the beginning of the new year found president kennedy and the top brass in Palm Beach, at the splendid mansion of Kennedy's father, Joseph P. Kennedy. All the top figures of the military establishment were present: Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, General Maxwell Taylor, the Joint Chiefs, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, and General Paul Harkins. Gilpatric, who was assigned the task of taking notes at the Palm Beach meetings, recorded that the President “emphasized the importance of playing down the number of U. S. military personnel involved in Vietnam.” Kennedy also stressed the need to avoid any impression that the U. S. military was participating in combat. The next day, in a memorandum, Gilpatric fleshed out Kennedy's policy on handling reports of U. S. military involvement, assigning the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense responsibility for developing “a suitable cover story or stories, a public explanation, a statement of no comment or an appropriate combination thereof.”

Kennedy hoped to leave the campaign of concealment to others, but he was forced to become a participant when, at a press conference on January 15, he was asked whether American troops were involved in combat in Vietnam. The President replied that they were not. But in fact they were. Americans were now flying combat missions in World War II-era propeller aircraft, among them A-26 Invaders, AD-6 Skyraiders, and T-28 Trojans, that recently had been brought to South Vietnam and painted with South Vietnamese government markings.