Category THE RACE

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.

There was another urgent matter on President Kennedy’s mind as he con­sidered options for the future in space. Kennedy had inherited Eisenhower

administration planning for an invasion of Cuba, since 1960 under the control of Fidel Castro, by CIA-trained Cuban exiles. Kennedy had reluc­tantly given the go-ahead to the plan a few days before April 14, and bomb­ing of Cuban airfields by what were characterized as airplanes flown by the exiles but actually flown by U. S. pilots began on April 15. The exiles went ashore at the Bay of Pigs on the morning of April 17. Within thirty-six hours, it was clear the plans had been ill-conceived, and that the invasion was a “perfect failure.”26

The fiasco in Cuba greatly distressed Kennedy; Sorensen describes him on the early morning of April 19, after the failure was evident, as “anguished and fatigued” and “in the most emotional, self-critical state I had ever seen him. He cursed not his fate or advisors but himself.” The days surrounding the failed invasion were “the worst week of his public life.” In the follow­ing days, “Kennedy’s anguish and dejection were evident to people around him.” Not only John Kennedy but also his brother Robert was affected. One account of a top-level meeting in the aftermath of the failure reports that Robert Kennedy, just after the president stepped out of the room, “turned on everybody,” saying, “All you bright fellows. You got the president into this. We’ve got to do something to show the Russians we are not paper tigers.”27

How much Kennedy’s emotional state and competitive character deter­mined or merely reinforced his resolve to proceed rapidly in space cannot be definitively known, but most evidence suggests that they were influential but not decisive factors. The failure was never explicitly linked to the review of the space program that took place in the days following the Bay of Pigs; Edward Welsh maintains that the fiasco was “not a factor at all” in that review. But Wiesner says of the Bay of Pigs, “I don’t think anyone can mea­sure it, but I am sure it had an impact. I think the President felt some pres­sure to get something else in the foreground.” He adds that, although the failed invasion was never explicitly linked to space, “I discussed it with the President and saw his reactions. I’m sure it wasn’t his primary motivation. I think the Bay of Pigs put him in a mood to run harder than he might have.” JFK’s national security adviser McGeorge Bundy suggests that “it is quite possible that, if the Bay of Pigs had been a resounding success, the President might have dawdled a little longer on the space decision.” Sorensen adds that Kennedy’s attitude toward the acceleration of the space program was influenced by “the fact that the Soviets had gained tremendous world-wide prestige from the Gagarin flight at the same time we had suffered a loss of prestige from the Bay of Pigs. It pointed up the fact that prestige was a real and not simply a public relations factor in world affairs.”28

One certain impact of the Bay of Pigs failure was to heighten White House concern regarding a possible failure of the first human launch in Project Mercury, which at that point was scheduled for May 2. A mission failure, especially if it resulted in the death of the Mercury astronaut on live televi­sion, was a possibility that the president and his advisers viewed with great concern.

As Lambright notes in his biography of James Webb, “while the decision to go to the moon was unfolding, a separate decision process—mainly in Webb’s own mind—was unfolding. This was the personal agenda Webb had brought to NASA—“a mission to use science and technology. . . to strengthen the United States educationally and economically.” Webb’s objective was to maximize the benefits of an accelerated space program for Earth in terms of research, education, and regional economic development. Walter McDougall in his award-winning book. . . the Heavens and the Earth described the total­ity of Webb’s vision as “Space Age America,” a term that indeed Webb some­times used.19

While the final review of the accelerated program was underway in the White House, Webb was consulting with his colleagues outside the gov­ernment and those whose support he thought might be important to the public acceptance of the new effort. For example, on May 15, he wrote to Vannevar Bush at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Webb had known Bush since his time in Harry Truman’s BOB. Bush had been President Roosevelt’s top technical advisor during World War II and his report Science, the Endless Frontier had laid the foundation for postwar government support of science.20 Webb told Bush that he regretted that the two “find ourselves on somewhat different sides of the complex ques­tion of manned space flight”; they earlier in May had had a confrontation at a Washington social function over the value of humans in space. Webb noted that “no one could have ridden down Pennsylvania Avenue with Commander Shepard without feeling the deep desire of those lining the Avenue for something to be proud of and a hero. At the moment I believe this feeling is somewhat expanded to include a desire for a real effort in the space field.” Webb assured Bush that “in the programs that are now under­way and which will shortly be put forward, I expect to do all that I can to build up the university research, teaching, and graduate and post-graduate quality and quantity of education. . . If we do not find ways to make the major program carry a burden in each of these fields, we simply are not going to meet the challenge of our times.”21

The most sweeping version of Webb’s vision can be found in a May 23 memorandum he prepared for the vice president as Johnson returned from his Asian trip. Webb told him that Houston Congressman Albert Thomas

has made it very clear that he and [Houston construction magnate and Johnson campaign contributor] George Brown were extremely interested in having Rice University make a real contribution to the effort, particularly in view of the fact that some research funds were now being spent at Rice, that the resources of Rice had increased substantially, and that some 3,000 acres of land had been set aside by Rice for an important research installation. On investigation, I find that we are going to have to establish some place where we can do the technology related to the Apollo program, and this should be on the water where the vehicle can ultimately be barged to the launching site. Therefore we have looked carefully at the situation at Rice, and at the possible locations near the Houston Ship Canal or other accessible waterways in that general area. George Brown has been extremely helpful in doing this.

In essence, Webb was preempting the decision on where to relocate the Space Task Group as it took on the lunar landing assignment, even though the process through which that decision would be formalized extended for four more months. But Webb did not stop with Houston; he now broadened his horizon to the whole region. His vision of using centers of excellence in areas like Oklahoma, Missouri, and Texas to spur regional development had been developed during his years working for Robert Kerr in Oklahoma. In January 1956, Webb in a letter to his former boss, President Harry Truman, had laid out his concept of using an Oklahoma-based “Frontiers of Science Foundation” to stimulate science, technology, and industry in that state and beyond.22 Now he told Johnson:

No commitments have been made, but I believe it is going to be of great importance to develop the intellectual and other resources of the Southwest in connection with the new programs the Government is undertaking. Texas offers an unusual opportunity at this time due to the fact that [long-time Webb friend and chairman of the National Academy Space Science Board] Dr. Lloyd Berkner. . . is establishing a Graduate Research Center in Dallas with the backing of Eric Johnston, Cecil Green, and others in that area (estimated at about one hundred million dollars) and in view of the fact that Senator Kerr and those interested with him in the Arkansas, White, and Red River System have now pushed it to the point that it is opening up the whole area related to Arkansas, Oklahoma, and in many ways helping to provide a development potential for Mississippi. If it were possible to get a combination where out – in-front theoretical research done by Berkner and his group around Dallas in such a way to strengthen all the universities in the area, and if at the same time a strong engineering and technical center could be established near the water near Houston and perhaps in conjunction with Rice University, these two strong centers would provide a great impetus to the intellectual and industrial base of this whole region.

Webb was still not done. He related his vision for Southwest regional development to the nation as a whole. Developing a strong technical compe­tence in the Southwest

would permit us to think of the country as having a complex in California running from San Francisco down through the new University of California installation in San Diego, another center around Chicago with the University of Chicago as a pivot, a strong Northeastern arrangement with Harvard, M. I.T., and like institutions participating. Some work in the southeast perhaps revolving around the research triangle in North Carolina (in which Charlie Jonas as the ranking minority on Thomas’s Appropriations Subcommittee would have an interest), and with the Southwestern complex rounding out the situation.23

This “grand mix of noble vision and pork-barrel politics”24 went well beyond anything that President Kennedy had in mind as he approved an accelerated space program, primarily as a foreign policy response to Soviet space successes and their political impacts. But the space program buildup over the next few years that resulted from Kennedy’s decision allowed Webb the room needed to put his agenda into practice, and Webb, a New Deal Democrat, had little hesitation in using his position at NASA to implement his vision of an improved America.

The first stop on President Kennedy’s two-day tour to inspect the facili­ties being developed for Apollo was the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. There he was briefed by Wernher von Braun on the approach that NASA had finally chosen for carrying out the lunar landing mission, called lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR). This approach had emerged in the first half of 1962 as NASA’s preferred approach to getting to the Moon, but the White House Office of Science and Technology and its exter­nal advisers on the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) were at the time of JFK’s trip embroiled in a dispute with NASA over the wisdom of that choice. As von Braun described the LOR approach, Kennedy inter­rupted, saying that “I understand that Dr. Wiesner doesn’t agree with this,” and calling his science adviser to join the discussion. “Some lively dialogue” then ensued among Wiesner, von Braun, Webb, Seamans, and others; this discussion was just out of the earshot of reporters. According to Seamans, the reporters “obviously knew we were discussing something other than golf scores.” Wiesner suggests that he and von Braun were having a “friendly” talk in front of the president when Webb, who thought the two were arguing, “moved right in,” so that “what had been a friendly discussion became a real argument” as the press “watched, heard, and listened.” Kennedy ended the five-minute discussion by saying, “Well, maybe we’ll have one more hearing and then we’ll close the books on the issue.”1

Key to the LOR concept was separating the functions of the lunar landing mission between two spacecraft, rather than the single heavy spacecraft con­templated in both the direct ascent and the Earth orbit rendezvous (EOR) approach to the lunar landing. One spacecraft, designated the command and service module (CSM) , would carry the crew to lunar orbit and back to Earth; the other, designated the lunar excursion module (LEM), would carry two crew members from lunar orbit to the Moon’s surface, and then, after they had finished their exploration, back to a rendezvous in lunar orbit with the CSM. After the crew and lunar samples were transferred to the CSM, the LEM could then be discarded. Since the LEM would operate only in the atmosphere-free vicinity of the Moon and would not have to carry the

heavy fuel and even heavier heat shield required for the return to Earth, it could be much lighter than a spacecraft that would both land on the Moon and also have to carry the crew back to Earth. This weight reduction result­ing from this separation of functions made it possible to launch the whole lunar landing mission with one Saturn V booster, rather than the two that would be required by the Earth orbit rendezvous (EOR) approach.

The LOR concept had been brought to Seamans’s attention in an impas­sioned nine-page November 15, 1961, letter from John Houbolt, an engi­neer at NASA’s Langley Research Center, who had bypassed several layers of the NASA chain of command in sending the letter. NASA in late 1961 was focusing on some form of EOR as its preferred approach to the lunar mis­sion, but Houbolt argued that the LOR approach was the better way to get­ting to the Moon before the end of the decade, was safer and less expensive, and required only one launch.2

After extended analysis of the concept, NASA’s top leaders by early July 1962 had agreed that LOR was indeed the best choice for achieving the

lunar mission by the end of the decade and were preparing to announce their decision at a July 11 press conference. In anticipation of the announcement, NASA on July 3 sent a summary of its comparison of the various options to science adviser Wiesner. By the end of the day, Wiesner called Webb “in a highly emotional state” to say that “L. O.R. is the worst mistake in the world.” Webb asked Joseph Shea, the NASA systems engineer who was lead­ing the effort to select the lunar landing approach, to go to the White House immediately; when he met with Wiesner, the science adviser called LOR a “technological travesty.”3

There were several reasons for Wiesner’s reaction.4 One was the intuitive sense that a mission that depended for its success, and for the crew’s survival, on a rendezvous in lunar orbit, 240,000 miles from Earth, would be exces­sively risky. This was especially the case since there had been no experience with rendezvous, and Project Gemini, the just-initiated effort to gain that experience, was at that time not scheduled to have its first flight until late 1963. (The first flight actually did not come until early 1965.) Given the end of the decade deadline, the choice of mission approach would have to be made before the feasibility of its key element, rendezvous, had been dem­onstrated. (This of course was also true for Earth orbit rendezvous, but if a problem developed in an Earth-orbiting mission, the astronauts could easily return home.) NASA’s engineering analyses showed that LOR was safer than EOR, but Wiesner and his staff did not trust those analyses. The principal staff person supporting Wiesner on space issues was Nicholas Golovin, who had been forced to resign his position at NASA the preceding fall and left the space agency with “bitter gall” in his throat, only to be quickly hired by Wiesner as his top staff person for space issues. Golovin was tenacious in his criticism of NASA’s choice of LOR during 1962 and became a particular irritant to the space agency as NASA attempted to move forward.

Wiesner was also hearing from the space vehicle panel of PSAC that it had serious reservations about the LOR choice. The panel had followed NASA’s planning for the lunar mission throughout the year. Members of the panel together with Wiesner met with the NASA leadership on July 6 to outline their concerns. As a result of this meeting, NASA was forced to change its message for the July 11 press conference to saying that the LOR choice was tentative and subject to further study and review.

Jerome Wiesner transmitted the PSAC views as an attachment to a July 17 letter to James Webb; in that letter Wiesner also set forth his own views. Like the PSAC panel, he was concerned about “which mission mode is most con­sistent with the main stream of our national space program, and therefore the one most likely to be useful in overtaking and keeping ahead of Soviet space technology.” In particular, Wiesner wanted more attention paid to “the ques­tion of which mode is likely to be most suitable for enhancing our military capabilities in space, if doing so should turn out to be desirable.” Wiesner told Webb that he had “reported the results of our discussions to the President.”5

Webb replied to Wiesner’s letter on August 20, listing the various studies that NASA was undertaking based on the Space Vehicle Panel’s suggestions and assuring Wiesner that NASA had thought carefully about the issues raised in Wiesner’s letter. He told Wiesner that “it is our considered opinion that the LOR mode. . . provides as comprehensive a base of knowledge and experience for application to other possible space programs, either military or civilian, as either the EOR mode or the C-5 [Saturn V] direct mode.” Webb thanked Wiesner for his and PSAC’s efforts, saying that “this con­structive criticism by eminently qualified men is of tremendous value.”6 This final comment may not have been totally sincere. The pressure resulting from President Kennedy’s “end of the decade” deadline was being felt within NASA, and continued criticism from the White House science office was a barrier to NASA’s moving ahead with its plans.

Wiesner and his assistant Golovin continued to intervene in NASA’s deci­sion process during July and August, and on September 5, a few days before the president was to visit various NASA installations, Wiesner once again wrote Webb reiterating his concerns regarding the LOR choice. Wiesner sent a copy of his letter to the president. In this letter, Wiesner called the contribu­tion of the LOR choice to the overall space capabilities of the United States “seriously questionable,” noting that any military applications of those capa­bilities “will be in the near earth environment” and that “whether manned military missions are to be either of a defensive or offensive character. . . the obvious needs for maneuverability and reasonable stay-time in orbit would require that refueling techniques be developed more or less contemporane­ously with those for rendezvous and docking.” While James Webb was sym­pathetic to using Apollo to build up overall U. S. space capabilities, his main focus in 1962 was selecting the approach that gave the best chance of getting to the Moon before the Soviets; Wiesner appeared less interested in the race to the Moon and more focused on developing near-Earth space capabilities with military relevance.7

This is where the situation stood as President Kennedy visited Huntsville and was party to the Wiesner-NASA debate. As Kennedy flew to Cape Canaveral, the next stop in his tour, he was asked what the likely outcome of the controversy would be. “Jerry’s going to lose, it’s obvious,” replied the president; “Webb’s got all the money, and Jerry’s only got me.”8

Wiesner and Golovin did not give up their fight easily and continued to contest NASA’s choice and supporting analyses in September and October. NASA finally assembled all of its analyses into a document that it hoped would be a final comparison of the approaches to carrying out the lunar landing mission and sent it to Wiesner on October 24. In that report, NASA estimated that the probability of success for any one lunar landing attempt was 40 percent for the LOR approach, 36 percent for the direct ascent approach, and 30 percent for EOR; probabilities of crew safety were 85 per­cent for LOR, 83 percent for direct ascent, and 89 percent for EOR. Wiesner and Golovin continued to question the NASA figures, but their fight was coming to a conclusion.9

The NASA report was accompanied by a “peevish” letter from Webb to Wiesner. Webb told Wiesner that “my understanding is that you. . . will examine this and you will let me know your views as to whether we should ask for an appointment with the President.” Webb’s view was “we should proceed with the lunar orbit plan, should announce our selection of the con­tractor for the lunar excursion vehicle, and should play the whole thing in a low key.” Webb said that unless he heard to the contrary, he would advise President Kennedy’s appointments secretary Kenneth O’Donnell “that nei­ther you nor the Defense Department wishes to interpose a formal objec­tion” to NASA’s going ahead with LOR. “In that case,” wrote Webb, “I believe Mr. O’Donnell will not feel it wise to schedule the President’s time and that the President will confirm this judgment.”10

As Webb wrote his October 24 letter, President Kennedy was totally involved with dealing with the problem of Soviet missiles in Cuba, and most certainly was not going to take time to referee the NASA dispute with his science adviser. Webb and Wiesner talked by telephone on October 29, the Monday after the weekend during which the Cuban missile crisis was resolved. Wiesner said that his message to the president would not be to overrule any decision NASA might reach, but rather to be sure that a full and honest assessment had been made of all the options; Wiesner still questioned whether this was the case. Webb told Wiesner he “thought it better not to go to a formal hearing or involve the President personally in the decision,” but Wiesner thought that “involving the President couldn’t be avoided” because someone was sure to ask Kennedy whether the decision was made after the best possible analysis. On November 2, Wiesner and three PSAC members met with Webb and his senior staff to go over once again the White House objections to LOR; Wiesner recommended that NASA select instead a new alternative, a two-person flight using the direct ascent approach that was being strongly advocated by the builder of the Apollo command and service module, North American Aviation. Choosing this approach would mean that North American would manufacture spacecraft that would land on the Moon, not just the ship that would ferry astronauts from the Earth to lunar orbit and back. Again NASA refused to alter its position that LOR was the preferred approach. After discussing his reservations with the president, Wiesner decided not to insist on a formal meeting with Kennedy to make a final decision.11

On November 7, the day that NASA confirmed its tentative choice of lunar orbit rendezvous and announced its intent to issue the contract for the lunar lander to Grumman Aerospace, McGeorge Bundy wrote Wiesner, saying that the “President’s conclusion on the moon method is that he would like a last letter from Wiesner to Webb saying that Kennedy “thinks the time is coming for a final recommendation and relies on Director Webb to review all the arguments and to produce that recom­mendation.” Bundy also told Wiesner that “we should make Webb feel the responsibility for a definite decision and the importance of weighing all opinions, without trying to make his decision for him.” This com­munication was somewhat after the fact, given the NASA announcement that day.12

Webb did write the requested letter to President Kennedy. He told the president that “by adopting LOR, the mission can be accomplished at least one year earlier in comparison to the EOR mode.” By this time, Webb was aware of Kennedy’s desire to accomplish the initial lunar landing at the earli­est possible date in order to give maximum assurance of accomplishing the landing before the Soviet Union did. The cost of LOR approach, suggested Webb, would be “10% to 15% less than for the EOR approach.” He told Kennedy that the decision to go with the LOR mode “had to be made at this time in order to maintain our schedules, which aim at a landing attempt in late 1967,” and that, with this decision made “we intend to drive forward vigorously on every segment of the manned lunar landing program.”13

With NASA’s November 7 announcement and Webb’s letter to Kennedy, NASA now indeed had all the pieces in place to “drive forward vigorously” on Project Apollo. Kennedy’s approach with respect to the LOR decision was again typical of his management style as president. He welcomed a wide variety of views being expressed while decisions were being made, but sel­dom if ever forced on an operating agency of the executive branch a course of action with which its leadership disagreed. If Kennedy felt that a wrong policy was being pursued, he was more likely to remove the agency head than insist on his carrying out a White House-imposed perspective. Now it was up to NASA to deliver on its commitments.

Reactions to Kennedy’s proposal were quick to appear and mixed in charac­ter. The New York Times editorialized that the proposal showed that Kennedy was “courageous” and that he was “able and willing to seize the opportunity of the moment to exercise an imaginative political initiative.” In the same edition of the newspaper, reporter John Finney noted that Kennedy’s pro­posal had “caught many Government officials by surprise,” caused “bewil­derment,” and was seen by many in Washington as “the first step toward pulling out of the costly ‘moon race.’ ” The Times reported the next day that “Europe’s Press Praises Kennedy,” citing the Manchester Guardian’s charac­terization of the president’s proposal as a “minor master-stroke.” Two weeks later, the Times reported that Brainerd Holmes, who had left his position in NASA as head of manned space flight in June, thought that a coopera­tive lunar mission would be “a very costly, very inefficient, probably a very dangerous way, to execute the program.” The trade publication Missiles and Rockets was most negative, rejecting “such a naive internationalist approach to the lunar project. It can only harm the U. S. effort to the benefit of the Soviet Union.” The magazine characterized Kennedy’s proposal as “ill con­ceived,” potentially leading to the U. S. manned space flight program facing the prospect of “dwindling from one of the most exciting challenges ever accepted by a nation to an unimportant pawn in the Cold War to be sacri­ficed in the first gambit of appeasement.”33

On November 16, 1963, John Kennedy made the short flight to Cape Canaveral from his family home in Palm Beach, Florida for an inspection tour of progress being made by NASA in the Gemini and Apollo programs. He also took a helicopter to a Navy ship offshore to witness the launch of a submarine-based Polaris missile. The president’s visit was seen as “an effort to focus attention on the nation’s space program” as the Congress made final decisions on the NASA FY1964 budget.

Kennedy was first briefed on the Gemini program by astronauts Gus Grissom and Gordon Cooper. He then had a short presentation on Apollo by George Mueller in the launch control center at Launch Complex 37; a Saturn 1 booster was sitting on that launch pad for a planned December launch attempt. As his party left the control center, the president lagged behind to inspect the models of the various launch vehicles being used by NASA, ranging from the small Redstone booster that had been used for the suborbital launches of Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom to the mighty Saturn V that would be used to send astronauts to the Moon. When he was assured that the models were all to the same scale, Kennedy used words like “amaz­ing” and “fantastic.” Robert Seamans, who accompanied Kennedy through­out the visit, suggests that the President “maybe for the first time, began to realize the dimensions of these projects.”

Kennedy then walked to the vicinity of the Saturn 1 booster, where he was briefed on the rocket’s dimensions and capabilities by Wernher von Braun (see cover image). Before leaving the launch pad, and much to the discom­fort of his Secret Service detail, Kennedy walked over and stood directly underneath the rocket. At that moment, he asked whether the upcoming launch “will be the largest payload that man has ever put in orbit.” When told that this was indeed the case, Kennedy responded: “That is very, very significant.” He recognized that with the upcoming launch the United States would finally surpass the Soviet Union in lifting capacity, a goal that he had pursued from his first presidential decisions on space. The party then flew by helicopter over the Saturn V launch facilities under construction at Launch Complex 39 on the adjoining Merritt Island; Kennedy had been shown a model of the complex during his earlier briefing by Mueller.

As he returned to the mainland after witnessing the Polaris launch, Kennedy said to Seamans, “I’m not sure that I have the facts really straight” with respect to the launch capability of the Saturn 1. “Will you tell me about it again?” Seamans responded that “the usable payload is 19,000 pounds, but we’ll actually have 38,000 pounds up there in orbit.” The rocket’s lift­off thrust would be 1.5 million pounds. Kennedy then asked, “what is the Soviet capability?” and Seamans told him that it was approximately 15,000 pounds of usable payload and that the Soviet booster had only a lift-off thrust of 800,000 pounds. Kennedy once again said: “That’s very impor­tant. Now, be sure that the press understands this.” As he was preparing to return to Palm Beach, he turned to Seamans and said: “Now, you won’t forget, will you, to do this?” He asked Seamans to get on the press plane to emphasize that the United States would soon close the weight-lifting gap in space. Seamans was successful in his presidentially assigned mission. The New York Times reported the next day that Kennedy was “enthralled by the sight of the Saturn 1 vehicle, which is expected to make space history next month” by putting the United States ahead of the Soviet Union in the weight placed in orbit.13

Six days later, on the short flight from Fort Worth to Dallas, John F. Kennedy told Representative Olin Teague that “he wanted to go to the Cape for the Saturn launch in December. He thought the space program needed a boost and he wanted to help.”14

There were several significant space issues that were unresolved in the final months of the Eisenhower administration.12 Dealing with these issues was to occupy president-elect Kennedy’s attention only briefly during the postelec­tion transition period. They included the relationship between civilian and military space efforts; a proposal to abolish the National Aeronautics and Space Council, the White House body for developing national space policy and strategy; the pace at which larger rocket boosters ought to be developed in order to close the weight-lifting gap with the Soviet Union; and NASA’s plans for a human space flight program to follow the initial U. S. effort to send an astronaut into orbit, Project Mercury.