
upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce
urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to
take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to rise from the
dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.
Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to
the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all
of God’s children.
It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This
sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until
there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-
three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro
needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude
awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither
rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship
rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our
nation until the bright day of justice emerges.
But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the
warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of
gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us
not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of
bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high
plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to
degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the
majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous
new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to
distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by
their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up
with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is
inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.
And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall march ahead. We
cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil
rights, “When will you be satisfied?”

We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the

unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long
as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the
motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied
as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger
one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their
selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating “for whites only.” We
cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a
Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we
are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until “justice rolls down like
waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and
tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of
you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered
by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality.
You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the
faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back
to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to
Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing
that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in
the valley of despair.
I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of

today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the
American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true
meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men
are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former
slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together
at a table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state,
sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression,
will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
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. I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with
its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and
“nullification,” one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls
will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and
brothers. I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day “every valley shall be exalted, every hill and
mountain shall be made low; the rough places will be made plain, and the

crooked places will be made straight; and the glory of the Lord shall be
revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”
This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this
faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.
With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our
nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be
able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail
together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one
day. This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with
new meaning, “My country, ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every
mountainside, let freedom ring.”
And if America is to be a great nation this must become true.
So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.
Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!
Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!
But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!
Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi.
From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring
from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will
be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and
white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to
join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last!
Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
As the unquestioned leader of the peaceful Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. was at the same time one of the most beloved and one of the most hated
men of his time. From his involvement in the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 until his
untimely death in 1968, King’s message of change through peaceful means added to the

movement’s numbers and gave it its moral strength. The legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. is
embodied in these two simple words: equality and nonviolence.
King was raised in an activist family. His father was deeply influenced by Marcus Garvey’s
back to Africa movement in the 1920s. His mother was the daughter of one of Atlanta’s
most influential African American ministers. As a student, King excelled. He easily moved
through grade levels and entered Morehouse College, his father’s alma mater, at the age
of 15. Next, he attended Crozer Theological Seminary, where he received a Bachelor of
Divinity degree. While he was pursuing his doctorate at Boston University, he met and
married Coretta Scott. After receiving his doctorate in 1955, King accepted an appointment
to the Dexter Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.
After his organization of the bus boycott, King formed the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, which dedicated itself to the advancement of rights for African Americans. In
April 1963, King organized a protest in Birmingham, Alabama, a city King called “the most
thoroughly segregated city in the United States.” Since the end of World War II, there had
been 60 unsolved bombings of African American churches and homes.
Boycotts, sit-ins, and marches were conducted. When Bull Connor, head of the
Birmingham police department, used fire hoses and dogs on the demonstrators, millions
saw the images on television. King was arrested. But support came from around the nation
and the world for King and his family. Later in 1963, he delivered his famous “I Have a
Dream” speech to thousands in Washington, DC.
After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, King turned his efforts to registering
African American voters in the South. In 1965, he led a march in Selma, Alabama, to
increase the percentage of African American voters in Alabama. Again, King was arrested.
Again, the marchers faced attacks by the police. Tear gas, cattle prods, and billy clubs fell
on the peaceful demonstrators. Public opinion weighed predominantly on the side of King
and the protesters. Finally, President Johnson ordered the National Guard to protect the
demonstrators from attack, and King was able to complete the long march from Selma to
the state capital of Montgomery. The action in Selma led to the passage of the Voting
Rights Act of 1965.
Early in the morning of April 4, 1968, King was shot by James Earl Ray. Spontaneous
violence spread through urban areas as mourners unleashed their rage at the loss of their
leader. Rioting burst forth in many American cities.
RFK on MLK
The day Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, Robert F. Kennedy was
campaigning for the presidency in Indianapolis, Indiana. Kennedy made this
speech in remembrance of Dr. King’s tireless efforts.
I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love
peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and
killed tonight.

Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice for his fellow
human beings, and he died because of that effort.
In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps
well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move
in. For those of you who are black—considering the evidence there
evidently is that there were white people who were responsible—you can
be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can
move in that direction as a country, in great polarization—black people
amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one
another.
Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to

comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has
spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and
love.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and
distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only
say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of
my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an
effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go
beyond these rather difficult times.
My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: “In our sleep, pain which cannot
forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our
will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the
United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not
violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one
another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our
country, whether they be white or they be black.
So I shall ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of
Martin Luther King, that’s true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our
own country, which all of us love—a prayer for understanding and that
compassion of which I spoke.
We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times; we’ve had
difficult times in the past; we will have difficult times in the future. It is not
the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of
disorder.
But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people
in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life,
and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to
tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for
our people.
But the world never forgot his contributions. Time magazine had named him “Man of the
Year” in 1963. In 1964, he won the Nobel Peace Prize and was described as “the first
person in the Western world to have shown us that a struggle can be waged without
violence.” In 1977, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the
highest award a civilian American can earn. In the 1980s, his birthday became a national
holiday, creating an annual opportunity for Americans to reflect on the two values he
dedicated his life to advancing: equality and nonviolence.
The Long, Hot Summers
On August 11, 1965, the atmosphere in the Watts district of Los Angeles turned white hot.
A police patrol stopped Marquette Frye, suspecting he was driving while intoxicated. A
crowd assembled as Frye was asked to step out of his vehicle. When the arresting officer
drew his gun, the crowd erupted in a spontaneous burst of anger.
Too many times had the local citizens of Watts felt that the police department treated them
with excessive force. They were tired of being turned down for jobs in Watts by white
employers who lived in wealthier neighborhoods. They were troubled by the overcrowded
living conditions in rundown apartments. The Frye incident was the match that lit their fire.
His arrest prompted five days of rioting, looting, and burning. The governor of California
ordered the National Guard to maintain order. When the smoke cleared, 34 people were
killed and property damage estimates approached $40 million.
The urban uprising, part of what was often called “the Long, Hot Summer,” had actually
begun in 1964. When a white policeman in Harlem shot a black youth in July 1964, a
similar disturbance flared (though on a lesser scale than the Watts riots.) Rochester, Jersey
City, and Philadelphia exploded as well. From 1964 to 1966, outbreaks of violence rippled
across many other northern urban areas, including Detroit, where 43 people were killed.
As youths of the counterculture celebrated the famed Summer of Love in 1967, serious
racial upheaval took place in more than 150 American cities. The assassination of Martin
Luther King, Jr. in 1968 touched off a wave of violence in 125 more urban centers.
At the behest of President Johnson, the Kerner Commission was created to examine the
causes behind the rioting. After a six-month study, the committee declared that the source
of unrest was white racism. Despite legislative gains against discriminatory policies,
America was moving toward two distinct societies divided along racial lines.
As the great migration of blacks from the South to northern cities continued, white
northerners began deserting the cities for the suburbs.
African Americans had been victimized by poor education, the unavailability of quality
employment, slum conditions, and police brutality. The average income of a black

household was only slightly more than half the income of its white counterpart. The Kerner
Commission recommended a wide array of social spending programs, including housing
programs, job training, and welfare. Civil rights legislation became the cornerstone of
Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program.
Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam
When Malcolm Little was growing up in Lansing, Michigan, he developed a mistrust for
white Americans. Ku Klux Klan terrorists burned his house, and his father was later
murdered—an act young Malcolm attributed to local whites. After moving to Harlem,
Malcolm turned to crime. Soon he was arrested and sent to jail.
The prison experience was eye-opening for the young man, and he soon made some
decisions that altered the course of his life. He began to read and educate himself.
Influenced by other inmates, he converted to Islam. Upon his release, he was a changed
man with a new identity.
Believing his true lineage to be lost when his ancestors were forced into slavery, he took
the last name of a variable: X.
Wallace Fard founded the Nation of Islam in the 1930s. Christianity was the white man’s
religion, declared Fard. It was forced on African Americans during the slave experience.
Islam was closer to African roots and identity. Members of the Nation of Islam read the
Koran, worship Allah as their God, and accept Mohammed as their chief prophet. Mixed
with the religious tenets of Islam were black pride and black nationalism. The followers of
Fard became known as Black Muslims.
When Fard mysteriously disappeared, Elijah Muhammad became the leader of the
movement. The Nation of Islam attracted many followers, especially in prisons, where lost
African Americans most looked for guidance. They preached adherence to a strict moral
code and reliance on other African Americans. Integration wasn’t a goal. Rather, the Nation
of Islam wanted blacks to set up their own schools, churches, and support networks. When
Malcolm X made his personal conversion, Elijah Muhammad soon recognized his talents
and made him a leading spokesperson for the Black Muslims.
Martin and Malcolm
Although their philosophies may have differed radically, Malcolm X believed

that he and Martin Luther King, Jr. were working toward the same goal and
that given the state of race relations in the 1960s, both would most likely
meet a fatal end. This excerpt is taken from The Autobiography of Malcolm
X, which was cowritten with famed Roots author, Alex Haley.
The goal has always been the same, with the approaches to it as different
as mine and Dr. Martin Luther King’s non-violent marching, that dramatizes
the brutality and the evil of the white man against defenseless blacks. And

in the racial climate of this country today, it is anybody’s guess which of the
“extremes” in approach to the black man’s problems might personally meet
a fatal catastrophe first—”non-violent” Dr. King, or so-called ‘“violent” me.
As Martin Luther King preached his gospel of peaceful change and integration in the late
1950s and early 1960s, Malcolm X delivered a different message: whites weren’t to be
trusted. He called on African Americans to be proud of their heritage and to set up strong
communities without the help of white Americans. He promoted the establishment of a
separate state for African Americans in which they could rely on themselves to provide
solutions to their own problems. Violence wasn’t the only answer, but violence was justified
in self-defense. Blacks should achieve what was rightfully theirs “by any means
necessary,” according to Malcolm X.
Malcolm X electrified urban audiences with his eloquent prose and inspirational style. In
1963, he split with the Nation of Islam; in 1964, he made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Later
that year, he showed signs of softening his stand on violence and even met with Martin
Luther King, Jr. to exchange remarks. What direction he might have ultimately taken is lost
to a history that can never be written. As Malcolm X led a mass rally in Harlem on February
21, 1965, rival Black Muslims gunned him down.
Although his life was ended, the ideas he preached lived on in the black power movement.
Black Power
On June 5, 1966, James Meredith was shot in an ambush as he attempted to complete a

peaceful march from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. Meredith had already
made national headlines in 1962 by becoming the first African American to enroll at the
University of Mississippi.
Civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Floyd McKissick of CORE, and Stokely
Carmichael of SNCC rushed to Meredith’s hospital bed. They determined that his march
must be completed. As Carmichael and McKissick walked through Mississippi, they
observed that little had changed despite federal legislation. Local townspeople harassed
the marchers while the police turned a blind eye or arrested the activists as troublemakers.
At a mass rally, Carmichael uttered the simple statement: “What we need is black power.”
Crowds chanted the phrase as a slogan, and a movement began to flower.
Carmichael and McKissick were heavily influenced by the words of Malcolm X, and
rejected integration as a short-term goal. Carmichael felt that blacks needed to feel a
sense of racial pride and self-respect before any meaningful gains could be achieved. He
encouraged the strengthening of African American communities without the help of whites.
Chapters of SNCC and CORE—both integrated organizations—began to reject white

membership as Carmichael abandoned peaceful resistance. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the
NAACP denounced black power as the proper forward path. But black power was a

powerful message in the streets of urban America, where resentment boiled and tempers
flared.
Soon, African American students began to celebrate African American culture boldly and
publicly. Colleges teemed with young blacks wearing traditional African colors and clothes.
Soul singer James Brown had his audience chanting: “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud.”
Hairstyles unique to African Americans became popular and youths proclaimed, “black is
beautiful!”
That same year, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale took Carmichael’s advice one step further.
They formed the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. Openly brandishing weapons,
the Panthers decided to take control of their own neighborhoods to aid their communities
and to resist police brutality. Soon the Panthers spread across the nation. The Black
Panther Party borrowed many tenets from socialist movements, including Mao Zedong’s
famous creed: “Political power comes through the barrel of a gun.” The Panthers and the
police exchanged gunshots on American streets as white Americans viewed the growing
militancy with increasing alarm.
Black Panther Party
In 1966, the Black Panther Party offered a list of their wants and beliefs.
Drawing from the language of the Declaration of Independence, the
document made a powerful statement about the state of race relations in
the United States at the time.
THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY
Platform & Program
October 1966
WHAT WE WANT
WHAT WE BELIEVE
1. WE WANT freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
WE BELIEVE that black people will not be free until we are able to
determine our destiny.
2. WE WANT full employment for our people.
WE BELIEVE that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man
employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen
will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the
businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can
organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
3. WE WANT an end to the robbery by the CAPITALIST of our Black Community.

WE BELIEVE that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the
overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years
ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the
payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities. e Germans are
now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. e Germans murdered
six million Jews. e American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over fty million black
people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.
4. WE WANT decent housing, t for the shelter of human beings.
WE BELIEVE that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community,
then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community,
with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
5. WE WANT education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American
society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day
society.
WE BELIEVE in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a
man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he
has little chance to relate to anything else.
6. WE WANT all black men to be exempt from military service.
WE BELIEVE that Black people should not be forced to ght in the military service to defend
a racist government that does not protect us. We will not ght and kill other people of color in
the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of
America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the
racist military, by whatever means necessary.
7. WE WANT an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people.
WE BELIEVE we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-
defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police
oppression and brutality. e Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States
gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves
for self-defense.
8. WE WANT freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
WE BELIEVE that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons
because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.
9. WE WANT all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer
group or people from their black communities, as de ned by the Constitution of the United
States.
WE BELIEVE that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black
people will receive fair trials. e 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a
right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social,
religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court
will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant
came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the
“average reasoning man” of the black community.
10. WE WANT land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major
political objective, a United Nations supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black
colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate, for the purpose of
determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.
WHEN, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the
political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers
of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God
entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare

the causes which impel them to the separation.
WE HOLD these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness. at, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among
men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of
government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish
it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and
organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to e ect their safety and
happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be
changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown, that
mankind are more disposed to su er, while evils are su erable, than to right themselves by
abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and
usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under
absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw o such government, and to
provide new guards for their future security.
The peaceful civil rights movement was dealt a severe blow in the spring of 1968. On the
morning of April 4, King was gunned down by a white assassin named James Earl Ray.
Riots spread through American cities as African Americans mourned the death of their
most revered leader. Black power advocates saw the murder as another sign that white
power must be met with similar force. As the decade came to a close, there were few
remaining examples of legal discrimination. But across the land, de facto segregation
loomed large. Many schools were hardly integrated and African Americans struggled to
claim their fair share of the economic pie.

Exercise 7.1
Open Link

Key Points and Links
Key Points
In 1954 the Supreme Court decision—Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka—ruled that segregation laws were
unconstitutional. Despite this ruling African Americans faced discrimination.
e Civil Rights movement was a social movement in the 1950s and 1960s which aimed to ght and end both
social and governmental discrimination in American society.
Civil Rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. advocated a nonviolent protest approach to drawing the
nation’s attention to discrimination faced by African Americans.
Not all Civil Rights leaders believed in integration and nonviolence. Some movements such as the Black Panthers
believed in success through Black Nationalism and forming separate support structures for African American
society.
Legislative successes of the Civil Right movement included the banning of poll taxes (1964, Twenty-Fourth
Amendment) and the 1965 Civil Rights Act which removed unfair barriers to African American voting.

The Vietnam War
The Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was the second-longest war in US history, after the war in Afghanistan.
Promises and commitments to the people and government of South Vietnam to keep
communist forces from overtaking them reached back into the Truman administration.
Eisenhower placed military advisers and CIA operatives in Vietnam, and John F. Kennedy
sent American soldiers to Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson ordered the first real combat by
American troops, and Richard Nixon concluded the war.
Despite the decades of resolve, billions and billions of dollars, nearly 60,000 American
lives and many more injuries, the United States failed to achieve its objectives.
One factor that influenced the failure of the United States in Vietnam was lack of public
support. However, the notion that the war initially was prosecuted by the government
against the wishes of the American people is false. The notion that the vast majority of
American youths took to the streets to end the Vietnam War is equally false. Early
initiatives by the United States under Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy received broad
support.
Only two members of the US Congress voted against granting Johnson broad authority to
wage the war in Vietnam, and most Americans supported this measure as well. The
antiwar movement in 1965 was small, and news of its activities was buried in the inner
pages of newspapers, if there was any mention at all. Only later in the war did public
opinion sour.
The enemy was hard to identify. The war wasn’t fought between conventional army forces.
The Viet Cong blended in with the native population and struck by ambush, often at night.
Massive American bombing campaigns hit their targets, but failed to make the North
Vietnamese concede. Promises made by American military and political leaders that the
war would soon be over were broken.
And night after night, Americans turned on the news to see the bodies of their young flown
home in bags. Draft injustices like college deferments surfaced, hearkening back to the
similar controversies of the Civil War. The average age of the American soldier in Vietnam
was 19. As the months of the war became years, the public became impatient.
Only a small percentage of Americans believed their government was evil or sympathized
with the Viet Cong. But many began to feel it was time to cut losses. Even the iconic CBS
newscaster, Walter Cronkite, questioned aloud the efficacy of pursuing the war.

President Nixon signed a ceasefire in January 1973 that formally ended the hostilities. In
1975, communist forces from the north overran the south and unified the nation.
Neighboring Cambodia and Laos also became communist dictatorships. At home,
returning Vietnamese veterans found readjustment and even acceptance difficult. The
scars of Vietnam wouldn’t heal quickly for the United States.
The legacy of bitterness divided the American citizenry and influenced foreign policy into
the twenty-first century.
Early Involvement
While Americans were girding to fight the Civil War in 1860, the French were beginning a
century-long imperial involvement in Indochina. The lands now known as Vietnam, Laos,
and Cambodia comprised Indochina. The riches to be harvested in these lands proved
economically enticing to the French.
After World War I, a nationalist movement formed in Vietnam led by Ho Chi Minh. Ho was
educated in the West, where he became a disciple of Marxist thought. Ho resented and
resisted the French. When the Japanese invaded Vietnam during World War II, they
displaced French rule. Ho formed a liberation movement known as the Viet Minh. Using
guerrilla warfare, the Viet Minh battled the Japanese and held many key cities by 1945.
Paraphrasing the Declaration of Independence, Ho proclaimed the new nation of Vietnam
—a new nation Western powers refused to recognize.
France was determined to reclaim all its territories after World War II. The United States
now faced an interesting dilemma. American tradition dictated sympathy for the
revolutionaries over any colonial power. However, supporting the Marxist Viet Minh was
unthinkable, given the new strategy of containing communism.
Domino Theory
American diplomats subscribed to the Domino Theory. A communist victory in Vietnam

might lead to communist victories in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
Such a scenario was unthinkable to the makers of American foreign policy.
President Truman decided to support France in its efforts to reclaim Indochina by providing
money and military advisers. The United States’ financial commitment amounted to nearly
$1 billion per year.
The French found Ho Chi Minh a formidable adversary. Between 1945 and 1954 a fierce
war developed between the two sides. Slowly but surely, the Viet Minh wore down the
French will to fight. On May 8, 1954, a large regiment of French troops was captured by the
Vietnamese, led by communist general Vo Nguyen Giap at Dien Bien Phu.
A Nation Divided

The rest of the French troops withdrew, leaving a buffer zone separating the North and
South. Negotiations to end the conflict took place in Geneva. A multinational agreement
divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel. The territory north of this line would be led by Ho Chi
Minh with Hanoi its capital.
The southern sector named Saigon its capital and Ngo Dinh Diem its leader. This division
was meant to be temporary, with nationwide elections scheduled for 1956. Knowing that
Ho Chi Minh would be a sure victor, the South made sure these elections were never held.
During the administrations of Eisenhower and Kennedy, the United States continued to
supply funds, weapons, and military advisers to South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh turned North
Vietnam into a communist dictatorship and created a new band of guerrillas in the South
called the Viet Cong, whose sole purpose was to overthrow the military regime in the South
and reunite the nation under Ho Chi Minh.
The United States was backing an unpopular leader in Ngo Dinh Diem. Diem was corrupt,
showed little commitment to democratic principles, and favored Catholics to the dismay of
the Buddhist majority. In November 1963, Diem was murdered in a coup with apparent CIA
involvement.
Few of Ngo’s successors fared any better, while Ho Chi Minh was the Vietnamese
equivalent of George Washington. He had successfully won the hearts and minds of the
majority of the Vietnamese people. Two weeks after the fall of Diem, Kennedy himself was
felled by an assassin’s bullet.
By the time Lyndon Johnson inherited the Presidency, Vietnam was a bitterly divided
nation. The United States would soon, too, be divided on what to do in Vietnam.
Years of Escalation: 1965–68
It was David vs. Goliath, with the United States playing Goliath.
On August 2, 1964, gunboats of North Vietnam allegedly fired on ships of the US Navy
stationed in the Gulf of Tonkin. They had been sailing 10 miles off the coast of North
Vietnam in support of the South Vietnamese navy.
When reports that further firing occurred on August 4, President Johnson quickly asked
Congress to respond. With nearly unanimous consent, members of the Senate and House
empowered Johnson to “take all necessary measures” to repel North Vietnamese
aggression. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution gave the President a “blank check” to wage the
war in Vietnam as he saw fit. After Lyndon Johnson was elected president in his own right
that November, he chose to escalate the conflict.
Operation Rolling Thunder
In February 1965, the United States began a long program of sustained bombing of North
Vietnamese targets known as Operation Rolling Thunder. At first, only military targets were
hit, but as months turned into years, civilian targets were pummeled as well.

The United States also bombed the Ho Chi Minh trail, a supply line used by the North
Vietnamese to aid the Viet Cong. The trail meandered through Laos and Cambodia, so the
bombing was kept secret from the Congress and the American people. More bombs rained
down on Vietnam than the Allies used on the Axis powers during the whole of World War II.
Additional sorties delivered defoliating agents such as agent orange and napalm to remove
the jungle cover utilized by the Viet Cong. The intense bombardment did little to deter the
communists. They continued to use the Ho Chi Minh trail despite the grave risk. They
burrowed underground, building 30,000 miles of tunnel networks to keep supply lines open.
Ground Troops
It soon became clear to General William, the American military commander, that combat
troops would be necessary to root out the enemy. Beginning in March 1965, when the first
American combat troops waded ashore at Da Nang, the United States began “search and
destroy” missions.
One of the most confounding problems faced by US military personnel in Vietnam was
identifying the enemy. The same Vietnamese peasant who waved hello in the daytime
might be a Viet Cong guerrilla fighter by night. The United States couldn’t indiscriminately
kill South Vietnamese peasants. Any mistake resulted in a dead ally and an angrier
population.
Search and destroy missions were conducted by moving into a village and inspecting for
any signs of Viet Cong support. If any evidence was found, the troops would conduct a
“Zippo Raid” by torching the village to the ground and confiscating discovered munitions.
Most efforts were fruitless, as the Viet Cong proved adept at covering their tracks. The
enemy surrounded and confounded the Americans but direct confrontation was rare.
By the end of 1965, there were 189,000 American troops stationed in Vietnam. At the end
of the following year, that number doubled. Casualty reports steadily increased. Unlike
World War II, there were few major ground battles.
Most Vietnamese attacks were by ambush or night skirmishes. Many Americans died by
stepping on landmines or by triggering booby traps. Although Vietnamese body counts
were higher, Americans were dying at a rate of approximately 100 per week through 1967.
By the end of that year, there were nearly 500,000 American combat troops stationed in
Vietnam.
General Westmoreland promised a settlement soon, but the end wasn’t in sight.
The Tet Offensive
During the Buddhist holiday of Tet, over 80,000 Viet Cong troops emerged from their
tunnels and attacked nearly every major metropolitan center in South Vietnam. Surprise
strikes were made at the American base at Da Nang, and even the seemingly
impenetrable American embassy in Saigon was attacked.

During the weeks that followed, the South Vietnamese army and US ground forces
recaptured all of the lost territory, inflicting twice as many casualties on the Viet Cong as
suffered by the Americans.
The showdown was a military victory for the United States, but American morale suffered
an insurmountable blow.
Doves Outnumber Hawks
When Operation Rolling Thunder began in 1965, only 15 percent of the American public
opposed the war effort in Vietnam. As late as January 1968, only a few weeks before Tet,
only 28 percent of the American public labeled themselves “doves”, or people who
opposed the war. But by April 1968, six weeks after the Tet Offensive, “doves”
outnumbered “hawks,” people who were for the war, 42 to 41 percent.
Only 28 percent of the American people were satisfied with President Johnson’s handling
of the war. The Tet Offensive convinced many Americans that government statements
about the war being nearly over were false. After three years of intense bombing, billions of
dollars and 500,000 troops, the Viet Cong proved themselves capable of attacking
anywhere they chose. The message was simple: this war wasn’t almost over. The end was
nowhere in sight.
Sagging US Troop Morale
Declining public support brought declining troop morale. Many soldiers questioned the
wisdom of American involvement. Soldiers indulged in alcohol, marijuana, and even heroin
to escape their daily horrors. Incidents of fragging, or the murder of officers by their own
troops, increased in the years that followed Tet. Soldiers who completed their yearlong tour
of duty often found hostile receptions upon returning to the states.
After Tet, General Westmoreland requested an additional 200,000 troops to put added
pressure on the Viet Cong. His request was denied. President Johnson knew that
activating that many reserves, bringing the total American commitment to nearly three-
quarters of a million soldiers wasn’t politically tenable.
The North Vietnamese sensed the crumbling of American resolve. They knew that the
longer the war raged, the more antiwar sentiment in America would grow. They gambled
that the American people would demand troop withdrawals before the military met its
objectives.
For the next five years, they pretended to negotiate with the United States, making
proposals they knew would be rejected. With each passing day, the number of hawks in
America decreased. Only a small percentage of Americans objected to the war on moral
grounds, but a growing majority saw the war as an effort whose price of victory was way
too high.
The Antiwar Movement

Of all the lessons learned from Vietnam, one rings louder than all the rest—it’s impossible
to win a long, protracted war without popular support.
When the war in Vietnam began, many Americans believed that defending South Vietnam
from communist aggression was in the national interest. Communism was threatening free
governments across the globe. Any sign of nonintervention from the United States might
encourage revolutions elsewhere.
As the war dragged on, more and more Americans grew weary of mounting casualties and
escalating costs. The small antiwar movement grew into an unstoppable force, pressuring
American leaders to reconsider its commitment.
Peace movement leaders opposed the war on moral and economic grounds. The North
Vietnamese, they argued, were fighting a patriotic war to rid themselves of foreign
aggressors. Innocent Vietnamese peasants were being killed in the crossfire. American
planes wrought environmental damage by dropping their defoliating chemicals.
Ho Chi Minh was the most popular leader in all of Vietnam, and the United States was
supporting an undemocratic, corrupt military regime. Young American soldiers were
suffering and dying. Their economic arguments were less complex, but as critical of the
war effort. Military spending simply took money away from Great Society social programs
such as welfare, housing, and urban renewal.
The Draft
The draft was another major source of resentment among college students. The age of the
average American soldier serving in Vietnam was 19, seven years younger than its World
War II counterpart. Students observed that young Americans were legally old enough to
fight and die, but weren’t permitted to vote or drink alcohol. Such criticism led to the
Twenty-sixth Amendment, which granted suffrage to 18-year-olds.
Because draft deferments were granted to college students, the less affluent and less
educated made up a disproportionate percentage of combat troops. Once drafted,
Americans with higher levels of education were often given military office jobs. About 80
percent of American ground troops in Vietnam came from the lower classes. Latino and
African American males were assigned to combat more regularly than drafted white
Americans.
Antiwar demonstrations were few at first, with active participants numbering in the low
thousands when Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf. Events in Southeast Asia and at home
caused those numbers to grow as the years passed. As the Johnson Administration
escalated the commitment, the peace movement grew. Television changed many minds.
Millions of Americans watched body bags leave the Asian rice paddies every night in their
living rooms.
Give Peace a Chance
The late 1960s became increasingly radical as the activists felt their demands were
ignored. Peaceful demonstrations turned violent. When the police arrived to arrest

protesters, the crowds often retaliated. Students occupied buildings across college
campuses forcing many schools to cancel classes. Roads were blocked and ROTC
buildings were burned. Doves clashed with police and the National Guard in August 1968,
when antiwar demonstrators flocked to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago to
prevent the nomination of a prowar candidate.
Despite the growing antiwar movement, a silent majority of Americans still supported the
Vietnam effort. Many admitted that involvement was a mistake, but military defeat was
unthinkable.
When Richard Nixon was inaugurated in January 1969, the nation was bitterly divided over
what course of action to follow next.
Years of Withdrawal
President Nixon had a plan to end American involvement in Vietnam.
By the time he entered the White House in 1969, he knew the American war effort was
failing. Greater military power may have brought a favorable outcome, but there were no
guarantees. And the American people were less and less willing to support any sort of
escalation with each passing day.
Immediate American withdrawal would amount to a defeat of the noncommunist South

Vietnamese allies. Nixon announced a plan later known as Vietnamization. The United
States would gradually withdraw troops from Southeast Asia as American military
personnel turned more and more of the fighting over to the Army of the Republic of
Vietnam. In theory, as the South Vietnamese became more able to defend themselves, US
soldiers could go home without a communist takeover of Saigon.
Troop withdrawals did little to placate the antiwar movement. Demonstrators wanted an
immediate and complete departure. Events in Vietnam and at home gave greater strength
to the protesters.
In the spring of 1970, President Nixon announced a temporary invasion of neighboring

Cambodia. Although Cambodia was technically neutral, the Ho Chi Minh trail stretched
through its territory. Nixon ordered the Viet Cong bases located along the trail to be
bombed.
Kent State and My Lai Massacres
Peace advocates were enraged. They claimed that Nixon was expanding the war, not
reducing it as promised. Protests were mounted across America.
At Kent State University, students rioted in protest. They burned down the ROTC building
located on campus, and destroyed local property. The governor of Ohio sent the National
Guard to maintain order. A state of high tension and confusion hung between the Guard
and the students. Several soldiers fired their rifles, leading to deaths of four students and
the wounding of several others. This became known as the Kent State massacre.

The following year the American public learned about the My Lai massacre. In 1968,
American soldiers opened fire on several hundred women and children in the tiny hamlet of
My Lai. How could this happen? It wasn’t unusual for Viet Cong guerilla activity to be
initiated from small villages. Further, US troops were tired, scared, and confused.
At first, the Lieutenant who had given the order, William L. Calley, Jr., was declared guilty
of murder, but the ruling was later overturned. Moral outrage swept through the antiwar
movement. They cited My Lai as an example of how American soldiers were killing
innocent peasants.
The Pentagon Papers
In 1971, the New York Times published excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret
overview of the history of government involvement in Vietnam. A participant in the study
named Daniel Ellsberg believed the American public needed to know some of the secrets,
so he leaked information to the press. The Pentagon Papers revealed a high-level
deception of the American public by the Johnson administration.
Many statements released about the military situation in Vietnam were simply untrue,
including the possibility that even the bombing of American naval boats in the Gulf of
Tonkin might never have happened. A growing credibility gap between the truth and what
the government said was true caused many Americans to grow even more cynical about
the war.
By December 1972, Nixon decided to escalate the bombing of North Vietnamese cities,
including Hanoi. He hoped this initiative would push North Vietnam to the peace table. In
January,1973, a ceasefire was reached, and the remaining American combat troops were
withdrawn. Nixon called the agreement “peace with honor,” but he knew the South
Vietnamese Army would have difficulty maintaining control.
The North soon attacked the South, and in April 1975, they captured Saigon. Vietnam was
united into one communist nation. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Cambodia and
Laos soon followed with communist regimes of their own. The United States was finally out
of Vietnam. But every single one of its political objectives for the region met with failure.
Over 55,000 Americans perished fighting the Vietnam War.

Exercise 7.2
Open Link

Key Points
After World War II, Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh opposed French colonial rule in Vietnam and would later
oppose United States involvement in Vietnam.
When France gave up control of Vietnam, the nation was divided into North Vietnam, under the control of
Communist Ho Chi Minh, and South Vietnam, which was heavily supported by the United States. Ho Chi Minh
encouraged and supported revolutionaries in the South known as the Viet Cong in their attempt to overthrow the
United States-backed South Vietnamese government.
Traditional US military intervention in Vietnam started in 1964 after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, where a US naval
vessel was allegedly red upon by North Vietnamese ships.
Fighting proved di cult for American troops as the Viet Cong in the South hid among the supportive populations
in South Vietnam.
Domestic support for the US war e ort declined as the news media reported continued US troops losses and
highlighted the horrors of war.
In 1973, a cease- re was put in place followed closely by the withdrawal of US troops. Soon after the South of
Vietnam fell to communist control.

JFK and LBJ
Politics from Camelot to Watergate
When John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in 1960, the United States was at the apex
of its postwar optimism. The 1950s economy raised the American standard of living to a
level second to none. Although communism was a threat, the rebuilt nations of Western
Europe proved to be solid Cold War allies.
The Soviet Union had the technology to send a nuclear missile across the North Pole, but
the United States maintained a superiority that could obliterate any nation who dared such
an attack. Across the world, newly independent nations looked to the United States for
assistance and guidance. Few Americans would have believed that by the end of the
decade, the nation would be weakened abroad and divided against itself.
Kennedy embodied that early ebullience. The youthful president and his wife drew parallels
to the magical time of King Arthur and Camelot. His New Frontier program asked the
nation’s talented and fortunate to work to eliminate poverty and injustice at home, while
projecting confidence overseas. Although Congress blocked many of his programs, his
confidence was contagious, and the shock of his untimely death was nothing less than
devastating.
Lyndon Johnson hoped to complete Kennedy’s work. His Great Society plan declared a
“war on poverty” that produced a glut of legislation unseen since the days of Franklin
Roosevelt’s Hundred Days. Welfare benefits were increased, healthcare costs were
defrayed, and funds were allotted for cleaning the air and water, rebuilding cities, and
subsidizing the arts and humanities.
A Civil Rights Act ended legal discrimination in public accommodations with regard to race.
Unfortunately for Johnson, the domestic-minded president became mired in a foreign

imbroglio—the war in Southeast Asia. Vietnam would taint his legislative successes and
end the possibility of a second Johnson term.
By 1968, the zeal for domestic reform was squelched by an increasingly unpopular war.
Families and friends across America were divided by the conflict. Assassinations of Martin
Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy only fanned the flames, and by the end of the decade
most Americans were weary of war, rioting, and political crusades—Americans sought a
return to normalcy.
The Election of 1960

It was one of the closest elections in American history.
The Republican insider was Richard Nixon of California, relatively young but experienced
as the nation’s vice president for eight years under Dwight Eisenhower. The Democratic
newcomer was John F. Kennedy, a senator from Massachusetts, who at the age of 43
could become the youngest person ever to be elected president. Regardless of the
outcome, the United States would for the first time have a leader born in the twentieth
century.
Age wasn’t the only factor in the election. Kennedy was also Roman Catholic, and no
Catholic had ever been elected president before. Al Smith, a Catholic, suffered a crushing
defeat to Herbert Hoover in 1928. This raised serious questions about the electability of a
Catholic candidate, particularly in the Bible Belt South. Questions were raised about
Kennedy’s ability to place national interests above the wishes of his pope.
To mollify these concerns, Kennedy addressed a group of Protestant ministers. He pledged

a solid commitment to separation of church and state. Despite his assurances, his faith
cost him an estimated 1.5 million votes in November 1960. Nixon decided to leave religious
issues out of the campaign and hammer the perception that Kennedy was too
inexperienced to sit in the Oval Office.
Nixon stressed his steadfast commitment to fighting communism. He had made a name for
himself as a staunch red-baiter in the post-war era, leading the charge against alleged spy
Alger Hiss. Nixon emphasized the importance of his eight years as vice president. The
Soviet Union and China were always pressing, and America could ill afford a president who
had to learn on the job.
Kennedy stressed his character, assisted by those in the press who reported stories about
his World War II heroism. While he was serving in the South Pacific aboard the PT109, a
Japanese destroyer rammed his ship and snapped it in two. Kennedy rescued several of
his crewmates from certain death. Then he swam from island to island until he found a
group of friendly natives who delivered a distress message Kennedy had carved into a
coconut to an American naval base. Courage and character became the major themes of
Kennedy’s campaign.
Although both candidates were seen as moderates on nearly every policy issue of the time,
each hailed from different backgrounds. Kennedy was from a wealthy background and
graduated from Harvard University. Nixon painted himself the average American, growing
up poor in California, and working his way through Whittier College.
In an attempt to broaden his base, Kennedy named one of his opponents for the
Democratic nomination his vice president. Lyndon Johnson was older and much more
experienced in the Senate. Johnson was from Texas, an obvious attempt by Kennedy to
shore up his potential weaknesses in the South. Nixon named Massachusetts Senator
Henry Cabot Lodge as his running mate to attack Kennedy in his region of greatest
strength.
In such a close contest, every event matters. Many analysts suggest that the decisive
battle in the campaign was waged during the televised presidential debates. Kennedy
arrived for the debates well-tanned and well-rested from Florida, while Nixon was
recovering from a knee injury he suffered in a tiresome whistle-stop campaign. The

Democrat was extremely telegenic and comfortable before the camera. The Republican
was nervous, sweated profusely under the hot lights, and couldn’t seem to find a makeup
artist that could hide his five o’clock shadow.
Radio listeners of the first debate narrowly awarded Nixon a victory, while the larger
television audience believed Kennedy won by a wide margin. When the votes were tallied
in November, Kennedy earned 49.7 percent of the popular vote to Nixon’s 49.5 percent.
Kennedy polled only about 100,000 more votes than Nixon out of over 68 million votes
cast. The electoral college awarded the election to Kennedy by a 303–219 margin, despite
Nixon winning more states than Kennedy.
Kennedy’s New Frontier
They called it Camelot.
Like King Arthur and Guinevere, a dynamic young leader and his beautiful bride led the
nation. The White House was their home, America their kingdom. They were John F. and
Jacqueline Kennedy.
After squeaking by Richard Nixon in the election of 1960, John F. Kennedy set forth new
challenges for the United States. In his inauguration speech, he challenged his fellow
Americans to: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your
country.”
Proclaiming that the “torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans,” Kennedy,
young and good-looking, boldly and proudly assumed office with a bravado. Many
Americans responded to his call by joining the newly formed Peace Corps or volunteering
in America to work toward social justice. The nation was united, positive, and forward-
looking. No frontier was too distant.
The newest frontier was space. In 1957, the Soviet Union shocked Americans by launching
Sputnik 1, the first satellite to be placed in orbit. Congress responded by creating the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) under President Eisenhower.
When Kennedy took office, the United States fell farther behind. The Soviets had already
placed a dog, Laika, in space (Laika was nicknamed “Mutnik,” as a pun on Sputnik, by the
US press), and in Kennedy’s first year, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first
human being to orbit the earth.
Kennedy challenged the American people and government to put a man on the moon by
the end of the decade. Congress responded enthusiastically by appropriating billions of
dollars for the effort. During Kennedy’s administration, Alan Shepherd became the first
American to enter space, and John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth. In
1969, many thought of President Kennedy’s challenge when Neil Armstrong became the
first human being to set foot on the moon.
Domestically, Kennedy continued in the tradition of liberal Democrats Roosevelt and

Truman, to some extent. He signed legislation raising the minimum wage and increasing
Social Security benefits. He raised money for research into mental illness and allocated
funds to develop impoverished rural areas. He showed approval for the civil rights

movement by supporting James Meredith’s attempt to enroll at the University of Mississippi

and by ordering his Attorney General, brother Robert Kennedy, to protect the freedom
riders in the South.
However, most of Kennedy’s more revolutionary proposals languished in the conservative

Congress. He wished to protect millions of acres of wilderness lands from developments,
but the Congress refused. His efforts to provide federal funds to elementary and secondary
schools were denied. His Medicare plan to provide health insurance for the nation’s elderly
failed to achieve the necessary support. Congress was dominated by a coalition of
Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats who refused to expand the New Deal
any further.
In his abbreviated presidency, Kennedy failed to accomplish all he wanted domestically.

But the ideas and proposals he supported survived his assassination. Medicare, federal
support for education, and wilderness protection all became part of Lyndon Johnson’s
Great Society.
Kennedy’s Global Challenges
The Cold War raged on in the 1960s.
President Kennedy faced a confident Soviet Union and a sleeping giant in the People’s
Republic of China. Fears of communist expansion plagued American foreign policy in
places as distant as Vietnam and as close as Cuba.
Like his predecessors, Kennedy made containment his chief foreign policy goal.
Abandoning Dwight Eisenhower’s heavy reliance on nuclear deterrence, Kennedy
expanded defense spending. The United States needed a “flexible response” capability.
To Kennedy, this meant a variety of military options depending upon the specific conditions.
Conventional forces were upgraded. Included in this program was the establishment of
special forces units similar to the Green Berets. Despite the expense, Kennedy believed
communism was a menace that required maximal preparation.
One of Kennedy’s most popular foreign policy initiatives was the Peace Corps. Led by
Sargent Shriver, this program allowed Americans to volunteer two years of service to a
developing nation. Applicants would be placed based upon their particular skill sets.
English teachers would be placed where the learning of the language was needed.
Entrepreneurs trained local merchants how to maximize profits. Doctors and nurses were
needed anywhere.
Kennedy thought the program was a win-win proposition. Third World nations received
much-needed assistance. The United States promoted goodwill around the world.
Countries that received Peace Corps volunteers might be less likely to submit to a
communist revolution. American participants obtained experiences that shaped well-
rounded, worldly citizens.
Relations with Latin America had gone sour since Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor
Policy. Latin American nations complained bitterly about United States’ support of
dictatorial military regimes. They pointed out that no large Marshall Plan was designed for

Latin America. In that spirit, Kennedy proposed the Alliance for Progress program.
Development funds were granted to nations of the Western Hemisphere who were
dedicated to fighting communism. After Kennedy’s death, funds for the Alliance for
Progress were largely diverted to Vietnam, however.
In 1961, the citizens of West Berlin felt completely isolated when the Soviet Union built the
Berlin Wall around the city. Kennedy visited West Berlin in the summer of 1963 to allay
their fears. In an attempt to show solidarity between West Berlin and the United States,
Kennedy ended his rousing speech with the infamous words: “Ich bin ein Berliner.” In
essence, Kennedy was saying: “I am a citizen of West Berlin.” The visit and the speech
endeared him to the people of West Berlin and all of Western Europe.
Kennedy’s greatest foreign policy failure and greatest foreign policy success both involved
one nation—Cuba. In 1961, CIA-trained Cuban exiles landed in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs,
hoping to ignite a popular uprising that would oust Fidel Castro from power. When the
revolution failed to occur, Castro’s troops moved in. The exiles believed air support would
come from the United States, but Kennedy refused. Many of the rebels were shot, and the
rest were arrested. The incident was an embarrassment to the United States and a great
victory for Fidel Castro.
In October 1962, the United States learned that the Soviet Union was about to deploy
nuclear missiles in Cuba. Kennedy found this unacceptable. He ordered a naval
“quarantine” of Cuba and ordered Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to turn his missile-
carrying boats back to the USSR. Any Soviet attempt to penetrate the American blockade
would be met with an immediate military response. The world watched this dangerous
game of nuclear chicken unfold. Finally, Khrushchev acceded to Kennedy’s demands, and
the world remained safe from global confrontation.
The Cuban Missile Crisis marked the closest the United States and the Soviet Union came
to direct confrontation in the entire Cold War.
Kennedy Assassination
Ask any American who was over the age of eight in 1963 the question: “Where were you
when President Kennedy was shot?” and a complete detailed story is likely to follow.
On November 22, 1963, a wave of shock and grief swept the United States. While visiting
Dallas, President Kennedy was killed by an assassin’s bullet. Millions of Americans had
indelible images burned into their memories. The bloodstained dress of Jacqueline
Kennedy, a mournful Vice President Johnson swearing the presidential oath of office, and
dozens and dozens of unanswered questions.
President Kennedy was scheduled to speak at a luncheon in Dallas on November 22. The
weather was bright and clear, and the President wished to wave to the crowds as his
motorcade moved from the airport through the city. A protective covering wasn’t placed
over his convertible limousine.
As the procession moved through Dealey Plaza, gunshots tore through the midday air.
Within minutes President Kennedy was dead, and John Connally, the Texas governor, was

badly wounded. Kennedy was rushed to the hospital, but to no avail. The news rang out
through the nation. Businesses and schools closed so grief-stricken Americans could
watch the unfolding events.
Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the murder. Oswald was an avowed communist who
spent three years living in the Soviet Union. He allegedly shot the president from a window
in the Texas School Book Depository in Dealey Plaza. Two days later, while Oswald was
being transferred between prison facilities, a nightclub owner named Jack Ruby stepped
out of the crowd and fired a bullet into Oswald at point blank range killing the prisoner.
Oswald’s murder was captured on live television.
Oswald’s death left many unanswered, searing questions. Among them: “Did Oswald
actually assassinate Kennedy?” “Did he act alone?”
A committee headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren studied the events surrounding the
assassination and declared that Oswald was Kennedy’s killer—and that he acted alone.
Critics of the Warren Commission cited irregularities in the findings. Questions surrounded
the ability of any sharpshooter to fire the number of bullets Oswald supposedly fired, from
such a great distance, with any degree of accuracy. Witnesses testified that shots were
fired from another direction at the president—the infamous grassy knoll—suggesting the
presence of a second shooter.
One theory suggests the possibility of a killer firing from a sewer grate along the road.
Conspiracy talk flourished—and continues to flourish. Groups as diverse as the Cubans,
the Russians, the CIA, and organized crime have been rumored Oswald cohorts.
Flaws in Kennedy’s autopsy report suggest the possibility of a cover-up. The president’s
brain, a very important piece of forensic evidence, simply disappeared.
After years of study, no conclusive evidence has been presented to disprove the findings of
the Warren Commission, but the same questions remain:
Did Oswald kill Kennedy?
Did he act alone?
Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society”
Lyndon Baines Johnson moved quickly to establish himself in the office of the Presidency.
Despite his conservative voting record in the Senate, Johnson soon reacquainted himself
with his liberal roots. LBJ sponsored the largest reform agenda since Roosevelt’s New
Deal.
The aftershock of Kennedy’s assassination provided a climate for Johnson to complete the
unfinished work of JFK’s New Frontier. He had 11 months before the election of 1964 to
prove to American voters that he deserved a chance to be president in his own right.
Two very important pieces of legislation were passed. First, the Civil Rights Bill that JFK
promised to sign was passed into law. The Civil Rights Act banned discrimination based on

race and gender in employment and ending segregation in all public facilities.
Johnson also signed the omnibus Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. The law created the
Office of Economic Opportunity aimed at attacking the roots of American poverty. A Job
Corps was established to provide valuable vocational training.
Head Start, a preschool program designed to help disadvantaged students arrive at

kindergarten ready to learn, was put into place. The Volunteers in Service to America
(VISTA) was set up as a domestic Peace Corps. Schools in impoverished American
regions would now receive volunteer teaching attention. Federal funds were sent to
struggling communities to attack unemployment and illiteracy.
As he campaigned in 1964, Johnson declared a “war on poverty.” He challenged

Americans to build a “Great Society” that eliminated the troubles of the poor. Johnson won
a decisive victory over his archconservative Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater of
Arizona.
American liberalism was at high tide under President Johnson:
e Wilderness Protection Act saved 9.1 million acres of forestland from industrial development.
e Elementary and Secondary Education Act provided major funding for American public schools.
e Voting Rights Act banned literacy tests and other discriminatory methods of denying su rage to African
Americans.
Medicare was created to o set the costs of healthcare for the nation’s elderly.
e National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities used public money to fund artists and galleries.
e Immigration Act ended discriminatory quotas based on ethnic origin.
An Omnibus Housing Act provided funds to construct low-income housing.
Congress tightened pollution controls with stronger Air and Water Quality Acts.
Standards were raised for safety in consumer products.
Johnson was an accomplished legislator and used his connections in Congress and
forceful personality to pass his agenda.
By 1966, Johnson was pleased with the progress he had made. But soon events in
Southeast Asia began to overshadow his domestic achievements. Funds he had
envisioned to fight his war on poverty were now diverted to the war in Vietnam. He found
himself maligned by conservatives for his domestic policies and by liberals for his hawkish
stance on Vietnam.
By 1968, his hopes of leaving a legacy of domestic reform were in serious jeopardy.
1968: Year of Unraveling
The turbulent 1960s reached a boiling point in 1968.
When the year began, President Johnson hoped to win the war in Vietnam and then cruise
to a second term to finish building his Great Society. But events began to spiral out of his

control.
In February, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam brought a shift in American public opinion toward
the war and low approval ratings for the President. Sensing vulnerability, Eugene McCarthy
challenged Johnson for his own party’s nomination. When the Democratic primary votes
were tallied in New Hampshire, McCarthy scored a remarkable 42 percent of the vote
against an incumbent president. Johnson knew that in addition to fighting a bitter campaign
against the Republicans he would have to fight to win support of the Democrats as well.
His hopes darkened when Robert Kennedy entered the race in mid-March.
On March 31, 1968, Johnson surprised the nation by announcing he wouldn’t seek a
second term. His vice president, Hubert Humphrey, entered the election to carry out
Johnson’s programs.
Feverish political turmoil bloomed in the spring of 1968. Humphrey was popular among
party elites who chose delegates in many states. But Kennedy was mounting an
impressive campaign among the people. His effort touched an emotional nerve in America
—the desire to return to the Camelot days of his brother. Kennedy received much support
from the poorer classes and from African Americans who believed Kennedy would
continue the struggle for civil rights. Both Kennedy and McCarthy were critical of
Humphrey’s hawkish stance on Vietnam.
On April 4, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination led to another wave of grief. Then,
waves of rioting swept America. Two months later, shortly after Robert Kennedy spoke to a
crowd cheering his sweep in the California primary, an assassin named Sirhan ended
Kennedy’s life. The nation was numb.
All eyes were focused on the Democratic Convention in Chicago that August. With
Kennedy out of the race, the nomination of Hubert Humphrey was all but certain. Antiwar
protesters flocked to Chicago to prevent the inevitable Humphrey nomination, or at least to
pressure the party into softening its stance on Vietnam.
Mayor Richard Daley ordered the Chicago police to take a tough stance with the
demonstrators. As the crowds chanted, “The whole world is watching,” the police bloodied
the activists with clubs and released tear gas into the streets. The party nominated
Humphrey, but the nation began to sense that the Democrats were a party of disorder.
The Republicans had a comparatively smooth campaign, nominating Richard Nixon as

their candidate. Nixon spoke for the “Silent Majority” of Americans who supported the effort
in Vietnam and demanded law and order. Alabama Governor George Wallace ran on the
American Independent Party ticket. Campaigning for “segregation now, segregation
forever” Wallace appealed to many white voters in the South. His running mate, Curtis
LeMay, suggested that the United States bomb Vietnam “back to the Stone Age.”
When the votes were tallied in November, Nixon cruised to an electoral vote landslide while
winning only 43.4 percent of the popular vote.
Triangular Diplomacy: US, USSR, and China

Unlike his predecessor, Richard Nixon longed to be known for his expertise in foreign
policy. Although occupied with the Vietnam War, Nixon also initiated several new trends in
American diplomatic relations. Nixon contended that the communist world consisted of two
rival powers—the Soviet Union and China. Given the long history of animosity between
those two nations, Nixon and his adviser Henry Kissinger, decided to exploit that rivalry to
win advantages for the United States. That policy became known as triangular diplomacy.
The United States had much to offer China. Since Mao Zedong’s takeover in 1949, the
United States had refused recognition to the communist government. Instead, the
Americans pledged support to the Chinese Nationalist government in Taiwan. China was
blocked from admission to the United Nations by the American veto, and Taiwan held
China’s seat on the Security Council.
In June 1971, Kissinger traveled secretly to China to make preparations for a presidential
visit. After Kissinger’s return, Nixon surprised everyone by announcing that he would travel
to China and meet with Mao Zedong. In February 1972, Nixon toured the Great Wall and
drank toasts with Chinese leaders. Soon after, the United States dropped its opposition to
Chinese entry in the United Nations and groundwork was laid for the eventual
establishment of diplomatic relations.
As expected, this maneuver caused concern in the Soviet Union. Nixon hoped to establish
a détente, or an easing of tensions, with the USSR. In May 1972, Nixon made an equally
significant trip to Moscow to support a nuclear arms agreement. The product of this visit
was the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (Salt I). The United States and the Soviet Union
pledged to limit the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles each side would build, and
to prevent the development of anti-ballistic missile systems.
Nixon and his Soviet counterpart, Leonid Brezhnev also agreed to a trade deal involving
American wheat being shipped to the USSR. The two nations entered into a joint venture in
space exploration known as Apollo-Soyuz.
Arguably, Nixon may have been the only president who could have accomplished this
arrangement. Anticommunism was raging in the United States. Americans would view with
great suspicion any attempts to make peace with either the Soviet Union or China. No one
would challenge Nixon’s anticommunist credentials, given his reputation as a staunch red-
baiter in his early career. His overtures were chiefly accepted by the American public.
Although the Cold War still burned hotly across the globe, the efforts of Nixon and
Kissinger led to a temporary thaw.

Exercise 7.3
Open Link

Key Points
John Kennedy narrowly defeated Richard Nixon in the election of 1960 and brought a youthful sense of optimism
to the White House. Kennedy’s programs of scienti c progress and social reforms became known as the New
Frontier.
In 1963, Kennedy was assassinated and Vice President Lyndon Johnson became president. Johnson succeeded in
many legislative areas where Kennedy found di culty—Medicare, education, and poverty- ghting programs.
Support for Johnson’s Great Society fell as poverty-related problems were not quickly solved, and the costs and
unpopularity of the Vietnam War caused problems for Johnson’s goals at home in the United States.
e assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy and the Vietnam war-related incidents in the
late 1960s seemed to put an end to the optimism of the early 1960s.
Richard Nixon won the election of 1968 on the promise to successfully run the Vietnam War and return the nation
to law and order after the turmoil of urban riots and the antiwar movement.

Pushing for Equal Rights
Shaping a New America
“Say it loud: I’m black and I’m proud.”

—Soul singer James Brown
“A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”

— Women’s rights leader Gloria Steinem
“We have a power that comes from the justice of our cause.”
—Farm workers leader Cesar Chavez
“If they close up all the gay joints in this area, there is going to be all-out
war.”
—Gay rioter at Stonewall
“The miracle today is communication. So let’s use it.”

—John Lennon, 1969
As awareness was being raised across America about civil rights for African Americans, it
was only natural that other groups who felt marginalized by the American mainstream to
make demands of their own. Not since the drive for suffrage had a drive for women’s rights
met with much success. A new feminist movement emerged in the 1960s pressing for
modern reforms.
With few exceptions, women were excluded from the highest paying jobs, earning only a
fraction of the wages of their male counterparts. The 1950s cult of the housewife
discouraged women from holding full-time jobs and from seeking higher degrees. The call
for legality and availability of birth control options like the pill galvanized many of feminists.
Eventually, the right to obtain a safe, legal abortion became a new milestone. These
demands and others led to the proposal of an Equal Rights Amendment to the
Constitution, which would forever ban sex discrimination in the nation’s laws and practices.

Latino Americans and Native Americans had also languished in the bottom economic
strata throughout much of the prosperous 1950s. Radical and moderate ethnic leaders
organized to close this gap. By the end of the decade, the time was ripe for gay Americans
to demand equality as well. The politics of identity dominated America as these and other
disadvantaged American groups found their voices of protest.
Another battle cry was sounded to save the planet from environmental destruction. Toxic
emissions, deadly pesticides, and fears of nuclear holocaust brought many concerned
Americans together in the earth awareness movement. This time “Green” Activists went
beyond conservation of resources to demand regulation of economic activities that could
hurt the nation’s environment.
In the 1960s, the first baby boomers entered college. These students were the largest
class of young Americans ever to enter the halls of ivy. Unlike the “Silent Generation” of
1950s youth, the baby boomers were vocal about reforming democracy in the United
States and the American presence abroad. College administrators were confronted with
inspired students requesting reforms of the core academic curriculum, greater
opportunities for free speech, and more relaxed college rules. A small but highly visible
segment of students withdrew from the mainstream and created a counterculture with
profound impact on American values, fashion, and music.
Modern Feminism
“Motherhood is bliss.” “Your first priority is to care for your husband and children.”
“Homemaking can be exciting and fulfilling.”
Throughout the 1950s, educated middle-class women heard advice like this from the time
they were born until they reached adulthood. The new suburban lifestyle prompted many
women to leave college early and pursue the “cult of the housewife.” Magazines such as
Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping and television shows such as Father
Knows Best and The Donna Reed Show reinforced this idyllic image.
But not every woman wanted to wear pearls and bring her husband his pipe and slippers
when he came home from work. Some women wanted careers of their own.
In 1963, Betty Friedan published a book called The Feminine Mystique that identified “the
problem that has no name.” Amid all the demands to prepare breakfast, to drive their
children to activities, and to entertain guests, Friedan had the courage to ask: “Is this all
there is?” “Is this really all a woman is capable of doing?” In short, the problem was that
many women didn’t like the traditional role society prescribed for them.
Friedan’s book struck a nerve. Within three years of the publication of her book, a new
feminist movement was born, the likes of which had been absent since the suffrage
movement. In 1966, Friedan and others formed an activist group called the National
Organization for Women (NOW). NOW was dedicated to the “full participation of women in
mainstream American society.”
They demanded equal pay for equal work and pressured the government to support and
enforce legislation that prohibited gender discrimination. When Congress debated that

landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination in employment on

account of race, conservative Congressmen added gender to the bill, thinking that the
inclusion of women would kill the act. When this strategy backfired and the measure was
signed into law, groups such as NOW became dedicated to its enforcement.
Like the antiwar and civil rights movements, feminism developed a radical faction by the
end of the decade. Women held “consciousness raising” sessions where groups of females
shared experiences that often led to their feelings of enduring a common plight.
In 1968, radical women demonstrated outside the Miss America Pageant outside Atlantic
City by crowning a live sheep. “Freedom trash cans” were built where women could throw
all symbols of female oppression including false eyelashes, hair curlers, bras, girdles, and
high-heeled shoes. The media labeled them bra burners, although no bras were actually
burned.
The word “sexism” entered the American vocabulary, as women became categorized as a
target group for discrimination. Single and married women adopted the title Ms. as an
alternative to Miss or Mrs. to avoid changing their identities based upon their relationships
with men. In 1972, Gloria Steinem founded a feminist magazine of that name.
Authors such as the feminist Germaine Greer impelled many women to confront social,
political, and economic barriers. In 1960, women comprised less than 40 percent of the
nation’s undergraduate classes, and far fewer women were candidates for advanced
degrees. Despite voting for four decades, there were only 19 women serving in the
Congress in 1961. For every dollar that was earned by an American male, each working
American female earned 59¢. By raising a collective consciousness, changes began to
occur. By 1980, women constituted a majority of American undergraduates.
As more and more women chose careers over housework, marriages were delayed to a
later age and the birthrate plummeted. Economic independence led many dissatisfied
women to dissolve unhappy marriages, leading to a skyrocketing divorce rate. Supreme
Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, invoking the memory of her mother, evokes the mood
of the women’s rights movement: “I pray that I may be all that she would have been had
she lived in an age when women could aspire and achieve, and daughters are cherished
as much as sons.”
The Fight for Reproductive Rights
For decades, pioneers like Margaret Sanger fought for contraceptives that women would
control. With the introduction of the birth control pill to the market in 1960, women could for
the first time deter pregnancy by their own choice.
The fight for reproductive freedoms was intense. Organized religions such as the Roman
Catholic Church stood firm on their principles that artificial contraceptives were sinful. Many
states in the early 1960s prohibited the sale of contraceptives—even to married couples.
In a landmark decision, Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Supreme Court ruled such
laws were unconstitutional. Setting a precedent, the Court determined that a fundamental
right to privacy exists between the lines of the Constitution. Laws prohibiting contraceptive

choice violated this sacred right. The ban of prohibitive laws was extended to unmarried
couples in Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972). A federal judge imparted the right to purchase
contraceptives to unmarried minors in 1974.
The pill made it finally possible for American women to separate sexuality and
childbearing. Masters and Johnson, a pioneering research team in the field of human
sexuality, challenged entrenched beliefs that women did not enjoy sex and were merely
passive partners.
In 1973, the Supreme Court heard the case of the anonymous Jane Roe, an unmarried
Texas mother who claimed the state violated her constitutional rights by banning the
practice of abortion. By a 7–2 vote, the Court agreed. Since Roe v. Wade, the battle lines
have been drawn between pro-choice supporters of abortion rights and pro-life opponents
who seek to chisel away at the Roe decision.
The Equal Rights Amendment
“Equality of rights under the law shall not be abridged by the United States or by any State
on account of sex.”
This simple sentence comprised Section 1 of the Equal Right Amendment (ERA), which
was first proposed in Congress by the National Women’s Party in 1923. Feminists of the
late 1960s and early 1970s saw ratification of the amendment as the only clear-cut way to
eliminate all legal gender-based discrimination in the United States.
Amending the Constitution is a two-step process. First, the Congress must propose the
amendment by a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate. After proposal, it must
be ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures. Organizations like NOW began a hard
push for the ERA in 1970.
Leaders such as Gloria Steinem addressed the legislature and provided argument after
argument in support of the ERA. The House approved the measure in 1970, and the
Senate did likewise in 1972. The fight was then taken to the states. ERA-supporters had
the early momentum. Public opinion polls showed strong favorable support. Thirty of the
necessary thirty-eight states ratified the amendment by 1973.
But then the tide turned. From nowhere came a highly organized, determined opposition
that suggested that ratification of the ERA would lead to the complete unraveling of
traditional American society.
The leader of the Stop-ERA Campaign was a career woman named Phyllis Schlafly.
Despite her law degree, Schlafly glorified the traditional roles of American women. She
heckled feminists by opening her speaking engagements with quips like: “I’d like to thank
my husband for letting me be here tonight.” Schlafly argued that the ERA would bring many
undesirable changes to American women.
Protective laws like sexual assault and alimony would be swept away. The tendency for the
mother to receive child custody in a divorce case would be eliminated. The all-male military
draft would become immediately unconstitutional. Those opposed to the ERA even
suggested that single-sex restrooms would be banished by future courts.

Stop-ERA advocates baked apple pies for the Illinois legislature while they debated the
amendment. They hung “Don’t draft me” signs on baby girls. The strategy worked. After
1973, the number of ratifying states slowed to a trickle. By 1982, the year of expiration,
only 35 states had voted in favor of the ERA—three states shy of the necessary total.
Feminist groups maintained that a serious blow was struck toward the idea of gender
equity in the United States. They also saw women divided against other women. Despite
early gains by the feminist movement, the rise in social conservatism led Americans of
both genders to draw limits on a constitutionally mandated equality between the sexes.
Roe v. Wade and Its Impact
No topic related to the feminist movement has aroused such passion and controversy as
much as the right to an abortion. In the 1960s, there was no federal law regulating
abortions, and many states had banned the practice entirely, except when the life of the
mother was endangered.
Women’s groups argued that illegality led many women to seek black-market abortions by
unlicensed physicians or to perform the procedure on themselves. As a result, several
states such as California and New York began to legitimize abortions. With no definitive
ruling from the federal government, women’s groups sought the opinion of the United
States Supreme Court.
States were permitted to adopt restrictive laws in accordance with respecting the mother’s
health during the second trimester. The practice could be banned outright during the third
trimester. Any state law that conflicted with this ruling was automatically overturned.
Women’s groups were ecstatic. But immediately an opposition emerged. The Roman
Catholic Church had long criticized abortion as a form of infanticide. Many fundamentalist
Protestant ministers joined the outcry. The National Right to Life Committee formed with
the explicit goal of reversing Roe v. Wade.
The issue is fundamentally thorny because it involves basic faiths. Those who believe life
begins at conception feel that the unborn child deserves the same legal protections as an
adult. Ending such a life is equivalent to murder to those who subscribe to this belief.
Others argue that life begins at birth, and that laws restricting abortion interfere with the
right of a woman to decide what is in her own best interests. Opponents of abortion use the
label “pro-life” to define their cause. Supporters of Roe v. Wade identify themselves as
“pro-choice.”
Since 1973, the battle has raged. Pro-life groups began to lobby their senators and
representatives to propose a Right-to-Life Amendment to the Constitution. Although
introduced in Congress, the measure has never received the necessary support. Pro-
choice groups such as the National Abortion Rights Action League fear that a slow erosion
of abortion rights has taken place since Roe v. Wade.
The Hyde Amendment of 1976 prohibits the use of federal Medicaid funds to be used for
abortions. Later Court decisions such as Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) have upheld
the right of states to impose waiting periods and parental notification requirements.

President George Bush imposed a “gag rule” that prohibited workers in federally funded
clinics from even mentioning abortion as an option with their patients. Bill Clinton promptly
ended the gag rule in 1993.
Planned Parenthood clinics have become local battlegrounds over the abortion
controversy. Since Planned Parenthood prides itself in providing safe, inexpensive
abortions, protesters regularly picket outside their offices. Several Planned Parenthood
sites have even been bombed by antiabortion extremists.
The fate of Roe v. Wade continues to lie with the Supreme Court. Although every ruling
since 1973 upheld the decision, the composition of the Court changes with every
retirement. Activists on each side demand a “litmus test” for any justice named to the
federal courts. Republicans have tended to appoint pro-life judges, and Democrats have
selected pro-choice nominees.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the battle remains as fierce as ever.
Environmental Reform
It was time to save the earth.
A century of full-fledged industrialism in America had taken its toll on the environment.
Concerned citizens began to appeal in earnest to protect more of the nation’s wilderness
areas. Emissions into the atmosphere were creating smoggy haze rings above many
metropolitan centers. Trash was piling up. Many Americans felt free to deposit waste from
their increasingly disposable society along the sides of the roads. In the climate of social
activism, the 1960s also became a decade of earth action. Rachel Carson sent a wake-up
call to America with her 1962 book, Silent Spring. Carson wrote of the horrors of DDT, a
popular pesticide used on many American farms. DDT wrought havoc on the nation’s bird
population. The pesticide, when ingested by birds, proved poisonous. Carson then
witnessed a spring where birds didn’t return to farms.
The book created a firestorm of concern for the environment. Many students involved in
the peace and civil rights movements also embraced the call for environmental awareness.
President Johnson responded with the Wilderness Protection Act, the Water Quality Act,
and the Air Quality Act. An activist organization named Greenpeace formed in 1969.
Inspired by Senator Gaylord Nelson and created by students, the nation celebrated its first
Earth Day on April 22, 1970. President Nixon, despite his overall lack of sympathy for the
earth movement, couldn’t resist supporting popular environmentalist measures.
In 1970, he signed legislation creating the Environmental Protection Agency, a federal

watchdog dedicated to proper care of the planet. He also stiffened standards for emissions
and waste with the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. The Endangered Species Act also
provided much-needed protection to wildlife on the brink of annihilation.
For years, the environmentalists had two major factions. Conservationists such as
Theodore Roosevelt believed that the nation’s natural heritage could be maintained
through wise, efficient use of resources.

Preservationists such as John Muir and the Sierra Club celebrated the majesty of the
landscape and preferred protection of wilderness areas. The 1960s ushered in the
ecologists, who studied the relationships between living organisms and their environments.
Pollution was destroying this delicate balance, and the result could be health problems,
extinction of species, or even planetary destruction.
Young Americans learned ecology in elementary school as a nationwide awareness

campaign attempted to raise consciousness. Woodsy Owl advised youngsters to “never be
a dirty bird.” Thousands felt their heartstrings tugged as they viewed television
advertisements depicting mountains of trash culminating with a pensive Native American
shedding a single, mournful tear.
The 1970s brought growing concerns with the nuclear power industry. Fission plants
produced hazardous by-products that were difficult to dispose of safely. An accident at a
nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg nearly released a lethal bubble of
radioactive gas into the atmosphere in 1979. Pressure groups mounted protests against
nuclear testing by the United States. President Carter announced a bold initiative to
develop renewable sources of energy.
Although many environmentalists were disappointed that all goals weren’t reached,
substantive changes did improve the quality of American air and water, and the nation had
its eyes open to the need to preserve the planet.
Others Demand Equality
The 1960s broadened the traditional definition of civil rights, as the politics of identity
exploded in the United States. As African Americans and women demanded much-needed
reforms, other groups who felt on the margins of American society organized as well. The
climate was conducive to change, and many felt the need to seize the moment. Latino
Americans, Native Americans, and gay Americans demanded fair treatment and inclusion
under the banner of civil rights.
Mexican Americans, or Chicanos, were steadily growing in population in the American

Southwest throughout the twentieth century. In 1965, Cesar Chavez led a strike on behalf
of the migrant farm workers in California. Chavez used the strategies of Martin Luther King,
Jr. to reach his goals of higher pay and better working conditions. In addition to the strike,
he organized the United Farm Workers union and enacted a nationwide boycott of grapes
to support his cause. Responding to the mistreatment of union membership in the fields,
Chavez commenced a three-week hunger strike to receive national attention. When the
grape growers recognized his union in 1970, his deeds were vindicated.
Not all Mexican American activism followed King’s approach. A group known as the Brown
Berets, who modeled themselves after the Black Panthers, strove to take control of the
streets of Chicano neighborhoods. They battled the Immigration and Naturalization
Service, and chanted “Brown Power” in the same spirit that Stokely Carmichael chanted
“Black Power.”
As politics became more radicalized, a “Red Power” movement emerged in Native

American communities. In urban Native American ghettoes across the Midwest, the

American Indian Movement (AIM) took shape. Members of AIM were tired of working
through a system they believed was the primary reason many Native Americans lived in
dire poverty. They chose attention-grabbing stunts as the means to draw attention to their
cause.
In 1969, members of AIM seized Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. AIM members
offered the US government the equivalent amount of trinkets that Peter Minuit paid to the
inhabitants of Manhattan Island in 1626. For 18 months the occupation forces held firm. In
1972, AIM protesters occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, DC.
The final battle of the war for the Great Plains was reenacted in 1973 when members of
AIM seized Wounded Knee in South Dakota. After a 71 day holdout, the siege collapsed.
Identity politics flared among homosexual Americans as well. The catalyst for the gay
rights movement came when New York City police officers raided the Stonewall Inn in May
1969. The patrons of the bar felt singled out for police harassment for years, but this time
they fought back, hurling rocks, fists, and insults at the police. On the one-year anniversary
of the Stonewall Riot, the first gay rights parade was staged in New York City. Although
many legal rights and protections such as marriage for gay Americans remained out of
reach into the twenty-first century, small gains were achieved in the years that followed
Stonewall. In 1974, the American Psychiatric Association officially removed homosexuality
from its list of mental illnesses. By the mid-1970s, the FBI no longer considered
homosexuals a security risk, and gays were no longer denied civil service jobs based on
their sexual orientation.
Although the fight for societal acceptance rages on, the many civil rights movements were
born in the cauldron of the protest movements of the turbulent 1960s.
Student Activism
In June 1962, the founding members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) ratified
the Port Huron Statement. The Huron Statement was a manifesto, largely written by a
young student named Tom Hayden, condemning middle-class materialism, racism,
conformity, and anticommunism.
Strongly influenced by C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite, SDS members feared that the Cold
War was undermining American democracy. A military-industrial complex seemed to be
driving the United States. Military leaders justified huge budgets by involvement in foreign
wars. The expenditures led to major defense contracts for industrialists and millions of jobs
across America. The liberal establishment of Kennedy and Johnson accepted the trend for
fear of losing powerful supporters and thousands of votes from working Americans. The
results, they claimed, led to unjust involvement in foreign conflicts. Hayden called for
“participatory democracy,”—grassroots organizations where the true voices of Americans
could be heard.
SDS became the leaders of the antiwar movement in America. Drawing support from the
civil rights movement, SDS chapters organized local demonstrations on college campuses
and marches to the steps of the Capitol Building. They worked in inner cities to provide free
lunches and participated in voter drives to turn out the African American electorate in the
Deep South. In addition to these causes, the movement was concerned with student rights.

Many universities required a dress code, curfews, and restrictions on free speech. As SDS
advocated a freer society, they pointed their arguments to their deans as well as their
political representatives.
With the growth of SDS, the New Left flourished in America. Student leaders labeled the
Old Left the Socialists of a bygone era. The Old Left was concerned with the problems
brought by poverty, while the New Left criticized the suburban conformity and career
materialism spawned by postwar affluence as well. They were critical of their left-leaning
national politicians. SDS leaders didn’t believe Kennedy and Johnson were sincere in their
support of civil rights. In the wake of McCarthyism, taking a soft stand on communism was
unthinkable to Washington politicians. While the New Left didn’t glorify the Soviet system,
they were willing to blame both the United States and the Soviet Union for escalating the
Cold War.
As the decade came to a close, SDS fragmented into moderate and radical factions, much
like most other movements. Although most SDS members were dedicated to peaceful
protest, some did go beyond marches to the occupation of buildings and confrontations
with the police. An extreme branch of SDS splintered off to form the Weathermen in 1970.
This group was a terrorist organization openly committed to a violent overthrow of the
government. FBI scrutiny forced many Weathermen underground before long.
Flower Power
“Make love, not war.” “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.” “I am a
human being—please do not fold, bend, spindle, or mutilate.”
These and many more became slogans for emerging youth culture—a counterculture—in
the 1960s. A counterculture is a group of people who reject the social values of a greater
society. The baby boom was entering its teen years, and in sheer numbers, they
represented a larger force than any prior generation in the history of the United States. As
more and more children of middle-class Americans entered college, many rejected the
suburban conformity designed by their parents.
Never more than a minority movement, the so-called “hippie” lifestyle became synonymous
with American youth of the 1960s. Displaying frank new attitudes about drugs and sex,
communal lifestyles, and innovations in food, fashion, and music, the counterculture youth
of America broke profoundly with almost all values their parents held dear.
Like the utopian societies of the 1840s, over 2,000 rural communes formed during these
turbulent times. Completely rejecting the capitalist system, many communes rotated duties,
made their own laws, and elected their own leaders. Some were philosophically based, but
others were influenced by new religions. Earth-centered religions, astrological beliefs, and
Eastern faiths proliferated across American campuses. Some scholars labeled this trend
as the Third Great Awakening.
Most communes, however, faced fates similar to their nineteenth-century forebears. A

charismatic leader would leave or the funds would become exhausted, and the commune
would gradually dissolve.

One lasting change from the countercultural movement was in the American diet. Health
food stores sold wheat germ, yogurt, and granola, products completely foreign to the 1950s
America. Vegetarianism became popular among many youths. Changes in fashion proved
more fleeting. Long hair on young men was standard, as were Afros. Women often wore
flowers in their hair. Ethnic or peasant clothing was celebrated. Beads, bellbottom jeans,
and tie-dyed shirts became the rage, as each person tried to celebrate his or her own
sense of individuality.
The common bond among many youths of the time was music. Centered in the Haight-
Ashbury section of San Francisco, a new wave of psychedelic rock and roll became the
music of choice. Bands like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and the Doors created
new sounds with electrically enhanced guitars, subversive lyrics, and association with
drugs.
Folk music was fused with rock, embodied by the best-known solo artist of the decade,
Bob Dylan. When the popular Beatles went psychedelic with their landmark album, Sgt.
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, counterculture music became mainstream.
It’s important to note that the counterculture was probably no more than 10 percent of the
American youth population. Contrary to common belief, most young Americans sought
careers and lifestyles similar to their parents. Young, educated people actually supported
the war in Vietnam in greater numbers than older, uneducated Americans. The
counterculture was simply so outrageous that the media made their numbers seem larger
than in reality. Nevertheless, this lifestyle made an indelible cultural impact on America for
decades to come.
What happened to the ideals of the counterculture? Why weren’t they able to sustain their
utopian views? In part, their views were subsumed by the greater culture. Moreover, it’s
one thing to say you want a revolution, quite another to try to affect one.

Exercise 7.4
Open Link

Key Points
A modern women’s rights movement formed in the 1960s and 1970s. is movement brought attention to
discrimination faced by women in education and in the workforce and successfully expanded women’s
reproductive rights with the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973.
e Roe v. Wade decision would lead to decades of political ghting over abortion rights. ese ghts continue to
this day and play a large part in the political lives of many Americans.
e modern environmental movement came to the forefront in the 1960s and 1970s partially inspired by the 1962
book, Silent Spring. e movement earned governmental victories such as the Air Quality Act and the creation of
the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.
In the mid- to late 1960s a counter-culture movement known as the “hippie” culture rose to challenge societal
norms. While the hippie culture made up a small minority of young people, it had a lasting impact on the popular
culture of the time.

Uneasiness in the 1970s
A Time of Malaise
Something was terribly wrong in America in the 1970s.
The United States was supposed to be a superpower, yet American forces proved
powerless to stop a tiny guerrilla force in Vietnam. Support for Israel in the Middle East led
to a rash of terrorism against American citizens traveling abroad, as well as a punitive oil
embargo that stifled the economy and forced American motorists to wait hours for their
next tank of gasoline.
A hostile new government in Iran held 52 American citizens hostage before the eyes of the
incredulous world. The détente with the Soviet Union of the Nixon years dissolved into
bitter animosity when a second arms-control agreement failed in the Senate and a Soviet
army of invasion marched into Afghanistan. The US military juggernaut seemed to have
reached its limits.
At home, the news was no better. The worst political scandal in US history forced a
president to resign before facing certain impeachment. Months of investigation turned into
years of untangling a web of government deceit. Details of illegal, unethical, and immoral
acts by members of the White House staff covered the nation’s newspapers. Upon
resignation, the president was granted a full and complete pardon. Many Americans
wondered what happened to justice and accountability.
The booming economy sputtered to a halt. Inflation approached 20 percent and

unemployment neared 10 percent—a combination previously thought to be impossible.
Crime rates rose as tales of the decaying inner cities fell on deaf ears. A nuclear disaster of
unspeakable proportions was barely averted at the Three Mile Island fission plant in
Pennsylvania.
Many Americans coped with the current ailments by turning inward. Outlandish fashion and
outrageous fads such as streaking, mood rings, and pet rocks became common. Younger
Americans finished their workweeks and sought escape in discotheques. Controversy
surrounding “decaying morality” surfaced with regard to increased drug use, sexual
promiscuity, and a rising divorce rate. As a result, a powerful religious movement turned
political in the hopes of changing directions toward a more innocent time.
The United States celebrated its bicentennial anniversary in 1976 without the expected
accompanying optimism. Instead, while many reflected on the past laurels of American
success, an overarching question was on the minds of the American people: what had
gone wrong?

Undoing a President
On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested after breaking into the headquarters of the
Democratic National Committee located in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC. The
burglars weren’t ordinary thieves. They carried wiretaps to install on telephones. They
carried cameras to photograph documents. Four of the five criminals were anti-Castro
Cubans who had been previously hired by the CIA. The fifth was James McCord, the
security adviser for Nixon’s campaign staff, known as the Committee to Re-Elect the
President, or CREEP. Although the incident failed to make the front pages of the major
newspapers, it would soon become the most notorious political scandal in American
history.
In the heated climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s, President Nixon believed strongly
that a war was being fought between “us” and “them.” To Nixon, “us” meant the
conservative, middle- and working-class, church-going Americans, who believed the United
States was in danger of crumbling. “Them” meant the young, defiant, free love, antiwar,
liberal, counterculture figures who sought to transform American values.
Nixon would stop at nothing to win this war of hearts and minds, even if it meant breaking
the law.
In 1971, a White House group known as the “Plumbers” was established to eliminate
administration leaks to the press. Their first target was Daniel Ellsberg who had worked on
the Pentagon Papers, a highly critical study of America’s Vietnam policy. Ellsberg leaked
the Pentagon Papers—intended to be used internally by the government—to the New York
Times. The Plumbers vandalized the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, hoping to find
discrediting information on Ellsberg to release to the public.
Later that year, Attorney General John Mitchell resigned to head CREEP. The campaign
raised millions of dollars in illegal contributions and laundered several hundred thousand
for plumbing activities. A White House adviser named G. Gordon Liddy suggested that the
Democratic headquarters be bugged and that other funds should be used to bribe,
threaten, or smear Nixon’s opponents. After the arrest of the burglars, Nixon suggested the
payments of hush money to avoid a connection between Watergate and the White House.
He suggested that the FBI cease any investigation of the break-in. He recommended that
staffers perjure themselves if subpoenaed in court.
The Watergate cover-up was initially successful. Despite a headline story in The
Washington Post by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein suggesting White House
involvement, Nixon went on to win 49 of 50 states in the November 1972 presidential
election against George McGovern.
When the burglars were tried in January 1973, James McCord admitted in a letter that
members of the Nixon Administration ordered the Watergate break-in. A Senate committee
was appointed to investigate, and Nixon succumbed to public pressure and appointed
Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox to scrutinize the matter.
Complicitous in the cover-up, many high-level White House officials resigned including
Nixon’s Chief of Staff, Bob Haldeman, and his Adviser on Domestic Affairs, John

Ehrlichman. In an unrelated case, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned facing charges of
bribery and tax evasion. Nixon’s own personal counsel, John Dean, agreed to cooperate
with the Senate and testified about Nixon’s involvement in the cover-up. In a televised
speech, Nixon told the American public: “I am not a crook.” It seemed like a matter of
Nixon’s word against Dean’s until a low-level aide told the committee that Nixon had been
in the practice of taping every conversation held in the Oval Office.
Nixon flatly refused to submit the tapes to the committee. When Archibald Cox demanded
the surrender of the tapes, Nixon had him fired. Public outcry pressed Nixon to agree to
release typewritten transcripts of his tapes, but Americans weren’t satisfied. The tape
transcripts further damaged Nixon. On the tapes, he swore like a sailor and behaved like a
bully. Then there was the matter of 17 crucial minutes missing from one of the tapes.
Finally, in United States v. Nixon, the Supreme Court declared that executive privilege
didn’t apply in this case, and Nixon was ordered to give the evidence to the Congress.
By this time, the House Judiciary Committee had already drawn up Articles of
Impeachment, and Nixon knew he didn’t have the votes in the Senate to save his
Presidency.
On August 8, 1974, Nixon resigned the office, becoming the first president to do so. His
successor, Gerald Ford, promptly awarded Nixon a full pardon for any crimes he may have
committed while in office. The press and the public cried foul, but Ford defended his
decision by insisting the nation was better served by ending the long, national nightmare.
During his years in office, Nixon had brought a controversial end to the Vietnam War,
opened communication with Red China, watched NASA put astronauts on the moon, and
presided over a healing period in American history in the early 1970s. Despite these many
accomplishments, Watergate’s shadow occludes Nixon’s legacy.
The Sickened Economy
The United States had grown accustomed to steady economic growth since the end of
World War II. Recessions were short and were followed by robust economic growth. For
the first time since the Great Depression, Americans faced an economy that could result in
a lower standard of living for their children.
Inflation, which crept along at one to three percent for the previous two decades, exploded
into double digits. Full employment, defined as five percent or less, had been achieved in
most years since 1945. Now the unemployment rate was nearing the dangerous ten
percent line. Americans asked the question: what went wrong?
Economists had long held that inflation and unemployment were polar forces. High inflation
meant a great deal of spending; therefore, many jobs would be created. Unemployment
created jobless Americans with less money to spend; therefore, prices would stay the
same or fall. Surprisingly, the United States experienced high unemployment and high
inflation simultaneously in the 1970s—a phenomenon called stagflation. Experts and
commoners debated the roots of this problem with differing opinions.

One possibility was the price of oil. When Israel defeated its Arab neighbors in the Yom
Kippur War of 1973, Arab oil producers retaliated against Israel’s allies by leading the
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to enact an embargo. Oil prices
skyrocketed immediately in the United States as the demand outstripped the supply.
Automobiles and drivers sat in long gas lines at service stations.
The price of oil is independent of other factors such as falling worker productivity and
foreign competition, which led to greater unemployment. Oil prices also influence the prices
of all consumer goods. Products that require oil to produce would now cost more. Any
commodity shipped by truck or airplane would pass its new expenses off to the consumer.
As the decade progressed, the embargo was lifted, but OPEC steadily raised prices each
year. The price of a gallon of gasoline more than tripled from the 1970s to 1980.
Richard Nixon tried to fight inflation first by cutting government spending, but ultimately by
imposing wage and price controls on the entire nation. Gerald Ford watched the inflation
rate soar above 11 percent in 1974. He enacted a huge propaganda campaign called Whip
Inflation Now (WIN), which asked Americans to voluntarily control spending, wage
demands, and price increases. The economy, along with Watergate disillusionment, led
Ford to suffer defeat at the hands of Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential election.
Carter tried tax and spending cuts, but the annual inflation rate topped 18 percent under
his watch in the summer of 1980. At the same time, the unemployment rate fluctuated
between six and eight percent. Economic woes may well have been the decisive factor in
Carter’s defeat to Ronald Reagan in the election of 1980.
Foreign Woes
America sank deeper into malaise when it looked around at what was going on in the rest
of the world.
The decade began with America’s longest war ending in its first decisive military defeat in
its 200-year history. Diplomacy seemed powerless to stop the economic dependence of the
United States on the volatile Middle East for a steady supply of oil. Terrorists from this
region and others threatened heads of state and ordinary citizens around the globe.
Despite an auspicious start, relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated by the end of the
decade.
Terrorism was on the rise around the globe. The world watched in horror as Arab gunmen
cut down 11 Israeli weightlifters at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. The Irish Republican
Army (IRA) killed thousands of English and Irish citizens attempting to receive recognition
for their cause—an independent homeland. Americans began to see the world slipping into
anarchy and felt powerless to fix the problem.
In 1979, the new Islamic fundamentalist government of Iran captured 52 Americans at the
US Embassy in Tehran. They demanded the return of their former leader, Shah
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to Iran in exchange for the lives of the hostages. For 444 days,
Americans watched helplessly as their fellow citizens were held in confinement. A rescue
effort ordered by President Carter crashed in the desert in April 1980.

Malaise, malaise, malaise.
One exception to these negative trends was the Camp David Agreement, brokered by
Carter in 1978. These accords resulted in the mutual recognition of Israel and Egypt, a
giant first step toward a lasting peace.
But the US-USSR détente arranged by Nixon and Kissinger was crumbling by the end of
the decade. A second arms limitation treaty between the superpowers known as SALT II
was delivered to the Senate—only to be rejected. The USSR had surpassed the United
States in nuclear warheads. The Cold War became frostier.
A Marxist revolution in Nicaragua brought greater fears of communism spreading to the

Western Hemisphere. Finally, in 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan with combat
troops from the Red Army. Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev promised that Afghani leaders
had requested military assistance, but American diplomats were dubious.
Fearing Soviet expansion into the Middle East, the Carter Administration strongly
condemned the action and levied a wheat boycott on the Soviet Union. The 1980 Olympic
Games held in Moscow were boycotted by the United States.
America’s claim to dominant status in the world had been seriously challenged, by the end
of the 1970s.
So, Americans started looking inward, inside themselves, in the hope of feeling better.
Finding Oneself
Tom Wolfe called the 1970s the “Me Decade.”
Across the land, Americans seemed determined to escape from the wars and social
movements of the previous decade. Disillusionment with national and global action led
many to look inward and find solace in discovering more about themselves.
A magazine entitled Self sold thousands of copies. Women demanded respect as equal
partners. Fashions veered toward the outrageous and ridiculous, reflecting the glorification
of rule-breaking and self-expression. The sexual revolution took hold from the inner city to
the small town. Therapy sessions mushroomed as Americans in all walks of life searched
to find “the real me.”
Every rule of fashion was shattered in the 1970s. Lapels, ties, and collars, reached record
widths. The polyester leisure suit, available in a palette of citrus and pastel colors, was
extremely popular among young males. The jacket, pants, and vest were often worn with
an open collar to display thick necklace chains nestled in exposed chest hair. Hair was
large and long for both males and females. Afros proved popular. Sideburns were long and
bushy.
Bellbottom jeans and hip-huggers were the rage on many college campuses in the early
1970s. Platform shoes, which sometimes added as much as a foot to a person’s height,
were introduced. In the late 1970s, big-name labels become appealing as thousands of
Americans rushed to purchase expensive designer jeans.

As women asserted themselves economically, socially, and politically, the idea of remaining
trapped in an unhappy marriage became less and less appealing. Consequently, the
divorce rate soared. A 1974 book entitled The Courage to Divorce encouraged individuals
to put their own happiness above that of their spouses and children.
Nowhere was the self-indulgence of the 1970s more evident than in the fads of the decade.
New forms of therapy were introduced to help a person find oneself. Disco music and the
disco scene capitalized on the widespread desire to forget daily troubles and just have fun.
Temperature-sensitive mood rings were a bogus attempt to display inner feelings
outwardly. Public streaking showed a desire to break society’s norms and to show comfort
with one’s own body.
In 1975, an entrepreneur named Gary Dahl sold common rocks to thousands of Americans
advertised as the Pet Rock. These “pets” were peddled with accessories and guidebooks,
incurring the wrath of cultural critics across the nation who believed a new low had been
reached. Whether Americans were searching for meaning, escaping from the daily grind,
or simply looking for a good laugh, the 1970s marked the height of self-expression.
The New Right
Not everyone was happy with the social changes brought forth in America in the 1960s and
1970s. When Roe vs. Wade guaranteed the right to an abortion, a fervent pro-life
movement dedicated to protecting the unborn child took root.
Antifeminists rallied against the Equal Rights Amendment and the eroding traditional family
unit. Many ordinary Americans were shocked by the sexual permissiveness found in films
and magazines. Those who believed homosexuality was sinful lambasted the newly vocal
gay rights movement. As the divorce and crime rates rose, an increasing number of
Americans began to blame the liberal welfare establishment for social maladies. A cultural
war unfolded at the end of the 1970s.
Enter the New Right.
The New Right was a combination of Christian religious leaders, conservative business
bigwigs who claimed that environmental and labor regulations were undermining the
competitiveness of American firms in the global market, and fringe political groups.
There was nothing new about political and economic conservatism. Barry Goldwater based
his 1964 presidential campaign on the premise that the New Deal should be reversed. He
declared that big government was the greatest threat to American liberty. Social spending
and welfare needed to be cut to reduce the tax burden on individuals and families.
Government regulations were inhibiting economic growth and personal freedoms. When
foreign competition made inroads against American corporations in the 1970s, many
people began to believe Goldwater had been right. Big business wielded its financial
resources as a backbone of the New Right Movement.
Another linchpin of the conservative backlash was the Christian Right. Since the 1950s,
members of the evangelical Christian denominations increased fivefold. By the mid-1970s,
over a quarter of adult Americans identified themselves as born-again Christians.

The Christian Right had many faces. Fundamentalists such as Jerry Falwell believed in a
literal interpretation of the Bible. Pentecostalists such as Pat Robertson claimed the Holy
Spirit communicated directly with people on a regular basis.
Despite theological divisions, all evangelical leaders agreed that America was experiencing
a moral decline. They explained that homosexuality was a crime against God, and that a
woman’s place was in the home in support of her family. They criticized the “liberal” media
for corrupting America’s youth. They chided the courts for taking religion out of the public
schools and supported private Christian academies and homeschooling as alternatives.
Many Catholic Americans agreed with the sentiments of the New Right. The reforming
spirit of the Catholic Church reached its high water mark in the 1960s with a convention
called Vatican II. Latin was dropped as a requirement for the mass. Lay people were given
a greater role in Church services. Support was given for ecumenical outreach to other
Christian denominations and Jewish synagogues.
Social politics of the time forged connections between Catholic and Protestant leaders.
Abortion and “family rights” were seen as areas of common ground. The appointment of
the conservative John Paul II in 1979 marked an end to the reform spirit within the Church.
New Right leaders were highly organized and understood the potential of mass
telecommunications. Pat Robertson formed the Christian Broadcasting Network to send his
message. The Praise the Lord (PTL) Club, led by Jim Bakker, transmitted faith-healing and
raucous religious revival to the largest viewing audience of any daily program in the world.
They built massive databases containing the names and addresses of potential financial
contributors and regularly solicited funds. In 1979, Jerry Falwell formed the Moral Majority,
Inc. This group, and hundreds of others, raised money to defeat liberal senators,
representatives, and governors. They sought to control school boards on the local level to
advance their conservative agenda. Ronald Reagan freely accepted contributions from the
New Right on his way to the Presidency in 1980.
Like most movements, the New Right contained an extremist element. Racial hatred
groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party joined the outcry against
American moral decline. Ultra-libertarian militia groups formed in many states dedicated to
attacking the American government they believed had become far too invasive. They
steadfastly supported the right to bear arms as a means to defend themselves from
tyranny. Some groups began stockpiling arsenals. These organizations interpreted the
term “cultural war” in the most literal, ominous sense.
For many, the end of the 1970s seemed shrouded in a dark malaise.
But morning in America was about to dawn.

Exercise 7.5
Open Link

Key Points
In 1974, the Watergate scandal resulted in the resignation of President Richard Nixon—the rst president in
American history to resign. e Watergate scandal involved an attempted break-in (and electronic “bugging”) of
the Democratic Party headquarters before the 1972 election and the following cover-up involving President Nixon.
In the mid- to late 1970s, the US economy faced unusually high levels of in ation while experiencing slow
economic growth. e economic issues brought about a feeling of malaise—or sickness—regarding the American
economy.
e United States faced foreign policy challenges throughout the 1970s in the form of an Islamic revolution in Iran
in 1979, which resulted in an anti-American government in control and a heightening of tensions with the Soviet
Union at the end of the 1970s.
e conservative political movement (and by extension the Republican Party) saw a resurgence in the 1970s.
Evangelical Christians-spurred in part by the Roe v. Wade decision, big business groups and free-market
libertarians came together to form a political alliance that would lead the Republican Party to political power in
the 1980s.

The Reagan Presidency
The Reagan Years
Americans were fed up.
In 1980, confidence in the American economy and government hit rock bottom. Looking for
a change and the promise of a better future, voters turned to Ronald Reagan for answers.
His message was clear. Government has become too big and needs to be trimmed down
to size. Taxes are insanely high and need to be cut to stimulate growth and investment.
Military spending should be increased to fix the degenerating state of the American war
machine. Morality and character need to be reemphasized in American life. The United
States is still the largest superpower in the world with the best system of government. It’s
time to feel good about being an American again.
Reagan’s election brought a dramatic change to the federal government. No president,

Republican or Democrat, had attempted to reduce the size of the federal government since
Franklin Roosevelt initiated his New Deal. The tax cut that was handed to the American
people benefited wealthy Americans most, with the hope that their increased income would
trickle down to poorer Americans—the so-called trickle-down theory. The economic
stagnation of the 1970s did come to an end, but at the cost of huge federal deficits and the
increasing poverty rate.
The 1980s were a decade of scandals. The Iran-Contra Scandal proved that White House
officials were willing to break the law to carry out their political agenda. Religious leaders
like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart became mired in sex scandals. Moral turpitude
ended the political career of Colorado Democrat Gary Hart, who might well have been
president one day. A savings and loan scam fleeced American taxpayers for billions and
billions of bailout dollars.
American lifestyles changed dramatically during the 1980s. Cable television introduced a
whole palette of new programming for the discriminating viewer. Compact discs replaced
records as the most popular medium for recorded music. Banking became more
convenient with the proliferation of automatic teller machines. Businesses and individuals
rushed to purchase personal computers that held the promise of radically simplifying
difficult tasks.
As the decade came to a close, it became clear that the malaise of the 1970s was over.
The United States received a boost of confidence when the Cold War came to an end in
1991. The menace of a threatening Soviet Union now belonged to history, and the United
States claimed the status of the only remaining superpower in the world.

“Morning in America”
The long national nightmare was over.
The United States was filled with hard-working, God-fearing citizens who cared about their
fellow Americans. Inflation and unemployment were problems of government, not the
national character. Vietnam was over; America was the most powerful nation in the world.
The Soviet Union was an evil empire. Old-fashioned initiative and ingenuity would maintain
America’s competitive edge in commerce.
These themes soothed a nation sick with the malaise of the 1970s. When all had seemed
lost, a grandfatherly figure stepped forth and optimistically reassured Americans that the
age-old beliefs they held about the grandeur of the United States weren’t myths.
This man, Ronald Wilson Reagan, understood the spirit of the times, and his message,
personality, and politics dominated the 1980s.
Traditionally, working-class Americans, Southerners, Catholics, and urban dwellers had

strong ties to the Democratic Party. The Republicans relied heavily on support from the
rural Midwest, Protestant leaders, and wealthier voters. Ronald Reagan built a new
coalition for the Republican Party in his quest for the presidency in 1980.
Working Americans were shocked to see unemployment rates nearing double digits.
Inflation was pushing the middle class into tax brackets previously reserved for the affluent
classes. Reagan promised to reduce their level of misery with sound fiscal policy.
Southerners disgruntled by affirmative action and busing found friendly ears in the Reagan
campaign. The endorsement of Reagan by the Protestant establishment didn’t deter
devout Catholics from voting Republican, since Reagan promised to oppose abortion rights
and promote family values.
Crime-plagued city denizens looked to Reagan for comfort as he portrayed himself as the
law-and-order candidate. Americans across demographic lines were warmed by his
promises for a stronger America domestically and overseas. Very quickly, these “Reagan
Democrats” crumbled the old alignment. Jimmy Carter, his opponent in the 1980 election,
never stood a chance.
Reagan’s victory over the incumbent Carter was an electoral vote landslide. He tallied 489
votes to Carter’s 49. The Republicans also captured a majority of the Senate for the first
time since 1954. Analysts point out that this perceived mandate might have been
overstated. Voter turnout was the lowest in the history of presidential elections. Liberals
argued that people weren’t voting for Reagan’s conservative agenda as much as they were
voting against Jimmy Carter. During his reelection campaign, Carter endured an approval
rating of 23 percent—lower than Richard Nixon’s in the darkest days of Watergate.
The new president seemed to be in the right place at the right time. Within hours of his
inauguration, Iran released the American hostages that had been held for 444 days.
Dubbed “the Great Communicator,” Reagan had a smile and a confidence that comforted
many. At the age of 69, he was the oldest president ever to take office, but he exuded a
youthful vitality that obscured his years.

Even an assassination attempt worked in his favor. When John Hinckley, Jr. put a .22
caliber bullet in Reagan’s chest within two months of his inauguration, he took it all in
stride. “I hope you’re all Republicans,” he quipped to the physicians that greeted him at the
hospital. His popularity soared.
Charges that he had little control over his staff and a less-than-functional understanding of
many matters of policy fell mostly on deaf ears. He earned a reputation as the “Teflon
President”—no scandal could stick to him.
In 1984, Reagan won a smashing reelection campaign over Walter Mondale. Democrat
Mondale, running with the first woman nominee for vice president, Geraldine Ferraro, won
only his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. A 1984 Reagan campaign
ad declared proudly: “It’s morning in America.” Whether the claim was fact or fiction,
American voters accepted Reagan’s assurances and enthusiastically cried for a second
term.
Reaganomics
The media called it Reaganomics.
During the campaign of 1980, Ronald Reagan announced a recipe to fix the nation’s
economic mess. He claimed an undue tax burden, excessive government regulation, and
massive social spending programs hampered growth. Reagan proposed a phased 30-
percent tax cut for the first three years of his presidency. The bulk of the cut would be
concentrated at the upper-income levels. The economic theory behind the wisdom of such
a plan was called supply-side or trickle-down economics.
Tax relief for the rich would enable them to spend and invest more. This new spending
would stimulate the economy and create new jobs. Reagan believed that a tax cut of this
nature would ultimately generate even more revenue for the federal government. The
Congress wasn’t as sure as Reagan, but they did approve a 25 percent cut during
Reagan’s first term.
The results of this plan were mixed. Initially, the Federal Reserve Board believed the tax
cut would reignite inflation and raise interest rates. This sparked a deep recession in 1981
and 1982. The high interest rates caused the value of the dollar to rise on the international
exchange market, making American goods more expensive abroad. As a result, exports
decreased while imports increased. Eventually, the economy stabilized in 1983, and the
remaining years of Reagan’s administration showed national growth.
The defense industry boomed as well. Reagan insisted that the United States was open to
a “window of vulnerability” to the Soviet Union regarding nuclear defense. Massive
government contracts were awarded to defense firms to upgrade the nation’s military.
Reagan even proposed a space-based missile defense system called the Strategic
Defense Initiative. Scientists were dubious about the feasibility of a laser-guided system
that could shoot down enemy missiles. Critics labeled the plan “Star Wars.”
Economists disagreed over the achievements of Reaganomics. Tax cuts plus increased
military spending would cost the federal government trillions of dollars. Reagan advocated

paying for these expenses by slashing government programs. In the end, the Congress
approved his tax and defense plans, but refused to make any deep cuts to the welfare
state. Even Reagan himself was squeamish about attacking popular programs like Social
Security and Medicare, which consume the largest percentages of taxpayer dollars. The
results were skyrocketing deficits.
The national debt tripled from one to three trillion dollars during the Reagan years. The
president and conservatives in Congress cried for a balanced budget amendment, but
neither branch had the discipline to propose or enact a balanced budget. The growth that
Americans enjoyed during the 1980s came at a huge price for the generations to follow.
Foreign and Domestic Entanglements
Ronald Reagan, Cold Warrior.
Before he became president, Reagan set the tone for relations with the Soviet Union by
labeling the USSR an “Evil Empire.” Around the world, communism seemed to be
spreading. Soviet troops were in Afghanistan. Nicaragua was led by a Soviet-backed
Sandinista government. Communist guerillas threatened to take over in neighboring El
Salvador. Cuban-backed troops waged a successful insurgency in Angola. The age of
détente was over.
Reagan hoped to negotiate with the Soviet Union, but believed he could only achieve
concessions if dealing from a position of superiority. His increase in military spending
would force a similar increase on the part of the Soviet rivals. In addition to upgrading all
three branches of the American strategic defense, he proposed a bold new scheme to
defend the US mainland from any incoming ballistic missiles. This Strategic Defense
Initiative (SDI) drew criticism from liberal Democrats who deemed it too costly and from
scientists who questioned its feasibility.
When Mikhail Gorbachev assumed leadership of the USSR in 1985, proclaiming a new
policy of openness, Reagan believed it was time to act. The two leaders agreed in principle
to an Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987, which for the first time eliminated an
entire class of existing nuclear weapons.
Around the globe, Reagan was determined to vanquish the specter of Vietnam. He
believed the United States could ill afford to sit passively while communism expanded
aggressively. He announced the Reagan Doctrine, which pledged American support to
“Freedom Fighters” opposing Communism anywhere on the globe. Funds and CIA training
were awarded to the government of El Salvador to help defeat communist guerillas. After
left-leaning revolutionaries took over the island of Grenada in 1983, Reagan dispatched the
Marines to install a US-friendly regime. The United States gave support to the Mujahideen
Rebels who fought against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Another international menace was state-sponsored terrorism. In October 1983, 239

Marines were killed in Lebanon by a suicide bomber. Governments such as Syria, Libya,
and Iran were suspected of training terrorist groups on their own soil. Reagan warned the
nations of the world that if the United States could ever prove a link between an act of
terrorism and a foreign government, there would be serious consequences. When the CIA

linked the bombing of a West Berlin discotheque to the government of Libya, Reagan
sprang into action. US planes retaliated in April 1986 by bombing Libya, including the
home of its leader, Muammar al-Qaddafi.
Terrorism and anti-Communism combined to confront Reagan with his worst domestic
scandal. In November 1986, the press reported that American military supplies had been
secretly sold to archenemy Iran in exchange for their support for the release of American
hostages held in Lebanon. As the story unraveled, it was revealed that a National Security
Council aide, named Oliver North, diverted proceeds from the Iran deal to support the
Nicaraguan Contras, who fought against the Sandinista government.
The Congress had expressly forbidden such aid, but high-level Reagan Administration
officials had proceeded nonetheless. Documents were shredded to mask the paper trail in
the White House. No connection between the scandal and President Reagan was ever
proven. When asked about his knowledge of the Iran-Contra Affair, Reagan repeatedly
replied: “I don’t remember.” Although no charges were ever raised, the “Teflon President”
was somewhat smeared by the ugly mess in the White House.
Life in the 1980s
“I want my MTV.”
Americans enjoyed many fundamental changes in their standard of living in the 1980s.
One major transformation was the new, expanded role of television. Cable television,
although available in the 1970s, became standard for most American households. This
change ushered in a whole host of new programming.
Sports-minded Americans could watch the ESPN network 24 hours a day. Nickelodeon
catered to the children of the baby boomers with youth-centered daily programming, and to
the boomers themselves by broadcasting reruns of classic sitcoms at night. Americans
could catch up with the news at any time by watching CNN.
MTV, or Music Television, brought a revolution to the recording industry. MTV broadcast
music video interpretations of popular songs. Beginning in 1981, with the prophetic
Buggles’ tune, “Video Killed the Radio Star,” MTV redefined popular music. Stars like
Madonna and Michael Jackson were much more able to convey an image as well as
music. Madonna’s “Material Girl” message typified the values of an increasingly
materialistic decade.
The videocassette recorder (VCR) allowed Americans to record television shows and
watch them according to their own schedule and view feature films in the privacy of their
own homes.
Perhaps the product that introduced the greatest change in American lifestyles of the
1980s was the personal computer. Introduced by Apple in 1977, the personal computer
allowed management of personal finances, quick word-processing, and desktop publishing
from the home. Businesses could manage payroll, mailing lists, and inventories from one
small machine. Gone were the ledgers of the past. The Silicon Valley of California, which

was the home to many of the firms that produced the processors that made these
computers run, became the symbolic heart of the American technological economy.
“Greed is good,” declared the lead character of the movie, Wall Street. With the growing
economy, many middle-class Americans rushed to invest in the bullish stock market and to
flaunt their newly acquired wealth. Young Urban Professionals, or yuppies, replaced the
socially conscious hippie of the previous generation of youth. Yuppies sought executive
track jobs in large corporations and spent their money on upscale consumer products like
Ray-Ban sunglasses, Polo apparel, and Mercedes and BMW automobiles. The health and
fitness industry exploded as many yuppies engaged in regular fitness routines.
The hedonism of the 1970s was being reevaluated. Many drugs, which were considered
recreational in the 1970s, were revealed as addictive, deadly substances. As reports of
celebrities entering rehabilitation centers and the horrors of drug-ridden inner cities
became widely known, First Lady Nancy Reagan’s message to “just say no” to drugs
became more powerful. Regardless, newer and more dangerous substances like crack
cocaine exacerbated the nation’s drug problem.
The sexual revolution was rocked by the spread of Acquired Immune Deficiency
Syndrome, or AIDS. This deadly disease was most commonly communicated by sexual
contact and the sharing of intravenous needles.
The End of the Cold War
The fall of the Berlin Wall. The shredding of the Iron Curtain. The end of the Cold War.
When Mikhail Gorbachev assumed the reins of power in the Soviet Union in 1985, no one
predicted the revolution he would bring. A dedicated reformer, Gorbachev introduced the
policies of glasnost and perestroika to the USSR.
Glasnost, or openness, meant a greater willingness on the part of Soviet officials to allow
western ideas and goods into the USSR. Perestroika was an initiative that allowed limited
market incentives to Soviet citizens.
Gorbachev hoped these changes would be enough to spark the sluggish Soviet economy.
Freedom, however, is addictive.
The unraveling of the Soviet Bloc began in Poland in June 1989. Despite previous Soviet
military interventions in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland itself, Polish voters elected a
noncommunist opposition government to their legislature. The world watched with anxious
eyes, expecting Soviet tanks to roll into Poland preventing the new government from taking
power.
Gorbachev, however, refused to act.
Like dominoes, Eastern European communist dictatorships fell one by one. By the fall of
1989, East and West Germans were tearing down the Berlin Wall with pickaxes.
Communist regimes were ousted in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. On Christmas Day, the
brutal Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife were summarily executed on live

television. Yugoslavia threw off the yoke of communism only to dissolve quickly into a
violent civil war.
Demands for freedom soon spread to the Soviet Union. The Baltic states of Estonia,
Latvia, and Lithuania declared independence. Talks of similar sentiments were heard in
Ukraine, the Caucasus, and the Central Asian states. Here, Gorbachev wished to draw the
line. Self-determination for Eastern Europe was one thing, but he intended to maintain the
territorial integrity of the Soviet Union. In 1991, he proposed a Union Treaty, giving greater
autonomy to the Soviet republics, while keeping them under central control.
That summer, a coup by conservative hardliners took place. Gorbachev was placed under
house arrest. Meanwhile, Boris Yeltsin, the leader of the Russian Soviet Republic,
demanded the arrest of the hardliners. The army and the public sided with Yeltsin, and the
coup failed. Though Gorbachev was freed, he was left with little legitimacy.
Nationalist leaders like Yeltsin were far more popular than he could hope to become. In
December 1991, Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Russia itself declared independence and the
Soviet Union was dissolved. Gorbachev was a president without a country.
Americans were pleasantly shocked, but shocked nonetheless, at the turn of events in the
Soviet bloc. No serious discourse on any diplomatic levels in the USSR addressed the
likelihood of a Soviet collapse. Republicans were quick to claim credit for winning the Cold
War. They believed the military spending policies of the Reagan-Bush years forced the
Soviets to the brink of economic collapse. Democrats argued that containment of
communism was a bipartisan policy for 45 years begun by the Democrat, Harry Truman.
Others pointed out that no one really won the Cold War. The United States spent trillions of
dollars arming themselves for a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union that fortunately
never came. Regardless, thousands of American lives were lost waging proxy wars in
Korea and Vietnam.
Most Americans found it difficult to get used to the idea of no Cold War. Since 1945,
Americans were born into a Cold War culture that featured McCarthyist witch-hunts,
backyard bomb shelters, a space race, a missile crisis, détente, the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, and the Star Wars defense proposal. Now the enemy was beaten, but the
world remained unsafe. In many ways, facing one superpower was simpler than
challenging dozens of rogue states and renegade groups sponsoring global terrorism.
Americans hoped against hope that the new world order of the 1990s would be marked
with the security and prosperity to which they had become accustomed.

Exercise 7.6
Open Link

Key Points
Ronald Reagan easily won the election of 1980 over Jimmy Carter who seemed unable to solve the nation’s
economic ills of the 1970s. Reagan ushered in a new era of cutting taxes and the size of government and was
supported by a newly powerful conservative coalition.
e Reagan administration pushed a set of policies based on trickle-down economics. is theory of economics
held that tax cuts would pay for themselves by expanding economic activity so much that the resulting growth
would overcome revenue lost in tax cuts.
A major scandal broke in the mid-1980s with the Iran-Contra Scandal. e scandal involved an illegal arms deal
with Iran where the proceeds were sent to the Contras—one side in a civil war in Nicaragua.
In the mid-1980s Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev attempted a series of economic reforms to keep the nation’s
struggling economy viable. e reforms proved to be too little too late and in 1991, the Soviet Union fell apart
leading to the end of the Cold War.

Change to End the Twentieth Century
Toward a New Millennium
The last decade of the twentieth century was marked with dizzying change for the United
States. With the Soviet Union out of the picture, American diplomats sought to create a
“new world order” based on democracy, free-market capitalism and the Western lifestyle.
Challenges from abroad didn’t disappear with the end of the Cold War. The invasion of
Kuwait by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq threatened a major percentage of the world’s oil
reserves. In the largest American military operation since the Vietnam War, the United
States led a multinational force in the liberation of Kuwait.
The collapse of the Cold War in Yugoslavia allowed centuries of hatred between rival
ethnic groups to bubble to the surface. The term “ethnic cleansing” was applied to the
process of removing an entire nationality out of a particular territory by threats, violence, or
genocide. The United States contributed blue-helmet peacekeeping troops to Bosnia to
end ethnic cleansing and committed air support to Kosovar Albanians who faced the same
fate.
American troops were used to provide food to starving civilians in war-torn Somalia, to
restore a democratically elected president to Haiti, and to bomb suspected terrorist bases
in Sudan and Afghanistan.
Americans began to think of themselves as peacekeepers of the world.
As both parties moved to the center to claim the largest numbers of American voters, bitter
partisanship emerged. Voters punished the Republicans by voting against George Bush in
1992. After two years of Bill Clinton, voters punished him by turning the House and the
Senate over to the Republicans. A bitter partisan struggle emerged over the personal
sexual improprieties of Clinton in 1998, leading to an impeachment vote largely along party
lines. Although disgusted with Clinton’s behavior, voters punished overzealous
Republicans by trimming their majority in Congress in 1998.
The 1990s marked a revolution in communications. Individual use of the Internet

mushroomed from a handful of scientists and professors at the beginning of the decade to
becoming widespread by the year 2000. Companies regeared their approaches for online
commerce. Electronic mail was a common new form of communications between relatives,
friends, and colleagues. Satellite dish networks challenged cable companies for business
in telecommunications.

The United States entered the twenty-first century as the leading users of Internet and
satellite technology. These devices opened new windows of opportunity to spread
American culture across the globe. Vietnamese in Hanoi were wearing Tommy Hilfiger
shirts, Russians were downing Big Macs in Moscow, and Nike sneakers were being made
in sweatshops around the world. American products and culture were being spread around
faster than a computer virus.
The twentieth century had been dubbed by many as “the American Century.” Would the
twenty-first century also be an American century? Or will the United States be eclipsed by
new superpowers like China or the European Union? Only time will reveal the answers.
Operation Desert Storm
The first major foreign crisis for the United States after the end of the Cold War presented
itself in August 1990. Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, ordered his army across the
border into tiny Kuwait. This was no ordinary act of aggression. Iraq’s army was well
equipped. The United States had provided massive military aid to Iraq during their eight-
year war with Iran, giving them the fourth largest army in the world.
Kuwait was a major supplier of oil to the United States. The Iraqi takeover posed an
immediate threat to neighboring Saudi Arabia, another major exporter of oil. If Saudi Arabia
fell to Saddam, Iraq would control one-fifth of the world’s oil supply. All eyes were on the
White House, waiting for a response. President Bush, who succeeded President Reagan,
stated simply: “This will not stand.”
In the last months of 1990, the United States participated in the defense of Saudi Arabia in
a deployment known as Operation Desert Shield. Over 500,000 American troops were
placed in Saudi Arabia in case of an Iraqi attack on the Saudis. The United States further
sought multilateral support in the United Nations Security Council. Traditionally, Iraq was
an ally of the Soviet Union, who held a veto power over any potential UN military action.
Looking westward for support for their dramatic internal changes, the USSR didn’t block
the American plan. The UN condemned Iraq and helped form a coalition to fight Saddam
militarily.
Bush, remembering the lessons of Vietnam, sought public support as well. Although there
were scant opponents of the conflict, the vast majority of Americans and a narrow majority
of the Congress supported the President’s actions. When all the forces were in place, the
United States issued an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein: leave Kuwait by January 15, 1991,
or face a full attack by the multinational force.
January 15 came and went with no response from the Iraqis. The next night Desert Shield
became Desert Storm. Bombing sorties pummeled Iraq’s military targets for the next
several weeks. On many days there were over 2,500 such missions. Iraq responded by
launching Scud missiles at American military barracks in Saudi Arabia and Israel. Attacking
Israel was a stratagem to persuade all the neighboring Arab nations to join the Iraqi cause.
After intense diplomatic pressure and negotiation, the Arab nations remained in opposition
to Iraq.

On February 24, the ground war began. Although the bombing lasted for weeks, American
ground troops declared Kuwait liberated just 100 hours after the ground attack was
initiated. American foot soldiers moved through Kuwait and entered southern Iraq. This
posed a dilemma for the United States. The military objectives were complete, but
Saddam, the perpetrator of the rape of Kuwait, was still ruling Iraq from Baghdad.
President Bush feared that the allies wouldn’t support the occupation of Baghdad.
Concerns were raised that if Saddam’s regime were toppled, the entire nation could
disintegrate into a civil war. Soon Iraq agreed to terms for a ceasefire, and the conflict
subsided.
Iraq didn’t leave Kuwait untouched. Millions of dollars of valuables were plundered by the
occupying troops. As Iraq retreated, they detonated explosives at many of Kuwait’s oil
wells. The disaster to the environment grew as Iraq dumped oil into the Persian Gulf. The
costs were enormous, and casualty figures staggering. Although estimates range in the
hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, only 148 Americans were killed in the battle. This
was primarily because of the technological advances of the United States.
The Persian Gulf War was a television event. CNN broadcast round-the-clock coverage of
unfolding events. Americans saw footage from cameras placed on smart bombs as they
struck Iraqi targets. The stealth fighter, designed to avoid radar detection, was put into use
for the first time. General Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr. and General Colin Powell became
household names as citizens watched their direction of the conflict.
The United States passed its first test of the post-Cold War world. Skillful diplomacy proved
that the United Nations could be used as an instrument of force when necessary. Although
Moscow didn’t contribute troops to the operation, they gave tacit approval for the attack.
The potential for multinational cooperation was demonstrated. The largest American
military operation since Vietnam was completed with smashing success. Most Americans
felt confident in their military and technological edge once more. President Bush promptly
declared that the “new world order had begun.”
A Baby Boomer in the White House
Popularity is fleeting.
President Bush enjoyed an approval rating in March 1991 of 91 percent for his handling of
Operation Desert Storm. As the presidential race for 1992 began to unfold, many potential
candidates were scared to challenge him and looked to 1996 as a better opportunity. But
the recession that battered the American economy wouldn’t go away. As growth remained
low and unemployment persisted, some of the shine began to wear off the president. Not
since James Monroe’s second term in 1820 had a sitting president been reelected during
an economic slump.
Enter Bill Clinton.
The two candidates could hardly have been more different. Bush was a hero of World War
II and had extensive Washington experience, including heading the CIA, Ambassador to
the United Nations, and eight years as vice president.

Clinton was born after World War II and didn’t fight in Vietnam, so he faced constant
charges of dodging the draft. He had no experience on the federal level of government; he
simply was the popular governor of Arkansas. Throughout the campaign, scandal after
scandal hit Clinton. Charges of adultery were addressed on television. When accused of
smoking marijuana in the 1960s, Clinton confessed—but added that he didn’t inhale.
Rumors of a real estate scandal called Whitewater surfaced from time to time. Clinton was
no “Teflon” candidate. Everything stuck to him, but none of it mattered in the end.
His campaign adviser posted a sign over his desk that read simply: “It’s the economy,
stupid.” With a charismatic smile and a gentle, sincere voice, Clinton hammered away at
the recession, and promised new ideas and a break with twelve years of Republicans in
the White House.
Additional problems beset President Bush in 1992. In April, the city of Los Angeles erupted
into a five-day looting and burning rampage that killed more than 50 people and claimed
damages nearing $1 billion. The riot was touched off by the acquittal of five Los Angeles
police officers for the beating of Rodney King during his arrest in 1991. A hidden camera
showed the officers repeatedly beating King with nightsticks while he lay on the ground.
Despite the video evidence, the jury found the police officers not guilty of using excessive
force. The announcement of the verdict released years of pent-up rage many African
Americans felt about the ongoing problem of police brutality.
Bush faced a challenge for his own party’s nomination by Patrick Buchanan, a journalist
and former Nixon aide. Buchanan voiced concern about immigration, free trade, abortion,
and appealed to the social conservatives in the Republican Party. Although the President
defeated Buchanan handily in the primaries, he was forced to spend resources in the
effort.
The most successful third-party candidate since 1912 emerged in the form of Ross Perot, a
Texas billionaire. Perot brought the problem of the nation’s growing national debt to the
campaign. Millions watched his self-funded 30-minute primetime campaign commercials
that attacked both Republicans and Democrats for reckless spending and immense
deficits.
Election Day belonged to Bill Clinton. Although he garnered only 43 percent of the popular
vote, he beat President Bush handily in the electoral tally. Bush earned 38 percent of the
vote, and Perot reached an impressive 19 percent of American voters. Much of Clinton’s
support came from baby boomers. Clinton’s victory marked an end to the domination of
politics by the World War II generation. Americans who had come of age during the
turbulent sixties and seventies now had a representative in the White House.
Republicans versus Democrats
It seemed like Bill Clinton had everything going for him. He defeated an incumbent
president and became the first Democrat to win the White House since Jimmy Carter
defeated Gerald Ford. He had a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate to work with
him.

One of the first major initiatives he began was healthcare reform. Many Americans were
concerned about spiraling medical costs. Medicare didn’t cover prescription drugs and only
paid a portion of healthcare costs. Over 20 million Americans had no health insurance
whatsoever. Clinton assembled a task force to study the problem and assigned his wife,
Hillary, to head the committee. She became the most politically active first lady since
Eleanor Roosevelt.
Eventually, Clinton presented a plan to Congress to limit costs and insure each American
citizen. Powerful interest groups representing doctors and insurance companies opposed
Clinton. Many in the Congress thought the program too costly. Conservatives compared
the plan to socialized medicine. Despite a “friendly” Democratic Congress, the Clintons’
proposal was defeated.
When the midterm Congressional elections took place in 1994, the Republicans thought
they had a chance to capture at least one house. Led by Representative Newt Gingrich,
Republicans in the Congress signed a Contract with America. The contract was simply a
list of ten promises each signatory pledged to pursue if the Republicans won. The
stratagem worked brilliantly. The Senate votes narrowly awarded a Republican majority.
More astonishing were the results in the House.
The Democrats had controlled the House of Representatives since 1954. Many
Republicans had gotten used to acting like an opposition party. When the votes were
counted, Republicans outscored Democrats in House seats 230–205. Gingrich was
rewarded for his efforts by being named Speaker of the House.
But Bill Clinton was a political survivor. Even though voter turnout was low, Clinton
accepted the Republican victory and pledged to work with the House leadership. Gingrich
and his cohorts took a tough stand with the president. Unless Clinton agreed to accept
deep cuts in social spending programs in 1995, they threatened to shut down the
government and appropriate no funds. It was a classic standoff—Clinton versus Gingrich.
When neither party would blink, a partial shutdown of government services took place. The
American public often decides the victors of such battles. Polls showed strong support for
the president. Many Americans saw the Gingrich Republicans as mean-spirited zealots
who wanted to end funds for school lunches. Clinton slowly saw his approval ratings rise.
By the time he ran for a second term in 1996, the economy was booming and the huge
budget deficit had been controlled. Voters rewarded Clinton by reelecting him over the
Republican candidate, Robert Dole.
In January 1998, a scandal that nearly ended Clinton’s presidency unfolded in the press. It
was reported that Clinton engaged in a sexual relationship with a White House intern
named Monica Lewinsky during his first term. Although Clinton originally denied the
charges, overwhelming evidence was presented that Clinton and Lewinsky engaged in
repeated sexual contact, even in the Oval Office.
Republicans were outraged. An independent counsel, named Kenneth Starr, was

appointed to gather evidence against Clinton. As the summer ended, Clinton admitted that
many of the reports were true and that he was ashamed of his behavior. The House
Judiciary Committee drew up articles of impeachment on four counts including abuse of
power and obstruction of justice. Across the nation, Americans debated whether or not
Clinton’s misbehavior constituted an impeachable offense.

The House decided that two articles of impeachment were in order, and in December 1998,
Clinton joined Andrew Johnson as the only presidents to be impeached. In such
proceedings, the Senate has the final word and acts as a judge and jury. Two-thirds of the
Senators must vote guilty to remove a president from office. Clinton survived this final vote
to impeach which unfolded along party lines.
As the year 2000 approached, partisan politics were as toxic as ever. Republicans claimed
that they fixed the economy and Clinton got the credit. Regardless of who gets the credit or
blame, the 1990s were a decade of very steady economic growth. The crippling budget
deficits of the 1980s were finally brought under control, and Americans enjoyed low
inflation, low unemployment, low interest rates and a booming stock market. Even the bad
blood between the two parties couldn’t change that.
Living in the Information Age
Some have begun to call it the Information Revolution. Technological changes brought
dramatic new options to Americans living in the 1990s. From the beginning of the decade
until the end, new forms of entertainment, commerce, research, work, and communication
became commonplace in the United States. The driving force behind much of this change
was an innovation popularly known as the Internet.
Personal computers had become widespread by the end of the 1980s. Also available was
the ability to connect these computers over local or even national networks. Through a
device called a modem, individual users could link their computer to a wealth of information
using conventional phone lines. What lay beyond the individual computer was a vast
domain of information known as cyberspace.
The Internet was developed during the 1970s by the Department of Defense. In the case of
an attack, military advisers suggested the advantage of being able to operate one
computer from another terminal. In the early days, the Internet was used mainly by
scientists to communicate with other scientists. The Internet remained under government
control until 1984.
One early problem faced by Internet users was speed. Phone lines could only transmit
information at a limited rate. The development of fiber-optic cables allowed for billions of
bits of information to be received every minute. Companies like Intel developed faster
microprocessors, so personal computers could process the incoming signals at a more
rapid rate.
In the early 1990s, the World Wide Web was developed, in large part, for commercial
purposes. Corporations created home pages where they could place text and graphics to
sell products. Soon airline tickets, hotel reservations, books, and even cars and homes
could be purchased online. Colleges and universities posted research data on the Internet,
so students could find valuable information without leaving their dormitories. Companies
soon discovered that work could be done at home and submitted online, so a whole new
class of telecommuters began to earn a living from home offices, unshaven and wearing
pajamas.

New forms of communication were introduced. Electronic mail, or email, was a convenient
way to send a message to associates or friends. Messages could be sent and received at
the convenience of the individual. A letter that took several days to arrive could be read in
minutes. Internet service providers like America Online and CompuServe set up electronic
chat rooms. These were open areas of cyberspace where interested parties could join in a
conversation with perfect strangers.
Advocates of the Internet cited its many advantages. The commercial possibilities were
limitless. Convenience was greatly improved. Chat rooms and email allowed individuals to
converse who may never have had the opportunity in the past. Educational opportunities
were greatly enhanced because of the wealth of knowledge now placed at the fingertips of
any wired individual. “Surfing the ‘net” became a pastime in and of itself.
Critics charged that the Internet created a technological divide that increased the gap
between the haves and have-nots. Those who couldn’t afford a computer or a monthly
access fee were denied these possibilities. Many decried the impersonal nature of
electronic communication compared to a telephone call or a handwritten letter. Hate groups
were using the Internet to expand their bases and recruit new members. The unregulated
nature of the Internet allowed pornography to be broadcast to millions of homes. Protecting
children from these influences, or even from meeting violent predators would prove to be
difficult.
Regardless of its drawbacks, by the end of the 1990s, the world was fast becoming wired.
The End of the American Century
In 1900, the United States was an emerging giant. In the midst of its second industrial
revolution, America had just begun to acquire an overseas empire and international
influence.
During the first half of the twentieth century, the United States proved to be the decisive
combatant in two major world wars, earning the right to determine a postwar outcome. The
Cold War that plagued the world in the last half of the twentieth century proved in the end
to be an American victory as well.
American scientists had developed nuclear technology, the computer, put human beings on
the moon, and were at the vanguard of immunization techniques.
America’s postwar economy was the envy of the globe. A consumer-driven middle class
built the highest standard of living in the world. American popular culture was everywhere.
Levi’s jeans, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Hollywood movies were enjoyed around the
world.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States was the only remaining
military superpower, and the world looked to Washington for leadership at combating
aggression in the Persian Gulf, ending ethnic cleansing in places such as Kosovo, and
halting nuclear proliferation.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) ended economic barriers with
Canada and Mexico and promised even more prosperity.

Why then did so many Americans feel uneasiness and uncertainty as the twenty-first
century approached? Economic challenges were created by the prosperous Pacific Rim
and a stronger European Union. Despite prosperity, real incomes stagnated for the bottom
half of American wage earners. Although legal barriers to equality were largely eliminated
for American minority groups, economic equality was but a dream. Women made
advances toward equity, but still earned less than 75 cents for every dollar earned by
American males. Many Americans felt they were working longer hours for less.
Pessimists depicted America as a civilization in decline. The rise of the divorce rate led to
many children being raised in broken homes. Gun violence was a major problem. School
shootings became commonplace. When two students entered Columbine High School in
Littleton, Colorado in April 1999, with weapons, they murdered 13 people before taking
their own lives. Critics pointed to a media that glorified and promoted violence, permissive
gun laws, failing schools, and neglectful parenting.
Environmentalists observed the ominous dwindling of rainforests and global warming

trends. Disasters such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989 and rising gasoline prices in
2000 illustrated America’s embarrassing dependency on fossil fuels and the ecological and
economic havoc that resulted.
In the meanwhile, the United States will rely on its history of increasing democracy and
respect for human rights, its dynamic diversity, and the innovative character of its people to
seek new solutions to whatever problems may arise.

Exercise 7.7
Open Link

Key Points
In August of 1990, Iraq, under the direction of its dictator Saddam Hussein, invaded and conquered the
neighboring nation of Kuwait. After months of taking a defensive position in Saudi Arabia, United States and allied
forces invaded Iraq and liberated Kuwait in January of 1991.
A combination of a recession, an unusually popular third party candidate, and President Bush going back on a no-
new-taxes pledge ended 12 years of Republican control of the White House with the election of Bill Clinton as
president in 1992. Clinton would go on to win a second term in o ce but would nish his second term mired in
scandal, including a successful impeachment vote in the House of Representatives but not being convicted and
removed by the Senate.
e Internet, developed in the 1970s and 1980s, gained widespread usage in the 1990s. New opportunities for
trade, entertainment, education (such as you’re experiencing now), advertising, and politics brought about an
economic boom in the mid- to late 90s.

The USA and Terrorism
America’s War on Terror
With the end of the Cold War came a new threat to the security of the United States—
terrorism. The Soviet Union’s collapse left the United States as the world’s sole
superpower. The United States became a focus of radical groups throughout the world.
From the 1990s to the present—and likely for decades beyond—the United States faces a
continuing threat from non-nation enemies.
September 11, 2001
e United States came under attack by Al-Qaeda terrorists on September 11, 2001, crashing jet airliners at, among other locations, New York’s
City’s World Trade Center. (Image by Michael Foran [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

On September 11, 2001, two jets were intentionally flown into the two main towers of the
World Trade Center in New York City. Another plane was intentionally flown into the
Pentagon in northern Virginia while a fourth plane crashed in western Pennsylvania when
passengers attempted to retake control of the plane. The crashes resulted in nearly 3,000
people killed. These planes were hijacked and crashed as part of an organized act of
terrorism. The terrorist organization known as Al-Qaeda, under the leadership of a man
named Osama bin Laden, was responsible for the attack.
Al-Qaeda claimed that their motivation for these attacks was based on continued United
States interference with Middle Eastern politics, especially the United States support of the
nation of Israel. Radical organizations turned to terrorist tactics in an attempt to achieve
their political goals. In some cases, terrorist groups received support from nation-states
such as Libya and Iran. This is known as state-sponsored terrorism.
The Beginning of the War on Terror
Having been the home of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, the country of Afghanistan became the epicenter of America’s War on Terror.
After the attack on September 11, 2001, President Bush demanded that the government of
Afghanistan hand over Osama bin Laden and shut down Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.
The government of Afghanistan had been harboring Al-Qaeda leaders and fighters. When
the Taliban, the name for the group that rules Afghanistan, refused to turn over bin Laden,
the United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan in a move to neutralize any terrorist
bases in the area. The United States quickly destroyed known Taliban and Al-Qaeda
camps while killing many foreign-born fighters. However, the mountainous terrain and
challenging political realities of Afghanistan made progress to defeat Al-Qaeda and Taliban
groups in Afghanistan painfully slow. US troops still operate in Afghanistan today to support

its new government and to prevent the growth of terrorist groups within remote regions of
the nation.
Afghanistan had its first national democratic election in December of 2004. Despite this
positive step, US military remained necessary to maintain the stability of the nation. Osama
bin Laden was finally tracked down and killed by US special forces as he hid in Lahore,
Pakistan in 2011. Many within the US government question Pakistan’s role in hiding bin
Laden. Special forces tracked bin Laden’s location to a walled compound which ended up
being located within one mile of Pakistan’s elite military compound.
Iraq War
e United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003 remains a controversial subject for many Americans.
President George W. Bush and his advisors became worried that terrorist groups might get
hold of weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical or nuclear weapons. Some
intelligence officials in the United States believed that Saddam Hussein in Iraq possessed
such weapons. The United States and its allies insisted that weapons inspectors be
allowed into Iraq to check for the presence of weapons of mass destruction—Iraq agreed.
By March of 2003, inspectors had found nothing, but US officials insisted that Iraq was
concealing the location of the weapons. The United States and a group of its allies invaded
Iraq in March of 2003, despite the UN Security Council’s refusal to authorize the use of
force against Iraq. By May 1, 2003, President Bush declared major fighting over, and in late
2003, Saddam Hussein was captured (to be later executed by the new Iraqi government in
2006).

The invasion of Iraq was controversial in the United States because there was no clear
evidence of current weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in Iraq (Iraq did,
however, have such programs throughout the 1990s). The aftermath of the war became
more concerning than the WMD question. Without a strong central government, Iraq
descended into a civil war. Shia and Sunni militias turned against each other, and Kurds in
the north sought self-rule or autonomy. US forces attempted to maintain peace, fight
budding terrorist groups and assist in the building of a new democratic nation, all at the
same time. The effort proved to be costly and support for the war dropped towards the end
of George W. Bush’s presidency.
Islamic extremist groups, including a branch of Al-Qaeda known as Ansar al-Islam, gained
influence and recruits in parts of Iraq and nearby Syria in the vacuum of power created by
the fall of Saddam’s government. By the time the US officially ended formal military
operations in 2011, a new group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL),
also referred to as ISIS, began fighting to control territory and export terrorism beyond the
borders of the Middle East. The group formed a self-proclaimed Islamic caliphate in parts
of Syria and western Iraq. ISIL claimed the city of Raqqa, Syria, as the capital of its
caliphate. US and Russian forces, supporting different factions in the Syrian Civil War,
pushed ISIL out of many of its strongholds in Syria. Iraqi forces, with the support of US
special operators, liberated areas in western Iraq from ISIS control, including the major city
of Mosul.
Shown here is a map of all state-based opponents of ISIL. e blue shading denotes those areas under the Combined Joint Task Force—
Operation Inherent Resolve. Green shading shows other state-based opponents, and red shading shows territories held by ISIL at its late-2015
peak. (Image By ERAGON [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons)
Western nations, especially European nations, face challenges related to ISIL fighters
returning to commit terrorist activities. A few thousand of ISIL’s fighters came to Syria from
European countries, so they still hold European passports. Those not killed in battle can

attempt to return back to their home countries or travel to other ISIL-controlled areas. It’s
clear the threat from ISIL hasn’t been eradicated, despite defeats in Syria and Iraq.
Studies have shown that hundreds of ISIL fighters have returned to European nations after
having been involved in direct combat. Other fighters that escaped the fighting traveled to
unstable parts of Africa in which ISIL maintains strongholds. It’s widely believed that they
will recruit and train others to carry out attacks within western nations or on western
citizens traveling abroad. ISIL also recruits members via the Internet and social media
platforms making it difficult for law enforcement to identify and stop attacks from individual
actors that decide to carry out attacks in the name of ISIL.
Efforts to Combat Terrorism on the Homefront
The attacks of September 11, 2001, exposed some weaknesses in US intelligence

gathering and law enforcement efforts. Efficient mechanisms were not in place for the
sharing of information between different law enforcement agencies and geographical
offices. US leaders looked for ways to improve intelligence gathering and domestic
security. In October of 2001, Congress passed (and President Bush signed) the Patriot Act.
The Patriot Act greatly expanded the federal government’s ability to seize and listen in on
communications between people within the United States. This law became controversial
due to concerns that it went too far in violating US citizens’ right to privacy. In 2002, the
Department of Homeland Security was created to centralize many government agencies
that focus on domestic security.

In 2002, the Department of Homeland Security was formed to bring many existing security agencies under one umbrella.
In 2004, the Bush administration starting detaining captured suspected terrorists at a US

military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It was argued that since these people were
considered military combatants (captured where US forces were engaged in military
operations), they didn’t have a right to trial procedures guaranteed under the constitution to
United States citizens. In the years since its use as a terrorist detention center, the military
base and its method of operations faced numerous court challenges based on the fact that
many detainees were not given the writ of habeas corpus. The writ of habeas corpus,
contained in Article 1 of the US Constitution, protects individual liberty by requiring the
government to present evidence of wrongdoing before a person can be detained or jailed.
Despite legal victories, both Bush and Obama administrations were hesitant to completely
close the center (although Obama did ask Congress to close it down and brought several
accused terrorists to the US for trials). President Trump’s administration pledged to keep
the facility open in 2017.
Today, the United States still faces the threat of terrorist attacks. Since September 11,
2001, various incidents of “lone wolf” terrorism have occurred. In such cases, people within
the United States become radicalized online through social media sites but may not have
direct contact with terrorist groups. These people have acted out in ways that severely
injured and killed people within the United States. For example, in November of 2017, a

man who claimed to be inspired by online Islamic State propaganda drove a car into a
crowd in New York City, killing eight people. As terrorist threats evolve, US intelligence and
law enforcement will need to change to confront new challenges.
Nuclear Proliferation
The spread of nuclear weaponry to nations hostile to the US has become a concern as Iran
and North Korea sought to develop such weapons over the past few decades. Iran began
its nuclear energy program in the 1980s, and by the late 1990s, US officials became
concerned that Iran may be attempting to produce nuclear weapons. International
organizations and groups of nations attempted to negotiate a stop to the progression of
any technology that could lead to nuclear weapons. When negotiations broke down or
international inspectors were expelled from Iran, sanctions were placed on Iran as
punishment. Sanctions on Iran often involved limiting or stopping trade and banking activity
with Iran.
In a recent agreement brokered by the Obama administration, Iran agreed to reduce its
stockpile of enriched uranium in exchange for the removal of sanctions. As of 2017, Iran
doesn’t have nuclear weapons. Many criticize the Iran nuclear deal. Criticism stems from
the fact that the agreement wasn’t presented to and passed by Congress, Iran received a
large payment of hard currency (cash payments totaling 1.3 billion dollars) secretly
delivered, and the agreement gives Iran the ability to restart its nuclear energy program
after a ten-year period. After the agreement, Iran released four US hostages in exchange
for the United States dropping charges against seven Iranians for previous violations of
sanctions on Iran.
North Korea began developing nuclear technology in the 1980s and 1990s. Similarly to
Iran, the international community tried a mixture of aid and sanctions to encourage North
Korea to give up its nuclear weapons programs. In 2003, North Korea officially developed
its first nuclear weapon. North Korea next sought to develop technology to deliver nuclear
warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles. In 2017, several intermediate-range
intercontinental ballistic missiles were tested. Testing such missiles and using rhetoric
indicating that the ultimate goal is to develop technology capable of delivering a nuclear
weapon anywhere on the United States mainland has created a very tense situation. The
United States and multiple allies have successfully pushed tough sanctions through the
United Nations. It remains to be seen if China and Russia will follow through on
implementing the sanctions. While North Korea claims nuclear weapons will be used to
keep other nations from invading the nations, other nations such as the United States fear
the North will use weapons against allies or sell them on the open market to other nations
or terrorist groups.
Review the article(http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41228181) from

BBC news to compare life in North Korea to life in South Korea. Note the
focus on militarization over infrastructure development, which is critical to
economic development in the North.


Exercise 7.8
Open Link

Key Points
On September 11, 2001 a terrorist attack involving four hijacked airliners organized by terrorist group Al-Qaeda
killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States. is would trigger a war on terror that lasts until this day.
e war on terror included military action overseas, such as the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, to shut down a
government hosting terrorist groups, and e orts at home to improve intelligence gathering/sharing, such as the
passage of the Patriot Act and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.
Concerns over the possible development of weapons of mass destruction drove the Bush administration into
invading Iraq in 2003. Iraq descended into various groups ghting amongst themselves, and the chaos allowed for
the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Link
"Nine charts which tell you all you need to know about North Korea"(http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-
41228181)

Bush and Obama Presidencies
The Bush and Obama Presidencies
The election of 2000 and the foreign and domestic events that happened since then set the
scene for our world today. In this section of your course, you’ll learn about the challenges
and the government proposals to face the challenges put forth by President George W.
Bush and President Barack Obama.
In the election of 2000, Republican George W. Bush (son of past President George H.W.
Bush) competed against Democratic candidate Al Gore (Bill Clinton’s vice president). The
election ended up being a close contest with George W. Bush narrowly winning the
electoral vote, despite losing the popular vote.
e presidential election 0f 2000 was an extremely close contest, with the eventual victor, George W. Bush, actually losing the popular vote.

The election was noteworthy for a few reasons. The results of Florida, which would
ultimately decide the election, were argued in the courts for weeks with the Supreme Court
finally stopping the recount, giving the election to Bush. Bush received fewer votes
nationwide but won the election due to the way the electoral college awards electoral
votes. Finally, a third party candidate, Green Party’s Ralph Nader affected the outcome,
since most of his voters would have voted for Al Gore had he not run. If the third party
candidate hadn’t been involved in the election, the Democratic nominee, Gore, would have
won.
With regards to foreign affairs, Bush’s first term in office mainly focused on the war on
terror as described in the previous section. Domestically, Bush oversaw a dramatic tax cut
in 2001 and an overhaul of the nation’s primary and secondary education system with a
law known as No Child Left Behind. This education law mandated standardized testing
across the nation as a way to measure student success. The hope was that the law would
encourage schools to improve performance through a series of budgetary rewards and
punishments. Under President Obama, the law was modified to loosen the standards and
lessen the negative consequences of failing to comply.
President Bush successfully pushed through a major expansion of Medicare in 2003,

known as Medicare Part D. This program focused on expanding coverage of prescription
drug costs for Medicare recipients. This bill was controversial in the Republican Party
because it represented a significant expansion of the Medicare program adding hundreds
of billions of dollars to future budgets.
Bush’s Second Term
NASA Image of Hurricane Katrina

George W. Bush easily won a second term in 2004 against Democratic challenger John
Kerry. In August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast of the United
States and resulted in extensive damage to areas in southern Louisiana and Florida. The
storm devastated the city of New Orleans. The storm cost at least 1,200 lives and
hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. Some parts of the storm-damaged areas have
still not been rebuilt to this day. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and
state and local governments came under scrutiny for a slow response to the storm which
left millions of Americans struggling to get by in the immediate aftermath of the storm.
Some Americans blamed President Bush personally for not adequately responding to the
needs of those affected by the storm.
President Bush attempted to lead an effort into privatizing parts of Social Security with the
argument that people would be better off investing their own money for retirement rather
than paying taxes into Social Security. This attempt failed and hurt Republicans going into
the 2006 mid-term elections. In 2006, the Democratic Party won majorities in the House
and Senate for the first time since 1992. This shift was driven by the unpopularity of the
Iraq war, government corruption on the part of the previously ruling Republicans, and a
desire for change. Nancy Pelosi was selected by the Democratic majority in the House to
act as the first female Speaker of the House in US history.
The Economic Crash of 2007–2008
In the 2000s, many banks began giving mortgages to homebuyers who had poor credit
scores. These loans were known as sub-prime loans. These types of loans were profitable
for banks since the home buyer would need to pay a high interest rate to compensate for
the riskiness of the loan. Bankers were encouraged to increase the number of these loans
given out through bonuses for the number of loans made. Thousands of these loans were
sold to investment banking firms who would bundle the loans into investments known as
Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs). Investors could buy and sell these CDOs just like
any other investment. This created a system where mortgages would ultimately be owned
by investors, not the banks originally giving out the mortgages. As a result, the local
mortgage creating banks didn’t care if the mortgages that were being written were too
risky.
Government policies related to housing helped fuel the housing

bubble(https://www.forbes.com/2009/02/13/housing-bubble-subprime-
opinions-
contributors_0216_peter_wallison_edward_pinto.html#20a87754778b).
By 2007, many people with sub-prime mortgages began to fall behind on their high
payments. Unpaid mortgages led to the collapse in the value of the CDOs. Making the
situation more destructive was the fact that many investment banks took out insurance

policies against these CODs known as credit default swaps. Because the market for credit
default swaps was largely unregulated, investment banks took out billions of dollars of
insurance policies protecting against the loss of value of CDOs—mostly CDOs they didn’t
directly own. In effect, many of these investment banks were betting against the CDOs that
they sold to their clients as a good investment. When the value of CDOs collapsed, the
insurance policies came into effect, but most of the companies that created the policies
didn’t have the money on hand to pay out. Inadequate capital to back the claims led to
banks and insurance companies either collapsing or coming close to bankruptcy.
The financial problems trickled out throughout the world economy leading to trillions of
dollars in investment losses, a US unemployment rate of over 10 percent, and the most
serious economic recession since the Great Depression. The 2008 election took place
under these economic realities. Bush and Congress pushed a bailout plan that would
involve billions of low-interest loans to banks and insurance companies to keep the
economy going. While it can be argued this bailout stopped a complete collapse, it was
unpopular because it was seen as rewarding the same businesses that engaged in the
reckless behavior that led to the recession.
Two candidates—Democratic nominee Barack Obama and Republican nominee John

McCain—competed in the 2008 general election for president. The unpopularity of George
W. Bush, the crashing economy, and the desire for change helped Obama and the
Democrat Party claim victory in the election. Barack Obama became the first African
American president in US history.
Obama’s first challenge was to address the economic crisis. The American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act was passed in early 2009 to address the economic challenges faced by
the nation. This law cut taxes for average Americans and small businesses while
increasing spending on infrastructure and education as a way to stimulate the economy via
job growth. At the same time, the Federal Reserve drastically cut interest rates as a way to
encourage economic activity.
In 2010, The Supreme Court made a major decision in the Citizens United v. Federal
Election Commission (FEC) case. This decision opened the doors for nearly unlimited
amounts of campaign spending as long as the organizations spending the money did not
directly coordinate with candidates’ campaigns. The decision was based on the First
Amendment rights of donors to express themselves through campaign donations. This
case allowed for an increased amount of money to be used in the elections of United
States lawmakers.
President Obama attempted to address the problem of lack of health insurance for
Americans in his first term. Tens of millions of Americans didn’t have health insurance,
leading to a situation where an illness could ruin a person’s financial life. In 2009–2010
Obama pushed the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), through Congress
with the support of the Democrat-controlled House and Senate. This sweeping law
included provisions that prohibited health insurance companies from refusing insurance
based on preexisting conditions, created government-run marketplaces for people to buy
health insurance plans at group rates if they didn’t get insured through their employer and,
most controversial of all, mandated that all Americans buy health insurance or face a fine.

The law became controversial because it passed with no Republican support. The
requirement to purchase insurance was seen as an infringement on personal liberty by
some Americans.
Republicans came back strong in the mid-term election of 2010. The economy hadn’t come
back to precrash levels yet, Obamacare was unpopular, and the Republican Party gained
energy from the “Tea Party” movement which pushed a more conservative view of
government. Republicans won back control of the House which would slow any further
policies Obama would attempt to pass into law. Furthermore, Republicans took control of a
majority of state governments across the country which would allow them to draw
legislative districts after the census of 2010.
Obama’s Second Term
President Obama won reelection against Republican candidate Mitt Romney in 2012. With
the Republicans continuing to hold control of the House of Representatives, a period of
gridlock hit the US national government. President Obama and the Republican House
disagreed on approaches related to budgetary issues, foreign policy, and the role of the
federal government. As a result, little in the way of lawmaking occurred in Obama’s second
term in office. In 2014, Republicans gained the majority in the Senate. Republicans in the
Senate stalled many of Obama’s judicial appointees including a controversial case where
they refused to hold a hearing for an Obama appointee (Merrick Garland) to the Supreme
Court for about 10 months before the 2016 presidential election. Democrats wanted
Merrick Garland to replace Antonin Scalia, who died unexpectedly in 2016. Scalia’s judicial
philosophy involved taking a strict interpretation of the constitution, which is the approach
favored by most conservatives. Republicans fought to keep the Supreme Court seat open
until the election of 2016 was decided.
One example of Obama taking executive action without the support of Congress would be
his Deferred Action for Child Arrivals (DACA) order for the federal government. Under this
executive order, people in the country illegally brought here as minors by their parents,
weren’t to be aggressively pursued for deportation as long as they didn’t have a criminal
record.
In 2015, a major Supreme Court case—Obergefell v. Hodges—struck down state laws

banning same-sex marriages. It was argued that such laws violated a same-sex couple’s
rights to equal protection of the laws according to the Fourteenth Amendment. This
decision marked a major change in civil rights in the United States.

Exercise 7.9
Open Link

Key Points
e election of 2000 that resulted in victory for Republican George W. Bush was notable because the winner didn’t
receive the most popular votes, and the close election was decided when the Supreme Court stopped the recount
of votes in Florida.
President Bush oversaw two major tax cuts, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a major expansion of Medicare, and a serious
economic recession in his eight years in o ce.
In 2008, Barak Obama became the rst African American president.
Obama faced the challenge of a crashed economy by passing a stimulus bill that would hopefully restart the
economy. e A ordable Care Act (passed in 2010) dramatically changed the way many Americans get healthcare
insurance.
With the election of a Republican House of Representatives in 2010 and a Republican Senate in 2014, the federal
government entered into a period of gridlock, in which legislation was di cult to pass into law.
Link
"A Government-Mandated Housing Bubble"(https://www.forbes.com/2009/02/13/housing-bubble-subprime-

opinions-contributors_0216_peter_wallison_edward_pinto.html#20a87754778b)

Political Division
In 2016, Republican candidate Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton
competed in the presidential election. Trump ran a campaign centered around stronger
border security, including building a wall between the United States and Mexico, and
focused on encouraging job growth. Clinton ran a campaign focused on her experience in
government. Many were excited about the possibility of Clinton becoming the first woman
President. The campaign was also marked with scandals regarding Trump’s use of social
media and allegations of sexual misconduct and Clinton’s improper handling of
government-related electronic information.
Trump won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote by almost 3 million votes.
This would be the second time since the election of 2000 the winner of the popular vote
didn’t win the presidency. The Republican Party held control of both the House and Senate
giving the Republican Party control of the federal government.
The election map of 2016 shows states won by Trump colored in red. States won by
Clinton are colored in blue. Two states aren’t shown on the map: Alaska voted for Trump
and Hawaii voted for Clinton. Notice how Democrat voting states tend to hug the West
Coast and the northeast corner of the nation. This election result reflected a trend within
the country where most of the interior states and the southeast tend to vote Republican
while the West Coast and Northeast tend to vote Democrat. Of course, this isn’t to say that
these states will always vote this way—demographic and issues-based change can always
happen.

e election map of 2016 shows Republicans (red) maintaining strongholds in the interior states and the South. Democratic strongholds (blue)
remained in the Northeast and on the West Coast.
The picture of how people vote becomes a bit more complicated if you break voting results
down by county:

An Election Map of 2016 Broken down by County
Take note how the blue (democratic voting) areas seem to be small islands in a sea of red.
This is because urban (city) dwellers tend to vote Democratic while people in less densely
populated areas (rural) tend to vote Republican. Republican voters happen to be spread
over a greater area, while Democratic voters tend to be condensed in cities. It can be said
that while there are differences in geographic voting patterns, the real divide may be
between urban and rural voters.
Trump’s First Year in Office
The removal or changing of executive department regulations was one of the first moves
made by the Trump administration and the Republican Congress. President Trump
removed regulations of businesses he claimed were part of government over-reach.
Congress used a law known as the Congressional Review Act to quickly remove some
Obama-era regulations. This law allowed Congress to remove executive regulations up to
60 days from their creation with only a simple majority in the House and Senate. The ability
to use simple majorities to pass legislation removes the threat or use of filibuster. A
filibuster is used to stall or kill legislation. It can be ended with 60 votes in the Senate,
which is 10 votes more than a simple majority.
In April 2017, Trump appointee to the Supreme Court Neil Gorsuch, was confirmed to take
a seat on the court by the Senate. Gorsuch’s confirmation (and appointment) was notable
for a few reasons. The vacancy had been available since the previous seat holder, Antonin
Scalia, died in February of 2016. The Republican Senate kept the seat empty for more

than a year by refusing to hold hearings on Obama’s appointee. In the confirmation hearing
for Neil Gorsuch, the Republican Senate took another unprecedented move by removing
the possibility of a filibuster in the confirmation process. This pattern played out throughout
2017, in which President Trump and the Republican Senate confirmed a record amount of
federal appeals judges.
Republicans in Congress attempted and failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act
(Obamacare) in late summer and early fall of 2017. This failure was quickly followed up
with a large tax cut focused mainly on reducing the corporate tax rate, eliminating the
estate tax (although the final bill only altered the estate tax), and lowering income taxes.
This law, known as the Tax Cut and Jobs Act was passed in December 2017. Supporters
claim that this bill will spur economic activity and lead to a growth in the number of jobs
available for Americans. Critics claim the new law will add to the national debt and will only
act as a giveaway to wealthy Americans.
Modern Political Issues
With the election of Trump in 2016, despite him losing the popular vote, many people in the
US came to question the wisdom of the Electoral College. Because of the way the
Electoral College is set up, voters in low-population states have more power in deciding
who becomes president than voters in high-population states. The frequency of recent
examples of the winner getting fewer votes (elections of 2000 and 2016) has brought this
issue to the forefront.
The method of drawing out legislative districts has become a concern. Every 10 years the
federal government measures demographic data in what’s known as the US Census. Since
states can gain or lose population relative to each other, the number of House
Representatives for each state can change. Congressional districts must be redrawn to
reflect changes in representation and any internal population movement within a state. All
legislative districts must have approximately the same number of people. State legislatures
have the power to draw these new districts, and with modern computer technology, can
draw very precise districts.
Many legislatures have chosen to draw the maps in such a way as to benefit their own
political party. This practice is known as Gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is a way for
elected officials to pick their voters through careful drawing of the legislative districts. The
result can be elected officials in office who may not accurately reflect the will of the voters.
For example, the Republican Party in Pennsylvania controlled the redistricting process
after the 2010 Census. Districts were drawn in such a way that even though roughly 50
percent of Pennsylvania voters vote for Democrat candidates for House elections,
Republican lawmakers hold 13 out of 18 House of Representative seats in Congress. The
problem is made worse by the fact that state legislators also draw the district lines for their
own districts—making changing party control of state legislatures unlikely. Activists have
pushed lawsuits against the political gerrymandering of districts and pushed for state
lawmakers to change the way districts are drawn.
In recent years, political scientists have noticed that voting Americans are becoming more
loyal to their political party or beliefs and are unwilling to consider voting for other political
parties. This trend is known as polarization. Polarization can be linked to increasing
negative views of opposing parties (known as negative partisanship) and modern media

options allowing people to only see news that they agree with rather than news that may
challenge their own world view. Along with increased polarization, a divide between rural
and urban Americans has appeared. Generally speaking, voters in rural areas favor the
Republican Party while voters in urban areas favor the Democrat Party.

Exercise 7.10
Open Link

Key Points
e election of 2016 brought the United States a relatively scandal- lled election year, ending with the election of
President Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress.
President Trump and the Republican Congress set about to immediately remove or replace many Obama-era
executive regulations.
Modern political concerns, such as questioning the Electoral College and gerrymandering, have become topics of
debate.

Self Check: Lesson 7
Open Link

[7] Lesson 7 Exam
Open Link


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American History: Part 2 / Lesson 7: The 1960s to the Present

© 2023 PF High School, LLC Page: 1 of 111

Explain the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s

Analyze causes for America's inability to win the Vietnam War

Examine the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson

Recognize why the 1970s is considered a time of malaise

Describe successes and failures of the Bush and Obama presidencies

Recognize political divisions in America by examining recent election patterns

© 2023 PF High School, LLC Page: 2 of 111

The Civil Rights Movement

A New Civil Rights Movement

© 2023 PF High School, LLC Page: 3 of 111

© 2023 PF High School, LLC Page: 4 of 111

Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

Three riders complied, Parks didn’t.

King, Abernathy, Boycott, and the SCLC

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Don’t Ride the Bus

Don’t ride the buses to work to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday. If

© 2023 PF High School, LLC Page: 6 of 111

Showdown in Little Rock

Can You Meet the Challenge?

© 2023 PF High School, LLC Page: 7 of 111

This editorial by JANE EMERY appeared in Central High student

Will you be stubborn, obstinate, or refuse to listen to both sides of the

The challenge is yours, as future adults of America, to prove your maturity,

© 2023 PF High School, LLC Page: 8 of 111

The Sit-In Movement

The civil rights sit-in was born.

Gains and Pains

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In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.:

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Full text of “I Have a Dream”

On August 28, 1963, over 250,000 people gathered in Washington, DC

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we

© 2023 PF High School, LLC Page: 11 of 111

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to

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We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of

© 2023 PF High School, LLC Page: 13 of 111

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true.

So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

© 2023 PF High School, LLC Page: 14 of 111

© 2023 PF High School, LLC Page: 15 of 111

Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to

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The Long, Hot Summers

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Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam

Martin and Malcolm

Although their philosophies may have differed radically, Malcolm X believed

© 2023 PF High School, LLC Page: 18 of 111

On June 5, 1966, James Meredith was shot in an ambush as he attempted to complete a