Category After Apollo?

With most preparations for President Nixon’s involvement with Apollo 11 in place, Frank Borman in early July made a quick visit to the Soviet Union. He had met Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in January, and Dobrynin had followed that meeting with an invitation for Borman and his family to visit Moscow. Borman informed Nixon and his national security adviser Kissinger of the invitation, and they urged him to accept. Borman remembers that Nixon “was already intrigued” with the idea of U. S.-U. S.S. R. cooperation in a joint space mission, and he viewed the Borman visit as an “opening wedge” in the process of defining such a mission. Borman was the first U. S. astronaut to visit the Soviet Union, and his trip received positive press cov­erage there. In a formal meeting with the president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Mstislav Keldysh, who was the senior publicly acknowledged official in the Soviet space program, Borman raised the possibility of the United States and the Soviet Union increasing their space cooperation, and got a positive response. On his return to the White House, Borman reported to the president that he had not “gathered much technical information on the Soviets’ space program,” but had gotten the impression that “the Soviets would be receptive to a joint space mission.” The July 1969 Borman visit can thus be seen as a first step leading to the 1975 joint U. S.-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz mission with its “handshake in space.”21

The good relations created by Borman on his trip had an immediate payoff. On July 13, three days before the Apollo launch, the Soviet Union launched the Luna-15 robotic probe, with the intent of first orbiting, then landing on, the Moon, scooping up some lunar soil, and bringing it back to Earth. There was some concern that the trajectory of the Soviet mission might intersect with Apollo 11 while both were in lunar orbit, resulting in a collision. At NASA’s request, Borman used the White House-Kremlin “hot line” to send a message to Keldysh requesting the orbital parameters of the Soviet probe. On July 17, Keldysh replied with the requested information, saying that “the orbit of probe Luna-15 does not intersect the trajectory of Apollo-11 spacecraft.” Never before had the Soviet Union provided such detailed information on one of its ongoing space missions. While Luna-15 did reach lunar orbit, it crashed onto the Moon on July 21 as the Apollo 11 crew was preparing to lift off of the lunar surface.22

By July 14, Borman was back from his trip to the Soviet Union; he would stay involved with President Nixon until the Apollo 11 astronauts were safely back on Earth on July 24. One action Borman took at the president’s request was to prepare brief profiles of the Apollo 11 crew for Nixon and similar profiles of the crew’s wives for Mrs. Nixon. With respect to Neil Armstrong, Borman told Nixon that the mission commander was a “quiet, perceptive, thoroughly decent man, whose interests still turn to flying,” and that he “follows the stock market actively.” Armstrong was “a little reserved, but when you get to know him, he has a very warm personality.” Buzz Aldrin was described as “very athletic, aggressive, hard charging,” an “almost humorless, serious personality,” and “very concerned about social problems.” Michael Collins was in “superb physical condition.” Collins was “in some sense skep­tical, more inclined toward the arts and literature rather than engineering” and a “devoted family man.” With respect to the astronauts’ wives, Borman described Jan Armstrong as “quite composed and very factual.” Joan Aldrin was “more demonstrative than either of the other wives, and perhaps more apt to show her concern.” Pat Collins “tends toward the intellectual; [is] very interested in current events”; and “enjoys evenings that include candlelight and wine for dinner.”23

NASA had sent to the White House proposed remarks for President Nixon to use as he spoke with the astronauts on the Moon. From Borman’s perspective, “the gist of those remarks was that the current administration was responsible for Apollo 11’s success. . . The statement was pure poli­tics, an exercise in self-congratulations.” Borman advised Nixon not to use NASA’s input. He told the president “look, Mr. President, you really don’t have anything to do with Apollo 11. You’re just the fortunate or unfortu­nate recipient of this mission. . . If it fails, you’ll get tarred with it, and if it succeeds you’ll get some of the credit. But for you to say what NASA is sug­gesting—that in effect you were the father of the space program—is just plain wrong.” Rather, suggested Borman, the president should say “some­thing very simple and nonpartisan, a few words of congratulations, and then get off the air.” Borman also advised against the plan of playing the national anthem as Armstrong and Aldrin stood next to the American flag during the telecast conversation involving the president. This “would force the crew to stand at attention for some two and one-half minutes. This time, plus the time allocated to unveiling the plaque and mounting the flag, would add up to a significant portion of the time on the lunar surface which is non-productive from a scientific or exploration viewpoint.”24

President Nixon met with Haldeman, Flanigan, Chapin, and Borman on July 14 to discuss plans for his involvement. According to Haldeman, Nixon “was really intrigued with his participation in the whole thing.” The plan at this point was for the president to go to either the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston or the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for his phone call to the astronauts on the Moon; Nixon’s long-time personal secretary Rose Mary Woods suggested that the call should instead come from the Oval Office, and the president agreed. Going into the meeting, Nixon was “cranked up” about playing the Star-Spangled Banner when the American flag was placed on the Moon, but he accepted Borman’s reservations about that idea, also recognizing “possible adverse reaction to overnationalism.”25

One more important detail had to be attended to in the final days before the launch: what to do in case of a mission failure involving astronaut deaths, particularly if Armstrong and Aldrin could not lift off the Moon to rendezvous with Michael Collins in lunar orbit. NASA had prepared a disaster contingency plan and sent it to the White House. In addition, Flanigan’s assistant Jonathan Rose reviewed with Borman and Safire a “rain plan” in the event of an Apollo H disaster, suggesting the need for a presidential statement and phone calls to the crew’s widows, and then a “National Day of Mourning” after the president returned from his around- the-world trip. Borman had earlier urged the president’s speechwriters to think about “what to say to the widows,” and Safire had prepared a state­ment in the event that Armstrong and Aldrin were stranded on the Moon. The suggested remarks began by saying: “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.” The message added: “Others will follow, and surely will find their way home.” After the president’s statement, at the point when NASA cut off communications with the astronauts, “a clergy­man should adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, commending their souls to the ‘deepest of the deep.’”26 Fortunately, this statement was not needed.

Even after “having brooded, dreamed and schemed for the Presidency for the last sixteen of his fifty-five years,” Richard Nixon on January 20, 1969, was not well prepared to take over the reins of government. Nixon had an “encyclopedic” understanding of foreign affairs, but there were “deep and obvious gaps. . . in his knowledge of the federal government and the Congress.” As Nixon began his transition to the White House, there was “an appalling vacuum of advance planning on how to organize and oper­ate one of the biggest and most intricate governments in the world.” Nixon could “count on fewer close associates to help him run the government than any recent predecessor.” His “handful of trusted [campaign] lieutenants and advisors would, of course, take up key positions in the White House and the administration,” but “almost to a man, they were sadly inexperienced in the ways of Washington.” To supplement his few close associates in fill­ing key White House and administration positions, Richard Nixon had “to call on outsiders that would make his, at the beginning, an administration of strangers.”27 It took more than a year for the Nixon White House opera­tion to settle into place; during its first year in office there was a great deal of policy, budget, and personnel confusion. This confusion had more of an influence on NASA, as its future plans were being debated, than on many other government agencies.

Although Mueller was not ready to suggest sending humans to Mars, the team that had developed the integrated plan under his guidance had also prepared a scenario in which the hardware systems developed through the integrated plan could be used for a Mars landing in 1986. Paine heard a briefing on this scenario on July 19, as he waited in Houston for the next day’s landing on the Moon. This briefing likely solidified Paine’s decision to confront the STG with a technically plausible approach to a human Mars mission, one that would build upon the plan he had already selected as NASA’s preference for the 1970s.

Then, on July 23, Paine decided to “wheel up NASA’s big gun,” the charismatic director of its Marshall Space Flight Center, Wernher von Braun, to take the lead in preparing the STG presentation. Von Braun was a well – known spokesman for pushing the frontiers of space exploration. After being brought to the United States from Germany at the end of World War II, he had readily adapted to his new country and had become widely known as a space visionary through his appearances on television, magazine articles, and in numerous talks around the country. Von Braun had long been thinking about the technical requirements for sending humans to Mars, and after being exposed to Mueller’s thinking in May 1969 had also directed his cen­ter’s Future Projects Office to develop an approach to using the integrated plan hardware for a two-year mission to Mars. He was thus well prepared to respond to Paine’s request that he prepare a presentation based on the earli­est feasible date for an initial Mars mission.28

Von Braun was later to raise some reservations about his role in presenting the Mars mission proposal to the STG. In a 1970 interview, he suggested that “I have never in the last two or three years strongly promoted a manned Mars project. I have supplied some data on how one would mount a Mars project, a manned Mars visit with today’s technology, but I in fact have always actively advocated not to pursue such a thing at this point in time. People. . . have tried to cast me in the image in the last few years as the Mars or bust guy in this agency, which I am definitely not.” He continued, in a not very veiled rebuke to Tom Paine, that “I, for one, have always felt that it would be a good idea to read the signs of the times and respond to what the country really wants, rather than try to cram a bill of goodies down some­body’s throat for which the time is not ripe or ready.” He wondered “how bullish you can get in a bear market,” adding that “there may be too many people in NASA who at the moment are waiting for a miracle, just waiting for another man on a white horse to come and offer us another planet.” But the political environment “is more difficult and more demanding than it was with that carte blanche from Kennedy,” since “we have turned from a vision­ary society to an introspective society in the last ten years.” As his biographer notes, while von Braun may have had serious reservations about being used to present an ambitious Mars plan to the STG, “he certainly kept quiet about them in 1969.”29

Agnew on July 25 sent a memorandum to the STG members and observ­ers announcing an August 4 meeting of the STG. Paine had decided to have the meeting at NASA so von Braun could use the space agency’s elabo­rate three-screen projection system for his presentation. Agnew’s memo said that as an important item of business “the recommendations of the Staff Directors for the Principals will be discussed.” But first, NASA would make a presentation “on a proposed major new program goal which would focus United States space efforts during the coming decade.”30

The White House review of the budget NASA was requesting for Fiscal Year 1971 began in earnest on October 8, 1969, when NASA submitted a FY1971 budget request of $4.497 billion, an over $600 million increase from what President Nixon six months earlier had approved for FY1970. Thus began what the veteran official in charge of NASA’s budget prepara­tions, Bill Lilly, called “one of the most screwed-up operations anyone had ever seen in terms of how a budget was received and processed—the infight­ing between the White House staff and the Bureau of the Budget, [NASA] getting contrary directions from both sides, and it was a mixed up process all the way through.” Tom Paine characterized the budget review as “byzan­tine.” Decisions made during this budget review were of critical importance to NASA’s future, not just the next fiscal year but also beyond, since they could either support or reject the path forward set out in the STG report.9

In the week before the March 7 release of the space statement, there were some final edits to the draft that had been ready on January 3. The plan was to have NASA Administrator Paine return directly from Japan, where he had been discussing post-Apollo cooperation, arriving in Florida in time to meet with the president at his Key Biscayne retreat, then to be available to answer press questions after the statement’s release.31

NASA was given one more chance to comment on the draft. The space agency suggested two substantive modifications and a few word changes. Instead of just a passing mention of the space shuttle, NASA suggested add­ing two sentences saying “we are currently examining the design of a reus­able space shuttle that could evolve into a new space capability. With this capability, we could fully exploit and use space for the benefit of all man­kind and at the same time substantially reduce the cost of space operations.” This was another attempt to get the president on the record as supporting the shuttle. It was rejected. The other suggested addition reflected a vague mention of the intention to fly foreign astronauts: “Unmanned scientific payloads from other nations already make use of our space capabilities on a cost-shared basis; we look forward to the day when these arrangements can be extended to larger application satellites and astronaut crews.” This suggested change was tentatively accepted by Whitehead; he told Flanigan’s office that, if Flanigan “has any troubles” with the mention of foreign astro­nauts, “blow the whistle fast!!!”32 Flanigan did not object, and the NASA change was incorporated into the statement.

On March 5, the statement went to John Ehrlichman for final review before being sent to the president. Ehrlichman recommended to Nixon “that you approve the Space Statement. . . for release this Saturday.” After getting the president’s verbal approval, Ehrlichman on March 6 checked the “Approve” option on the memo. This was the climax of the elaborate staff process that had begun exactly five months earlier with Flanigan’s October 6 charge to Whitehead to begin drafting the space statement.33

There were at this midweek point still plans for President Nixon to meet with Tom Paine on Saturday in Key Biscayne before the statement was released. Flanigan prepared a briefing memorandum in anticipation of the meeting. Recognizing that NASA was not happy with the cautious tone of the statement and that Nixon was more positively inclined toward the space program than most of his advisors, Flanigan told Ehrlichman that, while he believed that “it would be desirable for the President to meet with Paine for a short time, I would urge that this not be an occasion for Paine to attempt to talk the President into reinterpretations of the Message, since we are not yet ready to make any further commitments on NASA programs.” Flanigan told Nixon that the space statement “was designed primarily to put space in per­spective vis-a-vis our other priorities and to set forth a rationale for planning the future direction of the space program.” Flanigan reminded the president that the “thrust” of the statement was “more explanatory of a rationale than a listing of program initiatives,” and recommended that Nixon suggest to Paine that he “address the rationale as well as program initiatives in his press brief­ing.” With respect to international cooperation, Flanigan told the president “this area turns out to be more difficult than might be expected.” Flanigan counseled Nixon, if Paine were to raise the question of the level of presidential commitment to the space station and the space shuttle, to “stress the need to consider a full range of options and make design and development decisions only after more technological and cost unknowns are resolved.”34

As it turned out, Paine and Nixon did not meet on the morning of March 7; the president took most of the morning off from official duties. Nor did any of the activities that had been planned in December to accompany the release of the statement take place; by this time, the statement was modest enough in aspiration to convince the White House it did not merit high vis­ibility. Flanigan had suggested in early February that “much of the interest in the future of the space program has been dissipated”; the White House press and communications staffs apparently agreed.35 In May 1961, John Kennedy had announced his decision to go to the Moon in a nationally tele­vised address before a joint session of Congress. In 1970, Richard Nixon’s space policy was announced in the form of a statement issued by the White House press office; Nixon himself was nowhere to be seen.

The final version of the space statement differed little from the draft that had been ready for release in January, with the exception of incorporating some, but not all, of NASA’s suggested changes and linking the rationale put forth in the statement to the administration’s FY1971 budget decisions. The document was released as a “Statement by the President.” The statement noted that “over the last decade, the principal goal of our nation’s space program has been the moon” and that it was now time to “define new goals that make sense for the Seventies.” Those goals had to be chosen while rec­ognizing “that many critical problems here on this planet make high priority demands on our attention and resources. By no means should we allow our space program to stagnate. But—with the entire future and entire universe before us—we should not try to do everything at once.” It mentioned the STG report and said that “after reviewing that report and considering our national priorities,” Nixon had “reached a number of conclusions concerning the future pace and direction of the nation’s space effort.”

Having said that there was a need to “define new goals that make sense for the Seventies,” the statement did not spell out such goals, at least in a way similar to President Kennedy in 1961. Rather, it called for an approach to space that was both “bold” and “balanced.” It identified “three general purposes” to “guide our space program”: exploration, scientific knowledge, and practical applications. Six “specific objectives” were identified: [6]

• “We should work to reduce substantially the cost of space operations.” The statement noted the need in the “longer-range future” for a means of transporting payloads into space that would be “less costly and less complicated” and said “we are currently examining. . . the feasibility of re­usable space shuttles as one way of achieving this objective.”

• “We should seek to extend man’s capability to live and work in space.” The statement discussed the “Experimental Space Station (XSS).” (NASA by this time had christened the orbital workshop as Skylab, but had not convinced the White House to use the new name in the statement.) It said that “on the basis of our experience with the XSS, we will decide when and how to develop longer-lived space stations.”

• “We should hasten and expand the practical applications of space technol­ogy.”

• “We should encourage greater international cooperation in space.”

The core policy element of the statement set out the approach to treating space as “an investment in the future.” The final version of this policy decla­ration differed little from what had been in the January draft:

We must realize that space activities will be part of our lives for the rest of time. We must think of them as part of a continuing process—one which will go on day in and day out, year in and year out—and not as a series of separate leaps, each requiring a massive concentration of energy and will and accom­plished on a crash timetable. Our space program should not be planned in a rigid manner, decade by decade, but on a continuing flexible basis, one which takes into account our changing needs and our expanding knowledge.

We must also recognize that space expenditures must take their proper place within a rigorous system of national priorities. What we do in space from here on in must become a normal and regular part of our national life and must therefore be planned in conjunction with all of the other undertakings which are also important to us.36

The overall message of the president’s space statement was that NASA’s days of operating outside of the continuing competition for government resources were over. The Apollo program in 1962 had been formally assigned the government’s highest national security priority, giving it preferred access to scarce resources, and it was difficult for the NASA leadership, indeed for most of the space community that had grown up alongside Apollo, to accept a future in which that priority was drastically reduced, with space becoming just one among many areas of government activity. Yet a realistic reading of the Nixon space statement in the context of the overall policies of his admin­istration should have made clear that this was the space agency’s most likely prospect.

Another of the early recommendations of the Ash Council was to abolish the National Aeronautics and Space Council (NASC), on the grounds that its policy coordination function could be performed by the combination of OST and OMB.6 As discussed in chapter 2, the Space Council, composed of the head of NASA, the secretaries of state and defense, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, the secretary of transportation (added by Congress in 1970), and chaired by the vice president, had seldom met at the principals level during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, and its staff had had little influence on Johnson administration space policy decisions. Vice President Agnew in early 1969 had taken initial steps to revitalize the coun­cil, selecting Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders as the council’s executive secre­tary and trying to build up a high-quality professional staff under Anders’ direction.

However, the Space Council staff did not play a significant role in the decisions with respect to the FY1971 budget or the content of the March 1970 presidential space statement. A key reason for the lack of influence on the part of Anders and his staff was that they were working for Vice President Spiro Agnew. Richard Nixon and his immediate advisors were disinclined to give Agnew any meaningful policy role, preferring to use him for political attacks on administration opponents and as a link to state and local officials. Agnew soon lost interest in space issues. Without the “top cover” of an influential vice president, Anders was largely left on his own to find ways to involve himself and his staff in ongoing policy debates. He had some success in this regard in areas such as space science and applications and aeronautics, and he got personally involved with Cap Weinberger with respect to the NASA program, but neither Vice President Agnew nor the Space Council as a body from 1970 on had any involvement in discussions related to the future of human space flight.7

As preparations for developing the FY1972 Nixon budget began, White House staff secretary Ken Cole on August 24 wrote the new director of OMB, George Shultz, reminding him of the Ash Council proposal to elimi­nate the Space Council and suggesting that “it seems appropriate to again consider” abolishing the council and that “perhaps this is a project that the Office of Management and Budget will want to undertake.” The response to this suggestion took some time to develop. In September, OMB Assistant Director Dwight Ink commented that “the Space Council has not really played a significant policy role since its inception.” He noted that Anders had “assembled a vigorous staff who want to exert more leadership, but the Space Council does not provide a viable base for their efforts.” In October, OMB Assistant Director Don Rice indicated his “general feeling” that “organiza­tions [such as the Space Council] spend money and make paperwork—both of which are bad until proven otherwise.” OMB Associate Director Arnold Weber on October 29 suggested that “the Council should be abolished effec­tive June 30, 1971.” He added “the change in emphasis on space programs as we attempt to fit those programs into overall national priorities makes it unnecessary to retain” the council. The OMB recommendation recognized “some political and public relations problems,” such as the appearance of “an insensitivity on the part of the Administration to the problems of the aerospace industry” and of “an attempt to reduce the stature of the Vice President.”8

As it turned out, the White House in December 1970 decided to keep the Space Council. Vice President Agnew called Ehrlichman, inquiring about the fate of the council. Ehrlichman told him that “the President’s State of the Union [speech] undoubtedly would involve changes in organizational structure which would contemplate elimination of the Space Council as a separate and independent entity.” Agnew asked for a meeting to discuss the situation. Agnew persuaded Ehrlichman that the council’s staff could be an asset in selling the administration’s space and aeronautics programs to Congress and an effective liaison with the aerospace industry. These assign­ments would not involve the council staff in policy formulation, but rather use the staff as a “selling device.” Ehrlichman agreed that it would be “bad politics to dismantle [the Council] now,” since it could send a signal that such an action marked “the end of the space program.” That was not a mes­sage that the Nixon White House wanted to send; there was already concern about the impact of aerospace unemployment on the 1972 presidential elec­tion. After lunching with Ehrlichman a few days later and learning that the council was not likely to be dissolved, Bill Anders told him “I believe the Council and its staff can fit into the reorganized White House team quite nicely and can provide valuable support to both domestic and national secu­rity interests across a broad front.”9

Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins were launched toward the Moon at 9:32 a. m. (all times are Eastern Daylight Time) on July 16, 1969.* President Nixon watched the launch in the White House together with Borman. Soon after the third stage of the Saturn V booster fired to send the crew on a trajectory that would bring them to the Moon three days later, the White House issued a presidential proclamation designating July 21 as a “National Day of Participation.” The statement declared “Apollo 11 is on its way to the moon. . . Never before has man embarked on so epic an adventure.” It noted that “in past ages, exploration was a lonely enterprise. But today the miracles of space travel are matched by the miracles of space commu­nication. . . Television brings the moment of discovery into our homes, and makes all of us participants.” Indeed, the Apollo 11 mission was the first event to be televised globally; the communications satellite required to com­plete a global network had been put into orbit over the Indian Ocean only a few days earlier. Nixon ordered all federal government offices to be closed on July 21; he urged “the Governors of the States, the mayors of cities, the heads of school systems, and other public officials to take similar action” and “private employers to make appropriate arrangements so that as many of our citizens as possible will be able to share in the significant events of that day.” While Armstrong and Aldrin were scheduled to land on the Moon on the afternoon of July 20, their mission timeline called for a sleep period before emerging from Eagle for their historic moonwalk sometime after 2:00 a. m. on the morning of July 21. One purpose of declaring July 21 as what amounted to a national holiday was to allow as many as possible to stay up well past midnight to watch the first steps on the Moon without having to worry about getting up to go to work the same morning.

On the morning of July 20, President Nixon presided over an interdenom­inational church service in the East Room of the White House. The service was attended by some 300 people, including cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, and the diplomatic corps. Borman read the same verses from the Bible that he and his crew had read as they circled the Moon on Christmas Eve, and a Quaker minister provided the sermon.27

After a virtually trouble-free voyage, the Apollo 11 spacecraft went into orbit around the Moon on July 19, and at 1:44 p. m. on July 20 the lunar module Eagle separated from the command and service module Columbia to begin its descent to the lunar surface. After a hair-raising final few moments which saw Neil Armstrong take over manual control of Eagle to pilot the spacecraft to a safe landing spot, Apollo 11 landed on the Moon at 4:18 p. m. A few seconds later, Armstrong reported “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” Accompanied by Borman, Nixon watched the land­ing on television in his hideaway office in the Executive Office Building next to the White House.

Fundamental to understanding how decisions were made with respect to space is thus the approach Richard Nixon took to assembling his senior White House staff. First in significance and power among Nixon’s immedi­ate associates was Harry Robbins “Bob” Haldeman, whom soon after the election Nixon designated as the White House chief of staff. Haldeman’s background was in advertising; he had worked for the giant advertising com­pany J. Walter Thompson for 20 years, taking time off during Nixon’s 1960 presidential and 1962 gubernatorial campaigns. Haldeman and his staff con­trolled all papers flowing into and out of the Oval Office and controlled access to the president for all but a very few individuals who had “walk-in rights.”28

Haldeman presented himself as being overridingly concerned with the process of making policy choices rather than their substance; he was dedicated to making sure that Nixon received all plausible policy options before reach­ing a decision. There was one important fact that Haldeman kept secret from Nixon—that he was compiling a detailed day-by-day account of the Nixon White House. He marked the daily entries “Top Secret” and stored them in a White House safe. Twenty years after leaving the White House under the cloud of the Watergate scandal, Haldeman, believing that his diary would “provide valuable insights for historians, journalists, and scholars,” decided to make it public. A book containing some 40 percent of the 750,000 words in the diaries was published in 1994, after Haldeman’s death.29

Although at the outset of the Nixon administration John Ehrlichman had a secondary role among the president’s advisors, during 1969 he quickly became together with Haldeman a powerful member of Richard Nixon’s inner circle. Ehrlichman was Bob Haldeman’s college classmate, then got a law degree, and began a successful practice in Seattle. He, like Haldeman, was a veteran of Nixon’s prior political campaigns. At the start of the Nixon administration, both Haldeman and Ehrlichman “were almost wholly ignorant of major national issues, the federal government, and politics in its broadest sense. . . That positions of such power and influence should be filled by men of such slight experience in public affairs” was described as “the single most extraordinary aspect of the early Nixon White House.”30

Of Nixon’s innermost circle, it was Ehrlichman who over the next few years would get most involved in space-related issues.

Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and other senior Nixon advisers acquired size­able staffs to assist them in their responsibilities. Many of these staff mem­bers were under 30 years in age—much more so than in previous White House staffs. They were chosen primarily for their “pugnacity and proven loyalty,” and were equally as inexperienced in actually managing the federal government as were Haldeman and Ehrlichman. During 1969 and 1970, a young staff assistant several layers down in the White House hierarchy, Clay Thomas “Tom” Whitehead, would have a great deal of influence in shaping decisions on post-Apollo space activities.

A third member of Nixon’s inner circle was his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. His choice was somewhat surprising; Kissinger as a Harvard professor had long been a protege of New York governor and potential rival for the 1968 Republican presidential nominee Nelson Rockefeller. Nixon did not know Kissinger well before his election, but soon afterward the two met and found they thought along very similar lines with respect to international issues. Kissinger was quickly offered the national security advisor position and after consulting Rockefeller and others in the East Coast Republican establishment accepted Nixon’s invitation to join his administration.

The relationship between Nixon and his three senior advisers was strictly professional. Leonard Garment, one of Nixon’s law partners during the 1960s who came to Washington with Nixon in January 1969 and served in the White House through almost all of the Nixon administration, suggests that “the relationships among Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Kissinger, and Nixon were singularly devoted to the breeding and tending of power. They were not friends, not even a little. Indeed, if the members of Nixon’s German general staff shared an emotion, it was an intense dislike of Nixon, which he returned.” Garment notes that this “strange quartet” after 1969 was

increasingly able to centralize control over executive branch activities until the forces of Watergate scandal tore them apart.31

There was an important shift in the context within which the civilian space program was viewed by the Nixon administration compared to the approach since 1957; that earlier approach had seen space as primarily a for­eign policy and national security issue. The primary rationale for the kind of space program that the United States had pursued during the 1960s was as a peaceful symbol of national power and as a foreign policy tool in the Cold War U. S.-Soviet competition. While Nixon recognized the continu­ing foreign policy salience of space achievements, by the time he entered the White House he had concluded that more domestically oriented rationales for what the United States would do in space after Apollo, such as applying space capabilities to problems on Earth and seeing the space program as a stimulus to technological innovation and as a way of maintaining a qualified aerospace industrial and employment base, would have priority in shaping his space policy. The race to the Moon was on the verge of being won, and Nixon saw no compelling reason to continue the space program at a racing pace. By treating space as primarily a domestic rather than a national secu­rity and foreign policy issue, the Nixon administration changed the calculus by which the benefits of a post-Apollo space effort would be measured. It was thus individuals on the Nixon White House staff with responsibility for domestic policy issues who had particular influence on Richard Nixon’s space policy choices. This choice also meant that Nixon himself, who was far more interested in foreign policy than domestic issues, would view space policy as a matter of secondary concern.

The senior member of Nixon’s staff with direct oversight responsibility with respect to NASA was thus Assistant to the President Peter Flanigan. Flanigan’s other policy responsibilities were issues related to the U. S. finan­cial community and international trade, to the 15 independent regulatory agencies that were then part of the executive branch, and to other tech­nical government agencies like the National Science Foundation and the Atomic Energy Commission. At the outset of the Nixon administration, this position had been filled by former Congressman Robert Ellsworth. But Ellsworth had hoped for a more responsible position, and soon was ready to leave the White House to become ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He was replaced in April 1969 by Flanigan, described by Ehrlichman as a “young prince of Wall Street.”32 Flanigan was an invest­ment banker and also a veteran of Nixon campaigns in 1960 and 1962. He had served the Nixon 1968 presidential campaign as its link to the financial community. As he assumed his White House position in April, Flanigan inherited from Ellsworth’s staff the previously mentioned Tom Whitehead as one of his staff; Whitehead was Flanigan’s primary assistant for NASA issues. Whitehead held a doctorate in management from MIT, where he had first majored in engineering. He during the 1960s had spent time at the Rand Corporation, a think-tank steeped in a systems analysis approach to assessing policy issues. Flanigan and Whitehead were to play key policy roles

in shaping the approach that the Nixon administration would take to the post-Apollo space program.

At the center of this small group of individuals sat Richard Nixon, “a loner, seated in an Oval Office as hushed and solemn as a hermitage.” Nixon designed his approach to governance to isolate himself “from the demands of the hated bureaucracy while ensuring that power was centralized in the White House.” Much of Nixon’s communication with his immediate staff was through notes he scribbled on the memorandums and on daily news summaries he read in the evenings as he sat alone. Nixon was an “improbable president” who “didn’t particularly like people. . . lacked charm or humor or joy,” and was “virtually incapable of small talk.” Nixon was “insecure, self-pitying, vindictive, suspicious. . . and filled with long-nursed anger and resentments.” This study will not probe deeply into the Nixon psyche. There are many other accounts of this “peculiar man” that analyze the way his per­sonality influenced his conduct as president; on occasion, however, it will be clear how some of his peculiarities affected his space decisions.33

Because Nixon and his advisers were unfamiliar with how the process of governing actually worked and suspicious of career government bureau­crats, they seem to have underestimated the importance of the “institutional presidency” lodged in the Executive Office of the President. With respect to space issues, the Bureau of the Budget (BOB) and the Office of Science and Technology (OST) were particularly important. While the president could appoint the heads of these offices, the staffs of both were career government employees, more dedicated to supporting the institution of the presidency than to supporting any particular president. In order to make sure that these offices served the priorities of a particular president, in this case Richard Nixon, the individuals he appointed to lead these offices had to be strong managers, able to transmit the president’s policy priorities to the permanent staff and able to see that they were reflected in specific recommendations and decisions. This did not happen at the start of the Nixon administration. Nixon selected as director of BOB a Chicago banker named Robert Mayo, whom he did not know. Mayo was suggested by Nixon’s nominee for sec­retary of the treasury, David Kennedy, another Chicago banker, for whom Mayo had worked. Mayo turned out to an individual with whom Nixon found it unpleasant to deal; he was a weak BOB director and would leave the administration in 1970. Nixon selected as his science advisor and director of OST Lee DuBridge, the retiring president of the prestigious California Institute of Technology. Nixon had known DuBridge for over 20 years, but he also soon discovered that DuBridge was neither a strong leader nor some­one to whom Nixon could turn for advice reflecting the president’s interests. By the end of 1969 DuBridge found himself increasingly marginalized in the policy process, and he too would leave the White House in 1970. But it was DuBridge and his OST staff and Mayo and his BOB staff who would join with Peter Flanigan and Tom Whitehead to deal with space issues on a continuing basis during 1969.

Paine led off the NASA presentation on August 4; he suggested that “Apollo 11 started a movement that will never end, a new outward movement in which man will go to the planets, first to explore, and then to occupy and utilize them.” He then turned the meeting over to von Braun, who described a “typical manned Mars mission,” which he claimed represented “no greater challenge than the commitment made in 1961 to land a man on the moon.” This was a remarkable (and unrealistic) claim, given the myriad technologi­cal challenges associated with a two-year flight into deep space. Because the opportunities for Mars missions could be identified with high accuracy, von Braun was able to use precise dates in presenting his mission profile. The round trip to Mars would take 640 days, departing Earth orbit on November 12, 1981, and returning on August 14, 1983. The mission would be carried out by two spacecraft, each carrying six astronauts (all male). After arriving at Mars, the spacecraft would remain in Martian orbit for 80 days. First making sure the Martian surface was safe for human presence, three crew members from each spacecraft would land for 30- to 60-day explor­atory sorties. The trip back to Earth would take 290 days and would include a swing by of Venus. After arrival back in Earth orbit, the crew and Martian samples would transfer to the space station, then be returned to Earth using space shuttles. Von Braun told the STG members that the plan he had out­lined could be carried out with a NASA budget peaking at $7 billion in 1975 and then leveling at $5 billion/year in the 1980s.31

Paine closed the presentation by saying “with the successful Apollo land­ing on the Moon, we know that man can lay claim to the planets for his use. We know further that man will do this; the question is, which nations and when?” He was less optimistic than von Braun about the costs of the program, suggesting that it would require “a budget rising to $9 to $10 bil­lion” in the second half of the 1970s. He suggested that “a commitment in principle to these achievements must be made now.”32

The FY1971 budget process had actually started six months earlier, when BOB Director Mayo on April 4 had indicated to NASA areas of particular interest to BOB with respect to upcoming budget decisions. These included

• “Should the U. S. undertake the development of a long duration manned orbital space station in the FY1971-73 period?”

• “Should a grand tour mission to the outer planets be undertaken in the next decade?”[4]

On May 23, Mayo added to these two areas for intensive study the issue of the Apollo launch rate—whether there should be one, two, or three launches to the Moon a year after the first successful lunar landing. The question of Apollo launch rate was of particular interest to a young analyst in BOB’s Office of Program Evaluation, Richard Speier; that office carried out special studies for BOB in support of its budgeting function. Speier was arguing within BOB that by limiting Apollo launches to one per year and by not only cancelling future production of the Saturn V launcher but also halting manufacture of the last two already approved Saturn Vs, there could be a budget savings of $1 billion in FY1971.10

During summer 1969, the budget process moved forward in its normal rhythm, independent of the activities of the STG. Mayo in a July 28 letter to Tom Paine gave NASA two budget targets for FY1971. One, the “official target,” was the maximum amount that would be available for NASA under the current fiscal outlook. This figure was $3.5 billion. In addition, NASA was told that in planning its future activities it should assume budgets of $3.5 billion per year for the next eight years, the anticipated tenure of the Nixon administration. This could hardly have been a welcome message for NASA, given that the agency at the same time was preparing to brief the STG on an ambitious program leading to an early Mars mission and requir­ing substantial budget increases in coming years.

NASA was also given an alternative target of $4.6 billion, with budget levels rising to $6 billion in subsequent years. This target was provided “as a means of indicating priorities at a higher resources level, in case subsequent events enable changes in current plans.” The large difference in the two tar­get figures was not all that unusual in the early stages of the budget process, since they bracketed what the BOB staff thought at the time was the most likely outcome, a NASA budget in the $3.7-$4.0 billion range.11

Even as the STG was finalizing its report, NASA budget examiners within BOB were preparing a lengthy critique of the report and an analysis of pos­sible NASA programs at four different budget levels, ranging from one pro­gram at $1.5 billion/year, two options at $2.5 billion/year, and one at $3.5 billon/year. The BOB staff characterized the draft STG report as “inad­equate as a basis for Presidential decision,” noting that the report assumed “a Presidential posture favoring rapid deployment of new manned space flight systems,” but that “the combination of Defense and domestic budget com­mitments with concomitant budget demands for the next 2 to 4 years may make such a space posture untenable.” The staff paper suggested that “the crucial problem with manned space flight is that no one is really prepared to stop manned space flight activity, and yet no defined manned project can compete on a cost-return basis with unmanned space flight systems. In addi­tion, missions that are designed around man’s unique capabilities appear to have little demonstrable economic or social return to atone for their high costs. Their principle [sic] contribution is that each manned flight paves the way for more manned flight.”12