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I think LBJ made a mistake keeping the Kennedy hacks around after JFK was killed. He should have brought in his own people and dumped RFK too.
LBJ even stated such when he was president. LBJ, like roughly half the nation, hated JFK when the man was alive (and LBJ's hatred for him continued even after Kennedy's death). I believe the quote is "...I surrounded myself with Kennedy-lovers..."
True..there seems to be something missing about JFK's decision making process.....the decision to expand our involvement in Vietnam despite the failure at the Bay of Pigs and the very recent French defeat...seems too easy to blame Johnson when JFK had the more important role in setting the stage...
Yes, let's examine JFK's thinking and how he repeatedly refused requests from the Pentagon and his Cabinet to send in combat troops. The Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile demonstrated the fact that Kennedy could not trust his military advisers.
Sympathy for Johnson ? Too easy to blame LBJ ? The role Kennedy was setting the stage for was withdrawal. LBJ blew it. He could have continued Kennedy's plan for withdrawal; instead he choose to escalate; bomb and send in combat troops. Nope; its not too easy to blame Johnson.
Gallup polls are poor indicators of a president's popularity, especially the polls contained in the link you posted.
Gallup polls, at the time of JFK's presidency, were conducted largely by telephone calls--and this automatically skews the poll results because telephones were still a luxury item in the early 1960s. Further, consider how small the sample sizes were--certainly these samples were not representative of a huge population. For more information on the nature of polling in the U.S., see Sarah Igo's recent book The Averaged American. Historians generally consider polls to be a poor indicator of public opinion at a given time. Historians tend to be super-critical of polls conducted both today and yesterday--quite simply, polls are poor primary sources.
[Snip Only for Lenght]
Thank you for the interesting post and website. Is there any books that you would recommend on his administration? I have only read about five books on this era and all have been about the assassination. Thanks for your time.
Last edited by technobarbie; 06-26-2011 at 10:09 PM..
Thank you for the interesting post and website. Is there any books that you would recommend on his administration? I have only read about five books on this era and all have been about the assassination. Thanks for your time.
The historiography of JFK is extensive, and he pops up in all types of histories--from Cold War histories to Civil Rights Era histories. And thene there's the assassination books, some of which border on quackery. Comprehensive listing of works are impossible to list here.
The books that I'd recommend are Herbert Parmet's JFK: The Presidency (1983); and Richard Reeves' President Kennedy (1993). Author Robert Dallek has a lengthier biography of JFK--and I've only read parts of it. It's rather well done too. These are starts. Mine their biblios for further reading.
... because telephones were still a luxury item in the early 1960s.
I don't know where this came from, but it needs re-examining. My father had a 10th grade education, and made our living as a mechanic. That placed us in the lower-middle class, or the upper-lower. My parents bought their very first home in 1952. Had it not been for the GI Bill, they could not have afforded it. It was in a housing tract (in some areas they're called subdivisions) in eastern Memphis TN. Beginning then, and continuing through every neighborhood we/they ever lived in, every family had a telephone. All of my grandparents, uncles and aunts (they lived in rural Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama) had telephones too.
I don't know where this came from, but it needs re-examining. My father had a 10th grade education, and made our living as a mechanic. That placed us in the lower-middle class, or the upper-lower. My parents bought their very first home in 1952. Had it not been for the GI Bill, they could not have afforded it. It was in a housing tract (in some areas they're called subdivisions) in eastern Memphis TN. Beginning then, and continuing through every neighborhood we/they ever lived in, every family had a telephone. All of my grandparents, uncles and aunts (they lived in rural Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama) had telephones too.
To me, that doesn't equate with "luxury item."
-- Nighteyes
More than half the folks in the South and West did not have telephone service even up to the 1970s. And having a telephone was expensive--so much so that party lines were common where service did exist because it cut down on the cost of having a phone.
More than half the folks in the South and West did not have telephone service even up to the 1970s. And having a telephone was expensive--so much so that party lines were common where service did exist because it cut down on the cost of having a phone.
I am forced to call "BULLSH*T" on your assertion. To be more accurate, perhaps you should revise your statement to read "having a PRIVATE LINE" was still a luxury. Even so, we got our first private line in 1961, which was in Mobile Alabama, at the beginning of the "early 1960's" period you specified.
Otherwise, you are hereby REQUIRED to state your source(s) for your assertion. My personal and direct experiences, covering western Tennessee, northern Mississippi, and most of Alabama, Louisiana and Georgia ("backwoods" areas all) cast considerable doubt on said assertion. With but a little effort I'm sure I could add the personal experiences of countless others of my approximate age.
For your general benefit, I was born in June of 1946. My first clear and specific memories are from 1949, though I have "vignette" memories from 1948.
Last edited by Nighteyes; 06-28-2011 at 04:13 PM..
I am forced to call "BULLSH*T" on your assertion. To be more accurate, perhaps you should revise your statement to read "having a PRIVATE LINE" was still a luxury. Even so, we got our first private line in 1961, which was in Mobile Alabama, at the beginning of the "early 1960's" period you specified.
Otherwise, you are hereby REQUIRED to state your source(s) for your assertion. My personal and direct experiences, covering western Tennessee, northern Mississippi, and most of Alabama, Louisiana and Georgia ("backwoods" areas all) cast considerable doubt on said assertion. With but a little effort I'm sure I could add the personal experiences of countless others of my approximate age.
For your general benefit, I was born in June of 1946. My first clear and specific memories are from 1949, though I have "vignette" memories from 1948.
First of all, there's no need to get snippy about anything. I could very well be wrong. Likewise, you could be wrong as well because sometimes our anecdotal memories are not fool-proof.
Secondly, the whole point I made about telephone accessibility was to point out how Gallup polls are poor indicators of a president's popularity because these polls relied on telephone respondents (polls conducted today are equally unreliable because they rely too much on land-line telephone respondents). Further, the polls used dreadfully low sample sizes. To sum up, my post was about how JFK was an unpopular president. Generally speaking people over 40 distrusted his youth--and if you think the nation was divided today, then think back to 1960 and how close that election was. After Nixon lost such a close elections, conservatives rallied to cast aspersions on JFK's performance as president--and this wound up on the editorial pages of the country's largest newspapers.
It's similar to today. Bush won two close elections and he was a very hated president by a large segment of the population. Same thing can be said about Obama, but he won 2008 by a somewhat larger margin than did Bush in either 2000 or 2004.
As for sources, I cited one secondary source that's rather complete on the nature of polling: Sarah Igo's The Averaged American. I mean, the big thing or the best example in her book is how newspapers, based on telephone polls, declared Dewey POTUS in 1948. Yet we know that this was a big blunder by the newspapers who predicted the outcome of the election based on skewed polling results.
Here's another source on government policy vis-a-vis new tech: Alan Marcus's The Future is Now.
In the above book, Marcus outlines how state legislatures and the U.S. Congress debated all types of subsidy bills to provide rural Americans with modern conveniences like the affordable, private telephone line.
So as for primary sources, these can be found relating to the telephone in the records of our legislative bodies. Politicians heard from their constituents about their problems--one of which was telephone accessibility in rural areas in the Deep South (the states you mentioned and Arkansas) and the West like Kansas, Colorado, etc. Go read the House or Senate Journal from the 1950s (or the respective legislative records from any state) and I'd bet that you will find much debate about government's relationship with telephone companies and how constituents griped about the low accessibility of the "new" devices. Debates generally revolved around how Rural Farmer X and his wife could not have a telephone because the company's reach wasn't that far, and politicians wondered if government should help extending the reach of the companies.
Again, the issue resonates today. Dial-up internet is no longer practical since most websites cannot be viewed on a dial-up connection. But in rural areas like the Deep South and the West, high speed internet is simply not available unless its the slow but expensive satellite internet. Even that is not available in all areas (the U.S. has a vast land-mass).
Now I research education policy in the United States after WWII--that's my comfort zone. But in my research, I've perused copious files from the Farm Bureau Federation. While it's not entirely related to my project, I have found that as late as 1970 one of the biggest issues for farm families was telephone service in their areas. Quite simply, some areas of states like Mississippi and Louisiana (and in the West) there just was no service offered. the FBF lobbied state legislatures and the federal government for relief--for subsidies to the telephone companies so people could get a telephone.
Given the original intent of my post about telephones as a luxury item, I was particularly thinking of farm families because they generally opposed JFK and his administration's policies.
There's another big thing you're leaving out about the post-WWII era that made folks in big cities a little reluctant to get a telephone. Attitudes about the telephone (about any "new" technology) is that it contributes to laziness or at the very least, some held the attitude that it was unproductive to have a phone when there was the telegraph. Instead of paying a monthly bill for telephone service, many city dwellers just used the telegram whenever they need to contact people because this was a pay as you go type of thing.
Telephones were omnipresent in big city businesses. For business workers, they spent much time on the phones and didn't want to do this at home. I remember, since we're talking about memories here, that office workers were reluctant to get a computer in the mid-1990s because they spent all their time on the computer at work.
Implicit in what I've just typed relates to white Americans, for the most part. Consider black Americans' place in society in the post-WWII era. Most worked in agricultural work or as domestic servants. Telephone accessibility for African Americans was a continual problem because of their low wages and service didn't exist in all rural areas.
Again, my first post about phones was not so much about phones per se. Rather, its intent was to demonstrate how polls are unreliable pieces of data and this is the way historians view past Gallup and other polls. To reiterate, polls are poor indicators of just about anything--because of the way pollsters procure information.
Perhaps "luxury" item was a poor statement on my part. My point is is that telephones never really became a household item for all Americans until the mid-1970s to early 1980s. After the anti-trust suit against the Bell Company in that time period, many companies emerged and connection and installation rates went down drastically in some areas. Further, rates lowered that enabled more and more Americans to afford a phone.
Perhaps "luxury" item was a poor statement on my part.
At last, FINALLY, you perceive my point!
Quote:
Originally Posted by DiogenesofJackson
My point is is that telephones never really became a household item for all Americans until the mid-1970s to early 1980s.
Awww, you just recanted your own statement.
Perhaps it would be a good idea for you to define exactly what you mean by "all Americans". I will be the first to admit that not each and every American household in all of these entire 48 (or 49, or 50) United States had a telephone in the early 1960's. There were some, in a few isolated areas, that did not. In fact, I can point you to several households where that was true.
I did, and do, and will continue to, cast considerable doubt on your assertion that "telephones never really became a household item until the mid-1970's to early 1980's." My experience, and those of several hundreds of thousands of others just like me, say otherwise. I am sure, in fact, that were you to actually bother to consult them, Ma Bell's own statistics will verify my assertion.
My friend, I graduated from college in the late 1960's. As poor and ratty and bug-infested and tattered as it was, my very-first-ever domicile had an active, bright red, Touch-Tone telephone in the living room for which I paid monthly. It was connected to a private line. In other words I, as a thoroughly broke recent college graduate residing in a small Deep-South municipality, could afford (and had) telephone service. All of the households in my neighborhood, poor and downtrodden though they may have been, also had telephones.
To be frank, your assertion is pure and unadulterated male bovine excretia.
With regards to all and enmity to none,
-- Nighteyes
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