Chapter 29 Key Terms

1. "Kennedy Round"-The sixth and at that time the most ambitious "Round" of trade negotiations
under the aegis of GATT. The Kennedy Round, which lasted from 1963 to 1967, yielded agreements reducing prevailing tariff levels maintained by developed countries on industrial products by about onethird, an "Anti-Dumping Code, "and a short-lived International Wheat Agreement which was intended to stabilize world wheat prices. (The Wheat Agreement replaced the latest in a series of International Wheat Agreements going back to the 1950s.)

2. Lee Harvey Oswald-More than any other president of the century (except perhaps the two
Roosevelts and, later, Ronald Reagan), Kennedy made his own personality an integral part of his presidency and a central focus of national attention. Nothing illustrated that more clearly than the popular reaction to the tragedy of November 22, 1963. Kennedy had traveled to Texas with his wife and Vice President Lyndon Johnson for a series of political appearances. While the presidential motorcade rode slowly through the streets of Dallas, shots rang out. Two bullets struck the presidentone in the throat, the other in the head. He was sped to a nearby hospital, where minutes later he was pronounced dead. Lee Harvey Oswald, who appeared to be a confused and embittered Marxist, was arrested for the crime later that day, and then mysteriously murdered by a Dallas nightclub owner, Jack Ruby, two days later.

3. Warren Commission- Most Americans at the time accepted the conclusions of a federal
commission, appointed by President Johnson and chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren, which found that both Oswald and Ruby had acted alone, that there was no larger conspiracy. In later years, however, many Americans came to believe that the Warren Commission report had ignored evidence of a wider conspiracy behind the murders. Controversy over the truth about the assassination has continued ever since.

4. Barry Goldwater- Johnson envisioned himself as a great coalition builder: He wanted the support
of everyone, and for a time he very nearly got it. His first year in office was, by necessity, dominated by the campaign for reelection. There was little doubt that he would winparticularly after the Republican Party fell tinder the sway of its right wing and nominated the conservative Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. In the November 1964 election, the president received a larger plurality, over 61 percent, than any candidate before or since. Goldwater managed to carry only his home state of Arizona and five states in the Deep South. Record Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, many of whose members had been swept into office only because of the margin of Johnsons victory, ensured that the president would be able to fulfill many of his goals.

5. Robert Weaver- Closely tied to the antipoverty program were federal efforts to promote the
revitalization of decaying cities and to strengthen the nations schools. The Housing Act of 1961 offered $4.9 billion in federal grants to cities for the preservation of open spaces, the development of masstransit systems, and the subsidization of middle income housing. In 1966, Johnson established a new

cabinet agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (whose first secretary, Robert Weaver, was the first African American ever to serve in the cabinet).Johnson also inaugurated the Model Cities program, which offered federal subsidies for urban redevelopment pilot programs.

6. Sit-In- John Kennedy had long been vaguely sympathetic to the cause of racial justice, but he was
hardly a committed His intervention during the 1960 campaign to help win the release of Martin Luther King Jr. from a Georgia prison won him a large plurality of the black vote. But like many presidents before him, he feared alien-southern Democratic voters and congressmen. His administration set out to contain the racial problem by expanding enforcement of existing laws and supporting litigation to overturn existing segregation statutes, hoping to make modest progress without creating politically damaging divisions, the pressure for more fundamental change could not be contained. In February 1960, black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworths lunch counter; and in the following weeks, similar demonstrations spread throughout the South, forcing many merchants to integrate their facilities

7. SNCC- In the fall of 1960, some of those who had participated in the sit-ins formed the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which worked to keep the spirit of resistance alive.

8. CORE-The Congress of Racial Equality or CORE is a U.S. civil rights organization that played a pivotal
role for African-Americans in the Civil Rights Movement. Membership in CORE is still stated to be open to "anyone who believes that 'all people are created equal' and is willing to work towards the ultimate goal of true equality throughout the world.

9. "Freedom Rides"- In 1961, an interracial group of students, working with the Congress of Racial
Equality (CORE), began what they called freedom rides (reviving a tactic CORE had tried, without much success, in the 1940s). Traveling by bus throughout the South, the freedom riders tried to force the desegregation of bus stations. In some places, they met with such savage violence at the hands of enraged whites that the president finally dispatched federal marshals to help keep the peace. Kennedy also ordered the integration of all bus and train stations. In the meantime, SNCC workers began fanning out through black communities and even into remote rural areas to encourage blacks to challenge the obstacles to voting that the Jim Crow laws had created and that powerful social custom sustained. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) also created citizen-education and other programs many of them organized by Ella Baker, one of the great grassroots leaders of the movementto mobilize black workers, farmers, housewives, and others to challenge segregation, disfranchisement, and discrimination.

10. George Wallace- The turbulent events of 1968 persuaded many observers that American society
was in the throes of revolutionary change. In fact, however, the response of most Americans to the turmoil was a conservative one. The most visible sign of the conservative backlash was the surprising success of the campaign of the segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace for the presidency. In 1964, he had run in a few Democratic presidential primaries and had done surprisingly well, even in several states outside the South. In 1968, he became a third-party candidate for president, basing his campaign on a host of conservative grievances, not all of them connected to race. He denounced the

forced busing of students, the proliferation of government regulations and social programs, and the permissiveness of authorities toward race riots and antiwar demonstrations. There was never any serious chance that Wallace would win the election; but his standing in the polls at times rose to over 20 percent.

11. "I Have A Dream"- To generate support for the legislation, and to dramatize the power of the
growing movement, more than 200,000 demonstrators marched down the Mall in Washington, D.C., in August 1963 and gathered before the Lincoln Memorial for the greatest civil rights demonstration in the nations history. President Kennedy, who had at first opposed the idea of the march, in the end gave it his open support after receiving pledges from organizers that speakers would not criticize the administration. Martin Luther King Jr. in one of the greatest speeches of his distinguished oratorical career, roused the crowd with a litany of images prefaced again and again by the phrase I have a dream. The march was the high-water mark of the peaceful, interracial civil rights movement.

12. "Affirmative Action"-Many African- American leaders (and their white supporters) were
demanding, similarly, that the battle against job discrimination move to a new level. Employers not only should abandon negative measures to deny jobs to blacks; they also should adopt positive measures to recruit minorities, thus compensating for past injustices. Lyndon Johnson gave his tentative support to the concept of affirmative action in 1965. Over the next decade, affirmative action guidelines gradually extended to all institutions doing business with or receiving funds from the federal government (including schools and universities)and to many others as well.

13. De Jure and de facto segregation- By the mid-1960s, the issue of race was moving out of the
South and into the rest of the nation. The battle against school desegregation had moved beyond the initial assault on de jure segregation (segregation by law) to an attack on de facto segregation (segregation in practice, as through residential patterns), thus carrying the fight into northern cities.

14. Black Panthers- Particularly alarming to many whites (and to some African Americans as well)
were organizations that existed entirely outside the mainstream civil rights movement. In Oakland, California, the Black Panther Party (founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale) promised to defend black rights even if that required violence. Black Panthers organized along semi military lines and wore weapons openly and proudly; They were, in fact, more the victims of violence from the police than they were practitioners of violence themselves. But they created an image, quite deliberately, of militant radicals willing to fight for justice, in Newtons words, through the barrel of a gun.

15. Malcolm X- In Detroit, a once-obscure black nationalist group, the Nation of Islam, gained new
prominence. Founded in 1931 by Elijah Poole (who converted to Islam and renamed himself Elijah Muhammad), the movement taught blacks to take responsibility for their own lives, to live by strict codes of behavior, and to reject any dependence on whites. The most celebrated of the Black Muslims. as whites often termed them, was Malcolm Little, a former drug addict and pimp who had spent time in prison and had rebuilt his life after joining the movement. He adopted the name Malcolm X (X to

denote his lost African surname).Malcolm became one of the movements most influential spokesmen, particularly among younger blacks, as a result of his intelligence, his oratorical skills, and his harsh, uncompromising opposition to all forms of racism and oppression. He did not advocate violence, as his critics often claimed; but he insisted that black people had the right to defend themselves, violently if necessary, from those who assaulted them. Malcolm died in 1965 when black gunmen, presumably under orders from rivals within the Nation of Islam, assassinated him in New York. But Malcolms influence did not die with him. A book he had been working on before his death with the writer Alex Haley (The Autobiography of Malcolm X) attracted wide attention after its publication in 1965 and spread his reputation broadly through the nation. Years after his death, he was to many African Americans as important and revered a symbol as Martin Luther King Jr.

16. Green Berets- The Kennedy administration entered office convinced that the United States
needed to be able to counter communist aggression in more flexible ways than the atomic-weaponsoriented defense strategy of the Eisenhower years had permitted. In particular, Kennedy was unsatisfied with the nations ability to meet communist threats in emerging areas of the Third Worldthe areas in which. Kennedy believed, the real struggle against communism would be waged in the future. He gave enthusiastic support to the expansion of the Special Forces (or Green Berets, as they were soon known)soldiers trained specifically to fight guerrilla conflicts and other limited wars.

17. "Alliance for Progress"- Kennedy also favored expanding American influence through peaceful
means. To repair the badly deteriorating relationship with Latin America, he proposed an Alliance for Progress: a series of projects for peaceful development and stabilization of the nations of that region.

18. AID- Kennedy also inaugurated the Agency for International Development (AID) to coordinate
foreign aid.

19. Peace Corps- Kennedy also established what became one of his most popular innovations: the
Peace Corps, which sent young American volunteers abroad to work in developing areas.

20. Berlin Wall- Before dawn on August 13, 1961, the East German government, complying with
directives from Moscow, began constructing a wall between East and West Berlin. Guards fired on those who continued to try to escape. For nearly thirty years, the Berlin Wall served as the most potent physical symbol of the conflict between the communist and non- communist worlds.

21. Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid- In the grim aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy traveled to
Vienna in June 1961 for his first meeting with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. Their frosty exchange of views did little to reduce tensions between the two nationsnor did Khrushchevs veiled threat of war if the United States continued to support a noncommunist West Berlin in the heart of East Germany. Khrushchev was particularly unhappy about the mass exodus of residents of East Germany to the West through the easily traversed border in the center of Berlin. But he ultimately found a method short of war to stop it. Before dawn on August 13, 1961, the East German government, complying with directives from Moscow, began constructing a wall between East and West Berlin. Guards fired on those who

continued to try to escape. For nearly thirty years, the Berlin Wall served as the most potent physical symbol of the conflict between the communist and non- communist worlds.

22. Ho Chi Minh- The nationalists were organized into a political parw the Vietminh, which had been
created in 1941 and led ever since by Ho Chi Mmli, a communist educated in Paris and Moscow, and a fervent Vietnamese nationalist. The Vietminh had fought against Japan throughout World War II. In the fall of 1945, after the collapse of Japan and before the Western powers had time to return, the Vietminh declared Vietnam an independent nation and set up a nationalist government under Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi. Ho had worked closely during the war with American intelligence forces in Indochina in fighting the Japanese; he apparently considered the United States something like an ally. When the war ended in 1945, he began writing President Truman asking for support in his struggle against the French. He received no reply to his letters, probably because no one in the State Department had heard of him. At the same time, Truman was under heavy pressure from both the British and the French to support France in its effort to reassert its control over Vietnam. The French argued that without Vietnam, their domestic economy would collapse. And since the economic revival of Western Europe was quickly becoming one of the Truman administrations top priorities, the United States did nothing to stop (although, at first, also relatively little to encourage) the French as they moved back into Vietnam in 1946 and began a struggle with the Vietminh to reestablish control over the country. At first, the French had little difficulty reestablishing control. They drove Ho Chi Minh out of Hanoi and into hiding in the countryside; and in 1949, they established a nominally independent national government under the leadership of the former emperor, Bao Daian ineffectual, Westernized playboy unable to assert any real independent authority. The real power remained in the hands of the French. But the Vietminh continued to challenge the French- dominated regime and slowly increased its control over large areas of the countryside. The French appealed to the United States for support; and in February 1950, the Truman administration formally recognized the Bao Dat regime and agreed to provide it with direct military and economic aid. For the next four years, during what has become known as the First Indochina War, Truman and then Eisenhower continued to support the French military campaign against the Vietminh; by 1954, by some calculations, the United States was paying 80 percent of Frances war costs. But the war went badly for the French in spite of the American support. Finally late in 1953, Vietminh forces engaged the French in a major battle in the far northwest corner of the country at Dien Bien Phu, an isolated and almost indefensible site. The French were surrounded, and the baffle turned into a prolonged and horrible siege, with the French position steadily deteriorating. It was at this point that the Eisenhower administration decided not to intervene to save the French . The defense of Dien Bien Phu collapsed and the French government decided the time had come to get out. The First Indochina War had come to an end.

23. Viet Cong/NLF- Diems early successes in suppressing the sects in Vietnam led him in 1959 to
begin a similar campaign to eliminate the Vietminh supporters who had stayed behind in the south after the partition. He was quite successful for a time, so successful, in fact, that the North Vietnamese found it necessary to respond. A new policy emanating from Moscow beginning in 1959, emphasizing communist wars of national liberation (as opposed to direct Soviet confrontations with the United States and NATO), also encouraged Ho Chi Minh to resume his armed struggle for national unification. In

1959, the Vietminh cadres in the south created the National Liberation Front (NLF), known to many Americans as the Viet Congan organization closely allied with the North Vietnamese government. It was committed to over-throwing the puppet regime of Diem and reuniting the nation. In 1960, under orders from Hanoi, and with both material and manpower support from North Vietnam, the Nil began military operations in the South.

24. Dean Rusk- Dean Rusk was a secretary of state and one of Kennedys foreign policy advisors.He
firmly believed that the United States had an obligation to resist communism in Vietnam.

25. Robert McNamara- Robert McNamara was an American business executive and the eighth
Secretary of Defense, serving under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to 1968, during which time he played a large role in escalating the United States involvement in the Vietnam War.

26. Gulf of Tonkin Resolution- During his first months in office, Johnson expanded the American
involvement in Vietnam only slightly, sending an additional 5,000 military advisers there and preparing to send 5,000 more. Then, early in August 1964, the president announced that American destroyers on patrol in international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin had been attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Later information raised serious doubts as to whether the administration reported the attacks accurately. At the time, however, virtually no one questioned Johnsons portrayal of the incident as a serious act of aggression, or his insistence that the United States must respond. By a vote of 416 to 0 in the House and 88 to 2 in the Senate, Congress hurriedly passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized the president to take all necessary measures "to protect American forces and prevent further aggression in southeast Asia the resolution became in Johnsons view at least, an open-ended legal authorization for escalation of the conflict.

27. Ho Chi Minh Trail- Central to the American war effort was a commitment to what the military
called attrition, a strategy premised on the belief that the United States could inflict so many casualties and so much damage on the enemy that eventually they would be unable and unwilling to continue the struggle. But the attrition strategy failed because the North Vietnamese proved willing to commit many more soldiers to the conflict than the United States had expected (and many more than America itself was willing to send). It failed, too, because the United States relied heavily on its bombing of the north to eliminate the communists war-making capacity. American bombers struck at strategic targets (factories, bridges, railroads, shipyards, oil storage depots, etc.) in North Vietnam to weaken the material capacity of the communists to continue the war; and they bombed jungle areas of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the infiltration routes by which Hanoi sent troops and supplies into the south. In addition, the Americans hoped bombing would weaken the will of North Vietnam to continue the war.

28. Eugene McCarthy- Beginning in the summer of 1967, dissident Democrats (led by the talented
activist Allard Lowenstein) tried to mobilize support behind an antiwar candidate who would challenge

Lyndon Johnson in the 1968 primaries. When Robert Kennedy declined their invitation, they turned to Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota. A brilliantly orchestrated campaign by Lowenstein and thousands of young volunteers in the New Hampshire primary produced a startling showing by McCarthy in March; he nearly defeated the president. A few days later, Robert Kennedy finally entered the campaign, embittering many Mccarthy supporters, but bringing his own substantial strength among blacks, the poor, and workers to the antiwar cause. Polls showed the president trailing badly in the next scheduled primary, in Wisconsin. Indeed, public animosity toward the president was now so intense that Johnson did not even dare leave the White House to campaign. On March 31, Johnson went on television to announce a limited halt in the bombing of North Vietnamhis first major concession to the antiwar forcesand, more surprising, his withdrawal from the presidential contest. For a moment, it seemed as though the antiwar forces had won. Robert Kennedy quickly established himself as the champion of the Democratic primaries, winning one election after another. In the meantime, however, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, with the support of President Johnson, entered the contest and began to attract the support of party leaders and of the many delegations that were selected not by popular primaries but by state party organizations. He soon appeared to be the front- runner in the race.

29. Hubert Humphrey- Hubert Humphrey served under President Lyndon B. Johnson as the 38th
Vice President of the United States. Humphrey twice served as a United States Senator from Minnesota, and served as Democratic Majority Whip. Humphrey was the nominee of the Democratic Party in the 1968 presidential election but lost to the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon.