The speech is considered one of Kennedy's best, both a notable moment of the Cold War and a high point of the New Frontier. It was a great morale boost for West Berliners, who lived in an enclave deep inside East Germany and feared a possible East Germa…
The Soviet Union was many things at once: a superpower, a planned economy, a tightly controlled state, and a society of more than 280 million individuals spread across vast and varied territories. Between the 1950s and the 1980s, the USSR projected strength…
In October 1961, border disputes led to a standoff and for 16 hours the world was on the brink of war while Soviet and American tanks faced each other just 300 feet (100 meters) apart. In August 1961 Washington and its British and French allies had fail…