Category After Apollo?

That suggestion set off a brief and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to add an attention-getting angle to the space statement. The idea was attractive to White House speechwriters; lead writer James Keogh “was enthusiastic about casting the message as a call for more international cooperation,” since “if this were the central theme, the message would take on a novel and excit­ing quality which the present draft is lacking.”17

Early Interest in Increased International Cooperation

There was substantial background to White House interest in international space cooperation. As the Nixon administration entered office in January 1969, Arthur Burns had identified three themes from the space transition task force deserving of detailed attention. Two of these themes were a need for an overall review of the space program and the possibility of significant reductions in launch costs. These items had been combined in the decision to create the Space Task Group. The third theme was increasing the amount of and broadening the character of international cooperation in space. President Nixon had asked Secretary of State William Rogers to assess ways of achiev­ing these objectives. Rogers responded to the president on March 14, 1969, saying that “we are interested in space cooperation, not only for its intrin­sic scientific merits, but also to further specific foreign policy objectives.” Rogers identified “major new opportunities for international cooperation.” These included “foreign participation in the U. S. manned flight program, including foreign scientist-astronauts.” He told the president that he was examining the benefits of Nixon making at the successful climax of the first lunar landing mission “a major public statement on the international values of our ongoing space program.”18

Such a statement was not issued. Although he said nothing specific about increased international cooperation at the end of the Apollo 11 mis­sion, President Nixon did address space cooperation as he spoke before the General Assembly of the United Nations on September 18, 1969. Nixon told delegates from around the world “I feel it is only right that we should share both the adventures and the benefits of space.” He said that the United States would take “positive, concrete steps. . . toward internationalizing man’s epic venture into space—an adventure that belongs not to one nation but to all mankind, and one that should be marked not by rivalry but by the same spirit of fraternal cooperation that so long has been the hallmark of the international community of science.”19

Although Tom Whitehead had been deeply involved as Peter Flanigan’s assistant in developing the Nixon administration position on post-Apollo space efforts and had been the originator of the president’s March 1970 space statement, NASA issues had in fact not been his primary concern in the first year of the Nixon administration. Rather, his major focus had been revising the policy and regulatory regime for telecommunications; it was Whitehead who was the moving force behind the Nixon “open skies” policy that permitted the domestic use of communications satellites. By early 1970, the White House decided that there were enough telecom – munications-related issues on the policy agenda to merit a separate orga­nization to deal with them; Richard Nixon on February 9, 1970, sent a message to Congress announcing his intention to establish an Office of Telecommunications Policy within the Executive Office of the President.4 On September 22, Whitehead was named director of that office. Moving to head the new office meant that Whitehead would no longer serve as Flanigan’s staff person for NASA issues; that responsibility was divided between Flanigan staffers Will Kriegsman and Jonathan Rose. Over the subsequent months, neither exercised the amount of influence on NASA issues that had characterized Whitehead’s involvement. In addition, even as he directed the new office, Whitehead at critical moments would engage himself in decisions related to NASA’s future.