hower. The avuncular Eisenhower was a calming figure during the early years of the Cold War, while Kennedy exemplified youth and vigor and promised great change.
Certain questions remain about the validity of the election of Kennedy, especially because of peculiarities in Chicago, and the era was woefully short because Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. In spite of the promise of a new era, it was not an era of peace, and the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis in particular brought the Communist threat close to American shores for the first time. This was also the time in which Southeast Asia would become vital with the war in Indochina, soon to be known as the Vietnamese War. The Kennedy Administration had much to say about labor, about civil rights, and about effecting change in the political culture, though it is still argued how much it managed to do about any of these issues. The Kennedy Administration was seen as forward looking, though this may not have been as true as many people may have thought, though more so than had been seen before. Black Americans began using nonviolent protest as a political tool on a widespread basis, and this would become the vehicle of choice for a number of disaffected groups over the next few years and into our own present era. The Camelot era offered hope to a new generation, and its ending dashed those hopes and led to increased tensions and new demands during the rest of the 1960s.
The way the Kennedy Administration ended contributed to the mythology of the time so that Kennedy's presidency was viewed as more expansive and effective than it really was, and the murder of a President set Camelot more firmly as an image, leaving the President forever youthful and tragic. At the same time, while the Kennedy era began in a spirit of exhilaration and youth that infected the whole country, many of the hopes at the beginning went unfulfilled by the reality:
Kennedy was a popular pr...