A SHORT HISTORY OF RIGHT WING DESTRUCTION PART 15

The United States and the world were in ferment as we entered the 1960's.

We were ready to expand our boundaries technologically and scientifically.  We were ready to finally embrace civil rights for African-Americans who had been denied their full constitutional rights for one hundred years.  The Cold War took on a new dimension with a proxy war in Vietnam.  The United States supplied aid to South Vietnam and the Soviet Union supplied aid to North Vietnam.

But the very real Cold War, the kind that employed nuclear weapons, was a Sword of Damocles hanging over the human race.  Both the United States and Soviet Union had weapons sufficient to destroy the entire human race several times over.

John F. Kennedy brought glamour, wit, and idealism to the White House.  Important social safety nets such as Medicare got seeded during the Kennedy years and finally passed into law during the subsequent Johnson administration.

The realities of the Cold War were symbolized by construction of the Berlin Wall.  Berlin was ground zero for a possible nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union.

We saw the rise of Martin Luther King as a major civil rights leader and we saw the ugliness of entrenched racism in the United States on display.  Civil rights workers were attacked and killed in the South.  Martin Luther King was arrested and wrote his famous Letter From Birmingham Jail.    Opponents of civil rights brought up the old doctrine of states' rights to justify segregation.

President Kennedy stated the goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade.  It was another form of proxy war because the "space race" was intended to show the superiority of the American system over the system in the Soviet Union.

More to come