Two points:
(1) The original rulebooks are heavily inundated with Tolkien's creations.
(2) Every play report I've heard from people who gamed at Arneson's and Gygax's tables is also inundated with Tolkien's creations.
Gygax's claims in Dragon #95 that the Tolkien influences are both "minimal" and nothing more than a "superficial" marketing attempting is, frankly, an absurd attempt to revise the known history of the game. And the core of his argument (that you can't recreate Tolkien's works by playin D&D out-of-the-box and, therefore, there is no Tolkien influence on the game) is just painfully insulting.
I also find the entire editorial distasteful for its hypocrisy. He starts by voicing outrage at those who would assert Tolkien's influence on D&D without asking him about it, and then goes on to attack LOTR as an allegory of World War II (which Tolkien had frequently denied). You can either be outraged when people assume things about a work that the creator denies or you can make assumptions about a work that the creator has denied... You don't get to do both without looking like a hypocritical idiot.
Is D&D's fantasy milieu the result of "kitchen sinking" vast swaths of fantasy literature? Of course. Does Tolkien make up a rather considerable portion of that kitchen sink? Absolutely.
