Johnson to Chair Space Council

During the transition, Ted Sorensen and David Bell, the Harvard economist whom Kennedy had chosen to be his budget director, met several times with BOB deputy director Elmer Staats. Among the many issues discussed, they agreed that the Space Council was not needed and that legislation abolishing it should be reintroduced in the new Congress. As late as December 17, an action to “abolish the National Aeronautics and Space Council” appeared on a “Preliminary Check-List of Organizational Issues” prepared for the transi­tion team by Richard Neustadt.48

However, by mid-December, when Kennedy and Johnson met in Palm Beach to discuss the new administration’s legislative program, Kennedy had decided to assign the vice president-elect lead responsibility within his admin­istration for space issues. To signify this, Kennedy announced on December 20 that the vice president would replace the president as chair of the National Aeronautics and Space Council.49

The precise sequence of events surrounding this announcement remains unclear. On December 17, in preparation for Johnson’s meetings with Kennedy, Kenneth Belieu, who was the staff director of the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences that Johnson had chaired, sent a memo to Johnson on “Government Organization for Space Issues.” In it, Belieu suggested that Johnson urge Kennedy to “reactivate the Space Council.” But he did not suggest that Johnson ask Kennedy to make him the council’s chair; rather, he said, “While the law would necessarily need to be changed to include the Vice President as a formal member of the Council, the President could invite the Vice President to attend and preside over the Council meetings in his absence, pending a change in the law.” Belieu also told Johnson that “at NASA there has been a continuing lack of leadership and competence” and that “the Air Force can be expected—and apparently already has started—to make a basic power play to grab the entire Space program. This would involve eliminating NASA.”50

The Space Council assignment was a logical one for Johnson. Beginning soon after the launch of Sputnik 1, he had played a prominent role in shaping the Congressional response to the Soviet space achievements. An October 17, 1957, memorandum from one of his top advisers, George Reedy, pointed out to Johnson that the Soviet achievement “could be one of the great divid­ing lines in American and world history, the whole history of humanity” and suggested that it offered the Democrats, and specifically Johnson, an oppor­tunity to present themselves as being more in tune with such a development. Following Reedy’s advice, Johnson chaired the twenty days of hearings on “satellite and missile programs” held by his Preparedness Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee between November 1957 and January 1958. As Johnson addressed the Senate’s Democratic caucus on January 7, 1958, in an address Reedy characterized as having “compelling power,” he claimed that “control of space means control of the world.”51 As the Senate organized itself to deal with space issues, Johnson named himself chairman of the new Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, even as he main­tained his position as majority leader.

In a 1969 interview with veteran television journalist Walter Cronkite on the occasion of the launch of the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon, Lyndon Johnson told Cronkite that president-elect Kennedy had asked him whether there was anything “that I thought I could be helpful to the Administration on.” Johnson replied that “I would like to work in the field of space,” and that Kennedy had replied that “a President had all a person could do and the Law provided that the President would be Chairman of the Space Council.” Kennedy told Johnson that if he were “willing to assume that obligation, he would ask the Congress to amend that statue.”52

Two days after the decision to make Lyndon Johnson chair of the Space Council was announced, Belieu wrote a follow-up memorandum on “Space Problems” that focused on the potential Air Force “power grab.” He told Johnson that the NASA-Air Force conflict was “why I have been so firmly convinced that the Space Council needs to be resurrected and reestablished,” since “only someone with your force and vigor and understanding can sepa­rate the men from the boys. With President’s backing and a man you could trust running NASA, and with close liaison and affinity to the Pentagon at the higher civilian levels, the problem can be licked.”53

Even after the announcement of the space role for Johnson, Richard Neustadt on December 23 sent Kennedy a “memo on space problems for you to use with Lyndon Johnson.” Neustadt in a cover letter said that his memo­randum was a response to Kennedy for a suggestion, which seemingly must have come before December 20, “on something you could give him to work on and worry about”; he called the memorandum a “quickie,” one that “was worked up today in collaboration with the Budget staff, and no doubt could be vastly improved. But the main thing was to get you something to use.” The Neustadt memorandum noted that “the ‘space’ program, both civil and mili­tary, raises problems of great difficulty” that were “essentially. . . problems of policy direction.” The memo noted that “an opportunity now exists to revi­talize the National Aeronautics and Space Council under the Chairmanship of the Vice President” in order “to have it operate selectively on the high priority policy issues.”54 Whether the suggestion to make Johnson the Space Council chair came from the Johnson camp or the Kennedy camp is not totally clear. There is, as the preceding paragraphs show, even suggestive evidence that the initiative may have come from Lyndon Johnson himself.

Johnson returned to Palm Beach to meet with Kennedy on December 26, this time accompanied by Oklahoma senator Robert Kerr, who was LBJ’s choice as his successor as chairman of the Senate space committee. To make Robert Kerr the new chairman meant bypassing several senators on the com­mittee more senior than Kerr. Of them, only Senator Clinton Anderson of New Mexico was potentially interested in the chairmanship. Anderson was persuaded not to stand in Kerr’s way and instead to accept the chairmanship of another committee during a phone call from Kerr as he met with Johnson and Kennedy on December 26; Kerr told Anderson on the telephone that the two men wanted Kerr to have the chairmanship, and that he hoped Anderson would agree. Anderson immediately accepted this request.55 Until he became committee chair, Kerr had shown little interest in space; his friendship with Lyndon Johnson and his stature as a leading senator were his prime qualifications for the chairmanship. In Kerr, Johnson knew he had a close and powerful ally who would help him push the new administration to propose a larger space program and who would be sympathetic to the politi­cal (and pork-barrel) uses of that larger program.

After Kennedy’s meeting with Johnson and Kerr, The New York Times reported that the three had agreed “on plans to expand the United States’ exploration of space… reflecting Mr. Kennedy’s serious concern over the Soviet lead in this field and his oft-repeated campaign argument that United States prestige had slipped abroad as a result.”56 Whether this was, in fact, what the men had agreed upon was not immediately clear. It was not until four months later, in April 1961, that the Space Council was activated and Lyndon Johnson as its chairman given the task of proposing a way for the United States to enter and win the space race.