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The Yalta Conference took place in a Russian resort town in the Crimea from February 4-11, 1945, during World War Two. At Yalta, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin made important decisions regarding the future progress of the war and the postwar world.

World Leaders at the Yalta Conference

The Allied leaders came to Yalta knowing that an Allied victory in Europe was practically inevitable but less convinced that the Pacific war was nearing an end. Recognizing that a victory over Japan might require a protracted fight, the United States and Great Britain saw a major strategic advantage to Soviet participation in the Pacific theater. At Yalta, Roosevelt and Churchill discussed with Stalin the conditions under which the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan and all three agreed that, in exchange for potentially crucial Soviet participation in the Pacific theater, the Soviets would be granted a sphere of influence in Manchuria following Japan's surrender. This included the southern portion of Sakhalin, a lease at Port Arthur (now Lüshunkou), a share in the operation of the Manchurian railroads, and the Kurile Islands. This agreement was the major concrete accomplishment of the Yalta Conference.

The Allied leaders also discussed the future of Germany, Eastern Europe and the United Nations. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin agreed not only to include France in the postwar governing of Germany, but also that Germany should assume some, but not all, responsibility for reparations following the war. The Americans and the British generally agreed that future governments of the Eastern European nations bordering the Soviet Union should be "friendly" to the Soviet regime while the Soviets pledged to allow free elections in all territories liberated from Nazi Germany. Negotiators also released a declaration on Poland, providing for the inclusion of Communists in the postwar national government. In discussions regarding the future of the United Nations, all parties agreed to an American plan concerning voting procedures in the Security Council, which had been expanded to five permanent members following the inclusion of France. Each of these permanent members was to hold a veto on decisions before the Security Council.

Initial reaction to the Yalta agreements was celebratory. Roosevelt and many other Americans viewed it as proof that the spirit of U.S.-Soviet wartime cooperation would carry over into the postwar period. This sentiment, however, was short lived. With the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 12, 1945, Harry S. Truman became the thirty-third president of the United States. By the end of April, the new administration clashed with the Soviets over their influence in Eastern Europe, and over the United Nations. Alarmed at the perceived lack of cooperation on the part of the Soviets, many Americans began to criticize Roosevelt's handling of the Yalta negotiations. To this day, many of Roosevelt's most vehement detractors accuse him of "handing over" Eastern Europe and Northeast Asia to the Soviet Union at Yalta despite the fact that the Soviets did make many substantial concessions.

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Milestones: 1937-1945 - Office of the Historian

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Truman Doctrine | Definition & Facts | Britannica

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Truman Doctrine, pronouncement by U.S. President Harry S. Truman on March 12, 1947, declaring immediate economic and military aid to the governments of Greece, threatened by communist insurrection, and Turkey, under pressure from Soviet expansion in the Mediterranean area.

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The Marshall Plan formed the greatest voluntary transfer of resources from one country to another known to history. Technically known as the European Recovery Program, the plan was passed by the U.S. Congress with a decisive majority and was signed by President Truman on April 3, 1948--just in time to influence the Italian election in that year.

The Marshall Plan did not, in and of itself, cause Western European economic recovery. Indeed, there was little direct correlation between the amount of U.S. aid received and the speed of economic recovery in the various recipient countries. France and Britain obtained much more aid per capita than West Germany, which nevertheless progressed more quickly than either. But the Marshall Plan (guided by the European Cooperation Administration, ECA) helped to tide Western Europe over a dangerous period. The plan provided new confidence to Western Europe; the plan furnished money, food, fuel, and machinery at a time when the Western European economies were all in disarray. Marshall Plan experts argued in favor of free trade, decentralized management, breaking up of cartels, the elimination of quotas and customs, and labor-saving technologies.

Manuscript draft of a speech on post-war reconstruction in Europe. Such documents record the evolution of the Marshall Plan, which promoted economic recovery with innovative and bold initiatives. The original draft is in the Truman presidential library, and a copy is filed in the Hoover Institution Archives.

The Americans also delivered know-how. For example, at the Doboelman soap works in Holland, American experts showed the Dutch how to cut processing time from five days to two hours with new machinery. In Norway, fishermen used a new type of net made from yarn spun in Italy. In Offenbach in West Germany, Marshall Plan leather revived the handbag industry; in Lille, Marshall Plan coal kept a steel factory in business; and in Roubaix, Marshall Plan wood maintained one of the world's largest textile mills. In 1945, only twenty-five thousand tractors were in use on French farms; four years later, Marshall Plan aid had put another two hundred thousand tractors in the field. Overall, American investment in Western Europe grew apace, and more and more U.S. patents found customers abroad. Americans had good reason for talking about "the American century."

A host of U.S. technical experts, consultants, and managers also contributed their experience to Western Europe. But there was also a reverse flow of Europeans to the United States. As William James Adams, an economist, puts it with regard to France:

Under the Marshall Plan, France dispatched large numbers of business executives, trade unionists, civil servants to the United States with an eye toward absorption of American productivity. They returned not only with . . . butch haircuts and wineless lunches, but also with an appreciation of how business was conducted in a relatively dynamic, seemingly disorganized setting.

The plan likewise presented an immense U.S. political commitment. Not for nothing did George C. Marshall, a professional soldier, receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. In a more intangible sense, Europeans benefited from the American sense of optimism and the American premise that peace, labor productivity, consumerism, welfare, and profits went hand in hand--this at a time when gloomy existentialist philosophies were in high fashion among European intellectuals. America produced cheaper coal (coal miners struck in Europe's coldest winter, 1946) and sent food to tide the Europeans over and then the means to revive quickly their economies through the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan, like NATO, created an intricate network of intra-European and transatlantic contacts among businessmen, civil servants, and trade unionists.

Above all, the Marshall Plan was designed to push Europeans toward political and economic cooperation--a major objective of U.S. policymakers. Paul G. Hoffman, who headed the ECA, predicted European unification through a common market. Aid was administered through the OEEC (Organization for European Economic Cooperation, created in 1948, replaced in 1961 by the OECD, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). In terms of a narrowly conceived realpolitik, the Americans might have benefited from dealing separately with their European allies in a strictly bilateral fashion. In practice, the Americans looked toward a new Western European economic association.

The Marshall planners were convinced that only a prosperous Europe could resist communism. The Plan worked.

The United States was both a lobbyist for a united Europe and also a role model. Surely, European federalists argued, the United States could not have developed into the world's greatest economic power had the fifty states remained divided by customs barriers and if a New Yorker visiting California were obliged to show his passport every time he crossed the border of a state. The OEEC created a network of transnational bodies and transnational committees to deal with specialized questions. (These included the European Payments Union [EPU], set up in 1950, and a central bank and clearinghouse for intra-European trade and payments. By 1959 the European currencies had largely become convertible, and the EPU was replaced by the European Monetary Agreement.)

Yet the Marshall Plan was only passed against heavy U.S. domestic opposition. American isolationists resented having to spend American taxpayers' money on foreign countries that had already defaulted on their previous debts from World War I. Businessmen didn't want to reconstruct competitor European industries. Congressmen only wanted to give food, not loans. The Soviet Union and its allies all the world over denounced the plan for strengthening the hold of U.S. capitalism on Western Europe; hence the Soviet Union would not become a beneficiary of the plan, nor would Moscow permit any of its satellites to participate. Even pro-American Europeans were bound to feel uneasy. It was hard to ask a foreign country for aid, harder still to ask aid from a donor whom visiting European dignitaries had traditionally described in unflattering terms. A handful of purists also complained because of the plan's Keynesian connotations, its refusal to leave European recovery to the free market alone.

Nevertheless, the plan worked. It succeeded in part because it gained widespread political acceptance within the United States itself--a remarkable political achievement. The plan represented a new welfare capitalism--confident, committed to raising productivity, raising wages, expanding markets, and establishing good labor relations by depoliticizing trade unionism. The Marshall planners were convinced that only a prosperous Europe would resist communism and that only a prosperous Europe would provide expanding markets for U.S. as well as European producers. On the whole, the plan was well administered; there were no scandals, no massive diversion of funds into the pockets of political and bureaucratic racketeers. Yet the expenditure involved was astronomical by the standards of the time. The Marshall Plan and other forms of foreign assistance between them cost the United States $17.6 billion (or $120 billion in current value for the Marshall Plan alone)--as we said, the largest voluntary transfer of resources in history. Ten years after the end of the greatest war in history, Western Europe had not only fully recovered but had become far more prosperous and productive than before.

Adapted from The USA and the New Europe, 1945-1993, Published by Blackwell. Used with permission. To order, call 800-903-1181. The following books, available from the Hoover Press, provide additional information on the Marshall Plan: The Rebirth of the West: The Americanization of the Democratic World, 1945-1958, by Peter Duignan and L. H. Gann, and Our Finest Hour: Will Clayton, the Marshall Plan, and the Triumph of Democracy, by Gregory A. Fossedal. Also available as part of the Essays in Public Policy series is "World War II and Europe", by Peter Duignan and L. H. Gann. To order, call 800-935-2882.

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The Marshall Plan formed the greatest voluntary transfer of resources from one country to another known to history. Technically known as the European Recovery Program, the plan was passed by the U.S. Congress with a decisive majority and was signed by President Truman on April 3, 1948--just in time to influence the Italian election in that year.

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For nearly one year, Stalin cut the West Berlin enclave off from all land and river transit. The Allies responded with an airlift that supplied the population with over two million tons of freight.

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NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg welcomed the Prime Minister of Slovenia Robert Golob to NATO Headquarters on Thursday (21 March 2024).

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Known to some as the Red Scare of 1919, the First Red Scare was a precursor to the Red-baiting and witch hunting that occurred in the years following World War II. During this period:

People truly believed that Reds were under the bed - not to mention in the water supply, creeping through the halls of government, and even spying from space.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. First some background.

After the Russian Revolution, communism was dreaded by America's business and industrial leaders. Fearing labor unrest, they treated it like the plague. According to Red Scared!: The Commie Menace in Propaganda and Popular Culture, a 2001 book by Michael Barson and Steven Heller:

These same leaders forged secret alliances with racists, jingoists, and other America-first fanatics in spreading anti-Communist propaganda throughout the nation. In turn, they succeeded in convincing a mass of Americans that their lives were threatened by Communists who were nestled among the immigrants entering the United States.

After the 1917 Russian Revolution, Bolshevism became totally entrenched in Russian life, and in 1919 the American Communist Party was founded in Chicago. Refusing to recognize Lenin's government, President Wilson committed arms and troops to the war against Bolshevism abroad and increased the level of anti-Communist propaganda at home.

Interestingly, though, the Red Scare begins much earlier than 1917. Let's start our timeline with the Manifesto of the Communist Party, publishedin 1848.

Red Scare Timeline: 1848-1927

1848: Karl Marx and Frederic Engels write the Manifesto of the Communist Party. It declares: " A specter is haunting Europe, and that specter is Communism."

1879: Josef Stalin is born in the Georgian village of Gori and christened Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. In 1912, Lenin gives him the name Stalin - Man of Steel.

December 26, 1893: Mao Zedong is born in the farm village of Shaosan, not far from Changsha, the capital city of Hunan province.

1903: Lenin leads the split from the 5 year old Russian Social Democrat Labor Party. He forms the Bolshevik Party.

January 9, 1905: Bloody Sunday erupts. The Imperial Guard of the absent Czar Nicholas II, at the direction of the grand duke, opens fire on a crowd of several thousand unarmed laborers marching on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to protest mistreatment; 1500 demonstrators are wounded or killed.

1905: Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party candidate for president in 1900 and 1904, founds the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The group is known as the Wobblies.

November 7, 1917: The October Revolution (the Russian calendar was used) marks the Bolshevik seizure of power with forces that number no more than 250,000. The 15 member Politburo is formed immediately. Josef Stalin, a founding member and an experienced revolutionary activist, is given the post of People's Commissar of Nationalities.

1917: Lenin's State and Revolution is published.

1917: Congress passes the Espionage Act, making it illegal to mail literature "advocating or urging treason, insurrection, or forcible resistance" to the laws of the United States.

April 1918: Lenin forms the Revolutionary Military Council.

July 8, 1918: The Romanov royal family - the czar, the empress, and their children - are shot to death by the Bolshevists. Their bodies are buried in a remote forest, but their graves are rediscovered in 1922.

1918: Congress passes the Sedition Act, which forbids anything "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive" being either spoken or written about the US government or the Constitution.

September 1918: Eugene V. Debs is tried in Cleveland and found guilty of violating the Espionage Act. He is sentenced to 2 concurrent 10 year terms, asserting: "While there is a lower class, I am in it: while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free." He served his time in an Atlanta penitentiary, even though Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer urged President Wilson to grant him clemency.

March 1919: Lenin establishes The Comintern, the Third Communist International. Its mandate is to coordinate Communist activity worldwide via decree from Moscow.

April 30, 1919: A postal clerk in New York discovers bombs in 20 packages addressed to a variety of government officials. The bombs are set to explode the next day, on May Day. The attack launches America's First Red Scare.

August 1919: The Justice Department creates the General Intelligence Division. Its first director is J. Edgar Hoover, a graduate of George Washington University Law School.

August 1919: Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer asks Immigration to deport black activist Marcus Garvey. But he doesn't go to prison until his arrest in January 1922 on charges of mail fraud. His sentence is commuted in 1927, and Garvey is deported back to his native Jamaica.

1919: John Reed's books, Red Russia and Ten Days That Shook the World, are published. They're based on his first-hand account of the 1917 Revolution. Back in the US, Reed is expelled from the Socialist Party. He and Benjamin Gitlow form the Communist Labor Party. For a few years, it competes with the Russian led Communist Party of America. Later in 1919, Reed returns to Russia. The Comintern gives him money and instructions to further the growth of the Communist movement in America. Jailed in Finland on his way back to America, Reed falls into poor health. He dies in Moscow in 1920. Lenin sees to it that he is buried within the walls of the Kremlin - the only American to ever be so honored.

January 10, 1920: The League of Nations is formed. It's dissolved on the same day in 1946, shortly after the founding of the United Nat ions.

September 16, 1920: A bomb explodes on Wall Street, killing 30 and injuring many others. Anarchists are blamed.

1920: The Red Army, led by Georgi Zhukov, defeats the White Army of the Cossacks and other counter-revolutionaries. This ends Russia's civil war.

November 1920: The first Chinese Communist Manifesto is published in Shanghai.

May 1921: The Communist Party of America (CPA) and John Reed's Communist Labor Party (CLP) merge into the American Communist Party (ACP) at a convention held in Woodstock, NY.

December 24, 1921: Newly elected President Warren G. Harding orders the release of Eugene V. Debs from prison. In 1920, while in prison, Debs had run as the Socialist Party candidate for president. He boldly stated: "I consider the Russian Revolution] the greatest single achievement in all history. I am still a Bolshevik. I am fighting for the same thing here they are fighting for there."

April 3, 1922: Stalin is elected general secretary to the Central Committee, the most important post in the Party.

December 1922: The USSR is officially formed.

January 21, 1924: Lenin dies and is succeeded by Josef Stalin.

January 1925: Leon Trotsky is removed from his position as commissar for the army and navy and chairman of the military council.

October 1925: The National Negro Labor Congress is organized by the Communist Party.

August 23, 1927: Anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are electrocuted. They were convicted of robbery and murder in 1921. Their trial and execution become rallying points for American progressives.

Thanks to Red Scared a book by Michael Barson and Steven Heller, for the information presented in this post.

If you're interested in the Red Scare, be sure to take a look at Cold War Studies latest post. Click here to read.

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THE FIRST RED SCARE: A TIMELINE | Cold War

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Known to some as the Red Scare of 1919, the First Red Scare was a precursor to the Red-baiting and witch hunting that occurred in the years following World War II. During this period: People truly believed that Reds were under the bed - not to mention in the water supply, creeping through the halls [...]

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After a ninety-minute artillery barrage starting at 4 o'clock on Sunday morning, North Korean tanks and infantry crossed the Thirty-Eighth Parallel and drove south through gaps in the border hills in intermittent driving rain. Most of the South Korean army units in the area had stood down for the weekend and many of the officers and men were relaxing in Seoul, the South Korean capital. The invasion was almost certainly launched with Soviet and Chinese Communist approval in the expectation of a quick walk-over, after Dean Acheson, the American Secretary of State, had publicly declared in January that the United States would not guarantee any area of the mainland of Asia against military assault.

Spearheaded by heavy tanks, the North Koreans took the town of Kaesong and crossed the Imjin River. Some South Korean soldiers resisted with suicidal courage, tying explosives to their bodies and throwing themselves onto the enemy tanks as human bombs, but the North Korean superiority in numbers and equipment was overwhelming. The American ambassador in Seoul cabled Washington and the United Nations commission in Korea reported to the Secretary General that the invasion 'is assuming the character of a full-scale war'. The Security Council met that Sunday afternoon - the Soviet delegate stayed away - and adopted an American resolution condemning North Korea's attack and demanding an immediate cease-fire and withdrawal across the border. Next day, the 26th, President Truman announced that the United States government would 'vigorously support' the Security Council.

On Tuesday the 27th, American air and sea forces were ordered to South Korea's assistance and General Douglas MacArthur, the seventy-year-old Supreme Allied Commander in Japan, was put in command of all American units in the operations. The Security Council met that evening, again without the Soviet representative, and adopted an American resolution recommending the members of the United Nations to 'furnish such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the armed attack and to restore international peace and security in the area.' The North Koreans were now within a few miles of Seoul and the city fell on the 28th.

General MacArthur flew to Korea on the 29th, the Thursday, with a retinue of pressmen, to see the situation for himself. His aircraft, a Constellation, was 'bounced' by an enemy warplane, which was driven off by the escorting Mustangs while the general watched, entirely unperturbed, which was more than could be said of the journalists. After landing, he was driven around the rear areas of the battlefield in a jeep and saw huge numbers of refugees flooding south, South Korean soldiers among them. US naval units were meanwhile bombarding Inchon, the port of Seoul, which the North Koreans had captured. President Truman told a press conference that the United States was not at war, but was taking 'police action against a bunch of bandits'.

That night the North Koreans broke through the South Korean defence line on the Han River, ferrying tanks across under cover of darkness. In Washington next day the President announced that he had authorised the US Air Force to act against targets in North Korea, a naval blockade of the whole Korean coast and the employment of American ground units in Korea. Meanwhile armed support was pledged by the British government and those of the leading Commonwealth countries.

The war had begun in earnest and after the first week over half the South Korean army had disappeared. The United States would send well over 5 million men to the Korean theatre of war before the conflict ended three years later, but the war would involve servicemen from an extraordinary gallimaufry of other nations - the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, India, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg, Colombia, Greece, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Thailand and Turkey - and would cost United Nations and South Korean forces more than 200,000 casualties before the independence of South Korea was restored.

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After a ninety-minute artillery barrage starting at 4 o'clock on Sunday morning, North Korean tanks and infantry crossed the Thirty-Eighth Parallel and drove south through gaps in the border hills in intermittent driving rain. Most of the South Korean army units in the area had stood down for the weekend and many of the officers and men were relaxing in Seoul, the South Korean capital.

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Formally known as the Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance, the Warsaw Pact was created on 14 May 1955, immediately after the accession of West Germany to the Alliance. It complemented the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, which was the regional economic organisation set up by the Soviet Union in January 1949 for the communist states of Central and Eastern Europe.

The Warsaw Pact embodied what was referred to as the Eastern bloc, while NATO and its member countries represented the Western bloc.

NATO and the Warsaw Pact were ideologically opposed and, over time, built up their own defences starting an arms race that lasted throughout the Cold War.

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Formally known as the Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance, the Warsaw Pact was created on 14 May 1955, immediately after the accession of West Germany to the Alliance. It complemented the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, which was the regional economic organisation set up by the Soviet Union in January 1949 for the communist states of Central and Eastern Europe.

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History changed on Oct. 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The world's first artificial satellite was about the size of a beach ball, about 23 inches in diameter and weighing less than 190 pounds. It took about 98 minutes to orbit the Earth on its elliptical path. That launch ushered in new political, military, technological, and scientific developments. While the Sputnik launch was a single event, it marked the start of the space age and the U.S.-U.S.S.R. space race.

More: Sputnik - The Dawn of the Space Age

Last Updated: Oct 4, 2017

Editor: Sarah Loff

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Oct. 4, 1957 - Sputnik, the Dawn of the Space Age

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History changed on Oct. 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The world's first artificial satellite was about the size of a beach ball, about 23 inches in diameter and weighing less than 190 pounds.

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60 years on, MHM Editor Neil Faulkner analyses the epic guerrilla struggle behind the Cuban Revolution of 1959.

For four tense years, at the height of the Cold War, an impoverished Caribbean sugar-island found itself at the centre of global politics. The Cuban Revolution of January 1959, the Bay of Pigs Invasion of April 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 were events of worldwide significance.

All three of these events were, in very different ways, remarkable military collisions. Marking the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, we take a detailed look at this epic struggle against the odds.

The Battle of Santa Clara was the largest pitched battle of the entire insurgency and the final decisive clash between the fidelistas - the guerrilla revolutionaries - and the batististas - the army of the military dictatorship.

Santa Clara is representative of the entire conflict, which involved a seemingly impossible victory against the odds. The guerrillas were outnumbered ten to one, and were equipped only with small arms, whereas the soldiers were defending a series of strongpoints with an armoury of heavy weapons.

This imbalance was characteristic of the war as a whole. Only 20 or so guerrillas survived a military ambush a few days after their initial landing in December 1956. At that moment, the Batista regime had tens of thousands of soldiers under arms and an arsenal of advanced Western weaponry, including artillery, tanks, and warplanes. Yet, not much more than two years later, the victorious fidelistas entered Havana.

The military power of the politico-social movement unleashed by the Cuban Revolution was evident again at the Bay of Pigs. However misconceived and mismanaged as a military operation, the speed and ease with which the incursion was liquidated - despite the surprise landing in a remote region, the serious fighting was over within three days - is further testimony to the inner strength of the Cuban popular movement.This raises important questions about the relationship between morale and materiel in modern warfare.

On the other hand, the US was largely successful in containing the Cuban Revolution and preventing it from turning into a Latin American conflagration, and this, as Che Guevara fully understood, meant not only isolation but also impoverishment for Cuba - which remains, after 60 years of US blockade, and especially since the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989, crippled by underdevelopment and poverty.
This is an extract from a 15-page special feature on the Cuban Revolution in the February issue of Military History Matters. To read the full analysis, get a copy of the issue from your local Barnes & Noble or W H Smith, or click here to subscribe to the magazine and have it sent straight to your door every month.

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The Cuban Revolution | Military History Matters

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The Cuban Revolution of January 1959, the Bay of Pigs Invasion of April 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 were events of worldwide significance. All three of these events were, in very different ways, remarkable military collisions. Marking the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Revo ...

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How does Khrushchev hope the exhibit might improve relations between the United States and the Soviet Union? How does Nixon think Soviet visitors will respond to the exhibit? Why does Nixon believe communication, especially through television, is necessary for both nations? How is Khrushchev’s claim…

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The 1960 election campaign was dominated by rising Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit Earth. American leaders warned that the nation was falling behind communist countries in science and technology. Three years later, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over Soviet territory and its pilot captured. The incident led to the cancellation of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's planned trip to Moscow and the collapse of a summit meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

In Cuba, the revolutionary regime of Fidel Castro became a close ally of the Soviet Union, heightening fears of communist subversion in the Western Hemisphere. Public opinion polls revealed that more than half the American people thought war with the Soviet Union was inevitable.

The Candidates

John Fitzgerald Kennedy captured the Democratic nomination despite his youth, a seeming lack of experience in foreign affairs, and his Catholic faith. On May 10, he won a solid victory in the Democratic primary in overwhelmingly Protestant West Virginia. His success there launched him toward a first ballot victory at the national convention in Los Angeles-although he did not reach the 761 votes required for the nomination until the final state in the roll call, Wyoming.

After choosing Texas senator Lyndon Johnson as his running mate, Kennedy told the convention delegates that he would get the nation moving again. He declared that the United States would have the will and the strength to resist communism around the world.

The Republican nominee, Vice President Richard M. Nixon was 47-years-old, just four years older than Kennedy. He pointed to the peace and prosperity of the Eisenhower administration and assured the voters that he would maintain American prestige, leadership, and military strength. He chose Henry Cabot Lodge, US ambassador to the United Nations, as his running mate. Nixon struck many voters as more mature and experienced than Kennedy and led in the polls after the national conventions.

Both candidates sought the support of the steadily growing suburban population and, for the first time, television became the dominant source of information for voters.

The Debates

The Kennedy and Nixon campaigns agreed to a series of televised debates. Many in the Nixon camp, including President Eisenhower, urged the vice president to reject the debate proposal and deny Kennedy invaluable national exposure. But, a good debater, Nixon confidently agreed to share a platform with his rival on nationwide television.
In 1950, only 11 percent of American homes had television; by 1960, the number had jumped to 88 percent. An estimated seventy million Americans, about two-thirds of the electorate, watched the first debate on September 26th.

Kennedy had met the day before with the producer to discuss the design of the set and the placement of the cameras. Nixon, just out of the hospital after a painful knee injury, did not take advantage of this opportunity. Kennedy wore a blue suit and shirt to cut down on glare and appeared sharply focused against the gray studio background. Nixon wore a gray suit and seemed to blend into the set. Most importantly, JFK spoke directly to the cameras and the national audience. Nixon, in traditional debating style, appeared to be responding to Kennedy.

Almost overnight the issues of experience and maturity seemed to fade from the campaign. Nixon seemed much more poised and relaxed in the three subsequent debates, but it was the first encounter that helped to reshape the election.

Religion and Civil Rights

Kennedy tried to identify himself with the liberal reform tradition of the Democratic party of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, promising a new surge of legislative innovation in the 1960s. He hoped to pull together key elements of the Roosevelt coalition of the 1930s-urban communities of color, ethnicity-based voting blocs, and organized labor. He also hoped to win back conservative Catholics who had deserted the Democrats to vote for Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, and to hold his own in the South.

In September, John F. Kennedy eloquently confronted the religious issue in an appearance before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. He said, "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the President-should he be Catholic-how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote." But anti-Catholic feeling remained a wild card in the campaign.

Civil rights had emerged as a crucial issue in the 1960 campaign. Kennedy faced the challenge of promoting policies that white southern Democrats supported while, at the same time, courting Black voters away from the Republican Party, the party that many Black voters aligned with after the Civil War because it was the party of Abraham Lincoln and emancipation.

Just a few weeks before the election, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested while participating in a protest in Atlanta, Georgia. Although it was politically risky, John Kennedy phoned his wife, Coretta Scott King, to express his concern, while a call from Robert Kennedy to the judge helped secure her husband's safe release. The Kennedys' personal intervention led to a public endorsement by Martin Luther King Sr., the influential father of the civil rights leader. The publicizing of this endorsement, combined with other campaign efforts, contributed to increased support among Black voters for Kennedy.

Down to the Wire

In the final days of the campaign, the immensely popular President Eisenhower began a speaking tour on behalf of Republican candidates. Several key states seemed to shift toward Nixon, and by Election Day pollsters were declaring the election a toss-up.

On November 8, 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected president in one of the closest elections in U.S. history. In the popular vote, his margin over Nixon was 118,550 out of a total of nearly 69 million votes cast. His success in many urban and industrial states gave him a clear majority of 303 to 219 in the electoral vote. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the youngest man ever elected president, the first Catholic, and the first president born in the twentieth century.

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John F. Kennedy was elected president in one of the closest elections in United States history. Kennedy's popular vote margin over Nixon was 118,550 out of a total of nearly 69 million votes cast. His success in many urban and industrial states gave him a clear majority of 303 to 219 in the electoral vote.

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A left-wing revolution in Cuba had ended in 1959 with the ouster of President Fulgencio Batista and the establishment of a new government under Premier Fidel Castro. The Castro regime quickly severed the country's formerly strong ties with the United States by expropriating U.S. economic assets in Cuba and developing close links with the Soviet Union.

These developments proved a source of grave concern to the United States given Cuba's geographical proximity to the United States and brought Cuba into play as a new and significant factor in the Cold War. In March 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower directed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to develop a plan for the invasion of Cuba and overthrow of the Castro regime. The CIA organized an operation in which it trained and funded a force of exiled counter-revolutionary Cubans serving as the armed wing of the Democratic Revolutionary Front, known as Brigade 2506.

Following his election in November 1960, President John F. Kennedy learned of the invasion plan, concluded that Fidel Castro was a Soviet client posing a threat to all of Latin America and, after consultations with his advisors, gave his consent for the CIA-planned clandestine invasion of Cuba to proceed. Launched from Guatemala, the attack went wrong almost from the start. Components of Brigade 2506 landed at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961 and were defeated within 2 days by Cuban armed forces under the direct command of Castro.

The failed invasion strengthened the position of Castro's administration, which proceeded to openly proclaim its intention to adopt socialism and pursue closer ties with the Soviet Union. It also led to a reassessment of Cuba policy by the Kennedy administration. The President established a committee under former Army Chief of Staff General Maxwell Taylor and Attorney General Robert Kennedy to examine the causes of the defeat suffered at the Bay of Pigs.

This examination and policy assessment, initiated in May 1961, led in November of that year to a decision to implement a new covert program in Cuba, with the codename of Operation Mongoose. Oversight for Operation Mongoose was provided by the 5412/2 Special Group, under the auspices of the National Security Council, expanded to include General Taylor and Attorney General Kennedy.

Operation Mongoose was designed to do what the Bay of Pigs invasion failed to do: remove the Communist Castro regime from power in Cuba. Orchestrated by the CIA and Department of Defense under the direction of Edward Lansdale, Operation Mongoose constituted a multiplicity of plans with wide-ranging purpose and scope. Lansdale presented the Project's six-phase schedule to Attorney General Kennedy on February 20, 1962, and President Kennedy received a briefing on the operation's components on March 16, 1962. Lansdale outlined the coordinated program of political, psychological, military, sabotage, and intelligence operations, as well as proposed assassination attempts on key political leaders, including Castro. Monthly components of the operation were to be set in place to destabilize the communist regime, including the publication of Anti-Castro propaganda, provision of armaments for militant opposition groups, and establishment of guerilla bases throughout the country, all leading up to preparations for an October 1962 military intervention in Cuba. Some (though not all) of the planned Operation Mongoose actions were deployed during 1962, but the military intervention did not occur, and the Castro regime remained in power.

Although not considered as significant a U.S. foreign policy failure and embarrassment as the Bay of Pigs invasion, Operation Mongoose failed to achieve its most important goals. Meanwhile, throughout the spring and summer of 1962, U.S. intelligence reports indicated expanded arms shipments from the Soviet Union to Cuba. Amidst growing concern in Washington over whether the Soviet weapons being introduced into Cuba included ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, in October 1962 the Kennedy administration suspended Operation Mongoose in the face of this far more serious threat-one that resulted in the most dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

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Milestones: 1961-1968 - Office of the Historian

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The Berlin Wall (1961-1989) was a guarded, concrete wall between West Berlin (controlled by the Western Allies) and East Berlin (the Soviet sector of Berlin and the capital of East Germany). It was constructed by East Germany, officially known as the German Democratic Republic, and was described by its government as a barrier protecting its people from "fascist elements." The Berlin Wall closed off the population flow between East Germany and West Germany. Between 1949 and 1961 about 2.5 million East Germans had fled to the West. By the 1980s the Wall, including electrified fences and fortifications, extended 28 miles (45 km) through Berlin and a further 75 miles (120 km) around West Berlin. It came to physically symbolize the Iron Curtain that separated Western Europe and the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War. The Berlin Wall was demolished in 1989 as a result of the wave of democratization in East Europe, and was followed by the unification of Germany in 1990.

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The Berlin Wall (1961-1989) was a guarded, concrete wall between West Berlin (controlled by the Western Allies) and East Berlin (the Soviet sector of Berlin and the capital of East Germany). It was constructed by East Germany, officially known as the German Democratic Republic, and was described by its government as a barrier protecting its people from "fascist elements."

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For thirteen days in October 1962 the world waited-seemingly on the brink of nuclear war-and hoped for a peaceful resolution to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In October 1962, an American U-2 spy plane secretly photographed nuclear missile sites being built by the Soviet Union on the island of Cuba. President Kennedy did not want the Soviet Union and Cuba to know that he had discovered the missiles. He met in secret with his advisors for several days to discuss the problem.

After many long and difficult meetings, Kennedy decided to place a naval blockade, or a ring of ships, around Cuba. The aim of this "quarantine," as he called it, was to prevent the Soviets from bringing in more military supplies. He demanded the removal of the missiles already there and the destruction of the sites. On October 22, President Kennedy spoke to the nation about the crisis in a televised address.

Click here to listen to the Address in the Digital Archives (JFKWHA-142-001)

No one was sure how Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev would respond to the naval blockade and US demands. But the leaders of both superpowers recognized the devastating possibility of a nuclear war and publicly agreed to a deal in which the Soviets would dismantle the weapon sites in exchange for a pledge from the United States not to invade Cuba. In a separate deal, which remained secret for more than twenty-five years, the United States also agreed to remove its nuclear missiles from Turkey. Although the Soviets removed their missiles from Cuba, they escalated the building of their military arsenal; the missile crisis was over, the arms race was not.

Click here to listen to the Remarks in the Digital Archives (JFKWHA-143-004)

In 1963, there were signs of a lessening of tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States. In his commencement address at American University, President Kennedy urged Americans to reexamine Cold War stereotypes and myths and called for a strategy of peace that would make the world safe for diversity. Two actions also signaled a warming in relations between the superpowers: the establishment of a teletype "Hotline" between the Kremlin and the White House and the signing of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on July 25, 1963.

In language very different from his inaugural address, President Kennedy told Americans in June 1963, "For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."
Visit our online exhibit: World on the Brink: John F. Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis

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In October 1962, an American U2 spy plane secretly photographed nuclear missile sites being built by the Soviet Union on the island of Cuba. Because he did not want Cuba and the Soviet Union to know that he had discovered the missiles, Kennedy met in secret with his advisors for several days to discuss the problem.

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America's Tragedy: Remembering the JFK Assassination

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July 20, 1969: One Giant Leap For Mankind - NASA

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July 1969. It’s a little over eight years since the flights of Gagarin and Shepard, followed quickly by President Kennedy’s challenge to put a man on the moon

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Table of Contents

1. Lee Harvey Oswald's Earlier Life

2. President and Governor Shot in Motorcade

3. Lyndon B. Johnson Sworn In

4. Lee Harvey Oswald Shot

5. JFK Funeral

6. Investigation Ends, Conspiracy Theories Begin

President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m. while riding in a motorcade in Dallas during a campaign visit. Shots rang out as Kennedy's motorcade turned past the Texas School Book Depository at Dealey Plaza, with crowds lining the streets. The driver of the president's Lincoln limousine, with its top off, raced to nearby Parkland Memorial Hospital, but after being shot in the neck and head, Kennedy was pronounced dead at 1 p.m. He was 46 years old. A generation of Americans would forever remember where they were when they heard about the president's assassination, as it would have a profound political and cultural impact on the nation.

By 2:15 p.m., Lee Harvey Oswald, a new employee at the Book Depository, was arrested for JFK's assassination, as well as for the fatal 1:15 p.m. shooting of Dallas patrolman J.D. Tippit. Two days later, on Nov. 24, Oswald would be murdered by local nightclub owner and police informant Jack Ruby at point-blank range and on live TV.

Lee Harvey Oswald's Earlier Life

Oswald was born in New Orleans in 1939. His father died of a heart attack two months before he was born. After living off and on in orphanages as a boy, he moved with his mother to New York at age 12, where he was sent to a youth detention center for truancy. It was during this time that he became interested in socialism. After moving back to New Orleans, Oswald joined the Marines in 1956, where he earned a sharpshooter qualification, and discovered Marxism.

Upon receiving an early honorable discharge from the Marines in 1959, he defected to the Soviet Union for two and a half years, where he was denied citizenship, but allowed to stay in the country-and was monitored by the KGB. Upon learning that Oswald had wanted to defect, the Marines downgraded his 1959 discharge from "honorable" to "undesirable" in 1962. Later that year, Oswald returned to Texas with his Soviet wife and young daughter.

Kennedy

Watch the three-episode documentary event, Kennedy. Available to stream now.

One year later, Oswald would purchase, by mail, a rifle with telescopic sight and a .38 revolver. That year, he attempted to shoot retired United States Major General Edwin A. Walker who had been a staunch critic of communism. Later in 1963, Oswald was denied passage to Cuba and the U.S.S.R. during a trip to Mexico City. He returned to Texas and started a job at the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas.

In an interview with " Frontline," investigative journalist Gerald Posner said Oswald's hatred wasn't for Kennedy. "What he did hate was the system and what Kennedy stood for," Posner tells the PBS show. "He despised America. He despised capitalism. When he eventually had the opportunity to strike against Kennedy, it was that symbol of the system that he was going after."

President and Governor Shot in Motorcade

According to the official investigation, Oswald acted alone, firing three bullets from a sixth-floor window at the southeast corner of the Book Depository. Kennedy was struck once in the upper back and once in the head and slumped over onto his wife, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. Texas Governor John B. Connally Jr., who was also in the limo with his wife, was shot once in the back. He later recovered from his injuries. After killing Tippit, Oswald was arrested a few minutes later in the back of a movie theater.

"The man is 24-year-old Lee Oswald, espouser of leftist causes, an active member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, an avowed admirer of Russia and of Cuba's Fidel Castro, a man who once lived in Russia," Dan Rather reported on CBS News at the time.

During his interrogation, Oswald denied any guilt. "I didn't shoot anybody, no sir ... I'm just a patsy," he told reporters.

Lyndon B. Johnson Sworn In

The first lady and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had been three cars behind Kennedy in the motorcade, returned to Air Force One at Dallas Love Field with Kennedy's body, in a bronze casket.

Johnson was sworn in at 2:38 p.m. as the 36th president of the United States while aboard the airplane prior to takeoff. Jacqueline Kennedy, still in a pink suit splattered with blood, stood at Johnson's side. An autopsy on Kennedy's body was performed at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland.

"This is a sad time for all people. We have suffered a loss that cannot be weighed," Johnson said in his first public statement as president. "For me, it is a deep personal tragedy. I know that the world shares the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy and her family bear. I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help-and God's,"

On November 23, 1963, Johnson declared November 25 a national day of mourning.

Lee Harvey Oswald Shot

On Sunday morning, November 24, in front of the press, Oswald was being led to be transferred to the county jail from Dallas Police Headquarters. "The Dallas police were extremely worried for the safety of their prisoner," KRLD radio reporter Bob Huffaker, who was there, told CBS News. "We knew that Oswald was the most hated suspect of the 20th century."

Ruby shot Oswald point-blank in the stomach with a small-caliber pistol. Oswald died at Parkland Hospital, where Kennedy had died two days earlier.

Ruby was indicted on November 26 and convicted of murdering Oswald and sentenced to death by electric chair. The ruling was overturned on appeal, but Ruby died of a pulmonary embolism stemming from lung cancer in 1967 before a new trial could take place.

JFK Funeral

On November 25, a horse-drawn caisson carried Kennedy's flag-draped coffin to St. Matthew's Catholic Cathedral from the Capitol Rotunda. More than 800,000 people lined Pennsylvania Avenue to watch the procession, according to the Washington Post.

"The president's caisson was drawn by four horses, including the riderless horse named Black Jack, a 'magnificent black gelding,' according to the JFK Library, which carried an empty saddle and saber," the newspaper reported. "Boots were reversed in the stirrups. 'The riderless horse,' the JFK Library explained, 'is one of the highest military honors bestowed upon the fallen.' "

Kennedy was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery, following the requiem mass, with leaders from dozens of nations in attendance. Jacqueline Kennedy lit the eternal flame that has continued to flicker since JFK's death.

Investigation Ends, Conspiracy Theories Begin

The President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy-known as the Warren Commission -concluded "the shots which killed President Kennedy and wounded Governor Connally were fired from the sixth-floor window at the southeast corner of the Texas School Book Depository." It also said, "The shots which killed President Kennedy and wounded Governor Connally were fired by Lee Harvey Oswald."

Despite the official finding, many believe Oswald didn't act alone, or that other conspirators-from the world of organized crime to the CIA to Cuban exiles-are responsible for Kennedy's assassination. A 2017 poll by FiveThirtyEight, found just 33 percent of Americans believe Oswald alone killed Kennedy. Some 30,000 never-before-seen or un-redacted documents were released to the public by the National Archives in 2017 and 2018.

Sources

" November 22, 1963: Death of the President," John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

" Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald? " Frontline, PBS

" The Warren Commission Report," National Archives

" The day John F. Kennedy was killed: How America mourned a fallen president," The Washington Post

" Accused JFK assassin is arrested, then gunned down," CBS News

Fact Check

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Assassination of John F. Kennedy - Facts, Investigation, Photos | HISTORY

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Facts about President John. F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963-and the investigation and conspiracy theories that followed.