Bay of Pigs to the Vietnam War
In his forward to his 1992 narrative of the Renaissance: "A World Lit only by Fire," author William Manchester struggled to make sense of seemingly random events that lead to the Reformation and the Age of Discovery.
"...Yet I knew from experience that such chains of circumstance are always there, awaiting discovery. To cite a small, relatively recent example: In the first year of John F. Kennedy's presidential administration, four developments appeared to be unrelated; America's humiliation at the Bay of Pigs in April, Kennedy's confrontation with Nikita Khrushchev in Austria six weeks later, the raising of the Berlin Wall in August, and, in December, the first commitment of American ground troops to Indochina. Yet each event had led to the next. Khrushchev saw the Cuban fiasco as evidence that the young president was weak. Therefore he bullied him in Vienna. In the mistaken belief that he had intimidated him there, he built the Wall. Kennedy answered the challenge by sending 400 Green Berets to Southeast Asia, explaining to those around him that, 'we have a problem making our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place.'"
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