John F. Kennedy and the Missile Gap (review)

The U.S. defense budget routinely sparks debate over the funding needed to ensure American security and preparedness, and those debates have become especially contentious in combating the threat of terrorism. Although this challenge differs in many respects from the conflicts of the Cold War—especially with respect to the nature and goals of the adversary and the means of deterrence, just to name a few—U.S. defense politics in the mid-twentieth century nevertheless can provide useful insights for policymaking today. In particular, the fears, ultimately unfounded, of a “missile gap” with the Soviet Union, which began in the final years of the Eisenhower administration and continued into the Kennedy administration, reveal the need to evaluate carefully U.S. immediate and long-term defense interests and resources. Christopher A. Preble’s well-researched and clearly written study makes a significant contribution to such research through its comprehensive analysis of the strategic, political, and economic underpinnings of the “missile gap” myth.

Preble begins by examining how President Dwight D. Eisenhower linked national security closely to defense spending, emphasizing the need for fiscal restraint throughout his presidency. Eisenhower’s “New Look” strategy declared that the United States had to combat the external threat of communism, but in so doing, ensure that its defense budget did not pose an internal threat to American interests and values. The New Look relied on nuclear deterrence to contain communism, thus controlling defense spending by limiting conventional forces.

This strategy faced criticism throughout Eisenhower’s two terms in office, but perceptions of U.S. defense vulnerabilities heightened after the Soviet Union deployed the Sputnik satellite in 1957. Critics took issue with Eisenhower’s view that the United States did not need to increase defense spending to counter the perceived growth in Soviet weapons. As Preble writes,“The missile gap was a critique of the strategic and economic foundations of the New Look and a political critique of the Eisenhower presidency” (x). Two significant studies, the Gaither Report and the Rockefeller Report, concluded that the United States would soon fall behind the Soviet Union in its defense capabilities. Preble aptly finds that “the missile gap became the rallying cry for those who had previously been unable to dent Eisenhower’s political armor” (51).

As the debate over the alleged missile gap intensified in the late 1950s, Senator John F. Kennedy emerged as a public critic of the Eisenhower administration’s defense policies. Preble writes that during the 1960 presidential election, Kennedy repeatedly stressed the need to strengthen U.S. defenses and, more broadly, to restore American prestige by “regaining the initiative in the Cold War” (104). Preble goes on to present an original and detailed evaluation of Kennedy’s attention to foreign policy in such highly competitive states as Pennsylvania and New York. In particular, Preble identifies Kennedy’s efforts “to connect foreign policy and national security to the local concerns of individual voters” (144).

Once in office, however, Kennedy soon learned that U.S. defenses were much stronger than his campaign rhetoric about a looming missile gap with the Soviet Union had suggested. The Kennedy administration faced public criticism on this issue after Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara revealed to reporters in early 1961 that a missile gap did not, in fact, exist. By late 1961, the administration officially had affirmed U.S. strategic superiority, and the missile-gap debate essentially was moot, though some Republicans declared that Kennedy had won election on a false platform. Kennedy himself requested internal administration studies of the history of U.S. intelligence on Soviet defense forces, and his advisers concluded that a definitive assessment of U.S. superiority was not available until after Kennedy became president. Regardless, Kennedy continued to pursue a massive defense buildup throughout his time in office. Preble concludes that “John F. Kennedy’s political fortunes were uniquely tied to the missile gap, which was a major factor in Kennedy’s rise to political prominence” (177).

The multidimensional evaluation...