By the late 1950s, the seemingly placid surface of American society was becoming restless. The 1960s were one of the most divisive and turbulent eras of the twentieth century. It contributed to a bold and confident effort by political leaders to attack social and international problems within the framework of conventional liberalism.

It was hoped for vigorous new leadership.

House was built through most of the 1960s by Berlin Wall and it was seen as a time to embody liberal hopes.

Malcolm X assassinated a senator who narrowly missed being the party's vice presidential candidate.

The antiwar movement's ambassador is Joseph P. Kennedy.

Nixon was elected president before and during his run for president, and his appearances helped comfort the American people despite his perceived weaknesses as a presidential candidate. He overcame doubts about his youth and religion to win with a small plurality of the popular vote and a slightly more comfortable electoral majority.

The electoral strength of the two candidates is shown. Most of the plains and mountain states were swept by the South.

His thin popular mandate and Congress dominated by Republicans and conservative Democrats frustrated many of his hopes. Kennedy was able to win approval of the tariffs his administration had negotiated, as well as build a legislative agenda that included a call for a tax cut to promote economic growth.

The popular reaction to the tragedy of November 22, 1963. In Texas with his wife and Vice President Lyndon Johnson for a series of political appearances, as the presidential motorcade rode slowly through the streets of Dallas, shots rang out. The president was hit in the throat and in the head. He was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead. He was murdered by a Dallas nightclub owner as he was being moved from one jail to another. President Johnson appointed a federal commission to investigate the assassination and most Americans accepted their conclusions. The commission, chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren, found that Oswald and Ruby acted alone.

Many Americans believed that the Warren Commission report ignored evidence of a larger conspiracy. There is still controversy over the assassination.

The Kennedy assassination was a defining event for a lot of people. Lyndon Baines Johnson, Kennedy's successor in the White House, was well-liked by most of the nation at the time. Johnson was a native of the poor "hill country" of west Texas and had risen to become majority leader of the U.S. Senate by dint of extraordinary, even obsessive, effort and ambition. He surprised a lot of people when he accepted the vice presidential nomination on the ticket with Kennedy after failing to win the Democratic nomination for president.

Kennedy's personality could hardly have been more different from Johnson's. Like Kennedy, Johnson believed in the active use of power. He compiled the most impressive legislative record since Franklin Roosevelt.

The campaign for reelec tion dominated Johnson's first year in office. After the Republican Party nominated the very conservative Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, there was little doubt that he would win. In the November 1964 election, the president received a larger plurality than any other candidate. Arizona and five other states in the Deep South were retained by Goldwater because of his stance against communism and government expansion. The failed Goldwater campaign galvanized many right-wing activists who would propel the growth of conservative political strength for decades to come.

Many of the members of Congress who were swept into office because of the margin of Johnson's victory were Democrats.

In the 1960s, the federal government took steps to create new social welfare programs. Medicare provides federal aid to elderly individuals for medical expenses.

Many critics were appeased by Medicare. It avoided the stigma of "welfare" by making Medicare benefits available to all elderly Americans, just as Social Security had done with pensions. The program had a large middle-class constituency. Medicare shifted responsibility for paying those fees from the patient to the government in exchange for allowing doctors serving Medicare patients to practice privately and charge their normal fees. Medicaid extended federal medical assistance to welfare recipients and other indi gent people of all ages.

Kennedy had been planning for a larger assault on poverty in the last months of his life and Johnson launched only weeks after taking office. The Office of Economic Opportunity was the center of the war on poverty.

The Community Action programs gave many poor people jobs and gave them experience in politics. The Community Action approach was impossible to sustain. The program was damaged by administrative failures. The popular image of the Community Action programs was damaged by the excesses of a few agencies.

During its first two years, the OEO spent $3 billion and helped reduce poverty in some areas. It did not eliminate poverty completely.

The federal government's efforts to strengthen the nation's schools were tied to the antipoverty program. The preservation of open spaces, the development of mass-transit systems, and the subsidization of middle-income housing were offered grants by the Housing Act of 1961. Robert Weaver was the first African American to serve in the cabinet when Johnson established the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1966. The Model Cities Program offered federal subsidies for pilot programs.

Kennedy tried to get federal aid to public education, but he failed to overcome two important obstacles. Johnson was able to circumvent both objections with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, as well as a series of subsequent measures. The aid was based on the economic conditions of the students, not on the needs of the schools.

The Immigration Act of 1965, one of the most important pieces of legislation of the 1960s, was supported by the Johnson administration. The "national origins" system, which gave preference to immigrants from northern Europe over those from other parts of the world, was eliminated by the 1965 act. It was possible for people from all over the world to enter the United States on an equal basis. The character of American immigration changed in the early 1970s. The character of the American population has been changed by large groups of Asians entering the United States.

The Great Society reforms increased federal spending. Tax revenues from the growing economy nearly compensated for the new expenditures. Kennedy had first proposed a tax cut in 1962, but Johnson was able to win passage of it in 1964. The cut increased the federal deficit, but substantial economic growth over the next several years made up for much of the revenue that was lost. The federal budget rapidly outpaced increases in revenues as Great Society programs began to compete with America's military ventures. The federal government spent $94 billion in 1961. By 1970, the sum had grown to $196 billion.

The popularity of federal efforts to solve social problems was weakened by the high costs of the Great Society. It reduced hunger in America.

Millions of elderly and poor people were able to get medical care because of it. In American history, it contributed to the greatest reduction in poverty. 21 percent of the American people lived below the poverty line in 1959 according to the most widely accepted estimates. Only 12 percent remained below that line in 1969. Some of the progress was a result of Great Society programs.

Issues of racial justice and equality were at the forefront of American politics by the early 1960s. While scholars debate the origins and legacies of the modern civil rights movement, they don't challenge how deeply it influenced the nation's history in the late twentieth century.

John Kennedy was sympathetic to the cause of racial justice, but he was not a true crusader. He was afraid of alienating southern voters and Democrats in Congress. His administration wanted to contain the racial problem by using existing laws and not new legislation.

Even before Kennedy took office, the pressure for change was growing. In the 1950s, African Americans in northern cities became more active in opposing discrimination. They wanted progress in housing, jobs and educa tion. In the South, protests grew in the 1960s. In February 1960, black college students in North Carolina staged a sit-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter, and in the following months, similar demonstrations spread throughout the South, forcing many merchants to integrate their facilities. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was formed in the fall of 1960 by people who had participated in the sit-ins.

Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered the integration of all bus and train stations after they were met with violence from some white southerners.

The movement grew in the Deep South in 1963. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. helped launch a series of dem onstrations. Police Commissioner Eugene "Bull"Connor supervised a brutal effort to break up the peaceful marches, arresting hundreds of demonstrators and using attack dogs, tear gas, electric cattle prods, and fire hoses, at times against small children, in full view of television cameras.

The nation and the South were involved in the civil rights movement.

It has been argued that their efforts were similar to those of King and other leaders. Visibility to movement was brought to a number of different ways by the produced scholarship.

The early histories of the civil rights move are usually brief. They rest on a work of communities that challenge the narrative of moral purpose and personal regation. By understanding the local oricourage by which great men and women gins of the movement, these and other scholars inspired ordinary people to rise up and argue, can we understand its true character.

The central importance to racist assumptions in the 1930s is one of the key elements of the Communist Party. Some of the earliest civil tably King himself were not organized by activists.

Few historians would deny the importance of the early growth of African of King and other leaders to the successes of American militancy and the movement of the civil rights movement.

Others were not sure of the success of the ruling. A grow did not provide an effective enforcement ing literature on northern, urban, and relatively mechanism for desegregation and in many radical activists suggested that focusing other ways failed to support measures that too much on mainstream leaders and the cele would have made school desegregation a real Historians have given a lot of attention to the life into the present.

In studies of the civil rights African Americans sentenced to death within movement as well as in accounts of the criminal justice system, the contributions of local beyond has brought into focus such issues.

The court ordered the University of Alabama to enroll several black students, but Governor George Wallace stood in the doorway of the auditorium to prevent it. He gave way after federal marshals arrived. Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi. Four African American children were killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

The events in Alabama and Mississippi made it clear that the president could no longer ignore the issue of race. Kennedy spoke about the "moral issue" facing the nation in an important television address the night of the University of Alabama confrontation. He introduced new legislation prohibiting segregation in public accommodations, barring discrimination in employment, and increasing the power of the government to file suits on behalf of school integration.

The largest civil rights demonstration in the nation's history took place in Washington, D.C. in August 1963.

The assassination of President Kennedy gave new life to civil rights legislation. The ambitious measure that Kennedy had proposed in June 1963, which was passed through the House of Representatives, was stopped in the Senate.

The civil rights movement shifted its focus to voting rights after winning a significant victory. During the summer of 1964, thousands of civil rights workers, black and white, northern and southern, spread throughout the South, but primarily into Mississippi, to work on behalf of black voter registration and participation. Three of the first freedom workers to arrive in the South, two whites and an African American, were murdered. Law enforcement officials were involved in the crime.

The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party is an alternative to the regular state Democratic party organization. The regular party's right to its seats at the Democratic National Convention was challenged by the MFDP under the leadership of Fannie Lou Hamer. President Johnson was able to broker a compromise that allowed members of the MFDP to be seated as observers, with promises of party reforms later on, while the regular party retained its official standing. The agreement was rejected by many MFDP members.

In March 1965, King helped organize a major demonstration in Alabama to push for the right of blacks to register to vote. The attack on the demonstrators by the local police was televised nationally. Two northern whites were murdered in the course of the march. As the focus of the movement began to move from political to economic issues, they failed to satisfy the rapidly rising expectations of civil rights activists.

African Americans lived in metropolitan areas at a rate of 69 percent by 1966. Poor urban black communities were getting worse even though the economic condition of most Americans was improving. At the beginning of the 1960s, more than half of nonwhite Americans lived in poverty.

I had to leave the next day.

On the 10th of September 1962, the home of Mr. and County and Senator James O. Mrs. Robert Tucker was shot at.

We traveled twenty-six miles to Mr. Joe McDonald's house, which was shot in.

We were met by police in Mississippi. The Highway Patrolmen only took us to the Continental Trailway bus. We were allowed to take the literacy test in Winona, Mississippi, at the time. Four of the people took the test and went back to Ruleville, but two of them were held up by the City Police and the State because they wanted to go to the Highway Patrolmen.

Four people went in to use the restaurant and were charged with driving a bus, which was 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780 800-313-5780

After we paid the fine, Reverend Jeff rushed out to see what had happened, and I got off of the bus to see what had happened. The area where I worked as a timekeeper was once home to a State Highway Patrolman and a sharecropper.

After they told me, my husband came, as soon as I was seated on the bus, I saw and said the plantation owner was raising when they began to get the five people in a Cain because I had tried to register. Before the patrolman's car. I was six years old when I got in the car.

The second Negro was ordered to take me to the booking room. Some blackjack was left by them.

The first Negro Simpson was ordered by the State after I was placed in a cell. The person who beat me to sit on my feet began to hear screams and licks from my feet.

One white man got up and began to beat rible screams after hearing the sounds of licks. I could hear someone telling me to keep quiet.

She began to register to become a first-class citizen after a while. If asked for mercy on those people.

The men came to my cell. One of these men was land of the free and the home of the brave, a State Highway Patrolman, and he asked where we have to sleep with our telephones.

He said, "Thank you."

He used a curse word.

There were two Negro prisoners in the cell.

The Highway Patrolmen took the blackjack first.

When the television networks broadcasted Patrolman, for me to lay down on a bunk, the level of public support on my face.

The first Negro Party rose when I laid on my face.

All rights belong to the person. Permission was used.

There were no Jim Crow laws in those cities.

The battle against job discrimination began to move to a new level when many African American leaders struggled in relative obscurity in the 1940s and 1950s. They argued that the only way for employers to prove they weren't discriminating against African Americans was to hire minorities.

Positive measures should be used to recruit minorities. Affirmative action guidelines gradually extended to virtually all institutions doing business with or receiving funds from the federal government. Discrimination based on gender received federal interest. When "sex" was added to the 1964 Civil Rights Act at the last minute, many thought it was an attempt to kill the bill. The result gave federal authority to begin dismantling discrimination against women in the workplace and higher education.

In the summer of 1966 there was a major campaign in Chicago, in which King played a prominent role, and it was a symbol of the movement's new direction. The goal of the Chicago campaign was to highlight housing and employment discrimination in the north. The Chicago campaign evoked violent opposition from white residents and failed to attract wide attention or support in the way events in the South had done.

When riots broke out in African American neighborhoods in major cities, the problem of urban poverty was thrust into national prominence. In New York City's Harlem, there were riots in the summer of 1964. The Watts section of Los Angeles was the site of the most serious race riot since World War II. In the midst of a traffic arrest, a white police officer struck a protester with his club. There was a week of violence after the incident. Thirty-four people died in the uprising, which was eventually quelled by the National Guard. In the summer of 1966 there were 43 more outbreaks in Chicago and Cleveland. In the summer of 1967, there were eight major disorders, the largest of which was a racial clash in Detroit in which 43 people died.

Televised images of the violence alarmed millions of Americans and created both a new sense of urgency and a growing sense of doubt among some whites who had embraced the cause of racial justice only a few years before. In the spring of 1968, the Commission on Civil Disorders was ordered by the president to recommend massive spending to eliminate the abysmal conditions of the ghettoes. The riots exposed the need for stern measures to stop violence.

Black power meant different things.

The social and psychological impact of the black-power ideology was instilling racial pride in African Americans. Black power created a deep split within the civil rights movement.

Traditional black organizations such as the NAACP, the Urban League, and King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference are facing competition from more radical groups. The Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee both began as relatively moderate interracial organizations. By the mid-1960s, these and other groups were calling for more radical and occasionally violent action against white racism and were rejecting the approaches of older, more established black leaders.

The Nation of Islam, based in Oakland, California, was one of the most radical organizations in the idea of black power. Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam in 1964 and founded the Muslim Mosque, Inc., which he hoped would allow him to work with other civil rights leaders. He came back from Mecca with a renewed hope that racial problems could be solved. He was assassinated by rivals within the Nation of Islam. He was a major figure in many African American communities after his death, just like Martin Luther King Jr.

The optimistic liberalism of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations dictated a more active and aggressive approach to dealing with the nation's problems.

The Kennedy administration believed that the United States needed to be able to counter communist aggression in more flexible ways than the defense strategy of the Eisenhower years. Kennedy was dissatisfied with the nation's ability to meet communist threats in "emerging areas" of the Third World. He supported the expansion of the Green Berets, soldiers trained to fight guerrilla conflicts and other limited wars.

Kennedy favored peaceful means to expand American influence. He proposed an "Alliance for Progress" to repair the relationship with Latin America.

The assault on the Castro government in Cuba was one of the first foreign policy ventures of the Kennedy administration. On April 17, 1961, with the approval of the new president, 2,000 of the armed exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, expecting first American air support and then a rebellion by the Cuban people. Kennedy withdrew the air support at the last minute because he didn't want the US involved in the invasion. The expected uprising did not happen. Castro forces easily crushed the invaders, and within two days the whole thing had collapsed.

Kennedy traveled to Vienna for his first meeting with Khrushchev after the Bay of Pigs. Khrushchev's threat of war unless the United States stopped supporting West Berlin did not reduce strains between the two nations.

The mass exodus of people from East Germany to the West through the border in the center of Berlin was a problem for Khrushchev. He found a way to stop it. The wall between East and West Berlin was built just before dawn on August 13, 1961. Those who tried to escape were shot at by guards. The Berlin Wall was the most powerful physical symbol of the conflict between the communist and noncommunist worlds.

The most dangerous and dramatic crisis of the Cold War took place in October. There was evidence that the Soviets were building sites for nuclear weapons on the island. To the Soviets, placing missiles in Cuba seemed to be a reasonable way to counter the presence of American missiles in Turkey. The missile sites were an act of aggression by the Soviets towards the United States. The president decided that the weapons must go after working with a special executive committee. On October 22, he ordered a naval and air blockade around Cuba. Kennedy received a message from Khrushchev suggesting that the Soviet Union would remove the missile bases in exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba. The president agreed.

The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1963, after improved dialogue between the nuclear powers.

Lyndon Johnson didn't have a lot of experience in international affairs.

He wanted to continue the policies of his predecessor but also to prove that he was a strong leader.

The Dominican Republic had an internal rebellion that gave him an opportunity to do so. For the next four years, different groups of people fought for control of the country after the assassination of the dictator. The conservative regime collapsed in the spring of 1965, in the face of a revolt by a broad range of groups on behalf of Juan Bosch. In order to quell the disorder, Johnson dispatched 30,000 American troops. The forces were withdrawn after Bosch was defeated.

The civil war in Vietnam dominated Johnson's foreign policy from the beginning.

The US blockade of Cuba during the missile crisis was supported by the CIA.

The United States wants to help its Latin American neighbors.

The conflict in Vietnam was seen as a Third World struggle on the fringes of the Cold War.

Diem was a hard-line nationalist uncontaminated by any collaboration with the French and bent on shoring up the authority of his regime. He was successful for a while. Diem was aided by the American CIA in his campaign against the powerful religious sects and the South Vietnamese organized crime syndicate. The United States came to regard Diem as a powerful and impressive alternative to Ho Chi Minh, his communist rival in North Vietnam. America gave military and economic aid to Diem.

Diem's success in suppressing sects led him in 1959 to start a campaign to eliminate the supporters of Ho Chi Minh who had remained in the south after the partition. The armed struggle for national unification was resumed by the supporters of Ho Chi Minh and the communist North.

The NLF began military operations in the south in 1960 under orders from Hanoi and North Vietnam.

This was the beginning of the Vietnam War.

By 1961, NLF forces had established effective control over many areas of the coun tryside and were threatening Diem's power. Diem lost the support of his own military and many other groups in South Vietnam. The Diem regime tried to make Catholicism the dominant religion of the country in an effort to limit political dissent. The Buddhists staged enormous antigovernment demonstrations, during which a monk doused himself with gasoline, sat cross-legged, and set himself on fire in front of photographers and television cameras. Buddhists burned themselves in other areas.

Diem was pressured by American officials to reform his government, but he did not make any significant concessions. In the fall of 1963, Kennedy approved a plan by a group of South Vietnamese generals to topple Diem. John Kennedy was killed a few weeks after the coup.

The American commitment to the survival of South Vietnam was already substantial when Lyndon Johnson took over. In his first months in office, he sent an additional 5,000 military advisers to Vietnam and was about to send 5,000 more. In August 1964, the president announced that American destroyers had been attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. There were doubts about whether the administration reported the attacks accurately. Almost no one questioned Johnson's portrayal of the incident as a serious act of aggression. The resolution was seen by Johnson as an open-ended legal authorization for escalation of the conflict.

With the South Vietnamese leadership still in disarray and the communist military pressure growing stronger, more and more of the burden of opposition to the Viet Cong fell on the United States. After communist forces attacked an American military base in February 1965, Johnson ordered American bombing of the north in an attempt to destroy the depots and transportation lines that brought supplies into South Vietnam. In March 1965, two battalions of American marines landed at Da Nang in South Vietnam, bringing the total American troop strength to over 100,000.

The president announced four months later that American soldiers would be involved in the conflict. By the end of the year, there were more than 180,000 American combat troops in Vietnam; in 1966, that number doubled; and by the end of 1967, over 500,000 American soldiers fought there. The air war continued. More than 4,000 Americans and an unknown number of Vietnamese were killed by the spring of 1966.

The attrition strategy failed because the North Vietnamese were willing to commit more soldiers and resources to the conflict than the United States had predicted.

The communists' war-making capacity was not expected to be eliminated by the bombing of the north. North Vietnam was not a modern industrial society, and it had relatively few of the types of targets that bombing is effective against.

The bombing was responded to by the North Vietnamese. They built a network of underground tunnels, shops, and factories. The Soviet Union and China provided aid to the North Vietnamese.

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Winning the hearts and minds of the people is how to "pacify" those regions. It was possible to route the Viet Cong, but the pacification was more difficult. The pacification program gave way to a more heavy-handed relocation strategy, in which American troops uprooted villagers from their homes, sent them fleeing to refugee camps or into the cities, and then destroyed the villages and surrounding countryside. An American military official said that it became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.

As the war dragged on, some American officers and officials urged the president to expand the military efforts. Johnson remembered the Korean War. He was starting to face obstacles at home, and he was starting to fear drawing China into the Vietnam War.

Few Americans protested the American involvement in Vietnam as late as the end of 1965, even though they were influential. Political support for the war began to erode as it dragged on.

By the end of 1967, American students opposed to the war became a significant political force. Enormous peace marches in New York, Washington, D.C., and other cities drew broad public attention to the antiwar movement.

A growing number of reporters who had been in Vietnam helped sustain the movement with their revelations about the brutality of the war.

In January 1966 the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, began to stage highly pub licized and occasionally televised congressional hearings to air criticisms of the war. Robert F. Kennedy, brother of the slain president, joined other members of Congress in opposing Johnson's policies.

The consensus seemed to be collapsing even within the administration. Robert McNamara left the government in 1968, after he helped extend the American involvement in Vietnam. His successor as secretary of defense, Clark Clifford, became a powerful voice in the administration for a cautious scaling down of the commitment.

Inflation rose from 2 percent in the early 1960s to 3 percent in 1967, 4 percent in 1968, and 6 percent in 1969 because of Johnson's commitment to fighting the war while continuing his Great Society reforms. In August 1967, Johnson asked Congress for a tax increase. Conservatives demanded a $6 billion reduction in funding for Great Society programs. The reduction was accepted by the president as a way to mollify congressional conservatives who were unnerved by economic troubles and critical of social welfare programs.

The renewed material to many younger folk musicians was one of the impulses of the 1960s.

The revival of folk music in the 1950s and early 1960s was aided by the artificial, consumerist culture of modern folk musicians who lived and performed in America.

As the politics of the 1960s became more heated, and as young people in particular became politically aroused, it was folk music that was more clearly expressed. Peter, Paul, and Mary were in the youth culture of the time.

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It was based on a song from the South and a song from the white Communist Party rallies in the 1940s. Most of the Weavers were attracted by it. Bob Dylan's influence on the 1960s Party's Popular Front was never fully understood by musicians associated with the Communist. The Weathermen began their careers singing who named themselves after them after Woody left, even inadvertently providing a name to Guthrie, Pete Seeger, the Weavers, and the most radical of Students for a ers whose music would become popular again. They like to know which way the wind blows. The Joan Popular Front set out to be entirely Baez, whose politics were no secret to any American.

It wasn't just Pete Seeger and the Weavers con that made them college campuses. The Kingston trio recorded slick, pop versions of 1960s. Folk was a kind of music that seemed to reflect the "authenticity" of the audience. The youth culture was trying to find Folkway Records.

A collection of eighty-four performances recorded in the 1920s and 1930s that became popular with young Americans did not have a real connection with the traditions they were trying to evoke.

Their own troubled world might be explained by the similarities between the 1930s 1960s and the 1960s.

The folk-music tradition of more democratic, more honest, and more expressing a political message and natural than the land they knew continues today.

Special Rider Music renewed their rights in 1993. All rights belong to the person. International copyright is secured. Permission was granted for this to be reproduced.

The twin crises of the war in Vietnam and the racial situation at home produced great social and political tensions by the end of 1967. Tensions burst to the surface in the course of 1968, threatening national chaos.

The year 1968 was one of the most turbulent years in the history of the United. By the late 1960s, the Baby Boom had created a large age due to American events, and the war in Vietnam was coming of age. The assassinations of Martin and Robert Kennedy in Vietnam caused a surge in the number of people atunrest across the nation's cities, student tending colleges and universities. There was a period of postwar prosperity and upheavals in which this generation had grown.

Student impatience was the most common form of turbulence of what the world should offer them. In France, a student uprising in May generations had demonstrated with the far exceeded in size and ferocity anything obstacles that stood in the way of their that occurred in the United States. A new global youth culture attracted the support of French workers that was in many ways at odds with the city of Paris.

It was a factor in the downfall of the gov valued nonconformity.

The power of South Korea, students and other young of global media contributed to the spread of turbulence in 1968. The introduction of satellite communication in the early 1960s made it difficult to transmit live news across the world.

There was more wide lightweight portable television cameras spread protest, as in Czechoslovakia, where media organizations were able to respond to hundreds of thousands of citizens in support of what became in the past. It caused a global and enormous demand for greater democracy and a repu particularly in industrial nations but even diation of many of the oppressive rules and in the poorer areas of the world. Protests structures imposed on the nation in one country were capable of communist regimes.

Russian tanks rolled into the city to crush the uprising in Paris.

Students in many parts of the world were protesting against the gay and lesbian rights that they considered antiquated. The events of 1968 did not change anything at the universities, but they did help the character of their own world.

In most parts of the world, the 1968 political changes that affected the uprisings came and went without fundamen peoples.

On January 31, 1968, the first day of the Vietnamese New Year, communist forces launched an enormous, concerted attack on American strongholds throughout South Vietnam. The communists temporarily took over a few cities. The sight of communist forces in the heart of Saigon, setting off bombs, shooting down South Vietnamese officials and troops, and holding down fortified areas was shocking to the American people. The brutality of the fighting in Vietnam was suggested to the American public by the Tet offensive. In the midst of the fighting, television cameras recorded the sight of a South Vietnamese officer shooting a captured and defenseless young Viet Cong soldier in the head.

The Viet Cong were driven out of most of the positions they had seized by American forces. During the battle they inflicted enormous casualties on the communists and permanently diminished the ranks of the NLF, forcing North Vietnamese troops to take on a much larger share of the fighting, but such accomplishments were not appreciated by the American public. The United States may have won the war in Vietnam, but it was a political defeat for the administration.

The opposition to the war grew in the following weeks. Leading newspa pers and magazines began taking public stands against the conflict. Johnson's popularity rating was the lowest of any president since Harry Truman, and public opposition to the war almost doubled.

In the summer of 1967, dissident Democrats tried to mobilize support for an antiwar candidate who would challenge Lyndon Johnson in the 1968 primaries.

They recruited Senator Eugene McCarthy after Robert Kennedy turned them down. A brilliantly orchestrated campaign by young volunteers in the New Hampshire primary produced a startling showing by McCarthy, who nearly defeated the president.

Robert Kennedy brought his own strength to the antiwar cause by embittering many McCarthy supporters but also bringing his own strength to minorities, poor people, and workers. The president is trailing badly in the next primary. The first major concession to the anti war forces was made by Johnson on March 31, 1968, when he announced a limited halt in the bombing of North Vietnam. He withdrew from the presi dential contest.

Robert Kennedy won election after election to become the Democratic Party's champion. The Vice President entered the contest with the support of the President and began to get the support of the party leaders and the many delegations that were selected not by popular primaries but by state party organizations. Kennedy was the leader in the race.

James Earl Ray, who was captured in London two months later, had no apparent motive. He never revealed the identity of his employers, despite evidence that he had been hired to do the killing.

A lot of grief was produced by King's death. It produced anger among some African Americans. Riots broke out in more than sixty American cities after the assassination. There were 43 people who died.

Robert Kennedy appeared at a Los Angeles hotel late in the night of June 6 to acknowledge his victory in the California primary. Sirhan Sirhan, a young Palestinian, shot Kennedy in the head as he left the ballroom after his victory statement. Kennedy died early the next morning.

Even the most optimistic observers predicted turbulence when the Democrats gathered in Chicago for a convention in which Humphrey was the only real contender. Both Kennedy and McCarthy supported an antiwar plank in the party platform. Thousands of antiwar protesters staged demonstrations in a downtown park. On the third night of the convention, as the delegates began their balloting on the now virtually inevitable nomination of Humphrey, demonstrators and police clashed in a bloody riot in the streets of Chicago. Police used tear gas and billy clubs to break up the protesters. A badly fractured party made it difficult for Humphrey to manage his campaign after he got the nomination.

The events of 1968 convinced some people that American society was about to change. Many Americans responded to the turmoil by questioning the social changes of the prior decade and taking a conservative political turn.

George Wallace's campaign for the presidency was a sign of the conservative backlash. He was a third-party candidate for president in 1968 because of conservative grievances. He denounced the forced busing of students to achieve racial integration in public schools, the proliferation of government regulations and social programs, and the permissiveness of authorities toward crime, race riots, and antiwar demonstrations. Wallace's standing in the polls rose at times to over 20 percent, despite the fact that there was never any chance that he would win the election.

The Republican Party was trying to mobilize the conservative middle in favor of order and stability.

He easily captured the nomination of his party for the presidency by offering a vision of stability, law and order, government retrenchment, and "peace with honor" in Vietnam. Nixon hung on to win despite a last-minute surge by Humphrey, just as he did in 1960.

He received 43.4 percent of the popular vote to Humphrey's 42.3 percent, and 301 electoral votes to Humphrey's 191. George Wallace, who like most third-party candidates faded in the last weeks of the campaign, still has a chance to win the election and carry five southern states with a total of 46 electoral ballots. Nixon did not win a decisive personal mandate. According to the elec tion, a majority of the American electorate was more interested in stability than in promoting social change.

The 1960s were the most enduring and powerful decade of the twentieth century. It began with the election and the assassination of John Kennedy, an attractive and energetic young president who captured the imagination of millions. It produced a period of political innovation, led by President Lyndon Johnson, who greatly expanded the size and functions of the federal government and its responsibility for the welfare of the nation's citizens. He referred to it as the Great Society. This time also saw the emergence of a civil rights movement that won a number of important legal victories, including two major civil rights acts that dismantled the Jim Crow system.

The spirit of optimism that made the early 1960s so productive brought surface problems and grievances that had no easy solutions. Expectations of social and economic equality were awakened by the civil rights movement. The peaceful, interracial crusade of the early 1960s gradually turned into a much more militant, confrontational, and increasingly separatist movement towards the end of the decade. The 1960's saw the emergence of an angry rebellion against many aspects of American culture and politics, which resulted in a large amount of student protest at the end of the decade. A small and largely unnoticed Cold War commitment to defend South Vietnam against communist aggression from the north led to a large and disastrous war that destroyed the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, sent thousands of young men and women to their deaths, and showed no signs of producing a victory. A decade that began with high hopes and soaring ideals ended with division.