For John, BLUF: Not everything on the show following yours is correct. Nothing to see here; just move along.
I was listening to News Reader Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, where she is interviewing Film Producer Oliver Stone. Mr Stone, talking about President Kennedy, says that it was only after he was inaugurated as President and had had his Secretary of Defense confirmed and sworn in that he found out that the "missile gap" he had run on was a myth.
The truth is that President Eisenhower offered to brief Candidate Kennedy on the truth early on and finally in July 1960, during the election, CIA Director Allen Dulles did brief Senator Kennedy and Senator Johnson, before the election.
Regards — Cliff
Wasn't the missile gap a product of Team B? I'll have to go back to my library to look that one up.
ReplyDeleteI think "Team B" is the mid-1970s.
ReplyDeleteYou may be thinking of the classified Gaither Report which had an unclassified equivalent in the "Rockefeller Report". I can't find it on line, but I have it somewhere. Both surfaced before the 1960 election.
I think this was a winner for Senator Kennedy. People were worried after the Soviet Union put up Sputnik and stayed ahead of us in the "Space Race" for a while. I do think that President Kennedy moved us along more smartly toward going to the moon that a President Nixon might have.
Regards — Cliff
If you subscribe to Neil Degrasse Tysons's theory about the drivers of space program, Nixon likely would have gone the same path.
ReplyDeletehttp://youtu.be/40YIIaF1qiw?t=5m50s
The link is all salient, but particularly around the 5:55 mark.