Check out part 1 and part 2 of our series on JFK
Kennedy’s Foreign Policies Challenges
April 1961, an early crisis occurred in the American foreign affairs arena where John F. Kennedy approved the to send 1,400 CIA- trained Cubans exiles. They were to be taken to in an amphibious landing at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba.
Kennedy met with Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushev in Vienna that June. They were to discuss the Berlin city, which had been divided after World War II between Allied and Soviet control. After two months, East Germany troops began constructing a wall to divide the city. Kennedy sent an army convoy to reassure the Americans living in West Berlin that he would support them. In June 1963, he was also to deliver one of his well renowned speeches in West Berlin.
There was a misunderstanding between Kennedy and Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Kennedy announced a naval blockade of Cuba ,after learning that the Soviet Union was constructing a number of nuclear and long-range missile sites in Cuba that could pose a threat to the continental United States. The tense standstill took almost two weeks before Khrushchev agreed to pull apart Soviet missile sites in Cuba. In return for this America promised not to attack the island and the remove U.S. missiles from Turkey. Kennedy won his greatest foreign affairs victory when Khrushchev in July 1963. Khrushchev approved to join him and Britain’s Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in signing a nuclear test prohibition treaty.
John F. Kennedy Assassination
President J.F Kennedy and his wife landed in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. He had spoken in San Antonio, Austin and Fort Worth the previous day. The party then traveled in a motorcade to the Dallas Trade Mart (the site of Jack’s next speaking engagement) from the airport. As the motorcade was passing through downtown Dallas shortly at about 12:30 p.m., gunshots filled the atmosphere around. President Kennedy was shot twice, in the neck and head. Later he was pronounced dead after arriving at a nearby hospital.
Twenty-four-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, known to have been a Communist sympathy, was under arrest for the killing but was shot and seriously wounded two days later by local nightclub owner (Jack Ruby) while being led to jail.
Alternative theories of Kennedy’s assassination emerged almost immediately. This included- conspiracies run by the KGB, the Mafia and the U.S. military-industrial complex, among others.
A presidential commission, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, concluded that Oswald had acted alone. But an assumption and arguments over the assassination has persisted from time to time.
John Kennedy assassination was the turning point in US protection of presidents.