Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (67 page)

Popular attitudes toward the Vietnam War especially revealed the persistent power of patriotic, anti-Communist opinion. The war sparked the most extensive protests in American history: at least 600,000 people joined "moratorium" demonstrations in Washington in late 1969. But anti-war demonstrators enraged millions of other Americans, many of them working-class people who were not necessarily pro-war but who deeply resented the fact that many of the young protestors ridiculed American institutions and avoided military service. "Here were those kids, rich kids who could go to college, didn't have to fight," a construction worker railed. "They are telling you your son died in vain. It makes you feel your whole life is shit, just nothing."
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The anti-war protests especially angered the Cold Warriors who directed foreign policy in Washington, and until 1970 they had only limited effect on electoral politics: all three major presidential candidates on the ballot in 1968 opposed American withdrawal from the war. Significant reductions in American ground forces came only in 1969–70, by which time "cut-our-losses" realists began to coalesce effectively but very uneasily with moral opponents of the war. By then it was obvious to all but a minority of people that the United States had little chance of winning.

Political attitudes revealed other ambiguities in the 1960s. While contemporary accounts, especially in the mass media, lavished attention on the rise of the student and anti-war Left, conservative activists were also mobilizing. The Young Americans for Freedom, a right-of-center organization, was founded in 1960. It attracted as many members in the 1960s as the SDS, established in the same year. "Neo-conservative" intellectuals, regrouping to criticize the liberal programs of the early 1960s, gathered increasingly large audiences by 1970. The GOP, meanwhile, rebuilt itself after suffering serious defeats in the early 1960s; in 1966 it scored impressive victories, and in 1968 it recaptured the presidency. Conservatives have often controlled national politics, especially the presidency, since that time.

A final, durable continuity: America remained one of the most religious cultures in the Western World. This religiosity assumed a large variety of forms. Religious leaders and church-goers continued to contribute to the civil rights movement. Norman Vincent Peale, still preaching the message of positive thinking, prospered as a much-admired figure. So did Billy Graham, whose evangelical crusades drew millions in the United States and elsewhere in the world. Although church-going in the United States fell a bit from its peak in the 1950s, it remained high. An estimated 43 percent of Americans regularly attended services in 1968, compared to approximately 10 to 15 percent in England and France.
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Less noticed at the time, but obvious later, fundamentalists of varied persuasions were becoming increasingly numerous and preparing to speak out. Some were super-patriotic and politically reactionary; others were scarcely able to contain their rage at the Supreme Court and at elites—governmental, corporate, educational, scientific—that they perceived to be ruining the nation. While the fundamentalist leaders were white and upper middle-class, the followers included large numbers of poor and working-class people.
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The appearance in 1970 of Hal Lindsey's book
The Late Great Planet Earth
suggested the depth of fundamentalist feelings in the country. This was a pre-millenarian tract that foresaw a nuclear apocalypse caused by an anti-Christ, after which Jesus Christ returned to earth and saved mankind. The book became the best-selling non-fiction book of the 1970s and sold more than 28 million copies by 1990.

What these complex trends—the changes as well as the continuities— indicate is that the 1960s were an age of increasingly open polarization and fragmentation.
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The decade, to repeat, ushered in unprecedented affluence and escalating expectations, and it left long-range legacies, especially in the realm of race relations and in the personal behavior—much more free and anti-authoritarian—of many young people. Yet well-entrenched older values, cherished by what Richard Nixon and others called the silent majority, persisted along with these changes. The conflict between older and newer mores, contested openly on the ever-broader and more sensational stage of the mass media, sharply exposed already existing divisions in the nation, especially along lines of age, race, gender, and social class. The center that had more or less held in the late 1950s cracked in the 1960s, exposing a glaring, often unapologetic polarization that seemed astonishing to contemporaries.
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16
The New Frontier at Home

Inauguration day, January 20, 1961, was cold and bright, the sun reflecting brilliantly off new-fallen snow in Washington. The glare prevented the aging poet Robert Frost, who was invited to recite at the ceremony, from reading the poem he had composed for the occasion. He gave one instead from memory. But this was the only hitch in a memorable day. Thousands among the throng at the Capitol, and millions among those who watched the event on television, were captivated by the image of a youthful, vigorous, and eloquent Kennedy, who proclaimed his determination to advance American ideals throughout the world. Summoning the idealism and commitment of the American people, he told them: "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. . . . Ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man."
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Critics found Kennedy's oration to be bombastic. Yet popular reaction was generally enthusiastic, and many people never forgot his call to action. Moreover, Kennedy seemed ready to deliver on his promises. Although his selectees for top posts were hardly known as reformers—Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, and Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon were Republicans—he made a show of assembling a team of highly educated and activist advisers. Many of them were academic people—"the best and the brightest"—from Harvard and other elite institutions. Dean Rusk, his Secretary of State, had been a Rhodes Scholar. In celebrating the brilliance of his team Kennedy rarely missed a chance to accentuate the difference between his presidency and that of the allegedly tired Eisenhower administration.

Kennedy's administrative style indeed differed from Eisenhower's. Where Ike had relied on a hierarchical system that he had known as an army officer, JFK sought out ideas from a corps of free-wheeling advisers. Chief among them was his brother Robert, whom he dared to name as Attorney General. McNamara, a super-efficient and dominating administrator whom JFK took from the presidency of the Ford Motor Company, was another. Serving him as advisers in the White House were Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a Harvard history professor, and Theodore "Ted" Sorensen, an articulate young liberal.
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Sorensen helped write many of JFK's major speeches, including the inaugural address. For political matters Kennedy relied heavily on able strategists—critics called them the Irish Mafia—such as Kenneth O'Donnell and Lawrence O'Brien. Many other Americans, most of them young and idealistic, converged on Washington to seek lesser posts in the ever-growing federal bureaucracy and to trumpet bold new ideas about town. Old hands fondly likened the atmosphere to the early days of the New Deal.

Some contemporaries, including Democrats, were appalled by what they perceived accurately as the loose administrative style of the new administration. "They've got the damnedest bunch of boy commandos running around . . . you ever saw," Adlai Stevenson told a friend.
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And serious flaws soon revealed themselves. In April the Kennedy administration blundered impetuously into a disastrous effort to overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba. But even this debacle had no apparent effect on the young President's extraordinary popularity. Kennedy, indeed, reached out with unparallelled success to the media. He was the first President to allow his press conferences to be televised live. By May 1961 some three-fourths of the American people had seen at least one. Of these viewers, a staggering 91 percent said that they had a favorable impression of his performance, as opposed to only 4 percent who responded unfavorably.
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Setbacks also failed to blight the special and apparently contagious confidence that Kennedy and his advisers sustained. Many of them, like Kennedy himself, had matured during World War II, days of struggle and sacrifice that had supposedly given them the "toughness"—a favorite word of Kennedy people—to cross the new frontiers of the 1960s. Extraordinarily self-assured, they were even as young people highly conscious of their place in history. Kennedy liked to cite the words of Shakespeare in
Henry
V:

We . . . shall be remembered;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers . . .
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here.

Thanks in part to this élan, Kennedy managed to bring a special aura to the American presidency. Truman and Eisenhower, to be sure, had presided over substantial growth in the size and power of the executive branch. The extraordinarily telegenic Kennedy greatly accelerated these trends by drawing popular attention to the pomp and circumstance of the office. Kennedy and his elegant wife Jackie invited a parade of famous artists, musicians, and writers to the White House. Carefully orchestrated state dinners for visiting dignitaries received wide publicity. Jackie proudly showed off the way that she redecorated the presidential home. Many reporters, themselves young and liberal, lavished attention on the high culture and taste that the Kennedys appeared to bring to government. An air of royalty was enveloping the land of the common man.

Americans began hearing more and more about the "awesome" responsibilities of the Oval Office, now regularly capitalized by credulous journalists who described the High Decision-Making taking place there and who left no doubt that the fate of the world depended on the deeds of the American President. Theodore White's popular account of the 1960 election,
The Making of the President
, 1960 (1961), not only highlighted the brilliance of Kennedy and his advisers but also spoke reverently of the "hush, an entirely personal hush" that surrounded presidential activity. The hush, he added, "was deepest in the Oval Office of the West Wing of the White House, where the President, however many his advisers, must sit alone."
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The celebration of the American presidency, and by extension of the potential of the federal government, greatly encouraged contemporary advocates of strong White House leadership. Kennedy himself remained personally very popular throughout his presidency. Along with the booming economy, which after 1962 seemed capable of almost anything, the magnified mystique of the presidency stimulated ever-greater expectations among liberals and others who imagined that government possessed big answers to big problems. The revolution of popular expectations, a central dynamic of the 1960s, owed a good deal of its strength to the glorification of presidential activism that Kennedy successfully sought to foment.

H
IGH EXPECTATIONS
early gripped contemporaries who yearned for a New Frontier in the realm of domestic policies.
Newsweek
predicted following the election that Kennedy could hope for a "long and fruitful 'honeymoon' with the new Democratic 87th Congress." If Kennedy "jumps right in with a broad new legislative program,"
Newsweek
added, "he will find Congress so receptive that his record might well approach Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous 'One Hundred Days.'"
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The magazine proceeded to list reasons why Kennedy might succeed, chief among them the support of capable Democratic leaders such as House Speaker Rayburn and Vice-President Johnson, who was to preside over a Senate that he had dominated as majority leader since 1955. Many domestic programs that adorned the Democratic domestic agenda, such as legislation to help "depressed areas," federal aid to education and to housing, and a hike in the minimum wage from $1 to $1.25 an hour, had wide support among congressional liberals. Some form of federal health insurance seemed possible.

Reformers had a few successes over the next three years. Working purposefully in 1961, Kennedy succeeded in enlarging the House Rules Committee, a bottleneck that had long blocked liberal efforts, and Rayburn then shepherded through a hike in the minimum wage.
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Congress also enacted legislation providing modest public funding for manpower training and depressed areas, notably Appalachia. In 1962 it approved important (though little-noted) amendments to drug regulations; these required new drugs to be tested for efficacy as well as for safety before they could be approved for use.

Kennedy also took a few steps that later advanced the interests of women. In 1961 he named Eleanor Roosevelt to head a Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. Its report in 1963, in some ways far from feminist, advocated special training of young women to prepare them for marriage and proclaimed that motherhood was the major role of the American woman. Dominated by advocates of protective labor legislation for women, the commission also opposed the Equal Rights Amendment.
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The President meanwhile appointed fewer women to high-level federal posts than had his predecessors: he was the only President since Hoover never to have a woman in the Cabinet.
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Still, the commission made some difference. It called for a federal stand against sex discrimination and affirmed that women, like men, had a right to paid employment. It also stimulated formation of similar commissions on the state level. Thanks in part to the commission, Kennedy issued an executive order ending sex discrimination in the federal civil service. In 1963 he signed an Equal Pay Act that guaranteed women equal pay for equal work. Although this act excluded employees not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act and had no provisions for enforcement, it had some effect. In the next ten years 171,000 employees received a total of $84 million in back pay under the act.
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Most important, Kennedy's commission encouraged women activists on both the state and federal levels to develop networks and to talk seriously about curbing long-standing divisions within their ranks. In this way, Kennedy unintentionally aroused expectations that encouraged a much more self-conscious feminist movement after 1964.

Kennedy, who had a mentally ill sister, also moved more actively than presidential predecessors to advance the cause of mental health. In 1963 Congress passed a Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers Act, which funded local mental health centers that were to provide a range of out-patient services, including marital counseling, help for delinquents, and programs for unwed mothers and alcoholics. The act sought in part to get mentally ill people out of large state hospitals, which supporters of the legislation considered to be "snake pits" of callous and inhumane treatment. Thanks to subsequent funding for this effort at deinstitutionalization, the population of mental hospitals declined from 475,000 in 1965 to 193,000 in 1975. Use of mental health services, meanwhile, exploded (six-fold between 1955 and 1980) among a populace ever more concerned about its psychological well-being.
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The new President took special interest in measures aimed at promoting economic growth. Some of these sought to reassure corporate leaders, most of whom had supported Republicans over the years. In 1962 Kennedy secured approval of legislation that accelerated depreciation allowances and granted businesses tax credits for investment in certain kinds of equipment.
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The law probably enhanced corporate investment and growth. Kennedy also sought to mend political fences with business that had been damaged following his heavy-handed attempt earlier in 1962 to stop leading steel companies from introducing inflationary price increases. After the companies temporarily backed down, he had been quoted as saying, "My father always told me that all businessmen were sons-of-bitches, but I never believed it till now." Angry corporate leaders had responded by wearing
S.O.B.
("Sons of Business") buttons on their lapels.
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In 1962 Kennedy began to listen carefully to Keynesian economists, notably Walter Heller, a University of Minnesota professor whom he had named to head the Council of Economic Advisers. Heller, like many other economists in the early 1960s, was buoyantly self-confident about his discipline. "Our statistical net," he maintained, "is now spread wider and brings in its catch faster. Forecasting has the benefit of not only more refined, computer-assisted methods but of improved surveys of consumer and investment intentions."
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Heller's enthusiasm brilliantly reflected the rapidly rising confidence that liberals, especially in the social sciences, were developing about the ability of "experts" to manage American society. This self-assurance, expanding still more in the mid-1960s, excited and energized liberal activism at the time.

Although Kennedy had to struggle to understand the theoretical arguments of Heller and other economists, he made considerable progress, and by 1962 he was ready to act on Heller's advice. For political and humanitarian reasons he was anxious to reduce unemployment and to accelerate economic growth. He also concluded that moderately higher federal deficits, which Heller foresaw, could be risked without causing serious inflation; Eisenhower, after all, had (unintentionally) run sizeable deficits during the recessionary years between 1958 and 1960. And cutting taxes always sold well with Congress and the public. So it was that he came out publicly in late 1962 for one of Heller's main goals: a cut in personal income and corporate taxes. Such reductions, it was argued, would free funds for investment and thereby promote economic expansion.
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