The correct answer to this open question is the following.
The event that President John F. Kennedy blamed on the failures of the Eisenhower administration was the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik.
Those were the conflictive years of the Cold War in which the United States and the Soviet Union compited in the arms race and the space race. President Kennedy was worried that the Soviets had been the first ones to launch a spacecraft into space before the Americans. This made President Kennedy set the space race as one of his priorities during his administration.