Quote Originally Posted by DungeonMaster6
Actually, it was Johnson who really escalated Nam and under Kennedy the closest we came to nuclear was the Cuban Missile Crisis.

As for Iraq the majority of Democrats in Congress voted to go war.
Kennedy put in the US Military advisors, without whom, there would have been nothing to escalate. We shouldn't have filled in behind the French abandonment.

The Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis were, for all intents and purposes, a linked sequence of incidents in the same theater. But technically, you are correct.

We started it at the Bay of Pigs, which put Castro firmly in bed with the Soviets, the missile crisis was the result of the co-escalations, them emplacing missiles, us blockading the high seas. etc. etc.