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There's a problem with your source. Here's a line from one of their articles:

To answer the threat of the MIG-25 Foxbat, U.S. developers designed and fielded the F-4 Phantom.

That's a big fat negative. The Phantom first flew in 1958 and entered service in 1960. The Foxbat didn't even have its first flight until 1964 and entered service in 1970. It's like Hillary saying she was named after the famous Everest climber, even though she was born before the feat.

To their credit, however, they do say this:

The Navy planned to defend the carriers, using the strategy of defense in depth. The attacking Soviet aircraft will be met at long ranges by counterair aircraft based on the carriers. This requirement was initially met by the "Missileer," the name given to an aircraft of proposed in the 1950s. The F6D-1 Missileer was not a fighter at all, as a "fighter" is currently defined. It is merely a platform that launched air-to-air missiles. The theory behind the missileer is that high performance can be put into the weapon instead of the aircraft. On 21 July 1960 the Navy announced that a contract for the development of the Missileer aircraft for launching the Eagle long-range air-to-air guided missile, was being issued to the Douglas Aircraft Corporation. Eventually, the Navy development organizations became convinced that the F6D was too slow, too narrow in application, and too expensive [both the Phoenix missiles and the AN/AWG-9 radar used on its replacement, the F-14 Tomcat, evolved from the abortive Douglas F6D Missileer program].

I am not even sure I totally buy that, since, IIRC, the Phoenix system was made for the F-111's (which we discussed earlier) multi-role platform.

In any event, my origninal sourcing comes from the many volumes of Jane's All The World's Aircraft and other books from their writers I've collected over the years. I'd consider them much more authoritative in the field over GS. That's probably where GS got their F-14 info. How they came up with the other bit is beyond me.

My memory is that the Mig-25 was the response to the B-70 threat. I'll agree with you that the F-4 was already in the field long before the 1973 Arab Israeli war where we first saw the MiG-25 operationally, although we did know of it's existence from a Mayday appearance prior to that. We did know that the IAF tried to intercept a -25 with F-4s.

My recollection of talking with MacDac design engineers about what features the F-15 needed was in 1972-1973. Not once was Mach-3 ever discussed. We knew by then, that most turn and burn fighting was done subsonically and most of that within gun range. We wanted low wing loading and high turn and slew rates.

Sparrows were useless in that quarter (useless overall as a matter of fact) and sidewinders and guns were the weapons of choice. Neither would have been a threat to the Mig-25. There were some discussions of an intercepter version of the F-15 with either the Falcon or the Phoenix systems but they died at birth.