How Successful Was Kennedy's New Frontier

Kennedy faced great Congressional opposition during his short presidency and this was a very large reason for the aims of the New Frontier largely going unachieved. However, there were other reasons for the limited success of the New Frontier, such as Kennedy’s lack of strong mandate due to the very slim majority through which he was elected which was a margin of only 113,000. This led to many of Kennedy’s proposals being struck down by Congress such as much of his plans for social welfare and unemployment programmes, most notably his school reforms proposals. However, there were successes in this area, such as the Area Development Act 1961 .The new Frontier also failed to make much significant progress in the area of Civil Rights, as there was no legislation passed during the Kennedy administration, although there were small victories in this area too. The New Frontier did have some
Social welfare and unemployment programmes are an area that is mostly defined by limited success and compromise. Kennedy had grand plans for this area, for example he wanted to introduce Medicare to help the elderly and the poor have access to healthcare however the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Wilbur Mills manage to quash this bill by refusing to give it enough time to be discussed. Another failure in this area was educational reforms. Kennedy proposed the School Assistance bill in 1961 which asked for $2.3 billion over the course of three years to be spent on building new schools and increasing teachers’ pay but the bill was struck down in the House of Representatives. Kennedy did use executive orders to increase school lunch and milk programmes to the poor however which, whilst still being a positive