It is impossible to generalise a whole decade in the way that the above statement does. Although during the early sixties public opinion was high, Kennedy was a failure in American domestic policy, and the threat of the USSR culminating in the Cuban Missile Crisis undermines the view of America as a 'Camelot'. In the latter years of the sixties despite the assassinations and disastrous Vietnam War campaign, Johnson was able to effect significant changes with landmark civil rights legislation and a legislative record which has not been matched since.

The ethos that emerged at the turn of the decade, of conflict, protest and idealism the latter was personified by the newly elected president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. For the bulk of middle class Americans the fifties had been a very prosperous decade, although relatively quiet and conservative, and in entering the sixties the civil rights movement was in full swing and m

Kennedy was elected on a platform of liberal interventionism, following on the democratic trend started by Roosevelt in the thirties, enforced by Truman in the post war years, only interrupted by Eisenhower, who incidentally became the most liberal Republican in political history, he advocated change. One of the most crucial factors in his election was his promise of civil rights legislation, on which he closely collaborated with Martin Luther King; in gaining the black vote Kennedy was able to beat Nixon by the narrowest of margins.

At the time of Kennedy's assassination he did have a civil rights bill he was attempting to pass through congress but we will never know if he would have been able to pass it on its own merits. Despite Kennedy's woeful legislative record, Kennedy's emphatic, youthful and vigorous exterior enabled him to stay a strong spokesperson for America and the relative strength of the economy, which is mutually exclusive to the effects of presidential power, also kept public opinion for Kennedy high. Kennedy was also able to stay in favour with the American public with his foreign policy, although it started almost as badly as his domestic policy with the Bay of Pigs fiasco he more than made up for it with during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The result of the crisis saw soviet missile boats turning round and heading back to Russia and Kennedy was shown to be a hard-line president when it came to communism.

Following the assassination of Kennedy, he was succeeded by his vice president Lyndon Baines Johnson. Johnson was quite the opposite of Kennedy; he was not a poster boy for America but a hard line lifetime southern democrat with years of experience. Using his years of e

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