The American Promise A History Of The United States

Kennedy and other Democrats criticized the Eisenhower administration for relying too heavily on nuclear weapons. They wanted to build up conventional ground forces as well, to provide the nation a "flexible response" to Communist expansion. Although the president exaggerated the actual threat to national security, several developments in 1961 heightened the sense of crisis and provided rationalization for a military buildup. On April 17, 1961, about thirteen hundred anti-Castro exiles who had been trained and armed by the CIA landed at the Bay of Pigs on the south shore of Cuba. Early in 1961, Kennedy and Khrushchev held a meeting in which the Soviet premier demanded an agreement recognizing the existence of two Germanys; otherwise, he warned, the Soviets would sign a separate treaty with East Germany. Kennedy used the Berlin crisis to add $3.2 billion to the defense budget and to expand the military by 300,000 troops. The Kennedy administration sought to complement its hard-line policy toward the Soviet Union with fresh approaches to the independence movements that had convulsed the world since the end of World War II. In 1961, Kennedy launched his most dramatic third world initiative: the Peace Corps (Roark? 285). The final piece of Kennedy's defense strategy was to strengthen American nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union. The superpowers came perilously close to using nuclear weapons in 1962 (Roark? Patricia and Cohen? 286). Having sent more military advisers, weapons, and economic aid to South Vietnam during his first year as president, in August 1964, Lyndon Johnson seized opportunity to increase the pressure on North Vietnam. Johnson's tough stance in the Gulf of Tonkin crisis, just two months before the 1964 elections, helped counter the charges made by his opponent, Barry Goldwater, that he was soft on communism. By ...