Kennedy & The Cold War

The Bay of Pigs Invasion

• On April 17, 1961, about 1,400 Cuban exiles launched what became a botched invasion at the Bay of Pigs on the south coast of Cuba.
• The invasion proved to be a military and diplomatic disaster.
• The U.S. lost credibility for its clumsy invasion tactics and its violation of agreements not to interfere in the Western Hemisphere.

The Berlin Crisis

• The Berlin Crisis of 1961 occurred between June 4th and November 9th, 1961, and was the last major political-military European incident of the Cold War about the occupational status of the German capital city, Berlin, and of post–World War II Germany.
• The division of Berlin was actually planned to be a temporary measure. However, the Soviet Union demanded it to be permanent, hoping that it would reduce the flow of East Germans escaping through Berlin to West Germany.
• The Berlin Wall came to be a somber symbol of Cold War tensions.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

• The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis of 1961, was a 13 day confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union initiated by American ballistic missile deployment in Italy and Turkey with consequent Soviet ballistic missile deployment in Cuba.

Kennedy Assassination

• President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, while riding in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza.
• By 2:15 p.m., Lee Harvey Oswald, a new employee at the Book Depository, was arrested for JFK’s assassination, as well as for the fatal 1:15 p.m. shooting of Dallas patrolman J.D. Tippit. Two days later, on Nov. 24, Oswald would be murdered by local nightclub owner and police informant Jack Ruby at point-blank range and on live TV.

Space Race

• Russian cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyvich Gagarin became the first human being in space.
• The Space Race started on April 12th of 1961.
• Monuments were raised to him across the Soviet Union and streets renamed in his honor. The triumph of the Soviet space program in putting the first man into space was a great blow to the United States, which had scheduled its first space flight for May 1961.