all right this is Alan Brinkley The Unfinished Nation chapter 28 the turbulent 60s once again if you are using an earlier edition of the textbook either eth and before this will appear as chapter 29 so chapter 28 Begins by going over a little bit of domestic politics uh expanding the liberal state uh liberal meaning more or less welfare state and we've seen this expansion of the liberal State really ever since FDR uh through to Truman who had his fair deal and even through Eisenhower now remember Eisenhower was a republican but Eisenhower did expand Social Security he increased minimum wage he built the highway system um and this is going to continue to Kennedy and I'm running out of room here but eventually uh Johnson as well right which are the two uh presidents of the 1960s Kennedy and Johnson in the election of 1960 uh John F Kennedy was running for president Lyndon Johnson was uh was his vice president so uh beginning in 1960 Eisenhower had served his eight years in office and Eisenhower had a pretty popular presidency and so many Americans believe that this set up uh Eisen Howard's vice president to more or less have the FastTrack to the presidency and that in fact was Richard Nixon Who challenged John F Kennedy in the 1960 election so Richard Nixon will just say this was Eisenhower's vice president and challenged JFK for short John F Kennedy uh in the 1960 election now before this Eisen Hower who was a congressman from California had made a kind of name and reputation for himself during the Cold War uh kind of aggressively pursuing what was respected communist you know he really was kind of a cold warrior John F Kennedy on the other hand he was um you know probably the most striking feature about Kennedy at the time of the election was kind of his his youth um many Americans thought that Kennedy kind of represented a new era of American politics kind of like out with the old Richard Nixon and in with the new John F Kennedy was also a Catholic uh he had a very kind of wealthy background so Kennedy much like uh progressives of earlier decades like the Roosevelts for example who were also very wealthy but entered into uh kind of the public Arena Kennedy was cut from the same uh cloth and he'd also served in World War II story about Kennedy and how he saved some members of uh the ship that he was serving on so he had kind of a war hero status as as well so this election very much the election of 1960 Kennedy the Democrat versus Nixon the Republican very much kind of contrasting styles of new versus old right that that was kind of the the idea um Americans could choose either to stay the course I mean things had kind of gone pretty well under Eisenhower to be quite Frank and you know that was the safe bet or they could go with Kennedy who maybe had more potential as a candidate right a little bit more risky of a candidate but a greater ability to do good and in the election of 1960 it was one of the closest uh elections in American history right very close but what many historians or some historians would attribute to the difference between Kennedy and Nixon was not in fact kind of anything Rel to the campaign itself but was actually the popularity of Television by that time uh JFK appeared more presidential whatever that means on TV in fact the uh 1960 election was the first election to have the televised debates where the debates were on TV and Kennedy really used advantage of the television he looked better on television he spoke to the camera he wore makeup whereas Richard Nixon was not really kind of you know quite a custom you might say to having having to portray himself as uh as presidential but at the end of the day it was Kennedy who won that election and became the next president of the United States now when Kennedy was in office uh you know a Democrat Cut From the Same Cloth as as Franklin Roosevelt as Harry Truman he had his own domestic agenda he called it the New Frontier so this is Kennedy's domestic program and for the most part we're talking about you know things kind of related to welfare so any type of assistance that is provided to the broader American public now Kennedy's presidency was cut short when he was assassinated in 1963 and this was one of those incidents that really kind of shocked the entire nation Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas Texas in I think it was November 1963 um so upon his assassination that meant that the vice president who at the time was lynon Johnson and one of the reasons why Kennedy chose Johnson was because Kennedy was a Democrat from Massachusetts a Northern State and he really wanted to make sure that he had support from the southern Democratic wing and so Lyndon Johnson from Texas a Democrat from the south that was kind of a way of um you know ensuring that he could get the southern vote and so lynon Johnson was the vice president or we just say senator from Texas uh vice president turned president after the assassination and um you know Kennedy's assassination was one of those events where if you have the chance to you know if you did live at that time or if you had the chance to speak with someone who was old enough to remember it was one of those events that like you know everybody knew exactly and could remember what they were doing and where they were when they heard that news because it had been so shocking uh Kennedy was running for reelection right the 1964 presidential campaign was coming up and he was in Texas to try and you know encourage people to go out and and vote for him and while he was in the back of this car that you see here he was shot and killed uh by Lee Harvey Oswald who was Kennedy's uh assassin so Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed Kennedy and he did it with you know I don't know the exact type of gun but it was a rifle it was from a a long distance and so when Kennedy was shot and killed nobody really knew where the shooter was um nobody knew um kind of who the shooter was we might say but eventually Lee Harvey Oswald was apprehended by authorities now what makes the Kennedy assassination kind of prone to conspiracies and we might kind of just make a note of that the JFK is prone to conspiracy and the reason for that is because Lee V Oswald the man responsible for doing it he himself ended up being assassinated very shortly afterwards and um you know kind of uh the motives behind why he did it or perhaps the kind of the story building up to what ultimately led to his decision to kill Kennedy that's just information that we'll never know because he was killed so quickly after he had shot and killed Kennedy um Lee Harvey Oswald it's believed that he was inspired by the Cold War you know he had been to the Soviet Union he had been to Cuba he sympathized with the Soviet cause and killing the American president was kind of a way to uh further the Soviet uh the Soviet position um after the assassination the uh you know government opened up an investigation into it the Warren Commission this was set up to investigate the assassination and it concluded that Oswald was The Lone Gunman according to the Warren Commission named after Earl Warren Chief Justice of the Supreme Court uh there was no uh no conspiracy uh but once again kind of in the eyes of the American popular imagination um one of the reasons why this consp or why this assassination is far more open to things like conspiracy is because of Oswald's very quick death uh afterwards so following the death of Kennedy that meant that now things were passed to lynon Johnson and lynon Johnson we mentioned the Democrat from the state of Texas Johnson was a very skilled political just politician um you know here you see a picture of his kind of famous close talking approach um politics requires to get you know require somebody to get like senators and members of con Congress on their side and Johnson could do that through intimidation now he assumed the presidency in 1963 off the back of Kennedy's assassination but that meant that he would still have to run in the 1964 election which he did and he ran against Barry Goldwater who was the Republican Goldwater is kind of interesting in in some ways first of all Johnson wins the 1964 election and this election is not even close right whereas the 1960 election is very close this one is more or less a slam dunk but what's sort of interesting about Goldwater is that in a lot of ways he is kind of like you know one of the pioneers of the modern quote unquote small government um conservatism conservative movement so very different than Eisenhower you know he was kind of promoting he was promoting ideas in the 1964 campaign that would later on become more or less synonymous with the conservatism of the 1980s and people like Ronald ran um not a lot of people know Barry Goldwater because he got so crushed in this um crushed in this election but kind of a lot of the ideas about small government end up do becoming more important later on on Down the Line and so with a slam dunk win in 1964 now it was time for Johnson to enact his uh domestic agenda and Johnson's program is the Great Society so this is Johnson's domestic program and really quite frankly this was the largest since the new deal right Johnson's domestic program only the New Deal by FDR could surpass it in terms of you know programs and money and and kind of all those other things um Johnson sometimes referred to his domestic program as the quote unquote war on poverty you know that's what Johnson you know claims that uh his uh his administration was doing and there were all sorts of different programs that Johnson enacted probably two of the most important ones were Medicare and Medicaid medic care this provided um we'll say Health Care to the elderly it was a federal healthc Care Program designed to really subsidize the cost of healthcare for elderly and then Medicare was eventually expanded into Medicaid which provided Health Care to uh we'll say those who were impoverished right who had were below a certain like income threshold so Medicaid did not have any type of um age requirement on there and kind of a a way to remember this or at least the way that I remember this is Medicare you care for the elderly Medicaid you provide aid for those who are in poverty right Medicare elderly Medicaid a program for those who are in poverty uh again there are a lot of programs uh we we're not going to list kind of every single uh part of Johnson's Great Society program but one organization that was set up was the office of Economic Opportunity and this kind of had a whole basket of various programs from you know educational resources you know uh aid for college for example uh employment resources or unemployment resources um things like food stamps Housing Programs so really was Johnson's program really was very sort of uh expansive right and this idea was to to you know declare war on poverty now probably amongst some of the more significant laws passed by the Johnson Administration I mean the Great Society program is a is a big one but one definitely worth mentioning is the change to immigration because if we think back uh as far as the history of immigration goes in the United States probably the last time that we mentioned this was back in the 1920s and in the 1920s there were sort of very restrictive immigration laws uh laws that were fundamentally based off of national origin so the United States had immigration laws or immigration policies from 1920 to 1965 that were more or less based off of what country one came from and the idea behind these laws was to limit immigration from from certain countries and one of the consequences or one of the kind of side effects of that was that by the 1950s you know the United States had a pretty homo uh homogeneous or or uniform maybe that's a uh population you know you might be able to go back you know into the earlier era of the Gilded Age and you know you could make distinctions between you know Italians and Irish and Jewish and you know cities like Little Italy and whatnot but you know because of very kind of restrictive immigration laws and due to you know cultural assimilation through the decades um by the 1950s you had a pretty uniform white American society um the 1960s are a major change in terms of immigration laws and that is Johnson's Immigration Act of 19 65 which eliminated national origin as a requirement or as a yeah as a requirement or immigration so no longer would the country that one is from be a requirement or consideration there'd be other kind of consideration ations like you know family members educational levels skill levels uh stuff like that and the consequence was to really kind of shift immigration patterns and again if you're kind of keeping track of immigration history in the United States this sort of last or fourth wave of immigration was primarily from two areas uh one was from Asia which earlier laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act completely had banned Asian immigration um and also Latin America so really starting after the 1960s 1965 a lot more people arriving to the United States from Asian countries and a lot more people arriving from Latin American countries the national origin requirement for immigration was uh was eliminated now as far as the Great Society goes um you know because of the proximity I would say of Great Society programs to modern-day politics typically your position on the success or failure of the Great Society probably lies where your political affiliations are um but your textbook does mention two things one is that kind of on the positive side we might say that the Great Society had a positive impact for those who got assistance right so there's really no denying that for those that got the various programs that were provided by the Great Society that they experienced an increased standard of of living um the detractors of the Great Society program would sort of bring up the point that the stated goal of declaring war on poverty and eliminating it know the Great Society program did not eliminate poverty in the United States and they would probably look at the cost benefit analysis you know is or are the programs efficient enough are they sustainable enough uh you know can the United States continue to spend on programs like Medicare and Medicaid and the various other things of the Great Society so uh that's kind of where the the Great Society stands as far as its you know successes or its uh or its failure um moving on uh from domestic politics back to the issue of civil rights so uh recall last chapter we introduced the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement which really begins in the 1950s but does stretch into the 1960s and so it's this chapter that we will get to the culmination of the Civil Rights Movement so there are some very important um you know development in regards to civil rights uh during the 1950s things like Brown versus Board of Education for example but what many civil rights Advocates found was that even though there were certain legal victories like the Brown versus Board decision that the pace of desegregation wasn't quite going quick enough in fact uh even with brown versus bour you know 10 year maybe not 10 years but you know even years after this decision most schools were still not desegregated and so those who were advocating for an end to the Jim Crow system said look we can't just simply wait around for this to happen we have to kind of make the change happen ourselves and so you had a an entire new wave of civil rights protests and civil rights activism in the 1950s and 19 or sorry in the 1960s excuse me that took a more kind of direct approach um there are two kind of two ones worth noting here that are probably the most recognizable of these protests uh the first ones is the sit in protests and these were protests of black I mean it started off as black students but it didn't have to only be black students uh sitting I will say peacefully at the white only sections of restaurants and what that involved was uh the same strategy that Martin Luther King Jr had used during the Montgomery Bus Boycott Civil Disobedience right remember civil disobedience and Civil Disobedience meant to break immoral laws and so the whites only section of the Lunch Counter even though it was legal the law of the land it was immoral and so the Cen protest first originated with four black students in North Carolina and they went to a wallsworth which was kind of like a department store that also had a kind of like a restaurant or lunch counter built in and you know they sat in and the Whit's only section they were denied service and they you know when the store closed they went home and they turned up you know the very next day and continued to do the same thing and pretty soon what started with four people in North Carolina turned into protests kind of all around the country and so new organizations were created to kind of take this more confrontational approach one of them was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and this was an organization really of younger right like college age of younger I will say activist to a stage sens which uh occurred across the country and um you know sometimes the senss could be rather uneventful but sometimes they could turn much more violent here's an image of people staging a sit in protests and they're getting you know drinks and food and all sorts of other things uh uh thrown at them um so the ciens were were kind of a big uh part of the new agitation of the 1960s but maybe the most recognizable and and more dangerous were the uh were the Freedom rights and these were a series of I mean I don't even know if you would call them protests necessarily um because they weren't even protesting anything they were they were essentially there to try and enforce what was already uh a law so we'll call these a series of say I don't know incidents where again kind of I mean not necessarily young with this group but definitely more confrontational uh series of instance where activists tested the desegregation [Music] ruling on buses uh specifically actually let's make this interstate buses so Interstate buses So what had happened essentially was that the Supreme Court had ruled that segregation on interstate busing was illegal and Interstate busing is busing from one state to another and essentially they said look if you want to have a a bus system within within a state then segregate all you want right separate the the white and black passengers but if there's a bus that goes from one state line into the other state lines um kind of at a federal level um it can't be segregated that you have to allow white and black passengers to sit wherever they want and the Supreme Court had made this ruling a long time ago but nobody was really like enforcing it and nobody was really like testing it and so the the Freedom Writers what they decided to do was they were going to test the law right they were going to sit in on these buses in an integrated fashion whites and blacks sitting uh sitting next to each other and they were going to ride throughout the South and simply kind of test the uh you know the limits of the ruling um the group that organized these Freedom Rides was called core or the Congress of racial equality they organized the freedom rights and you know groups like core you know they were much more confrontational in fact they had asked Martin Luther King Jr to join them uh at the time Martin Luther King Jr thought that it was too dangerous and he wouldn't go he actually encouraged the Freedom Writers not to do it um even the the President JFK and and I believe his attorney general at least his brother at the time Robert F Kennedy again they had become sympathetic to the Civil Rights Movement but even they didn't approve of the freedom rights they believed that it was too dangerous and so the Freedom Writers and and core were really kind of pushing the envelope um people like king and the kennedies ended up being uh correct about that um the you know a lot of the Freedom Writers faced violence along the way but the most kind of Infamous example was when one of the buses was firebomb in Alabama while it was making its its way down to New Orleans which was where the the destination essentially was and eventually Robert Kennedy had to send in federal troops to rescue the Freedom Writers because they had all been arrested in in Mississippi but one of the things that both of these things did right the stins and the Freedom Writers was that it put civil rights back on the front page right we're talking you know we're talking early 1960s here uh you know Supreme Court decisions like Brown versus Bor that happened like five years ago you know six years ago seven years ago and you know even for somebody like John F Kennedy who who eventually does become very much sympathetic to the Civil Rights and even demands civil rights legislation by using this kind of activism Kennedy is forced to answer for what's going on in the South and again has sort of the effect of like push in civil rights once again to the uh to the Forefront eventually people like Martin Luther King Jr do become convinced that the more confrontational approach is necessary and Martin Luther King Jr became more um you know confrontational uh holding rallies and protests in some of the most segregated cities in uh the country at the time chiefly among them was Birmingham Alabama the PO uh police commissioner of Birmingham Alabama was Eugene Bull Connor so he was the police commissioner Commissioner of Birmingham Alabama which Birmingham Alabama did kind of hold the reputation for the I don't know if most seg segregated city is sort of the proper proper way of phrasing it probably the heart of segregation you know Birmingham was really kind of considered yeah most segregated city is is kind of the point there and so King said look I'm going to hold a a a protest in the most segregated city in the country you know I'm going to take inspiration from the Sid in movement and from the Freedom Writers and really kind of push the uh push the envelope um the March that was going on in Birmingham Alabama Eugene B Connor the police commissioner of Birmingham ordered police STS uh tear gas and fire hoses on civil rights Marchers and kind of like what we mentioned earlier um in in the the last chapter one of the great impacts of kind of incidents like this you know police dogs and tear gas and fire hoses being forced upon um you know what are otherwise you know people who are Marching and protesting M uh not causing any any trouble images like this where people are being you know assaulted by sitting down at a lunch counter or even the Freedom Writers was the impact that television had and television could portray all these things in sort of a you know not necessarily a live format but in a way that Americans never really could understand what was going on in the American South at the time and so with all of these incidents effectively what the Civil Rights Movement was doing was they were gaining more support right uh when the Freedom Writers had their buses firebomb that gained more support when the stins were assaulted that gains more support when the police dogs were ordered on protesters they gain more support so the TV ends up being a very impactful technology uh in this era and it's certainly right there with the Civil Rights uh movement now as far as resistance to the Civil Rights Movement goes there was still quite a bit of support in the South uh George Wallace in many ways became the face of resistance to desegregation he was the governor of Alabama and probably the quote most closely associated with Wallace is segregation today segregation tomorrow and segregation forever now the president at the time who was JFK uh JFK was part of the democratic party and remember for a very long time that the Democrats were the party of the South but earlier presidents like Truman and his support for civil rights started to cause a division in the Democratic party and the Dixiecrats which were the Southern call them Pro segregation Democrats uh really you know some of them started going for third party you know in the was it the election of 19 was it 48 um you know you had a third party running against Truman because of Truman's support for civil rights and so when Kennedy first came into office you know one of the things that he did to to try and Sh up his Southern vote was to choose Johnson right you know somebody from the south and politically when Kennedy first got into office he wasn't really all that he wasn't all that vocal about his support for civil rights you know he was kind of worried about losing Southern voters but during his presidency not only did Kennedy become an you know supporter of the Civil Rights Movement but he outright you know outright called for a Civil Rights bill and all of the events of the 1960s had kind of motivated Kennedy to come to this position especially in the way that uh the Civil Rights Movement was related to the Cold War but kind of the breaking point for Kennedy was the death of Medgar Evers uh Medgar Evers was the leader of the Mississippi NAACP chapter and he was assassinated and it was upon the death of megar Evers that Kennedy called on Congress to pass a civil running out of room here civil rights law right Kennedy had had kind of come to the come to the support of civil rights but now with Medgar Evers being assassinated essentially in the driveway of his home a shot in the back um Kennedy went to Congress and said look we we need a a civil rights law now right we need a civil rights law now and by doing that effect you know effectively just completely split his party into two right the dixie crats would vote for candidates like George Wallace and other third-party candidates for the next decade or so as a result of that so with the civil rights law now in Congress many of those who supported the Civil Rights Movement kind of coming from all sorts of backgrounds right Snick core SCC right kind of all these different groups the naac all these different groups they all marched on Washington in 1963 to support the passage of a civil rights law through Congress so the March on Washington was 200,000 people went to DC to support the passage of Kennedy's Civil Rights bill at the time it was a bill um a bill after it signed into law becomes a law um at the March on Washington when 200,000 people went to DC in order to try and get Congress to put pressure on Congress to pass that Martin Luther King Jr gave what is probably his most famous speech and that is the I Have a Dream speech speech by King uh and really it was about the kind of optimism of race relations in the future us you know he talked about a future in which you know the difference or the line between black and white would be would be eroded um King has a lot of famous speeches but probably none more famous than uh you know I have a dream and again very optimistic and forward looking looking uh eventually with with some opposition from Southern Senators but eventually the United States Congress did succeed in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 the Civil Rights Act of 1964 really is kind of the Hallmark piece of legislation for the Civil Rights Movement now one important kind of note to make here was that before this law was passed pass as we covered earlier Kennedy was assassinated and so the question went for Johnson and at the time Johnson being a southern Democratic senator uh there was maybe some question about where Johnson stood on civil rights but when Lyndon Johnson became the president in the aftermath of Kennedy's assassination Johnson more or less vowed to pass the Civil Rights Act so in terms of which President is actually responsible for passing the Civil Rights Act it is Johnson right Lynden Johnson Kennedy was the one that created it or demanded it Johnson was the one that finished it because Kennedy was uh killed you know Kennedy or Johnson said that he would not allow Kennedy's Legacy to go in vain it was very important for this to get done despite what his constituents in Texas might say right you know coming from uh from that state um the Civil Rights Act again we can we can consider this really like the Hallmark law of the Civil Rights Movement I mean some would say that the Civil Rights Movement ends in 1964 uh we're going to stretch it just one year later in 1965 for reasons why we'll mentioned here but as as far as what the Civil Rights Act does it bans segregation in public accommodations so things like restaurants um hospitals all right Etc it was a Banning on Jim Crow segregation so that was the law that overturned Jim Crow right and that was kind of the the achievement there but even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 it wasn't quite done because there were still the issue of voting rights now recall from our earlier chapters the 14th amendment was the notion of equality before the law and the way that southern governments had got around the 14th amendment was by the saying separate but equal right that was Jim Crow effectively what they could do was create separate facilities call them equal on paper but the reality was that they weren't equal well the Civil Rights Act of 1964 got rid of that it kind of closed the loophole but the second loophole was the 15th Amendment and the 15th Amendment said that one could not be denied the right to vote based off race color or previous servitude but once again it was through other things like pole taxes literacy tests right these other sort of conditions that eventually uh allow the disenfranchisement of of almost every African-American voter in the South so even though the Civil Rights Act closed the loophole on the 14th Amendment there was still the outstanding issue of voting right and that's kind of the last major Harrah we might say as far as the Civil Rights Movement goes and so in 1964 and 1965 there was a massive campaign to register black voters in the South we call this the freedom Su summer this was the campaign to register black voters in the South and it involved you know people coming from all over the country going primarily to Mississippi which you know the um the percentage of black voters who were registered there was the lowest and so a lot of these activists went to Mississippi in an effort to try and increase that number and you know they were met with resistance there was an instance in which three uh people were killed trying to register voters um it was uncovered that in fact there were even more corpses that were potentially related to the effort to try and get people vot uh voting so you know resistance was still very much present and still very much violent the battle over voting rights in the South especially in Mississippi really demonstrated the fracturing of the democratic party and kind of the political chaos that would ensue the um kind of standard Democratic party in Mississippi the state democratic party was a segregated uh all white [Music] um I don't know would you call it organization or committee but you know this was the Democratic party that was segregated um but an additional Democratic party was also founded in Mississippi called the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party and this was the integrated Democratic party in the South and we can see that the Democrats are kind of split on this issue right is the Democratic party the party for segregation or is it the party for civil rights and eventually what happened is during the 1964 um what do they call that convention you know others like Martin Luther King tried to find some sort of compromise you know between these two sides but eventually what happened was that both of these constituencies essentially walked out um and and there was no uh ability to compromise on whether or not the Democratic party would remain the party of segregation or would remain or or be the party of of civil rights right and that fracturing is has only become more evident in in in sort of future elections during the convention though testimony was given by Fanny Lou hamr that really moved the nation and kind of made more people aware of the types of obstacles that African-American voters faced in the South uh Fanny Lamer was a uh she was a sharecropper or from a sharecropping family a Cropper from the south and provided Elis testimony of her really ordeal voting right everything that she had to go through um while trying to vote and the resulting you know sexual assault that she experienced and for Americans to hear you know kind of firsthand what it was like simply trying to vote in the American South and the types of ordeals specifically the ordeal that this specific individual Fanny Lamer uh went through um it got a lot more support for the civil rights movement and eventually push Congress to pass one more piece of legislation which can kind of Mark the ending of the civil rights movement and that is the Voting Rights Act of 1965 the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would close these loopholes right the pole taxes the literacy tests all of those things would now be forbidden uh the Voting Rights Act provided federal protection to African-American voting rights so with that with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 we would typically say that that is the kind of conclusion of the formal Civil Rights Movement so from Brown V board right and this is I think 1954 for to civil rights and voting rights 1964/65 so that's that's usually what we use to kind of bookmark the uh Civil Rights Movement but of course understanding that there is much going on before Brown versus Bor and much going on after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act was uh was passed so now that the Civil Rights Movement was effectively over right or or it accomplished its goals it had gotten rid of Jim Crow it had gotten rid of those laws that had disenfranchised African-American voters for almost a hundred years the question was now what and in this sort of way the Civil Rights Movement kind of fractured into different priorities we might say um so for example the face of the movement Martin Luther King Jr became more concerned with issues related to Poverty for example he focused on what was called the Poor People's campaign and kind of sought to uh redress those grievances um some advocated for further change including affirmative action and affirmative action policies in the United States would become one of those kind of Highly debated political topics um it emerges in the 1960s and is still very much relevant past the 2000s but affirmative action policies or affirmative action laws is uh provide special considerations and you know things like hiring admissions to colleges uh promotions or I mean it's not just African-Americans um we'll just say racial minorities leave this for what historically disenfranchise groups so in the context of civil rights this means um you know African-Americans but it could also include women for example uh in certain jobs and colleges it could also include other racial minorities anics Native Americans um and um you know the idea of affirmative action will become popular in the 1960s doesn't really come into fruition until the 1970s you start to see some actual affirmative action policies uh and then it eventually kind of makes its way up to the Supreme Courts uh and and arguments about the legality of such policies but affirmative action was in some ways Maybe One Step Beyond the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act which just kind of ensured that the 14th and 15th amendments were being upheld now in the aftermath of civil rights legislation there was a wave of urban violence that broke out across American cities in the 1960s um I mean yeah in the 1960s mid 1960s and the wave of urban violence in the 1960s really kind of had Americans questioning uh what was the source of this and had the country really made enough progress when it came to race relations in fact some would conclude from the riots that in fact race relations after civil rights weren't getting worse but in fact were sorry weren't getting better but were getting worse so uh probably some of the more famous examples 1965 in Watts Los Angeles uh those riots left 34 people dead in 1967 in Detroit Michigan uh 43 people were left dad and in the year 1966 43 different riots took place in American cities and again Americans were questioning why was this a question of poverty for example which Lynden Johnson believed it was uh race relations were they better or worse and kind of contrary to everyone's belief at the time you know the idea was that once civil rights legislation was pass race relations ought to get better that was what people thought but it turned out that in the immediate aftermath of you know 1964 1965 that these examples here didn't quite show that in fact might even be contrary to what many people believed for some the riots proved that the problem of racial discrimination was not over that the Civil Rights movement needed to continue in some way shape or form but maybe not exactly as it existed previously um those that continued the struggle against racial discrimination some of them uh a much smaller number of them I should mention uh Coes around the ideology of black power and black power was more so an approach to the issue of R race uh that we might say uh rejected the nonviolence of the earlier Civil Rights Movement not to say that it was only explicitly violent but you know the Civil Rights Movement by King kind of had like a nonviolence at all costs uh black power rejected the idea that non-violence ought to be used at all times uh and also rejected cooperation with white Americans uh so for example organizations like you know Snick and core you know during the Civil Rights era Snick and core were integrated organizations they consisted of both white and black members during the 1960s and 1970s Snick and core became all black organizations uh looking to emphasize separate ation um ethnic identity Independence um freedom from the rest of of White Society um so this was a shift away from assimilation and a focus on black run institutions uh uh black Independence we might say economic political and otherwise of the organizations that best represented this new approach probably was the Black Panthers and the Black Panthers one of the things that was was maybe the most recognizable about the Black Panthers and how they differed with earlier civil rights Advocates was and the way that they dressed and they essentially dressed in military uniforms and this was a stark contrast to what people like Martin Luther King Jr were not just advocating but kind of presenting themselves as right to present oneself in a military uniform kind of mean uh you know as the idea that that any any measure necessary is is on the table in fact one of the slogans of black power became by any means necessary and by any means necessary is a much different message than non-violent Civil Disobedience another organization that adopted the black power approach was the Nation of Islam the Nation of Islam embraced religion of Islam so it rejected rejected Christianity as a white American religion or at least a white European religion and embraced Islam which was a religion that had a much longer history in Africa um it's let's see advocated or racial separation and identification so for those who would adhere to the ideas um that the Nation of Islam promoted uh rejected Christianity converted to Islam often times changed their names of the adherence to the Nation of Islam and the ideology of black power probably the most famous one was Malcolm X we can see just in the X of his name kind of this idea of rejecting what had been uh inherited uh from American society so Malcolm X was born Malcolm little but the last name little was not kind of his ancestral name we might say uh little was a a last name that was likely and I would have to look this up but likely provided for Malcolm via a an enslaver uh and so that was not kind of his you know true last name we might say and so he changed his name simply to x and x kind of was an indicator or a symbol that in fact a lot of the history for African-Americans in the United States had been erased by the system of transatlantic slavery so refusing the last name of his enslaver refusing the religion of enslaver of his ens Slayer converting to Islam Malcolm X was a symbol of um you know this this kind of emphasis of racial identification now uh Malcolm X we just call him probably the most recognizable or at least maybe another way of putting it the face of black power and what's fascinating about Malcolm X is that he advocated for black power for most of his life but as an inherit to the Islamic faith he actually took a trip to Mecca and upon his arrival from his trip to Mecca coming into contact with a lot of different people from different backgrounds white brown black um all Islamic he came back and and kind of toned down the separatist type of rhetoric we might say that he changed to seeking cooperation with whites and when he came back to the United States with kind of a more watered down or or or you know with a message that resembled more of what Martin Luther King Jr might have said during the Civil Rights Movement he was assassinated by if they weren't official members of the Nation of Islam they were definitely um supporters of it so it was It was kind of the more radical wing of the black power faction that didn't like the moderate tone that that Malcolm X was taking and what's kind of fascinating about the assassination of Malcolm X is that kind of a very similar thing actually happened to mandas Gandhi uh Gandhi who had advocated against British occupation for a very long time uh who represented not you know Gandhi represented a unified India but he was Hindu um he was assassinated by an extremist Hindu that didn't like the fact that he was willing to work with Muslims Malcolm X was assassinated by a more extreme member of the Nation of Islam because he had started talking about cooperating with white Americans so it was kind of the the radical faction assassinating the more moderate faction um black power the Black Power movement would continue to be um uh kind of an important intellectual and social movement moving forward from the 1970s into the 1980s and 1990s but it was much much smaller than the civil rights movement and kind of um you know less mainstream right I would say but um people like Malcolm X the impact that he had oftentimes he is put in the same conversation and at the same kind of level in terms of influence as Martin Luther King Jr right Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X are seen kind of you know I just thought of this right now but kind of in the same way as Booker T versus deoy if you remember that uh back in uh in the earlier chapter so moving on from the Civil Rights Movement we are going to get into Kennedy and Johnson's policies in regards to the Cold War now in terms of the Cold War uh Kennedy and Johnson probably both would say that that was their priority as president um the Cold War continues under Kennedy and Johnson now Kennedy in fact one of the accusations against him was that he was so young and inexperienced that he wasn't going to be tough enough on the Cold War well Kennedy turned out to be pretty tough right when it came to the Cold War and that was maybe uh um maybe maybe something he had to prove right as president um so Kennedy and Johnson both committed to fighting the Cold War right both of them make a note of that Kennedy and Johnson are committed they cold Warriors as they say to the Cold War so like uh earlier chapters there going to be all sorts of different parts of the globe that are kind of up for grabs that both the United States and um and the Soviet Union are vying for control over uh these countries became collectively known as the third world these are nations that are mostly newly independent you know uh economically somewhat underdeveloped they won't uh use that term they'll say developing uh and politically unstable and they really become kind of the you know both the US and Soviets want control of them all right so the idea is that the first world that is the US and allies these are the Nations that are capitalist democracies the second world is the Soviet Union and allies so places like um Soviet Union Poland China the third world is kind of a question mark right you know they haven't chosen communism or capitalism yet and this is going on at a time where there's massive decolonization you know there's like um you know between 1946 when World War II ends and the modern day there's something like a hundred new countries become independent and of course the question for the United States and the Soviet Union is are these new countries going to be Communists or are they going to be capitalists and so um both the Soviets and the Americans want to influence the third world right they want to get them on their side now Kennedy is very much in uh you know in agreement that theer you know America ought to pursue its cold war goals with that being said though there are different approaches that Kennedy takes um one of them is the Peace Corp the Peace Corp was created by Kennedy to provide humanitarian relief EF to the third world to win the hearts and Minds so you know when we think about winning the Cold War you know we think about the war in Korea and fighting and all this other stuff and overthrowing governments and that's all true right that all happened but one way that you could win the cold war is you know winning the hearts and Minds by providing humanitarian relief and that's kind of what the peace scord did um you know so that was a different strategy right that the United States might be able to uh to take but again don't kind of mistake Kennedy's humanitarian effort for sort of weakness Kennedy was also president that established the Green Beret which were like a superior military unit uh you know that could get their hands dirty if uh if necessary so it meant just fighting the Cold War on on all fronts now as far as has the most immediate concern with Kennedy when he came into office uh office was Cuba right and recall from last chapter that the Cuban Revolution had installed asro and communism and so when Kennedy comes into office kind of issue number one on his desk is President Kennedy what are you going to do about Cuba Cuba has just installed the first communist government in the Western Hemisphere and we need to take care of this Kennedy's response is the Bay of Pigs invasion this is a secret we'll say CI oops CIA organized overthrow of the Castro government essentially the answer is you know just do what we did in Iran just do what we did in Guatemala and that is just overthrow Castro but do it secretly and so the Bay of Pigs invasion was to take about 2,000 Cuban Exiles send them to Cuba cause a popular revolution against Castro and then get rid of him unfortunately though for Kennedy and the United States this failed and the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion would spark off a massive crisis Fel Castro seeking protection of Cuba worried that the Americans would overthrow uh his regime seeks out assistance from the Soviet Premier Nikita kushev Nikita kushev agrees to place missiles in Cuba for their protection from the United States remember Nikita kushev leader of the Soviets and agrees to put misses in Cuba for Cuba's protection again why did Cuba need protection they needed protection because of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion um at the time the relationship between the Soviets and the Americans was becoming more dire and more tense and in fact it was during Kennedy's time in office that the Berlin Wall the wall that divided West and East Berlin um I don't know if I'd say started construction we'll say started construction you know because there had always been a border between East in West Berlin but you know it been like checkpoints in the past and then it might have been like you know a fence or a barb wire but beginning of the 1960s the construction of like the actual cement concrete division between East and West Berlin um was uh you know was was being built and this became in essence the symbol of the Cold War and just an example of kind of the hardened division you know as things weren't getting better with the Soviets and the Americans things were getting worse and um you know the Berlin Wall you see some of the early construction going on here eventually it'd be outfitted with like barbwire and landmines and guard towers it'd be a pretty serious uh pretty serious barrier um one of the reasons too why the uh Soviets needed to uh build the wall was because of the masses a massive economic uh differences a lot of people were fleeing the West to or sorry fleeing the East to the West you know this was a wall interestingly enough not a wall to keep people out it was a wall to keep people in and keep them in eastern Berlin um by that time the uh economic differences between the west and the East were only growing more uh more large but meanwhile in Cuba when the Soviets had secretly placed missiles there um this was eventually discovered by the Americans and this sparked off the Cuban Missile Crisis the Cuban Missile Crisis is the discovery of missiles in Cuba and really the US response so the question was how would the United States respond well President Kennedy actually went public he went on television and told the entire nation that there were missiles in Cuba and so a panic we might say kind of engulfed the US for 12 days um because of the capacity for these missiles to strike the United States so quickly some believe that this was you know that the United States was on the verge of of war with the Soviet Union and there was good reason to believe that Americans went to bed every night not knowing if they would wake up because of the potential for for War uh Kennedy did a couple of things one was that he ordered a quarantine of the island that is the US was to cut off all Soviet um we'll say shipments to Cuba especially the military ones Kennedy also demanded removal the missiles Kev for his part uh he refused right he essentially said no and so kind of where was the United States you know on the one hand we have Kennedy saying look you have to remove the missiles in Cuba kushev essentially says no and the question is who's going to back down first right this is the prime example of a term that we mentioned earlier and that was brinksmanship right neither side willing to back down both sides posturing and probably in all of of the Cold War probably the closest that the country ever got to World War III and if War had broken out in 1962 the year that it was happening um the use of hydrogen and other weapons could make this war very deadly if you want to be especially dramatic about the Cuban Missile Crisis you could say that like this is the closest that human beings have ever gotten to extinction because the possibility for war between the superpowers was probably at the closest so for example there was a question about the qu right what if the Soviets violated it would that be reason enough for the Americans to go to war I don't know right maybe um you had planes in the skies at all times ready to drop bombs on the other side you had both the United States and the Soviet Union kind of um disclosing uh what was previously confidential information so for example the Soviets and Americans both thought that they had like hidden submarines around the world um but on you you know during the Cuban Missile Crisis they were making each other known of kind of their their secret information right if you think about it like a like a poker game or something like that they were kind of showing each other their cards saying like look do you really do you really want to go all in right I have this card you have that card in and you know things got pretty uh pretty scary publicly both sides could not back down why all about the hearts and Minds you know how would Kennedy look if he back down well in the eyes of the world he look like a chicken and so he couldn't back down same thing with cruise ship but secretly they could so they eventually found a way out of the Cuban Missile Crisis in fact the uh the the deescalation of the Cuban Missile Crisis is considered probably one of Kennedy's greatest accomplishments as president and essentially the agreement was that one missiles removed from Cuba that was one oops two and this was the whole reason why the conflict started to begin with you uh the US promised Cuban sovereignty in other words the United States said look we we won't get rid of Castro we won't invade Cuba we'll we'll leave you alone you don't need to protect them and three the kind of one of the the secret Parts was that the US removed very similar missiles in turkey turkey is a country that is close to the Soviet Union essentially about as close as Cuba is to the United States and so this was kind of okay you remove your missiles I'll remove ours and we'll call it a done deal and the Kennedy crev pack was signed or it was agreed to and uh the Cuban Missile Crisis was over in the aftermath a hotline was established between both the Soviets and the United States as a way to prevent future conflicts this was a direct line from Moscow capital of the Soviet Union to Washington DC and was kind of a way to hopefully avoid World War III in uh in the future which of course we know today happened but um at the time the the reality of another crisis like Cuba was you know probably if you were a betting man you probably would have bet that there would have been another conflict when when there wasn't but again when we think about the Cuban Missile Crisis we could say that this is probably the closest that the United States and the Soviets ever got to uh ever got to war now as far as foreign policy goes that's probably Kennedy's greatest achievement again he was assassinated in 1963 and so kind of the the central conflict involving the Cold War and the UN United States Vietnam uh Kennedy doesn't have all that much to kind of contribute there uh instead that falls to President Johnson and if there are kind of you know if there's one name to make synonymous with the Vietnam War it is President Johnson fact so much so that sometimes the Vietnam war is called Johnson's War your textbook does mentioned real quick here uh in this section called Johnson and the world that there was us continued so I'll just I'll mention it here because your textbook mentions it uh the there was us continued interventions in Latin America and you got a nice kind of graphic showing you the years and interventions here and you can kind of pick your poison from Nicaragua and Honduras and Dominican Republican Virgin Islands all those other things but the central foreign policy crisis of the Johnson Administration and the central foreign policy crisis perhaps in all of the Cold War is the situation in Vietnam and it's under President Johnson that the Vietnam War gets underway in sort of the the way that we recognize it um recognize it today so as far as the conflict in Vietnam goes let us recall where we last left off in the Vietnam War was that France uh had left right France had what's another word evacuated uh retreated I just say left Vietnam and divided itam will say in two North and South uh it was no dind DM who came to control the anti-communists South and because he was anti-communist he was us supported the French had initially uh allowed for or planned for elections those elections were cancelled by DM and Vietnam remain divided and it was under DM's regime who not only cancelled elections but also didn't do himself any favors by persecuting Buddhists um he was somewhat of a dictator in South Vietnam and so a lot of the Vietnamese population turned against them in fact they went even farther than turning against them and that was they start Ed a Guerilla war against the DM regime the you know Guerilla troops or militia or Army whatever you want to call it that began their campaign against no dind DM called themselves the NLF or the National Liberation Front these Fighters would be known by the United States as the Viet Kong this is we'll say the the Army and this is an Army in South Vietnam it's not the South well let's not do that cuz that's going to be um that's going to be confusing let's just call this the gorilla forces um start a war against the DM regime in 1960 in 1960 and of course the National Liberation Front or the Viet Kong they are getting support from the north right North Vietnam is giving them support um this is essentially the beginnings of the Vietnam War right at the time the United States is there supporting DM but DM is the one who is mostly fighting against the Viet Kong and the NLF however though when we think about the Vietnam War it's not like the Korean war in which it's north versus South the north is controlled by the Communists the north is controlled by hoi Min the Vietnam war is fought in the South and it's primarily a rural to urban conflict right whereas the urban that's kind of where DM has his power that's where the United States has their power and in the rural areas it's the NLF and the Viet Kong now this conflict gets underway in the 1960s 1961 1962 1963 the NLF and Viet Kong are waging a war against DM and DM's regime however though because DM is so unpopular he's almost doing more harm than he is good he is assassinated by his own bodyguards with um we could say approval from the United States uh DM's assassination put South Vietnam essentially under the control of the US military right that's kind of how the United States finds itself in the Vietnam War um it had supported France before France left it supported DM DM left so who's really kind of left there at the table to support South Vietnam and prevent communism from spreading well it's really only the US now um it's kind of like a dond dash right you know France DM and the United States all sit down for dinner and when the check comes France and DM leaves and who's there to pay for it well the United States kind of just finds themselves as the last ones at the table and now it's up to the US military to fight against the Viet Kong to to ensure that South Vietnam remains uh anti-communist so it's under John Johnson's presidency well I I should say by the way only a few weeks after DM's assassination Kennedy was assassinated and so Kennedy doesn't really get to weigh in on DM's assassination um from what he said at the time Kennedy did support DM in Vietnam did you know did want to fight against communism but there have been some speculation into what Kennedy believed privately and privately um many say that Kennedy actually wanted to get out of Vietnam but again we'll never know because Kennedy was also killed but now this Falls to Johnson and Johnson wants primarily to help in a much more uh kind of expanded way might say that Johnson wants more us support in Vietnam but the problem is that Johnson doesn't have the funds required because he needs Congress right Congress has power of the purse and if Johnson can convince Congress that the threat in South Vietnam is grave enough then maybe Congress will give Johnson the authority to increase or escalate American involvement and that's exactly what happens um it's based off of the Gulf of tonen incident and this was an incident in which it was reported that two US destroyers sort of like a battleship were attacked by North Vietnam it later turned out this was not accurately reported not ACC reported but the way in which it was reported allowed for or motivated Congress to pass the Gul of tonen resolution which gave the president gave Johnson the tools or maybe we'll say gave Johnson the authority and ability to escalate the Vietnam War so Congress believing that the North Vietnamese had attacked American ships say Okay Johnson here's the green light you can use quote all necessary measures to repel aggression in North Vietnam and so the Gul of tank uh tonen resolution essentially was a you know a blank check right take all necessary measure measures to battle the Communist threat or communist aggression in North Vietnam and just like that when the Gulf of tonan resolution was passed troop escalation happened significantly this happened in 1964 so when we say look here's what the Vietnam war is in the United States you say the Vietnam War went from 1964 until 1973 again we know that there's a much earlier conflict that precedes that we know that the NLF and the Viet Kong have been fighting DM since the 1960s we know that fighting was going on with France earlier before that and you can even go all the way back to to Japan and Japanese Occupation but the reason why we say American why we say the Vietnam War started in 1964 for the United States was because that was the year of the Gul of tonen resolution and once President Johnson was given the green light to use all necessary measures troop escalation significantly increased in 1963 when President Kennedy was still alive there were 16,000 Americans in Vietnam um one year after the Gulf of tonan resolution in 1965 that had grown to 180,000 by 1967 1968 which is considered the height of the Vietnam War half a million American soldiers had gone into Vietnam we can see from this Visual and you kind of a slow and steady support for the DM regime 1963 DM and Kennedy are both assassinated Gulf of tonen resolution and boom the increase in American troops year after year right going up and up and up and up eventually reaching a high point of nearly half a million and 1968 becomes the kind of height right again that's the the year of of highest American involvement and so when Americans escalated the war in Vietnam there was still a lot of support for kind of this very very aggressive uh stance towards the uh the Cold War um however the Americans found themselves in a war that they had never fought before right sometimes it's described as a quagmire and that is like you know the US was sort of like stuck in Viet Vietnam it was not a conventional War right when we think about the Korean War for example or World War II um these were professional armies that had much more clearly delineated sides right uh here because the the conflict is pretty much rural and urban and there's no distinction between civilian and Soldier uh it makes the conflict incredibly difficult to fight in fact almost from the beginning Americans began to question you know themselves what metric is Victory that is how do the United States know that they're winning and so essentially the United States fought a war of attrition that was a war to Simply Outlast the other side um however though the Viet Kong in the South had very consistent and steady support um the hoi Min Trail this was a trail that went through the neighboring countries of Cambodia and LA to supply oops the Viet Kong and they receed support from the Soviet Union and China supported the Vietnamese so outlasting um outlasting the enemy proved to be very difficult because of the hoi Min Trail and outside support so we have a map here of uh of Vietnam uh this is the dividing line between the North and the South essentially um but most of the war was fought in the South so uh us bases are marked in blue I don't know how well we can see that but I'll just go ahead and Mark some of them here right this is where us bases were and the United States can control these areas but the reality was is that most of the Viet Kong was kind of out in on the countrysides right in the rural areas not clearly defined in military uniforms often disguised as civilians and the way that the the war could continue going was that you know support could come from China into North Vietnam it could get eventually to the hoim Min Trail which went through LA and Cambodia and could keep money and supplies and weapons uh continuing to get to the Viet Kong Fighters could which could then use them against the American Military so Americans became um you know the the sort of prospects of how to measure Victory you know Americans started to question that and ultimately what the United States decided on was that they would use this kind of obscure I mean I guess it's not obscure but they would use the measure of body count as a measure of Victory body count was the metric by which the US determined Victory or defeat right otherwise known as kill count and it was very simple it was if the Americans killed more Viet Kong than the Viet Kong killed Americans that was considered winning now if we take a step back we think okay what what actually is the United States trying to do here right what what is the US what's the purpose of American occupation in in Vietnam well it's to prevent communism now how do you know you're doing that how do you know that you're actually preventing communism well in some sense it is kind of that old saying of the hearts and Minds does the more people you kill necessarily translate to more people being convinced that communism is not the right ideology well in fact it's it's the opposite and kind of one of the realities that set in in Vietnam was that you know as Americans occupied Vietnam longer in fact it was more hearts and Minds turned against the US and this also wasn't playing very well in the rest of the world you know this strong powerful industrial nation beating up a you know poor uh Nation like Vietnam you know people you know kind of start looked at that war and said you know this is you know this this isn't quite right right there there's something that's been miscalculated here the the incentives are are sort of off and this idea of losing the hearts and Minds was not just attributed by American occupation and and body count but also by incidents like the myi massacre which is probably the most infamous massacre in all the Vietnam War this is where US soldiers killed Vietnamese civilians and in a war of occupation with the line between civilian and Soldier very much blurred this was the type of conflict in which the massacre of civilians was very real and what made the myi massacre even kind of more atrocious was the fact that there was an effort to cover it up in the uh in the aftermath and so the longer that Americans stayed in Vietnam actually the worse it was for the prospects of victory that the hearts and minds of the people of Vietnam uh were turning against the United States right and this is kind of what we mean by uh by a quagmire right you kind kind of become stuck in there or or U you're unable to find a way out now at home what the Vietnam war did was it created really what could be considered the first anti-war movement in maybe all of American History right a very call a a very active and strong anti-war movement at home and you know there had been people who were against Wars earlier but like you know as a as a social movement mobilizing massive amounts of people uh politically organizing um I mean you you could probably accurately say that this was the first anti-war movement in in American history and of the things that Americans protested certainly was the violence and the occupation and the killing of civilians and the bombing of the Vietnamese but of the things that the anti-war movement was against was the military draft and this was instituted during the Vietnam war the conscription was used and it was a point of protest especially for those involved in the anti-war movement now at the time most politicians had supported a very aggressive stance uh and including a a position in Vietnam uh President Johnson at the time was completely committed to uh to the Vietnam War right the Johnson's War as they called it but you started to have politicians like highlevel politicians begin speaking out against the war and one of them was Robert Kennedy and Robert Kennedy kind of emerged as a quote unquote new left this is the brother of the slain President John Kennedy and the new left was kind of like a new Progressive politics um the new left was Pro civil rights oops and anti-war right and those were probably the two biggest indicators that marked a Divergence from the old left right if we think about old Democratic party uh the old Democratic party was in favor of segregation now Johnson was also in favor of civil rights and Kennedy before him was also in favor of civil rights but the old Democratic party was for war and uh you know Robert Kennedy emerged as sort of a anti-war candidate as a new left we'll call political leader and so for those that wanted an end to the war for those that wanted civil rights for those that wanted you know things like environmentalism right that's kind of what the new Left marked and Kennedy was Kennedy was providing a voice in political leadership for a lot of Americans who had come to these positions given all of the kind of disturbance or all of the uh kind of turbulence as your textbook calls it turbulence of of the 1960s now Americans in Vietnam for the meantime did remain somewhat supportive of it but 1968 turned out to be a very kind of important year um you know sometimes history just kind of has these years in which there's a lot of stuff going on and 1968 is uh is one of them uh it was the year of the Tet Offensive uh the T offensive in 1968 this was a large scale coordinated attack on pretty much all us bases in Vietnam including Saigon which was the say the US capital in Vietnam and the reason why the Ted offensive was significant was because up until this point from you know 1964 when Americans really became involved all the way until 1968 Americans were convinced and had been told by the government that they were winning right they were they're winning and that victory was right around the corner right but as the years dragged on it's like okay have we won the war yet no just a little bit more to go have we won it yet no just a little bit more to go well when the Viet Kong launched this massive attack in 1968 it effectively had the impact on American audiences convincing them that the Vietnam War needed to be abandoned right and so we consider the test offense and this is the point that the majority of Americans became convinced to leave Vietnam right if if we were really winning the whole time how could they have launched such a big attack like this now the T offensive was a complete disaster for the Viet Kong and the North Vietnamese who suffered huge huge casualties but the point was made and the point was is that you know the the war wasn't going anywhere in fact the Ted offensive was kind of like you know we're just getting started started and at that point Americans said look we've had enough we've been here for 4 years we we should have been or we were being told that we were winning the whole time and evidence on the ground does not seem to match with that another very important thing in changing people's minds in uh in the United States about the war was television and you know the television exposed right Americans were exposed to the brutality of War you know this was a time period where there wasn't um really wasn't any censorship when it came to TV and a lot of times you know news reporters just grabbed their cameras went to Vietnam and started to like live broadcast it to millions of people in the United States and it's one thing to read in the newspaper about a war it's another thing to maybe even see the image of like a dead body but you know there were instances in which you know it was shown on TV people getting shot in the head in the streets of Saigon and people saw on TV the corpses of US troops and US soldiers and Americans became very turned off by that and you know the images of Warfare being broadcasted live uncensored to American audiences and the fact that the war was not going well in the four years that the United States was there Americans said look it's time to leave right it's time to exit Vietnam and and that's kind of what uh what we're going to demand now the Ted offensive was one reason why 1968 was an important year the second reason was because it was also the year of a presidential election the uh 1968 presidential campaign and this would be a campaign that kind of represented all of the political problems going on in American Society at the time first and foremost President Johnson who was the incumbent who had won in 1964 by a l man slide decided to not run Johnson withdrew from the campaign due to his support of the Vietnam War and well we'll say public opinion against it um the Vietnam Moore killed Andrew Johnson's presidency it had become so unpopular that no matter what he did no matter what he did with the Great Society program Medicare Medicaid no matter what he did in terms of um civil rights the Civil Rights Act the Voting Rights Act Right Johnson did all that stuff uh carried out the legacy of John F Kennedy the Vietnam War had become so unpopular and Johnson was so committed to it that he withdrew and when he withdrew from the 19 pres uh 1968 presidential election the question was well who is going to be the Democratic nominee right who's going to go through this and remember it's not just the Democratic party going through an identity crisis on Vietnam because they have to decide are they for the Vietnam War or are they against the Vietnam War but it's also civil rights you know is this the old Democratic party of um you know of the South or is the Democratic party the part of civil rights so this is kind of a major identity crisis now potentially there were some people that could kind of represent the new face of the democratic party one of them being Martin Luther King Jr who again focused on issues related to Poverty he also we say focused on poverty was also an anti-war advocate or anti-vietnam War and was you know the unquestionable leader of the civil rights movement in 1968 King was assassinated um Robert Kennedy the brother of the slain president he had already began emerging as a um kind of new face for the Democratic party in in uh you know the 1960s uh also as anti-vietnam war and actually ran for president and many people thought that Robert Kennedy was the sort of uh what you know he was kind of the foregone conclusion of who is going to be the Democratic nominee you know here he was he had the name brand recognition he was the brother of the slain president he was against the war he was for civil rights he was building a political campaign he had actually won some primary elections uh RFK was assassinated in 1968 as well during the presidential election um here's his dead body on the floor uh the image above is King's assassination he was shot and killed while on the balcony of a hotel um Kennedy was killed Martin Luther King the the person who assassinated King we don't know exactly what his motives were but the person who assassinated Kennedy assassinated Kennedy for his support of Israel this thing the Israel Palestine uh conflict us support of Israel in Middle Eastern conflicts and it kind of reminds us that despite everything going on in the United States like the Vietnam War like civil rights like everything in this chapter that during the Cold War the United States really is kind of everywhere all at once and it was because American support for Israel that motivated the Assassin of uh of RFK and so with King assassinated with Robert F Kennedy assassinated John F Kennedy assassinated in 1963 uh Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965 you know the 1960s are a very kind of rough and Rocky period with with a lot of these politically motivated murders um the nomination Falls to Hubert Humphrey and he is kind of an uninspiring leader um you know pretty much everyone else's choices have either been killed or you know decided not to run again and so he is the nominee for the Democrats and really just not you know what can we say about Humphrey um he is just uh he's not much support behind him in fact at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago you have more or less just outright riots breaking out um so what about on the other side what about on the Republican side or what about on the conservative side well um a lot of those dixie crats end up voting third party for George Wallace the segregation candidate so we might say the dixy crats Southern Democrats break off and vote third party uh George Wallace runs as the we'll call the pro segregation candidate remember George Wallace segregation today segregation tomorrow segregation forever is essentially where Wallace stands the Republicans decide they're going to go with Richard Nixon right the same Richard Nixon that lost to John F Kennedy in 1960 eight years have passed and maybe this is an opportunity to revive Nixon's career Nixon is the Republican candidate and Nixon is running on a campaign of what he calls the silent majority um you know the 1960s is a time period of a lot of change um you know you have the Civil Rights Movement you have uh the anti-war movement you also have kind of emerging identity movements like black power um Hispanic activism Native American activism you have the second women's rights movement so um there was a lot of kind of what Nixon would call a a vocal minority but Nixon said look you know it's the anti-war protesters and and all these other kind of Advocates that dominate the television and dominate the newspaper but there's a silent majority of Americans out there and this is what Nixon called upon to uh vote him into office and so the silent majority this is Nixon's voting base who want really kind of less change right they want to kind of conserve things a little bit more right that change has gone pretty rapidly in the past decade and that's kind of Pumped the breaks in regards to Vietnam Nixon takes a very kind of unique position and that is he is against the Vietnam War or or he wants to end it but Nixon's version of ending the Vietnam war is peace with honor that is Nixon wants to end the Vietnam more with PE with honor will maybe mention that a little bit more but um we'll say without immediate Retreat I mean that's kind of maybe the most simple way of of putting it um Nixon says look I do want to get us out of Vietnam but we're going to do it in a way that's honorable right uh peaceful that will kind of allow the Americans to save face and as a result of the election of 1968 the Democrats completely in disarray they do win a couple of States Washington Minnesota they do somehow manage to uh carry Texas uh George Wallace and the segregation forever candidate you can see that he does have some success in some of the former Confederate States of the South but ultimately it is Richard Nixon the Republican who becomes the next president in 1968 marking in some ways a shift in American political um kind of policy but as we'll discover the next chapter he also does kind of provide a continuation of some things as well