Credibility gap

Credibility gap is a term that came into wide use with journalism, political and public discourse in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. At the time, it was most frequently used to describe public skepticism about the Lyndon B. Johnson administration's statements and policies on the Vietnam War. It was used in journalism as a euphemism for recognized lies told to the public by politicians. Today, it is used more generally to describe almost any "gap" between an actual situation and what politicians and government agencies say about it.

History

The term "credibility gap" came against a background of the use of the term "missile gap", which the Oxford English Dictionary lists as first being used by then-Senator John F. Kennedy on 14 August 1958, when he stated: "Our Nation could have afforded, and can afford now, the steps necessary to close the missile gap." "Doomsday gap" and "mineshaft gap" were the imagined post-apocalyptic continuations of this paranoia in the 1964 Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove.

The term "credibility gap" was widely in use as early as 1963, according to Timetables of History. Prior to its association with the Vietnam War, in December 1962, at the annual meeting of the U.S. Inter-American Council, Republican US Senator for New York Kenneth B. Keating praised President John F. Kennedy's prompt action in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but he said there was an urgent need for the United States to plug the "credibility gap" in U.S. policy on Cuba. It was popularized in 1966 by J. William Fulbright, a Democratic Senator from Arkansas, when he could not get a straight answer from President Johnson's Administration regarding the war in Vietnam.

"Credibility gap" was first used in association with the Vietnam War in the New York Herald Tribune in March 1965, to describe then-president Lyndon Johnson's handling of the escalation of American involvement in the war.