Just as sure as Washington's cherry trees produce cherry blossoms, the Kennedy Administration was bound to be embarrassed by a first flap. The wonder was that the flap came so soon and exploded out of such a well-marked booby trap. The misfortune was that it involved a basic problem of national defense: the world view of the relative missile strength of the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
The trouble began when well-intentioned Defense Secretary Robert McNamara called Pentagon correspondents to his office for a background briefing. McNamara had done some of his homework well: he made an impressive presentation of the current state of U.S. nuclear forces. Then, like Republican Defense Secretaries Neil McElroy and Tom Gates before him, honest Bob McNamara tried to explain that merely counting missiles is not the way to assess U.S. or Russian military strength. All other weapons must be taken into account. The important thing, said McNamara, is that there should be no "destruction gap." Then, casually, he added that today the Russians probably have no more intercontinental ballistic missiles than the U.S.
Grand Deception. McNamara did not deny that during the next three years a nose count of Russian ICBMs may find the Soviets moving ahead. But the next day's papers headlined stories focused on the proposition that the "missile gap," which has worried the nation since Sputnik I shot spaceward in 1957, no longer exists.
The uproar soon echoed through the White House, President Kennedy conferred with McNamara and with Defense Department Controller Charles Hitch, learned that the study he had ordered of U.S. defense posture was not yet completed, and decided on his own defensive strategy. Press Secretary Pierre Salinger's regular news conference was delayed an hour and a half while tactics were threshed out in the President's oval office. Then Salinger announced that since no study had been completed, there could be no conclusion that the missile gap had disappeared. The newspaper stories, said Salinger, were "absolutely wrong." At his own press conference next day, John Kennedy at first seemed to deny that there had been any McNamara meeting with the press ("if such a meeting took place"), stated that until his audit of U.S. defense forces was complete, he could make no comment on the missile gap.
But the gap flap was not easily silenced—and for good reason. During the campaign Candidate Kennedy had played heavily on the possibility of a dangerous missile gap. "We are facing a gap on which we are gambling with our survival," he said on the Senate floor a year ago. Lyndon Johnson had clucked that "the missile gap cannot be eliminated by the stroke of a pen." Missouri's Senator Stuart Symington, the Democrats' chief defense specialist had charged: "A very substantial missile gap does exist and the Eisenhower Administration apparently is going to permit this gap to increase." Ike found the attacks so galling that in his final message to Congress last month he said: "The bomber gap of several years ago was always a fiction, and the missile gap shows every sign of being the same."