Now What?

The excitement of Apollo 11 had barely begun to diminish when on September 15 President Nixon received the report of the “Space Task Group” he had created in February 1969 to recommend the course of the post-Apollo space program. That report laid out an ambitious plan, culminating in human trips to Mars sometime in the next 15 years. The president was soon to decide that the nation neither wanted nor could afford that kind of ambition in space. But this “deceleration” of the U. S. space program was still in the future as Richard Nixon and his associates made sure that the president was closely identified with the success of Apollo 11, even though he had only the good fortune to be the occupant of the White House when the lunar land­ing occurred. One way of emphasizing the linkage between the president and the mission’s success was a purposeful ignoring in Nixon’s statements related to Apollo 11 of the role of the two presidents actually responsible for Apollo—Lyndon B. Johnson, who had provided steady support for the proj­ect during his five years in the White House, and especially John F. Kennedy, who had the original vision of using a mission to the Moon as an instrument of U. S. grand strategy and then had backed up that vision with a massive commitment of human and financial resources. Richard Nixon was able to harvest the fruits of Kennedy’s and Johnson’s nurturing of Apollo without any additional commitment of tangible resources on his part. His major, and not insignificant, contribution was linking the prestige of the office of the president of the United States to the Apollo achievement. He did so skillfully, personally orchestrating his engagement with the lunar landing and its aftermath. Nixon took some significant risks along the way. If there had been a mission failure at some point or if the Apollo 11 crew members had not been so successful in their unaccustomed role as global diplomats, the “spirit of Apollo” that President Nixon so effectively used to signal U. S. determination to maintain global leadership might not have been so potent a symbol. But NASA delivered extraordinary results in carrying out the first landing on another celestial body, and Richard Nixon was able to leverage that success to a major strategic triumph for the United States.