Kennedy
Election of 1960
- November 8, 1960
- Democratic
- Lyndon B. Johnson
- Richard Nixon
- Kennedy: 49.7% Nixon: 49.6%
The Cold War
- Defense Secretary Robert McNamara creates strategy of developing an array of military options that could be precisely matched to the necessities of the crisis at hand; called "flexible response"
- Kennedy sent more then fifteen thousand American men into South Vietnam, which would not allow for a graceful pullout of troops
- Soviets secretly bringing missiles into Cuba; US President puts Cuba into a "quarantine" until the missiles are removed; Cuban Missile Crisis puts the US on edge with communist control
Kennedy and Civil Rights
- Freedom bus burned;1961
- provided support for MLK
- March on Washington
- Voter Education Project
- sent 400 federal marshals and 3,000 troops to enroll James Meredith in college
Kennedy assassination
- Dallas, TX
- November 22, 1963
- Lee Harvey Oswald
- LBJ sworn in on a waiting airplane