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Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev saw the failure of the Bay of Pigs as a sign of the new administration’s weakness. Khrushchev quickly rushed in to exploit this flaw by covertly sending nuclear-armed missiles to Cuba plus the technical and military perso
The idea of hostile nuclear warheads parked a mere 90 miles from the United States was terrifying, but so was the prospect of a naval battle off the coast of Cuba, which might ignite a thermonuclear war. For the next four days, Americans braced themselves for “the big one.” Offices and factories staged air raid drills, as did the nation’s schools, where children practiced “duck and cover”: ducking under their desks and covering their heads.
Few had much hope that such maneuvers would help one survive a full-scale thermonuclear assault.
On October 28, Premier Khrushchev backed down, offering to remove the missiles under U.N. supervision. For his part, President Ke
An Autumn Day In Dallas
Late in November 1963, President Ke
The accused assassin, captured later in the day (though not before murdering Dallas police officer J.D. Tippett), was Lee Harvey Oswald, a misfit who had lived for a period in the Soviet Union, having renounced his U.S. citizenship. As he was being transferred from the city to the county jail, Oswald was assassinated himself on November 24 by Dallas nightclub owner and small-time mobster Jack Ruby.
LBJ
Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-73), the popular Texas senator tapped by Ke
War on Poverty
Americans had much to admire as well as much to criticize about the “thousand days” of the Ke
The phrase Great Society became, like FDR’s New Deal, the label for an ambitious, idealistic package of legislation, including Medicare, which helped finance medical care for Americans over 65; elementary, secondary, and higher education acts to enhance education and provide financial aid to college students; and legislation relating to what Johnson called a War on Poverty.
Civil Rights Act of 1964
Of all the creations of the Great Society, none has had more lasting and profound impact than the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act ba
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was followed the next year by a Voting Rights Act, which destroyed the last vestiges of local legislation intended to prevent or discourage African-Americans from voting. In 1968, at the end of the Johnson years, another civil rights act rendered discrimination by landlords and realtors illegal.
President Johnson’s Great Society was built in part on the memory of JFK and was also a result of the black political and social activism of the 1950s and 1960s. By the end of the Johnson years, equality in America was certainly not fully de facto—a fact of life-but it was at least de jure—a condition of law.
The Least You Need to Know
The modern civil rights movement began with the integration of the armed forces in 1947 and developed through a nonviolent program of civil disobedience led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and others.
Although John F. Ke
Main Event
The year before Rosa Parks’s bus ride, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively declared segregation illegal when, on May 17, 1954, it handed down a decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The decision was the culmination of a long series of lawsuits first brought against segregated school districts by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the 1930s. Repeatedly, the Supreme Court ruled consistently with its 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson that found “separate but equal” accommodations for blacks constitutional as long as all tangible aspects of the accommodations were, indeed, equal. But in 1954, Thurgood Marshall (1908-93; in 1967, he would become the first African-American appointed to the Supreme Court) and other NAACP lawyers demonstrated that segregated school systems were inherently unequal because of intangible social factors. The high court agreed. Desegregation of the nation’s schools became the law of the land. In some places, the process of integration proceeded without incident; in others, it was accompanied by violent resistance that required the intervention of federal marshals and even federal troops.