and declared that his politics were ‘to change what
we can, to better what we can.. .’. This meant rec-
onciling reformers and those opposed to social
change, persuading the more liberal legislators that
half a loaf was better than none, and those who
were more conservative that acceptance of some
reform would avert the danger of more fundamen-
tal and undesirable change. But, as vice-president,
Johnson had made little impact nationally; that all
changed as he stood grim-faced next to Jackie
Kennedy aboard Air Force One as he was sworn in
as president.
Appearances proved deceptive. The Kennedy
image and dynamism seemed to have died with
the assassinated president as the older man, who
had already suffered one heart attack, started his
term of office with the words, ‘Let us continue.’
Johnson proved much more successful than
Kennedy in gaining congressional approval for the
moderate measures already sent to Capitol Hill,
where they had lain logjammed by the opposition
of Congress. Bills for foreign aid, for wider access
to college and university education, and for tax
reductions to stimulate the economy all passed
into law. Among the most significant legislative
leftovers from the Kennedy administration but
enacted under its successor was a bill concerning
civil rights.
‘Civil rights’ meant, in effect, legislation to
remove the discrimination and disabilities suffered
by non-white Americans, the great majority of
whom were African American. Between 1950 and
1980 the total population of the US increased
from 152.3 million to 227.7 million. The major-
ity of those Americans classified as ‘non-white’
were ‘black’, that is, 15 million in 1950 and 26.6
million in 1980. The Hispanics from Puerto Rico
(US citizens) and Latin America are the second-
largest ethnic minority, numbering 14.6 million
in 1980. The population from Asia also increased
rapidly; joining the Chinese and Japanese immi-
grants of the late nineteenth century, there now
came a large influx of Filipinos, Koreans and
Vietnamese. But it was the African Americans
who led the civil rights protests with a success that
influenced other ethnic minority movements.
The decade from the early 1960s to the early
1970s became one of stark contrasts, the federal
administration, Congress and the Supreme Court
playing a leading role in supporting civil rights
and intervening against the attempts by the
Southern states to apply state laws to suppress
black protest and demonstrations. At the same
time the federal government sought to banish
poverty through an expansion of social security
entitlements and payments. It was thus a decade
of reform not witnessed since Roosevelt’s New
Deal. But there was an important difference:
unlike in the 1930s, in the 1960s the US was
riding an economic boom that seemed self-
generating provided administrations just kept
spending. The 1960s also saw a loosening of cus-
tomary restraints, as a new generation made news
by rejecting sexual furtiveness and taboos. But the
liberal hope of integrating society, the African
Americans and the whites and the other ethnic
minorities, of lessening the gulf between rich and
poor, of establishing a consensus on America’s
mission to lead the free world, ended instead in
bitter conflict and deep disillusionment.
At the close of the period a president facing
impeachment left the White House in disgrace,
Richard Nixon becoming the first president
to resign his office. Officers of the respected Fed-
eral Bureau of Investigation, the incorruptible
‘Untouchables’ who had broken the gangsters of
the 1930s, were now revealed as having infringed,
under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, the civil
liberties of American citizens. The Central
Intelligence Agency had likewise become virtually
a law unto itself, and the seamy side of Washington
politics caused widespread disillusionment with the
whole process of government.Ten years earlier, in the South, the black protest
movement of the 1960s gathered such force that
it overwhelmed the efforts of Democrats, enjoying
widespread support from their fellow whites, to
‘keep the niggers in their place’. The enforced
segregation of the African American citizens and
the humiliations to which they were daily exposed
to remind them that they were ‘inferior’ racially –
a system that was called apartheid in South Africa- was very much alive and well in the US in the
1960s, and not only in the South. In the nation’s
capital, Washington, discrimination would prove a