The Eisenhower presidential years of the 1950s were heated up by fears of the Cold War: Russian and Chinese communism, missiles, spies, McCarthyism, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his "Brink of Disaster" missile policy. The fear of commie spies doing us in was a major worry in our government and President Ike. So, what did he do to head it off? He ordered spying by using American air power to take a look at what was going on in Russia by having high altitude flights over their country to look for ICBMs--Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile sites.
Francis Gary Powers was a US Air Force pilot of a special high altitude aircraft, so high that regular military planes could not fly as high as the U2 spy plane he piloted. He took off from Pakistan, an American ally then as now, on May 1, 1960--a date when we were still in high school, a month-plus before we graduated. The flight was detected by the Russian defense and they fired a surface-to-air missile. Powers knew he was in trouble, since 14 missiles had been fired at him. He bailed out and the plane was hit and fell to the earth. That was not supposed to happen, because Powers had been ordered to make sure the plane was destroyed so the Russians could not examine it to see what kind of plane the US had for spy purposes.
For an American plane to fly over Russia was a threat the the Russians. It would have terrified and outraged the US had the Russians done such a thing. Ike denied it was a spy plane. He said it was a "weather research aircraft that strayed off course". It happened 13 days before a summit conference that was to be held in Paris. It got cancelled. Powers was captured when he landed in his parachute on Russian soil. He confessed that he was on a spying mission. He was sentenced to prison by the Russians and spent a year and a quarter as a Soviet prisoner.
Because the plane was intact enough to show it was a spy plane, and Ike lied to the world what kind of plane it was and why it was flying over Russia, it resulted in a great humiliation of the US. Ike, a hero of WWII, a popular president, was caught in a lie. The whole country was embarrassed that the plane was shot down and the pilot captured, but not so much that most Americans thought spying on the Russians was such a bad idea. as they thought it would protect us in a defensive way by looking to see what the Soviets were up to with their missiles.
I don't remember it being discussed in any classes at Rogers when we were still students there. I do remember a graduate class history professor of mine addressing the class about the negative impact of the incident, focusing on President Eisenhower lying about it. The whole class was embarrassed and angry that any president would tell such a big lie. But that was in 1969, the height of the Vietnam War. There was a general negative attitude young Americans had in those days. Nineteen-sixty was when Americans felt we were fighting a silent war to protect us from Russian-Communist bombings or infiltrations that would crumble the nation.