“Camelot,” performed by

Richard Burton, 1960

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

Kennedy in 1961 after lifting a shovel of dirt exacerbated his chronic back problems

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

Castro addresses an enthusiastic crowd of Cubans in May of 1961

Cuban tanks and planes meet the Bay of Pigs invaders, April

15, 1961

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

The Berlin Wall goes up, August 1961

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

Family fun time in a backyard bomb/radiation shelter

School children practicing the “Duck and Cover” atomic bomb Civil Defense drill

Frame timber house built to study the effects of atomic blasts on civilian populations, Nevada Test Site, June

1953

American U-2 spy photo of the Cuban atomic missile base, October 14th 1962

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

One of the Soviet submarines surfacing near the quarantine line about 500 miles off the Cuban coast

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.

New recruits to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam

American “advisors” and pilots evacuate ARVN soldiers from a jungle outpost

An American officer leading ARVN soldiers into battle, c. 1963

One of Diem and Nhu’s ill-advised Strategic Hamlets, 1963

American schematic of the general design for Strategic Hamlets

Ngo Dinh Nhu, Diem’s brother and head of Secret Police, c. 1960

Madame Nhu on the cover of Life magazine, 1963, and practicing her aim