THINKING
The map in the background of this photo has become an interesting mystery. I first noticed it in this 1964 photo in the collection of the Library of Congress. The angle of Greenland and Australia make it unusual, especially since (as I argued in an article a few years ago), most DOD wall maps tend to use the Miller Cylindrical or Mercator Projections. Those projections have their own merits, but are probably not the best in many strategic contexts when an accurate understanding of area or distance may have bearing on a key decision.
https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.41610/
That’s why it is so interesting that this map appears to be an equidistant projection, based on my attempts to recreate it with GIS software. I have not yet been able to get it quite right, but I am able to produce something rather close with an azimuthal equidistant projection centered over Asia. I don’t know what point of projection was used and have tried a few might have been obvious, especially in the 1960s, including Beijing, Tokyo, Saigon, and Delhi. A couple of my attempts are here:
None of these is quite the same, so I clearly don’t have the right point of projection or there are some other parameters I don’t know.
I have found a few other photographs with this map in the background, so I believe it decorated the wall of a Pentagon conference room for a number of years. I have never seen one quite like it in contemporary collections so it may have been a custom production for the room itself. The extent of the wall is notable, too, since it is very wide in the horizontal without much vertical extent (relative to any standard sheet map).
The map appears in the background of two photos, from 1961 and 1962, in the official Joint Staff history of the period. Another example of the map showing up in the background of a Joint Chiefs photo is this one from 1962:
