Curtis LeMay the US Army and Navy frequently suffered budgetary cutbacks and program cancellations by Congress and Secretary McNamara. During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, LeMay clashed again with U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Defense Secretary McNamara, arguing that he should be allowed to bomb nuclear missile sites in Cuba. He opposed the naval blockade and, after the end of the crisis, suggested that Cuba be invaded anyway, even after the Soviets agreed to withdraw their missiles. Kennedy secretly agreed to remove US missiles from Turkey and Italy. Unknown to the US, the Soviet field commanders in Cuba had been
Missile gap a dangerous extremist, who worked with the American military to plant the idea of a Soviet first-strike capability to justify a pre-emptive American attack. That belief about Kennedy as a militarist was reinforced in Soviet minds by the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, which led to the Cuban Missile Crisis after the Soviets placed nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962. A second claim of a missile gap appeared in 1974. Albert Wohlstetter, a professor at the University of Chicago, accused the CIA of systematically underestimating Soviet missile deployment in his 1974 foreign policy article, "Is There a Strategic Arms