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President John F. Kennedy (1961-1963)
•A Democrat, but a fierce cold warrior
•At 43, youngest elected president in history (TR had been 42, but not elected)
•First Catholic president
The Nixon-Kennedy debate in 1960, the first of a long-line of image-conscious televised presidential debates where style will often outweigh
substance
American royalty, John and Jacqueline Kennedy
King Arthur (Richard Burton) and Queen Guinevere (Julie Andrews) in the hit Broadway musical, Camelot
The rain may never fall till after sundown.By eight, the morning fog must disappear.In short, there's simply notA more congenial spotFor happily-ever-aftering than hereIn Camelot.
John F. Kennedy’s younger brother, Robert, briefly joined Joseph McCarthy’s Senate investigative committee, though he later resigned
because he was disturbed by McCarthy’s tactics
Senator Kennedy’s 1956 Pulitzer Prize winning book, Profiles in Courage—“more the work of a ‘committee’ than of any one person,” but JFK received the prize and the political accolades
Photo from a 1957 Life magazine spread suggesting that JFK (who is throwing the football to his brother Robert) was
fit and youthful
Robert McNamara (Secretary of Defense) and Dean Rusk (Secretary of State)—the “best and the brightest”?
Nikita Khrushchev denouncing Stalinism and Stalin’s crimes during the 20th Soviet Congress in 1956
•Despite considerable resistance within the Kremlin, Khrushchev attempts to improve relations with the United States
•Builds up considerable trust for Eisenhower, who he considered a friend
•U-2 incident in 1960 derails progress toward detente, as do growing tensions over Berlin
Popular magazine article on JFK’s flexible solution to Cold War Containment: Special Forces or Green Berets, 1961
Fulgencio Batista, a former elected president of Cuba who then led a military coup in 1952 that made him the dictator of the nation
Fidel Castro, the fiery young Cuban nationalist and revolutionary who led the widely supported popular
revolt against Batista in the late 1950s
Kennedy and Khrushchev meet in person for the first time in Vienna, June 1961—Khrushchev’s belief that he can push around the young president
heightens tensions over the issue of Berlin
One American response to growing tensions with USSR in the early 1960s: Atlas nuclear warhead rockets in underground silos of hardened concrete
strong enough to withstand a first-strike nuclear attack
American submarine with open launch tubes for carrying Polaris missiles, which could be equipped with nuclear warheads
Frame timber house built to study the effects of atomic blasts on civilian populations, Nevada Test Site, June
1953
Previously classified U.S. government map showing the 1962 deployment of American atomic missiles in Turkey,
immediately south of the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
“Every idiot can start a war, but it is impossible to win this war . . . therefore
the missiles have one purpose—to scare them, to restrain them . . . to give them back some of their own medicine. The Americans had surrounded our country with military bases and threatened us with nuclear weapons, and now they
would learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at them.”
--Nikita Khrushchev, 1962
Ex-Comm (Executive Committee) meeting during Cuban Missile Crisis, October 14-27, 1962
Robert Kennedy
John Kennedy
October 22, 1962, JFK goes on national
television to tell the American people of the
Cuban crisis and his plans for a naval “quarantine” and
demand for immediate removal of the missiles
Khrushchev’s long (eight pages) and emotional letter to JFK, writing “We are of sound mind and understand perfectly well that if we attack you, you will respond the same way.”
Khrushchev offers to withdraw the missiles if JFK ends the
blockade and promises not to invade Cuba.