Category THE RACE

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.

In the early days of the eighty-seventh Congress, two bills related to the Space Council were introduced in the House of Representatives. One was the Eisenhower administration bill abolishing the council, on which there had been no action in the previous year; Sorensen and Bell had agreed during the transition to have this bill reintroduced, and apparently that decision had not been countermanded even though president-elect Kennedy had at least tentatively decided to retain the council. The other bill was introduced by congressman Emilio Daddario (D-CT). It would have not only have autho­rized the president to make the vice president a member and the chairman of the Space Council, but also would have delegated to the vice president executive functions that were assigned by law to the president.5 No legisla­tive action was taken on either of these proposed bills, but the White House wanted to make sure that the Daddario bill did not move forward, since it would have given the vice president more power than Kennedy desired; in addition, such a delegation of executive power to the vice president was most likely unconstitutional.

On February 14, Lyndon Johnson wrote to Kennedy, telling him that “in accordance with your request, I have made a study of the National Aeronautics and Space Council.” That study had suggested that “the Council as it now stands has the power to make certain decisions between agencies and pro­grams which is a power that under the Constitution only the President can have.” Thus, “if it is your desire to remove the President as Chairman of the Council, it will be necessary to change the basic structure of the Council so that it coordinates the information—not the activities—of the various space projects and advises you accordingly.”6 Following up on this letter, Moyers asked Richard Neustadt, who was continuing to serve the new administra­tion as a consultant on organizing the presidency, for his thoughts on the organization and operation of the council. Moyers also worked with staff members of the Senate Committee on Aeronautics and Space Sciences to prepare the various documents needed to make the changes in the 1958 Space Act that were thought to be required.

Neustadt responded on February 28. He said that he was “much con­cerned” regarding “the Vice President’s position as a constitutional officer who cannot share, so should not be pressed to take on, operating responsibil­ity” that was assigned to the president. In a memorandum on “Organizing the Space Council,” Neustadt noted that “where space programs are concerned, the President should have available the same sort of top-level, politically – responsible advice on policy (and follow through) that he can claim in other fields from a Cabinet secretary,” but that “the Vice President should not be asked to serve as ‘Secretary for Space’ except in the role of senior adviser. It would be unfair to cast him in the role of department head responsible for operations.” Neustadt’s late February critique of an operational role for the vice president implies that at least some on LBJ’s staff, if not Johnson him­self, were continuing to push for such responsibility.

Neustadt recommended that there was no need for the council to have the nine members, including three public members, who were mandated in the 1958 Space Act; in his view, “the Chairman, State, Defense and NASA would suffice.” (At least one prominent space scientist was interested in becoming a public member of the Space Council. On February 4, 1961, University of Iowa professor James Van Allen, 1958 discoverer of the Earth – circling radiation belts that bore his name, wrote Vice President Johnson, saying that “I would be honored to serve with you on this body [the Space Council] as a vitally interested member of the general scientific commu­nity.”) Neustadt proposed a small council staff “with broad experience in government, possessed of balanced judgment, keen analytical ability, and a taste for quiet staff work.” He suggested that the council’s name be changed to either the “President’s Advisory Council on Space,” which was the term that president-elect Kennedy had used in December as he announced the new role for his vice president, or “President’s Space Council.” He felt that any modifications, whether through a reorganization plan or through new legislation, “change the law as little as possible.” Neustadt’s memorandum, which he characterized as “one man’s opinion,” was followed on March 1 by another BOB staff memorandum. This document stressed that “the Space Council should exist solely to advise the President. . . The President should retain executive responsibility, and executive functions should not be del­egated to the Vice President.”7

Vice President Johnson again got personally involved in early March, in particular asking budget director David Bell how best to finance the coun­cil’s staff. Bell told him that since the Space Council was a statutory agency on its own, it was not legal to transfer funds from the NASA or DOD budget to fund its operations, a possibility that had been explored by Johnson’s staff. However, Bell said, President Kennedy had agreed to provide funds from his “Special Projects” budget to fund the council’s executive secretary and two more staff positions, and that NASA had agreed to delegate three or four of its employees to act as council staff. Bell said that it was his understanding “once you have your initial staff on board, you expect to have them prepare necessary modifications to the National Aeronautics and Space Act.”8

With the question settled of how staff salaries would initially be paid, Vice President Johnson could recruit an individual to serve as council execu­tive secretary. On March 20, President Kennedy sent the nomination of Dr. Edward C. Welsh to the Senate; Welsh had been actually chosen for the posi­tion several weeks earlier and had already been actively working on reorga­nizing the council. Welsh was a longtime government employee and was at the time a legislative assistant to Senator Stuart Symington (D-MO). He held a doctorate in economics and had been in charge of Symington’s hearings on air power in 1956, had helped staff LBJ’s Preparedness Subcommittee hearings after Sputnik, and had been the lead staff person for Symington’s hearings on government organization for space in 1959. He had also been the executive director of the task force on reorganizing the Department of Defense set up by Kennedy during the presidential campaign. Welsh had been the primary author of the strident October 1960 Kennedy campaign statement on space, which had argued that “control of space will be decided in the next decade. If the Soviets control space they can control earth.” In Welsh, Lyndon Johnson got a strong, if somewhat self-important, advocate for a vigorous U. S. space effort.

As he was under consideration for the Space Council position, Welsh met with James Webb, who told Welsh that he believed in “a vigorous role on the part of the operating agency [NASA] and did not want to have a Council or any other interagency group be controlling the operating day-to-day func­tions.” Welsh told Webb he agreed with this point of view.9 Welsh’s confir­mation hearings before the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences were held on March 23. After Welsh’s opening statements, there were no questions. The Senate voted to confirm Welsh on the same day and he was sworn into office on March 24.

Welsh’s first assignment was to draft the changes in the Space Act that were needed to make the vice president its chair and to make other desired adjustments in the council’s membership and organizational location within the executive office of the president. By March 30, Welsh had prepared a memorandum noting that there were three options available to change the provisions of the 1958 Space Act—a reorganization plan, an amendment to the then-pending NASA Authorization Bill, or a separate amendment to the Space Act. Welsh had contacted key members of the Senate and House, and had learned that there was a congressional preference for a simple amend­ment to the Space Act.10 Within the executive office, the BOB still favored a reorganization plan, but such a plan would have had to wait sixty days to allow any congressional comments before it could be put into place. The congressional perspective prevailed, and a decision was made to move for­ward with proposing an amendment to the Space Act.

Before the amendment could be approved by President Kennedy and his top advisers, there were two issues to be dealt with. One was whether to propose a name change for the Space Council, a topic that had been discussed ever since December. Neustadt and Welsh discussed this topic at an April 4 breakfast. Apparently Welsh was concerned that the titles that Neustadt had suggested in his February 28 memorandum, which began with the word “President’s” rather than “National,” would not indicate the intended broad scope of the council’s activities. In a follow-up memorandum to Welsh later that day, Neustadt suggested that the issue of the council’s name was not “all-important or worth getting into a tizzy about.” He added: “I very much appreciate your sensitivity about the change from ‘National’ to ‘President’s’ . . . But isn’t it possible you are being oversensitive?” Neustadt noted that Lyndon Johnson also chaired the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, and “no one conceives its title as an attack on him.”11

The other issue was the wording of the proposed amendment to the Space Act. Edward Welsh and James Webb had not been able to agree on how best to indicate in the amendment the separation of the functions of the Space Council and the functions of the president. While Welsh wanted to put for­ward a simple amendment that retained the Space Act language that speci­fied the functions of the council, Webb wanted to add a new section to the Act that specified the duties that would remain the president’s responsibility. These differences had been discussed in a March 7 meeting between budget director Bell and special counsel to the president Ted Sorensen, and the decision was made to go forward with the Welsh version of the amendment.12 No change in the name of the National Aeronautics and Space Council was suggested. The secretaries of defense and state, the administrator of NASA, and the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission remained council members; the one additional government member and the three public members of the council were eliminated, and the council was made part of the executive office of the president.

Welsh told Vice President Johnson on April 6 that his version of the pro­posed amendment “had been cleared in the Executive Office of the President with Messrs. Bell, Staats, and Neustadt, and that Budget Director Bell had agreed to discuss the paper with Ted Sorensen and President Kennedy.” He also noted that Representative Overton Brooks had agreed to schedule a hearing on the amendment and that there had been preliminary agreement to the amendment obtained from the staffs of Senators Kerr, Bridges, and Dirksen and with Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, Majority Leader John McCormack, and Congressman Thornberry of the Rules Committee.

President Kennedy transmitted the amendment to the Congress on April 10; Welsh testified as the only witness before the House Committee on Science and Astronautics on April 12. This was the day on which the Soviet Union orbited the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin, and that feat, rather than the changes in the Space Act, was the focus of the committee’s ques­tions. In his testimony, Welsh noted that “the Vice President is already by statute a member of the National Security Council,” and that “to make him a member of the Space Council seems to be a comparable action with suitable precedence.” One issue raised by Chairman Brooks during the House hear­ing was “doesn’t the Vice President have some executive authority [under the amendment]? Isn’t he for some purposes a part of the executive branch?” Welsh replied that “in this specific instance this responsibility would be advi­sory and not in a real sense executive.”13

The House approved the amendment by voice vote on April 17. Welsh then testified before the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences on April 19, again as the sole witness. Committee approval quickly followed and the Senate approved the amendment on April 20. As he signed the bill amending the Space Act on April 25, President John F. Kennedy stated that “Working with the Vice President, I intend that America’s space effort shall provide the leadership, resources, and determination necessary to step up our efforts and prevail on the newest of man’s physical frontiers.”14 By this time, the Space Council under Vice President Johnson’s leadership was already well embarked on a review that would recommend sending Americans to the Moon.

From the start of Project Mercury in 1958, the project’s plan called for several brief suborbital flights with an astronaut aboard before committing a human to an orbital mission. The first such flight could have come in March 1961 if it had not been for the combination of some relatively minor problems on the January 31 Mercury-Redstone-2 flight carrying the chimpanzee Ham and the biomedical concerns raised by PSAC about an astronaut’s ability to withstand the stresses of spaceflight. An additional test flight without an astronaut (or chimpanzee) aboard was inserted in the Mercury schedule, and the first crewed flight, Mercury/Redstone-3 (MR-3), was slipped until the end of April or early May; to some, that flight seemed rather anticlimactic when Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth on April 12.

Beginning with the Wiesner task group report in January and extending almost to the day of the flight, there were White House fears that the risks of the MR-3 mission outweighed its benefits. These fears were only ampli­fied by the failure at the Bay of Pigs in mid-April; the possibility that a U. S. astronaut might perish in the full light of the television and other media cov­erage of the mission so soon after the United States had looked so weak in its unwillingness to support the invasion force it had trained was very troubling to President Kennedy and his top advisers. Sorensen remembers that while “gloating Russians, undecided Third World neutrals, and concerned allies” awaited the outcome of the flight, “untold numbers of the American press insisted for weeks that all their reporters must receive passes to be present.” At the same time, there was insistence that “their editorial writers and col­umnists must be free to deplore the media circus atmosphere resulting from so many reporters being present.” The White House concern was “that such a big buildup would worsen our national humiliation [the Bay of Pigs] if the flight were a failure.”34

Jerome Wiesner had raised similar concerns as far back as March 9. In a memorandum to McGeorge Bundy, Wiesner expressed his worry about the pressure for live TV and press coverage of the MR-3 launch, fearing that there was a danger of the event tuning into a “Hollywood production” that “could jeopardize the success of the entire mission.” He suggested that the government should meet such pressures “with firmness.” Wiesner on the other hand was concerned about how best to exploit the public relations value of a successful mission to serve administration interests, since “in the imagination of many” the mission would “be viewed in the same category as Columbus’ discovery of the new world.”35 Wiesner’s hope for a historic first was definitively dashed by the Soviet orbital flight in April.

At the March 22 meeting on the NASA budget, President Kennedy had asked about the risks associated with the first Mercury flight. Hugh Dryden assured him that “no unwarranted risks would be involved” and that “the decision to ‘go’ was being made by project managers best qualified to assess the operational hazards.” The PSAC panel on Mercury agreed with this assessment, saying the flight would be “a high risk undertaking but not higher than we are accustomed to taking in other ventures.”36

Still, doubts about the wisdom of going ahead with the mission, at least so soon after the Soviet orbital flight and the Bay of Pigs fiasco, persisted. The person who had led the PSAC review of Mercury, Donald Hornig, on April 18 sent a memorandum to Sorensen raising two questions: (1) “Is MR-3 still justified, in view of the risks, after the Russian flight?” and (2) “If so, should the present schedule be maintained or should it be carried out at a later time?” Hornig noted that after the Gagarin flight “the fact that one human can withstand these conditions [of spaceflight] is now established.” Hornig’s conclusion was that “it seems likely that we should proceed on schedule, particularly since the world already knows that schedule,” but that “our estimate of the risk is still that it cannot presently be demonstrated that the likelihood of disaster is less than one in ten or one in twenty.”37

On April 26, Wiesner told the Space Council’s Welsh that his office had been receiving messages from “some of the scientists whom he knows rais­ing a question about the advisability of our going forward with the Mercury man-in-space shots.” Their concern, said Wiesner, was that “if these shots were successful, they would still look relatively small compared with what the Russians have done, and, if the shots failed, the damage to our prestige would be serious.” In reporting this message to Vice President Johnson, Welsh said that he believed “we should go ahead. . . Having announced that we were going to make the efforts, I believe that we would suffer seriously if we did not go ahead.”38 Concerns about the wisdom of proceeding were not limited to the White House. Senators John Williams (R-DE) and William Fulbright (D-AK) suggested “that the flight should be postponed and then conducted in secret lest it become a well-publicized failure.”39

The MR-3 flight was scheduled to lift off on the morning of May 2. In the preceding days, Ted Sorensen and the president’s brother Robert Kennedy discussed whether it was worse to postpone the flight after the press buildup had reached such a peak or to go ahead with the flight and run the risks of failure.40 President Kennedy made the final decision on whether to go ahead with the flight in an Oval Office meeting on April 29. Present at the meet­ing were Wiesner, Sorensen, Bundy, and Welsh, among others. One of those present raised the point of “maybe we should postpone the Shepard flight, maybe we shouldn’t take this risk, something might go bad, there might be a casualty, and we’ve had a number of things go rather poorly here and maybe we shouldn’t do this right now.” The majority of the group favored post­poning the flight, but Welsh argued that it was no riskier than flying from Washington to Los Angeles in bad weather, and asked the president, “why postpone a success?” According to Welsh, “that ended the discussion.”41 On May 1, the day before the flight was scheduled, James Webb and White House press secretary Pierre Salinger met with Kennedy for a final review of the press arrangements for covering the launch. Webb assured the president that all precautions had been taken and the flight should go for­ward as scheduled. Kennedy asked his secretary to place a call to NASA’s public information officer in Florida, Paul Haney, to discuss plans for televi­sion coverage and to discuss the reliability of the Mercury capsule’s escape system. Salinger talked to Haney from the Oval Office and, after Haney reviewed the history of the launch escape system, told Kennedy that he felt that JFK’s questions had been adequately answered.42

Because of poor weather, the MR-3 flight was postponed on May 2 and again on May 4. Finally, on May 5, astronaut Alan Shepard was launched on what he described as a “pleasant ride.” A wave of national relief and pride over an American success swept the country, from the White House down to the person in the street. At the White House, Kennedy’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln interrupted a National Security Council meeting to tell the president that Shepard was about to be launched. Kennedy, joined by Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, Ted Sorensen, McGeorge Bundy, Arthur Schlesinger, and others crowded around a small black and white television set in Lincoln’s office to watch the takeoff. As Jacqueline Kennedy walked by, the president said: “Come in and watch this.” Sorensen suggests that the group watching the flight in Lincoln’s office “heaved a sigh of relief, and cheered” as Shepard and his spacecraft were pulled from the Atlantic Ocean.43 After Shepard was safely aboard the recovery ship, Kennedy called him, saying, “I want to congratulate you very much. We watched you on tele­vision, of course, and we are awfully pleased and proud of what you did.”44 The decision to carry out the Shepard flight in full view of the world seems to have paid off. A May 1961 report of the U. S. Information Agency comparing international reactions to the Gagarin and Shepard flights noted that in terms of public reaction “the U. S. reaped a significant psychologi­cal advantage over the Soviet Union.” This was due in large part to the “openness” surrounding the Shepard flight, plus the flight’s “technologi­cal refinements and the poise and humility of the U. S. astronaut.” People around the world contrasted this “critically to Soviet secrecy and blatant pro­paganda exploitation, as well as the obviously politically controlled behavior of Gagarin.” The report went on to say that “without question the greatest impact on expressed opinion in the Free World was made by the openness of the U. S. both as to the flight itself and to the release of scientific infor­mation.” In contrast, “Soviet secrecy was deplored and even continued to

arouse some skepticism.” Some of the commentary “showed a significant tendency to identify itself with the U. S. success.”45

If the Shepard flight had been a catastrophic failure, it is very unlikely that President Kennedy would have, or politically could have, soon after­ward set as a national goal the flight of Americans to the Moon. However, the unqualified success of the flight in both technical and political terms likely swept away any of Kennedy’s lingering reservations with respect to the benefits of an accelerated space effort with human space flights as its centerpiece. In a formal statement issued after the flight, Kennedy said: “All America rejoices in this successful flight of Astronaut Shepard. This is an historic milestone in our own exploration into space. But America still needs to work with the utmost speed and vigor in the further development of our space program. Today’s flight should provide incentive to everyone in our nation concerned with this program to redouble their efforts in this vital field. Important scientific material has been obtained during this flight and this will be made available to the world’s scientific community.” At a press conference later in the day, Kennedy announced that he planned to under­take “a substantially larger effort in space.”46

While the locations for new Apollo facilities were settled expeditiously, NASA was slower in selecting what approach to use in getting to the Moon and thus what spacecraft and launch vehicle would be needed for the lunar land­ing. On November 20, 1961, almost six months after President Kennedy’s May 25 speech, Jerome Wiesner provided to Theodore Sorensen an “outline of major problems” with respect to NASA’s progress in implementing the lunar landing program.21

Wiesner noted that “six months have elapsed since the decision was announced to put man on the moon, yet none of these crucial hardware programs have progressed beyond the study phase. Lead times on these development and construction programs are of critical importance.” He also noted that “it is hoped that there will be no further field stations beyond these already announced. However, there are major problems related to the activation of these centers.”

NASA was aware of these White House concerns. Webb told Dryden and Seamans that he had “scouted around” and had discovered that President Kennedy “has some concern as to whether we are proceeding rapidly enough and with enough procurement and program commitment activity to accom­plish the goals he has set for the nation.” NASA had issued a contract on August 10 to the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory for the Apollo guid­ance system, and on November 20 was one week away from contracting for the Apollo command and service module, one element of the spacecraft needed for the lunar landing. However, delays in selecting the design of launch vehicle for the lunar mission had meant that its procurement had had to wait. While NASA had chosen the locations for its Apollo-related facili­ties, Webb also reported that “there is some evidence that the President has had some doubts raised as to whether our decisions with respect to the Cape Canaveral, Michoud, and Houston installations were based on the needs of the program or had political overtones.”22

Space was one of four areas of scientific cooperation initially identified for possible discussion at the June 3-4 Vienna summit; the others were nuclear science, earth science, and life science. In a May 29 memorandum to the president on summit preparations, national security adviser Bundy attached “a new and much improved memorandum from Wiesner’s office.” This memorandum listed only four potential cooperative projects, two in space and two in nuclear science. The two space projects suggested were “use of ground facilities for cooperative experiments” and “planetary probes.” Cooperation in a lunar landing program was only briefly mentioned as one of the “other possible areas for cooperative projects.”27 In transmitting the memorandum, Bundy cautioned the president that “your own proposals [on scientific cooperation] to Khrushchev should probably go no further than to express your own interest and to suggest that the matter be discussed at experts’ meeting arranged by Ambassador [Llewellyn] Thompson.” This approach was prudent, suggested Bundy, because “the practical process of scientific cooperation can be very difficult even with friends, and you will not want to get your own prestige hooked to specific negotiations that could be made sticky at any time by the Soviets.”28

The Vienna summit was, in President Kennedy’s words, “a very sobering two days.” During their meetings, both alone with just interpreters present and with their staff, “Khrushchev had not given way before Kennedy’s rea­sonableness, nor Kennedy before Khrushchev’s intransigence.”29 The Soviet leader insisted that he would sign a peace treaty with the German Democratic Republic by the end of the year, and that the new East German govern­ment would then have the right to cut off U. S. access to Berlin. Kennedy responded that this was unacceptable, and that if necessary the United States would use force to assure its access. Khrushchev replied “force will be met with force.” The president concluded his conversation with Khrushchev with the observation that “it would be a cold winter.”30

In this grim atmosphere, there was little chance to bring up secondary top­ics such as space cooperation. The only opportunities for more relaxed conver­sation came at two luncheons for the U. S. and Soviet delegations. At the June 3 lunch hosted by President Kennedy, the talk turned to the flight of Yuri Gagarin and then to the possibility of launching a man to the Moon. None of the other proposals for scientific cooperation prepared for Kennedy’s use were discussed. With respect to a lunar mission, Khrushchev said that “he was cautious because of the military aspects of such flights.” Then, “in response to the President’s inquiry whether the US and the USSR should go to the Moon together, Mr. Khrushchev first said no, but then said ‘all right, why not?’ ” Reportedly, the second response was made “half-jokingly.” The next

day it was Khrushchev’s turn to host a lunch, and once again Kennedy turned the conversation to a mission to the Moon. Khrushchev commented that “he was placing certain restraints on projects for a flight to the moon.” The Soviet premier noted that “such an operation” would be “very expensive” and might “weaken Soviet defenses.” He added: “Of course, Soviet scientists want to go to the moon,” but “the U. S. should go first because it is rich and then the Soviet Union would follow.” President Kennedy once again suggested a coop­erative lunar landing effort; Khrushchev retracted his casual agreement of the preceding day, noting that “cooperation in outer space would be impossible as long as there was no disarmament.” This was the case because “rockets are used for both military and scientific purposes.” To Kennedy’s suggestion that perhaps Soviet and U. S. lunar missions could be coordinated in their timing in order to save money, Khrushchev replied “that this might be possible but noted that so far there had been few practical uses of outer space launchings. The race was costly and was primarily for prestige purposes.”31

The reason for this overnight change of mind, even if he had been serious in his response on the preceding day, was apparently Khrushchev’s consul­tations with his advisers. The Soviet chairman’s son, Sergey Khrushchev, has suggested that in May 1961 “my father was faced with the decision of whether to accept the challenge [of a race to the Moon] and be prepared to spend billions for the sake of keeping the palms of victory, or whether he should step aside and allow his undoubtedly richer competitor to get ahead of him. . . My father was not prepared to answer this question.” In addition, “the military men came out against this proposal—they wanted to protect their secrets. Korolev [Sergei Korolev, the “chief designer” of the Soviet space program] was also against it, since he did not like the idea of sharing the palms of leadership with anyone.”32 In his memoirs, Nikita Khrushchev explains his unwillingness to cooperate in space as being due to the Soviet weakness in intercontinental ballistic missiles. He noted that “we had only one good missile at the time; it was the Semyorka [the R-7 ICBM] . . . Had we decided to cooperate with the Americans in space research, we would have had to reveal to them the design of the booster for the Semyorka.” He added: “We knew if we let them have a look at our rocket, they’d easily be able to copy it.” Thus, “they would have learned its limitations, and from a military standpoint, it did have serious limitations. In short, by showing the Americans our Semyorka, we would have been giving away both our strength and revealing our weakness.”33

There the discussion on space cooperation ended. During the remainder of 1961, Cold War tensions were high and the Berlin Wall was erected; the outlook for any significant space cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union was correspondingly bleak. President Kennedy’s proposal to the Congress and the nation that the United States embark on an extremely ambitious space effort, with Project Apollo as its centerpiece, received wide­spread political support. The idea that the lunar landing program might be a joint U. S.-Soviet undertaking appeared stillborn, and other areas of poten­tial space cooperation remained unexplored.

President Kennedy on January 17, 1963, sent to Congress a Fiscal Year 1964 budget request for NASA of $5.712 billion. The New York Times editori­alized that “whether the $20 billion (or $40 billion) race to the moon is justified on scientific, political, or military grounds, we do not think the matter has been sufficiently explained or sufficiently debated. We hope it will be in the present Congress.” In his March 21 press conference, President Kennedy was questioned about the pace of the U. S. space program as com­pared to that of the Soviet Union. He responded: “The United States is mak­ing, as you know, a major effort in space and will continue to do so. We are expending an enormous sum of money to make sure that the Soviet Union does not dominate space. We will continue to do it.”2

On March 29, Congressman Charles Halleck (R-IN) released a letter from former President Dwight Eisenhower in which Eisenhower suggested that “the space program, in my opinion, is downright spongy. This is an area where we particularly need to demonstrate some common sense. Specifically, I have never believed that a spectacular dash to the moon, vastly deepen­ing our debt, is worth the added tax burden it will eventually impose on our citizens.” President Kennedy was asked about Eisenhower’s comments at an April 3 press conference; he responded: “We are second in space today because we started late. It requires a large sum of money. I don’t think we should look with equanimity upon the prospect that we will be second all through the sixties and possibly the seventies. We have the potential not to be. I think having made the decision last year, that we should make a major effort to be first in space. I think we should continue to do so.” He added: “Now President Eisenhower—this is not a new position for him. He has disagreed with this, I know, at least a year or year and a half ago when the Congress took a different position. It is the position I think he took from the time of Sputnik on. But it is a matter on which we disagree.” Kennedy added: “It may be that there is waste in the space budget. If there is waste, then I think it ought to be cut out by the Congress, and I am sure it will be. But if we are getting to the question of whether we should reconcile ourselves to a slow pace in space, I don’t think so.”3

Respected New York Times columnist James Reston soon suggested that “the debate on the nation’s space program is getting out of hand. Some Republicans are attacking the program as if it were a vast boondoggle, and President Kennedy is defending it as if it were the Bill of Rights.” Reston added that “the space program deserves a more serious response. For a large and influential sector of the scientific community of the nation. . . believes that the scientific objectives of the program can be achieved at a fraction of the cost by putting instruments, rather than man, on the moon.” Thus scientists see the issue as “whether the immense additional cost of the man­landing should take a higher priority than using a part of the savings for other essential tasks that would invigorate the economy and create jobs.” Three weeks later, Reston reported that “the debate over the Government’s space budget is getting rough and threatening to create a crisis of confidence in the Administration’s whole space program.” Reston cited the contradic­tions between Vice President Johnson’s claims that the space program was having a positive economic impact with statements by others in the Kennedy administration that in fact the program was taking scientists and engineers away from economically more valuable pursuits. The result, he suggested, was “a confusion of testimony that is bewildering the Congress and drag­ging the space program into the arena of politics.”4

The scientific community’s critique of Apollo was very visibly articulated in an April 19 editorial in the leading journal Science signed by its editor, Philip Abelson. Abelson suggested that “the lasting propaganda value of placing a man on the moon has been vastly overestimated. The first lunar landing will be a great occasion; subsequent boredom is inevitable.” He added that “most of the interesting questions regarding the moon can be studied by electronic devices” and suggested “a re-examination of priorities is in order.” Abelson’s editorial received attention well beyond the scientific community; his criticism was noted in front-page articles in prominent news­papers and in an April 20 appearance on the Today television program.5

Project Apollo became the twentieth-century archetype of a successful, large-scale, government-led program. As peacetime engineering endeavors sponsored by the government, only the construction of the Panama Canal between 1904 and 1914 and the construction of the Interstate Highway System over several decades beginning in the 1950s rivaled Apollo in terms of the scope and difficulty of the task and the scale of human and financial resources required. The success of Apollo has also led to the cliche, “if we can put a man on the Moon, why can’t we. . . ?” In their 2009 book titled with that cliche, Eggers and O’Leary suggest that “democratic governments can achieve great things only if they meet two requirements: wisely choosing which policies to pursue and then executing those policies.”18

I believe that this study demonstrates that Project Apollo met both of these requirements for success. Eggers and O’Leary attribute much of the successful execution of the lunar landing program to the leadership of NASA administrator James Webb. I suggest that many others, both within and out­side of NASA, should share credit for that implementation success, including particularly John Kennedy.19 President Kennedy gave Webb a great deal of freedom to manage NASA as Webb saw fit. A number of times between 1961 and 1963 Kennedy heard from others, often science adviser Jerome Wiesner or budget director David Bell, who questioned or disagreed with the path chosen by Webb. In particular, Wiesner waged a vigorous campaign to over­turn NASA’s choice of the lunar orbit rendezvous approach for carrying out the landing mission. Brainerd Holmes let it be known to Kennedy that Webb opposed his suggestion that the schedule for the first lunar landing be accelerated; Kennedy shared Holmes’s desire for the earliest possible landing. Even the Mercury astronauts took their plea for an additional flight in the Mercury program directly to President Kennedy. In every instance, Kennedy deferred to Webb as the individual responsible for carrying out the space pro­gram and thus the person who should make these decisions. Kennedy’s style as chief executive was to seek as much information as possible in formulating his policy choices, but once a decision was made, Kennedy seldom intervened in its execution.

In my 1970 book, I suggested that “the experience of the lunar landing decision can be generalized to tell us how to proceed toward other ‘great new American enterprises.’ ” I set out in that book four conditions that seemed to me to be requirements for making a wise decision regarding an ambitious future objective:

1. The objective sought must be known to be feasible, with a high degree of probability, at the time the decision to seek it is made.

2. The objective must have been the subject of sufficient political debate so that the groups interested in it and opposed to it can be identified, their positions and relative strengths evaluated, and potential sources of sup­port have time to develop.

3. Some dramatic “occasion for decision,” such as a crisis resulting from an external or domestic challenge, must occur to create an environment in which the objective and the policies to achieve it become politically fea­sible.

4. There must be in leadership positions in the political system individuals whose personalities and political philosophies support the initiation of new large-scale government activities aimed at long-term payoffs and who have the political skill to choose the situations in which such activities can be initiated successfully.

Even writing in 1970, I recognized that the first of these conditions was very limiting, and would not work when the end desired required both tech­nological breakthroughs and significant changes in deep-seated behavior patterns. However, I thought that “finding objectives with high social utility which could be achieved by a specific time using technologies, either physi­cal or social, which are based on existing knowledge is not difficult.”20 Forty years later, I find these comments either remarkably optimistic or remark­ably naive, probably both. What was unique about going to the Moon is that it required no major technological innovations and no changes in human behavior, just mastery over nature using the scientific and technological knowledge available in 1961. There are very few, if any, other potential objec­tives for government action that have these characteristics.

The reality is that attempts to implement other large-scale nondefense programs over the past forty years have never been successful, in the space sector or in the broader national arena. Both President George H. W. Bush in 1989 and President George W. Bush in 2004 set out ambitious visions for the future of space exploration, but neither of those visions became real­ity; the political and budgetary support needed for success were notably missing. More recent attempts to re-create a space race mentality by posit­ing that China was intending to send humans to the Moon before a U. S. return have fallen flat. In 2010, President Barack Obama proposed a dra­matic move away from the Apollo approach to space exploration, stressing the development of new enabling technologies and widespread international collaboration; he also declared that the Moon would not be the first desti­nation as humans traveled beyond Earth orbit. This proposal was met with skepticism and political controversy; as I write these words, its fate is still unclear. In the nonspace sector, there have been few opportunities for large – scale government programs that do not require for their success a combina­tion of technological innovation and significant changes in human behavior. The attempts to declare a “War on Cancer,” for example, required not only research breakthroughs but also changing the smoking habits of millions of Americans. Attempts to move toward U. S. “energy independence” run afoul both limited research and development spending and the complex ties between non-U. S. energy suppliers and the U. S. financial and government sectors. Providing adequate health care for all Americans turns out to be primarily a political, not merely a technical, challenge. Managing global environmental change has both high technical uncertainties and challenging social inertia to overcome. And so on.

Given this situation, I am now inclined to accept an alternative explana­tion that I rejected forty years ago: that the lunar landing decision and the efforts that turned it in into reality were unique occurrences, a once-in-a – generation, or much longer, phenomenon in which a heterogeneous mixture of factors almost coincidentally converged to create a national commitment and enough momentum to support that commitment through to its fulfill­ment. If this is indeed the case, then there is little to learn from the decision to go to the Moon relevant to twenty-first century choices. This would make the lament “if we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we. . . ?” almost devoid of useful meaning except to suggest the possibility that governments can succeed in major undertakings, given the right set of circumstances. Other approaches to carrying out large-scale government programs will have to be developed; the Apollo experience has little to teach us beyond its status as a lasting symbol of a great American achievement.