FREE ESSAY ON CHAPTER 27 OUTLINE

CHAPTER 27 OUTLINE

Vlad Smerkis
Chapter 27
The Politic of Conflict and Hope
(1960 - 1969)
1. Kennedy and the Cold War
a. A Narrow Victory
i. Kennedy and Nixon had entered Congress in the same year - 1946.
ii. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts was the son of a very wealthy businessman and
ambassador.
iii. In contrast, Richard Nixon was always an outsider in the world of wealth and power.
iv. Both Candidates pledged to build up the nation's military might and ensure continued
prosperity.
v. Kennedy's Catholicism posed one of the great questions about the campaign.
vi. On Election Day 69 million votes were cast.
b. Fighting the Cold War
i. The cold war and its many dangers - arms races, competitions in the Third Worlds -
were on everyone's mind as Kennedy took office.
ii. The greatest threat to freedom, in Kennedy's view, was posed by the iron tyranny of
communism.
iii. Part of the price was a large increase in defense spending.
iv. Creating an elite branch og the army called the Special Forces (or Green Berets).
v. Thanks to its nuclear superiority, the United States would also be able to fight an
all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
c. A Peaceful Revolution
i. Kennedy knew that communism fed on poverty and social injustice.
ii. The Peace Corps created in 1961, sent young men and women to do volunteer work in
developing countries.
iii. Alliance for progress aimed to stop communism in Latin America by offering economic
and technical aid to nations in the regions.
iv. The Alliance was mostly a failure.
d. The Invasion of Cuba
i. Kennedy faced one of his toughest foreign policy problems in Cuba. In 1959, Cubans
overthrew the dictatorship of Gulgencio Batista. Though the United States had supported
Batista.
ii. A bearded young lawyer named Fidel Castro led the uprising. American public opinion
supported Castro at first.
iii. Before long, however, Castro was jailing and murdering his opponents.
iv. Over harsh American objections, Cuba signed a trade agreement with the Soviet Union.
v. Eisenhower also put the Central Intelligence Agency to work on a secret plan to
overthrow Castro. The idea was to train and equip a group of anti-Castro Cuban exiles
living in the United States.
vi. Thus, on the morning of April 17, 1961, the Cuban exile force went ashore at Bahia de
Cochinos (the Bay of Pigs).
e. Crisis in Berlin
i. The chief subject of debate between the two leaders was Berlin.
ii. Berlin had been a focus of war tension since the 1940s.
iii. At Vienna, Khrushchev tried to push the West out of Berlin, but Kennedy would not
budge.
iv. Rather than attack West Berlin, the Communists decided to wall it off.
v. The Berlin Wall became a frightening symbol of the cold war's division of Europe
f. The Cuban Missile Crisis
i. The crisis began on October 16, 1962.
ii. For six days Kennedy huddled with close advisers in secret meetings while news of the
missiles was kept from the public.
iii. On October 22, 1962, the President went on television to tell the public about the
Soviet missiles in Cuba.
iv. Two days later, as the world held its breath, Soviet ships approached the blockade.
v. But the crisis was not over.
vi. In fact, the United States already planned to remove the outdated missiles in
Turkey.
vii. The President's brother, Robert Kennedy, then offered another idea. He suggested
that the President privately assure the Soviets that the United States would remove its
missiles from Turkey.
g. The Missile Crisis Analyzed
i. Defenders of Kennedy, on the other hand, argue that he achieved the best result
possible.
ii. While the debate over the Cuban missile crisis continues, few can doubt that it
marked the peak of the cold war.
iii. In 1963 the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to stop using testing nuclear
weapons in the air and under water. The agreement was called the Nuclear Test-Ban
Treaty.
2. A Thousand Days
a. The New Frontier
i. Kennedy's New Frontier program suggested grand reforms, but provided few plans for
achieving them.
ii. Kennedy chooses people, as one adviser put it, which was young and vigorous and
tough.
iii. No matter how talented the executive branch, only Congress can pass laws.
iv. Kennedy did win an increase in the minimum wage form $1 to $1.25 an hour. 
v. He also got Congress to approve $5 billion in urban renewal - programs to rebuild
run-down areas of the nation's cities.
vi. In the area of civil rights, Kennedy failed to press hard for new laws.
vii. In 1963 Kennedy finally made a strong plea for civil rights legislation.
b. Kennedy's Economic Program
i. In his economic views, Kennedy was a moderate.
ii. The focus of this cooperation was on wages and prices.
iii. Kennedy wanted both sides to agree to guidelines in wages and prices.
iv. For the most part, however, Kennedy was not anti-business.
c. Fighting Poverty
i. Many Americans, like Kennedy, knew little about poverty in the United States.
ii. In 1963, JFK called for a national assault on the causes of poverty.
d. New Frontiers in Space
i. In 1961 the Soviet Union made history by sending a man into space - the cosmonaut Yuri
Gagarin.
ii. Space flight was largely the outgrowth of the cold war.
iii. The space program fascinated the American people.
iv. The race to the moon continued through the 1960s.
v. Then, an July 16, 1969, three astronauts took off in a spacecraft named Apollo 11.
e. Tragedy in Dallas
i. Kennedy had gone to Texas to build support for his 1964 re-election campaign.
ii. It is difficult to describe the effect that John Kennedy's death had on the American
people.
iii. The suspected assassin was Lee Harvey Oswald.
iv. On the plane carrying the slain President's body back to Washington, Vice President
Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as the new President.
v. The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald had been the assassin and that he had
acted on his own.
vi. President for just a thousand days, Kennedy met with many failures in office.
Bibliography
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