Unit Eight: The 1960s and 1970s: Tumultuous Times for America
Unit Eight: The 1960s and 1970s: Tumultuous Times for America
(and material on the End of the Cold War and the rising importance of the Middle East on the US)
The election of 1960 featured the first nationally televised debate between presidential candidates. While those who head the debate on the radio thought Richard Nixon had won, those who watched on TV thought the younger, more photogenic John F. Kennedy had won the debate. Kennedy went on to win the election.
One year earlier Communist revolutionary Fidel Castro took over Cuba. The CIA planned an invasion by anti-Castro Cubans at the Bay of Pigs that turned into a disaster, pushing Cuba into a closer alliance with the USSR, resulting in the Cuban Missile Crisis, when America nearly went to war with the Soviets over the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba. The next year, JFK was killed while on a trip to Dallas. When the suspected killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, was shot on live TV a few days later, the new president, Lyndon Johnson, formed the Warren Commission, headed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, to investigate whether there had been a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. The commission found that there was no conspiracy and that Oswald had acted alone.
President Johnson then set out to enact a series of anti-poverty programs called the Great Society, but ultimately, his decision to send troops to the Vietnam war ate up the funding that would have gone to these programs.
Many history books cite the landmark Supreme Court ruling in the case of Brown v. Board of Education as the start of the Civil Rights movement, but an emerging theory is that the not guilty verdicts for two white men accused of brutally murdering 14 year old Emmett Till in 1955 motivated citizens of Montgomery, Alabama to boycott their local segregated bus system following the arrest of Rosa Parks. It was this boycott that brought Dr. King into an active role in the Civil Rights struggle, culminating with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which banned Jim Crow policies. The Civil Rights movement then lost momentum following controversial statements from leaders such as Malcolm X and groups like the Black Panthers whose rhetoric and actions suggested a coming race war, and ghetto riots such as the one in the Watts section of Los Angeles. Finally, the Dr. King’s assassination in 1968 stands out as a dramatic end the Civil Rights movement.
Meanwhile, the American government was becoming more involved in a war in Southeast Asia. The communist guerilla leader Ho Chi Minh had helped to fight off Japanese occupation of his homeland during WWII, then drove the French out, taking control of North Vietnam in the 1950s, and, was supplying Vietcong rebels fighting against the pro-American government in South Vietnam in the 1960s. When North Vietnamese forces reportedly fired on a US ship off the coast of North Vietnam, LBJ pressured congress to approve the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, permitting Johnson to send forces to fight against communists in Vietnam.
After a few years in which the American people were told the US was winning the war, a dramatic VC attack called the Tet Offensive showed that America was not winning “the battle for hearts and minds,” but that the local villagers supported the rebels instead. The unpopularity of the war, outrage over atrocities such as the My Lai Massacre and mounting anti-war and anti-draft protests made it impossible for Johnson to run again in 1968. But just as Robert Kennedy was about to secure the democratic nomination that year, he was shot by an assassin angered over his support for Israel following the Six Day War. The democratic convention that year was held in Chicago, where riots broke out when police under the direction of Mayor Richard J. Daley attacked demonstrators. The election of 1968 was easily won by the Republican candidate Richard Nixon.
Nixon’s approach to Vietnam involved attempts to withdraw US forces while increasing bombings of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but eventually called for an “incursion” into Cambodia, which set off more demonstrations leading to the killing of four students at Kent State by National Guardsmen. Eventually, Nixon secured help from China, and brought the troops home, but two years later, the North overran the south, uniting Vietnam as a communist country, and changing the name of the former southern capital, Saigon to Ho Chi Minh City.
The late 1960s and early 1970s saw a wage of social liberation movements such as Cesar Chavez’s attempts to organize the United Farm Workers, the American Indian Movement’s dramatic occupation of Wounded Knee, and the Supreme Court case of Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion.
In 1974, Richard Nixon became the only president to resign from office. He did so after being exposed in a plot to cover up a burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in 1972. Upon taking office, the next president, Gerald Ford, granted Nixon a full pardon for any crimes he may have committed, despite not being convicted of any yet.
The next president, Jimmy Carter, lost the election of 1980 to Ronald Reagan after being unable to win freedom for American hostages held in Iran. Members of Reagan’s administration then got caught illegally supplying weapons to anti-communist fighters in the Iran-Contra Affair. At the end of the 1980s and start of the 1990s, the Cold War ended when East German citizens tore down the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union collapsed. The Chinese government, in contrast, brutally crushed demonstrations at Tiananmen Square. Meanwhile, the fall of the USSR led to their withdrawal from Afghanistan, where rebel fighters such as Osama Bin Laden had been supplied and trained by Americans. Bin Laden would later plan the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
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