Category THE RACE

An unsolicited suggestion that the Soviet Union did not in fact have a lunar landing program came from a somewhat questionable source, but was widely reported. On July 17, 1963, there were press accounts that British scientist Sir Bernard Lovell, director of the Jodrell Bank Radio Observatory, who had just returned from a visit to the Soviet Union, was saying, “a month ago I believed, like everyone else in the West, that the US-Soviet Moon race was a real struggle. Now I seriously doubt it.” One NASA official deeply involved in international affairs characterized Lovell’s attempt to influence the course of affairs in 1963 “by all odds the strangest chapter in US/USSR space relationships.”17

Asked at a press conference on July 17 about whether, in light of Lovell’s statement, the United States intended to continue its lunar landing pro­gram, President Kennedy replied “in the first place, we don’t know what the Russians are—what their plans may be.” But “there is every evidence that they are carrying on a major campaign and diverting greatly needed resources to their space effort. . . I think we ought to go right ahead with our own program and go to the moon before the end of the decade.” Pressed on the issue, Kennedy continued, in apparent agreement with the position taken by James Webb in November 1962: “The point of the matter always has been not only of our excitement or interest in being on the moon, but the capacity to dominate space, which would be developed by a moon flight. . . I think we should continue and I would not be diverted by a newspaper story.” Asked about the possibility of the United States cooperating with the Soviet Union in a lunar mission, Kennedy said for the first time publicly “we have said before to the Soviet Union that we would be very interested in coop­eration.” However, he added, “ the kind of cooperative effort which would be required for the Soviet Union and the United States to go to the moon would require a breaking down of a good many barriers of suspicion and distrust and hostility which exist between the Communist world and our­selves.” Kennedy concluded that he would “welcome” such cooperation, but that he “did not see it yet, unfortunately.”18

In a July 23 letter to NASA deputy administrator Dryden, Lovell provided more details on his conversations with M. V. Keldysh, president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He reported that Keldysh had informed him of “the rejection (at least for the time being) of the plans for the manned lunar land­ing” because of several uncertainties regarding the feasibility of such a mis­sion. Keldysh also said that “the manned project might be revived if progress in the next few years gave hope” that such an undertaking would indeed be feasible. Keldysh was reported as saying that “he believed the appropriate procedure would be to formulate the task on an international basis.” More specifically, Keldysh suggested “that the time was now appropriate for sci­entists to formulate on an international basis (a) the reasons why it is desir­able to engage in the manned lunar enterprise and (b) to draw up a list of scientific tasks which a man on the moon could deal with that which could not be solved by instruments alone.”19 As noted earlier, the Soviet Academy of Sciences had limited involvement in, and knowledge of, the Soviet space program, and particularly its human spaceflight aspects, yet Keldysh’s state­ments were seen by the media and some politicians as authoritative.

President Kennedy was kept aware of the issues raised by Lovell’s letter. The CIA told the White House that the letter was “another step in a Soviet move to internationalize manned lunar exploration.” Wiesner forwarded to Kennedy a July 25 article in the New Scientist magazine written by Lovell about his views on the Soviet program; Wiesner highlighted the sections of the article dealing with human space flight.20

During August, “speculation mounted. . . with more and more of a ten­dency to move to an assumption that the USSR has in fact indicated that it wanted to cooperate rather than compete in a moon landing. . . There was a feeling in NASA that the state of Soviet thinking should be fully checked out,” on the outside chance that “the USSR may indeed wish to inspire a slowdown or mutual accommodation in this space race.” Thus, in an August 21 letter to Soviet Academy President Keldysh, Dryden offered to meet with Blagonravov “to discuss further proposals for cooperation.”21

The two met over lunch at the United Nations in New York on September 11. Dryden reported that “Blagonravov stated that ‘Lovell’s statement (i. e., that there was a temporary hold in the lunar program) might be true as of today.’ ” Dryden told his counterpart that “it was not necessary to use Lovell as a channel to convey Soviet desires to the U. S.” Blagonravov also raised “the possibility of cooperation in manned lunar exploration after instrumented landings on the moon had been made.” According to Dryden, “this is a real change from previous discussions in which he had taken the point of view that there was no use in discussing cooperation in this area because of the political situation.” Dryden judged “that the Russians as well as us are having discussions on the value of manned lunar landing,” but that it was “dangerous” to rely only on statements coming from the Soviet Academy for an understanding of Soviet plans, since he was convinced that the Soviet lunar landing program “is a program originated and operated by the military.”22

The reality was that neither President Kennedy, nor NASA, nor anyone else in the U. S. government knew the true state of Soviet space efforts and internal debates as of September 1963. Each participant in the decision pro­cess brought his own values and objectives to the deliberations. Thus it is somewhat ingenuous to have observed, as did one senior NASA official, that the Lovell letter and the Dryden-Blagonravov conversation “contributed to an apparently coherent and progressive picture of Soviet readiness either to abandon their own lunar program or join in a cooperative effort,” and that this was “a dangerously misleading view for the credulous, the uninformed, and the wishful thinkers in official and unofficial places.”23

Congressional budget cuts and widespread criticism were not the only threats to Apollo’s success during 1963. The relationship between James Webb and “Apollo czar” Brainerd Holmes never recovered from their differences in the final months of 1962 with respect to requesting additional funding to try to move forward the date of the initial lunar landing attempt. It became increasingly clear in the following months that Webb and Holmes could not work together effectively. As the accomplishments of Project Mercury were being celebrated by various ceremonies and receptions in Washington on May 21, 1963, Holmes became incensed that he was not mentioned at any point during the day; he called Robert Seamans, complaining that “there is absolutely no excuse for the lack of recognition” and that Webb “hates me.” Seamans later commented that “to say he was upset is to put it very mildly,” and that Holmes’s reaction that day “was really the start of the sequence of events that led to his leaving.” During a reception that evening at Webb’s home, Holmes and Webb got into a public argument. In a series of meetings a few days later, first with Seamans, then with Seamans and Dryden, and finally with Seamans, Dryden, and Webb, Holmes was asked to resign. On June 12 he announced that he would be leaving NASA within the next few months to return to industry.29

NASA sought the president’s assistance in quickly finding a replacement for Holmes. On June 11, Webb sought JFK’s help in recruiting to the NASA position Ruben Mettler, president of Space Technology Laboratories, an organization providing systems engineering support for the Air Force ICBM and space programs. Webb told the president that Mettler had “exactly the qualifications and the experience necessary. . . and has the complete confi­dence of men like Secretary McNamara and Dr. Wiesner.” Webb suggested that the president could assist the recruitment effort by joining McNamara and Webb in signing a letter to the chairman of the Board of the Thompson – Ramo-Wooldridge Company, the parent company of Space Technology Laboratories, requesting Mettler’s services and indicating that “we all will be working together in this program and that we all want and need him and are presenting the request in the form of a national draft.”30 It is not clear whether such a letter was ever sent.

At any rate, NASA was not able to convince Mettler to leave his West Coast position, and so turned to one of his senior associates at the Space Technologies Laboratories, George Mueller, as Holmes’s successor. As he formally joined NASA on September 1, 1963, Mueller was greeted by a front-page article in The New York Times headlined “Manned Test Flight Lags 9 Months in Moon Project” and saying that such a delay “has led some space officials to question whether it will be possible to achieve the Administration’s objective of landing men on the moon by the end of the decade.” Newsweek in its September 23 issue reported that “the Apollo man – on-the-moon program is almost a year behind its original timetable—and almost certainly will not meet the target set by Mr. Kennedy.” The magazine suggested that “the crux of the delay is threefold—money, machines, and men,” and suggested that there was “lagging morale and confusion inside NASA.”31

Soon after assuming his position at NASA, George Mueller asked two senior NASA engineers to conduct a quick and discreet inquiry into the state of the Apollo program. On September 28, the two reported to Mueller that “if funding constraints. . . prevail,” the “lunar landing cannot be attained within the decade at acceptable risk,” and that the “first attempt to land men on the moon is likely about late 1971.” Mueller showed this report to Robert Seamans, who directed that it not be distributed, much less publi­cized; there are reports that he told Mueller to destroy the report since it was so at variance with what NASA was saying publicly, but at least some copies were retained. On the basis of this report and his own experience, by the end of October Mueller mandated a dramatic change in the Apollo schedule, known as “all up” testing; this required that all parts of the Saturn V launch vehicle be tested together, rather than separate tests for each launcher stage. This critical management decision made feasible getting to the Moon by the end of the decade.32

Whether NASA’s problems with the Apollo schedule were known to the White House is not clear from the written record. Given John Kennedy’s avid reading of the general media, it is probable that he noticed the Times and Newsweek stories. The program’s troubles in maintaining its schedule are likely to have played a role in a major White House review of the nation’s civilian and national security space programs that was just beginning in early October 1963.

Conclusion

Certainly if the Soviet Union had responded positively to Kennedy’s September 20, 1963, offer to cooperate in sending people to the Moon, there could have been profound changes in the character of the Apollo program. But even if such cooperation were not to have materialized, there is strongly suggestive evidence that Kennedy’s advisers, if not the president himself, were thinking about significant changes in the national space program in the October-November 1963 period. Those changes might well have included relaxing the schedule aimed at an initial lunar landing by late 1967, or even abandoning the Moon goal altogether. The New York Times noted as NASA celebrated its fifth birthday in early October that “technically, politically, financially, the space agency was in trouble. . . After five years of seemingly unlimited growth, the agency had suddenly and unexpectedly found its future ambitions and growth questioned by segments of the scientific com­munity it had tried so hard to patronize and by a Congress that had always seemed so open-handed and enthusiastic.”33 That questioning extended to John Kennedy’s inner circle, and it was very uncertain in the fall of 1963 whether the White House would maintain the lunar landing program on its planned course.

John Kennedy laid out his basic argument for his candidacy in one of his early campaign speeches. He told an audience in Portland, Oregon, that

Other countries of the free world—troubled and restless—are looking for new leadership from the United States, and I believe they are willing to accept and respect the leadership of an administration that will move vigorously on these five fronts:

1. An administration that moves rapidly to rebuild our defenses, until America is once again first in military power across the board;

2. An administration that moves rapidly to revamp our goals in education and research, until American science and learning are once again preeminent;

3. An administration that moves rapidly to reshape our image here at home, until it is clear to all the world that the revolution for equal rights is still the American revolution;

4. An administration that moves rapidly to renew our leadership for peace, until we have brought to that universal pursuit the same concentration of resources and efforts that we have brought to the preparation of war; and

5. Finally, an administration that moves rapidly to remold our attitudes toward the aspirations of other nations, until we have a fuller understanding of their problems, their requirements, and their fundamental values.16

Theodore Sorensen notes that there was a single theme that Kennedy stressed throughout the campaign: “the challenge of the sixties to America’s security, America’s prestige, America’s progress.” Kennedy on the campaign trail proclaimed over and over again that “it is time to get this country moving again.” Eventually that phrase or a variation of it appeared in every campaign speech. By the end of October, “the issue of slipping prestige had become the dominant one of the campaign”; according to the polls, Kennedy had a substantial lead over his Republican opponent, Richard M. Nixon, on this issue.17

It was in this context that Kennedy made frequent references to the space program in his campaign appearances. For example:

If the Soviet Union was first in outer space, that is the most serious defeat the United States has suffered in many, many years. . . Because we failed to recognize the impact that being first in outer space would have, the impres­sion began to move around the world that the Soviet Union was on the march, that it had definite goals, that it knew how to accomplish them, that it was moving and we were standing still. This is what we have to overcome, that

psychological feeling in the world that the United States has reached maturity,

that maybe our high noon has passed. . . and that now we are going into the

long, slow afternoon.18

Although a speech devoted solely to space issues was drafted for Kennedy’s campaign use, it was never delivered.19

Kennedy’s campaign rhetoric with respect to the loss of U. S. prestige because of the Soviet space successes was reinforced by a classified U. S. Information Agency report that was leaked to The Washington Post. The title of the October 10 report was “The World Reaction to the United States and Soviet Space Programs—A Summary Assessment.” The report was based on polls taken in Great Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, and Norway. On the basis of the results of these surveys, the report concluded that “in antici­pation of future U. S.-U. S.S. R. standing, foreign public opinion. . . appears to have declining confidence in the U. S. as the ‘wave of the future’ in a number of critical areas.”20

Vice presidential candidate Lyndon B. Johnson in his campaign appear­ances did not stress the space issue as strongly or as frequently as did Kennedy, even though from the launch of Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957 on, Johnson had taken the lead in the Senate on space issues. In late October 1960, in response to Richard Nixon’s defense of the space record of the Eisenhower administration, Johnson released a “white paper” prepared by the staff of the Senate space committee, which he chaired. Johnson criticized the admin­istration’s space policy but stressed that both Democrats and Republicans in Congress had recognized the need for a strong space effort. The paper contended that “The sad truth is that U. S. progress in space has been con­tinually hampered by the Republican administration’s blind refusal to rec­ognize that we have been engaged in a space and missile race with the Soviet Union and to act accordingly.” In a statement released with his white paper, Johnson echoed the sentiments of Kennedy’s October 10 statement regard­ing the strategic significance of space: “It is a fact that if any nation succeeds in securing control of outer space, it will have the capability of controlling the earth itself.”21

Throughout the campaign, Kennedy frequently linked the Eisenhower administration’s failures in space to its allowing the Soviet Union to achieve a significant advantage vis-a-vis the United States with respect to the devel­opment and deployment of ballistic missiles—the so-called “missile gap.” On July 23, after the Democratic convention, candidate Kennedy had a highly classified briefing from the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Allen Dulles. A wide variety of topics were covered, including “an analysis of Soviet strategic attack capabilities in missiles.” Kennedy asked Dulles “how we ourselves stood in the missile race.” Dulles told him that “the Defense Department was the competent authority on this question.” After subsequent meetings with defense officials, Kennedy told Sorensen that the briefings “were largely superficial” and “contained little he had not read in The New York Times.”22

The reality was that at the time of the Dulles briefing, there was limited information available to the U. S. leadership on Soviet deployment of intercon­tinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The missions flown by the U-2 spy plane prior to the May 1, 1960, downing of a flight over Russia piloted by Francis Gary Powers had suggested that there had been very limited deployment of the initial Soviet ICBM, and thus that a prospective “missile gap” was not likely to emerge. The first successful U. S. spy satellite mission was not launched until August 18, 1960, after Kennedy’s CIA briefing, and it took several additional missions later in 1960 and in early 1961 to confirm that the indications from the U-2 flights were correct. (In fact, only four of the original ICBMs were ever deployed; it took some twenty hours to prepare the rocket for launch, making it an unwieldy military weapon. Its main role turned out to be as the workhorse launch vehicle for early Soviet space missions.23)

According to Sorensen, the U-2 evidence was not made available to Kennedy in the various intelligence briefings he received during the cam­paign. Also, from Kennedy’s September 1960 question to Trevor Gardner about whether the United States or the Soviet Union would be first to have a reconnaissance satellite, it appears Kennedy was not briefed on the CORONA intelligence satellite program that Eisenhower had approved in February 1958; its existence was known to very few people within the Congress. Even so, Eisenhower was “reportedly furious” that Kennedy continued to raise the missile gap issue throughout the campaign, while his opponent, Richard Nixon, could not provide information that would counter Kennedy’s claims because of its highly classified nature.24

The Air Force push for a larger role in space had continued after the Kennedy administration came into office; the major aerospace trade magazine Missiles and Rockets reported late in March 1961 that “the showdown on who will take charge of the U. S. man-in-space program—and with it the main role in space exploration” would come soon, and that in the choice between NASA and the Air Force, “the best bet on who will win when the cards are dealt: the Air Force.”23 By the time this report appeared, however, Air Force ambi­tions had been significantly tempered by both the president and the new managers of the Department of Defense.

Webb’s conduct with respect to the Mercury-Atlas test flight had dem­onstrated to the Air Force that he was not easily intimidated. Bolstered by this success, Webb and other top NASA officials embarked on a conscious campaign to establish close working relationships with the new civilian lead­ership of the Department of Defense. This was an attempt, reported Robert Seamans, to “so handle ourselves that, rather than have things pull fur­ther apart, the wounds got healed and things got pulled together.”24 Webb did not know well Kennedy’s hard charging and intellectually brilliant sec­retary of defense, Robert McNamara (and the two apparently did not get along from the start of their relationship), but he knew McNamara’s num­ber two person, deputy secretary of defense Roswell Gilpatric, from their time together in the Truman administration. Gilpatric says that one of the reasons he was named McNamara’s deputy was “to work with NASA and Webb” and “to help avoid conflicts between DOD and NASA.” He also noted that McNamara “was impatient with Webb” and “felt that he talked too much.”25

The most vocal demands for an immediate response to the Soviet flight came from the House of Representatives, and particularly its Committee on Science and Astronautics. Committee hearings took place in a highly charged atmosphere.13 On April 12, the committee held a previously scheduled hear­ing on the proposal to revise the 1958 Space Act to make the vice president the chairman of the Space Council. Edward Welsh was the only witness. But the minds of the representatives were on the Gagarin flight, not the Space Council. Committee chair Overton Brooks stated that “we ought to make a determination that we. . . are going to be first in the future.” Republican James Fulton proclaimed that “we in the United States should publicly say that we are in a competitive space race with Russia and accept the challenge.” On April 13, James Webb and Hugh Dryden appeared before the commit­tee to defend the NASA budget increases that the president had approved on March 23. The focus of the hearings was not on those additions to the NASA budget to speed up the booster programs; rather, it was on the funds for human space flight on which the president had deferred approval. Fulton told Webb and Dryden that “I believe we are in a race, and I have said many times, Mr. Webb, ‘Tell me how much money you need and this committee will authorize all you need.’ ” Congressman Vincent Anfuso suggested that he was “ready to call for a full-scale congressional investigation. I want to see our country mobilized for war because we are at war. I want to see our schedules cut in half.”14

After helping prepare the Webb-McNamara report over the May 6-7 week­end, Willis Shapley found himself in charge of carrying out a review of that report from the BOB perspective. The draft of the internal BOB review was completed on May 18, and BOB director Bell sent it to Secretary of Defense McNamara, NASA administrator Webb, and Atomic Energy Commission chairman Glenn Seaborg with a request for immediate comments. Welsh of the Space Council also received a copy in the absence of Vice President Johnson, who was still touring in Asia. The final version of the review was dated May 20.

The review was the kind of thorough “due diligence” assessment that was the BOB’s responsibility, pointing out the implications of the decisions being proposed and examining potential obstacles to their successful implementa­tion. With respect to the magnitude of resources that would be needed, the review pointed out that what was being proposed was an increase of over $2 billion per year—perhaps even $3 billion per year—over previously planned budgets. It recognized that the budget estimates being used were subject to upward revision, suggesting that “the funds required by the manned lunar landing objective may have been underestimated by as much as $200 million in 1962 and perhaps $1 billion per year in future years.” What would be needed was “a commitment to a long term-effort and to pro­vide the resources it requires. Starts and stops, changes in goals, or failure to provide the required level of budgetary support would impair the success of the program.” It noted that “the commitment actually extends beyond the achievement of the manned lunar landing . . . By 1967 we will have geared

the nation up to an annual space effort of almost $7 billion per year; it is unrealistic to assume that an effort of approximately this level would not continue for many years.”

The draft BOB report pointed out the need to consider “the implica­tions of likely and possible outcomes other than complete success” of the lunar landing program; interestingly, this discussion was missing from the final version. The draft noted that “the magnitude of the effort required for the manned lunar landing program is so great and the proposed schedule so tight that it will place a major strain on our capabilities in the space and related fields.” It also noted that “increases in the space programs of the magnitude proposed cannot help having the effect of diverting scientific and technical manpower from other areas of national need” and might cause “a major and continuing distortion in the utilization of our scientific and technical resources which will have detrimental effects in other areas of seri­ous national concern.” The commitment to space would “also reduce our flexibility as a nation to undertake large scale, all-out efforts in other areas not now foreseen which may suddenly appear to be of comparable national importance.”

The review recognized that using 1967 as the internal planning date for the first lunar landing would “necessitate a rapid build-up,” but recommended that this planning date be maintained. With respect to making the target date publicly known, the BOB recommendation was to “make a major effort to avoid any public commitment to [a] specific target date.”16

Whether President Kennedy or his closest advisers read the BOB analysis cannot be known with certainty. If they did read it, they would have had the benefit of a comprehensive and thoughtful analysis of the implications of the decisions that Kennedy was about to announce.

In his November 20, 1961, status report on NASA’s Apollo buildup, Jerome Wiesner had noted that “it is hoped that there will be no further field sta­tions beyond these already announced.” This turned out to be a false hope. As the NASA leadership assessed the various capabilities it would need to manage Apollo effectively, it concluded that NASA was sorely lacking in high-quality electronics competence. This presented a problem with respect to NASA’s ability to manage its contracts with industry and academia, since NASA calculated that 40 percent of the cost of launch vehicles was related to their electronic components; for spacecraft, the cost was 50 to 70 percent. In addition, experience with early robotic spacecraft suggested that there were significant differences in the reliability requirements for electronic compo­nents in space as compared to on Earth. Most NASA employees at the time were more interested in the structural and propulsion aspects of spacecraft and launch vehicle design and development than their electronic aspects.38

In January 1962 associate administrator Robert Seamans asked the NASA staff to investigate what could be done to address this situation. Albert Kelly, director of electronics and control in NASA’s Office of Advanced Research and Technology, spent the next ten months preparing a detailed report on the issue; the November 1962 report concluded that the best approach to gaining the needed competence was to create a new NASA laboratory, or “field center,” dedicated to managing NASA’s electronics research. The NASA leadership had in fact several months earlier reached the same conclu­sion; the issue then became where to locate the new center. Webb, Dryden, and Seamans gave greatest weight to two criteria in making this decision: (1) a location near one or more universities involved in advanced electronics research, and (2) a location where the industrial community was also work­ing on electronics and was research-oriented.

Another consideration, according to James Webb, was President Kennedy’s questioning “why some of the best brains in the East were not working more actively in our program.” Webb told Kennedy that “a new Electronics Research Center in the eastern part of the country” would not only satisfy a specific NASA need, but would also “kill several birds with the same stone by making this Center a focal point of contact between some of our ablest people and some of the ablest ones working in advanced fields in universi­ties.” Kennedy told Webb that “while he felt that this was certainly an impor­tant objective, he was going to leave the decision to me but would like to be kept informed.” By October 1962, Webb told Kennedy that he, Dryden, and Seamans had decided to locate the Center in Boston, “making it clear that the geographic proximity to Harvard, MIT and the brilliant researchers and scholars in the electronics and associated fields in the city was one of the major bases for our judgment.” In fact, said Webb, NASA wanted “to put it [the new Center] within walking distance of both Harvard and MIT.”39

There were two political problems with that decision. President Kennedy was of course from Massachusetts, and thus such a decision could appear as if it had been influenced by his desire to bring some of the benefits of the space buildup to his home state. Even more problematic was the fact that the President’s youngest brother, Edward “Ted” Kennedy, was in 1962 running to fill the remaining two years of President Kennedy’s Senate term, and his campaign argued that he “could do more for Massachusetts.” If NASA had announced, without any prior notice or competition, a decision to locate a major new facility in Massachusetts, the political reaction likely would have involved NASA in a tightly contested election, a situation both President Kennedy and James Webb wanted to avoid.

When Webb on October 16, 1962, told Kennedy of NASA’s plans for locating the new center in the Boston area, he also said that it was extremely important from NASA’s “image of careful professional work and decisions made on a technical basis that this should not become a matter under dis­cussion in the then ongoing campaign in Massachusetts where his brother was running for the Senate.” Kennedy’s response was that “he approved the concept of the Electronics Research Center.” Kennedy also “stated that he was prepared to accept it in his budget” and “agreed that it should not be introduced into public discussion until the budget was to go to Congress” in early 1963, after the Senate election. To avoid the appearance of Kennedy’s political influence on the decision, Webb buried the initial funding for the new center in the NASA budget request submitted to the BOB in September 1962; this was not difficult to do, since the initial request of $5 million was very small compared to the overall $6.2 billion NASA budget request. Even the BOB was not informed of NASA’s intentions. As a former director of the BOB, Webb was well versed in ways to manipulate the normal process of BOB review. In Fall 1962, according to Webb, “the only persons who knew we were planning this Center outside of NASA” were President Kennedy and his top political operative, Kenneth O’Donnell.”40

Once the election was over and Ted Kennedy had won the Senate seat, NASA was ready to let the BOB in on its plans. Before meeting with budget director Bell on December 13 to finalize the NASA FY1964 budget request, Webb asked Kenneth O’Donnell to check with the president to make sure that Kennedy still agreed with NASA’s decision to develop the new center. Assured that this was indeed the case, NASA and the BOB inserted into the president’s budget message notice of the decision to create a new Electronics Research Center and to locate it “in the Greater Boston area.” Kennedy directed that “this matter should be handled with the most complete discre­tion.” There was no leak to the press of this decision until the budget became public with its submission to the Congress in mid-January 1963.

The Congress, and particularly NASA’s House of Representatives oversight committee, the Committee on Science and Astronautics, was not pleased to learn that NASA had made this decision without prior consultation with the committee. Over the next several years, the committee and NASA remained at loggerheads over whether NASA could proceed with its plans. There was also opposition from some Senate members who believed that the areas they represented should have been able to compete for the new NASA center. At one point, President Kennedy got personally involved, meeting on June 11, 1963, with Webb and Representative Joseph Karth (D-MN), who thought that the center was not really needed, but if NASA went ahead with its plans to create it, the new center could very well be located in his state. Kennedy was “very gracious,” but he was unable to change Karth’s mind regarding the issue.41

By the time Congress finished work on the NASA FY1964 budget in December 1963, there was tentative agreement to allow NASA to proceed with its plans, subject to Congressional review of several required studies. Even after those studies were completed, there was continued questioning of NASA’s plans for the center; “the fight for and against the Center raged on through 1965.” It was not until 1966 that the Congressional opposition died down, even though the Electronics Research Center had become opera­tional in 1965. This was too late for the center to have much of an impact on the Apollo program. The Electronics Research Center was to have a short lifetime; NASA announced in December 1969 that as part of its post-Apollo retrenchment, it had decided to close the facility.42

Conclusion

While Jerome Wiesner at the end of 1961 might have been concerned by what appeared to be too slow a pace in NASA’s implementation of the lunar landing decision, to those at NASA involved in the effort the rate of activ­ity during 1961 and 1962 seemed extremely rapid. In the weeks following Wiesner’s November 20, 1961, memorandum, NASA chose the contractors for the Apollo spacecraft and the first and third stages of the Saturn V vehi­cle. By the start of 1962, construction had begun at all the new facilities that would be required for Apollo. A major NASA reorganization to prepare the space agency for managing Apollo was announced on November 1, 1961; among the changes made was the creation of a separate Office of Manned Space Flight as one of the major program units at NASA headquarters. Chosen as its head, with the title associate administrator for manned space flight, was a dynamic young executive from RCA named Brainerd Holmes. Webb and Seamans had thought briefly about asking Wernher von Braun to become the human space flight manager, but that possibility disappeared when Hugh Dryden said that he would retire if it became reality. (Dryden was apparently one of those at NASA who resented von Braun’s involvement with the Nazi regime in Germany before and during World War II.) On April 11, 1962, President Kennedy assigned to Project Apollo the highest national priority, designated DX; this gave the undertaking first call (together with some defense and a few other space efforts) on whatever human and physical resources were needed for its accomplishment.43

It was thus clear by mid-1962 that the mobilization of the resources needed to accomplish a lunar landing was well underway. President Kennedy had warned the Congress and the American public on May 25, 1961, that achieving the lunar goal “would take many years and carry very heavy costs.” In the fifteen months following his May 25 speech, the realism of that warn­ing became increasingly evident; by September 1962, President Kennedy concluded that it was time for him to take a first-hand look at the unfolding effort.

Mid-1963 developments—improved U. S.-Soviet relations, growing criti­cisms of the U. S. Moon program, White House concerns about its costs, and possible signals of Soviet openness to collaboration—formed the back­ground against which President Kennedy decided in September 1963 to include a suggestion of U. S.-Soviet cooperation in going to the Moon in his September 20 address before the United Nations General Assembly.

JFK Still Interested

Whether or not Kennedy had ever given up on the idea of such cooperation during the difficult days of 1961 and 1962, the changed situation in 1963 made him again interested in actively pursuing the idea. As noted above, in his July 17 press conference, Kennedy for the first time had publicly stated his preference for a cooperative approach to lunar exploration.

The United States and the Soviet Union agreed to a Limited Test Ban Treaty on July 25, six weeks after JFK’s American University speech, and the relationship between the two nuclear powers was less tense then at any time since Kennedy had come to the White House. As part of

Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s agenda when he was in Moscow in early August to sign the treaty, Kennedy asked Rusk to raise the space coopera­tion possibility with Nikita Khrushchev. When Rusk did so, Khrushchev responded only with a quip: “Sure, I’ll send a man to the moon. You bring him back.”24 Kennedy himself discussed the possibility in an August 26 meeting with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. At the end of a wide ranging conversation, the president “raised the question of activities in outer space.” He talked about possible cooperative projects, “including going to the moon.” Dobrynin found this “an interesting thought” and told Kennedy he would raise it with Khrushchev, saying that he was aware that Khrushchev was interested in “more cooperation in outer space.” Kennedy told the Soviet ambassador that “if each knew the other’s ambi­tions and plans, it might be easier to avoid all-out competition” and that “if Mr. Khrushchev thought that a cooperative effort was possible, he would be interested.”25

On September 10, U. S. ambassador Foy Kohler visited Soviet foreign min­ister Gromyko in Moscow. Kohler referred to President Kennedy’s August 26 conversation with Dobrynin, and asked whether the Soviet government “had given consideration to the President’s broad, imaginative proposal for joint cooperation in outer space projects and if he would be prepared to discuss this subject” during his forthcoming visit to the United States to attend the United Nations General Assembly’s opening sessions. Gromyko indicated that the Soviet Union “agreed in principle with the idea and he would of course be prepared to examine any specific proposals [that the] US might have in mind.”26

Kohler reported this conversation to the president at a September 17 White House meeting. Kennedy first asked Kohler for his views on the concept of a joint lunar mission. Kohler told Kennedy that Gromyko had found the sug­gestion “interesting”; however, Kohler thought that the “Soviets were both intrigued and puzzled by what the president might have in mind.” Thus Gromyko, while giving a “cautious welcome” to the president’s idea, had asked that “we come up with some concrete suggestions.” Kennedy replied that “while this was not an idea that he had considered in detail, he contin­ued to be interested in developing it and thought it would in fact be useful, for example, and save a great deal of expense if we could come to some kind of agreement with the USSR on the problem of sending a man to the moon.” Kohler repeated that he thought that “there might be some real interest in developing cooperation in this field since Khrushchev had a problem of allo­cation of extremely limited resources” and that made carrying out Kennedy’s proposal “relatively simple.”27

Speechwriter Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., may not have been aware of these presidential initiatives and conversations when he inserted language pro­posing a joint U. S.-Soviet moon mission in his draft of the UN address, although it is hard to conclude that he independently came up with the same idea. But there is no doubt that the concept had been widely discussed by President Kennedy and others between July and September 1963.

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.