The 1960s A PROMISING TIME? As the 1960s began, many Americans believed they lived in a promising time. The economy was doing well, the country seemed poised for positive changes, and a new generation of leaders was taking charge of the government. According to a Gallup poll, a majority of Americans believed their government would always do the right thing. In fact, many expressed hope that the federal government would be able to solve the nation s remaining problems in the not too distant future. Another conception of a promising time dealt less with a sense of hope and anticipation of better times ahead, but rather with the fact that during the early 1960s politicians were doing a lot of promising. Often, they made promises without taking into consideration how realistic they were. This would eventually prove problematic since people who are promised something and then are disappointed when the promise goes unfulfilled tend to be more resentful than those who had never been promised something in the first place. THE 1960 ELECTION ****** Two young candidates, Democrat John F. Kennedy and Republican Richard M. Nixon ran for president in 1960. For the first time, both candidates were born in the 20 th century, so in many ways the election marked the end of one era and the beginning of another, particularly since the outgoing President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was the oldest man ever to hold the office. Kennedy, the Democrat, could not directly criticize the Republican President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, since even after eight years in office, Ike remained hugely popular with the American people. Instead, he indirectly criticized the Eisenhower administration for not being activist enough. He told voters that eight years of conservative government had left the country soft, overly contented, lazy, and self-satisfied. As a result, the more dynamic Soviet Union was threatening to overtake the U.S. in the Cold War. (Kennedy called attention to the Soviets successful launching of the Sputnik satellite in 1957.) The Kennedy campaign coined a slogan to express this sense that only by voting for Kennedy could the nation catch up in the Cold War: It s time to get the country moving again. 1
The slogan was effective largely because it tapped into the sense that 1960 was a promising time, but also because it was vague it didn t state where the country should be moving, so voters could assume that by voting for Kennedy, the country would move in the direction they wanted it to move. In fact, many did not interpret the slogan as a comment on the Cold War, but rather as a reference to civil rights, or economic policy, or the space program, or whatever they themselves cared about. In November 1960, Kennedy won the presidency in one of the closest elections in American history. Looking at how close the vote was, it hardly seemed like a ringing endorsement for Kennedy or the Democrats, but in the days and weeks afterward and particularly after Kennedy delivered his memorable inaugural address on January 20, 1961 it began to feel like the new President had a significant mandate to lead the nation in a new direction. Moreover, it appeared that the people wanted an activist government a government that would intervene more aggressively to wage the Cold War against the Soviet Union and to.solve the nation s domestic problems. KENNEDY S FOREIGN POLICY Kennedy set out to be more pro-active than Eisenhower in stopping the spread of Communism. His rhetoric and his policies tended to be more aggressively anticommunist. During the 1960 campaign, for example, he had criticized Eisenhower for allowing a missile gap. He claimed, falsely as it turned out, that the USSR had surpassed the US in it number of nuclear missiles. In fact, the US was far ahead, but Eisenhower could not (or chose not to) correct this false statement. CUBA Kennedy also criticized the Eisenhower administration for allowing Cuba to go communist. Kennedy believed that the Communist government in Cuba that had taken over in a revolution in 1959 posed a direct threat to U.S. national interests. He believed that to insure U.S. national security, Fidel Castro had to go. In the first days of his administration, he agreed to sign off on a plan that would overthrow Castro. The plan, which entailed an invasion of Cuba led by Cuban exiles (funded by the American CIA), was referred to later as the Bay of Pigs Invasion. 2
The hope was that once the exiles landed in Cuba, the Cuban people would rise up against Castro and support the invaders. This did not happen. (In 1961, most Cubans still supported Castro and had not grown disillusioned with the repressiveness of his Communist regime.) As a result, the invasion was a fiasco and failed spectacularly. It was a great embarrassment for the new Kennedy administration, even though the plan itself had been drawn up during Eisenhower s administration. The question later arose, Why would Kennedy authorize such a dubious plan? In part, he did so because he assumed that the plan, devised by the Eisenhower administration, would eventually become public. If he did not agree to go forward with it, even after Eisenhower had approved it, he would look weak. Since the whole theme of his presidential campaign had been to make U.S. foreign policy more dynamic and to demonstrate U.S. strength in the world, he felt he had little choice but to proceed with the invasion. Its failure, however, left Kennedy feeling he had to achieve some kind of foreign policy success. Tensions with the Soviets in Berlin afforded him an opportunity. BERLIN Berlin, the capital of Germany until the end of World War II, was located in the center of the Soviet zone of the newly divided Germany. After 1945, the city itself was divided in half the east side under Soviet control; the west side under U.S. control. This was particularly frustrating for the Soviets since many men and women who lived in Eastern Europe under Communism sought to escape through West Berlin. They simply traveled from places under Soviet control (Czechoslovakia, Hungary, etc.) to Berlin. Once in the city, they then crossed into West Berlin and took the next plane out to places like France, England, or the United States. These tended to be the smartest, most ambitious, most talented, and most entrepreneurial people. Their departure from the Communist world to the West was called the brain drain. In short, these people could choose which system was better Communism or democracy by voting with their feet. And since everyone went from the Soviet zone to the American zone, it seemed clear to most observers which system was better. Many US officials feared that the Soviets would try to take over West Berlin so as to solve the problem of the brain drain. In such a situation, the question arose as to how the US should respond. Was it worth going to war perhaps even a nuclear war to preserve the freedom of the West Berliners? To stop the brain drain out of Eastern, Soviet-controlled Europe, the Soviets built a wall around the city of West Berlin. This wall was intended to keep people from escaping into the West. However, it also made the Communist system look even more oppressive. The Wall solved the Soviets brain drain problem, but was a public 3
relations disaster since it made it appear that they were literally imprisoning the citizens of Eastern Europe. In 1963, Kennedy traveled to Berlin and spoke at the Wall. He referred to the Wall as a symbol of Soviet oppression and the failure of the Communist system. He told the cheering crowd that all people in the world who wondered which side in the Cold War offered genuine freedom should come to Berlin and see for themselves. All people who were dedicated to preserving freedom and liberty, he said, were Berliners. The Kennedy speech at the Berlin Wall proved one of the high points of his administration and a major propaganda victory for the U.S. in the Cold War. This was the foreign policy win Kennedy had been looking for. VIETNAM As in Cuba, Kennedy also pursued a more aggressive policy in Vietnam. The nation had been a French colony since the 19 th century, however it was occupied by Japan during World War II. When the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the Allies forced them out of Vietnam and the Vietnamese Communists under Ho Chi Minh expected that the country would finally gain its independence. In fact, the Vietnamese Communists did establish a government in the Northern half of the country, but in the South the French returned to reclaim their old colony. The Vietnamese Communists then declared war on the French, a war that lasted until the French finally withdrew in 1954. During this war, the U.S. had supported (and funded) the French. When the French left, the Eisenhower administration pledged to support the anti-communist Vietnamese in the South. When Kennedy took over, he continued this support and even hoped to escalate the U.S. role if that could insure the defeat of the North Vietnamese Communists. Most Vietnamese, however, saw the war as less a Cold War struggle between Communism and democracy and more an anti-imperialist war waged to expel foreigners (of any kind) from Vietnam. Vietnamese in the North and the South were just as suspicious of the Americans as they had been of the French and the Japanese. The Americans continued their support of the South Vietnamese convinced that they would succeed where the French had failed. It was hard to determine why U.S. officials were so convinced of this, but Americans in a promising time genuinely believed their nation could achieve its goals because Americans were simply superior to the French. America was a more powerful nation than North Vietnam, so how could it be defeated? When Kennedy died in November 1963, some believed he was having second thoughts about the U.S. intervention in Vietnam, though there is no way of knowing with any certainty if he would have changed the U.S. policy had he lived. His successor, Lyndon B. Johnson further escalated the U.S. presence in Vietnam, believing that he was following Kennedy s wishes. The controversy over Vietnam would come to dominate 4
American politics in the mid- to late 1960s and, in many ways, contribute to the end of the promising time and fuel the divisions that characterized American society after 1965. 5