policy - The Black Vault

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to believe that the American economic and social system had eliminated the
possibility of serious social conflict at home
danger to the nation was from communism abroad.
and that the most urgent
The election of John Kennedy in 1960 was an extraordinary event
for American intellectuals who saw members of their own group, including
luminaries like John K. Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger, move from Harvard
to Washington.
Many like Robert Frost believed that they were witnessing
the dawning of a new "Augustan Age" in which intellectuals would be given
* access to the power of the federal government which they were trained to
manipulate toward solving domestic and international problems. In fact,
the relationship between intellectuals and the Kennedy administration was
significantly less eventful.
Intellectuals got research contracts, government
appointments, consultantships, and foreign travel; and they gave an
intellectual tone to the administration. The i'ntellectuals tended, however,
to be influential only as their ideas fitted the needs of their
patrons, and they tended to be forced into the role of technician while
real decisions were made by politicians. The assassination of Kennedy did
not break the connection between the Democratic administration and the
liberal intellectuals who had the run of domestic departments of the
government as recruits, consultants, and idea men as they funded studies
that identified ways of solving problems through application of federal
resources.
This close affiliation between the liberals of the Democratic
Party and the American intellectual community left the intellectuals illprepared
to move into opposition against the government concerning the
Vietnam War. Intellectuals criticized the Tonkin Gulf actions of President
Johnson, but Barry Goldwater offered no hopes for the intellectuals,
and there was general support for Johnson until after the November election.
The attack on Pleiku and the US response of bombing North Vietnam
brought a quick souring of relations between the White House and a large
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