They knew what they were doing, the Warren Court, the radical Congress and Senate, JFK and LBJ, the 1964 election was a 61% to 38% statement on that generation.
“However, if there is one man who can take the most credit for the 1965 act, it is John F. Kennedy. Kennedy seems to have inherited the resentment his father Joseph felt as an outsider in Boston’s WASP aristocracy. He voted against the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and supported various refugee acts throughout the 1950s. In 1958 he wrote a book, A Nation of Immigrants, which attacked the quota system as illogical and without purpose, and the book served as Kennedy’s blueprint for immigration reform after he became president in 1960. In the summer of 1963, Kennedy sent Congress a proposal calling for the elimination of the national origins quota system. He wanted immigrants admitted on the basis of family reunification and needed skills, without regard to national origin. After his assassination in November, his brother Robert took up the cause of immigration reform, calling it JFK’s legacy. In the forward to a revised edition of A Nation of Immigrants, issued in 1964 to gain support for the new law, he wrote, “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies.” Sold as a memorial to JFK, there was very little opposition to what became known as the Immigration Act of 1965.”
“They knew what they were doing, the Warren Court,”
Eisenhower said that the two biggest mistakes he made as President were nominating Earl Warren and William Brennan to the Supreme Court. Not exactly a ringing endorsement for the theory that the Warren Court was intended by Ike’s generation. Calls for Warren’s impeachment were common and weren’t restricted to fringe groups.
“the radical Congress and Senate,”
From 1936 to 1963 the conservative coalition of southern Democrats and conservative Republicans dominated the House and Senate. Only Lyndon Johnson with his inside knowledge of Congress was able to defeat them.
“the 1964 election was a 61% to 38% statement on that generation.”
That was hardly an endorsement of anything. The 1964 election was, as Goldwater predicted it would be, a sympathy vote for the dead JFK, assassinated one year earlier.
““However, if there is one man who can take the most credit for the 1965 act, it is John F. Kennedy.”
The destructive 1965 Immigration bill was passed in 1965; JFK was dead in November 1963.
“After his assassination in November, his brother Robert took up the cause of immigration reform, calling it JFK’s legacy”
Robert Kennedy became Senator from New York in 1965 and supported the immigration bill; but the bill was pushed mainly by Ted Kennedy who had occupied JFK’s old Senate seat from Massachusetts since 1962.