Power and the presidency
The Nixon-Kennedy debate
Kennedy and Khrushchev
Bay of Pigs incident
Cuban missile crisis
Presidential detail
In early 1961 President John F. Kennedy concluded that Fidel Castro was a Soviet client working to subvert Latin America. After much debate in his administration Kennedy authorized a clandestine invasion of Cuba by a brigade of Cuban exiles. The brigade hit the beach at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961, but the operation collapsed in spectacular failure within 2 days. Read from the State Historian's data
In the fall of 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union came as close as they ever would to global nuclear war. Hoping to correct what he saw as a strategic imbalance with the United States, Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev began secretly deploying medium range ballistic missiles (MRBM) and intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBM) to Fidel Castro's Cuba. Once operational, these nuclear-armed weapons could have been used cities and military targets in most of the continental United States. How did American react?
A quick look at the life of John F. Kennedy in this mini-bio video.
Fifty years after the election that sent John Kennedy to the White House, the impact of his thousand days in the Oval Office continues to be seen in positive repercussions from the civil rights movement and problematic ones from the Vietnam War. He pioneered the media age that has shaped national politics ever since and expanded the role of the federal government in ways that continue to reverberate.
Read from this USA Today article