Question

what events led to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and how?

Answer 1

There's a good summary of events here that you can read for your answer:
http://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/JFK-in-History/Cuban-Missile-Crisis.aspx

In short, the Soviets were placing nuclear weapons on Cuba which gave them an incredibly close staging area for a missile attack in minutes if it ever came to war. The US found out about this from their spy flights and saw it as a direct threat to their security, but the hardest thing they needed to figure out was how to deal with it without firing a shot.

This was one of the times in history that the US and the Soviets came very close to what could have ended up as a nuclear war, the tensions between both nations being as high as they were that any misstep could have easily become a catalyst for conflict.

Answer 2

One that you will tend not to find in standard texts, because it contrasts painfully with the "Camelot" image of his Presidency, is the perception by Khrushchev that Kennedy was a young and inexperienced leader who could be manipulated or browbeaten. Khrushchev had met Kennedy during the Vienna conference in the summer of 1961, and decided that Kennedy was a weenie, at least compared to Eisenhower and Nixon, with whom he'd been dealing before. That emboldened him to proceed with the missiles in Cuba.