ABSTRACT
Defeating communist revolution in the developing world was a central goal of the Kennedy administration. In Kennedy’s view, the Eisenhower era had been a time of national torpor, ‘[e]ight gray years … of drift, of falling behind, of postponing decisions and crises’.1 To Kennedy, Eisenhower had neglected the entire spectrum of challenges to American security, from the nuclear arms race to the Soviet conventional military threat in Europe to so-called ‘brush-fire’ wars in the developing world. In Kennedy’s judgement, what he termed ‘wars of subversion’ posed a particular danger.2 Under the administration’s counter-insurgency strategy, the United States used military assistance, foreign aid, diplomacy, intelligence operations, and assistance to foreign police and paramilitary forces to control instability and subversion and combat communist guerrillas.
