President Kennedy establishes his New Frontier with a challenge to venture into outer space.

During Fidel Castro's tenure as President of Cuba, he survived an estimated 638 attempts on his life - and that's just from the CIA.

On June 9, 1954, two-thirds of the way into the 36-day televised Army-McCarthy hearings in which Sen. Joseph McCarthy argued that the U.S. Army was harboring communists, the investigation hits a turning point. When Joseph Welch, the Army's special counsel, accuses McCarthy of having "no sense of decency," the tide of public opinion turns and McCarthy's career is eventually ruined.

Within the CIA, the Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961 was regarded as the "perfect failure."