| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Christopher A. Preble. John F. Kennedy and the Missile Gap. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2004. Pp. xi, 244. $32.00.
By 1960, a large number of American opinion leaders came to believe, mistakenly, that the Soviet Union had larger stockpiles of intercontinental ballistic missiles than did the United States. This "missile gap" thinking climaxed during John F. Kennedy's campaign for president in 1959 and 1960, and came to an end in October 1961 when Kennedy administration officials, having already decided on a major defense buildup, declared that there was no gap.	1
Providing a context for the rise and fall of the missile gap, this book by Christopher A. Preble seeks to understand why Kennedy came to believe in it, and the importance of that belief for his later defense decision making. It is an extremely thorough, well-documented effort that portrays Kennedy's predecessor as president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, as right to deny the gap's existence; Kennedy as wrong to affirm it; and Eisenhower as having "lost the battle over the missile gap" (p. 91) because of Kennedy's politically potent arguments.	2
Gap thinking, Preble maintains, was sustained primarily by economic considerations. First, with respect to economic philosophy, as many have noted, Eisenhower believed the American public would not accept defense spending increases when faced with higher taxes, and he felt higher military spending would detract from American nonmilitary economic potential. Kennedy, by contrast, stressed that the U.S.-Soviet military balance was eroding, that Americans would accept greater economic sacrifice to repair it and the insecurity it entailed, and that higher defense spending could and should be an instrument of economic growth.	. . .

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