Category THE RACE

Th, s book has had an extremely long gestation period. Understanding its evolution is important to an appreciation of its character and intent.

My involvement with President John F. Kennedy’s role in the race to the Moon began as I prepared my doctoral dissertation in political science at New York University in the late 1960s, even as I began my academic career in Washington, DC, at The Catholic University of America in September 1966. I actually signed a contract to publish the dissertation before I defended it. As I moved from Catholic to The George Washington University in 1970, the MIT Press brought out a hardcover edition of the dissertation as The Decision to Go to the Moon: Project Apollo and the National Interest. The University of Chicago Press published a paperback edition in 1976. (As a side note, working on the study of the Apollo decision provided an opportunity to be present at the July 16, 1969, launch of the Apollo 11 mission, and also the Apollo 14 and Apollo 17 launches. Those experiences alone were worth the effort that went into research and writing the dissertation and subse­quent book.)

My detailed study of the decision-making process by which President Kennedy became convinced that it was in the national interest for the United States to enter, with the intent of winning, the space race with the Soviet Union has been described as “classic” and “powerful and seminal” by lead­ing space historian Roger Launius.1 Such an assessment is, of course, very gratifying. But as the years passed, I became increasingly dissatisfied with the completeness of the study’s narrative elements. The basic story stood the test of time, but because my research for the book was carried out even before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin reached the Moon, only a very lim­ited base of primary documents on which to base the study was available. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library had not yet opened, and Lyndon B. Johnson was still president. That meant the narrative lacked the fullness made possible only by using the documentary record; also, many oral histo­ries discussing the Kennedy presidency were not yet available. The flip side of this situation was that the events and considerations that led to the deci­sion to go to the Moon were still fresh in the minds of the key participants in that decision, and I was fortunate enough to be able to interview most of them. Of those involved with the decision to go to the Moon, only Robert McNamara and President Johnson declined interview requests; of course, by that time both John and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. Early on,

NASA chief historian Gene Emme and through him NASA administrator James Webb became convinced that I was trying to prepare an unbiased account of the decision process, and their support greatly facilitated my research. Thus the 1970 book was based primarily on my interviews with participants in the decision process and the secondary literature, although I was able to gain access to a few key documents. That meant that the story of JFK’s lunar landing decision was not complete.

I also came to realize that I had totally missed an important theme in President Kennedy’s thinking in the January—May 1961 period. His first instinct on coming to the White House had been to seek cooperation in space with the Soviet Union, not competition. Even after he announced his decision to send Americans to the Moon on May 25, 1961, Kennedy had suggested to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, as they met face-to-face for the only time ten days later in Vienna, that the United States and the Soviet Union should go to the Moon together. Khrushchev responded negatively, and at least for the time being, the cooperative alternative was foreclosed. There was no mention of this alternative path in the 1970 book.

I also came to realize that I had told only one part of the story of John F. Kennedy and the lunar landing program. Achieving large-scale objectives through government action has two requirements. One is a well-crafted decision on what objective to pursue. I believe that JFK’s lunar landing decision was indeed an example of choosing a course of action only after careful thought and examination of possible alternatives. But turning a decision into action, and carrying that action through to completion, is also needed for success. While there have been a number of studies of Project Apollo that examined its technical and management elements, surprisingly I found that there had been no focused attention paid to the actions and decisions of President Kennedy and his White House associates from May 1961 through November 1963 that generated the political will needed to mobilize the financial and human resources which made the lunar landing program possible.

This recognition led me in 1998 to propose to the NASA Headquarters History Office a comprehensive study of John F. Kennedy and the U. S. space program. Then NASA administrator Dan Goldin and his associate admin­istrator for policy and plans Lori Garver (now NASA deputy administra­tor) gave top-level support to my request, and NASA’s chief historian Roger Launius approved a modest contract to help me get started. Over the next several years, I carried out a first round of gathering primary documents and other material from the Kennedy Library and the NASA Historical Reference Collection at NASA’s headquarters, and drafted a few parts of the book. But my duties as professor and director of the Space Policy Institute of George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, plus a seemingly unquenchable appetite for international travel, took me away from sustained writing.

I never lost my interest in finishing the study, however. As I prepared to leave GW’s active teaching faculty in June 2008, once again it was Roger

Launius, by now senior curator in the Space History Department at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, who suggested that I apply for the museum’s most senior fellowship, the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Aerospace History. I was awarded that position, and from September 2008 through August 2009, I was in residence at the museum, finishing another round of research in the Kennedy Library and the NASA archives and get­ting most of the writing of a first draft completed. As I finished a chapter draft, both Mike Neufeld, chair of the museum’s space history department and Wernher von Braun biographer, and Roger Launius provided very useful comments. I returned to GW’s Space Policy Institute as professor emeritus in September 2009, and finished my research and drafting of the manuscript there.

The current study is thus much more than a warmed-over version of my 1970 book. It adds a great deal of new material to the account of the initial decision-making process in that study, providing a fuller understanding of the factors at play as Kennedy made his choice. In addition, the MIT Press graciously provided its permission to incorporate as much of the contents of the earlier book into the new manuscript as I wished, and I have drawn upon many text passages and used almost all of the earlier interview material in crafting this narrative. In doing so, I have tried not lose any of the quali­ties that have made The Decision to Go to the Moon the standard account of that decision. The earlier book ended with President Kennedy’s speech to a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961, in which he announced: “We should go to the Moon.” This new study carries the story until the tragic day in Dallas when Kennedy’s presidency was so abruptly terminated. Even on November 22, 1963, John Kennedy was intending to speak in positive terms about the future of the U. S. space program.

I have attempted to maintain throughout this study a focus on the deci­sions and actions of President John F. Kennedy, his inner circle of advisers who made decisions and took actions on behalf of the president, the career executive office staff who supported the Kennedy presidency, and the agency heads with whom the president interacted. Kennedy before he was inaugu­rated assigned a lead role in space policy to his vice president-elect, Lyndon B. Johnson, and I have also characterized Johnson’s role with respect to space decisions during the Kennedy administration. What I have not done, except when it was necessary to understand deliberations at the White House level, is give much attention to the technical and management aspects of Project Apollo itself. There is a very large literature on those topics.2

This study is not a complete account of John F. Kennedy and the American space program. Providing such an account was my original aspiration, but the realities of time and page count led to a decision to focus only on Kennedy and the race to the Moon, since that is the singular space achievement with which Kennedy will forever be associated. John Kennedy personally had only limited involvement in the steps taken during his administration to bring communication satellites into early use. But he was deeply involved in mak­ing sure that there were no international restrictions placed on the ability

of the United States to operate photoreconnaissance satellites, in limiting the spread of military conflict into the new environment of outer space, and in banning tests of nuclear weapons beyond the atmosphere. In his annual address to the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1961 and 1962, he laid out the principles that became the basis of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. Kennedy also became personally involved with all seven Mercury astro­nauts and particularly friendly with the first American to orbit the Earth, John Glenn. The astronauts represented a personality type quite attractive to Kennedy and about which he had written about in his book Profiles in Courage—individuals who had responded successfully to challenging cir­cumstances. So there is more to be written about Kennedy and space than is contained in this study.

While this narrative draws on what is available in the documentary record and has the benefit of interviews and oral histories that took place close to the events being discussed, it can never be really complete. One cannot know which of the many memoranda addressed to President Kennedy he actually read, and of those he read, to what issues and views he gave most attention. Kennedy enjoyed discussing policy issues with his advisers and associates; few of those conversations can be re-created. (A fascinating exception is the tape recording of a November 21, 1962, cabinet room meeting during which Kennedy and James Webb debated Apollo’s priority. What Kennedy said in this private meeting, including the phrase “I’m not that interested in space,” is rather different than his public rhetoric.) John Kennedy’s brother Robert was his closest confidant, but there is a very limited record of their discus­sions about the U. S. space program. So inevitably this study is a reconstruc­tion of history based on extensive, but still partial, evidence.

Given the more than a decade over which I have been working on this book, there are many people to thank, and I am bound to have forgotten to mention some who deserve recognition. It is obvious that I owe multiple expressions of gratitude to Roger Launius, and it is only fitting that this book is part of the Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology series of which Roger is co-editor. At NASA, in addition to the original sup­port provided by Lori Garver and Dan Goldin, I want to thank archivist Jane Odom and Colin Fries and Liz Suchow of the NASA History Office for their responsiveness in helping me locate key documents and other research mate­rial. The research staff of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library has been supportive during my many visits to the library; Maryrose Grossman was particularly helpful in digging through the photo archives to locate several of the images included in this book. (I must add my frustration in not being able to access a still unreleased audio tape of a meeting between President Kennedy and NASA administrator James Webb on September 18, 1963, during which Kennedy told Webb of his plans to invite the Soviet Union to join the United States in sending people to the Moon as he addressed the United Nations General Assembly two days later.) I had a very productive visit to the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in March 2010; the staff there was also very helpful.

I, of course, have to express thanks to the Smithsonian Institution for the offer of the Lindbergh Chair; without that year to focus on my writing, I might still be procrastinating. Mike Neufeld and his colleagues in the Department of Space History at the National Air and Space Museum were welcoming; I felt quite comfortable working in their midst.

George Washington students Krystal Brun and Megan Ansdell and MIT student Teasel Muir-Harmony provided occasional but valuable research assistance. My colleague Dwayne Day read the draft manuscript and pro­vided useful comments while also catching my many typos. My successor as director of the Space Policy Institute, Professor Scott Pace, welcomed me back to GW after my year at the museum. I am proud of having created the Space Policy Institute in 1987 and of the accomplishments of the many students who have learned about space policy there, my first students dur­ing my years at Catholic University four decades ago, and the young people from many countries I encounter during my continuing involvement with International Space University; these students, together with what I have written through the years, are my lasting heritage, and it is to them that this book is dedicated.

At Palgrave Macmillan, Chris Chappell has been enthusiastic about this study, and I have appreciated his guidance in getting the manuscript into print. Sarah Whalen and Heather Faulls have been very helpful in shepherd­ing the manuscript through the production process. I also welcomed the very useful comments by several anonymous reviewers of my book proposal.

It goes without saying that I am responsible for any errors in this account and for the interpretations of all the actions and decisions detailed herein.

In 1970, I dedicated The Decision to Go to the Moon to my wife Roslyn. Forty-one years later, she is still my wife and still a constant source of sup­port and encouragement. She deserves in gratitude much more than a book dedication.

During the transition, Ted Sorensen and David Bell, the Harvard economist whom Kennedy had chosen to be his budget director, met several times with BOB deputy director Elmer Staats. Among the many issues discussed, they agreed that the Space Council was not needed and that legislation abolishing it should be reintroduced in the new Congress. As late as December 17, an action to “abolish the National Aeronautics and Space Council” appeared on a “Preliminary Check-List of Organizational Issues” prepared for the transi­tion team by Richard Neustadt.48

However, by mid-December, when Kennedy and Johnson met in Palm Beach to discuss the new administration’s legislative program, Kennedy had decided to assign the vice president-elect lead responsibility within his admin­istration for space issues. To signify this, Kennedy announced on December 20 that the vice president would replace the president as chair of the National Aeronautics and Space Council.49

The precise sequence of events surrounding this announcement remains unclear. On December 17, in preparation for Johnson’s meetings with Kennedy, Kenneth Belieu, who was the staff director of the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences that Johnson had chaired, sent a memo to Johnson on “Government Organization for Space Issues.” In it, Belieu suggested that Johnson urge Kennedy to “reactivate the Space Council.” But he did not suggest that Johnson ask Kennedy to make him the council’s chair; rather, he said, “While the law would necessarily need to be changed to include the Vice President as a formal member of the Council, the President could invite the Vice President to attend and preside over the Council meetings in his absence, pending a change in the law.” Belieu also told Johnson that “at NASA there has been a continuing lack of leadership and competence” and that “the Air Force can be expected—and apparently already has started—to make a basic power play to grab the entire Space program. This would involve eliminating NASA.”50

The Space Council assignment was a logical one for Johnson. Beginning soon after the launch of Sputnik 1, he had played a prominent role in shaping the Congressional response to the Soviet space achievements. An October 17, 1957, memorandum from one of his top advisers, George Reedy, pointed out to Johnson that the Soviet achievement “could be one of the great divid­ing lines in American and world history, the whole history of humanity” and suggested that it offered the Democrats, and specifically Johnson, an oppor­tunity to present themselves as being more in tune with such a development. Following Reedy’s advice, Johnson chaired the twenty days of hearings on “satellite and missile programs” held by his Preparedness Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee between November 1957 and January 1958. As Johnson addressed the Senate’s Democratic caucus on January 7, 1958, in an address Reedy characterized as having “compelling power,” he claimed that “control of space means control of the world.”51 As the Senate organized itself to deal with space issues, Johnson named himself chairman of the new Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, even as he main­tained his position as majority leader.

In a 1969 interview with veteran television journalist Walter Cronkite on the occasion of the launch of the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon, Lyndon Johnson told Cronkite that president-elect Kennedy had asked him whether there was anything “that I thought I could be helpful to the Administration on.” Johnson replied that “I would like to work in the field of space,” and that Kennedy had replied that “a President had all a person could do and the Law provided that the President would be Chairman of the Space Council.” Kennedy told Johnson that if he were “willing to assume that obligation, he would ask the Congress to amend that statue.”52

Two days after the decision to make Lyndon Johnson chair of the Space Council was announced, Belieu wrote a follow-up memorandum on “Space Problems” that focused on the potential Air Force “power grab.” He told Johnson that the NASA-Air Force conflict was “why I have been so firmly convinced that the Space Council needs to be resurrected and reestablished,” since “only someone with your force and vigor and understanding can sepa­rate the men from the boys. With President’s backing and a man you could trust running NASA, and with close liaison and affinity to the Pentagon at the higher civilian levels, the problem can be licked.”53

Even after the announcement of the space role for Johnson, Richard Neustadt on December 23 sent Kennedy a “memo on space problems for you to use with Lyndon Johnson.” Neustadt in a cover letter said that his memo­randum was a response to Kennedy for a suggestion, which seemingly must have come before December 20, “on something you could give him to work on and worry about”; he called the memorandum a “quickie,” one that “was worked up today in collaboration with the Budget staff, and no doubt could be vastly improved. But the main thing was to get you something to use.” The Neustadt memorandum noted that “the ‘space’ program, both civil and mili­tary, raises problems of great difficulty” that were “essentially. . . problems of policy direction.” The memo noted that “an opportunity now exists to revi­talize the National Aeronautics and Space Council under the Chairmanship of the Vice President” in order “to have it operate selectively on the high priority policy issues.”54 Whether the suggestion to make Johnson the Space Council chair came from the Johnson camp or the Kennedy camp is not totally clear. There is, as the preceding paragraphs show, even suggestive evidence that the initiative may have come from Lyndon Johnson himself.

Johnson returned to Palm Beach to meet with Kennedy on December 26, this time accompanied by Oklahoma senator Robert Kerr, who was LBJ’s choice as his successor as chairman of the Senate space committee. To make Robert Kerr the new chairman meant bypassing several senators on the com­mittee more senior than Kerr. Of them, only Senator Clinton Anderson of New Mexico was potentially interested in the chairmanship. Anderson was persuaded not to stand in Kerr’s way and instead to accept the chairmanship of another committee during a phone call from Kerr as he met with Johnson and Kennedy on December 26; Kerr told Anderson on the telephone that the two men wanted Kerr to have the chairmanship, and that he hoped Anderson would agree. Anderson immediately accepted this request.55 Until he became committee chair, Kerr had shown little interest in space; his friendship with Lyndon Johnson and his stature as a leading senator were his prime qualifications for the chairmanship. In Kerr, Johnson knew he had a close and powerful ally who would help him push the new administration to propose a larger space program and who would be sympathetic to the politi­cal (and pork-barrel) uses of that larger program.

After Kennedy’s meeting with Johnson and Kerr, The New York Times reported that the three had agreed “on plans to expand the United States’ exploration of space… reflecting Mr. Kennedy’s serious concern over the Soviet lead in this field and his oft-repeated campaign argument that United States prestige had slipped abroad as a result.”56 Whether this was, in fact, what the men had agreed upon was not immediately clear. It was not until four months later, in April 1961, that the Space Council was activated and Lyndon Johnson as its chairman given the task of proposing a way for the United States to enter and win the space race.

Acquiring an expanded role with respect to space was just one element in Lyndon Johnson’s early push for influence within the Kennedy administra­tion. His ambition was apparently to serve as the president’s alter ego with respect to all areas of national security policy, not just the space program. Many prior vice presidents who had served under Democratic presidents, such as John Nance Garner, Harry Truman, and Alben Barkley, were not informed about or involved in national security matters, and Johnson did not want to repeat that pattern.

To achieve this objective, a few days after the inauguration Bill Moyers of Johnson’s staff drafted an executive order for President Kennedy’s sig­nature that would have given the vice president authority “at all times” for “continuing surveillance and review with respect to domestic, foreign and military policies relating to the national security” and would have allowed the vice president to chair the National Security Council in the president’s absence. To exercise this responsibility, the vice president would be “autho­rized to obtain pertinent information concerning the policies and operations of the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Bureau of the Budget and other departments and agencies affected [sic] with a national security interest.” The reasons for such an expanded role, suggested Moyers, included that “the nature of our times requires that the Vice President be adequately informed on vital matters” and that “the possibility of immedi­ate succession to the number one job, however remote and however dis­tasteful to think about from the President’s viewpoint,” would require a fully informed vice president. Even as he prepared the draft order, Moyers recognized that it would likely be opposed by many of JFK’s advisers, and suggested to Johnson that “a better way to achieve your objective, perhaps, is for the President simply to issue a directive to you, instructing you to play a greater role in national security.”2

While the new president and his White House staff were indeed resistant to the kind of publicly visible executive order that Moyers had drafted, they did accept the suggestion of a nonpublic presidential directive. On January 28,

Kennedy signed a letter to Johnson that had been drafted by Moyers, asking Johnson to review policies relating to the national security so that Kennedy could “have the full benefit of your endeavors and of your judgment” and to “maintain close liaison” with “departments and agencies affected with a national security interest.” In this letter, NASA was added to, and the BOB deleted from, the list of agencies subject to vice presidential review that had been in the draft executive order. Copies of the letter were sent to heads of all agencies involved in national security matters.3

These attempts at the start of the Kennedy administration to give Lyndon Johnson an expanded policy role were not successful. John Kennedy had needed Johnson to attract enough Southern voters to get elected, but Kennedy, and particularly his top aides, had no intention of making Johnson a major player in national security affairs. This quickly became evident. The weeks following the inauguration “were ones of despair for Johnson,” according to one of his biographers; “He felt trapped, useless, ridiculed.”4

The next step in Vice President Johnson’s review was to consult key congres­sional leaders to ensure that they would indeed be willing to support the kind of accelerated program that the president was likely to recommend. The original plan was to meet with the chairman, Overton Brooks, and ranking minority member, James Fulton, of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics on May 1, and the chairman, Robert Kerr, and ranking minor­ity member, Styles Bridges, of the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences on May 2. However, the May 1 meeting had to be postponed so that Johnson could participate in a National Security Council discussion of policy toward Viet Nam. Brooks was unhappy at this turn of events and with Johnson’s suggestion that Brooks submit a memorandum on his views in lieu of a face-to-face meeting.25 The meeting with the two senators and their staff actually took place on May 3. Webb and Dryden from NASA, John Rubel from DOD, Edward Welsh, representatives from the Atomic Energy Commission, the Department of State, and the BOB, and George Brown, Frank Stanton, and Donald Cook were also present.

The two senators whom Johnson invited to the meeting, Kerr and Bridges, were present not only because of their committee positions but also because they were two of the small number of veteran legislators who, together with Johnson, had controlled the Senate during the Eisenhower years. Johnson believed that their support would suffice to carry the rest of the Senate with them. Johnson opened the meeting by saying that “I believe it is the position of every patriotic and knowledgeable American that past policies and perfor­mances in space have not been enough to give this country leadership.” He noted that “the President has made it clear that he is determined that the United States move into ‘its proper place in the space race.’ That can only mean leadership. There is no other proper place for our country.” Johnson told those at the meeting that “we are here to discuss not whether, but how— not when, but now.”26 This strident view of American exceptionalism was a pervasive aspect of LBJ’s space review.

Robert Kerr told the others that “we need some cold-blooded deci­sions, but the Senate can be counted on in the end to face up to whatever is required.” Styles Bridges agreed, saying, “it certainly is necessary to attain the highest possible scientific use and to maintain the glory of the United States and its prestige, but basic to the whole matter is the security of the United States.” James Webb continued his cautious approach, telling the group that “there is a great deal that must be done before the vice president will be in a position to make the recommendations and the president be ready to go to the Congress and ask for the large sums that will be necessary, so we’ve got to be very careful now.” Johnson reacted negatively to Webb’s caution, saying “do you feel that you will not be prepared to give me answers for a month? . . . I am not trying to rush you. But you must not wait a month or Congress will have gone home.” He added: ““We’ll wait for a month if necessary for people [clearly meaning Webb] to get the guts enough to make solid recommendations.” Frank Stanton from CBS added an elitist perspec­tive: “We don’t have to be concerned about national support if wise men have decided upon the action necessary in the national interest.”27

Johnson completed his canvas of Congressional support by telephon­ing Overton Brooks and James Fulton to inquire whether the House of Representatives would also support an accelerated space effort. Given what these two men had been saying in their recent committee hearings about the need for a faster-paced program, their responses were not surprising. Fulton told Johnson, after checking with some other House Republicans, that he thought Republican support for an accelerated program would be almost unanimous.28 After the vice president’s call, Brooks submitted a ten-page memorandum of recommendations for the space program. Brooks said that he and his committee believed that “the United States must do whatever is necessary to gain unequivocal leadership in Space Exploration" He recommended an immediate acceleration of programs for communications, television, weather, and navigation satellites. He said that his committee was “committed to a forceful and stepped-up long range endeavor” and that “we cannot concede the Moon to the Soviets, since it is conceivable that the nation that controls the Moon may well control the Earth.”29

According to Webb, by the end of the May 3 meeting Lyndon Johnson “was close to demanding” from NASA a specific recommendation on a lunar landing program, not additional study of its requirements. Based on all information available to him, Webb felt that the lunar landing was “the first project we could assure the president that we could do and do ahead of the Russians, or at least had a reasonable chance to do.” Johnson pushed Webb, saying that “are you willing to undertake this? Are you ready to undertake it?” Webb replied that he was ready, “but there’s got to be political support over a long period of time, like ten years, and you and the President have to recognize that we can’t do this kind of thing without that continuing support.”30 The next day Webb wrote to the vice president, telling him that “my main effort yesterday was to be certain that you and the Senators were under no illusions whatever as to the magnitude of the problems involved in carrying out this decision and the absolute necessity, in my opinion, for a decision to back Secretary McNamara and myself to the limit.” Six years later, Webb, as he complained to the president about cuts in the NASA bud­get, was still reminding Lyndon Johnson that he had been “quite reluctant to undertake the responsibility of building a transportation system to the moon” and that Johnson “had almost to drive me to make the recommenda­tion which you sent on to President Kennedy.”31

As Lyndon Johnson was gauging Congressional support for an acceler­ated space effort, Kennedy was also independently consulting key members of Congress with respect to what type of enhanced space program would be politically acceptable. In particular, according to Webb, there was “little doubt in my mind” that Kennedy consulted Houston-area Congressman Albert Thomas, who chaired the House subcommittee controlling NASA’s appropriations. Thomas’s relationship with fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson was “not close,” but Kennedy “paid a very great deal of attention to what Thomas told him could be done and what he, Thomas, was prepared to do.” Kennedy also needed support from Thomas in other areas of his legislative agenda, and it is likely that Thomas alerted Kennedy to his desire to have an accelerated space program benefit his Houston Congressional district. Webb later recalled that Lyndon Johnson “had more weight in bringing President Kennedy to his decision than the staff around the White House was or is yet willing to recognize. . . In the end he [Kennedy] was, I believe, as strongly influenced by Johnson and Thomas as by any other two people. Once he felt he had to move ahead, he could proceed vigorously because he knew that these men could maintain a base of support that would give him a chance to succeed.”32

While James Webb might have wanted more time to have his staff carry out a fuller study of the requirements for sending Americans to the Moon, that was not to be. On May 4, a Thursday, Lyndon Johnson was asked by President Kennedy to embark the following Monday on a tour of Southeast Asia to provide a first-hand assessment of the situation there with respect to Communist-supported insurgencies. The next day, Johnson called Webb and Secretary of Defense McNamara and asked them to “prepare both a program for the President to send to Congress and a message for the President to use in the transmission of the message.” The vice president wanted to submit these papers to the president on the following Monday, before he left on his trip.33

The same day, Friday, May 5, the first U. S. astronaut, Alan Shepard, was launched on a 15-minute suborbital flight to the lower edge of outer space. Success in that flight was a critical factor in any decision that might follow.

It was clear to NASA managers that as part of the decision to start a rapid space buildup, NASA would have to quickly create several large new facili­ties. The decision on what kind of facilities to build and, politically more important, where to locate them, was thus a high priority issue in the months immediately following President Kennedy’s May 1961 speech. Although a formal announcement of facility decisions could not be made until August 1961, after the Congress had actually appropriated the increased FY1962 budget that the president had proposed, planning for the facility buildup began in earnest even before the speech. While most decisions with respect to launch vehicle production, testing, and launch were made without signifi­cant White House involvement, such was not the case with respect to locat­ing the new NASA “field center” which would train the men who would go to the Moon and oversee the development and operation of the spacecraft that would carry them there.11

Well before President Kennedy’s approval of the lunar landing mission, it had been clear to the NASA leadership that, if there was to be a follow-on

effort to Project Mercury, the Space Task Group, which was managing Mercury, needed to be moved from its location at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. This move was necessary because human space flight required engineering development, flight operations, and especially project management skills, not the engineering research-oriented approach that was characteristic of Langley.

As early as NASA’s creation in 1958, there was a specific view on where to locate the next new NASA installation; that view came from a politically

powerful source. Soon after NASA opened its doors for business on October 1, 1958, Administrator Glennan heard from Congressman Albert Thomas, whose district included Houston, Texas. Thomas was chairman of the House of Representatives appropriations subcommittee that controlled NASA’s fund­ing. Glennan learned that Thomas “was anxious that his district. . . should benefit from the space program.” Thomas suggested that Houston’s Rice University was willing to give NASA 1,000 acres of land as a location for a new NASA “laboratory.” Glennan told him that NASA was “not about to build any new laboratory facilities beyond the one already authorized and on which con­struction had begun.” (This would become the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.) Thomas responded “somewhat peevishly” that the decision to locate the new facility in Maryland “had gone through without his sanction since he had been absent” from Washington. Thomas persisted in his advocacy. He made several more calls to Glennan in late 1958 and finally told the NASA administrator: “Now look here, Dr., let’s cut the bull. Your budget calls for $14 million for Beltsville [actually Greenbelt], and I am telling you that you won’t get a god-damned cent of it unless the laboratory is moved to Houston.” Glennan was able to fend off this threat, but when it became evi­dent in 1961 that there would be a new NASA installation for human space flight and that many locations in the United States would compete for host­ing it, Glennan, who by then was back at Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, Ohio, advised Ohio state officials not to waste their time in that competition because “Houston would be the site chosen.”12

In late April 1961, as it was becoming clear that President Kennedy was likely to approve a major acceleration of the NASA human space flight program, NASA administrator Webb recognized that a separate, new NASA center would indeed be needed to manage the effort, and instructed his staff to begin the site selection process. He put $60 million in the NASA budget estimates being prepared for the White House as a down payment on constructing the new center. The site selection team considered locations in Florida and California, but was also well aware of Representative Thomas’s long-standing interest in having a new NASA installation in Houston. Thus NASA representatives visited Houston on May 16, even before the presi­dent’s announcement of the lunar landing goal. They were met there by George Brown of the Houston-based Brown & Root construction company, a Lyndon Johnson ally who had been consulted by the vice president dur­ing Johnson’s recent space review, and by a representative of the Houston Chamber of Commerce.13 But this turned out to be a false start in the site selection process; it was not restarted in earnest until August 7, when the Congress passed the appropriations bill that included the $60 million in funding for the new center.

As it became widely known in May that the president was going to propose a major acceleration of the NASA program, Representative Thomas made it clear to NASA administrator James Webb that the 1958 Houston offer, and the implied threat of problems for the NASA budget if it were not accepted, still stood. On May 23, Webb reported to Vice President Lyndon Johnson that Thomas had “made it very clear” that he was “extremely interested” in Houston being selected as the location for the new manned spacecraft center that clearly was going to be needed to manage the lunar landing program.14 In 1961, being the location for this center was a much more attractive proposition than it had been earlier, since the demands of Apollo would clearly require a major facility with many jobs created and thus a sig­nificant demand for housing and services in the areas adjacent to the new NASA installation. Rice University was still prepared to donate to NASA a sizeable plot of land some thirty miles south of downtown Houston as the location for the new center; Houston construction, real estate, and other business interests recognized that the facility would generate a wide variety of economic opportunities for the area. Humble Oil, the Houston corpo­ration that had donated the land to Rice now to be transferred to NASA, still owned most of the surrounding property, and realized that its value would increase substantially if a major new government facility were located on the university’s land. George Brown’s construction company, Brown & Root, hoped to get the contract to build the new NASA installation. Brown was chairman of the Rice Board of Trustees, had been a major contributor to Lyndon Johnson’s senatorial campaigns, and was also closely allied with Albert Thomas. Securing NASA’s agreement to locate its new center in the Houston area thus became a political issue of the first order.15

The opportunities presented by the decision to develop a new NASA center of course did not go unnoticed in other parts of the country, and both the White House and NASA were bombarded after the president’s May 25 speech by communications from members of Congress and state and local officials suggesting that the area they represented would be an ideal location for the new installation. Pressing the case for California was Representative George Miller, who was the acting chairman of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics after Overton Brooks fell ill. Missouri directed its advocacy through powerful Senator Stuart Symington. Making the case for Texas in addition to Thomas were Representative Olin “Tiger” Teague, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Manned Space Flight, and Representative Joe Kilgore; in addition, Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and Vice President Lyndon Johnson advocated the Texas cause. Johnson and Albert Thomas were not political allies within the fractious Texas Democratic Party, but they were united on this issue.

Of particular political concern to President Kennedy and his top political assistant Kenneth O’Donnell was continuing pressure from the governor of Massachusetts, John Volpe, to locate the new center at Hingham Air Force Base near Boston. Volpe wrote Kennedy on July 19, before the site selection process had formally begun, saying that “as one Bay Stater to another,” he wanted to call the advantages of the Massachusetts location to the president’s attention. By this time, NASA had made public its preliminary criteria for deciding on the location for the new center, and Volpe outlined the ways in which the Hingham location met those criteria, conveniently omitting the requirement set by NASA for “a mild climate permitting year-round, ice-free, water transportation; and permitting out-of-door work for most of the year.” Volpe closed his letter by saying to Kennedy, “may I urge your help in bringing this project to Massachusetts.”16 In the succeeding two months, O’Donnell and NASA’s Webb had a series of interactions reflecting Volpe’s hope that Boston would be chosen as the location for the new center.

The final criteria for site selection, including both eight “essential crite­ria” and four “desirable criteria,” were approved by top NASA managers in mid-August. Before that approval, conscious of the Massachusetts interest, Administrator Webb had reviewed and specifically reiterated the “mild cli­mate” requirement as being essential. In a September 14 memorandum to the president discussing the site selection process, Webb provided five justi­fications for the climate requirement, concluding that “selection of a site in an area meeting the stated climate criterion will minimize both the cost and the time required for this project” and noting the many ways in which the Boston area failed to meet the requirement.

Upon an initial assessment by the NASA site selection team, nine potential sites, notably not including Houston, met all or most criteria, and arrange­ments were made by the team to visit those areas. While visiting the original nine locations, an additional fourteen sites were brought to the attention of the team; the Rice University site favored by Representative Thomas was one of those additions to the list. In all, the site selection team visited twenty- three potential sites; they were located in Florida (2), Louisiana (3), Texas (9), Missouri (4), and California (5). At each site, the routine was similar: an afternoon arrival and greeting by state and local dignitaries, a meeting to explain the selection criteria, a breakfast meeting with local representatives, and a visit to the proposed site and a nearby college or university. The site selection team “felt that locations north of the freezing line were unlikely to meet the requirements” and thus did not originally plan to visit any such site.

Delegations representing sites in Virginia and Rhode Island not being considered by the selection team pleaded their case in presentations directly to NASA’s James Webb and Hugh Dryden. Also, on September 1, a Massachusetts delegation headed by Governor Volpe and Senator Benjamin Smith, John Kennedy’s former college roommate who had been appointed in December 1960 to fill JFK’s Senate seat, met with the two NASA leaders to argue for consideration of the Hingham site and to ask that the site selec­tion team at least visit Massachusetts. A large meeting of Boston business interests sponsored by the leading local newspaper, The Boston Globe, also called upon the president to select the Massachusetts site. On September 8, Governor Volpe called James Webb, again asking whether the team would visit Massachusetts. The phone conversation was described by Webb’s biog­rapher as “acrimonious.”17 Volpe told Webb that “great political pressure was building up” for such a visit. Webb responded that “it was most difficult to promise this without doing so in many other cases,” but told Volpe that he could make public his intervention with Webb in order to relieve some of the political pressure on the governor. Webb told President Kennedy in a somewhat self-congratulatory way that he believed that “it was an eminently fair proposal for me to have put to him.” Then, on September 13, without notifying Volpe or any other Massachusetts official, the site selection team did visit the Hingham site “for an inspection of the terrain and existing buildings.” The only other site visited on the basis of political intervention was in St. Louis, to satisfy Senator Symington’s request.

John F. Kennedy followed this process closely, and Webb kept him informed and then on September 11 briefed him on the likely outcome. According to Webb’s public statements at the time of the site selection, Kennedy told the NASA administrator then that even though there had been pressures on him to intervene in the process, he expected Webb “to make this decision in the light of the national interest.” Webb noted that Kennedy had “intervened in no way to try to favor his own state of Massachusetts, or to rule it out of the game.” Rather, the president wanted NASA to have full responsibility for the site selection decision. Webb later revised this account of the selection process, saying that Kennedy had at some point called Albert Thomas to seek his support for several bills before the House of Representatives. Thomas had been vague about his willingness to support the bills until Kennedy told him: “Now, you know Jim Webb is thinking about putting this center down in Houston.” From that point on, Thomas supported the three bills and “felt that he had a commitment from Kennedy” about the location of the new center.18

The site selection team reported its findings and recommendations in the second week of September. The team’s first choice, flying in the face of the political pressures from Texas interests, was MacDill Air Force Base near Tampa, Florida, which was scheduled for closure as a Strategic Air Command airfield. It is interesting to speculate whether Webb and Dryden would have accepted this recommendation, given their broader perspective and the need to consider political factors. But at the last minute the Air Force changed its mind about closing MacDill, and the team’s second preference, the Houston site associated with Rice University, became the top-ranked choice of the site selection group.19

Webb and Dryden met on the evening of September 13 and again on the morning of September 14 to review the site selection team report and hear the results of its last minute visit to Massachusetts. That visit did not change their assessment of the team’s ranking, and Webb and Dryden decided that “this laboratory should be located at Houston, Texas, in close association with Rice University and the other educational institutions there and in that region.” The new installation was designated the Manned Spacecraft Center. (It was renamed the Johnson Space Center after Lyndon Johnson’s death in 1973, even though it was Albert Thomas, not Johnson, who had the greater influence on the decision to locate the center in Houston.)

Webb informed the president of this decision in a September 14 mem­orandum, noting that “a press release has been prepared announcing this decision, and we are holding it for issue after the White House notification of those who your staff feels should have advance information.”20 Kenneth

O’Donnell remembered President Kennedy as saying, after reading Webb’s two September 14 memos, “It’s a good decision. Let’s go through with it.” The public announcement of the selection of the Houston location came on September 19. With that announcement and the choice of sites in Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi for launch-related facilities, the arc of new NASA installations along the Gulf of Mexico coast in the southeastern region of the United States that James Webb had advocated in his May 23 memorandum to Vice President Johnson had come into being.

On April 12, 1961, the Soviet Union once again achieved a spectacular space “first”—the orbiting of Soviet Air Force pilot Yuri Gagarin. As President Kennedy and his associates discussed how best to react to this newest Soviet achievement in space, notions of a cooperative initiative took a back seat. But the preference for cooperation was never far from Kennedy’s mind, and even as he decided that the United States should enter a space race, he at the same time made one more attempt to engage the Soviet Union in space cooperation.

On May 16, President Kennedy received a letter from Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev formally accepting Kennedy’s February suggestion that he and Kennedy meet. Khrushchev suggested that the meeting take place in Vienna in early June. This was to be the first (and what turned out to be the only) time the two superpower leaders met face-to-face. This late acceptance of Kennedy’s suggestion for such a meeting came after several rounds of communications between Moscow and Washington. The White House had believed the idea of a Kennedy-Khrushchev meeting dead after the Bay of Pigs debacle, but Khrushchev thought a meeting between the two heads of state could still be useful.20 From Khrushchev’s perspective, Kennedy and the United States were in a weakened position after the Bay of Pigs, and a summit meeting might result in compromises favoring Soviet interests. In a May 16 message to German chancellor Konrad Adenauer explaining his reasons for considering Khrushchev’s proposal for a meeting, Kennedy explained that he was “faced with the problem of going ahead with this or withdrawing my previous indication of my willingness to do so.” He added that he had given Khrushchev an “interim agreement” to a “get acquainted” meeting and that his “present disposition is to proceed. . . provided that there are no further untoward developments meanwhile.” Kennedy expected the discussions at the meeting to be “quite general in character.”21

In preparing for the meeting with Khrushchev, the idea of proposing U. S.-USSR space cooperation was resurrected, even as planning for setting the goal of a lunar landing before the Soviets was in its final stages. On May 18, Jerome Wiesner sent the president two papers “on possible cooperative projects in space to be explored with the Soviet Union.” One of these papers was a memorandum for the president from the Department of State dated May 12 summarizing the work that had been carried out in the February – April time period; the other was the April 13 report on possible cooperative initiatives. The State Department memo listed ten possible areas of coopera­tion, ranging from “reciprocal ground-based support for space experiments” to “coordination or cooperation in manned exploration of the moon.” It suggested that the initial approach to the Soviet Union should offer “a range of choice as to the degree and scope of cooperation they wish to embark on” and should be “unpublicized and low-pressure.” The paper also suggested that “we should not exclude from our list a mention of the possibility of cooperating in the most ambitious projects related to manned exploration of the moon and investigation of the planets.” This was so because such an omission would leave the United States “open to a Soviet initiative which would make them proponents of large-scale international cooperation, thus aligning them with a wide-spread sentiment. . . that such ventures should be undertaken cooperatively on behalf of all mankind.” The paper noted that “our recent astronaut flight [the May 5 suborbital mission of Alan Shepard] and the crystallization of plans for the expansion and acceleration of our space program have served to place us in a relatively favorable posture for an approach to the Soviets.” Wiesner asked Kennedy, “would you like me to do anything more about this?”22

Kennedy did indeed want these possibilities explored. According to one of those involved in preparing Kennedy for the summit meeting, the president did not have “any definite plan of procedure in mind.” Rather, “he wanted to keep himself flexible with a minimum of fixed positions, so as to be able to explore fully any openings that might emerge” during his conversations with the Soviet leader.” However, “the president did have in mind certain concrete possibilities for improving relations should the opportunity for pro­posing them arise. One that he considered might be particularly fruitful was cooperation in space.”23

Beginning in mid-May, Kennedy pursued both formal and informal paths to explore Soviet interest in space cooperation.24 As the agenda for the sum­mit meeting with Khrushchev was being planned, the president directed Dean Rusk to raise the possibility of space cooperation, including a joint lunar mission, with Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko. Gromyko’s May 20 reply echoed the Soviet line—that without progress towards gen­eral disarmament, “all cooperation in the field of rocket research and any exchange of information about Soviet rocket technology is inconceivable.”25

Kennedy did not accept this response as definitive. Beginning in the after­math of the Bay of Pigs crisis, the president had established a secret, back-chan­nel line of communication with the Soviet leadership. His brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, developed a relationship with Georgi Bolshakov, a mid-level agent of the intelligence service of the Soviet Army, the GRU, who was working under the cover of being a Soviet reporter in Washington. In the weeks before the summit, Robert Kennedy and Bolshakov met privately several times. The attorney general used the GRU agent to communicate President Kennedy’s thinking on what might be accomplished at a summit meeting directly to the Kremlin, and to receive back messages from the Soviet leadership, particularly with respect to the possibility of a summit agreement on a nuclear test ban as a step toward arms control. The Soviet response, which had been approved by the Presidium, left little hope for a successful summit unless the United States was willing to address the issue of the future status of Berlin after the Soviet Union signed a peace treaty with the commu­nist-controlled German Democratic Republic (East Germany).26

On May 21, following Gromyko’s negative response, Robert Kennedy added an inquiry to the Kremlin about the possibility of space cooperation to his conversations with Bolshakov. There was no response to this suggestion, and the president proceeded with announcing the lunar landing project in his address to Congress on May 25.

In the immediate aftermath of President Kennedy’s May 25, 1961, decla­ration that “we should go to the Moon,” and for most of the following twenty months, there was very little Congressional or public questioning of pursuing the ambitious lunar landing goal as a high national priority. The Congress, by large bipartisan majorities and after only limited debate, approved increases in NASA appropriations of 89 percent for Fiscal Year 1962 and 101 percent for Fiscal Year 1963. Leading newspapers and other shapers of public attitudes seemed caught up in the excitement of Project Mercury and the initial steps toward the Moon. But as 1963 began, ques­tioning of the lunar landing project began to emerge in various circles; the wisdom of the commitment to Apollo became the focus of a national discus­sion on the best U. S. path forward in space.

Historian Roger Launius has been somewhat critical of explaining Kennedy’s space decisions as the result of “an exceptionally deliberate, reasonable, judicious, and logical process.” He finds such an explanation as overly “neat and tidy.” Launius suggests that the strength of the rational choice model “is its emphasis on Kennedy’s Apollo decision as a politically pragmatic one that solved a number of significant problems,” and that its weakness is “its unwavering belief that individuals—and especially groups of individuals— logically assess situations and respond with totally reasonable consensus actions.” He adds that “since virtually nothing is done solely on a rational basis this is a difficult conclusion to accept.” Launius also wonders whether Kennedy’s attraction to the race to the Moon was a reflection of his “quint­essential masculinity.”11

I agree; of course other considerations than logic were involved in deci­sions related to the race to the Moon. The question is whether a rational approach was the predominant influence on policy choice in the 1961-1963 period, even as politics and personalities also played a part. I believe the preceding narrative suggests that this indeed was the case. A rational deci­sion process can address both solving current problems as well as finding a way to achieve longer-term goals. Certainly the immediate stimulus to the decision to go to the Moon was the threat to U. S. global leadership posed by the world’s reaction to Soviet space successes at the same time as the United States looked weak in its conduct of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Kennedy’s desire to regain his personal prestige and his administration’s momentum were also problems addressed by the Apollo choice. Finding a way at the same time to move away from current problems and to pursue a worthy goal is an opti­mum policy-making objective, and Kennedy’s space strategy was well-crafted to achieve this outcome. John Kennedy shared with others in his family an intensely competitive personality, and that characteristic certainly influenced the way he interpreted the U. S.-Soviet space relationship. He constantly used references to “a race,” the need for “winning” and being “first” in both his public and private comments on space.12 As Manned Spacecraft Center director Robert Gilruth commented, “he was a young man; he didn’t have all the wisdom he would have had. If he’d been older, he probably would never have done it.” It was a combination of Kennedy’s youthful faith in the future, his fundamentally competitive personality, and his broader concep­tion of the national interest that made him willing to accept the costs and risks of the lunar enterprise.

In 1964, political scientist Vernon van Dyke suggested that Kennedy’s need to restore national pride, which van Dyke characterized as “a need for national achievement and national morale” and as “gratification stem­ming from actual or confidently anticipated achievement,” was the basic motivation for the decision to initiate the U. S. lunar landing program. John Kennedy came to the White House believing that by the force of his per­sonality combined with forward-looking government actions he could “get this country moving again”; the combined shocks of the world reaction to the Gagarin flight and the Bay of Pigs fiasco challenged this belief. While restoring national (and perhaps personal) morale was indeed one of President Kennedy’s goals, it seems to me that he saw pride in American society and its achievements not primarily in domestic terms but more as an element of U. S. “soft power”—the ability of the United States to “obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admir­ing its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness.”13 In Kennedy’s thinking about Project Apollo, both pride and power were elements of a policy initiative aimed primarily at influencing other nations of the world. As he said in his May 25, 1961, speech announc­ing the decision to go to the Moon, “no single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind.”

Surprisingly, most historians of the Kennedy presidency give only passing attention to JFK’s space choices, even though Kennedy himself once char­acterized his decision to initiate Project Apollo as “among the most impor­tant decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.”14 An exception is the work of Michael Beschloss, who in 1997 characterized Kennedy’s lunar landing decision in a way that fits well with the more negative general assessment of Kennedy as president quoted earlier. Beschloss suggests that Kennedy “could easily tolerate the Gagarin success,” but after the collapse of the Bay of Pigs invasion, “he was desperately in need of something that would divert the attention of the public and identify him with a cause that would unify them behind his administration.” According to Beschloss, Kennedy’s April 20, 1961, memorandum to Vice President Johnson asking him to lead a review of the space program was “redolent of presidential panic.” Kennedy’s May 25 speech announcing the acceleration of the U. S. space effort asked for “the most open-ended commitment ever made in peacetime. . . and represented a high moment of the imperial presi­dency.” Beschloss argues that the proposed commitment was “a measure of Kennedy’s aversion to long-range planning and his tendency to be rattled by momentary crises,” and that “Kennedy’s desire for a quick, theatrical reversal of his new administration’s flagging position, especially just before a summit with Khrushchev, is a more potent explanation of his Apollo decision than any other.” Beschloss concludes that “Kennedy’s political objectives were essentially achieved by the presidential decision to go to the Moon, and he did not necessarily think much about the long-term consequences.”15

I believe the record of how the lunar landing decision was made gives only modest support to Beschloss’s analysis. Words like “desperately” and “panic” do not seem to me to describe Kennedy’s state of mind as he consid­ered whether to use a “space achievement which promises dramatic results” as a tool of his foreign policy. Both in the weeks before the Gagarin flight, especially during the March 22-23 review of the NASA budget, and during his own inquiries as Lyndon Johnson’s space review was underway, Kennedy heard a wide variety of views on the value of a prestige-oriented space effort. Beschloss suggests that it was the Bay of Pigs failure that convinced Kennedy to move forward with a space initiative. But on April 14, before the invasion began, Kennedy met with his space advisors and commented that “there’s nothing more important” than getting the United States into a leading posi­tion in space. Kennedy’s final approval of the acceleration of the space effort came on May 10; the summit meeting with Khrushchev was not finally set until a week later. Even then, Kennedy sent out feelers regarding a possible agreement at the summit meeting on U. S.-Soviet cooperation in going to the Moon; this is inconsistent with assertion that the need for a “quick, the­atrical reversal” of Kennedy administration fortunes before the summit was a key factor in Kennedy’s space decisions.

In summary then, I conclude that President Kennedy’s commitment to a lunar landing program as the centerpiece of an effort to establish U. S. space leadership was the result of thoughtful consideration, particularly given that it was reiterated a number of times between May 1961 and November 1963. The commitment was publicly embellished with rhetorical flourishes, but at its core was a Cold War-driven but rational policy choice.

The commitment also reflected values deeply embedded in the national psyche. When I wrote The Decision to Go to the Moon over forty years ago, my analysis of that decision reflected what Launius has correctly character­ized as “a fundamentally liberal perspective on U. S. politics and society” and a celebration of “the use of federal power for public good.” I suggested then that the Apollo decision reflected assumptions at the core of Western liberal philosophy. That man can do whatever he chooses, given only the will to do it and the techniques and resources required, is a belief that reflects motivations and characteristics basic to Western and particularly American civilization—a will to action, confidence in man’s mastery over nature, and a sense of mission. Specific decisions on what a government should do are made by its leaders, and ideally reflect a lasting conception of the national interest rather than more parochial concerns or the specifics of their char­acter. Through such decisions, the values and aspirations of a society can then be expressed through state action. John Kennedy embraced this activ­ist perspective; in his much-respected June 1963 commencement address at American University, he suggested that “our problems are man-made— therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable.”16

I would today revise my 1970 assessment, but only somewhat. The liberal perspective— that it is appropriate for the Federal government to under­take large-scale programs aimed at the public good—has been embraced by American presidents such as Woodrow Wilson, notably Franklin D. Roosevelt with his New Deal initiatives, John F. Kennedy and, after Kennedy, by Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama, as well as by the more progressive elements of the U. S. political community. Other presidents and the more conservative elements among U. S. intellectuals, media, and most probably the major­ity of the general public are, in contrast, skeptical of both the appropriate­ness and the feasibility of large-scale government programs aimed at societal improvement. So the proposal to focus massive government resources on a lunar landing effort in fact reflected only one of the two dominant strains in American political thought, the one that sees government steering of U. S. society as legitimate.

Conservative thinking as it applies to the commitment to Apollo was best articulated by historian Walter McDougall in his 1985 prize-winning study . . . the Heavens and the Earth. McDougall suggests that Kennedy’s pro­posal that the United States send Americans to the Moon “amounted to a plea that Americans, while retaining their free institutions, bow to a far more pervasive mobilization by government, in the name of progress.” The lunar landing decision was part of JFK’s assumption that some areas of “private behavior, when they involved the common security and well-being of the country” should be “susceptible to political control,” expressed through a “growing technocratic mentality.” He suggests that Project Apollo and the other initiatives proposed by Kennedy in his first months in office resulted in “an American-style mobilization that was one step away” from the Soviet approach to a planned society. To McDougall, “the commitment to go to the moon did more than accelerate existing trends in space. It served as the bridge over which technocratic methods passed from the military to the civilian realm.”17

Some justification for McDougall’s concern about the impulses behind the lunar landing decision can be found in the language used in the May 8, 1961, report signed by James Webb and Robert McNamara that recom­mended setting a voyage to the Moon as a national goal. In portions of the report embodying themes first suggested by McNamara assistant John Rubel, the report argued that the diffusion of U. S. research and development efforts during the 1950s, especially in the national security sector, had had “a strong adverse effect on our capacity to do a good job in space.” While the report did not suggest “that we apply Soviet type restrictions and controls upon the exercise of personal liberty and freedom of choice. . . we must create mechanisms to lay out and insist on achievement.” This call for concentra­tion of effort was also found in Wernher von Braun’s April 29, 1961, letter to Vice President Johnson responding to the questions President Kennedy had asked in his April 20 memorandum. Von Braun concluded his letter by noting that “in the space race we are competing with a determined opponent whose peacetime economy is on a wartime footing. . . I do not believe we can win this race unless we take some measures which thus far have been consid­ered acceptable only in times of a national emergency.”

Overall, however, McDougall’s analysis is derived more from his overall conservative perspective than from the facts of the situation in 1961-1963. While those charged with implementing the lunar mission individually went to extraordinary lengths to achieve success, neither John Kennedy’s nor James Webb’s management approach called for strong centralized control. The policy and budget decisions that steered Apollo in its early years were made through the normal decision-making process, not in a war-time or Soviet style. It was not the decision to go to the Moon that “militarized” civilian decision-making and led to such initiatives as President Johnson’s Great Society and James Webb’s attempts to use the space program as an instrument of change with respect to the U. S. educational and research systems. Those impulses stretched back to the activist presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Both Johnson and Webb were committed New Dealers who used their positions in government to take actions that in their view would be for the common good.

The debate over the appropriate role of the federal government in under­taking large-scale efforts on behalf of the U. S. citizenry is a continuing one, and a full discussion of that role is well beyond the scope of this study. What can be discussed, however, is what lessons can be drawn from the Apollo experience, and particularly from the way it was initiated by President John Kennedy, should there be a desire to begin another very expensive multiyear government initiative.

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy, then just over four months in the White House, addressed a joint session of Congress to deliver what was billed as a second State of the Union address on “Urgent National Needs.” Before the assembled senators and representatives and a national television audience, Kennedy declared: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.” Later in his speech, he reiterated: “I believe that we should go to the moon.” Sixteen months later, in his most memorable space speech, made before a crowd of 40,000 at Rice University in Houston, Texas, Kennedy gave this reason for undertaking the lunar jour­ney: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”1

John Kennedy was a very unlikely candidate to decide to send Americans to the Moon. He had shown little interest in space issues in his time as a sena­tor or during his presidential campaign. According to one journalist who had close ties with Kennedy, “Of all the major problems facing Kennedy when he came into office, he probably knew and understood least about space.”2 Yet just three months after his inauguration, in the aftermath of the Soviet Union on April 12, 1961, sending the first human, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, into orbit, Kennedy asked his advisers to find him “a space pro­gram which promises dramatic results in which we could win.” The answer came back less than three weeks later—sending astronauts to the surface of Earth’s nearest neighbor gave the best chance of besting the Soviet Union in a dramatic space achievement. The resulting prestige from winning a race to the Moon, Kennedy was told, would give the United States a major victory “in the battle along the fluid front of the Cold War.” Kennedy accepted this

advice, and soon after announced his decision to begin what he character­ized as “a great new American enterprise.”3

President Kennedy’s involvement with the lunar landing undertaking was much more intimate and continuing than is usually acknowledged. Kennedy not only decided to go to the Moon; over the remaining thirty months of his tragically shortened presidency, he stayed closely engaged in the effort and in making sure the benefits of Project Apollo would outweigh its burgeoning cost. Convinced that this was indeed the case, he pushed hard to make sure that Apollo was carried out in a manner that best served both the country’s interests and his own as president. As the authors of the recent study If We Can Put a Man on the Moon… comment, “Democratic governments can achieve great things only if they meet two requirements: wisely choosing which policies to pursue and then executing those policies.” Many presidents since John Kennedy have announced bold decisions, but few have followed those decisions with the budgetary and political commitments needed to ensure success.4 This study details the full range of JFK’s actions that carried Americans to the Moon.

Kennedy’s commitment to the race to the Moon initiated the largest peacetime government-directed engineering project in U. S. history. Project Apollo by the time it was completed cost U. S. taxpayers $25.4 billion, which would be equal to some $151 billion in 2010 dollars. Apollo is frequently compared to the construction of the Panama Canal as an expensive, long-term, government-funded undertaking. By the time the Canal was completed in 1914, the cost of its construction was $375 million, equivalent to $8.1 billion in 2010 dollars, much less than Apollo. Another compari­son might be with the multidecade construction of the Interstate Highway System, which began in the mid-1950s and for which the federal government paid $114 billion out of a total cost of $128 billion. By any measure available, Apollo required a historically massive commitment of public funds over a relatively brief period of time.5

This study is the first comprehensive account of the impact of John F. Kennedy on the race to the Moon; others have written extensively about the managerial and technical aspects of the Apollo achievement, but none have portrayed JFK’s perspective as he continued to push, in the face of growing criticism and concern about increasing costs, for moving ahead with the lunar landing program. The book contains a detailed narrative of the decisions and actions of President Kennedy, his inner circle of advisers who made deci­sions and took actions on his behalf, the career White House staff who sup­ported the Kennedy presidency, and the agency heads with whom Kennedy interacted. Kennedy before he was inaugurated assigned his vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, a lead role in space policy; the study also characterizes Johnson’s role with respect to space decisions during the Kennedy admin­istration. Except when necessary to understand deliberations at the White House level, the book does not give much attention to the specific details of Project Apollo itself.

John Kennedy saw his choice to go to the Moon “as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the Office of the Presidency.” Yet most general accounts of JFK’s time as president give only passing attention to his involvement with the lunar landing program. One goal of this study is to create as historically complete a record as pos­sible of that involvement. Doing so fills an empty niche in the record of the Kennedy administration. It also provides a detailed case study of how Kennedy went about conducting his presidency, assessing what actions were needed in the national interest, continuously seeking information from mul­tiple sources, but deferring to his agency heads to carry out the programs he set in motion. Readers of this account can decide for themselves what insights Kennedy’s space-related efforts provide about his personality and the way he carried out his presidency. The book’s concluding chapter, however, reflects on the character and quality of JFK’s space decisions, asks whether the way Apollo was conceived and carried out can serve as a model for other large-scale government efforts, and provides a perspective on the impact of Kennedy’s commitment to a lunar landing “before this decade is out” on both the evolution of the U. S. space program and the U. S. position in the world of the 1960s and later.

The image of John Kennedy that emerges from this study is at vari­ance from how he is often regarded with respect to space. Rather than a visionary who steered the U. S. space program toward a focus on exploring beyond Earth orbit, he emerges as a pragmatic political leader who soon after entering office came to see the U. S. civilian space program as an important tool to advance U. S. foreign policy and national security goals. He was flex­ible in his approach to space activities, willing to compete if necessary but preferring to cooperate if possible.

John F. Kennedy with his actions in the spring of 1961 and in the follow­ing months took the first steps toward the Moon. Eight years later, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong would take another “small step for a man, but a giant leap for mankind.” Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has suggested that “The 20th Century will be remembered, when all else is forgotten, as the century when man burst his terrestrial bounds.”6 In undertaking the lunar landing program, John Kennedy linked the politics of the moment with the dreams of centuries and the aspirations of the nation. Unfortunately, Kennedy did not live to see the first footprints on the lunar surface, but in the long sweep of history, it is one of the ways in which he will be most remembered.

One of the twenty-nine task forces advising president-elect Kennedy during the transition focused on “outer space.” The task force was led by Jerome Wiesner, a professor of engineering at MIT who had been involved in weap­ons research during World War II and had had a decade of experience dealing with the national security policy aspects of scientific and engineering issues. Wiesner had been a member of PSAC since its inception in 1957, but had not served on any of the PSAC subcommittees dealing with space issues. He had, however, most likely heard many of the briefings on space issues given to the overall committee. During the presidential campaign, Kennedy had sought his advice primarily on a possible nuclear test ban and other arms control issues. By the time the task force began its work, Wiesner had emerged as Kennedy’s most likely choice to be the presidential science adviser.

The other original members of the Wiesner “Ad Hoc Committee on Space” were:

• Edwin Purcell, the Harvard professor who had chaired the first PSAC study on space in 1958 and was chair of the PSAC space flight panel;

• Donald Hornig, professor at Princeton University and the PSAC member who was chair of PSAC’s space booster panel and had also led the PSAC “Ad Hoc Panel on Man-in-Space”;

• Edwin “Din” Land, President of Polaroid Corporation in Cambridge and an original PSAC member;

• Harry Watters, a top assistant to Land;

• Bruno Rossi, professor of physics at MIT; and

• Trevor Gardner, a former Air Force Assistant Secretary for Research and Development who also was chairing an Air Force committee in support of the service’s campaign for a larger role in space.

One indication that the decision to make Lyndon Johnson chair of the Space Council had been taken prior to December 17 was a meeting on that day between Jerome Wiesner, Kenneth Belieu, and Max Leher, who was the Senate space committee’s assistant staff director. The latter two, of course, worked for Johnson as committee chair. At that meeting, Wiesner expressed support for reestablishing the Space Council, and invited Belieu and Leher to join his task force.57 It is unlikely that this invitation would have been offered if it were not for the space policy role that Kennedy envisaged for Johnson.

Most of the members of Wiesner’s group were deeply familiar with space issues because of their past involvements. They chose to prepare their report without any briefings or other formal contact with NASA and DOD. The group met together only a few times before issuing its report; Robert Seamans, NASA’s associate administrator, notes that “alarming rumors” about what the group might say in its report “kept appearing in journals and newspapers.”58

On January 10, 1961, president-elect Kennedy met in Lyndon Johnson’s Senate office with Johnson, members of the Wiesner panel, Senator Kerr, and Representative Overton Brooks, chairman of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, to be briefed on the panel’s report. Because por­tions of the report dealt with the military space program and other sensitive policy matters, the entire report was classified “confidential.” An unclassi­fied version was made public the next day.59

The twenty-four page report was admittedly a “hasty review” aimed at providing a “survey of the program” and identifying “personnel, technical, or administrative problems” requiring prompt attention. It listed five princi­pal motivations for the space program:

1. National prestige

2. National security

3. Scientific observation and experiment

4. Practical nonmilitary applications

5. International cooperation.60

The panel recognized that “space exploration and exploits have captured the imagination of the peoples of the world,” and that “during the next few years the prestige of the United States will in part be determined by the leadership we demonstrate in space activities.”

The task force felt “compelled to criticize our space program and its man­agement” because of “serious problems within NASA, within the military establishment, and at the executive and other policy-making levels of govern­ment.” The report was critical of the management of both NASA and DOD space efforts. With regard to NASA, it called for “vigorous, imaginative, and technically competent top management,” implying that NASA’s current top officials had not demonstrated these qualities. The report deplored the tendency of each military service to create an independent space program and called for one service to be responsible for space within the DOD. It was concerned with the lack of coordination among the various agencies involved in space and endorsed the revitalization of the Space Council as “an effec­tive agency for managing the national space program.” The use of the word managing was particularly noted; some took this as a suggestion that the Space Council would have executive, not just coordinating, responsibilities in space.

Only the scientific portion of NASA’s programs was deemed “basically sound.” Even so, the report noted that “too few of the country’s outstanding scientists and engineers” were working in the space field. Developing boost­ers with greater weight-lifting capability was “a matter of national urgency,” since “the inability of our rockets to lift large payloads into space is key to serious limitations of our space program.”

The report recognized that “man will be compelled” to go into space “by the same motives that have compelled him to go to the poles and to climb the highest mountains of the earth.” Thus, “manned exploration of space will certainly come to pass and we believe that the United States must play a vigorous role in this venture.” The ultimate goal of human space flight, the group recognized, was “eventual manned exploration of the moon and the planets.” The panel acknowledged that “some day” humans in space might “accomplish important scientific or technical tasks,” but in the short run human space flight “cannot be justified solely on scientific or technical grounds.”

The Wiesner task force called Project Mercury “marginal,” as had the PSAC report a month earlier, and pointed out that it was “very unlikely” that the United States would be first to send an astronaut to orbit. Echoing the PSAC position, it was critical of the relative priorities given to human and robotic flight: “The acquisition of new knowledge and the enrichment of human life through technological advances are solid, durable and worth­while goals of space activities. . . By having placed highest national priority on the MERCURY program, we have strengthened the popular belief that man in space is the most important aim of our nonmilitary space effort.”

The task force recommended that President Kennedy not allow “the pres­ent Mercury program to continue unchanged for more than a very few months” and that he not “effectively endorse this program and take the blame for its possible failures.” It suggested that “a thorough and impartial appraisal of the MERCURY program should be urgently made.” It recommended that “we should stop advertising Mercury as our major objective in space. Indeed, we should make an effort to diminish the significance of this program to its proper proportion before the public, both at home and abroad.” Of par­ticular concern was the potential death of an astronaut in a Mercury mis­sion, particularly if he were to be stranded in orbit. Rather than continue to put emphasis on human space flight, suggested the panel, “We should find effective means to make people appreciate the cultural, public service, and military importance of space activities other than space travel.” Finally, the panel recommended “a vigorous program to exploit the potentialities of practical space systems” for communications, navigation, and meteorological observation.

After the panel’s briefing, the president-elect described the report as “highly informative” and his meeting with the task force as “very fruitful.” Once the report became public, it was subject to criticism from space advo­cates, and at his first post-inaugural press conference Kennedy remarked that “I don’t think anyone is suggesting that their [the task force’s] views are nec­essarily in every case the right views.”61 In terms of the space program’s sub­stance, in contrast to management issues, the report seemed to endorse the civilian space program that had been pursued by the Eisenhower administra­tion; it certainly was not “the ringing denunciation of Eisenhower’s lassitude on space initiatives that Kennedy. . . might have hoped for.” According to one historian, Kennedy “treated the panel’s findings “like a skunk at a wedding.” There was even some question after the inauguration of whether Wiesner agreed with everything in the report of the task force he had chaired.62

The day after he received the report of the panel, Kennedy named Jerome Wiesner as his new science and technology adviser. Wiesner’s selection meant that Kennedy would hear both sides of the case for a high profile civilian space program focused on human space flight, one perspective from Lyndon Johnson and the other from Wiesner.