The President Nixon announced his Nixon Doctrine, a foreign policy plan that emphasized the United States’ commitment to its treaty obligations, promised allies protection from other nuclear powers, and called on other countries to take responsibility for their own defense.
The CIA escalated Operation CHAOS, a program for domestic spying on American citizens. Over the next ten years, the CIA used questionable tactics to investigate and profile thousands of anti-war American citizens and organizations.
The New Left student activist organization Students for a Democratic Society completed its guiding manifesto, the Port Huron Statement.
President John F. Kennedy established the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt.
The President’s Commission on the Status of Women issued its report about women’s status under the law and opportunities in education and the workplace. The Commission, which was organized by President John F. Kennedy and chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt until her death in 1962, reported widespread inequality and discrimination.
President Johnson authorized Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained series of air strikes on North Vietnam that lasted until November 1968.
President Kennedy met Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at a summit in Vienna. Khrushchev threatened to give East Germany control of access routes to Berlin, and Kennedy responded with a pledge to defend West Berlin.
In the presidential election of 1968, Republican Richard Nixon faced off against Democrat Hubert Humphrey and American Independent Party candidate George Wallace. Humphrey had won the Democratic nomination after the assassination of Robert Kennedy, but Nixon took the national election.
On November 29, 1969, a group of American Indians sailed to Alcatraz, the island in San Francisco Bay that formerly housed a federal prison. Led by Russell Means, they intended to occupy Alcatraz to protest the government’s treatment of Native peoples. The protestors demanded the return of the island to American Indians. They also sought funding for its development and maintenance. The government refused and, after nineteen months, removed the protestors from the island on June 11, 1971.
Some 500,000 people attend the Woodstock music festival in the Catskills region of New York in August 1969.