Kennedy, who campaigned in the 1960 presidential election as a committed militarist, entered the White House promising to establish a new foundation on which to ensure the continuance of American power in such changing times. His inaugural call that America was ready to "pay any price, bear any burden" revived a muscular internationalism that had atrophied. In addition to bringing in Robert McNamara from the Ford Motor Company to rationalize the Department of Defense, Kennedy and his civilian advisers looked to counterinsurgency and covert operations as a way of both breaking the nuclear deadlock and controlling the rise of third-world nationalism. Kennedy ordered the military to create a branch of the Special Forces that could operate with more flexibility in the third world and set up a "Special Group" in the White House, headed by General Maxwell Taylor, to coordinate special-warfare policy at the highest echelons of government—with the result that superpower conflict was detoured outside of Europe, particularly into Southeast Asia .
In Latin America, Kennedy's vaulting idealism led to the Alliance for Progress, an ambitious project that wedded the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary traditions of American diplomacy—as did Theodore Roosevelt and other missionary presidents of an earlier era—this time to especially toxic effect. Announcing the program to a room full of Latin American ambassadors soon after his inauguration, Kennedy sought to steal Castro's insurgent thunder, committing Washington to "completing the revolution of the Americas." He promised billions of dollars in development aid in exchange for enacting land, tax, judicial, and electoral reform aimed at breaking up extreme concentrations of economic and political power, "to build," as the president put it, "a hemisphere where all men can hope for a suitable standard of living and all can live out their lives in dignity and in freedom." "Let us once again transform the American Continent into a vast crucible of revolutionary ideas and efforts," Kennedy roared, "a tribute to the power of the creative energies of free men and women, an example to all the world that liberty and progress walk hand in hand. Let us once again awaken our American revolution until it guides the struggles of people everywhere—not with an imperialism of force or fear but the rule of courage and freedom and hope for the future of man."

John F. Kennedy pinning a medal on outgoing CIA Director, Allen Dulles, who advised and orchestrated, among other things, the overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954, the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, and sat on the board of the United Fruit Company.

But while Kennedy's revolutionary rhetoric encouraged those who sought change, his actions empowered those who opposed it, the most illiberal forces in the hemisphere, men who despised democrats and political liberals as much as they hated card-carrying Communists. His administration committed the United States to strengthening the internal security capabilities of Latin American nations to protect against subversion, turning the region into a counterinsurgent laboratory. Advisers from the State and Defense Departments and the CIA worked to reinforce local intelligence operations, schooling security forces in interrogation and guerrilla warfare techniques, providing technology and equipment, and, when necessary, conducting preemptive coups. It was during this period that national intelligence agencies fortified and, in some cases, created by the United States—Argentina's Secretaria de Inteligencia del Estaclo, Chile's Direccion Nacional de Inteligencia, Brazil's Sistema Nacional de lnformacoes, El Salvador's Agencia Nacional de Servicios Especiales—began to transform themselves into the command centers of the region's death-squad system, which throughout the 1970s and 1980s executed hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans and tortured tens of thousands more. Millions were driven into exile. Throughout the worst of the repression, Washington nominally continued to support Latin America's "democratic left." But the most passionate defenders of liberalization and democracy were likely to be found in the ranks of Washington's opponents—and singled out for execution by Washington's allies.
President Kennedy with OAS task force in 1961 to discuss Alliance for Progress