Werbos's own explanation for his early non-recognition is publishing strategy, not DARPA suppression — and Kanal's independent testimony agrees

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In the same 1993 interview that contains the DOCSUB story (claim-werbos-1978-docsub-blocked), Werbos gives his own general account of why his 1970s papers failed to register, offered before the DOCSUB anecdote and independent of it: publishing was hard enough that "I tried to cram a lot into individual papers," and, in his words, "I think that's one of the reasons[,] they weren't widely recognized." This is a self-diagnosed problem of exposition and publishing strategy, not institutional suppression.

Independent secondary testimony about the specific 1974 thesis-report points the same direction. Laveen Kanal, a pattern-recognition researcher Werbos tried to interest in his work in 1975, recalled receiving a copy of the report "Beyond Regression: New Tools for Prediction and Analysis in the Behavioral Sciences" directly from Werbos, and wrote in 1993: "Soon the report got buried in the usual flood of paper... I have often wondered in recent years if the title had been different... would I have paid more attention to this report... I was not alone in neglecting his work" (Kanal 1993, as quoted in Yuxi Liu, "The Backstory of Backpropagation," 2023). Kanal held an unblocked, freely given copy and still missed it — for reasons of framing and title, not DARPA. This echoes Rumelhart's own stated reason for the 1986 citation gap ("he didn't cite previous work because they were so obscure," per claim-rhw-1986-reference-list-four-works) and the "container matters more than correctness" pattern already documented for Parker's 1985 MIT technical report.