Lyndon Johnson

Following John Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon Johnson came into office with several goals. Painfully aware of Kennedy's popularity, Johnson sought to prove himself faithful to the objectives of his predecessor and win equal affection. A Southerner, but now distanced from his Texas constituency, Johnson wanted to display his commitment to equalizing treatment for blacks, to eliminating poverty in America, and to bringing the war in Viet-

nam to a successful conclusion. In pursuit of these ends, Johnson presided over liberalism's "greatest triumphs and sharpest defeats," as historian William Chafe characterized the events of Johnson's tenure. Under the new president's guidance, Congress enacted path-breaking civil rights laws and produced legislation providing federal aid to education, housing, medicare, mental health programs, urban mass transit, preschool for underprivileged children, employment and training programs, environmental and consumer programs. Johnson's "War on Poverty" lifted the incomes of millions of American families.^[1]

Kennedy's assassination and the murders of black leaders Medgar Evers in 1963 and Malcolm X in 1965, together with Johnson's encouragement of civil rights legislation and his pursuit of the Vietnam war, all fueled the social protest in the 1960s. In 1962, a nascent student movement emerged seeking to quell militarism and to join with the civil rights movement in the cause of racial equality; by 1968, Students for a Democratic Society counted one hundred thousand members. Peaceful demonstration proved an inadequate force for halting the war, however, and campuses exploded in protest in 1968. Meanwhile, urban ghettos were beset by waves of violence, and in the spring of 1968 civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, who was running in the Democratic primaries as a peace candidate, were both murdered.

Although the national community seemed truly to be coming apart, by the mid-1970s the eruptions of angry protest had abated. The antiwar movement was defused by troop reductions and the elimination of the draft. Black leaders turned from street demonstrations to more traditional politics. Yet out of the turmoil of the 1960s, from both the government's commitment to moderate, controlled social change and the New Left's objective of radical social reorganization, was born a vital women's movement that endured for another decade.