nd the Cuban Missile Crisis in particular brought the Communist threat close to American shores for the first time. This was also the era in which Southeast Asia would become more important 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. It was a forward looking period, not as much as many people may have thought, but more so than had been seen before. Black Americans started 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. The way it ended dashed those hopes and led to increased tensions and new demands during the rest of the 1960s.
There is little doubt that 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. The Kennedy era began in a spirit of exhilaration and youth that infected the whole country, but many of the hopes at the beginning went unfulfilled by the reality: "Kennedy was a popular president, a star of the media unlike any
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