....American-trained Cuban exiles invaded Cuba for the purpose of overthrowing Fidel Castro’s communist regime. This operation was known by Eisenhower and Kennedy administration officials as the Bay of Pigs Invasion—later to be known as the Bay of Pigs Fiasco. CIA agents trained the Cuban exiles in a secret military base located in the Guatemalan jungles. The CIA’s intention was to carry out a successful, covert invasion of Cuba by training and arming 1,200 anti-Castro exiles. The operation was intended to motivate the Cuban residents to join the exiles’ (and Americans’) cause and help oust Castro. Under President Eisenhower, the Cuban exiles were promised aerial support from the United States military. However, President Kennedy was wary of the operation when he assumed power, and, in order to mask American involvement, Kennedy advised that the invasion be scaled down, denying aerial cover.
The invasion lasted 72 hours—the invading force was outnumbered and out-gunned. Over 100 Cuban exiles were killed and over 1,000 were captured. The invasion was a complete failure, and the consequences were drastic: stronger anti-American sentiment grew in Cuba, Castro’s authority was solidified, and the Soviet Union immediately increased its aid package to protect the island from their “northern aggressor.” The additional support Cuba received led to the infamous Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. Despite the fact that President Kennedy accepted responsibility for the unsuccessful invasion, the failed mission made the United States appear aggressive and unorganized.
....George Washington left Mt. Vernon and his status as a private citizen for an eight-day journey to New York to attend his inauguration, marking the commencement of his role as the first President of the United States. Washington had retired to his home in Mt. Vernon, Virginia after successfully leading the Continental Army to victory against the British during the Revolutionary War. Washington was a proven successful leader despite personal anxiety about assuming the position. At 57, Washington worried how his age would affect his performance as the nation’s leader. His diary reads, "At my age what possible advantages [could I gain] from public life? (I) Render service to my country with less hope of answering its expectations.”
Despite Washington’s unease towards becoming President, he felt that it was his civic duty to lead the country that he had fought to protect. On April 30, 1789, he was officially inaugurated.
"I bade adieu to Mount Vernon, to private life, and to domestic felicity; and with a mind oppressed with more anxious and painful sensations than I have words to express."
.…President Truman dismissed General Douglas MacArthur from his duties as the commander of US forces in Korea after a public spat between the two men over military strategy. MacArthur was a well-known war hero who had implemented great military maneuvers in the early part of the war and enjoyed great public admiration and support. Emboldened by his reputation and never lacking in self-esteem, MacArthur began to strongly push for greater engagement in Korea. First, although worried about the Chinese reaction, Truman agreed with his plan to attack North Korea and drive out the communist forces in late 1950. However, the Chinese army intervened and pushed back the American forces to South Korea. MacArthur did not change his mind, however, and started arguing for the bombing of mainland China and the use of Taiwanese nationalist forces against the Chinese military to win the war. Truman refused to go along with these plans and MacArthur began to act unilaterally, explicitly challenging Truman’s intended policy of limited engagement and diplomatic overtures.
In April 1951, Truman had finally had enough when MacArthur communicated directly with a like-minded Congressional Republican and issued an unauthorized statement with a veiled threat against the Chinese, replacing him with Gen. Matthew Ridgeway. At the time, the decision was extremely unpopular as MacArthur was still revered; he ended up receiving a hero’s welcome when he returned to the US and even gave a speech before Congress. However, Truman defended his decision and declared that:
Later historians have largely defended Truman’s decision not to escalate the conflict. Truman’s mistake was not a strategic one but a political one as he lost the public relations battle with MacArthur and other political opponents over the issue at the time. The conflict between the men is likely still the biggest civilian-military conflict in US history and a clear illustration of how the military is always under civilian rule as intended by the Founding Fathers.
.…Congress passed the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, a part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal program. The bill was part of the Roosevelt administration's continued efforts to fight the Great Depression and specifically to reduce unemployment. The bill initially authorized nearly $5 million for work-relief programs with the most significant aspect of the effort being the founding of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The agency's mission was to provide jobs for the unemployed through different public works projects such as the building of roads, national parks, and public buildings. It ended up being the largest New Deal agency with the bill being extended each year as requested by FDR, who preferred public jobs programs over welfare programs in combating the chronic symptoms of the Great Depression.
In total, over $880 million was spent on public works programs and the WPA employed over 8.5 million people on 1.4 million public projects before the program's end in the midst of the Second World War in 1943. While historians are in dispute over how effective the WPA and the public jobs were economically with the economy ultimately soaring back to life due to the increased defense spending during World War II, numerous major construction projects were finished due to the program and it was very popular among the people, contributing to FDR's landslide victory in 1936.
....President Eisenhower gave a news conference in which he coined one of the most famous terms in Cold War history, the “domino theory” or “the domino effect." Eisenhower commented on the situation in Indochina where Vietnamese nationalists were on the verge of defeating the French colonial forces, which the US official feared could lead to the establishment of a communist regime led by Ho Chi Minh. Dreading this outcome, Eisenhower was trying to rally support for increased aid to the French and contemplated the strategic implications of the conflict when asked about the importance of Vietnam to the United States:
In many ways, his statement at the time was not revolutionary, as the idea of falling dominoes was a natural extension of the containment strategy and the Truman Doctrine implemented in Europe as early as 1947. The speech did not have a large immediate impact and a month later an agreement was reached at the Geneva Conference that left the communist forces in control of North Vietnam. However, the phrase stuck and took on a life of its own and the strategic concept of intervention to contain the spread of communism became an established US policy, the most evident example being the heavy involvement in Vietnam a decade after the speech.
.…John Tyler was inaugurated as the tenth President of the United States after the death of President William Harrison, who died from pneumonia after only 32 days in office. As the vice president, Tyler assumed the presidency after a brief constitutional crisis about how presidential succession actually worked. Some argued that as per Article II Section I of the Constitution, only “the powers and duties of said [President’s] office…shall devolve on the Vice President” without the vice president actually assuming the office of the Presidency (Article I Section III suggests the opposite view). John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay and others including some in Tyler’s own cabinet believed that he was only an acting President, but not the occupant of the office itself. However, John Tyler himself dismissed that notion and set a working precedent of the vice president fully assuming the Presidency as he took the oath of office two days after Harrison’s death. He even returned some mail unopened that had been addressed to “the acting President of the United States” by his political opponents. In 1967 the 25th Amendment is ratified, superceding Article II, Section I.
Tyler’s contribution to the issue of Presidential succession is his most important one as his presidency was marked by conflict with most political actors. Tyler was an ardent supporter of states’ rights and slavery and had political views drastically different from his own party’s leadership, the Whigs, who had drafted him as vice president hoping to attract some southern voters who could not stomach the Jacksonian Democratic Party. Among other things, conflict ensued over the re-establishment of the National Bank as Tyler vetoed the law drafted by his own political party in Congress. Most of his cabinet resigned in protest and the Whigs threw him out of the party. He ended up being a President without a party and received death threats from both sides of the political divide. Tyler, nicknamed His Accidency due to the circumstances of his accession to the Presidency and his close encounter with death aboard a steam ship while President, ended up drifting back to his old Democratic roots and endorsed James Polk for President in the 1844 election without running himself. Later in life he tried to broker a peace agreement between the North and the South on the eve of the Civil War, but did not succeed and ended up aligning with the South – he was elected to the Confederate House of Representatives in 1861 and he died a year later.
.…the presidential veto was used for the very first time as George Washington vetoed a bill called the Apportionment Act. The bill would have implemented a plan to allocate the number of representatives for each state in such a way that would have increased the amount of seats for the northern states. The argument was about which number should be used in dividing the population into representatives. The bill would have divided the whole United States population by 30,000 and would have allocated extra seats to eight states with the largest fraction left after the division, these states being mostly northern ones. Washington was reluctant to appear as if he was favoring the South where he was from, but after discussions with many of his confidantes including Thomas Jefferson, he decided to veto the bill on constitutional grounds. Washington and others who supported his position argued that the Constitution requires the choice of a common divisor (a number that would divide each state's population evenly) and the division of the population residing in each state by that number to establish the size of the House of Representatives. Washington argued that under the proposed bill some states would have been allocated more representatives than one for 30,000, which violates Article I Section II of the Constitution: “The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative.”
Jefferson, who closely advised Washington on the issue, stated that the apportionment should instead be “derived from arithmetical operation, about which no two men can ever possibly differ." However, these disputes over technicalities involving the apportionment of the representatives have surfaced time and again as there are multiple ways to interpret the Constitution and to design a method of representative allocation. After Washington’s veto the Congress did just that and wrote a new bill that apportioned representatives at “the ratio of one for every thirty-three thousand persons in the respective States." Not only does this event signify the first presidential veto in American history, but it also represents the issue of interpreting the Constitution in different ways, a matter that was already prevalent amongst the Founding Fathers themselves. Today, the apportionment methodology used is the method of equal proportion. George Washington ended up vetoing one more bill in 1797 before ending his tenure in office.
.…President Truman signed the Foreign Assistance Act, more commonly known as the Marshall Plan, into law. After World War II, the economies of Western Europe were in shambles, which many feared could potentially threaten the democratic foundations of the region and lead to the expansion of communism. The Marshall Plan, initially a large $4 billion foreign aid package for Western Europe, was designed to help the economic recovery of the region ravaged by high unemployment and a multitude of social problems such as homelessness and starvation. Named after the Secretary of State George Marshall, the leading proponent of the plan, the aid was seen as vital in advancing US national interests as only a robust and economically healthy Europe would be able to contain the influence of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, in addition to the moral arguments for aid, Western European countries with healthy democracies and vibrant free market economies would be useful political allies and lucrative markets for US business interests. The revitalization of West Germany was especially seen as an important strategic move to stabilize the region and as a key component of the containment strategy and the Truman doctrine.
The plan enjoyed wide bipartisan support as both the Republicans in Congress and the Truman White House agreed on the general principles behind the containment strategy. In signing the bill (also known as the Economic Cooperation Act of 1948), President Truman declared it represented “perhaps the greatest venture in constructive statesmanship that any nation has undertaken”. Indeed, the Marshall Plan is one of the truly major bipartisan foreign policy achievements and more than just rhetoric: among its achievements, the GNP in Europe rose 32.5 percent between 1947 and 1951 and industrial production increased 40 percent from pre-war levels. The Plan ended up providing more than $13 billion to European development and largely achieved its economic objectives of increasing productivity, stimulating growth, and promoting trade. Moreover, it secured Western Europe as a crucial US ally and created a framework for transatlantic cooperation that carries on to this day.
....the British signed and issued The Quartering Act, requiring the United States colonies to provide Quarters (provide housing, food, bedding) for all Royal Soldiers during routine marches and times of battle. The Quartering Act, aimed at increasing Royal Military presence in the face of slipping British control over the colonies, subjected colonial homes to occupation without regards to the colonies’ privacy or sustenance. The act stated:
Disguised as a measure of protection for the colonies in the wake of the French and Indian War, the Quartering Act roused tensions between the British Government and the colonies. Aimed ultimately at cutting the costs of quelling unrest in the colonies in the wake of a series of tax rebellions, the Quartering Act only further provoked the anger of the colonists. The additional physical and monetary burden of the Quartering Act aroused similar sentiments towards the British Parliament as did the Stamp Act of 1765.
In the wake of the Quartering Act of 1765, New York colonists gathered in an assembly to challenge the act. The New York colonists ultimately refused to comply with the act, inciting British Parliament to impose further restrictions on colonial actions and enacting the Restraining Act of 1767, prohibiting colonial governments to challenge and prevent the actions of Britain. Ultimately, the Quartering Act became a part of the grievances against the British Government and served as foundational grounds against the British in the American Revolution.
President Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) during a televised address. The Strategic Defense Initiative called for the development of an advanced anti-ballistic missile system that would prevent potential nuclear attacks from the Soviet Union. Both earth and space battle stations were proposed; their purpose was to intercept Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles before they reached their target. The media dubbed the initiative “Star Wars” because of its spaced based facilities and its rumored laser technology.
The program incited both political and technological controversies. On the subject of foreign policy, many feared that this program would only escalate the arms race between the US and Soviet Union. Technologically, this program discussed defense systems that had not yet been created. Ultimately, the Strategic Defense Initiative was President Reagan’s response to the widespread American fear of a nuclear attack from abroad. The program was abandon with the collapse of the Soviet Union; however, SDI’s public proposal on March 23, 1983, offered a solution that would dissipate American fears of an attack from afar, and was able to bring comfort to a very anxious American population.
....American-trained Cuban exiles invaded Cuba for the purpose of overthrowing Fidel Castro’s communist regime. This operation was known by Eisenhower and Kennedy administration officials as the Bay of Pigs Invasion—later to be known as the Bay of Pigs Fiasco. CIA agents trained the Cuban exiles in a secret military base located in the Guatemalan jungles. The CIA’s intention was to carry out a successful, covert invasion of Cuba by training and arming 1,200 anti-Castro exiles. The operation was intended to motivate the Cuban residents to join the exiles’ (and Americans’) cause and help oust Castro. Under President Eisenhower, the Cuban exiles were promised aerial support from the United States military. However, President Kennedy was wary of the operation when he assumed power, and, in order to mask American involvement, Kennedy advised that the invasion be scaled down, denying aerial cover. 
....George Washington left Mt. Vernon and his status as a private citizen for an eight-day journey to New York to attend his inauguration, marking the commencement of his role as the first President of the United States. Washington had retired to his home in Mt. Vernon, Virginia after successfully leading the Continental Army to victory against the British during the Revolutionary War. Washington was a proven successful leader despite personal anxiety about assuming the position. At 57, Washington worried how his age would affect his performance as the nation’s leader. His diary reads, "At my age what possible advantages [could I gain] from public life? (I) Render service to my country with less hope of answering its expectations.”
.…President Truman dismissed General Douglas MacArthur from his duties as the commander of US forces in Korea after a public spat between the two men over military strategy. MacArthur was a well-known war hero who had implemented great military maneuvers in the early part of the war and enjoyed great public admiration and support. Emboldened by his reputation and never lacking in self-esteem, MacArthur began to strongly push for greater engagement in Korea. First, although worried about the Chinese reaction, Truman agreed with his plan to attack North Korea and drive out the communist forces in late 1950. However, the Chinese army intervened and pushed back the American forces to South Korea. MacArthur did not change his mind, however, and started arguing for the bombing of mainland China and the use of Taiwanese nationalist forces against the Chinese military to win the war. Truman refused to go along with these plans and MacArthur began to act unilaterally, explicitly challenging Truman’s intended policy of limited engagement and diplomatic overtures.
.…Congress passed the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, a part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal program. The bill was part of the Roosevelt administration's continued efforts to fight the Great Depression and specifically to reduce unemployment. The bill initially authorized nearly $5 million for work-relief programs with the most significant aspect of the effort being the founding of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The agency's mission was to provide jobs for the unemployed through different public works projects such as the building of roads, national parks, and public buildings. It ended up being the largest New Deal agency with the bill being extended each year as requested by FDR, who preferred public jobs programs over welfare programs in combating the chronic symptoms of the Great Depression.
....President Eisenhower gave a news conference in which he coined one of the most famous terms in Cold War history, the “domino theory” or “the domino effect." Eisenhower commented on the situation in Indochina where Vietnamese nationalists were on the verge of defeating the French colonial forces, which the US official feared could lead to the establishment of a communist regime led by Ho Chi Minh. Dreading this outcome, Eisenhower was trying to rally support for increased aid to the French and contemplated the strategic implications of the conflict when asked about the importance of Vietnam to the United States:
.…John Tyler was inaugurated as the tenth President of the United States after the death of President William Harrison, who died from pneumonia after only 32 days in office. As the vice president, Tyler assumed the presidency after a brief constitutional crisis about how presidential succession actually worked. Some argued that as per Article II Section I of the Constitution, only “the powers and duties of said [President’s] office…shall devolve on the Vice President” without the vice president actually assuming the office of the Presidency (Article I Section III suggests the opposite view). John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay and others including some in Tyler’s own cabinet believed that he was only an acting President, but not the occupant of the office itself. However, John Tyler himself dismissed that notion and set a working precedent of the vice president fully assuming the Presidency as he took the oath of office two days after Harrison’s death. He even returned some mail unopened that had been addressed to “the acting President of the United States” by his political opponents. In 1967 the 
.…the presidential veto was used for the very first time as George Washington vetoed a bill called the Apportionment Act. The bill would have implemented a plan to allocate the number of representatives for each state in such a way that would have increased the amount of seats for the northern states. The argument was about which number should be used in dividing the population into representatives. The bill would have divided the whole United States population by 30,000 and would have allocated extra seats to eight states with the largest fraction left after the division, these states being mostly northern ones. Washington was reluctant to appear as if he was favoring the South where he was from, but after discussions with many of his confidantes including Thomas Jefferson, he decided to veto the bill on constitutional grounds. Washington and others who supported his position argued that the Constitution requires the choice of a common divisor (a number that would divide each state's population evenly) and the division of the population residing in each state by that number to establish the size of the House of Representatives. Washington argued that under the proposed bill some states would have been allocated more representatives than one for 30,000, which violates Article I Section II of the Constitution: “The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative.”
.…President Truman signed the Foreign Assistance Act, more commonly known as the 
....the British signed and issued The Quartering Act, requiring the United States colonies to provide Quarters (provide housing, food, bedding) for all Royal Soldiers during routine marches and times of battle. The Quartering Act, aimed at increasing Royal Military presence in the face of slipping British control over the colonies, subjected colonial homes to occupation without regards to the colonies’ privacy or sustenance. The act stated: