Question

How did Kennedy's policies represent a shift from Eisenhower's conservatism to a more liberal view of government's role in American life. Cite economic, social, and political examples.

Answer 1

After the comparatively conservative 1950s, the decade that was the 1960s was associated with significant change and progressive social reform, especially when compared to the Eisenhower presidency, a time of "eight years of drugged and comfortable sleep." The 1960s was a decade that saw American liberalism reach its zenith with the advent of the Civil Rights movement that was successful in getting to grips with it.

The election of Kennedy in 1960 marked the beginning of an age of optimism and hope in a young, ambitious president and government, an administration that vowed to rid the United States of poverty and inequality and to provide modern America with progressive values of prosperity, employment, wealth, education and justice. Such values are not those of the New Deal of the Franklin Roosevelt, but those of the New Frontier for a new generation, distinctly progressive in nature, but fiscally responsible and as strongly anti-communist as the Eisenhower and Truman administrations.

It is understandable that Kennedy's supporters would nostalgically look back on a period that came to such a sudden end, and judge the three years he was in office within part of a wider timeframe that saw a Civil Rights Bill that gave the black population their voting rights, or place the entire blame for the failure of the American mission in Vietnam at the feet of his success.

The postwar reports of Nazi violence and Soviet intransigence had altered America's political landscape: liberal activists now had to prove their patriotism in fear of being connected to communism whose perceived threat had become America's biggest enemy. Schlesinger described the post-war twentieth century as an age of transition or catastrophe that had "no more exciting time to live–no more crucial time" and declared that the purpose of American liberalism was to "defend and strengthen free society" through "political, economic, moral and military means."

Liberal organizations should not interfere in domestic affairs unless it is demanded by austerity, such as the New Deal, and social intervention should come to an end once prosperity has been achieved. He states in The Affluent Society that the New Deal was completed and that food, clothing and shelter had been met for the vast majority of the American population, and that the use of Gross Domestic Product to measure the prosperity of the American nation was not an accurate measure, a measure that Kennedy would use himself during his presidency. since GDP did not distinguish what items made up its numbers, it was not a measure of personal or social wealth.

However, Kennedy was able to express liberal values as part of his proposed policies once he was in office by the time of his presidential campaign. Although vague about exactly what he would actually do, after a meeting with a Michigan delegation of civil rights activists, Kennedy stated categorically that the issue of civil rights was of enormous moral importance to him and, if elected, he would use the full prestige and weight of his office to completely eliminate second-class American citizenship for all Americans.