White House Oversight of NASA

One impact of his decision to send Americans to the Moon “before this decade is out” was to make the progress of the space program of direct personal interest to President Kennedy. As he planned for his presidency, Kennedy could not have anticipated making such a decision within four months of taking office, and thus he had been willing to delegate to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson the administration’s lead role in space policy, and to symbolize that role by making the vice president the chairman of a revitalized National Aeronautics and Space Council. When asked whether President Kennedy would have assigned such an apparently central role with respect to space to the vice president if he had realized how significant space efforts would become in the months immediately after his inauguration, Theodore Sorensen in 2009 responded, with a note of skepticism, “that’s a very interesting and thoughtful question, to which I don’t know the answer. . . I think, being very frank about it, that at the time he gave Johnson the chairmanship of the Space Council it was not a position that was among the highest priorities he faced, or among those that most interested him.”4