35. John Fitzgerald Kennedy: Graduated Harvard College (1940). In 1961 Kennedy established the Peace Corps. On April 17, 1961 a force of anti-Castro Cubans, trained by the Central Intelligence Agency, staged an unsuccessful attempt to establish a beachhead at the Bay of Pigs, Cuba. In August, East Germany in an attempt to curtail defections from East To West, constructed a wall separating East and West Berlin. On February 20, 1962 Lt. Col. John H. Glenn, Jr. became the first American to orbit the earth. In October, 1962 after U.S. reconnaissance flights revealed that Soviet offensive missiles were being installed in Cuba, the United States established a naval quarantine around Cuba. This period is generally considered the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war. On October 28, after the U.S. agreed to withdraw the quarantine and never to invade Cuba, the Soviets withdrew their missiles. On August 28, 1963 more than 200,000 persons staged a march in Washington, D.C. and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his I Have A Dream speech. South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown on November 1. On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was killed by an assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, as his motorcade wound through Dallas, Texas. Kennedy, at 43 years old, was the youngest man elected president; and at 46 years old, he was the youngest to die. Kennedy was the only president to win a Pulitzer Prize, for his biography Profiles in Courage. He was the first president to have served in the U.S. Navy. He was the only president to appoint his brother to a cabinet post.
Posted on: Sat, 23 Nov 2013 13:16:46 +0000
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