Describe Kennedy's major foreign policy crises, especially the Cuban Missile Crisis, and evaluate the decision-making process that resolved it.
John F. Kennedy won a close 1960 election against Richard Nixon, a race notable for the first televised presidential debates -- viewers who watched on television reportedly favored Kennedy's composed appearance, while radio listeners rated the debate closer, an early lesson in how a new medium can reshape politics itself. His administration's early foreign policy stumbled badly: the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, a CIA-planned effort by Cuban exiles to topple Fidel Castro's communist government, failed disastrously and embarrassed the new president. Months later, in August 1961, East Germany built the Berlin Wall to stop the flow of refugees fleeing to the West, creating the Cold War's single most visible physical symbol of a divided world.
The Cold War's most dangerous moment came in October 1962, when American reconnaissance photographs revealed Soviet nuclear missiles being installed in Cuba, within easy striking range of most of the continental United States. For thirteen tense days, Kennedy's inner circle of advisors debated options ranging from a full invasion to quiet diplomacy; Kennedy chose a naval "quarantine" of Cuba -- deliberately avoiding the word "blockade," which would technically have counted as an act of war -- while opening a direct channel to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. The crisis ended when the Soviets agreed to remove the missiles in exchange for a public American pledge not to invade Cuba and a secret agreement to remove American missiles from Turkey, a resolution historians still study as a model of careful, restrained crisis diplomacy that likely prevented a nuclear war. Kennedy did not live much longer: he was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and the official Warren Commission investigation concluded Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, though the event remains a subject of enduring public fascination and competing theories that this course notes without endorsing.
Mastery looks like: They can describe the Bay of Pigs and the Berlin Wall, sequence the Cuban Missile Crisis's key decision points, and state both parts of the deal that resolved it.
Common stumbles: Assuming the missile crisis was resolved by American toughness alone, without recognizing the quiet diplomatic concession (removing missiles from Turkey) that made a peaceful resolution possible.