CIVIL RIGHTS, VIETNAM, AND THE ORDEAL OF LIBERALISM
CIVIL RIGHTS, VIETNAM, AND THE ORDEAL OF LIBERALISM
Main themes of Chapter Twenty-nine:
The promise and peril of the liberal moment of the early 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson used the legacy of John Kennedy and his own political skill to erect his Great Society and fight the war on poverty with programs for health, education, job training, and urban development
The early successes and later fracturing of the civil rights movement, in which the movement finally generated enough sympathy among whites to accomplish the legal end of segregation
The persistence of racism and other unsolved civil rights problems, and the rise of the black power philosophy
The consequences of containment and the United States preoccupation with communism in leading the nation to use military force against leftist nationalist movements in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and, most disastrously, Vietnam
The cumulative shocks of 1968 on the American liberal imagination, and the subsequent rise of Richard M. Nixon
A thorough study of Chapter Twenty-nine should enable the student to understand the following:
The new directions of domestic reform manifested by John Kennedy's New Frontier program
The elements added to Kennedy's program by Lyndon Johnson's Great Society proposals, and the significance of the strategies employed by LBJ to pursue his program
The events of the civil rights revolution of the early sixties, from the Woolworth sit-ins to the rise of the Black Panthers
The reasons why the movement for African American civil rights became increasingly assertive in the 1960s
The background and sequence of events leading to the Cuban missile crisis
The gradual intensification of the United States commitment to defending the government in the southern part of Vietnam and the reasons why United States involvement in Vietnam changed both quantitatively and qualitatively in 1965
The military strategy of the United States in Vietnam and the reasons for its failure
The reasons why the 1968 Tet offensive had such a critical impact on both policy toward Vietnam and American domestic politics
The traumas of 1968 and their effect on the Presidential election of that year
The continuing historical debate over why the U.S. became involved in the conflict in Vietnam
1968 as a turbulent year throughout the world, from the Paris uprisings to the "Prague spring"
