Kennedy Takes a Position

The publicity-seeking chairman of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, Overton Brooks, was aware of and concerned by the Air Force campaign. Unsatisfied by Air Force assurances that it did not hope to take over the lead role in the U. S. space program, Brooks wrote a three-page let­ter to President Kennedy on March 9, saying that he was “seriously disturbed by the persistence and strength of implications reaching me to the effect that a radical change in our national space policy is contemplated.” Brooks told Kennedy that he did not want to see “the military tail wag the space dog.”30 Brooks followed this letter with hearings on the NASA-Air Force rivalry, but he was not able to get top DOD officials to testify, most likely due to an administration decision not to cooperate with the committee. The hearings shed little light on the evolving situation.

Despite the hopes raised by Kennedy’s campaign rhetoric, it is unlikely that the new administration could have, or would have, agreed with the Air Force hope for a larger role in space at the expense of NASA. As he left office, Dwight Eisenhower had warned of the increasing power of the “military- industrial complex,” and a move in the early months of the administration to increase Air Force activity in a visible area such as space would have been politically very difficult. Secretary of Defense McNamara was trying to get the management of defense activities under centralized control. The top peo­ple in DOD were not particularly space conscious, and McNamara and Webb had reached an understanding of the respective roles of their agencies that the White House would have been unlikely to countermand. NASA under Webb’s direction seemed to be shaping up in terms both of its organization and program success, and there were no compelling reasons to downgrade the importance of the agency. One of presidential science adviser Wiesner’s major priorities was to control the spread of the arms race into new areas; he too was unlikely to have supported an expanded military space effort.

President Kennedy replied to the Brooks letter on March 23, telling the congressman that “it is not now, nor has it ever been my intention to subor­dinate the activities of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to those of the Department of Defense.”31 With that response, the con­troversy over the NASA-Air Force relationship became a secondary policy issue, although it never completely disappeared.