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The war involved North Vietnam and allies including the Soviet Union, China, and other communist countries vs. South Vietnam and allies including United States, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, Thailand, and other anti-communist countries. The outcome was the signing of the Paris Peace Accords on January 27, 1973 to establish peace in Vietnam. This treaty was broken almost immediately, and fighting lasted fo two more years.
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Democrat John F. Kennedy defeats Richard Nixon in the election of 1960. During his time at office, Kennedy approved the Bay of Pigs invasion and had to deal with the aftermath of that. He also led America through the most tense part of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy also made it a goal to be the first country to have a man on the moon, a task he was successful in achieving. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas in November of 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald.
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A force of 1,500 Cuban exiles, trained and financed by the United States, lands at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in an attempt to overthrow the Castro regime. The operation, initiated and planned during the Eisenhower administration but launched under Kennedy, is a fiasco that badly damages U.S. prestige. -
This was a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union after Americans saw that the USSR was using Cuba as a missile construction site. This confrontation was direct and extremely dangerous, as it was the closest that the two parties came to resorting to nuclear conflict during the Cold War. -
Civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, where he describes a world where people aren't judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. He describes how he has a dream that one day, even in the viciously racist state that is Alabama, that little black boys and girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and girls as brothers and sisters. -
James Earl Ray killed MLK in his motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The killing set off a spree of riots and saw the end of the nonviolent protest movement, with the militant black power phase picking up pace. -
Republican Richard M. Nixon defeats Democrat Hubert Humphrey at the election of 1968. As president, Nixon decided to withdraw troops from Vietnam, as it was a very unpopular war among the American people. His legacy was tarnished after the Watergate Scandal, which was a political scandal in which Nixon covered up criminal activity relating to his re-election in 1972. This caused him to be the first and only president to resign from office in 1974.
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The Apollo 11 landed on the moon after a couple days of travel, piloted by Commander Neil Armstrong, who was the first man to step foot on the moon, and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin. Armstrong's quote after stepping onto the surface of the moon is well known today - "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."