1. Chapter 38 Part-3

2. The LBJ Brand on the Presidency Lyndon Johnson had been a senator in the 1940s and 50s, his idol was Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he could manipulate Congress very well (through his in-your-face “Johnson treatment”); he was also quite vain and egotistical.

4. President Johnson proved to be much more successful than Kennedy at working with Congress. As a president, LBJ went from mildly conservative to liberal, utilizing Kennedy’s death to pass a Civil Rights Act of 1964, which: 1.banned all racial discrimination in most private facilities open to the public, including theaters, hospitals, and restaurants. 2.Banned sexual as well as racial discrimination. 3.Created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), aimed at eliminating discriminatory hiring. Johnson’s program was dubbed the “Great Society,” and it reflected his New Deal inspirations. Public support for the program was aroused by Michael Harrington’s The Other America, which revealed that over 20% of American suffered in poverty.

5. Johnson Battles Goldwater in 1964 In 1964, LBJ was opposed by right- wing Republican Arizona senator Barry Goldwater who attacked the federal income tax, the Social Security system, the Tennessee Valley Authority, civil rights legislation, the nuclear test-ban treaty, and the Great Society. However, Johnson used the Tonkin Gulf Incident, in which North Vietnamese ships allegedly fired on American ships, to look tough on communism in Vietnam. Johnson received congressional approval for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which gave him a virtual blank check on what he could do in affairs in Vietnam.

8. The Great Society Congress On election day, Johnson won a huge landslide over Goldwater to stay president. Johnson’s win was also coupled by sweeping Democratic wins that enabled him to pass his Great Society programs and begin his “War On Poverty”.

9. Congress doubled the appropriation on the Office of Economic Opportunity to $2 billion and granted more than $1 billion to refurbish Appalachia, which had been stagnant. Johnson also created the Department of Transportation and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), headed by Robert C. Weaver, the first black cabinet secretary in the United States’ history.

10. LBJ also wanted aid to education, medical care for the elderly and indigent, immigration reform, and a new voting rights bill. Johnson gave money to students, not schools, thus avoiding the separation of church and state by not technically giving money to Christian schools. In 1965, new programs called Medicare and Medicaid were installed, which gave certain rights to the elderly and the needy in terms of medicine and health maintenance. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished the “national origin” quota and doubled the number of immigrants allowed to enter the U.S. annually, up to 290,000 – in effect, shifting our major sources of immigration to Latin America and Asia. An antipoverty program called Project Head Start improved the performance of the underprivileged in education. It was “pre- school” for the poor. The National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities was created to aid artists of all sorts

11. Battling for Black Rights The 24th Amendment eliminated poll taxes, and in the “freedom summer” of 1964, both blacks and white students joined to combat discrimination and racism throughout the South by attempting to register black voters.

12. But in June of 1964, a black and two white civil rights workers were found murdered in Mississippi, and 21 white Mississippians were arrested for the murders. However, the all-white jury refused to convict the suspects. Also, an integrated “Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party” was denied its seat. Early in 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. continued his peaceful resistance to unjust laws and resumed his voter-registration campaign in Selma, Alabama. He and his followers were assaulted with tear gas by state troopers.

13. LBJ’s responded by calling for America to overcome bigotry, racism, and discrimination. Johnson’s Voting Rights Act of 1965 attacked racial discrimination at the polls by outlawing literacy tests and sending voting registrars to the polls. Interestingly, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 resulted in white office-seeking southerners beginning to court black votes, as they realized they’d need their support.

14. Black Power 1965 began a period of violent black protests and riots in major cities (ex. Watts in LA). New black leaders such as Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little), preached black separatism inspired by the Nation of Islam and its founder, Elijah Muhammed. They urged action now, even if it required violence, to the tune of his battle cry, “by any means necessary.” Malcolm X was killed in 1965 by a group of Black Muslims after he had broken ties with the Nation of Islam.

15. Stokely Carmichael had formerly led the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and had a great appreciation for the two civil rights acts passed in ‘64 and ‘65, but because of the slow progress of the civil rights movement in bringing economic equality, he now urged an abandonment of peaceful demonstrations in order to more swiftly bring about GENUINE equality. Carmichael’s new creed, “Black Power,” became a rallying cry by blacks seeking economic equality and equal cultural acknowledgement in American society, but just as they were slowly moving in that direction, more riots broke out, and nervous whites threatened with retaliation. Plus, a new militant black political party known as the Black Panthers openly brandished weapons in Oakland, California, as a reaction against what they viewed as police brutality against blacks.

16. Tragically, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. As the years passed, thousands of blacks registered to vote and went into integrated classrooms, and they slowly built themselves into a politically powerful group.

18. Combating Communism in Two Hemispheres Johnson sent men to put down a supposedly communist coup in the Dominican Republic and was denounced as over-anxious and too hyper. In Vietnam, though, he slowly sent more and more U.S. men to fight the war, and the South Vietnamese became spectators in their own war. Meanwhile, more and more Americans died. By 1968, he had sent more than half a million troops to Asia, and was pouring in $30 billion annually, yet the end was nowhere in sight.

19. Vietnam Vexations Alongside the floundering Vietnam situation, the U.S. was also trapped in various world-wide conflicts due to its new-found role as a superpower. 1.America was floundering in Vietnam and was being condemned for its actions there, and French leader Charles de Gaulle also ordered NATO off French soil in 1966. 2.Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Israel stunned the world by defeating Egypt (and its Soviet backers) in the so-called 1967 Six-Day War, further intensifying Israeli-Palestinian relations that lasts to this very day. Israel gained new territory in the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank of the Jordan River, including Jerusalem.

21. Meanwhile, numerous protests in America went against the Vietnam War and the draft. Opposition was headed by the influential Senate Committee of Foreign Relations, headed by Senator William Fullbright of Arkansas. “Doves” (peace lovers) and “Hawks” (war supporters) clashed. Both sides (the U.S. and North Vietnam) did try to have intervals of quiet time in bombings, but they merely used those as excuses to funnel more troops into the area. Johnson also ordered the CIA (in a clear violation of its charter) to spy on domestic antiwar activists, and he encouraged the FBI to use its Counterintelligence Program (“Cointelpro”) against the peace movement. More and more, America was trapped in an awful Vietnam War, and it couldn’t get out, thus breeding more and more hatred and resentment to the American public.

23. Vietnam Topples Johnson Johnson was personally suffering due to the number of American casualties, as witnesses viewed him weeping as he signed condolence letters. He even prayed with Catholic monks in a nearby church—at night, secretly. The most serious blow to LBJ’s foreign policy was the Tet Offensive of 1968 in which the communist Vietnamese attacked every U.S. base in South Vietnam simultaneously. Though technically a victory, as the U.S. forces fought off the communists, it was a wakeup call to the American people that the war was far from over and was in fact NOT being won.

24. Johnson also saw a challenge for the Democratic ticket from Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, and the nation, as well as the Democratic party, was starting to be split by Vietnam. Early in ‘68, LBJ refused to sign an order for more troops to Vietnam. Then, on March 31, 1968, Johnson declared that he would stop sending in troops to Vietnam and that he would not run in 1968, shocking America.

25. The Presidential Sweepstakes of 1968 On June 5, 1968, Robert Kennedy, the “peace” candidate was fatally shot in California while campaigning, and another Kennedy brother is tragically murdered.

26. Despite a massive effort by the New Left, new peace candidate Eugene McCarthy was NOT nominated after Kennedy’s death, as the Democrats chose to go with LBJ’s “successor” VP Hubert Humphrey. At the Democratic Convention in Chicago, August 1968, angry antiwar zealots, deprived by an assassin’s bullet of their leading candidate, Bobby Kennedy, merged menacingly upon the streets of Chicago to protest Humphrey’s impending official nomination. An exasperated international television watched as the crowd broke into a riot with the Chicago police department bloodily beating down the protesters. The war had truly come home………….

27. The gleeful Republicans responded with Richard Nixon, paired with Spiro Agnew, as their candidates running on a platform calling for victory in Vietnam and a strong anticrime policy. They simply sat back watching the Democrats destroy each other. There was also a third-party candidate: George C. Wallace, former governor of Alabama, a segregationist who along with his running mate, former air force general Curtis LeMay, proposed to bomb the North Vietnamese back to the Stone Age. Nixon won in a nail-biter, yet with only 43.4% of the popular vote. A minority president, he owed his victory to division over the war, and protest against the draft, crime, and rioting.

29. The Obituary of Lyndon Johnson Poor Lyndon Johnson returned to his Texas ranch and died there in 1973. In the final analysis, LBJ’s Great Society programs won some noteworthy battles in education (ex. Head Start) and health care (medicaid, medicare). He had committed Americans into Vietnam with noble intentions, but he was stuck in a situation where he was darned if he did and darned if he didn’t.