The Situation Room was constructed in 1961, shortly after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. The CIA-backed invasion by Cuban exiles was an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro’s communist government in Cuba. Just over a year after the Bay of Pigs invasion, a US Air Force pilot flying reconnaissance in the Caribbean photographed missile launch sites in Cuba, less than 300 miles from Miami. This led to nearly two weeks of a tense standoff between the US and the Soviet Union before the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, finally decided to remove the missiles, thereby averting the threat of nuclear war.

The Vietnam War was another critical historical event that was often dealt with in the Situation Room. The war was a civil conflict between North and South Vietnam, breaking out in 1955 and lasting until 1975. The conflict also eventually became a proxy war between the Soviet Union and the USA, as both superpowers regarded Vietnam as part of a wider geopolitical and ideological conflict between capitalist democracy and communism. The US’s involvement became especially explicit during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, with US troops deployed into active combat in 1965.