In December 1960, with Sputnik recently in orbit, Castro freshly in Havana, and the West gripped by a creeping fatalism about Soviet inevitability, the Deputy Director of the CIA gave a speech to a room of Texas doctors. General Charles P. Cabell — the man who would be fired by Kennedy four months later over the Bay of Pigs — opened not with a threat assessment, but with a folksy parable about a farmer seeing his first locomotive:

"They studied it as it was standing in the station and the Mrs. turned to her husband and said, 'Pa, what do you think?' Pa said, 'It'll never run, it'll never run.' Well, the train pulled out, and, as it disappeared around a bend the Mrs. turned again and said to Pa, 'Now what do you think?' Pa shook his head, and answered, 'It'll never stop, it'll never stop!'"

Cabell was diagnosing a national mood swing. He continued:

"For years many people in this country were of the opinion that the Soviet Union could never become a going concern... More recently, however, there is a growing body of opinion abroad and in this country which is willing to grant practically unlimited capabilities and potentialities to the Soviet Union and its Communist allies. This view is also the Communist view. Moscow tells us in millions of words daily that Communism represents the wave of the future."

This is the forgotten claim: that in 1960, when Khrushchev was banging shoes at the UN and Western intellectuals were writing earnest books about convergence theory, a senior US intelligence officer was publicly arguing that the "inevitability of Communism" was itself a Soviet psyop — a manufactured perception, not an analytical conclusion. He explicitly identified elite Western pessimism as a Soviet propaganda asset.

Was he ahead of his time? Profoundly. Consider what the consensus actually was:

• In 1961, Paul Samuelson's bestselling economics textbook projected the Soviet economy would overtake the US between 1984 and 1997.
• JFK ran on a (fictitious) "missile gap" the Soviets supposedly enjoyed.
• As late as 1989, the CIA's own internal estimates were still overstating Soviet GDP by roughly 2x.

Cabell, in a speech to a medical society in Fort Worth, told the truth nobody in academic economics or the punditry would admit for another thirty years: that the appearance of unstoppable momentum was being sold, and that sensible people were buying it.

His train metaphor has a modern echo. Substitute "Communism" with whatever current technology, ideology, or market trend is currently being declared inevitable — AI doom, crypto, China's rise, American decline — and Cabell's framework still cuts. The same person who once said "it'll never run" tends, with no intervening update, to say "it'll never stop." The error isn't the direction of the prediction; it's the willingness to extrapolate any momentum to infinity. Trains, in fact, run and then stop.