Engaging the National Security Council

While Nixon’s most senior domestic policy advisers, Ehrlichman and Shultz, had become engaged in discussions of NASA’s future, that was not the case with respect to national security adviser Henry Kissinger. Kissinger had got­ten involved in evaluating post-Apollo space cooperation with Europe and the Soviet Union, but had not had much exposure to the broader issue of future U. S. space activities. Fletcher set out to remedy this situation, first by talking with Brigadier General Alexander Haig, Kissinger’s deputy on the National Security Council staff. Fletcher reported to Low that “in suggest­ing that the National Security Council become more involved with NASA affairs, Al Haig needed absolutely no persuasion. He has, for the last year and a half, been convinced of this and so has Henry [Kissinger], but they have been so busy they haven’t really tried to work the problem.” Haig had suggested “that someone who regularly meets with the President ought to be intimately familiar with NASA affairs” and that, if Kissinger were to play that role, “some mechanism has to be set up whereby Henry is regularly informed on what the major issues are in NASA.” Fletcher told Haig “that perhaps the principal issue before the President now was the space shuttle,” and gave Haig a copy of the November 22 “best case” memorandum on the shuttle rationale, while observing that “it is doubtful whether he is going to have the time to read” the document.13

NASA’s somewhat belated attempts to engage Kissinger as an advocate for the national security and foreign benefits of full capability shuttle and a strong civilian space program were intended as a corrective to the real­ity that from the start of the Nixon administration the future of the space program had been treated as an issue of domestic policy and thus had been evaluated in terms of employment effects, technological benefits, and budget priority. Whether NASA would have fared better in its post-Apollo aspirations if the Nixon White House had from the start seen the space program as a foreign policy and national security effort, as had been the case during the Kennedy administration, is an interesting but unanswer­able question.