Category THE RACE

U. S. ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson was scheduled to make a speech to the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space on November 27, and the speech was already in preparation in early November. Recognizing NASA’s reluctance to move out aggressively in sup­port of Kennedy’s proposal, Schlesinger suggested to Bundy that “it might help the current State Department-NASA debate” over the seriousness of the president’s offer if Bundy were to send a message to the State Department saying “I trust that Governor Stevenson’s speech. . . will include an adequate follow-up of the President’s moon proposal.”60

Drafts of Stevenson’s speech prepared prior to November 22 had indeed included such a reiteration. The senior State Department official on U. N. mat­ters, Harlan Cleveland, in a lengthy November 21 memorandum had devel­oped a reasoned justification for continuing to push the cooperative effort. He noted Nikita Khrushchev’s “somewhat erratic” statements on accepting Kennedy’s proposal, which, thought Cleveland, “no doubt reflect internal differences in the Soviet leadership over the desirability of cooperation with the U. S. They may also reflect financial difficulties.” Further, “by postulat­ing that it takes two to make a race. . . Khrushchev has put himself in the best position available in the circumstances—unless it can be demonstrated that it is he who is declining international cooperation.” Thus, “if the U. S. were to go silent on a dialogue initiated by the President, the conclusion no doubt will be drawn that the President has given in to advocates of non-cooperation.” Cleveland noted that “it is assumed that the Soviet Union has much more dif­ficulty with the mere thought of cooperation than we do and that they will have more serious ‘security problems’ at any realistic level of cooperation than we will have.” Thus, the United States would be “safe in shooting for the maximum amount of cooperation that the Soviets can be talked into yield­ing”; the United States should “egg on the Russians to cooperate in an open forum where the maximum influence of the on-looking world community can be brought to bear.” Cleveland opposed integrating the two programs, so that the United States would not have to “weld a U. S. capsule on a Russian rocket, or to mate a clean-cut American astronaut with a chubby cosmonette, or to compromise the security of either state, or to make progress of one national program dependent upon the progress in the other.” Rather, “the point is to put a largely symbolic umbrella over both national programs, plus the contributions of other countries, and to create the image of a mutually cooperative world program to put men on the moon as ‘representatives of all our countries’ regardless of the nationality of the first arrivals.”61

In the aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination, Cleveland noted in a November 23 memorandum that “the entire world will be watching every Administration statement in the days ahead for hints of a change in policies enunciated by President Kennedy.” Cleveland reported that after a November 23 Cabinet meeting, Ambassador Stevenson had raised with new President Lyndon B. Johnson the question of what he should say about President Kennedy’s proposal. Stevenson understood Johnson’s response to be that “he did not want to retreat an inch from the idea of international cooperation in the lunar program.” To make sure that this was indeed the case, Cleveland suggested that President Johnson be asked to review and con­cur with the specific language on this issue in the final draft of Stevenson’s speech. Secretary of State Rusk sent the draft speech to the White House on the next day for presidential review.62

The White House did change the speech draft. Originally the draft said with respect to Kennedy’s proposal: “that offer stands.” The revised version said: “President Johnson has instructed me to reaffirm that offer today.” It also said: “If giant strides cannot be taken at once, we hope that shorter steps can. We believe that there are areas of work—short of integrating the two national programs—from which all could benefit. We should explore the opportunities for practical cooperation, beginning with small steps and hopefully leading to larger matters.” Stevenson included those words in his speech, which was actually delivered on December 2. Although Webb apparently would have preferred that Stevenson not mention space in his speech, he was reported “resigned thereto and will not raise the same with the President.” Frutkin was reported as “very pleased” with the revised text, which reflected the NASA approach to cooperation.63

According to Harvey and Ciccoritti, President Johnson “wanted to keep his options open with respect to cooperation with the Russians, but he wanted to do so in a way that would end controversy at home. . . He was pre­pared to keep faith with the Kennedy lunar offer provided that the Russians came through with something worthwhile on their side.” But as the United States waited for a Soviet offer, “he wanted to get the lunar issue off the front burner. Emphasis for the moment needed to be shifted back to small first steps that were compatible with existing political realities.”64

James Webb on January 31, 1964, transmitted to President Johnson the report that had been prepared in response to JFK’s November 12 request. In his transmittal letter, Webb proposed guidelines to govern negotiations with the Soviet Union on space cooperation: “substantive rather than propaganda objectives alone; well-defined and comparable obligations for both sides; freedom to take independent action; protection of military and national security interests; opportunity for participation by friendly nations; and open dissemination of scientific results.” These guidelines severely limited the scope of potential cooperation. Webb suggested that “on balance, the most realistic and constructive group of proposals which might be advanced to the Soviet Union. . . relates to a joint program of unmanned flight projects to support a manned lunar landing. These projects should be linked so far as possible to a step-by-step approach, ranging from exchange of data already obtained to joint planning of lunar flight missions.” Webb also suggested that “no new high-level US initiative is recommended until the Soviet Union has had a further opportunity (possibly three months) to discharge its cur­rent obligations under the existing NASA-USSR Academy agreement or, in the alternative, until the Soviets respond affirmatively to the proposal you have already made in the UN.”65

The January 31 Webb report was a return to exactly the step-by-step approach the space agency preferred; it reflected “a considerable lowering of sights for cooperation in the lunar area.”66 It certainly did not represent the kind of dramatic approach to space cooperation that had led John F. Kennedy to make such cooperation a continuing element in his strategy for reducing tensions in the U. S.-Soviet relationships.

Whatever the U. S. approach, it was made irrelevant by the lack of a for­mal Soviet response to President Kennedy’s September 20 proposal or to its reiteration by the Johnson administration. Indeed, the Soviet Union did not fully honor even the agreements on limited cooperation that had been reached in 1962, even though some modest U. S.-Soviet cooperation did eventually take place, especially in the biomedical area. As the months passed, President Johnson turned his attention to his ambitious agenda for the Great Society. The United States was of course first to the Moon, and the Soviet Union experienced a series of failures in its lunar program. The opportunity to test whether dramatic space cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union could serve as a counterweight to their Cold War rivalry had passed.

In my 1970 book The Decision to Go to the Moon, I portrayed Kennedy’s 1961 decision to enter a space race with the Soviet Union as closely resem­bling the rational choice model of decision-making, in which a decision­maker identifies a desirable goal to be achieved or a problem to be addressed, assesses various options for achieving that objective, and selects the option with the best ratio of benefits to costs. It is important to note that what makes this decision process “rational” is the purposeful evaluation of alter­natives to achieve a stated goal and the choice of the alternative that embod­ies the best relationship between benefits and costs; the goal itself is a matter of judgment, and must be evaluated on the quality of that judgment. My reconstruction of the decision process in April and May 1961 suggested that

John Kennedy made the following judgments, each of which could be open to debate:

• Kennedy defined the U. S. national interest as requiring this country to be superior to any rival in every aspect of national power.

• This conviction reflected a Cold War interpretation of the international situation in which there was a zero-sum contest for global power and influ­ence conducted between two sharply opposed social and political systems, one led by the United States and the other by the Soviet Union, with an uncommitted “Third World,” and perhaps even more developed countries, deciding with which system it was better to associate.

• National prestige, Kennedy thought, was an important element of national power. As image-conscious as he was, Kennedy judged that what other nations thought about American power and resolve to use it was as impor­tant, if not more important, than the reality of that power. Kennedy once wondered aloud “What is prestige? Is it the shadow of power or the sub­stance of power?” He concluded that prestige was a real factor in acquiring and exercising national power.7

• Kennedy’s own analysis, the answers he got from the many people he que­ried in the weeks following the April 12 launch of Yuri Gagarin, his assess­ment of the national and international reaction to that feat, and the advice he received from people like Lyndon Johnson and James Webb convinced the president that dramatic space achievements were closely tied to national prestige and thus “part of the battle along the fluid front of the cold war.” In addition, Kennedy judged that the potential contributions of space capabilities to military power justified a significant investment in develop­ing those capabilities, albeit through a peaceful, civilian-led effort.

Once these judgments were made, the choice of sending Americans to the Moon emerged from a rapid but searching assessment of what space activity would best achieve a dramatic space “first” before the Soviet Union, thereby both enhancing U. S. prestige and serving as the focal point for the devel­opment of various space capabilities. It was this decision process that can best be characterized as rational. For example, veteran budget official Willis Shapley, who had been observing national security policy choices since he joined the BOB in 1942, commented that “after having been through quite a few major decisions, there was never a major decision like this made with the same degree of eyes-open, knowing-what-you’re getting-in-for” character. Science adviser Jerome Wiesner agreed, saying that he and Kennedy “talked a lot about do we have to do this. He said to me, ‘Well, it’s your fault. If you had a scientific spectacular on this earth that would be more useful—say desalting the ocean—or something that is just as dramatic and convincing as space, then we would do it.’ We talked about a lot of things where we could make a dramatic demonstration—like nation building—and the answer was that there were so many military overtones as well as other things to the space program that you couldn’t make another choice.” Wiesner added that “if Kennedy could have opted out of a big space program without hurting the country in his judgment, he would have.” Also, “these rockets were a surrogate for military power. He had no real options. We couldn’t quit the space race, and we couldn’t condemn ourselves to be second.” Time/Life reporter Hugh Sidey suggests that the Moon project “was a classic Kennedy challenge. If it hadn’t been started, he might have invented it all, since it combined all those elements of intelligence, courage, and teamwork that so intrigued John Kennedy.” Some years later, the admiring Sidey added that in deciding to go to the Moon, Kennedy “heard the poets. He was beyond politics and dollars.”8

The final words on why he decided to go to the Moon belong to President Kennedy himself. We have in the tape recording of his November 21, 1962, meeting with his space and budgetary advisers an uncensored record of his thinking on the reasons behind his commitment. Then he said:

• “This is important for political reasons, international political reasons. This is, whether we like it or not, in a sense a race.”

• “I would certainly not favor spending six or seven billion dollars to find out about space no matter how on the schedule we’re doing. . . Why are we spending seven million dollars on getting fresh water from salt water, when we’re spending seven billion dollars to find out about space? Obviously you wouldn’t put it on that priority except for the defense implications. And the second point is the fact that the Soviet Union has made this a test of the system. So that’s why we’re doing it. So I think we’ve got to take the view that this is the key program. Everything we do ought really to be tied to getting on the Moon ahead of the Russians.”

• “ We’re talking about these fantastic expenditures which wreck our budget and all these other domestic programs and the only justification for it in my opinion to do it in this time or fashion is because we hope to beat them and demonstrate that starting behind, as we did by a couple of years, by God, we passed them.”

• “ I’m not that interested in space.”

The public rhetoric of President Kennedy, particularly the memorable September 1962 speech at Rice University, created the impression that Kennedy was motivated in his support of Apollo by other reasons, and par­ticularly by a long range vision of space exploration. One clear conclusion of this study is that Kennedy was not a space visionary. Rather, he was a prag­matic decision-maker who came to the conclusion that “whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share.”

In the period between the November 8 election and his inauguration, presi­dent-elect Kennedy dealt with only one of these pressing space policy issues, asking vice president-elect Lyndon B. Johnson to assume the chairmanship of the National Aeronautics and Space Council. This request was widely viewed at the time as an indication of the secondary priority that Kennedy was assigning to space. Kennedy also was briefed on January 10 on the report of his task force on outer space, which was chaired by MIT engineer Jerome

Wiesner, who had served as a technical and arms control adviser during the presidential campaign and was the top candidate to be Kennedy’s White House science adviser. Wiesner’s report was very critical of NASA’s organi­zation and management and on the emphasis being placed on the Project Mercury human space flight effort; it also had harsh words for the national security space program.

The Weisner task force had prepared its report without any briefings or other input from NASA, and there was no other direct contact between the incoming administration and NASA’s managers during the transition period. The position of NASA administrator was one of the few senior positions for which no one had been nominated as Kennedy became president. Robert Seamans, who was the NASA associate administrator during the transition, later commented that “during the interval between Kennedy’s election and his inauguration, a sword of Damocles hung over NASA.” Seamans added that rumors that the report of the Weisner group would contain ideas such “as a merger of NASA and the military or a transfer of manned space flight to the military, along with hints about the incompetence of NASA leader­ship,” were “quite unnerving.”47

After the December meetings in which a new space role for the vice presi­dent was discussed, it took several months to sort out just what Kennedy had in mind in this regard. The Bureau of the Budget (BOB) staff in early January drafted a white paper on options for implementing the president­elect’s intent. The paper noted that “a way needs to be found to strengthen Presidential leadership of space activities without requiring an inordinate concentration on such matters to the detriment of the performance of other

Presidential responsibilities.” It suggested that “the President does not need to delegate decision-making on space matters”; rather, “he needs an assistant of stature, without agency ties, who can take the lead in seeing that plans and policies are formulated in the broad national interest and that agencies work together efficiently to this end.” To achieve this, the paper suggested, “the Vice President can provide the necessary assistance by serving essentially as a Presidential assistant on space matters and presiding over the [Space] Council.” The staff paper suggested that there was no immediate need for statutory changes; rather, the president could simply assign responsibility for chairing the Space Council to the vice president, even though he was not by law a member of the Council.

Although science adviser Wiesner attended some of the meetings Johnson called, at no time during this review was the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) as a body consulted about the wisdom of what was being recommended. Wiesner, reflecting the conclusions of the PSAC report that had been presented to President Eisenhower in December 1960, viewed the decision to accelerate the space program with a lunar landing mission as a central undertaking as “a political, not a technical issue. It was not an issue of scientific versus non-scientific issues; it was a use of technological means for political ends. It was on these considerations that I did not involve PSAC.” Wiesner did tell the president that PSAC “would never accept this kind of expenditure on scientific grounds.” Kennedy accepted this and in turn promised Wiesner that he would never justify the lunar mission in terms of its scientific payoffs.21

Somewhat surprisingly, there was another key individual who was some­what skeptical of the push for a major acceleration of the space program, with landing on the Moon before the Soviet Union as its central feature—NASA administrator James Webb. Webb described himself as “a relatively cautious person. I think when you decide you’re going to do something and put the prestige of the United States government behind it, you’d better be doggone well be able to do it.”22 Webb was reluctant to commit himself to a lunar landing effort until he was convinced that it was technologically sound, that NASA had the capability to execute it, and that it “did not go beyond what I thought Kennedy was willing to approve.” Webb wrote Wiesner on May 2, noting that the budget figures that had accompanied NASA’s April 22 presentation to the vice president had been put together “in a great hurry” and did not represent the results “of a careful study of the technological bottlenecks or difficulties.” Webb asked Wiesner to join him in insuring that the program to be recommended to the president “has real value and validity and from which solid additions to knowledge can be made, even if every case of the specific so-called ‘spectacular’ flights or events are done after they have been accomplished by the Russians.”23 By acting to emphasize his con­cern with the underlying validity of the accelerated program, Webb hoped both to maintain his good working relationship with Wiesner and, through Wiesner, the scientific community, and to influence the program recom­mendations so that if necessary he could later defend the program against charges that it was aimed only at prestige and was fundamentally distorted and unsound. Webb, in essence, “wanted to contain and shape the decision to reflect favorably on NASA, the nation, and himself.”24

The burden of White House oversight of NASA and its plans for implement­ing the lunar landing program and the other activities that were part of the accelerated space effort thus fell on various members of the White House staff and those career bureaucrats supporting them.9 Although most of those individuals have been mentioned previously, it may be useful to depict the structure of White House decision-making for space before discussing the specific actions taken during the June 1961 to December 1962 period.

The recommendation that President Kennedy approved in accelerating the U. S. space program suggested that the prestige associated with space achievements was “part of the battle along the fluid front of the Cold War.” Kennedy defined the lunar landing program primarily as a national security effort, and that meant that his special assistant for national security affairs, McGeorge Bundy, played an increasingly important role in space policy discussions between 1961 and 1963. Bundy’s deputy, Harvard economist Carl Kaysen, and National Security Council career staff member Charles E. Johnson played key roles in supporting Bundy on space issues; Kaysen also had a direct personal relationship with the president, particularly on arms control issues, and on occasion reported directly to Kennedy rather than through Bundy. On technical issues, Kennedy relied on his special assis­tant for science and technology, Jerome Wiesner, and various panels of the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC). From the start of 1962, Wiesner’s principal staff assistant on space matters was Nicholas Golovin, a physicist who had left NASA at the end of 1961 on less than harmonious terms. Another of Wiesner’s staffers, Eugene Skolnikoff, dealt with the inter­national aspects of the space effort. In August 1961 Wiesner was designated the White House official (instead of Welsh, the Space Council executive secretary) “to review and consult with relevant agencies of the Federal gov­ernment on organizational planning for the expanded space activities of the Federal government.”10 As planning for the accelerated space program moved forward, the president became increasingly concerned with its expo­nentially increasing costs. He leaned heavily on his director of BOB, David Bell, for careful assessments of the budgetary implications of the fast-paced space program. Bell’s deputy, Elmer Staats, and especially career BOB senior staffer Willis Shapley were deeply involved in space matters. Shapley was cen­tral to framing policy and budget issues as he drafted various policy papers for presidential review and decision.

Kennedy’s top adviser on most domestic policy matters, in addition to his duties as Kennedy’s speechwriter, was special counsel Theodore C. Sorensen. Kennedy in April 1961 had asked Sorensen to organize the review of the space program that was carried out by Vice President Johnson. Sorensen remained involved in space policy decisions as the president’s alter ego on most policy matters, but he seldom got directly involved with NASA over­sight as the Moon program evolved. On politically sensitive matters, such as the allocation of NASA contracts and the location of NASA’s facilities, Kennedy’s special assistant Kenneth O’Donnell became involved. Although he was the president’s closest confidant on most policy and political matters, Kennedy’s brother Robert seemingly had only limited involvement on space issues, although it is impossible to know how frequently space matters were discussed between the two brothers. It thus fell to Bundy, Wiesner, and Bell and their staff to be the primary points of contact between the White House and NASA as the U. S. space effort took its first steps toward a landing on the Moon.

Bilateral U. S.-U. S.S. R. cooperation was thus the preferred alternative to cooperating through the United Nations, and active discussion of this pos­sibility had begun soon after the president’s January 30 speech. Philip Farley, special assistant to the secretary of state for atomic energy and outer space, told Secretary Rusk on February 9 that he had been meeting with Wiesner and acting NASA administrator Dryden and had found “a good deal of uncertainty and diversity of expert opinion as to what makes technical and practical sense in the three areas mentioned in the President’s State of the Union message. . . as well as other possible areas of space cooperation.” To address this situation, the White House set up a “Task Force on International Cooperation in Space” in early February. The group was composed of both non-governmental people, particularly members of and consultants to the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), and officials from NASA, the Department of State, and the White House science office. The task force was charged both with identifying “the full range of possibilities for coop­erative efforts” and describing “the optimum shape of possible international cooperation in outer space. . . on the basis of pooling or even merging of efforts in a world-wide venture. . . Such a description of optimum interna­tional cooperation in space activities would be an important contribution to re-examination of U. S. objectives and programs in outer space.”11 The group was chaired by Bruno Rossi, a professor of physics at MIT, who had been a member of the Wiesner transition panel on outer space.

The task force carried out its examination between February 17 and mid-March.12 It came up with twenty-two specific proposals for U. S.-Soviet space cooperation, ranging from projects involving only data exchanges or coordination of separate projects, to intimate cooperation in ambitious proj­ects for the human exploration of the Moon and the robotic exploration of the planets, particularly Mars. At the first meeting on February 17, one of the members of the task force, Richard Porter of General Electric, submit­ted a memorandum suggesting a U. S.-Soviet “Rendezvous on the Moon” project to establish an international base on the surface of the Moon, along the lines of scientific bases in the Antarctic. Porter suggested that “if agree­ment could be reached on this major project between the United States and the USSR, all other bilateral and multilateral cooperative projects involving the USSR would become feasible and operative”; the group found this pro­posal intriguing. The thought was that if the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to cooperate in lunar exploration, they would then invite other nations to join in.13

As the Rossi task force was completing its examination, senior govern­ment officials were also discussing U. S.-Soviet space cooperation. On March 8, Rusk met with new NASA administrator Webb and deputy administra­tor Dryden. Rusk told the NASA officials that there was “keen interest in the possibility of a productive approach to the Soviet Union for outer space cooperation.” Webb’s reaction was that, given the current uncertainty regarding the Kennedy administration’s approach to space, a “decision on approaches to the Soviets was secondary to deciding what the United States wanted to do in space.” Webb spoke of the opportunities for foreign rela­tions inherent in the space program, and told Rusk that in his three weeks since becoming NASA administrator he had concluded that there was a need for acceleration of the NASA program and increased funding “by a substantial amount.” Rusk in reply wondered “what the purpose was of activities in space on this major scale. Should not the objectives be clearly identified and undertaken not competitively but on behalf of the human race as a whole.”14 State Department leadership remained throughout the Apollo program a source of skepticism of the value of a unilateral large-scale space effort.

The Rossi task force submitted its final report to Wiesner on March 20. The report noted that “a cooperative enterprise in this new and bold ven­ture would stimulate constructive thinking on the part of people all over the world and help reduce world tensions,” and that “it is vitally important for the avoidance of future conflicts to establish early cooperation in such fields where unchecked competition is likely to produce a dangerous situa­tion” such as “meteorological activities that might eventually lead to weather control, and large scale exploration of the moon and planets.” The report suggested that the United States should “give preference to projects that avoid the difficulties connected with a high degree of [Soviet] involvement or else to projects that are sufficiently bold and dramatic to sweep aside these difficulties.” Wiesner told Rossi that the task force had done a “superb” job in providing “the essential scientific judgment that is prerequisite for any political action that may follow.”15

The task force report was next reviewed and revised by several of the government agencies involved in the space program. An April 4 draft report of this second review set out the political rationale for expanded U. S.-Soviet space cooperation: “ The objectives are to confirm concretely the U. S. pref­erence for a cooperative rather than competitive approach to space explora­tion, to contribute to reduction of Cold War tensions by demonstrating the possibility of cooperative enterprise between the U. S. and the USSR in a field of major public concern, and to achieve the substantive advantages of cooperation that in major projects would impose more of a strain on eco­nomic and manpower resources if carried out unilaterally.”16

Interestingly, this paragraph was missing in an April 13 draft of the report, perhaps reflecting a shift in White House thinking toward a more competitive stance in space in the wake of Yuri Gagarin’s April 12 orbital flight. Three categories of cooperative proposals were suggested in that draft: (1) use of existing or easily attainable ground facilities for the exchange of information and services; (2) coordination of independently launched satel­lite experiments; and (3) “coordination or cooperation in ambitious projects for the manned exploration of the moon and the unmanned exploration of the planets.” With regard to the third category, the document suggested “as a first step in non-limited cooperative effort, the U. S. and the USSR would each undertake to place a small party (about 3) of men on the moon.” Such an undertaking would have the “greatest potential for matching the President’s theme that ‘Both nations would help themselves as well as other nations by removing these endeavors from the bitter and wasteful competi­tion of the Cold War.’ ”17

An early start on U. S.-Soviet space cooperation was not in the cards, how­ever. Even as the task force began its work, President Kennedy was receiv­ing initial indications that the Soviet Union was unlikely to be receptive to the kind of initiatives he had in mind. On February 13, he congratulated Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev on the launching of a Soviet scientific probe to Venus. In his reply, Khrushchev took note of Kennedy’s coopera­tive overtures in his inaugural address and State of the Union speech, but indicated that the creation of “favorable conditions” for space cooperation would require “settlement of the problem of disarmament.”18 This repeated the Soviet policy line of several years standing, linking cooperation in vari­ous areas, including space, to a U. S.-Soviet disarmament agreement, and did not auger well for the Kennedy approach of isolating areas of common U. S.- Soviet interest for cooperation even if tensions remained in the two coun­tries’ security relationship. Even so, as he met with new NASA administrator James Webb on March 22, the president stressed to Webb “his desire that we try to work out as many ideas as possible for utilization in the proposed conference with the Russians [a hoped-for Kennedy-Khrushchev summit meeting] for international cooperation. He said he hoped we would give this very high level attention.”19

A combination of factors—the increasing costs of Apollo, emerging Congressional opposition to those rapid increases, growing critiques of Apollo from leaders of the scientific and liberal communities, the uncer­tainty of whether the Soviet Union was in fact racing the United States to the Moon, and suggestions, coming primarily from the Republican opposi­tion, that there needed to be additional emphasis on the national security uses of space—led to President Kennedy’s asking several times during 1963 whether the original justifications for keeping Project Apollo on its planned schedule—and indeed, for the project itself—were still valid. In addition, the successful outcome of the Cuban missile crisis, the easing of tensions over Berlin, the signing of the Limited Test Ban Treaty, and Kennedy’s over­all desire to reach out to the Soviet Union with a new “strategy of peace” may have suggested to Kennedy that demonstrating U. S. technological and managerial superiority vis-a-vis the Soviet Union through a spectacular space achievement had lost some of its urgency.

President Kennedy’s rationale regarding the reasons why he had decided to accelerate the U. S. space program matured in the course of 1963. In November 1962 he had disagreed with James Webb, who had argued that the goal of the acceleration was preeminence in all areas of space activity; in response, Kennedy had insisted that “everything we do ought really to be tied to getting on the Moon ahead of the Russians,” and that he was “not that interested” in being the leader in other areas of space activity. Webb won his point; from mid-1963 on, Kennedy justified the fast-paced space pro­gram primarily in terms of its overall contribution to national power rather than as a race to the Moon. For example, in his July 17 press conference following reports that the Soviet Union did not in fact have a lunar land­ing program, Kennedy said: “The point of the matter always has been not only of our excitement or interest in being on the moon, but the capacity to dominate space, which would be demonstrated by a moon flight, I believe is essential to the United States as a leading free world power. That is why I

am interested in it and that is why I think we should continue.” Again in his October 31 press conference, Kennedy had said: “In my opinion the space program we have is essential to the security of the United States, because as I have said many times before it is not a question of going to the moon. It is a question of having the competence to master this environment.”1

It is important to realize that Kennedy’s decision to go to the Moon was not made once and for all time in April and May 1961. By mid-1961, Kennedy began questioning the costs associated with Apollo, and several times in 1962 and again, more intensely, in 1963 there were in-depth reviews of Apollo’s cost and schedule, asking each time whether the benefits of going ahead as planned justified the very high costs involved. In 1963, Kennedy saw an opportunity to cooperate with the Soviet Union in going to the Moon as a means of reducing U. S. costs while achieving other important strategic objectives; if the Soviet Union had responded positively, it certainly would have changed the character of Project Apollo.

There was thus not a single decision to aim at a lunar landing, but rather a series of decisions, each time with alternative paths being considered and each time with the resulting choice being to proceed with the program to land Americans on the Moon “before this decade is out,” either as a uni­lateral undertaking or cooperatively. Only at the very end of the Kennedy administration was serious consideration given to slipping the end of the decade schedule, and even then the decision made was to reject such slippage and to stay with the planned schedule.

Kennedy’s consistently reiterated commitment to Apollo can be best understood in terms of how he carried out his presidency overall. Theodore Sorensen, as he prepared Columbia University lectures which were later pub­lished as his book Decision-Making in the White House, asked national secu­rity adviser McGeorge Bundy for suggestions on what to say. Bundy replied that “the modes of Presidential decision are enormously varied,” that “deci­sions are made through the ceaseless process by which, if an administration is lively, recommendations and proposals are ground forward,” and that in a sense “the entire presidential existence is. . . a process of decision.” Viewing JFK’s commitment to Apollo in these terms is particularly useful. Bundy suggested that “the president’s larger policies: an open door to Moscow, an open door to all underdog Americans, an open door to intelligence and hope, honor to bravery, equal sense of past and future, gallantry to beauty, and pride in politics” were “colors of a permanent palette” and were reflected “in the small as well as the large decisions, drawn from in a hundred ways.”9 Policies in the space arena were indeed a reflection of Kennedy’s broader objectives as president. As Sorensen suggests, reflecting the multiple facets of Kennedy’s space strategy: [4]

addition, our relations with the Soviets, following the Cuban missile crisis and the test ban treaty, were much improved—so the President felt that, without harming any of those three goals, we now were in a position to ask the Soviets to join us and make it efficient and economical for both countries.

President Kennedy himself explained the subtlety of his space strategy as he wrote Congressman Albert Thomas in the aftermath of his September 20, 1963, proposal at the United Nations that the journey to the Moon become a cooperative undertaking: “This great national effort and this steadily stated readiness to cooperate with others are not in conflict. They are mutually supporting elements of a single policy.” Kennedy added: “If cooperation is possible, we mean to cooperate, and we shall do so from a position made strong and solid by our national effort in space. If coop­eration is not possible—and as realists we must plan for this contingency too—then the same strong national effort will serve all free men’s inter­est in space, and protect us also against possible hazards to our national security.”

One analyst of the Kennedy presidency correctly comments that “there would have been no race to the moon without the Cold War; the space pro­gram became as much a part of that conflict as Cuba, Berlin, and Laos.”10 Whatever President Kennedy, Vice President Johnson, and NASA admin­istrator Webb said about the purposes of Project Apollo in their public rhetoric, from the time that Kennedy asked Johnson to identify “a space program that promises dramatic results in which we could win,” it was well understood within the government that the primary objective of Apollo was winning a Cold War-inspired competition to be first to the Moon. To those more focused on the totality of the U. S. space program than was John Kennedy, it was also clear from 1961 on that a program aimed at sending Americans to the Moon could serve as a focal point for the develop­ment of space capabilities of strategic value for the United States. By 1963, President Kennedy had seemingly also embraced that view. The November 1963 “Special Space Report” recommending proceeding with Apollo on its then-planned schedule clearly stated that “principal purposes” of the lunar landing program were (1) “demonstrating an important space achievement ahead of the USSR”; (2) “serving as a focus for technological developments necessary for other space objectives and having potential significance for national defense”; and (3) “acquiring useful scientific and other data to the extent feasible.” These were the reasons John F. Kennedy decided in 1961 to go to the Moon, and they remained the objectives of Apollo at the time of his death.

This stability in the actual reasons for the lunar race served as the politi­cal foundation for White House decisions to allocate the massive resources required for Apollo’s success, even after Kennedy’s assassination. It is perhaps his willingness to stay the course in the face of increasing criticisms of the path in space that he had chosen that most indicates the quality and strength of John F. Kennedy’s original decision to go to the Moon.

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.