Challenges to American power

How successful was Kennedy's foreign policy?

In his New Frontier speech, Kennedy spoke of the challenge of 'unsolved problems of peace
and war. He was fascinated by such issues. As he said to Richard Nixon after the Bay of
Pigs disaster in spring 1961 (see page 109):
It really is true that foreign affairs is the only important issue for a president to handle, isn't it?
I mean, who gives a shit if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25, in comparison to something
like this?
Kennedy faced frequent Communist challenges to American power, especially in Berlin,
Cuba and Vietnam.
The legacy of crises over Berlin and relations with Khrushchev
Khrushchev was struggling to stay in power, partly because of his failure to make progress
on the Berlin problem (see page 74). Between 1949 and 1958, over 2 million East Germans
fled to West Germany, usually via Berlin. The number of people escaping was growing. The
East German government wanted Khrushchev to halt this public and persistent reminder of
its unpopularity, while Khrushchev worried that West Berlin was a Western centre of
espionage and propaganda (it was a glittering example of Western prosperity).

At a summit meeting with Kennedy at Vienna in June 10., Khrushchev told Kennedy
something must be done about Berlin or he would hand over the access routes to Bast
Germany (see page 75). Such summits were supposed to decrease tensions but Vienna
increased them: soon after, Khrushchev announced increased defence expenditure and
Kennedy followed suit. Then, without warning, the East Germans sealed off their
hundred-mile frontier with West Berlin with wire fences on 13 August 1961, and four days
later erected a
30-mile wall between West Berlin and East Berlin.
The significance of the Berlin Wall crisis
The Berlin Wall was highly significant:
• It stopped East Germans escaping East Germany and brought a certain stability to
Germany and Berlin because the lines of demarcation were now clearly drawn.
• It increased West German antagonism and anxiety with regard to the Soviet bloc. Kennedy
visited West Berlin to assure its citizens of his support.
He wanted to tell them he felt like one of them - 'I am a Berliner' ('Ich bin Berliner'). He got
his German wrong and said 'Ich bin ein Berliner' ('I am a doughnut), but the enthusiastic and
welcoming West Berliners knew what he had meant to say.
• It increased Cold War tensions: soon after, both the USSR and the USA resumed nuclear
testing.
• Western writers interpreted it as a triumph, because it demonstrated how East Germany
needed to wall its people in, but Soviet bloc writers also claimed victory, because the West
had been unable to stop its construction.
• Getting away with constructing the Wall might have encouraged
Khrushchev's adventurism in Cuba.
The challenge of Castro
In January 1959, the left-wing Fidel Castro overthrew the pro-American Cuban dictator
Fulgencio Batista. Castro increasingly criticised America's economic stranglehold over Cuba
and threatened American property there, although in spring 1960 both the US ambassador
to Cuba and the CIA concluded that he was not Communist. Eisenhower responded with
economic sanctions on Cuba July 1960). He approved the CIA build-up of a Cuban exile
military force that would hopefully overthrow Castro.
Kennedy thus inherited increasingly tense US-Cuban relations, along with Eisenhower's plan
for a CIA-supported invasion of Cuba by discontented Cuban exiles.

The Bay of Pigs fiasco

Kennedy received warnings against the invasion of Cuba from many quarters, including
Truman's Secretary of State Dean Acheson and the British. He nevertheless went ahead
with it because:
• He believed that Third World countries such as Cuba were the great new Cold
War arena.
• The plan had been endorsed by a military-hero president and by the CIA, which was at the
height of its prestige.
• He was a prisoner of his own militant anti-Communist rhetoric (in 1960 he promised that, if
elected, he would not allow Cuba to become a Soviet base in the Caribbean).
• Using Cuban exiles seemed a cheap and easy way to get rid of Castro.
In April 1961, 1600 Cuban guerrillas landed at the Bay of Pigs. Their invasion was a disaster
because:
• The Cuban exiles and US newspapers had forewarned Castro.
• The invaders landed miles away from the mountains to which they were supposed to flee if
anything went wrong
• Castro was very popular in Cuba, especially in the Bay of Pigs area, where he frequently
holidayed.
• Kennedy always insisted that US aid be minimal.
The exiles were killed or captured. Kennedy suffered worldwide humiliation, but to his
amazement received an 82 per cent approval rating from the American people.
Unsurprisingly, Castro moved closer to the Soviets and announced that he was a
Communist (he was essentially a pragmatist and had been driven to the Communist camp
by US policies) Khrushchev concluded that Kennedy was a soft touch and proceeded to
bully and bluster at the Vienna summit, erect the Berlin Wall, and install missiles in Cuba in
the belief that Kennedy would either not react or mess up again if he did.
The Cuban missile crisis
In August 1962, Soviet nuclear missiles and technicians arrived in Cuba. Why?
• Although Khrushchev claimed his aim was to protect Cuba, his main concem was the
Soviet Union and his own position. The Soviets had 50 ICBMs (see page 73), the Americans
304. The Soviets had 150 intercontinental bombers, the Americans 1200. These statistics
worried Khrushchev, especially as the Kennedy administration repeatedly boasted about US
nuclear superiority in autumn 1961. A massive Soviet ICBM build-up would be expensive, so
it made sense to put existing MRBMs and IRBMs on Cuba, 90 miles from the
US coast.
• Khrushchev resented American missiles being based in Turkey and pointed at the USSR:
'we must pay them back in their own coin ... so they will know what it feels like to live in the
sights of nuclear weapons!
• Khrushchev wanted to impress his critics at home and in China.
• As Khrushchev had got away with building the Berlin Wall, he hoped he could get away
with the installation of missiles in Cuba.
Kennedy's response
During September 1962, there were rumours in the American press that the Soviets had put
offensive missiles in Cuba. Kennedy warned the Soviets that this would be intolerable but
was confident that they would never station nuclear missiles outside their own territory. On
14 October, a U-2 spy plane photographed missile sites in Cuba. Two days later, Kennedy
established his Executive Committee of the National Security Council (Ex Comm) to
consider the options:
• Doing nothing was not an option because Kennedy feared it would endanger
US national security if the nation looked weak in the face of Soviet missiles 90 miles off the
Florida coast, and because he did not want Khrushchev to have another triumph.
• Using normal diplomatic channels such as the United Nations would be too slow.
• Unaware that the nuclear warheads were already in place in Cuba, some of the military
preferred a 'surgical air strike' or another invasion of Cuba, but
third world war,
Kennedy feared that would kill the Russians in Cuba and perhaps trigger a
• Some suggested the US withdraw missiles in Turkey in exchange for a Soviet withdrawal of
missiles from Cuba, but Kennedy did not want to be seen backing down over Turkey.
A naval blockade would prevent Soviet vessels getting more men and materials to Cuba.
State Department opposition to a surgical air strike
Under Secretary of State George Ball opposed the surgical air strike option, having
concluded from the records of Allied bombing in Europe that if the medical profession should
ever adopt the air force definition of surgical, anyone undergoing an operation for
appendicitis might lose his kidneys and lungs yet find the appendix intact.
Kennedy chose the blockade option, but felt that the word blockade was too aggressive and
instead spoke of a 'quarantine. The advantage of a blockade was that it would give
Khrushchev time to think again. The disadvantages were that it would give him time to
complete the installation of the missiles, and a Soviet-American war might begin if the
Soviets defied the blockade.
The Kennedy administration kept the Cuban missile crisis secret for over a week, but on 22
October Kennedy informed the American people of the missiles and the quarantine. The
situation was unbelievably tense. The United States had B-52 bombers on red alert and 156
ICBMs primed and ready to go.
Initially, the blockade line around Cuba was 800 miles, then Kennedy decreased it to 500
miles to give Khrushchev more time to think. On 24 October, two Soviet ships and a Soviet
submarine neared the 500-mile blockade line but then, with the world apparently on the
verge of nuclear annihilation, Khrushchev halted the ships and the submarine.
On 26 October, while Kennedy prepared for a possible invasion of Cuba, Khrushchev offered
to get the missiles out if Kennedy stopped the blockade and promised not to invade the
island. The next day, Khrushchev added a further demand - the removal of American
missiles from Turkey. Kennedy ignored the second offer and accepted the first, informing the
Soviets that if they failed to reply, the United States would invade Cuba on the 29th.
In the end, Khrushchev backed down. Although Kennedy had publicly promised not to
invade Cuba, he had secretly promised to withdraw American missiles from Turkey. In
addition, Khrushchev realised that the United States had nuclear and naval superiority and
was prepared for war.
The significance of the Cuban missile crisis
The West considered the crisis a triumph for Kennedy. Khrushchev's fall from power soon
after (October 1964) suggests that the Soviets agreed. Both the USA and the USSR were
frightened by the crisis, which led to something of a Cold War thaw:
• A hotline was installed between the Kremlin and the White House so that in future crises
the Soviet and American leaders could communicate directly by telephone (June 1963).
The Soviets and Americans signed the first treaty that attempted to put a brake on the
nuclear arms race - the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (Augus
1963).
Despite the contemporary and subsequent praise for Kennedy's performance, t can be
criticised over the Cuban missile crisis. His involvement in the Bay of Pi invasion and
subsequent CIA anti-Castro plots gave Castro and Khrushchev every reason to fear another
invasion and take preventive steps. It has also bee suggested that the outcome of the Cuban
missile crisis contributed to Americar overconfidence and the increased involvement in
Vietnam.
The deepening involvement in Vietnam
In a 1956 speech to the American Friends of Vietnam, Congressman John Kennedy
declared the tiny nation for which we are in large measure responsible to be very important
to the United States. Clearly, President Kennedy would at the very least continue the
commitment to South Vietnam because he believed in containment (see page 16), the
domino theory (see page 76) and the importance of the Third World - especially Vietnam.

i Kennedy did not want to be accused of 'losing Vietnam, and was also sensitive luncheon in
autumn 1961:
about his youth and inexperience. A journalist told him at a White House
We can annihilate Russia and should make that clear to the Soviet government ... you and
your Administration are weak sisters ... [America needs] a man on
[your daughter) Caroline's tricycle.
horseback ... Many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are riding

A red-faced Kennedy who retorted, Im just as tough as you are', was clearly a president who
thought he had much to prove.
Kennedy's military and civilian advisers urged him to continue the involvement:
Rusk and McNamara told him that a US departure would 'undermine the credibility of
American commitments everywhere! After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy told a friend, 'We
just can't have another defeat in Vietnam!' Escalation in Vietnam
When Kennedy became president in January 1961 there were under 1000
American advisers in Vietnam. At his death in November 1963 there were nearly 17,000,
many of whom were involved in combat, for example, at the battle of Ap Bac in 1963.
Kennedy greatly escalated the US involvement because Diem (see page 76) seemed
incapable of defeating the Communists in South Vietnam, and because the administration,
particularly McNamara, kept hoping that more advisers and war materiel might stabilise the
situation.
As the Communists grew stronger in South Vietnam, Kennedy had several options.
Withdrawal was not one of them because he would be accused of losing' Vietnam.
The reform option
The Kennedy administration urged Diem to introduce social, economic and political reforms
that would make his regime more popular. When Diem rejected this reform option, the
American press grew increasingly critical of him.
David Halberstam of the New York Times was particularly hostile, and Diem's influential
sister-in-law Madame Nhu told American reporters that he should be barbecued and I would
be glad to supply the fluid and the match'.
The American ground troops option
Even as he increased the number of American 'advisers' in South Vietnam to nearly 17,000,
Kennedy knew that sending in US ground troops was not the solution and rejected the
advice of his military to do so:
The troops will march in, the bands will play; the crowds will cheer, and in four days
everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops.
It's like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another.
By spring 1963, Kennedy was disheartened, telling a journalist friend:
... we don't have a prayer of staying in Vietnam ... These people hate us. They are going to
throw our asses out ... But I can't give up a piece of territory like that to the Communists and
then get the American people to re-elect me.
Events in Vietnam in spring 1963 convinced him that the best option was to replace Diem.
The replacement of Diem option
In spring 1963, amidst further references to barbecues by Madame Nhu, Buddhist monks
burned themselves to death in protest against the Catholic Diem's religious policies. Despite
having sent over 10,000 Americans to Vietnam by this time, Kennedy asked, Who are these
people? Why didn't we know about them before? If he really did not know that most South
Vietnamese were Buddhist, his administration was incredibly ill informed. Perhaps he was
simply trying to deflect blame from himself.
The Buddhist protests in Vietnam demonstrated Diem's unpopularity. Some historians have
suggested that Kennedy should have taken this opportunity to exit Vietnam, using the
argument that Diem repeatedly rejected American advice to introduce reforms. His brother
had floated the idea that perhaps
'now was the time to get out of Vietnam entirely, but Kennedy feared 'loss of Vietnam'
accusations at home and loss of face abroad.
Kennedy knew that an effective South Vietnamese regime was essential, saying in a
September 1963 interview:
We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men ... as adoisers, but
they have to win it - the people of Vietnam - against the Communists.
He nevertheless concluded the interview by saying, 'I think we should stay'. So, the
administration decided that the best option was to work towards a better South Vietnamese
government, and colluded in the overthrow and inevitable assassination) of Diem by South
Vietnamese army generals in November 1963.
Vice President Johnson said that collusion increased the US commitment. As the US
commander in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, said, it 'morally locked us in
Vietnam. Trapped by domestic and international Cold War politics, Kennedy had massively
escalated the US involvement in Vietnam.
Covert warfare and assassination
Many find it difficult to believe that Kennedy approved the assassination of Diem, but it is
significant that the CIA had several plans to deal with Fidel Castro that included
assassination.
After the Bay of Pigs humiliation, the Kennedys urged the ClA to gain revenge on Cuba. A
CIA memorandum of 1961 boasted 800 sabotage operations, 150 arson attacks, and bombs
placed at power and railway stations in Cuba. The Mafia were keen to re-establish their
lucrative prostitution, gambling and drugs operations in Havana, so the CIA approached
them about assassinating Castro. A disgruntled ex-girlfriend (she said Castro had made her
abort their child) claimed she was promised $80 million to kill Castro with a toxic Shellfish
pill. However, when they met, she recorded that love proved stronger, and she flushed the
pill down the bidet. Other CIA suggestions included poisoning Castro's cigars, offering him a
pen with a poisoned tip, contaminating his diving suit with tuberculosis, and exploding
clamshells in the area where he dived to blow his legs off. Convinced that Castro's beard
was an essential component of his charisma, the CIA also considered dropping depilatory
powder into his shoes to make it fall out. We believe, said Castro, that the Central
Intelligence Agency has absolutely no intelligence at all'

The legacy of the crises over Berlin and relations with Khrushchev
Kennedy and Khrushchev met for the first time at a summit in Vienna in June
1961. On the table for discussion was the ongoing problem of Berlin, which Eisenhower had
failed to settle, the situation in Cuba and the situation in Laos where US support of a
right-wing government was directed at holding back the communist organisation the Pathet
Lao. Berlin had been a bone of contention between the Superpowers since Stalin's failed
blockade of 1948 to 1949.
Kennedy stood firm on all three issues but privately confided that Khrushchev had savaged'
him. The Soviet leader felt confident that Kennedy was likeable but naive and hence decided
on a solution to his problem in Berlin where 30,000 more East Germans had escaped to the
West in July alone. On 13 August 1961 a barbed wire barrier was erected along the border
between East and West Berlin, followed by a wall which was built over the subsequent days.
Moving between East and West Berlin was strictly controlled and anyone caught without a
permit faced imprisonment, while those trying to cross illicitly were shot.
Kennedy was relatively calm about construction of the wall, saying that it showed that
Khrushchev did not intend to seize the whole of Berlin and that a wall was better than a war.
He was not criticised by either the media or the Republican party, indeed the crisis was only
seen as a crisis in Germany, whereas Kennedy instructed Dean Rusk to exploit the situation
for propaganda as far as was possible. In stark contrast Khrushchev saw Kennedy's lack of
belligerence as proof of the impression he had got at Vienne. that Kennedy was a coward
when it came to international issues and could be pushed around to the advantage of the
Soviet Union.
In June 1963 Kennedy travelled to West Berlin to reiterate the US commitment to the city
and gave one of his most famous speeches, stressing the US commitment to freedom
across the world. Berlin, however, was to remain divided for the next 36 years but the
building of the wall reduced tensions in Europe by effectively creating a status quo
acceptable to both sides at the same time as other areas began to become more dangerous.
In August
1963 Khrushchev summarised how Berlin featured in his planning in a spee. in lugoslavia
declaring "Berlin is the testicle of the West. When I want the West to scream, I squeeze on
Berlin."

Fidel Castro and Cuba

In January 1959 Fidel Castro deposed Fulgencio Batista, the US backed dictator of Cuba.
This meant that a socialist country was less than 100 miles from Florida. Castro nationalised
hundreds of American businesses and Cuban allies of the Batista regime fled to the US.
Castro feared an American attempt to depose him, as the CIA had done to the Guatemalan
President Jacob Arbenz in 1954, after Arbenz's land redistribution policies had angered the
US company United Fruit.
Risenhower had fated to address Cuba to anyafectis who hastite the A n work on a plot to
overthrow Castro using Cuban exiles who had fled to Florida
WI
However, this was not before Castro had humiliated the US by travelling to Neu York for the
General Assembly Meeting of the United Nations and met with Khrushchey, the new Soviet
leader, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and Khian Premier Jawaharlal Nehru as
well as Malcolm & isen hen he took toe around Harlem. Castr's success was embarrassing
for Eisenhower and Dulles as were his outspoken comments against poverty and racism in
the US but with on weee months of his presidency left, Eisenhower was willing to leave the
situation.
Kennedy inherited Eisenhower's CIA plan and authorised it as a show of strength. The
invasion, at a location called Bay of Pigs, in April 1961 was a fiasco as the majority of the
exiles were captured and those that escaped failed to persuade the local population to rise
up against Castro who was considerably more popular than Batista. The debacle put
Kennedy on the defensive when it came to foreign policy and made Khrushchev think he
was naive and could be pushed around. This feeling was confirmed when Kennedy failed to
take action over the Berlin Wall, encouraging Khrushchev to push a little harder. He did so by
forming a closer trading relationship with Castro and, by October 1962, placing Soviet
missiles on Cuba bringing US cities in range of soviet missiles for the first time.
The Cuban Missile Crisis
The Cuban Missile Crisis is often described as the closest the world has come to nuclear
war and the 13 days in the latter half of October 1962 when the crisis took place were
certainly astonishingly tense for the people of the US.
The speed with which the crisis unfolded is a measure of how seriously the events were
seen at the time.

General Curtis Le May told Kennedy he considered Cuba to be the greatest defeat in our
history' as the public were not made aware of the withdrawal of US missiles from both
Turkey and Italy as a result of the negotiations. But with the crisis averted Kennedy basked
in public adulation for the first time since before the Bay of Pigs. The missiles were removed
from Cuba within two months and a hotline was set up between the White House and the
Kremlin to allow for easier communication between the two nations' leaders at a time of
crisis. Khrushchev however was weakened by the crisis and communist hardliners in his
government began to erode his power; within two years of the crisis coming to an end he
had been deposed.
A CLOSER LOOK
How dangerous was the Cuban Missile Crisis?
The Doomsday Clock registered the crisis as having a rating of twelve minutes to midnight,
whereas the US military rated it at DEFCON 2, the highest state of military readiness ever. It
is an event that has been pored over perhaps as exhaustively as any in the Cold War, with
peripheral participants like Johnny Prokov or Vasili Arkhipov being credited as the man who
saved the world' by lazy journalists. But the danger felt very real and, as the events unfolded,
many thought that the end of the world was nigh.
Deepening involvement in Vietnam
With the building of the Berlin Wall resolving the European situation, Kennedy's foreign
policy team felt that the Cold War would now be fought in what was then known as the Third
World'. The situation in Vietnam was a clear example. Here was a country bordering China,
with two further neighbours, in one of whom, Laos, the US was also supporting a
government against communist insurgency. The leader of South Vietnam, a Catholic called
Ngô Đình Diê, m, had American support but was hated by the people for his persecution of
the Buddhist majority. By 1960, this mistreatment led the communist North to encourage
rebellion in the South in the hope of ousting Diê, m and re-unifying the country. The
implications for the domino theory were obvious. In addition there was an established
guerrilla force, the Vietminh, who had proven effective in conflict against both the Japanese
and the French.
However the Kennedys paid little attention to Vietnam initially. After the journalist Stanley
Karnow warned about the ominous situation in Vietnam in 1961, Bobby Kennedy replied,
Vietnam, Vietnam [...] we have thirty Vietnams a day here. As a result, and with the
acquiescence of Robert McNamara, Kennedy saw Vietnam as a military rather than a
diplomatic problem and sanctioned the build up of advisors there and the provision of further
aid to Diệm.

At the start of Kennedy's Administration there were 800 American military advisers in South
Vietnam but by 1963 there were 23,000 in addition to the 250,000 strong South Vietnamese
army under Diệm. Though the US advisers never engaged in combat, but rather sought to
bolster and train the South Vietnamese army in their fight against the Vietcong, the fact the
combined forces couldn't defeat approximately 12,000 Vietcong opposing them should have
been a clear warning of the different nature of the guerrilla warfare that was the norm in the
jungles of Vietnam. With Robert McNamara, a committed devotee of statistical analysis, at
the heart of policymaking, the figures merely seemed to make a US victory that much more
inevitable.
To counteract the guerrilla warfare employed by the Vietcong, Kennedy adopted a tactic of
'flexible response using different fighting and propaganda methods. Amongst these was an ill
thought out tactic known as strategic hamlets which involved moving Vietnamese peasants
from their villages to fortified villages protected by the South Vietnamese military and away
from the influence of the Vietcong. However this was resented by the peasants and Vietcong
influence in the hamlets occurred anyway. The Vietcong also succeeded in getting the
support of the peasants by paying for food and treating them respectfully, employing similar
tactics to Mao's Peoples Liberation Army during the Chinese Civil War.
Diệm's persecution of the Buddhist majority resulted in the self-immolation of Thích Quảng
Đức, a Buddhist monk in 1963. This brought international criticism of the US's role in
supporting Diệm. The image shocked Kennedy.
When the CIA discovered that one of Diệm's own generals, Dương Văn Minh, was planning
to assassinate him they failed to intervene and Diệm was killed a lew weeks before Kennedy
himself. General William Westmoreland, who took over as Commander in Vietnam on the
advice of McNamara in January 1964, stressed that the US's complicity in the assassination
of Diệm obliged them to stay in Vietnam to sort out the mess they had created.
Kennedy ignored the advice of Harold Macmillan, the Prime Minister of Britain and Charles
de Gaulle, the French leader, not to become further entangled in Vietnam. The need to show
himself as a strong leader, reassure other non-communist states in Asia, and stand up to
Soviet and Chinese aggression, along with the advice of technocrats like McNamara drew
Kennedy further into Vietnam, leaving Johnson the most poisoned of chalices.

Summary
Kennedy's popular legacy is dominated by his perceived victory in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
This is helped by imagery burnished in the popular media such as Dean Rusk's quote when
the Soviet ships turned around on 23 October,
"Were eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked' But Cuba was an initial
failure for Kennedy at the Bay of Pigs, as was much of his Latin American policy. Even the
results of the Missile Crisis are not clear cut. Khrushchev succeeded in getting US missiles
removed from Italy and Turkey and ensuring his client state of Cuba was preserved, all for
the limited cost of a few clandestine boat trips. The strategic advantage of potentially having
nuclear missiles in Cuba was also being eroded by developments in technology.
Elsewhere Berlin was a symbolic and propaganda success for Kennedy, especially in terms
of his speeches, but it is in Vietnam where his actions had the longest shadow. Seduced by
McNamara and the military into thinking the US were invincible, he developed the situation
into a much more serious one than Eisenhower had allowed. Ironically the great General's
fear of the Military-Industrial Complex prevented him feeding it. It was his successor, with his
willingness to invest in nuclear capability and put increased US presence on the ground, who
really contributed to the massive build up of the military which made the Vietnam War
inevitable.

Vietcong or VC: a Communist guerrilla force which operated in South Vietnam and was
supported by North Vietnam

Doomsday Clock: a symbolic clock face which hangs on a wall in the University of Chicago
and represents a countdown to global catastrophe. The closer the clock is set to midnight,
the closer the world is to global disaster
DEFCON: meaning Defense Readiness
Condition, this is a measure used to estimate the imminence of nuclear conflict by the US
armed forces ranging from 1 (nuclear war is imminent] to 5 [the lowest state of imminence)
Y TERM
nird World: originally a term to distinguish between those nations that were neither aligned
with NATO or with the Warsaw Pact.
Its later use was related to the developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America
domino theory: the idea that once one country fell to communism surrounding countries
would inevitably fall like dominos'
Vietminh: meaning League for Vietnamese Independence it was formed in 1941 and led by
Ho Chi Minh and Võ Nguyên Giáp.
With training from the OSS (the forerunner to the CIA) they fought a guerrilla war against the
Japanese from 1941-5 and then against the French from 1945-54. Following the division of
Vietnam many of the Vietminh became involved in the running of North Vietnam, but some
remained in the South and became the core of the Vietcong

15 October 1962
18 October
19 October
22 October
23 October
24 October
25 October
26 October
27 October
28 October
A U-2 spy plane discovers evidence of missiles in Cuba.
Robert Kennedy meets with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko who tells Kennedy that
the only help the Soviet Union is giving to Cuba is assistance growing crops and missiles
that are only for defence.
Ex-Comm suggests quarantining Cuba.
President Kennedy gives a televised speech to the nation.
Soviet ships on their way to Cuba are stopped 750 miles away under Khrushchev's orders.
Khrushchev refuses to remove the missiles from Cuba.
Kennedy orders flights over Cuba to be increased from once to twice per day.
Ex-comm begins discussions about invading Cuba.
Khrushchev sends a telegram, offering to dismantle the sites if Kennedy promises not to
invade Cuba.
A U-2 plane is shot down over Cuba. Kennedy receives a second telegram, demanding that
he also dismantle American missile bases in Turkey. Kennedy agrees to the proposal in the
first telegram. He also secretly agrees to remove US missiles from Turkey.
Khrushchev gives a speech saying he has agreed to Kennedy's arrangement.

Ex-Comm: a group convened to manage the Cuban Missile Crisis including, both Kennedys,
Johnson, Rusk, McNamara, McGeorge Bundy and top officials from the ClA and Department
of Defense. The groups meetings were secretly recorded by JFK

Fidel Castro (b. 1926) fought with Che Guevara against dictatorships in the Dominican
Republic and Colombia. Back in Cuba his guerrilla forces took power and he converted to
communism, developing close relations with the USSR. A 2006 Channel 4 documentary
alleges that there have been over 600 attempts on his life, many organised by the CIA.

Ap Bac Battle between Vietnamese Communist guerrillas and the army of South Vietnam,
which was assisted by US 'advisers'
(1963).
Ground troops In March 1965, President Johnson sent the first few thousand regular soldiers
(rather than just
'advisers') to Vietnam.

November 1960
April 1961
900 US troops in Vietnam in advisory capacity
Kennedy orders Bay of Pigs invasion
Berlin Wall built
August 1961
April 1962
Strategic Hamlet
Programme begins, US
troop numbers reach 11,000
October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis
June 1963
Kennedy visits Berlin, delivers 'Ich bin ein Berliner' speech
October 1963 Partial Nuclear Test
Ban Treaty signed with
USSR
November 1963
Diem overthrown and executed in Vietnam

American Friends of Vietnam US organisation that lobbied in favour of South Vietnam

1955-75.

MRBMs Medium-range ballistic missiles.

IRBMs Intermediate-range ballistic missiles.
Surgical air strike Air strike on specified targets.

Fidel Castro (1926-)

Castro led Cuba from 1959 to 2008. His criticisms of the
USA and his close association with the USSR and with revolutionary movements in Africa in
particular, made Cuba important in the Cold War.