[5] 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.
[6][full citation needed] 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.
A number of events—particularly the surprise Tet Offensive, and later the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers—helped to confirm public suspicion that there was a significant "gap" between the administration's declarations of controlled military and political resolution, and the reality.
"[9] The advent of the presence of television journalists allowed by the military to report and photograph events of the war within hours or days of their actual occurrence in an uncensored manner drove the discrepancy widely referred to as "the credibility gap".
Since 2017, the term has been used to describe the Trump administration, particularly in relation to the use of what White House Counsel Kellyanne Conway called alternative facts.