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Kennedy
President Kennedy's term of office arrived at a transitional time in American history, when the idealism of the 1950s was slowly beginning to fade into the realities of the Cold War. Foreign policy concerns were not the only thing to plague the Kennedy administration. Domestic issues were perhaps even more important. Shifting social norms presented problems related to race, class, gender, and power. Moreover, the anti-Communist scare was causing the administration to assume an aggressive interventionist policy the likes of which was unprecedented in American history. Involvement in Vietnam, committing American troops to a remote war, eventually led to a massive anti-war movement. Kennedy's assassination shook the nation awake, and ushered in a new era of social unrest. Civil rights and a broad mistrust of government would be themes in the next decade of American history. When Kennedy refers to the "larger freedom and a more equal and spacious society…one more step toward realization of…the promise of American life," he was being idealistic. In spite of some certain and measurable progress, America is not making progress toward the promise of greater freedom, liberty, and justice.
The era between 1945 and 1965 was defined by the escalation of the Cold War, which witnessed America moving away from its "promises." Specific events discussed in lecture...
The anti-Communist scare was rooted in a fear of a nuclear meltdown, and yet it became a systematic means of dumbing down the American populace with propaganda. Initially, the American public tacitly approved of intervention under the assumption that American-style capitalism was a superior social and economic system than one modeled after socialist and communist ideals. By 1965, whispers of unrest were already becoming apparent. As Oakes puts it, "Kennedy supported the containment of communism" but "sometimes helped to thwart third world independence and democracy in the name of anti-Communism by intervening in the domestic affairs of supposedly independent countries," (p. 852). Also by 1965, social unrest of another sort was gripping the United States. Race riots and a "mini civil war" in Birmingham, as the lecture refers to it, erupted.
Between 1965 and 1985, America was witnessing what Oakes calls "the apparent decline of social class differences," (p. 821). The key word in this sentence is "apparent," as social class differences remained poignant, and especially divided along racial lines. An…
Works Cited
Kennedy speech
Lecture notes
Oakes text
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