JFK and The Cold War

What we will cover...

• Bay of Pigs invasion
• Berlin Wall
• Cuban Missile Crisis
• Assassination of President Kennedy
• Wait to Find out!

Bay of Pigs invasion-

• APRIL 17, 1961
• 1400 Cuban exiles launched what became a botched invasion at the Bay of Pigs on the south coast of Cuba.
• Fidel Castro came to power in an armed revolt that overthrew Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.
• Led to a reassessment of Cuba policy by the Kennedy administration

Berlin Wall-

• August 13, 1961
• The wall separated East Berlin and West Berlin. It was built in order to prevent people from fleeing East Berlin
• It was the perfect symbol of the "Iron Curtain" that separated the democratic western countries and the communist countries of Eastern Europe throughout the Cold War
• November 9, 1989, as the Cold War began to thaw across Eastern Europe, it was announced that the border will open at midnight.

Cuban Missile Crisis

• Bay of Pigs Invasion was a major cause of the Cuban Missile Crisis
• It was the closest the Cold War came to escalating into a full scale nuclear war.
• October 1962
• The Soviet Union (USSR) began building missile sites in Cuba
• The US feared the USSR, it placed nuclear missiles in Europe that could hit the Soviet Union

Assassination of John F. Kennedy

• November 22, 1963
• Almost from the beginning, the killing of the popular young president was thought by many Americans to have been the result of a conspiracy
• His accused killer was Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine who had embraced Marxism and defected for a time to the Soviet Union.
• Oswald never stood trial for murder, because, while being transferred after having been taken into custody, he was shot and killed by Jack Ruby, a distraught Dallas nightclub owner.

Cold War Space Race

• he Cold War Space Race (1957 - 1975) was a competition in the exploration of space between the United States and the Soviet Union
• It was in summary a show of superiority between the two nations
• President John F. Kennedy announced before a special joint session of Congress the dramatic and ambitious goal of sending an American safely to the Moon before the end of the decade.
• In 1957, the Soviet Union launched the satellite Sputnik, and the space race was on