Category THE RACE

Responding both to President Kennedy’s concern over the increasing costs of the U. S. space effort and criticisms such as those in the August Reader’s Digest that there was too much emphasis on the lunar landing program at the expense of space efforts more directly relevant to national security, the White House in late September 1963 initiated a sweeping review of the U. S. civilian and military space programs and the balance between them. Representative Olin Teague a few days after Kennedy’s September 20 United Nations speech had written to President Kennedy, saying that he was “very anxious to know whether this national goal [being first to the Moon] was being abandoned or changed” and that he was “disappointed” at the sug­gestion of cooperation in the undertaking with the Soviet Union.1 National security adviser McGeorge Bundy replied on October 4 that he and White House congressional liaison Larry O’Brien had discussed Teague’s letter with the president. Bundy told Teague that Kennedy asked Bundy to contact Teague with “an interim answer to the important question which you raise” regarding the national security implications of the cooperative proposal. Bundy told the congressman that “the relation between national security and the space program is very clear and important in the President’s judg­ment, and he is currently engaged in a major review of the relative roles of different agencies. . . We can assure you that there will be new expressions of the Administration’s point of view.”2

What precisely was meant by the tantalizing term “new expressions” was not specified. But apparently there were some people advising President Kennedy that it was not necessary to continue the fast-paced effort to reach the Moon by the end of the decade; for example, secretary of state Dean Rusk in an October 3 meeting with the president suggested taking 15-20 years to reach the lunar surface. Others argued that more emphasis should be placed on human flights in Earth orbit carried out under Department of Defense auspices. NASA’s Webb saw Kennedy’s United Nations speech as “a slight withdrawal of support” for Apollo, a “slight testing of the sentiment

as to whether the program could stand without his strong support.” Webb saw the speech as reflecting a “feeling that this was just the beginning of a group around him [Kennedy] who wanted to withdraw support.” Who the members of this “group” were was not clear to Webb; he suggested in a 1969 interview that “I don’t know whether it meant Schlesinger and Sorensen or whether it meant the disarmament [and] arms control [advocates] or whether it meant Mr. McNamara. I would simply say those around him.”3

On November 8, 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected by a very narrow margin as the thirty-fifth President of the United States; his victory was confirmed only shortly after noon on the next day. In the following ten weeks before he took the oath of office, president-elect Kennedy moved forward briskly on many of the issues that he had highlighted in the campaign. However, he paid very limited attention to space topics during his transition activities. While the perceived lack of urgency in the Eisenhower administration’s space efforts may have been a useful issue to stress in the campaign, the reality was that the president-elect and his advisers did not give high priority to addressing either immediate or longer-term space questions during the post­election transition period. There was no contact made with the new National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which had begun opera­tions two years earlier, on October 1, 1958. Kennedy prior to his inaugura­tion nominated no one to replace Eisenhower appointee T. Keith Glennan as NASA administrator. As John F. Kennedy took the oath of office on January 20, 1961, there was thus significant uncertainty about the future of the U. S. space effort.

The first result of this “peace-making” effort was a February 23 agreement signed by Webb and Gilpatric, confirming the desirability of a single national launch vehicle program and indicating that neither NASA nor DOD would begin the development of a new space launcher without the written acknowl­edgment of such a step from the other agency. On February 24, Webb and Dryden met with McNamara, Gilpatric, and director of defense research and engineering Herbert York, an Eisenhower holdover. The group agreed that Webb and Gilpatric would meet “from time to time for lunch and would bring others as needed” as a way to coordinate NASA and DOD space activi­ties at the top level. They agreed on the need for a review in “about four weeks” from the date of the meeting to determine the need for accelerat­ing the existing space program; there was “a general feeling that we should accelerate the booster program.” There was discussion of a possible omnibus bill to cover all space activities in both NASA and DOD (an idea which was never implemented). Writing to budget director David Bell a few days later, Webb described the February 24 meeting as “splendid.”26

Webb’s biographer W. Henry Lambright suggests that NASA-DOD agreement was possible because Robert McNamara was already “trying to constrain the expansionist tendencies of the services” and wanted to use NASA “as a check on the air force.” In addition, both McNamara and Webb recognized that “if they failed to settle differences at the NASA-DOD level, Lyndon Johnson would have the opportunity to stake out a stronger claim for coordinating them through the National Aeronautics and Space Council.” Webb saw this period as part of a process in which NASA and the DOD were “like two strange animals. . . sparring around, smelling each other, seeing what could be done, testing each other out.”27

Shortly after taking office, McNamara had requested a review examining whether the Wiesner Task Force criticism of a “fractionated military space program” was valid. Based on this review and conversations within DOD, McNamara decided to centralize management of Department of Defense space efforts in the Air Force, and on March 6 issued a directive to that effect.28 This was not, however, exactly the outcome that the Air Force had hoped for, given the preceding NASA-DOD agreements; from McNamara’s perspective, centralizing space activity in one organization made it easier for him to exercise tighter control over that activity.

The next morning, April 14, Robert Seamans and George Low appeared before the committee, and were subject to even more intense pressure. Seamans in particular put himself in a vulnerable position with respect to administration policy, saying that although there were no plans at that time to ask Congress for funding for Project Apollo, the post-Mercury human space flight effort, it might indeed be possible with an accelerated effort to land on the Moon by 1967. Seamans noted that doing so would require “a very major undertaking. To compress the program by 3 years [the date of the first lunar landing in the recently revised NASA planning was 1970] means that greatly increased funding would be required. . . I certainly cannot state that this is an impossible objective. It comes down to a matter of national policy.” Seamans added that he would be “the first to review it wholeheart­edly to see what it would take to do the job. My estimate at the moment is that the goal may very well be achievable.” Seamans was, of course, well aware of the February report of George Low’s committee that had said that a lunar landing within the decade was technologically feasible; he was also aware of Kennedy’s decision in March not to approve additional funding for human space flight beyond Project Mercury, even as he provided addi­tional funding for larger space boosters. Seamans’s comments, coming just as the committee and the media were calling for an accelerated space effort, appeared to be adding NASA pressure on the president to the pressure com­ing from the House committee and the media; this was an uncomfortable position for Seamans to be in. He recalls that “it was unwise for an underling to get out ahead of the President.”15

Indeed, President Kennedy was not at all happy to read in the next day’s newspapers that a NASA official had made public statements that seemed to preempt what would necessarily be a presidential decision. The Washington Post headline read “Reaching the Moon First Would Cost Billions” and its story began, “A multi-billion dollar crash space program might put an American on the Moon by 1967—a top Government official said yesterday.” The New York Times headlined its report on Seamans’ testimony “costly drive might bring landing by ‘67.” Administrator Webb got both a message from budget director David Bell and a “strongly worded” letter from Kenneth O’Donnell asking about the testimony; O’Donnell was one of the presi­dent’s top assistants and his policy “enforcer.” For a few days, Seamans’ job was in real jeopardy, but Webb was able to calm the White House concern. In a letter to O’Donnell, Webb noted that the committee was in a “runaway mood” and that “the members of the Committee, almost without exception, were in a mood to try to find someone responsible for losing the race to the Russians” and were seeking information “that would focus public attention on the Committee, and the role it had chosen for itself as the goad to force a large increase in the program.” He defended Robert Seamans, saying that he had done “an exceptionally fine job” of resisting the committee’s inquiries with respect to NASA’s relations with the Bureau of the Budget (BOB)and the president.16

The BOB review did not attempt to assign a cost to the overall Apollo proj­ect through the planned first landing. In preparing NASA administrator Webb for possible questions at the press briefing planned to follow President Kennedy’s May 25 speech, NASA’s public affairs chief Bill Lloyd suggested that the answer to the questions “What is your best estimate? How many billions of dollars would the lunar landing program cost?” should be “our best guess is in the neighborhood of $20 billion.”17 The origins of this $20 billion figure apparently lie with James Webb. Robert Seamans reports that the NASA staff estimate for the additional cost of the lunar landing program above what had been previously planned was in the range of $10 to $12 billion; Hugh Dryden had used an $11.4 billion increment in his April 22 presentation to Vice President Johnson. According to Seamans, “Jim Webb put an ‘administrator’s discount’ on our ability to predict costs precisely.” Lambright suggests that Webb’s administrative discount applied both to announcing a date for the first landing attempt and for a precise cost of the project. With respect to the landing date, Webb wanted “a margin of flex­ibility weighted against what the technical experts thought was possible, just in case something went wrong. He did not want the prestige of the nation (much less his own reputation) resting on an overly optimistic deadline.” With respect to the projected costs, the $10 to $12 billion estimate “looked much too low to Webb. Because no one could anticipate all the contingen­cies, he enlarged the figure NASA sent Kennedy to $20 billion for the first lunar journey.” There are stories, apparently apocryphal, that Webb doubled the Apollo cost estimate during a ten-minute car ride from NASA headquar­ters to Capitol Hill; Seamans’s account suggest that there was substantially more thought given to the cost estimate than such stories would suggest.18

One critical decision with respect to the lunar landing project still remained unsettled as President Kennedy prepared in September 1962 to make an inspection tour of the facilities being developed for the accelerated space effort. That decision was the best approach to getting astronauts to the lunar surface. NASA in July 1962 had selected as its preferred approach rendez­vous in lunar orbit, a way to the Moon that had emerged in its consideration only at the very end of 1961. Kennedy’s science adviser Wiesner and his staff did not agree with this choice, and were actively pressuring NASA to reverse it in favor of an Earth orbit rendezvous approach. The president’s September 11-12 visit to NASA and industry installations was intended to give him an overview of the human space flight effort in preparation for the hard budget decisions that all knew were upcoming later in the year; it also exposed him to the ongoing argument about the choice of how best to fly to the Moon. It was also on this trip that John F. Kennedy at Rice University in Houston gave his most memorable address on the reasons why he had chosen to accel­erate the U. S. space effort.

As he toured the NASA facilities, Kennedy, as was his style, asked many questions, and learned that some within NASA believed that the first landing on the Moon could come as much as a year sooner than the late 1967 date that was at that point NASA’s target. To advance the landing date by that many months would require requesting from Congress an extra short-term supplement to the NASA budget, and there was considerable debate during October and November 1962 about the wisdom of that action. Adding more money to the human space flight budget was strongly advocated by associate administrator for manned space flight Brainerd Holmes, but equally strongly resisted by NASA administrator James Webb. Their disagreement escalated into tensions that culminated in Holmes leaving NASA in mid-1963.

The debate over extra money for NASA led to a November 21 White House meeting in which President Kennedy and Webb disagreed about the prior­ity of the lunar landing program compared to other NASA activities. In the

aftermath of this meeting, President Kennedy reluctantly decided not to try to accelerate the Apollo schedule, and to continue on the path of requesting funds for NASA adequate to maintain the late 1967 target date for the first lunar landing attempt. Even pursuing that path required a NASA Fiscal Year 1964 budget request of $5.712 billion, an increase of 55 percent over the NASA FY1963 budget of $3.674 billion but almost a half billion dollars less than what NASA had requested in September 1962. The continuing exponen­tial increase in NASA funding came at a time when Kennedy and his White House advisers were striving to limit overall budget growth, even as the finan­cial demands of Apollo approached 4 percent of the total federal budget.

The meeting with Ambassador Kohler on September 17 was apparently the final confirmation of Soviet interest Kennedy needed to decide to insert the cooperative offer into his United Nations speech. Kennedy kept a pre­viously scheduled September 18 appointment with NASA administrator James Webb to discuss a variety of space policy and budget issues. In a memorandum to the president in advance of the meeting, national secu­rity adviser McGeorge Bundy reported that Webb had called him to say that there had been “more forthcoming noises about cooperation from Blagonravov in the UN” and that “Webb himself is quite open to an explo­ration of possible cooperation with the Soviets” in the lunar landing effort. Bundy added that “the obvious choice is whether to press for cooperation or to continue to use the Soviet space effort as a spur to our own,” and that his “own hasty judgment is that the central question here is whether to compete or to cooperate with the Soviets in a manned lunar landing.” Bundy noted that:

1 If we compete, we should do everything we can to unify all agencies of the United States Government in a combined space program which comes as near to our existing pledges as possible;

2 If we cooperate, the pressure comes off, and we can easily argue that it was our crash effort on ’61 and ’62 which made the Soviets ready to cooper­ate.

Bundy added: “I am for cooperation if it is possible, and I think we need to make a really major effort inside and outside the government to find out in fact whether in fact it can be done.”28 Bundy’s preference for a coopera­tive approach was an important complement to Kennedy’s own inclinations, given the increasing reliance that the president was placing on Bundy’s views on national security and foreign policy issues.

By the time he met with Webb on September 18, Kennedy had all but finally decided to proceed with the cooperative proposal. According to Webb, “the President said that he was thinking of making another effort with respect to cooperation with the Russians, and that he might do it before the United Nations, and he said ‘Are you in sufficient control to prevent my being undercut in NASA if I do that?’ So in a sense he didn’t ask me if he should do it; he told me he thought he should do it and wanted to do it and that he wanted some assurance from me as to whether he would be undercut at NASA.”29

Robert Gilruth, the director of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, the NASA facility with the lead role in the Moon mission, on September 17 (at which point he had no idea that the President would pro­pose just that in three days) had “ruled out as impractical” the suggestion of a joint mission, even though the proposal “would be very interesting.” The article reporting Gilruth’s remarks appeared in The New York Times on the morning of September 18, and was probably the reason Kennedy asked

Webb at their meeting that day if he could control the NASA response to his cooperative proposal. Harvey and Ciccoritti suggest that “actually Webb had serious reservations about the enterprise, but felt that since the President was telling him and not asking him, it would be best to simply go along with the President’s wishes.” Webb’s fear was that damage might be done the U. S. program without any real prospect of achieving anything insofar as the Russians were concerned. Webb also felt that there had not been suf­ficient consultation within the administration and with congressional lead­ers. Indeed, given the last minute insertion of the cooperative proposal into the speech, no one in the Congress had been consulted. Neither, appar­ently, had Vice President Johnson or at least his Space Council staff; Edward Welsh called the proposal “startling” and wondered whether “it will have any impact other than to show our willingness to cooperate and possibly to suggest further slow-downs by the Congress.” The staff of NASA was also not happy to hear of the president’s intent; its effect was “to cause consterna­tion in the Space Agency because it had not been consulted on a matter so vital to its objectives and timetable.”30

On September 19, Soviet foreign minister Gromyko in his address to the UN General Assembly suggested that following the Limited Test Ban Treaty with additional steps in relaxing global tensions was desirable; this was inter­preted at the White House as a further indication that the time was ripe for a dramatic U. S. proposal on space cooperation. The cooperative proposal was incorporated in Theodore Sorensen’s final draft of Kennedy’s United Nations speech, prepared only on September 19. The same day, Bundy tele­phoned James Webb and told him that the president had decided to go ahead with the proposal. Webb “immediately telephoned directions around to the [NASA] centers to make no comment of any kind or description on this matter.”31

Thus the stage was set. Kennedy’s September 20 address was intended to set out the role of the United Nations in his strategy of peace. This was so because, he proclaimed, in the organization’s development, “rests the only true alternative to war, and war appeals no longer as a rational alterna­tive.” Kennedy noted that “the clouds have lifted a little” as result of various U. S.-Soviet interactions over the preceding months, leading to a “pause in the Cold War.” Such a pause, he suggested, could lead to the Soviet Union and the United States, together with their allies, finding additional areas of agreement. It was in this context that Kennedy proposed that the United States and the Soviet Union join together, so that the first people to travel to the moon “would not be representatives of a single nation, but representa­tives of all our countries.”32

In this context, on October 5, 1963, senior officials from NASA and Department of Defense (DOD), including James Webb and Robert McNamara, met at the Pentagon with McGeorge Bundy. Bundy told them that the White House wanted a comprehensive review of the space program and that as part of that review, the two agencies would be asked several ques­tions:

1. “What are the minimum elements of the space program essential to the lunar landing program?”

2. “What are the minimum elements of the space program essential to clearly specified military requirements?”

3. “What are the minimum elements of the space program essential to user requirements in areas common to military and commercial users (e. g. communications satellites, weather satellites, etc.)?”

4. “What are the elements essential to or desirable for scientific objectives in space?”

Bundy informed the officials that the NASA and DOD efforts in response to this set of questions would not only be used to rationalize the overall national space program to balance civilian and national security space efforts, to minimize duplication of effort, and thus to contain costs. They would also be inputs into a second review in which a task force headed by the director of the Bureau of the Budget (BOB) would “determine, in light of the FY1964 and FY1965 budget pressures, what should be set forth as the goals of the U. S. space program and what the nature and pace of the program should be.”4 The continuing commitment to a lunar landing before the end of the decade was very much a part of this second review.

In response to this directive, NASA and DOD in October and November first conducted a series of separate studies on the various elements of their individual programs. Then, during November and December, they carried out five joint studies in the areas of launch vehicles, manned Earth orbital activities, communications satellites, geodetic, mapping, and weather satellite programs, and various ground facilities. These studies were not completed until January 1964, and with one important exception discussed below, did not lead to major changes in the already planned NASA and DOD space efforts.5

As the White House-mandated review was underway, Nikita Khrushchev on October 25 made a statement reported by The New York Times with the headline “Soviet Bars Race with U. S. to Land Men on the Moon.” A few days later, well-informed Times reporter John Finney suggested “for months the Administration had been trying to back away from the idea of a lunar race.” Even so, suggested Finney, for the United States “the question is not whether to go to the moon or not,” but rather “the pace at which the lunar expedition should be pursued,” particularly, as Khrushchev had seemed to suggest, if the Soviet Union was not engaged in a competitive lunar effort. Finney’s conclusion was that “the United States will not abandon the lunar expedition, but it will be pursued with less competitive zeal and at a more leisurely pace.”6

It seems clear that indeed there was White House consideration being given at this point in time to carrying out Apollo at “a more leisurely pace.” In preparation for an October 31 presidential press conference, Charles Johnson of the National Security Council staff had suggested to McGeorge Bundy that there was “some merit in trying to unhitch ourselves from the idea of going to the moon in this decade as a hard proposition and focusing public attention on the critical period 1966-1967 when we will know if we have achieved adequate booster power” with the first launch of the Saturn V rocket. Bundy appears to have been sympathetic to such a suggestion; in September, he had told Kennedy that “the obvious choice [with respect to the future of the lunar landing program] is whether to press for cooperation or to continue to use the Soviet space effort as a spur to our own,” and that his preference was for cooperation, since “If we cooperate, the pressure comes off, and we can easily argue that it was our crash effort on ‘61 and ‘62 which made the Soviets ready to cooperate.”7

Charles Johnson’s suggestion of focusing on demonstrating the supe­rior booster power of the Saturn V launcher rather than achieving a lunar landing by the end of the decade was in line with the thinking of some top people in NASA. The NASA assistant administrator for public affairs, Julian Scheer, sent to the White House both an initial statement issued by the space agency the day after Khrushchev’s October 25 remarks and a fuller statement reflecting “thoughts developed by the Administrator, Associate Administrator and the Assistant Administrator for Public Affairs.” The October 26 statement said: “We will continue to conduct our own program according to our own needs” and the U. S. program “has a brake and a throttle.” The fuller statement noted that “as a practical matter, the time for a decision on whether to speed up or slow down a space program such as the program we have developed and is now underway cannot be made at this time.” This was because “technology comes from passing certain criti­cal points. One of these is booster power and we will not pass this critical point until 1965-66 when we should equal or surpass the Russian booster launch vehicle power.”8

NASA was concerned, however, that the White House not make a pre­mature statement suggesting significant changes in the end-of-the-decade goal, even if that possibility was under active consideration. On October 30, Seamans, who was acting NASA administrator because both James Webb and Hugh Dryden were absent,9 tried to reach Bundy to voice NASA’s con­cerns with respect to what the president might say at his October 31 press conference. He was unsuccessful in contacting Bundy and so relayed NASA’s concerns to budget official Willis Shapley. He told Shapley that “it seems to NASA extremely important that the President not indicate at this time that there is any vacillation in the executive branch with respect to the manned lunar program.” He added that both NASA and the White House would find themselves in an “extremely awkward position. . . if it were to be indi­cated by the President or any other official administration spokesman that the current objectives of the manned lunar landing program are likely to be relaxed or abandoned” before the ongoing White House reviews were com­pleted. Seamans told Shapley that “NASA’s present strong recommendation is that we should keep going” with the planned program “at this time,” so the country would “not lose the benefit of the near-term objectives (e. g., launch vehicle development, further manned space flight experience with Gemini) . . . even if it is subsequently decided not to press on to a manned lunar landing attempt as now planned.”10

These various activities and press reports in preparation for the president’s news conference strongly suggest that there was at the end of October 1963 serious consideration being given within the White House to significant changes in Project Apollo, and that these developments were seen by NASA as threatening the integrity of its efforts. NASA on October 30 also told the White House that it “did not want to suggest any new lines for consid­eration because NASA is committed to a policy of maximum effort directed towards a lunar landing in this decade.” The space agency reported to the White House that during the preceding 48 hours it “had received important expressions of support for the present program and timetable—some of this support is from unexpected sources. There is reason to believe that there is a reaction in the country of ‘don’t quit when you are ahead.’ ”n (Who these sources may have been is not clear from the historical record.)

President Kennedy was very likely aware of the arguments among his associates for and against slowing down the pace of the space buildup. At his October 31 press conference, Kennedy said, when questioned about Khrushchev’s statement that the Soviet Union did not have a lunar landing program, “I think that we ought to stay with our program. I think that is the best answer to Mr. Khrushchev.”12

As John F. Kennedy’s election as president was finally confirmed shortly after noon on November 9, there were seventy-two days before his inauguration—“seventy-two days in which to form an administration, staff the White House, fill some seventy-five key Cabinet and policy posts, name six hundred other major nominees” and “to formulate concrete policies and plans for all the problems of the nation, foreign and domestic, for which he soon would be responsible as President.”1

Kennedy did not begin this crucial transition period from scratch. After the party conventions, the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, had urged both candidates to begin to prepare for the transition, should they be elected. In September, Kennedy had asked high-powered Washington law­yer Clark Clifford, who had been a senior adviser to President Harry Truman and who had successfully represented Kennedy against allegations that he was not the author of the Pulitzer-prize winning Profiles in Courage, to be his primary transition adviser. Kennedy also had asked Columbia University professor Richard Neustadt, a leading scholar of the American presidency and author of the recently published Presidential Power,2 to provide his views on how best to organize the presidency.

Neustadt earlier in 1960 had begun to work on transition issues at the request of Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA). Jackson and Kennedy were similar in their strongly anticommunist views and on giving priority to military strength, and Kennedy had included Jackson on his short list as a running mate. Neustadt had prepared a twenty-two page memorandum by September 15 on “Organizing the Transition.” In this memo, Neustadt made a prescient observation: “The Vice President-elect will be looking for work.” Jackson took Neustadt to meet Kennedy on September 18, and the candidate was immediately impressed by Neustadt’s memo. Kennedy asked Neustadt to elaborate his arguments in additional memoranda, saying some­one in the campaign would get back to him in due time. As was typical of Kennedy’s style, he asked Clifford and Neustadt to work without consulting

one another, ensuring that he would have two independent sources of transi­tion advice.3

Neustadt heard no more from the Kennedy campaign until late October, when he was contacted by one of JFK’s associates, asking how he was pro­gressing. On November 4, Neustadt joined Kennedy on his campaign air­plane to hand the candidate several of the memorandums he had prepared. Within thirty minutes, Kennedy came to Neustadt, saying that he found the material “fascinating.” What he may have found most interesting in Neustadt’s analysis was the recommendation that he adopt a staffing pat­tern in the White House that was much closer to that used by Franklin D. Roosevelt than the military-like arrangements that had been set up by Dwight Eisenhower. “You would be your own ‘chief of staff,’ ” suggested Neustadt. “Your chief assistants would have to work collegially, in constant

touch with one another and with you_____ There is room here for a primus

inter pares to emerge, but no room for a staff director or arbiter, short of you. . . You would oversee, coordinate, and interfere with virtually every­thing your staff was doing.” Neustadt noted that “no one has yet improved on Roosevelt’s relative success in getting information in his mind and key decisions in his hands reliably enough and soon enough to give him room for maneuver.”4 This was a pattern that Kennedy as president would adopt for his space decisions, among many others.

Clifford delivered his transition memorandum and back-up notebooks to Kennedy on November 9, the day on which Kennedy’s election victory was confirmed. The president-elect then asked Clifford to serve as his liaison with the outgoing Eisenhower administration during the transition. Kennedy’s biographer Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who lunched with the president-elect that day, reports that Clifford’s memorandum was “shorter and less detailed than the Neustadt series,” but that “in the main the two advisers reinforced each other all along the line.” Both Neustadt, who stayed on as a consultant dur­ing the transition and in the early months of the Kennedy administration, and Clifford emphasized that Kennedy should organize the White House to serve his needs as president, with no chief of staff to control who had access to the president and thus whose advice he received.5

On November 10, John Kennedy met with his key campaign advis­ers before heading off for a much needed vacation. After the meeting, he announced three key appointments to his personal White House staff: Pierre Salinger as his press secretary, Kenneth O’Donnell as his special assistant and appointments secretary, and Theodore Sorensen as his principal adviser on domestic policy and programs, with the title of special counsel to the president. Salinger was a former journalist who had served as Kennedy’s press secretary during the campaign. O’Donnell had served as the orga­nizer and scheduler of Kennedy’s senatorial and presidential campaigns, and was part of the protective Massachusetts “Irish mafia” that had emerged around Kennedy during his political career. Sorensen was from Nebraska, the son of a Unitarian minister, and very different in style from Kennedy’s Massachusetts associates. He had joined JFK’s Senate staff in 1953 and had

become his chief speechwriter and domestic policy adviser and in many ways his alter ego on policy matters. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the Harvard histo­rian who was Kennedy’s link to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, notes that with respect to Sorensen, “it was hard to know him well. Self­sufficient, taut and purposeful, he was a man of brilliant intellectual gifts, jealously devoted to the President and rather indifferent to personal relations beyond his own family.”6 All three of these men were a generation younger than their equivalents in the Eisenhower administration; as they entered the White House in January 1961, Salinger would be 35, O’Donnell, 36, and Sorensen, 32. Kennedy was 43, the second youngest man ever to become U. S. president.

Salinger reports that during the 1960 campaign, O’Donnell “was con­stantly at JFK’s side. He took his orders directly from the candidate and saw to it that the rest of us carried them out—and to the letter.”7 Once Kennedy was in the White House, O’Donnell as appointments secretary controlled most access to the President; he also acted as Kennedy’s chief “enforcer” within the executive branch, making sure that senior agency officials acted in accordance with White House priorities. However, it appears that O’Donnell had relatively limited involvement in space-related issues other than those associated with the political ramifications of NASA’s facility location and contract award decisions.

Sorensen saw himself serving “as an honest broker, determining which decisions could be made by me and which could only be made by the presi­dent. . . In meetings where the president was not present, I often did not distinguish between my views and his.” Sorensen also notes that he and Kennedy were “close in a peculiarly impersonal way”; there was little social contact between him and Kennedy either as senator or president. There was no love lost between O’Donnell and his staff and Sorenson and his depu­ties during the time they served President Kennedy. Although O’Donnell’s hostility toward Sorensen and his staff was well known to most in the White House, Sorensen professes to have been unaware of the antagonism until years later.8

On space issues, it clearly was Sorensen who had more influence on President Kennedy’s thinking than O’Donnell, particularly during their early months in the White House. Sorensen, in fact, appears to have been something of a latent space enthusiast. As he speculated during the cam­paign about what job he might want if Kennedy were elected president, he wondered whether he “might fit in at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, using my ability to translate scientific and technologi­cal terms into layman’s language.” He also comments that “I had no real aptitude for science and astronomy. . . Space, like so many other issues, was one I learned on the job.” Sorensen later suggested that this “was just free­wheeling speculation as to whether I would have a post and what would be the most suitable post for me. But it didn’t take me too long to realize that that would have been totally inappropriate for me and inconsistent with the President’s wishes.”9

After this November 10 meeting, the exhausted president-elect did not return to active engagement with the transition process until the end of the month, although Clifford, Sorensen, and others were meeting during this period with their counterparts in the Eisenhower administration. Once he did become fully engaged, Kennedy first focused on selecting the ten mem­bers of his Cabinet; his first nominee was announced on December 1 and the final one on December 17. On that latter date, sixty additional key policy posts and several hundred more other key positions remained to be filled. As he met with Neustadt and Clifford while the search for the people to fill administration positions continued, Kennedy complained about the diffi­culty of finding the best individuals to staff his “ministry of talent,” saying: “People, people, people! I don’t know any people. I only know voters.”10 To help him understand the issues he would confront in the White House, the president-elect had during the campaign commissioned seven task forces; in December, an additional nineteen more were added, and three more in January. One of the December groups, discussed in more detail below, was on outer space; it worked under Sorensen’s guidance. The Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report called these task forces an “important innovation” in the presidential transition process, noting that there was “no precedent for the large number of task forces. . . with wide memberships.”11 As he received the reports of his twenty-nine teams, which were composed of the best avail­able individuals and who worked without compensation, Kennedy’s reac­tions ranged from “helpful” to “terrific.” Twenty-four of the twenty-nine teams, including the outer space group, turned in their reports before the January 20 inauguration.

The report of the committee headed by Trevor Gardner that had been intended to map an ambitious future for the Air Force in space was finally submitted on March 20; with its bullish recommendations, the report unin­tentionally reinforced Robert McNamara’s concern about the need to limit Air Force ambitions. The report’s conclusions were alarmist; the United States, the report claimed, could not overtake the Soviet Union in space for at least another three to five years; there were “no accelerated and imaginative programs” to close that gap. Thus there was “an impending military space threat,” which “endangers our national security and international prestige.” The report was critical of the separation between the civilian and military space programs, arguing that there should be one integrated national space program. The report called for a “dramatically invigorated space program” and called upon the DOD to create, and then make available to NASA, a series of “building blocks” of a firm technological foundation for whatever the nation wanted to do in space. It urged the Air Force to “develop the fundamental capability to place and sustain man in orbit,” since “the time when man in orbit can be completely, effectively, and efficiently replaced by mechanisms [robotic systems] is beyond today’s vision.” The report declared that “it is essential that the Air Force play a major support role in manned exploration of the moon and planets,” even though “direct contributions to national security cannot be identified.” The report devoted significant atten­tion to future human spaceflight efforts, and recommended both that the United States send people to the Moon and develop large space stations in the 1967-1970 period. It suggested that since there was a “military need for a variety of launch vehicles based on the F-1 engine,” development respon­sibility for that engine should be transferred back to the Air Force from NASA, and then the Air Force should “initiate urgent development of a first stage launch vehicle using the F-1 engine.”29 Given the agreements already described and the events of the next two months, the Gardner report had limited impact on both Air Force space activities and national space policy.