John F. Kennedy
By the time JFK became president, women still lagged behind in most of the fields they had been trying to change since the 19th Amendment. One may ask why women did not change federal or state policies at the ballot. After all, women are the majority of the population. A concentration of their vote should be sufficient to win elections of political candidates supporting women's rights.
There are many reasons this change did not occur. For instance, just because women won the right to vote does not mean that they would vote in large numbers. Family tradition, marital influence, and a lack of political expectations also played an important role. After all, the same reasoning could also apply to low and lower social classes among not voting males. Though the majority of people in any given society are not wealthy, laws typically benefit the upper class. Besides, it would be hard for everyone to be involved in decision–making activities without motivations. Why vote if things never change? The creation of the President's Commission on the Status of Women to report directly to him was done by executive order to avoid any Congressional interference. The ladies had landed in powerful territory. Never again would they have to picket the White House, go on hunger strikes, or parade on the streets. From now on, they would simply report to the President and voice their opinions directly to him. Executive Order 10980 was the turning point for the women's movement.
President Kennedy had his plate full, though. The Cuban missile crisis, the Cold War expanding in Indochina, and the explosive issue of race once again proved fatal for women's hopes. Kennedy was not particularly interested in the advancement of women's rights. Yet, his executive order sheltered the Commission from future neglects at the highest level.
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon Johnson took the helm of the nation in the most dramatic circumstance, Kennedy's assassination. The aftermath was a footnote to Kennedy's agenda devoted to halt communist expansion around the world and to moving forward civil rights legislation. And he took it to the next highest possible level.
Seldom in the life of the country had a President tried to do so much all at once. By 1964, he had a liberal majority in both houses and took full advantage of it. By appealing to moral responsibility, he convinced the country to embrace change by taking decisive steps to end segregation and racist laws. Similar to T. Roosevelt's support for the Hepburn Act, Johnson used moral principles to "sell" the 1965 voting rights. He was the architect of "Great Society" legislation that was in scope similar to FDR's New Deal domestic agenda. Abroad, he stepped up American involvement in Vietnam. Perhaps, Johnson was driven by ambition to leave behind the greatest presidential legacy in U.S. history. Or, maybe he did not have many choices to avoid unresolved problems from the past, all converging to the same point and at the same time. Johnson envisioned the Presidency as the engine driving the government.
Johnson was also the first president to carefully consider how to get maximum media exposure. In his 1964 State of the Union speech, he used short paragraphs and filled with catchy phrases like "we have come a long way. To finish that work that I called for a national war on poverty." The obvious popularity of the statement was a rhetorical device aimed at putting pressure on Congress to accept presidential leadership. The speech was not written for Congress. It was developed for popular consumptions. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. would claim that Johnson exceeded all the previous Presidents in adopting inherent and exclusive presidential authority and creating the Imperial Presidency. The Presidency was so directly involved in every aspect of the political life of the nation to the point of exceeding its constitutional limits.
Johnson's legacy on women's rights is tied to the 1964 passage of Title VII that forbade sex discrimination in employment. In effect, it succeeded mainly for the hard work of the National Organization for Women more than anything else. He promised a lot but did not quite deliver. At the beginning of his presidency, he did not keep his initial promise to hire fifty women to high Federal level positions. While not hostile to women's rights, his position on the issue is more the result of political calculation. Certainly, he fulfilled the role of voice of the people. He definitely covers many of the roles historian Clinton Rossiter described to belong to the president (chief of state, commander in chief, executive, legislator, party leader, and chief diplomat) (11); perhaps, women's lack of unity among their many groups magnified Johnson's over commitments in domestic and foreign policies. At the end, he was a victim of his own over extended presidency. He would not accept the Democratic Party nomination for the 1968 presidential election.
Comments: