Paul M. Henkels (right) is elected Executive Vice President by the Board of Directors of Henkels & McCoy.

January 3
US breaks diplomatic relations with Cuba.

March 1
President Kennedy issues Executive Order #10924, establishing the Peace Corps to improve education, agriculture, and living standards in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.

March 29
The 23rd amendment to the Constitution is ratified; it provides for congressional representation of Washington, D.C.

April 2
Adolph Eichmann's trial begins in Jerusalem (above left). Convicted of murder and of crimes against humanity for his part in Hitler's Final Solution, he will be sentenced to death by hanging. Eichmann was SS camp commandant of the infamous Auschwitz death camp in Poland.

April 12
Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin is the first man to travel into space,
as he circles the earth in 90 minutes in the Vostok I, 187 miles above the earth.

April 17
Operation Mongoose/Bay of Pigs. About 1,400 exiled Cubans land in their homeland in a failed CIA-sponsored and planned counterinsurgency effort to dislodge Fidel Castro (right) from power. They are quickly defeated and rounded up. It is an embarrassing failure for the new Kennedy administration.

May
Surprise!
FCC Chairman Newton Minow claims that television is a "vast wasteland."

May 5
Navy Commander Alan B. Shepard, Jr., blasts into space for a 20-minute ride "out of this world" in the Freedom 7. The space race is under way, but the US is behind.

Left: a Saturn rocket on the launching pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

May 25
President Kennedy presents a bold challenge before a joint session of Congress: Send a man to the moon by the end of the decade.

 

August 13
A low, barbed-wire barrier was strung between East and West Berlin, effectively dividing the city in half. Within days, workers cement concrete blocks into a low wall. The wall is later reinforced and is made bigger and stronger. During the next twenty-eight years an estimated 10,000 East Berliners will attempt to flee to the West. Two thousand will be successful. Right: Checkpoint Charlie, in the American zone of Berlin -- where East meets West -- is a crossing point into the Soviet sector. At the other end of the corridor are hundreds of Soviet troops trained to shoot to kill any would-be refugees.

September 18
United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold dies in a plane crash, en route to a peace keeping mission near North Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), in Africa.

October 1
Roger Maris, New York Yankee outfielder, breaks Babe Ruth's record, hitting his 61st home run, against the Boston Red Sox.

October 9
The New York Yankees win the World Series by defeating Cincinnati in five games.

October 29
USSR detonates a 50-megaton hydrogen bomb in the largest man-made explosion in history. This is equivalent to a blast from 50 million metric tons of TNT.

December 11
US military helicopters arrive at docks in South Vietnam along with 400 U.S. personnel, who will fly and maintain the aircraft. By the end of this year there are approximately 2,000 US military advisers in South Vietnam. For a complete timeline of major events in the Vietnam War, click here (PBS web site).