The Kennedy Years: The Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missle Crisis, Berlin Crisis and Others

Documents and Websites

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library

The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962
The 40th Anniversary

First Strike Options and the Berlin Crisis, 1961
New documents from the Kennedy Administration

Kennedy & Castro: The Secret History
Initiative with Castro aborted by assassination, declassified documents show

The ULTRASENSITIVE Bay of Pigs
Newly released portions of Taylor Commission report

JFK and the Diem Coup
JFK tape reveals high-level Vietnam coup plotting in 1963

Collections of U.S. Government Documents available online through the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series of the State Department:
* Volume I, Vietnam, 1961
* Volume II, Vietnam, 1962
* Volume V, Soviet Union
* Volume VI, Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges
* Volume IX, Foreign Economic Policy
* Volume X, Cuba 1961-1962
* Volume XI, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath
* Volume XXII, Northeast Asia

 

Books and Articles:

 Patterson, Thomas, ed., Kennedy's Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961-1963, NY, 1989.

Peter Kornbluh and Lawrence Chang, The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962: A National Security Archive Documents Reader

Sheldon M. Stern, The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis (Stanford 2005)

Freedman, Lawrence, Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam, NY, 2000.

 Fursenko, Alexandr and Timothy Naftali, "One Hell of a Gamble": Khrushchev, Castro, Kennedy, 1958-1964, NY, 1997.

 Hoffman, Elizabeth Cobbs, All You Need is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s, Cambridge, 1998.

 Latham, Michael, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and "Nation Building" in the Kennedy Era, Chapel Hill, 2000.

Hall, Michael, Sugar and Power in the Dominican Republic: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Trujillos, Westport, CT, 2000.

 Paterson, Thomas, Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution, NY, 1994.

Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba, edited by Peter Kornbluh (New Press)

May, Ernest R., and Philip D. Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cambridge, MA, 1998. 

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