JFK and Bay of Pigs
John F Kennedy won a very close race for presidency against Richard Nixon. Nixon was Eisenhower’s VP, but Kennedy still won and became the youngest president America had. He was the first catholic president and probably had a larger amount of votes from women due to his charm. Questions were raised about Kennedy's ability to place national interests above the wishes of his Pope as, again, he was a Roman Catholic. He pledged a solid commitment to separation of church and state. Despite his assurances, his faith cost him an estimated 1.5 million votes in November 1960. Nixon decided to leave religious issues out of the campaign and hammer the perception that Kennedy was too inexperienced to sit in the Oval Office.
Kennedy used his character, assisted by those in the press who reported stories about his World War II heroism. While he was serving in the South Pacific aboard the PT109, a Japanese destroyer rammed his ship, sinking it into two chunks. Kennedy rescued several of his crewmates from certain death. Then he swam from island to island until he found a group of friendly natives who delivered a distress message Kennedy had carved into a coconut to an American naval base. Kennedy was from a wealthy background and graduated from Harvard University. Nixon painted himself the average American, growing up poor in California, and working his way through Whittier College.
The electoral college awarded the election to Kennedy by a 303-219 margin, despite Nixon winning more states than Kennedy.
In 1961, the CIA sent Cuban exiles to Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, oping to ignite a coup/uprising that would rid Fidel Castro from power; for Castro had relationships with When the revolution failed, Castro's troops moved in, so it totally backfired. The exiles believed air support would come from the United States, but that didn’t happen. Many of the rebels were shot, and the rest were arrested. It was one big failure for the US.
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In October 1962, the United States learned that the Soviet Union was about to deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba