The missile gap fiasco is its own special saga. According to Ellsberg, who had access to the raw intelligence, during the Kennedy campaign, the CIA, navy, the army, and the air force each had their own estimates of Soviet ICBM numbers, which ranged from 100 to 1000. Whereas the actual number was known exactly, and that number was 4. F.O.U.R. He doesn't assert, if I recall correctly, that Kennedy knew that number, although he may have.
You think that until you dig into the Diem assassination. Or Bay of Pigs. Or any of the Castro assassination attempts. The Kennedy administration makes fucking Archer look like a documentary. Not to downplay the "we are fully aware of four missiles, but let's just round that up to a thousand" aspect of Kennedy foreign policy, just to point out that Democrats live in glass houses whose walls are already spidered with cracks. That's in a semi-functional intelligence community. Kennedy era was the opposite of.The missile gap fiasco is its own special saga.