John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address in 1961 announced his intentions to expand the reach of democracy to break free from the self-satisfaction that pundits such as William Buckley ascribed to an Eisenhower administration criticized as too predictable in its response to Cold War concerns. Following the principles set forth in Walt Rostow’s development theory, Kennedy sought to inoculate international society against the threats to liberal democracy—to remove the communist “drug-dealers” from the global schoolyard—and to work with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to create a military capable of the flexible response necessary in the new frontier of international politics. Remarkably, his address to the American people just over six years following Brown v Board of Education does not mention a single domestic initiative.
Still smarting from United States' intervention in Guatemala in 1954, many people in Latin America cheered Fidel Castro’s leadership of the Cuban revolution in 1959, but two years later, when Castro turned to the Soviet Union for support following the United States’ severing of diplomatic ties, Kennedy attempted a disastrous attack on the island nation. On April 17th, 1961, anti-Castro Cuban émigrés trained by the CIA invaded the sovereign nation in violation of United States' agreements not to interfere in the internal affairs of neighbors in the hemisphere. The invasion was repelled by Castro's troops, and the plot was discovered to have leads to United States' responsibility.
Kennedy’s “miscalculations” in the Bay of Pigs failure hardened Castro’s resolve to stand up to capitalist manipulation of his country’s resources, and set the stage for the increased tensions as Khrushchev angled to take advantage of a perceived weakness in the new American president.
Kennedy’s “miscalculations” in the Bay of Pigs failure hardened Castro’s resolve to stand up to capitalist manipulation of his country’s resources, and set the stage for the increased tensions as Khrushchev angled to take advantage of a perceived weakness in the new American president.
In June of 1961, President Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev met for the first time in Vienna, where Khrushchev famously took his impression of his American counterpart as weak and unlikely to respond with a show of strength to Soviet aggression. Khrushchev’s demands for a new treaty that protected the interests of Soviet authority in East Berlin angered Kennedy, and the president returned to Congress seeking an additional $3 billion in military appropriations and consulted his Joint Chiefs in consideration of “the use of our strategic power in the event of war” (SIOP-62). Khrushchev, for his part, built a wall to prevent the influx of East Germans into West Berlin, and Kennedy, accepting another setback in his efforts to extend freedom into the new frontier, ultimately agreed that a wall was better than a war.
The threat of nuclear war, however, increased as tensions mounted considerably over a thirteen-day period in October of 1962, after a U-2 spy plane showed evidence of Soviet offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles from the coast of the United States. President Kennedy immediately pronounced a blockade of the island, and Robert Kennedy met with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin on October 27th to negotiate terms to avoid nuclear war. In the end, Khrushchev decided to remove the missiles from Cuba, President Kennedy publicly vowed not to invade Cuba, thus accepting a communist-led government in the hemisphere, and privately agreed to disarm a missile base in Turkey that offered close-range strike capabilities on Soviet territory. These tense moments were the closest the world ever came to nuclear war, but also resulted in renewed attempts to control nuclear weapons, leading to the Limited Test Ban Treaty signed in the summer of 1963.
Kennedy's and Khrushchev's maneuverings in the fall of 1962 left the Western Hemisphere free of Soviet arms, and Kennedy reiterated his support of worldwide liberty in a speech in Berlin in June, 1963. President Kennedy, however, saw the situations in Central Africa and Southeast Asia become increasingly unstable as the post-colonial nations of Congo and Vietnam were transformed into new battlegrounds for competing ideological imperatives.
In January 1961, the democratically elected, yet politically vulnerable Congolese President Patrice Lumumba had been assassinated by insurgents known to the CIA. By November of that year, the support of the United States government and a coup by Mobutu had helped install Cyrille Adoula as leader and ally. Adoula, however, lacked the support of the people and stumbled as a ruler. By 1964, a bloody conflict ravaged the country until funding from the United States allowed Mobutu's corrupt leadership to find secure enough footing to allow the United States to turn greater attention towards the escalating intensity in Asia.
In March of 1961, President Kennedy had brought a sense of hopefulness to his negotiations with the government in Laos, but the agreement in Geneva of fourteen nations on the Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos in July 1962 did not prevent the continued use of the territory by the North Vietnamese Army, nor did it stop the United States from dropping 2.5 million tons of bombs over Laotian territory between 1964 and 1973.
By 1963, the American-supported Diem government in Saigon had clearly lost the trust of the Vietnamese people, and Buddhist monks, having been fired upon by GVN troops, began to self-immolate in protest. In early November, Kennedy gave his approval to a coup that toppled the government and killed its leaders, though Kennedy was troubled by their unexpected deaths. Within three weeks, he, too had been killed, and Lyndon Johnson inherited the decade long build-up of American commitments in Vietnam, with 25,000 Americans—some 16,000 of them soldiers—on the ground by the end of 1963.
Granted authority by Congress to take “all necessary measures to repel any armed attacks against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression” in Southeast Asia, President Johnson responded to alleged attacks on American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin with Operation Rolling Thunder, a massive bombing campaign of North Vietnam. Addressing the nation at Johns Hopkins University in April, 1965, he made the case for America as a defender of a world “where every country can shape its own destiny…[for] only in such a world will our own freedom be finally secure.”
Soon, however, the American war in Vietnam required more and more troops—184,000 by 1965; 385,000 by 1966; 485,000 by 1967; and 543,000 by 1968—and Johnson found himself in what popular news anchor Walter Cronkite called “a quagmire.” Public opinion began to shift against the war, and as Martin Luther King articulated in 1967, the time had come to break the silence and to speak out in favor of American withdrawal.
Soon, however, the American war in Vietnam required more and more troops—184,000 by 1965; 385,000 by 1966; 485,000 by 1967; and 543,000 by 1968—and Johnson found himself in what popular news anchor Walter Cronkite called “a quagmire.” Public opinion began to shift against the war, and as Martin Luther King articulated in 1967, the time had come to break the silence and to speak out in favor of American withdrawal.
Richard Nixon’s ascension to the White House in 1968 came with promises of a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam and was followed by the policy of “Vietnamization”—transferring responsibility for the conduct of the war to the Vietnamese. Antiwar protests increased throughout the United States, and Nixon’s announcement in 1970 that he would expand the war by bombing enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia brought a new round of vehement opposition, especially on college campuses.
As students increasingly spoke out against the the war, governmental authority found itself repeatedly challenged. On May 4th, 1970 at Kent State University in Ohio, National Guardsmen opened fire on protesting students, wounding nine and killing four.
Ten days later, at Jackson State University in Mississippi, twelve students were wounded and two more were killed when police responding to campus unrest fired over 400 rounds into Alexander Hall, a campus dormitory for women. Phillip Gibbs was a junior at Jackson State and the father of an 18-month-old. James Earl Green was a high school senior.