I found some items of interest: When it came to the development of the F-88 through the F-101 there was an interest in the ability of the airplane to carry and deliver small nuclear bombs (effectively, the goal was to destroy airfields and, preferably, all the aircraft on them) shortly (and by shortly I mean a few weeks) before the F-88 made it's first flight.
When the F-101 program started in the early 1950's, this capability was to be included into the design from day one. The aircraft was to be designated as a strategic-fighter (a term applied to the F-84's as well), which had a dual air-to-air, and air-to-ground mission: The first was to cover bombers as well as clear out the way by sweeping out and ahead, and shooting down everything they could; the other was to kick down the doors using nuclear bombs.
For either mission, the aircraft was initially designed with the idea of carrying 2 x 450 gallon tanks; for the air-to-ground mission: A nuclear weapon (most likely a Mk-7) would be carried along the centerline rack. As time went on, the idea would ultimately see carrying a Mk-5 within a streamlined pod that would lower-drag, as well as carry additional fuel (much like the B-58), which was arrived at around March/April of 1953. The pod was given the internal designation Model 96 by McDonnell, was designed to attach to a hardpoint capable of carrying a 10000 lb. store, which set the ultimate weight limit. There were a variety of configurations that included varying amounts of fuel, the means to carry either a buddy-refueling mechanism, or the means to carry a sweep-jammer in order to help penetrate enemy air-defenses, as well as different bombs as time went on. The USAF seemed to grow an interest in fitting their strategic fighter with strategic nuclear weapons of increasing size and power, ultimately including the provision for the TX-15 (which later became the Mk-15) thermonuclear bomb with a yield of 1.69 to 3.8 megatons. Despite the Model 96 pod, the provision for 2 x 450 gal. tanks were to be retained.
When it came to aerial combat, the aircraft was rated for 7.33g at design-weight, which was the norm for USAF aircraft, and was expected to be able to pull 3.4g under those conditions at 40000' while flying at 0.98 Mach. The high-altitude performance is surprisingly good, considering how tiny the F-101's wings are, and would correspond to a stall-speed of 151 knots (this would probably be around 5-15 kn. less when not transonic), particularly in light of the fact that: At this point in time, gun-kills were the norm; the aircraft could accelerate/climb/dive with ease, air-to-air missiles such as the AIM-4 and AIM-9 weren't particularly useful for aircraft pulling over 2-3g; the SA-2 (and more capable SAMs) didn't exist yet, and proposed jammers were intended to deal with the threats of its time.
For the air-to-ground mission the aircraft was intended to be capable of bombing using both high and low-altitude: High-altitude provided greater range, which was naturally a benefit for destroying air-defenses located further inside enemy territory, whereas low altitude made it easy to escape detection when range wasn't as important; For high-altitude, the dive-toss was favored since it would allow a similar aiming profile to a dive-bombing followed by a pitch-up to lob the bomb forward, as is used in LABS; for low-altitude, there was the LABS and vertical ascent method: Both involved an immelman, but the vertical ascent had the loop split up with a really long vertical climb before completing the half-loop and half-roll. The idea was that the bomb would be lofted up a huge distance (and by extension, fall back down a huge distance) giving the aircraft more time to escape the blast.
The F-101 ended up with a whole host of problems: For starters, it had a serious pitch-up problem which was partially related to the T-tail, but also to vortices that formed off the nose, which was long and pointy (as is the norm for supersonic aircraft). Apparently the scale-up laws for vortices made it difficult to grasp the full effect in wind-tunnel testing, and most people weren't generally even looking for that (missile designers had realized this could be a serious issue, but most aircraft designers didn't grasp the matter fully). They couldn't do stall tests early on owing to problems with the inlets (though there were some issues with the J57 as well, but that was fairly quickly resolved) leading to compressor stalls before they got to a high enough AoA to trigger one. The problem was first misidentified as an elevator reversal, but that wasn't the real cause: He just barely entered the pitch-up boundary for the aircraft and was very lucky. The aircraft would effectively run into pitch-up problems before the aircraft would ever stall and this proved to be something that ultimately ended the air-to-air mission decisively. For reasons I'm not entirely clear of (though I speculate it had to do with their work on the X-7), the guys at Lockheed might have already been aware of their plane's propensity towards pitch-up.
Range was also somewhat of a problem, though certainly few would call the F-101 a short-legged plane: Fuel-burn was around 15% higher than expected. I'm not sure how much of this was the J57 or the inlet, and I'm not completely sure if this would have been a total deal-breaker for the long-range fighter standpoint, though it wouldn't have been well-received.
While the F-101 normally had excellent acceleration and rate of climb, but when it carried the Model-96 pod: It had poor performance in the transonic range owing to the effect on the area-ruling of the aircraft (I'm still surprised by the fact that McDonnell seemed rather slow to realize the value of the area-rule considering they were quite remarkable in some areas of aerospace engineering). It also had a negative effect on directional and roll-stability as well and, while they tried to reshape the pod to make it better conform to the area-rule: It still seemed to come up short in stability (and might not have been enough from a drag-standpoint). This ultimately had a very negative effect on the air-to-ground capability of the aircraft as it only had two hardpoints of which two were designed to carry fuel, though the Mk-28 did provide the airplane with the ability to deliver a lightweight thermonuclear bomb.