1960s

okay today we're gonna start talking about the 1960s but before we get there I really have to back up and talk about some trends that get us there it seems to me that the 60s have a reputation for tremendous social change and a lot of that is appropriate well deserved on the other hand most of the trends that we see taking full development flowering if you will in 1960s really start after the Second World War the Second World War was total war was tremendously disruptive to ordinary people's lives it changed all sorts of patterns women started going outside the home and working in many cases for the first time itself those women hadn't done that before they had but lots of specific people who had been staying at home did that as part of the war effort a lot of people had their professions transformed or interrupted by working on the war effort either by being in the military or being in supporting industries and so on people moved to all sorts of parts of the country they haven't seen before in many cases they stayed it changed sexual relationships partly because of disruptions during the war partly because of the availability of cars after the war which may dating without chaperone possible for the first time in any case there were tremendous social changes associated with the 60s but in almost every respect they really began much earlier and so it's important I think to start a bit earlier to see how they developed let's think first about the struggle for civil rights when would you say the battle for civil rights really started in an earnest way there are lots of possible things you could give in a sense there's panic this is all honey you could go all the way back to anti-slavery movements in the early 1800s for example but what events do you associate with the struggle for civil rights yeah how so alright great point World War two brought people of different races in different parts of the country together in many cases for the first time and so that was something that changed racial attitudes began this sense of wait a minute I'm you know I fought next to these guys and they're okay and so forth so so yes that was something that began a change and really it was right around that time I think that important changes began to develop at first far outside of the law this man seems to be one of the most important figures in the history of civil rights who is that guy here's another picture I know it's Ricky the guy who hired Jackie Robinson ok Branch Rickey was a ballplayer who failed to catch her basically but he became a great manager and general manager he managed the st. Louis Cardinals in the 1940s taking them to several World Series 1942 look at these World Series programs 1943 1944 in 1945 he ended up moving to the Brooklyn Dodgers and brought Jackie Robinson into the Dodgers farm system initially he played for the Montreal Royals a Dodger farm team and in fact that itself was a new thing Branch Rickey was the first person to actually have major league teams have farm teams in the minor leagues in any case he integrated the Montreal Royals and that brought about the end of the Negro Leagues there had been a separate segregated baseball league for black players here you see Josh Gibson of the Homestead Grays at the bat he was considered the black Babe Ruth he was one of the greatest people in the Negro Leagues era this isn't widely known but my grandfather reported the Pittsburgh Pirates in the Homestead Grays every year played an exhibition game against each other ordinary ordinarily white teams just played white teams black teams just played back black teams but in a few cities with both these kinds of exhibition games would take place the white press completely ignored them but the black press paid a lot of attention and my grandfather reported that during those conflicts the Greece beat the crowd lot of the pirates so in general the standard of play in the Negro Leagues is very very high unfortunately we don't have very reliable statistics for a lot of what happened that but Jackie Robinson was a player that Rickey identified as somebody who was young enough to have a large career ahead of him and mentally tough enough to put up with what he would have to put up with so Robinson started playing for the Dodgers he could make the major leagues in 1947 he put up with a lot of crap a lot of taunts a lot of racial abuse it was a very difficult thing nevertheless he performed an extraordinarily high level and led the Dodgers to the pennant here you see Robinson with some of his teammates Pee Wee Reese second from the left here you see him being adored by fans so wasn't all abuse he was also a national hero and you see that yeah his own little magazine was created to honor him and actually that wasn't the only one there were a bunch of these now why do I make a big deal of this well yes it transformed baseball that's certainly true look at these stars of the 1940s Joe DiMaggio Johnny mugs Ted Williams Ralph Kiner notice anything they all have in common they're all white through it look at these 1950s and 1960s stars Willie Mays Hank Aaron Roberto Clemente Willie Stargell Bob Gibson I realized I've seen all those guys play in person yeah but anyway notice all of those guys are black now that's something that well had much more impact at the time than you might imagine now why baseball was the national passed passed by the NFL existed but it was really not something people paid much attention to it was roughly at the level of high school games now frankly basketball yeah there were basketball teams but they were too big deal there was one sport in the United States that people paid attention to and that was baseball and so baseball was integrated in 1947 it took a few years for other teams to catch up to where he was nevertheless he was somebody who had a big impact first in Brooklyn and the Dodgers began succeeding so well other teams basically had to integrate in order to keep up he moved to the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1955 and brought Roberto Clemente with him and so the Pirates became a team that was integrated very early which helped them in the 1960s and 70s and so on and so there was a transformation of what we considered the national pastime and I think that itself had a huge impact on racial attitudes not only was there a mixing during during the war and mixing as a result of a highway system and other developments we'll talk about but also people began to look up to his heroes people of another race and that transforms your attitudes how do you stay a racist if every night you fall asleep looking at a poster Roberto Clemente on your wall in any case yeah I don't want to talk about that we've already talked well I didn't talk about that but that's something we skipped you were supposed to have read about that so I'll jump you it took a while for legal things to catch up Dwight the Eisenhower who had led Allied forces in Europe well have been really overall during the Second World War in fact I've got to tell you once Rob Coons and I were at a conference in Canada and Canadians have a kind of thing I mean an inferiority complex about the United States so we were we had our tags on the subway as we were going somewhere I've been identified as being from the University of Texas and so this Canadian guy looks at us this is your Americans yes Americans say I think he was drunk but maybe that's just the way Canadians are he starts asking us these questions like Canada you know we didn't know the answers and I started defending us saying well look it's not that Americans don't know anything about Canada so we don't know anything about anything we wouldn't be able to answer these about any cross country other than our own so don't feel singled out Canadians you know well anyway that didn't mollifying them all I was I meant to be a joke but in any case he then said okay who is the commander of the Canadian forces in world war - and Rob Kuhn said Dwight David Eisenhower which really pissed him off Eisenhower was courted by both major parties to run for president 1952 he accepted the Republican nomination and won handily he became oh and yes here was the button I like Ike a simple method a simple sort of campaign message in any way in case Paul Johnson is described Eisenhower is the most successful of the 20th century presidents and the decade when he ruled was the most prosperous in American and indeed in world history Richard Nixon his own vice president described it as complex and devious and if there's anybody who knows complex and devious it's Richard Nixon no Eisenhower didn't appear to be complex and devious in fact he played a lot of golf and created this image that uh he was just kind of you know relaxing through the presidency but in fact he was up at five o'clock in the morning so by the time other people showed up for work actually I shouldn't say he was up at 5:00 he was at work at 5:00 which meant that he did a lot of things really before other people appeared most of his phone calls with European leaders and so on we're taking place long before anybody else calls the White House he had a few simple principles he believed in exercising power by stealth in the background there is an attitude well expressed in a Chinese classic The Art of War written by bumsoo I have a cat named after some soup and basically what some sue argues is that the best general is the one who does not fight okay does not make moves explicitly you might think of it as one of these games where you're pushing them where the marble has to go around the maze you just suck the took the board okay and that's what a good leader does screen2 sunsoo you subtly tip the board so that people aren't even aware of things Lao Tzu in the daodejing actually express expresses a similar idea he says the worst leaders people despise middling leaders they praise the great leaders they barely know even exist things are done we did these things ourselves but people say yeah and that's the kind of leader Eisenhower was it seemed like things were just happening K but his own hand was usually behind the scenes doing things very something he had a few simple principles he knew how horrible war could be so one person was to avoid war another was that strict constitutional control over military action he saw a trend toward the use of military force without congressional approval up until this point in American history in order for the United States to go to war Congress had to vote and declare war now it's routine that troops are committed and so on without this sort of congressional approval and Eisenhower saw this trend and thought it was a terrible idea he also thought it was very important that the United States preserve its economic the security of freedom rests on the economy and so he wanted to be very careful to control federal spending and commitments which he saw as having a natural tendency to increase well partly with Eisenhower's help there was a dramatic economic and political recovery in Western Europe in a variety of countries on both sides from the Second World War the United States economy get very well - this is the kind of car I remember riding around in as a kid and here's another 1950s automobile here's another one and of course we have an image of the nineteen fifties family Leave It to Beaver right and that sort of setting by the way that's filmed in Los Angeles there's one particular street where there are no palm trees and when people in Hollywood want to represent middle America that's where they go because it doesn't look like California well I mean that's the street I grew up on all those houses built myths 1950s for servicemen returning from the Second World War the Korean War and there were a number of other important changes Eisenhower backed the development of the interstate highway system which now goes across the entire country all of that was something begun in the mid to late 50s it made transportation much easier than had been before made the economic and social integration of the country much more complete well there are a number of things we could remark on about the 1950s developments in the economy the rise of the middle class the growth in prosperity the growth of the consumer culture tell visions cars being available to people in the middle class routinely for the first time people owning their own homes that level is really unprecedented all of this was of course from a low baseline and so the 50s prosperity great as it was in a sense was not what you would recognize today as prosperity okay I grew up I remember the 50s pretty well we had one car we had a house that was about 900 square feet my brother didn't have a room he he has kind of closet there was a little place where a wall went back there like this that's where he's been buzzed luckily he was small man he grew to be six four wouldn't fit in for very long um I remember my favorite meal actually at a typical meal was a slice of white bread with some meatballs from a can on it and if we were lucky my mother would actually sauté up some fresh mushrooms to go with it if she and I usually ate them before they up the table I would stand next door of the stove just plucked him out of the frying pan in any case it was not exactly affluence by our standards the first movie I ever saw was 101 Dalmatians that was when I was six that was really the only movie I ever saw before I was like eight and so it was not a fluence in a sense that most of us would recognize almost nobody was fat on the other head in the 1950s if you had enough to eat that was considered prosperity there were very low levels of inequality and it's an interesting question debated sometimes now why why was inequality so low during 1950s there are a number of explanations one is that a lot of people with the same life stage at the same time so just as it happened there were a lot of people starting families and so on some of it was that unions were stood still very strong keeping the color wages high but it was really just the beginning you might say of the white collar information economy dominance and so white collar wages were not yet that high partly not very many people at this stage had been to college and so the tremendous variation the high returns on education that we've seen over the last 50 years did not yet start partly it was that education at the college level was really mostly a matter of class and economic status rather than its ability if you look at the people who were going to Harvard a Yale in the 1950s they weren't actually very different in IQ let's say from people who went to other schools or people who didn't go to college at all what was the difference how did they get into Harvard Yale they were rich that changed in the 1960s so the total school start admitting people on the basis of SAT scores and grades and all of that I know some people who were I shouldn't say this but I know a guy who is really pretty stupid oh it was significantly older than I am and I always thought he was kind of dumb and then I finally went to Yale I went to you it made me glad I turn down Yale it was like oh good facts I wouldn't have it around people like that because by the time I was making my college decision look it was largely a matter of SAT scores and grades and all of that kind of thing but in his era it was really a question of your family had money and so it was a very different thing part of it is the tax rates in the 1950s were very very hot and so who's gonna pay a ninety-one percent tax rate almost no much okay you find ways of sheltering income from taxes which makes things look equal even if they're not really equal later that rich person actually takes that as income but this era they wouldn't nobody's gonna pay a ninety-one percent tax rate and so it looks like they have a lower income when in fact they use hoarding their wealth and accessing it in different ways of course there are many other cultural changes yeah I've been a rock and roll Elvis Presley who recorded his hits on bat microphone there was the advent of television here's a family gathered around a new TV which was pretty typical of TVs at the time you got four channels if you lived in a big city and they were black and white ours was nineteen interest and I kept it until about five years ago still worked but finally had died and there I didn't know where to take about 1950s era television together prepared in any case yeah there were all sorts of hit shows like The Honeymooners or like Amos and Andy I'm not one effect of televisions and of mobile is that it really decreased regionalism United States it started a process of homogenization that continues today well I started teaching at the University of Texas a lot of my students have an identifiable Texas accent really today almost none of you have identifiable Texas accent why a lot of you have moved around you've been exposed to television media you tend to speak with standard American speech when I was a kid you can identify where most people were from just by listening to them talk and not just in a general way I mean if you had heard me talk or heard my relatives as I was growing up you would immediately identify us as being from Pittsburgh and not just from the city actually our accents would have pinned us to the southern part of the city and specifically to like that neighborhood which by the way all the streets looks like this good for most of it that's a picture from like when I would live there see the streetcar 36 yeah but but you know you could really pin things down and really the kind of sweets that I grew up with um it's part of the reason I do excess I'm doing one right now okay if I get sick enough I start talking with a Pittsburgh accent again and most of you really wouldn't understand a lot of why I would say accent here's an example just to illustrate this point I haven't used this before have I I don't think so I've meant to do it when we got to the Katy cave Pittsburgh but I think I didn't have time anyway this is a sense I've actually heard my cousin say in school Danielle I'll say it again you companion yeah it's actually pretty close to 17th century Scottish people who had their first something Pittsburgh but ya Yin's it's what and Texan would be y'all okay and that's how you can tell the South Hills North Hills would be us yeah it's gone that's going okay but that's down the end that's the end all teachers are just dropped in Pittsburgh is feeling and that a lot of sense is rendered in an app that means and and that in other words actually it's interesting by colleagues so hook for Sarkar from India also says that doing all this and that and you know it's like apparently Hindi also has these constructions which means and I everything associated with that so you spent on the end that means are you all going down to the end well some prepositional phrase there in this case it was of the street but prepositional phrases are routinely dropped the perp to be is routinely dropped okay so are you going down to the end something um and to engage in the activities associated there with which is okay so that's anyway that's the way a lot people now by friend Nicholas he grew up in Brooklyn for him it was a very different sort of accent but nevertheless he too learned to speak in standard American speech but if you meet Nicholas his brother he sounds like this kid from Brooklyn hidden okay it's a very strong speech pattern that was typical in the 1950s now it's actually pretty rare the top TV shows that help talk modernize American the $64,000 question I Love Lucy yes Sullivan Show Disneyland the Jack Benny program I remember when I turn there blows this running joke that he was 39 years old even though it's really much older I remember when I got to age 39 it's the only birthday I found really talk because like oh god now so bliss Jack Benny Oh December bride I don't remember that well you bet your life pregnant well anyway just the facts ma'am just the facts um beast yeah these still bounce around in my brain settling no more importantly maybe the civil rights move to that we associate that in most respects actually with the 1960s but things did start during him immediately after the Second World War there were some crucial steps taken during the 1950s under the Eisenhower Larry Brown versus Board of Education was the court case in 1954 the declared segregation of schools unconstitutional eisenhower enforced it aggressively he sent federal troops to integrate schools in Little Rock in 1957 in at the very end of the 19th century a case 1896 Plessy versus Ferguson the court had decided that separate but equal facilities were acceptable so you could have a white water fountain if you had an equal but separate black water table you could have them all-white school if you had a separate but equal black school and so on the brown decision decided that separate is inherently unequal there's a poster indicating that separate is not equal and so the Court struck down that sort of arrangement and declared segregation itself by race unconstitutional if you look at the details of a brown decision it's actually a very weird decision it's based on social science research that as far as I can tell the court just completely misinterpreted it was about how African American kids feel bad about themselves but the research was actually done in an integrated school okay so if anything if you took it seriously it would be an argument against integration not in the favor I don't think the court really understood what it was doing on the other hand it surely came to the right result it would be very simple to say look the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees the protection of the laws how can you say to this child that they can attend that neighborhood school and said this child that they camped solely on the basis of their race that's obviously a denial of equal protection so it seems to me the court didn't have to go through all the social science stuff it could have just said and one paragraph this is an obvious violation with a Fourteenth Amendment well shortly thereafter December 1st 1955 in Montgomery Alabama Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white passenger it became a national incident and led to the Montgomery bus boycott led by dr. Martin Luther King jr. that was really his first exposure to the national scene it's important to recognize this wasn't just an individual act of courage she made a replacement she was arrested here she is being booked and fingerprinted there's the page of fingerprints so anybody who did to find this at the time suffered legal penalties in Little Rock in 1957 the situation was different the black students who are the first to attend Highschool had to put up with the incredible abuse and really physical threats as you see in this image it took federal troops to actually escort the children successfully into the school well partly in response to these incidents the Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 it created the Civil Rights Commission to defend African American voting rights here you see President Eisenhower signing it or about to sign it there was another follow up Civil Rights Act of 1960 which expanded the authority of federal government judges to protect specifically voting rights so what the famous acts are the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in nineteen and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 they had predecessors just a few years early earlier in the Eisenhower administration well that drive for civil rights intensified in the 1960s Martin Luther King jr. led the movement he did that under a new president John Fitzgerald Kennedy who brought not only a sort of new ideology but a new glamour of the presidency there aren't many precedents before Kennedy that actually were very photogenic or very glamorous I mean think Calvin Coolidge nice respectable golly I think a good president but not it's not exactly keval up I think if it was no idols right so Kennedy brought a kind of new glamorous to the office for the first time there were a number of other things that were new here here is a televised debate between John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon it was the first time there was a televised debate it attracted tremendous attention and occasionally c-span reruns it if you get the opportunity to watch it watch even little part of it you will be astounded and I mean in a good way and in a bad way the good way both of the answers these candidates give to complex questions are extraordinarily complex so what is your policy toward Cuba each one gives this masterful little essay basically you can see the outline in their heads wonderfully developed wonderfully logically recently so they're both fantastic by our present standards today you you watch a presidential debate it's mostly about sound that's right what would you do if someone rape your daughter this is likely to face arthur guards i had the whole bit is about capturing a soundbite to embarrass somebody or whatever but in these cases it was really something that elevated american politics television wasn't going to care very long it'll date american politics so this was a delightful delightful but brief moment in any case the 1960 election was important in other ways the patterns i've talked about the fact that the patterns early in the century shifted it was still this el-sheikh pattern but it changed 1960 was one of the times it started changing and as you can see here it looks like of those things that were just mixed up on the map on to blue counties are the ones won by Kennedy the red ones are the ones won by Nixon it's hard to identify much of a pattern there is this was really in the midst of a major shift in American politics was also one extraordinarily close election well here is Don Kennedy with his brothers Robert Kennedy and Ted Kennedy I meant to the glamour in the White House here is John Kennedy's wedding and here he is with Jackie at the inauguration ball furious with his kids at Halloween so there was a huge amount of media attention he really was a very glamorous with guy well the civil rights struggle continued in 1963 Martin Luther King led the march on Washington which was the site of his I have a dream speech and which was really a very dramatic event that attracted a great deal of national attention there you see him speaking to a huge crowd by the reflecting pool on the National Mall and there's another image of that same basic scene well back to Kennedy and let's shift attention to foreign policy for a moment John attended II was in a variety of ways and ideologically a complex president hence the question you have to answer for the special opportunity paper he was somebody who in the in the debates with Richard Nixon actually ran someone to make sense right talking about a missile map urging that tax rates had to come down and so forth so he wasn't associated with policies that we today associate with the Democratic Party in foreign policy at dramatic new items most presidents had subscribed to a doctrine articulated by John Quincy Adams wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled there will be America's heart her benedictions that are praised she goes not abroad in search of monsters destroy she's the well-wisher of the freedom and independence of all she's attempting and vindicated only for home what John Quincy Adams is saying is look we cheer on freedom wherever it exists in the world but we fight for our own freedom we don't get involved in other people's conflicts if you're fighting for freedom we applaud you yay we're on your side okay but that's all we're willing to do well that's changed after the Second World War George Kennan argued for a need for occasional counter pressure to contain the Soviet Union and Truman and Eisenhower adopted that sort of emendation of the John Quincy Adams doctrine we will fight for our own freedom or the freedom of our allies whose survival is vital to American self-interest so the idea was really well it's not just that we're going to be isolationist and only fight to defend ourselves we'll fight to defend freedom when it's our own at stake or those of close allies who are really vital to our own interests now that is a significant expand that was used optimally to back intervention in Korea in Cuba and ultimately in Vietnam so that is no trivial change but actually kennedy's conception was much more expansive still he said let every nation know whether it wishes us well or ill that we shall pay any price bear any burden meet any hardship support any friend oppose any foe to ensure the survival and success of Liberty so essentially Kennedy said we will fight for liberty no matter where no matter how no matter how it costs whether it's in our own self-interest or not we're on the side of freedom and we will fight on that side no matter what well that was something of a blank check really but his main emphasis wasn't really on military and altman's he wanted peaceful forms of involvement engagement to promote Liberty so he devised for first team he embedded that that were the Peace Corps the Green Berets so the third could be military pressure used but in very highly selective ways an alliance for progress meant to promote economic cooperation among many of the three countries of the world he backed increased economic and military aid to foreign nations so his main office was not really on military defense of freedom but on other ways of encouraging the spread of freedom well let's turn to Cuba which became the key turning point in his presidency with respect to his conceptions of foreign policy Fidel Castro began a rebellion in Cuba in the early 1950s there wasn't all that much fighting actually on the ground the real battle was waged in the new york times it was kind of a propaganda fight ah friend Franklin Roosevelt had said back in the 1930s about a dictator in Nicaragua Anastasio Somoza that he was a son of a but at least he was our son of a well the State Department said the same thing about patty Stowe who was ruling Cuba in the 1950s here's one official I know Batista is considered by many as a son of a but American interests come first he sees ourself a but by 1957 the pressure of the propaganda battle was such that the State Department decided Batista had to go so they backed his overthrow and backed Castro well Castro by the way I'm sorry that that my headings disappeared I know what happened though that's supposed to say Fidel Castro who the but there it goes anyway he postponed elections for 18 months he abolished all political parties he jailed opposition leaders he invested all legislative power in his cabinet just as Hitler had done through the enabling act he court-martialed his opponents he announced that revolutionary justice is based on legal precepts but on moral conviction I eat you guilty if I say you're guilty okay the alliance of the USSR and so Cuba went from being really a close ally of the United States and a country that was in very close economic cooperation with the United States to something allied with the USSR to being an enemy of the United States it went from being one of the richest nations of Latin America to being one of the poorest here for example is a scene of Cuba today you look at the cars did you think oh that's Cuban 1959 no that's Cuba now anyway Kennedy quickly realized the mistake that had been made here Eisenhower in fact had and B had begun training these Cuban exiles who were going to be a force to try to take the Cuba back from Castro well Kennedy inherited this program essentially and was not sure what to do with it one option was to abandon and say look this is hopeless we can't do this we made a mistake but now it's made so what are we gonna do on one option was to put the full power of the United States military in support of this invasion Kennedy didn't want to do that at risk confrontation with the Soviet Union so he said well we'll encourage them to attack but we won't actually do anything to help okay we won't provide air support we won't provide other kinds of military support the result of that was the twelve thousand armed Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs and Cuban has started an uprising against Castro it was a fiasco I quite a number of them were killed they were all captured Castro used to shoot those people in prison whom he accused of somehow cooperating in this and encouraging it he jailed one hundred thousand others he declared himself dictator and so this was really a disaster shortly thereafter I should say in the meantime Kennedy had met with Khrushchev in Vienna had come across as something of a wimp in Christoph's opinion that was not the American opinion of Kennedy we thought of him as glamorous but when you're up against the Russians drama can look like weakness so in any case if Khrushchev decided Kennedy was easily pushed around and decided to put missiles in Cuba just a few miles off the coast of Florida this is Cuba that shows you how close it is to Florida there's really just a 90 mile gap here in the waters and so Russian missiles began to be construct you hear but oh yes this is out of order but those are the guys captures the Bay of Pigs well the United States had become an economic embargo with Cuba and then on October 14 1962 u-2 spy planes revealed missile bases being constructed in Cuba Khrushchev said 42 long-range missiles at sort of intermediate range 24 long-range missiles 24 anti-aircraft missile groups and 22,000 Soviet troops and technicians to Cuba in support of this endeavor so this shows you what's those missiles that fully installed and operational what if they need to do their wooden short-range missiles in addition to those I mentioned it could reach Florida New Orleans but then the intermediate range could reach a significant part of the United States and then the long-range ones could reach almost everything yes yeah Microsoft would have been safe well here is a meeting of Kennedy with his cabinet trying to decide what to do in response to the placement of missiles in Cuba here were the options they faced one was to do nothing to allow the missiles to be installed in Cuba a second was to apply diplomatic pressure to go back to Christophe and say this is unacceptable we demand their removal a third was a naval blockade a quarantine to basically prevent any further missiles or supplies from entering Cuba the fourth option was an aerial attack to bomb the missile bases and the final option was invaded to actually send troops in decide to do the Bay of Pigs right said American forces in deceits those missile bases in to overthrow Castro now I want you to imagine from a moment that it's October 1962 and the year remember President Kennedy's cabinet which of those five options do you support there were people in the cabinet who supported all of the mother none of these is an obvious crazy movement okay so feel free to say whatever is on your behind you have good and respectable company or at least you did on the on the cabinet yep Oh combination two and three aren't necessarily you know mutually exclusive so you could apply that end and actually that's what Kennedy ended up doing he did apply the naval blockade declared quarantined and this confrontation came in the high seas um who would argue for another option well we know how that worked out right so in a sense it's historically cheating look I rarely did that it was a paper still here so I guess I guess I'll go about um there were people like Lyndon Johnson actually Kennedy's vice president who argued in favor of an aerial attack there were other people who said well let's just apply diplomatic pressure let's go risk confrontation in the end the president went with quarantine and announced that decision on national television picture here the tensions heck during this times the United States went to DEFCON two that is the highest degree of military preparedness short of war and here you see children ducking and covering under their desks in case of nuclear attack okay I was in the second grade in the fall of 1962 and I can tell you we did that okay we went through these drills we were all assigned dog tags and there was a color on the dog tag that would indicate whether in the case of nuclear attack you had time to walk home huh okay I live very close to the school so I had a green dog tag meaning I could go home and it had my name and blood type on it okay and my mother hopefully indicated that's because that's so that if you're dead they can figure out who you are some kids that yellow which meant well depends how close to the missiles and then if you were red that meant basement of the school for you okay the entire city of Pittsburgh actually shut down one day and we all simulated the nuclear attack we basically said okay what happens three o'clock today we're going to pretend there are incoming missiles observed and so businesses shut down I was sent home from school my mother and I huddled in a new bathroom we had just built in the basement it was creepy okay but there was a very real sense that we were that close to nuclear war and of course in Pittsburgh we what would be the first place anyone would have Pittsburgh which at the time is less than saved that it seems now given medic was the center of the u.s. steel industry in time whether in any case yes all missile crews were placed on maximum alert and there was a confrontation October 24th Soviet ships approached the quarantine line and stopped and here's a photograph of that confrontation there is the Soviet supply ship and there is the American destroyer that's where the confrontation happened the Soviet ship turned around no the perception of this at the time was that President Kennedy had done a great job he had faced down the Russians he had stood up to this threat he had done something incredibly courageous and had won the gamble and there is a truth to that perception on the other hand there were two things that happened behind the scenes that people at the time we're unaware of first of all he promised the Soviet Union never to invade Cuba okay that option is four and five would be completely off the table permanently off the table and the second thing is that the US had placed missiles in Turkey and he promised to remove the missiles in Turkey so once you know that you realize wait we made this sort of move placing missiles very close to the Soviet Union they responded by placing missiles very close to the United States then we both back down okay and that's a much more ambiguous outcome Paul Johnson describes it as a loss to the United States he says it was an American defeat the worst that had suffered in the Cold War I think that's going a bit far but nevertheless it was at best a stalemate it was really kind of up a man I would've beat the crap out of you he says he stands up and says I'll beat the crap out of you okay I don't know how to call you know what I don't know what that is exactly but whatever you call that that's what this was working us now in response Kennedy start the space program is there any place where we can catch them what can we do can we put a man on the moon before them and so he actually without a great deal of thought or deliberation announced his to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade which worked and so that was something that was actually a dramatic initiative that succeeded and that led to a significant you might say propaganda victory a very least but also a great deal of technological advance he also escalated involvement in Vietnam in a meeting and Uwe Boll office he said now we have a problem in making our power credible yeah bomb looks like the place that was gonna be not such a good call yeah there was supposed to be a dramatic picture of the man on the moon there okay I don't know where it went so yeah this is the dark side yeah Eisenhower had put forth the idea of the domino theory if he had Nam Falls to communist expansion than other countries in Southeast Asia will fall to loss will lose Cambodia Indonesia Thailand even India opposite and so Kennedy sent military advisers to help the South Vietnamese there was another leader like Batista there yep he arranged for Jim's assassination and a coup to replace it because he thought that it was really impossible to support the diem government here's the situation horse Vietnam was a total separate country South Vietnam was a democratic nation here is Laos on border in Cambodia most of the fighting took place in Vietnam or right on the borders with Laos and Cambodia a lot of refugees ended up in Thai man and so that's the situation that's the Kennedys thought this is a place to draw the line well not much more happen this is the motorcade November 22nd 1963 in Dallas some of President Kennedy's last moments alive the assassination was actually captured on film Abraham Zapruder happened to be standing in Dealey Plaza with his brand-new video camera and he took this film you see there the first bullet strike the president there's a close-up and you can see governor Connally of Texas was also hit by the bullet and was severely wounded but he survived that's how Lyndon Baines Johnson became president there he is on the flight back to Washington from Dallas the shooter was identified as Lee Harvey Oswald here handing out pamphlets in support of Castro a few days later he was shot by Jack Ruby as he was being transferred from one Jail to another in Dallas the Warren Report ended up concluding that Oswald acted alone and was solely responsible for the killing it has engendered a tremendous amount of controversy ever since we're we're out of time so next time actually we'll pick up with the Johnson presidency and we'll go from there

Channel: Daniel Bonevac

Views: 4,503

Rating: 4.9183674 out of 5

Keywords: 1960s (Event)

Id: Gq04cbGFGWw

Length: 43min 52sec (2632 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 22 2013