Kennedy, Johnson, and the Great Society

John F. Kennedy, elected in 1960, called for a "New Frontier," launched the Peace Corps, and set the goal of landing astronauts on the Moon, achieved by Apollo 11 in 1969. His presidency included the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba (1961) and the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the closest the Cold War came to nuclear war, and it ended with his assassination in November 1963. His successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, used his political skill to pass a sweeping domestic agenda he called the Great Society. It included the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a "War on Poverty" with programs like Head Start, federal aid to education, Medicare for older Americans and Medicaid for people with low incomes (both 1965), and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended the national-origin quotas of 1924. The Great Society greatly expanded the federal government's role, but the growing cost of the Vietnam War drained money and political support from it.

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