Kennedy, the Cold War, and the New Frontier

1. Kennedy, the Cold War, and the New Frontier

2. President John F. Kennedy takes over the Cold War in the 1960’s • The 1960 election changes politics • First Roman Catholic president • First televised presidential debate • Kennedy’s first challenges occur in Cuba • Cuba was an American protectorate from 1898-1959 • A revolution, led by Fidel Castro, put a new government in place that drew increasingly closer to the Soviets • The Bay of Pigs: April of 1960 • The CIA began secretly training Cuban refugees at the end of the Eisenhower administration • Kennedy authorizes a US backed invasion of Cuba by the refugees • Due to poor planning, the unwillingness of the US to risk its own troops, and popular support for Castro, the invasion failed • Cuban Missile Crisis: October of 1962 • The Soviets begin sending nuclear missiles to Cuba in the summer of 1962 • The US discovers this and imposes a blockade on Cuba to prevent weapons from being shipped there • Standoff occurs when Russian ships appear ready to run the blockade • The Soviet Union blinks and stops its ships • The Soviets agree to remove missiles, in exchange the US pledges to not invade Cuba and remove missiles from Turkey

3. The Berlin Wall is built in 1961 • Since the Berlin Airlift, 3 million refugees had fled from East Germany to West Germany • This was embarrassing to East Germany and harmed the East German economy • In order to prevent more refugees from leaving, Khrushchev and East German officials had a wall built on the border of East and West Berlin

4. Nuclear war notes • As a response to how close the US and the USSR came to nuclear war, Kennedy and Khrushchev attempted to reduce tensions • Set up a “hot line,” a dedicated phone line between the two leaders • Agreed to a limited test ban treaty that ended nuclear testing in the atmosphere

5. President Kennedy called his legislative program the “New Frontier” • Wanted to improve education • Wanted to fight poverty • Had trouble getting anything done in Congress • Conservative groups did not want major reform • Kennedy did not have a mandate because he won a very close election

6. On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated • Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine, was charged • His palm print was found on the murder weapon • He had spent time living in the Soviet Union and had been a public supporter of Fidel Castro • Two days after the assassination, while being transferred between prisons, Oswald was shot and killed by a nightclub owner named Jack Ruby • There have been a number of theories surrounding the assassination • The Warren Commission, the official government investigation, found the Oswald had acted alone in shooting the president • An investigation in 1979 said that Oswald had acted as part of a conspiracy, and there may have been a second shooter • Various conspiracy theories, blaming everybody from the Soviet Union to the mafia to the CIA, still exist • Kennedy’s Vice President, Lyndon Johnson, was sworn in as President on Air Force One on the same day the Kennedy died