Week 8 – The 1960s: From Camelot to the Moon

Question 1

New Frontiers I (1960s)

Answer 1

• The end of the “quiet years”
• John F. Kennedy becomes president (1960–63), until he is assassinated in Dallas, 1963, and vice president Lyndon B. Johnson takes over
• The Cold War continues
  o 1961: The Berlin Wall is built
  o 1961: The disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion
  o 1962: The Cuban Missile Crisis
  o 1967: The Six Days War
  o 1968: The Prague Spring

Question 2

New Frontiers II (1960s)

Answer 2

• The Vietnam War escalates and splits the nation
• The Civil Rights Movement becomes influential
• Segregation is contested
• The Hippie and Flower Power movements appear
• Student‘s movements become radicalized
• The Space Race accelerates
• Environmental consciousness and politics develop

Question 3

John F. Kennedy (29.5.1917 – 22.11. 1963)

Answer 3

• A new style in the White House evolves: John F. Kennedy and Jackie Onassis
• The “new frontiers” are located in space.
• Still, the US is mired in the cold war.

Question 4

What’s the Bay of Pigs disaster?

Answer 4

• 1961: 1400 Cuban exiles invade the Bay of Pigs in Cuba to overthrow Fidel Castro and the communist regime
• In 1959, Fidel Castro came to power in an armed revolt that overthrew Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.
• Kennedy withholds air support; the mission ends in a disaster

Question 5

What’s the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962?

Answer 5

• Krushtshov (president Soviet Union) presumes Kennedy to be weakened by the Bay of Pigs disaster, and deploys ballistic missiles to Cuba
• The installment is uncovered by the famous high reconnaissance spy airplanes, called U2
• Kennedy orders a sea blockade of Cuba – the world is on the brink of a nuclear war.

Question 6

Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Nov 22, 1963

Answer 6

• Kennedy is fatally wounded – allegedly by Lee Harvey Oswald, a highly disturbed loner who had lived in Russia and was a supporter of Castro
• As of today, there is still a cloud of uncertainty revolving around this assassination
• Oswald is shot two days later by Jack Ruby, local nightclub operator, “live” on TV

Question 7

The Vietnam entanglement starts with JFK

Answer 7

• By the end of 1962, Kennedy has 11,000 so-called “military advisors” (Green Berets) sent to support what most South Vietnamese consider a weak and highly corrupt government to defend South Vietnam against repeated intrusions by the communist Vietcong (VC), mostly through neighboring Laos
• Financial aids to the Ngo Dinh Diem government excel $400 million a year; after the Bay of Pigs disaster, however, Kennedy has lost trust in his military command and is reluctant to deploy massive military force.

Question 8

Lyndon B Johnson

Answer 8

• Vice-president Lyndon B. Johnson is sworn in as the new president aboard Air Force One after JFK’s assassination
• Johnson beats Republican right-wing ideologue Barry Goldwater in the elections 1964.

Question 9

The Vietnam entanglement continues with LBJ

Answer 9

• A staunch anti-communist, LBJ increases American military engagement in Vietnam.
• The Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, where American ships are attacked by North Vietnamese forces, leads to heavy bombing raids against North Vietnamese military bases and filtration routes in Laos and Cambodia.
• 1965 the first ground forces are dispatched to South Vietnam
• Later in the year, LBJ orders saturation bombing and 100,000 troops to Vietnam.
• 1966: Massive bombing with napalm and chemical herbicides (“Agent Orange”) sets in, leaving scars on the Vietnam peninsula still to been seen today.
• In 1968, 500,000 troops are installed in Vietnam
• Vietnam becomes the first televised war, creating one of the most iconic war photographs ever taken.

Question 10

What happens during the Vietnam War in the USA?

Answer 10

• Large anti-war demonstrations begin in the spring of 1965
• Left ideas, as well as the Hippie and Flower Power movement, emerge
• Returning war veterans, leftist student movements, and the peace movement increase pressure on the U.S. government
• Not since the Civil war has the nation been divided to such a degree

Question 11

What’s Agent Orange?

Answer 11

“Agent Orange” (so-called because it was delivered in orange containers) is used massively to defoliage the Vietnamese jungle, a terrain in which the Vietcong (VC) clearly holds tactical advantage.

Question 11

What are the consequences of Agent Orange?

Answer 11

• Not known at the time, “Agent Orange” contains high amounts of Dioxine, which causes long-term genetic and birth defects, and whose impact lasts until today.
• Until now, the US has declined any compensation, claiming there is no “convincing scientific evidence” of a connection between “Agent Orange” and the deformations.

Question 12

Consequences in Vietnam

Answer 12

Through the heavy use of both Agent Orange and Napalm, more than 30% of the country have become uninhabitable or at least highly hazardous to live in.

Question 13

Consequences for the US in Vietnam?

Answer 13

• When the U.S troops are finally withdrawn from Vietnam in 1973, 58,000 soldiers have fallen, and more than 300,000 thousand are wounded.
• 2 million Vietnamese have died, and more bombs were dropped on Vietnam between July 1965 and December 1967 alone than the Allied Forces dropped on Europe during the entire second World War.
• The pictures of the frantic escape from the American embassy in are indelibly burnt into the US-American psyche and constitute a trauma to be culturally negotiated for decades.

Question 14

Movies

Answer 14

• Born on the 4th of July
• Good Morning Vietnam
• Platoon
• Full Metal Jacket
• Deerhunter
• Apocalypse Now

Question 15

Vietnam novels

Answer 15

• A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo
• The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
• The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh
• Fields of Fire by James Webb

Question 16

Michael Herr’s Dispatches

Answer 16

• What makes Michael Herr‘s book Dispatches special is that he captures, in a matter-of-fact style, the horrors and absurdities of the Vietnam War.
• This contrast serves to carve out the moral ambiguities of the Vietnam War, which find their apex in a US colonel explaining that, in order to save a Vietcong village, “it had to be destroyed.”

Question 17

Still more dividing lines

Answer 17

• The Civil Rights movement gathers force
• Segregation contested: “Brown vs. Board of Education”, 1954
• Civil Rights acts of 1964 and 1965 fail to satisfy the nation‘s 21 million African Americans
• Black riots in Harlem, Rochester, Watts, Newark, Detroit, leaving hundreds dead and thousands injured
• The black movement becomes split between an assimilationist faction (Martin Luther King, “I Have a Dream”) and a radical, black nationalist faction (Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet”, Stokely Carmichael, Black Panthers)

Question 18

The Predecessor of the Civil Rights Movement: The Harlem Renaissance

Answer 18

• The Harlem Renaissance had made African American Culture an integral part of U.S. popular culture
• Artists like Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Zora Neal Hurston, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison had used African American cultural traditions (Blues, spirituals, folklore) to establish a genuinely „Black Voice“ and culture
• Still, many considered the Harlem Renaissance as unsuccessful, since the social, economic, and political situation of African Americans – especially in the South – hadn’t improved.

Question 19

Civil Disobedience – Henry David Thoreau, Rosa Parks, Mahatma Gandhi

Answer 19

• Martin Luther King uses a mixture of white American cultural traditions – the Puritan jeremiad, the work of Henry David Thoreau (Walden, “Civil Disobedience”), and the teachings of Gandhi to forge a Black protest movement designed to integrate African Americans into American society
• Others, like Malcolm X, pursue the way of a black nationalism that proposes an own, self-sufficient black nation, and resorts to both leftist and Islamist ideologies to emphasize the gap to the capitalist white society.
• The first black studies courses appear on college campuses.

Question 20

Other “minorities” raise their voices: Women‘s Lib

Answer 20

• Feminism on the rise
• NOW (National Organization of Women, lead by Betty Friedman, gains influence
• Free sexuality, the mini skirt, the pill revolutionizes the Puritan outlook dominant until the 50s
• Abortion laws liberalized.
• Women’s Studies become an academic discipline.

Question 21

Other “minorities” raise their voices: Native Americans and the Chicano/a movement

Answer 21

• AIM (American Indian Movement) protests for the right of Native Americans and initiates Indian activism (occupation of Alcatraz, 1969)
• The “Native American Renaissance” begins, supported by esoteric and ecological developments in society.
• Cesar Chavez founds the “National Farm Workers Association”, organizes exploited Mexican lettuce workers and grape pickers.
• Militant Mexican American leaders call themselves “Chicanos”.

Question 22

N. Scott Momaday

Answer 22

• One of the first major Native American novels, The Way to Rainy Mountain, is published.
• It marks the beginning of what is known as the Native American Renaissance.

Question 23

The occupation of Alcatraz

Answer 23

On 20 November 1969, a group of 89 American Indians take over the federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay and lays claim to it by ‘right of discovery’, in an effort to expose the suffering of American Indians.

Question 24

A small step for a man…

Answer 24

• In May 1961, John F. Kennedy had promised to reach out for “new frontiers” and to put a man on the moon by 1970.
• On July 20, 1969, the USA gains the final victory in the space race: Neil Armstrong is the first man to put a foot on the moon in the “Sea of Tranquility”

Question 25

The decade of assassinations

Answer 25

• 1963: John F. Kennedy
• 1965: Malcolm X
• 1968: Martin Luther King
• 1968: Robert Kennedy