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Cuban Revolution
The Cuban Revolution of 1959 began with the failed attack on the Moncada Barracks, and ended in triumph with the overthrowing of dictator Batista. At his trial, Fidel Castro gave his famous speech, History Will Absolve Me, and was pardoned after only two years. When released, he was forced into exile for his safety. In Mexico, he trained an army which he prepared for a guerilla war against Batista. -
Kennedy elected president
John F. Kennedy becomes the youngest man ever to be elected president of the United States, narrowly beating Republican Vice President Richard Nixon. He was also the first Catholic to become president. -
Bay of Pigs
On April 17, the Cuban-exile invasion force, known as Brigade 2506, landed at beaches along the Bay of Pigs and immediately came under heavy fire. Cuban planes strafed the invaders, sank two escort ships, and destroyed half of the exile's air support. -
13 days (Cuban Missile Crisis)
In October 1962, an American U-2 spy plane secretly photographed nuclear missile sites being built by the Soviet Union on the island of Cuba. President Kennedy did not want the Soviet Union and Cuba to know that he had discovered the missiles. He met in secret with his advisors to discuss the problem. After many long and difficult meetings, Kennedy decided to place a blockade around Cuba. The aim of this quarantine, was to prevent the Soviets from bringing in any more military supplies. -
Khrushchev announces the removal of missiles from Cuba
On October 28, Khrushchev announced his government's intent to dismantle and remove all offensive Soviet weapons in Cuba. With the airing of the public message on Radio Moscow, the USSR confirmed its willingness to proceed with the solution secretly proposed by the Americans the day before. In the afternoon, Soviet technicians began dismantling the missile sites, and the world stepped back from the brink of nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis was effectively over. -
Blockade
In a dramatic televised address to the American public, President John F. Kennedy announces that the Soviet Union has placed nuclear weapons in Cuba and, in response, the United States will establish a blockade around the island to prevent any other offensive weapons from entering Castro's state. Kennedy also warned the Soviets that any nuclear attack from Cuba would be construed as an act of war, and that the United States would retaliate in kind. -
US military employs Agent Orange
The USA developed a powerful chemical weapon called Agent Orange. It was a sort of highly toxic weedkiller. It was used to destroy the jungle where the Viet Cong hid. The Americans used 82 million litres of Agent Orange. They dropped a total of 100 million pounds of defoliants in 30,000 missions. -
Diem overthrown, murdered
The brutal murder of the president of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, and his powerful brother and adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu, on November 2, 1963, was a major turning point in the war in Vietnam. Up until the deaths of the Ngo brothers, the United States had been 'advising the government of South Vietnam in its war against the Viet Cong and their benefactors, the government of North Vietnam. -
President Kennedy is assassinated
Shortly after noon on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he rode in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas, Texas. -
Vietcong formed
"Viet Cong" is a Vietnamese term, adopted early in the Diem regime and earing a pejorative connotation, for Vietnamese Communisr. Both Americans, who usually abbreviated it to "VC," and Saigon's officials applied it to any member of either the military or the political arm of the indigenous [though Hanoi-directed] Communist movement in South Vietnam. The Viet Cong were called "Victor Charley" by the Americans, for the phonetic alphabet for VC, which was predicably shortened to simply "Charlie". -
Gulf of Tonkin incident
On August 2, 1964, the Maddox was conducting a "DeSoto patrol", referring to an espionage mission. The purpose of this mission was to collect intelligence on radar and coastal defenses of North Vietnam. It was this day that the North Vietnamese torpedo patrol boats attacked the Maddox. The U.S.S. Ticonderoga sent aircraft to repel the North Vietnamese attackers and sunk one boat while damaging other enemy vessels. -
Tet Offensive
On January 31, 1968, some 70,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces launched the Tet Offensive, a coordinated series of fierce attacks on more than 100 cities and towns in South Vietnam. General Vo Nguyen Giap, leader of the Communist People's Army of Vietnam, planned the offensive in an attempt both to foment rebellion among the South Vietnamese population and encourage the United States to scale back its support of the Saigon regime. -
MLK slain in Memphis
At 6:01 p.m. on April 4, 1968, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was hit by a sniper's bullet. King had been standing on the balcony in front of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, when, without warning, he was shot. The .30-caliber rifle bullet entered King's right cheek, traveled through his neck, and finally stopped at his shoulder blade. King was immediately taken to a nearby hospital but was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. -
Richard Nixon Elected President
Two years after losing to Kennedy, Nixon ran for governor of California and lost in a bitter campaign against Edmund G. Brown. Most political observers believed that Nixon's political career was over, but by February 1968, he had sufficiently recovered his political standing in the Republican Party to announce his candidacy for president. -
News of My Lai Massacre reaches U.S
In late 1969 the grisly details of My Lai were unleashed on the public, following a report by the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.
Around the same time the army commissioned an investigation into the cover-up, which became known as the Peers inquiry. -
Kent State
On April 30, 1970, President Richard M. Nixon appeared on national television to announce the invasion of Cambodia by the United States and the need to draft 150,000 more soldiers for an expansion of the Vietnam War effort. This provoked massive protests on campuses throughout the country. At Kent State University in Ohio, protesters launched a demonstration that included setting fire to the ROTC building, prompting the governor of Ohio to dispatch 900 National Guardsmen to the campus -
Last American troops leave Vietnam
The last combat troops of the United States were pulled out of South Vietnam on 29 March 1973. 8,500 American civilians, embassy guards, and defense office soldiers remained in Saigon. The largest helicopter evacuation in history occured on 29 April 1975 when 7,000 Americans and South Vietnamese were evacuated from the US Embassy in Saigon. Saigon fell the following day to the North Vietnamese troops. -
Ford calls Vietnam War "Finished"
President Gerald Ford gave a televised speech on April 23, declaring an end to the Vietnam War and all U.S. aid.
