ABSTRACT
When John F. Kennedy became president in 1961, he inherited several serious Cold War challenges from Dwight D. Eisenhower. During the next 34 months, the United States encountered crises in the Caribbean, Central Europe, and Southeast Asia, where the Soviet Union asserted its infl uence. To meet these challenges, Kennedy embraced “Flexible Response” as his strategy of symmetric containment of communist expansion. Nevertheless, he failed to roll back this threat in Cuba and Vietnam.
