The Volatile Social Upheavals of the Stormy Sixties - Essay Example

The Volatile Social Upheavals of the Stormy Sixties Any number of prominent protagonists and events precipitated and intensified the volatile social upheavals of the Stormy Sixties. The struggle for civil rights and its concomitant war on poverty was both fueled and tempered by the eloquent appeal of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., while President John F. Kennedy's sudden and devastating death left the Vietnam war hanging in the balance miserably unresolved and abruptly bequeathed to President Lyndon B. Johnson's political manipulation along with the ever-intensifying domestic offensive of riotous anti-war, anti-draft antagonism. That two out of the three aforementioned men surrendered their lives to the volatility of the tempest gives silent testimony to the tortuous involvement each of them had in the controversies troubling the explosive decade. The third, precipitated by default into the presidency, grappled boldly with the unrest and turmoil through a second term only to surrender the battle to highly entangled political dissolution shortly before the sixties gave way to the seventies. Martin Luther King Jr., distinctively honored in 1964 with the Nobel Peace Prize as its youngest laureate, had entered a civil rights movement already in progress, to take the forefront as an advocate for non-violence in one of the most momentous and far-reaching social upheavals of the decade. Yet, paradoxically, the civil rights leader's appalling assassination on April 4, 1968, unleashed an unfortunate surge of violence in major cities across the nation. Martin Luther King's mission reached beyond black civil rights into associated issues of inner-city poverty. In 1965 in Selma, Alabama, his voter-registration crusade culminated in the Selma-to-Montgomery Freedom March. The civil-rights leader later took on Chicago where he pushed programs to clean up the slums and secure affordable housing. There King encountered young blacks heady with the concept of Black Power who gave little heed to his appeals for nonviolent protest. The impasse led to his adoption of stronger support for an end to the war in Vietnam along with the predominant thrust for civil-rights, a move that some felt spread the movement too thin. Nonetheless, the well-timed shift drew new blood into the crusade in response to the fresh bid for peace. As King went on to tackle domestic issues of urban poverty, proposing national boycotts and nonviolent camp-ins, he envisioned a huge march of the poor on Washington, with a show of such power and size that Congress would be forced to deal with the enormous numbers of destitute and exploited Americans, but at the age of 39 the bullet of a unabashed mercenary silenced those plans. Posterity, left to speculate what might have been, was nonetheless to profit greatly from the enduring legacy of his all-too-abrupt loss. In the Cold War ambience shaping the uneasy start of the decade of the sixties President John F. Kennedy, initially circumvented the political drive for a strong United States military buildup and opted instead for a limited accord with South Vietnam's President Ngo Dinh Diem in a desultory effort to stabilize the anti-Communist regime. At first Kennedy committed only to a consultative military presence and supply of arms just short of a wholesale engagement of troops. After Diem's brother raided Buddhist pagodas, pictures of burning monks aflame in gruesome protest electrified media channels worldwide. By late 1963 with Washington's tacit approval Diem's own generals staged a coup and both brothers were seized and killed. By then military advisers in Vietnam already totaled a risky commitment of some fifteen thousand American ground troops. Three weeks later, on a campaign stop for the 1964 presidential race, in an ostensibly secure motorcade in downtown Dallas President Kennedy was assassinated. His murder, imprinting its own mark of anguish prematurely on the tempestuous decade, at best deprived the American public of the character of a promising young leader scarcely midway through his first term in office. Curiously or otherwise, the Dallas assassination catapulted a former Texas statesman into the Presidency, as Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in to finish out Kennedy's first term. Under his executive power Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As the situation in South Vietnam deteriorated with intensified Viet Cong activity, Johnson publicly withheld a decision for escalation or withdrawal until the Tonkin Gulf episode in August 1964 was provoked by US Navy and South Vietnamese gunships in covert raids along the North Vietnam coast. In the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that followed, Congress accorded a cart blanche for military engagement that precluded any formal declaration of war and exposed Johnson to the political pressures of sustaining the conflict with larger and larger commitments of American forces, from twenty-one thousand in 1965 to five hundred fifty thousand by 1958. Johnson's domestic aspirations for social reform in his home-front war on poverty and racial injustice through a Great Society were largely held hostage to the ravages of the indeterminate war in Vietnam. Though Johnson's administration had real credit for the programs of Medicare and Medicaid, Head Start and Job Corps and the formation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), his second term through the Stormy Sixties was plagued largely with growing opposition to the war, unprecedented leftist student activism on college campuses, disruptive protests against the draft, the first public burnings of draft cards in the United States, draft dodgers in profusion, and deplorable morale in many of the American military divisions overseas. Certainly Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson left their own characteristic stamp on the fiery decade in which each played an eminent role. History in the long run most likely owes more to the resourcefulness and character with which they confronted the tremendous challenges of the turbulent period, than to the hand each indubitably had in contributing by default to the multifaceted social disruptions dealt them by events often enough exasperatingly beyond their immediate control. Works Cited Branch, Taylor. At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 2006. Kaiser, David. American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War. Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000. Kennedy, David M, Cohen, Lizabeth, and Bailey, Thomas A. The American Pageant: A History of the Republic. 12th Edition. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002. Read More