subjugation of blacks. His original message, that the “white man” was (quite literally) the devil incarnate, had become transformed into a religiously inspired quest for racial equality. The quest was tempered by a conviction that black America had to look within, and not to white America, for the means to freedom and progress.
The evolution of Malcolm X was cut short on February 21, 1965, when he was gunned down by three Black Muslims during a speech at Harlem’s Audubon Auditorium. His Autobiography (dictated to Alex Haley, who would later gain fame as the author of Roots, a sweeping novel of black history), published just after his assassination, became an extraor-dinarily influential document in expanding and redefining the civil rights movement.
The journey of black America, like the life of Malcolm X, remained incomplete during the 1960s and remains incomplete to this day. The fact is that African-Americans generally live less affluently, amid more crime, and with less opportunity than white Americans. Yet the range of black leaders of the 1950s and 1960s, from Rosa Parks, to Martin Luther King, Jr., to Malcolm X, brought hope and social visibility to black America.
Sputnik and the New Frontier
Despite growing racial disharmony, the United States was a fairly self-satisfied place in the 1950s. Then, on October 4, 1957, the world learned that the Soviet Union had successfully launched a 184-pound satellite into earth orbit. Called Sputnik I, its radio transmitter emitted nothing more than electronic beeps, but it sent shock waves through the American nation. Suddenly, the U.S.S.R., our adversary in the postwar world, the embodiment of godless communism, had demonstrated to the world its technological superiority. The launching of Sputnik began a “space race,” in which the United States came in (lead second during the early laps. The Soviets put a man, “cosmonaut” Yuri Gagarin, into orbit four years after Sputnik and one month before American “astronaut” Alan B. Shepard was launched on a 15-minute suborbital flight on May 5, 1961.
Sputnik shook Americans out of their complacency. The 1960 presidential race, between Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard M. Nixon, and a dashing, youthful senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, almost ended in a tie. But the nation rejected the security of Eisenhower’s man and voted into office a candidate who embodied a new energy, vigor, and challenge.
JFK
At 43, John F. Kennedy was the youngest elected president in American history (Theodore Roosevelt was slightly younger when he assumed office after the assassination of William McKinley). Kennedy’s administration established the Peace Corps (an organization of volunteers assigned to work in developing nations), created the Alliance for Progress (which strengthened relations with Latin America), and set a national goal of landing an American on the moon before the end of the 1960s. Despite these accomplishments, Kennedy is best remembered for the magic (there is no better word) he and his beautiful wife, Jacqueline, brought to the White House and the national leadership.
“The Torch Has Been Passed…”
Intelligent (his books included the Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage), handsome, idealistic, athletic, irreverently witty, and a war hero, Kennedy declared in his inaugural address that the “torch has been passed to a new generation”—of which he was clearly the embodiment. Mired in a depressing Cold War, plagued by social problems, continually anxious over impending nuclear war, worried that the Soviets and the Chinese were winning the hearts and minds of the world, Americans eagerly embraced the attractive optimism of JFK.
Bay of Pigs and Brink of Armageddon
Although he was adored by many, Kennedy never succeeded in winning the support of Congress. He and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (1925-68), sought to further civil rights but were repeatedly thwarted by Congress. Kennedy tried to create programs to fund broad educational initiatives, only to see them diluted by Congress. He also introduced a program to provide medical care for the elderly, which was delayed by Congress.
Early in Kennedy’s administration, the nation suffered the tragic humiliation of a bungled attempt to invade Cuba, which was under the communist rule of Fidel Castro (b. 1926). In March 1960, President Eisenhower had approved a CIA plan to train anti-Castro Cuban exiles for an invasion to overthrow the Cuban leader. Kennedy allowed the preparations to proceed, and some 1,500 exiles landed on April 17, 1961, at Bay of Pigs on the island’s southwestern coast.
The result was unmitigated disaster. Not only had the attack’s secrecy been breached, but Kennedy, fearing Soviet reprisal, decided not to authorize promised U.S. air support. Worse, the CIA had badly misread the political climate of revolutionary Cuba. The general uprising the CIA believed would be set off by the landing simply did not happen. By April 19, the invasion was crushed and 1,200 survivors were captured. (They were released in December 1962, in exchange for $53 million worth of U.S. medicines and provisions.)
Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev saw the failure of the Bay of Pigs as a sign of the new administration’s weakness. Khrushchev quickly rushed in to exploit this flaw by covertly sending nuclear-armed missiles to Cuba plus the technical and military personnel to install and operate them. An American U-2 spy plane photographed the missile bases under construction, and on October 22, 1.962, President Kennedy addressed the nation on television, announcing a naval blockade of the island. Kennedy demanded that the Soviets withdraw the missiles, and by October 24, the blockade was in place.
The idea of hostile nuclear warheads parked a mere 90 miles from the United States was terrifying, but so was the prospect of a naval battle off the coast of Cuba, which might ignite a thermonuclear war. For the next four days, Americans braced themselves for “the big one.” Offices and factories staged air raid drills, as did the nation’s schools, where children practiced “duck and cover”: ducking under their desks and covering their heads.
Few had much hope that such maneuvers would help one survive a full-scale thermonuclear assault.
On October 28, Premier Khrushchev backed down, offering to remove the missiles under U.N. supervision. For his part, President Kennedy pledged never again to attempt to invade Cuba, and he also removed U.S. ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) from Turkish bases near the Soviet border. On October 29, the blockade was lifted, and JFK had scored a signal victory in Cold War “brinkmanship.”
An Autumn Day In Dallas
Late in November 1963, President Kennedy visited Texas to bolster his popularity as he geared up for the reelection campaign. The presidential aircraft—Air Force One—touched down at Dallas’s Love Field on the morning of the 22nd, and the president was given a gratifyingly warm greeting. A man who enjoyed contact with voters, who did not hesitate to “press the flesh,” Kennedy declined to ride beneath the bulletproof bubble top normally affixed to the armored presidential limousine. As the motorcade passed by a warehouse building called the Texas School Book Depository, three shots rang out, the second of which ripped into the president’s head, fatally wounding him. Texas
