A Last Try at U. S.-Soviet Space Cooperation before. Beginning the Race to the Moon

On April 12, 1961, the Soviet Union once again achieved a spectacular space “first”—the orbiting of Soviet Air Force pilot Yuri Gagarin. As President Kennedy and his associates discussed how best to react to this newest Soviet achievement in space, notions of a cooperative initiative took a back seat. But the preference for cooperation was never far from Kennedy’s mind, and even as he decided that the United States should enter a space race, he at the same time made one more attempt to engage the Soviet Union in space cooperation.

On May 16, President Kennedy received a letter from Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev formally accepting Kennedy’s February suggestion that he and Kennedy meet. Khrushchev suggested that the meeting take place in Vienna in early June. This was to be the first (and what turned out to be the only) time the two superpower leaders met face-to-face. This late acceptance of Kennedy’s suggestion for such a meeting came after several rounds of communications between Moscow and Washington. The White House had believed the idea of a Kennedy-Khrushchev meeting dead after the Bay of Pigs debacle, but Khrushchev thought a meeting between the two heads of state could still be useful.20 From Khrushchev’s perspective, Kennedy and the United States were in a weakened position after the Bay of Pigs, and a summit meeting might result in compromises favoring Soviet interests. In a May 16 message to German chancellor Konrad Adenauer explaining his reasons for considering Khrushchev’s proposal for a meeting, Kennedy explained that he was “faced with the problem of going ahead with this or withdrawing my previous indication of my willingness to do so.” He added that he had given Khrushchev an “interim agreement” to a “get acquainted” meeting and that his “present disposition is to proceed. . . provided that there are no further untoward developments meanwhile.” Kennedy expected the discussions at the meeting to be “quite general in character.”21

In preparing for the meeting with Khrushchev, the idea of proposing U. S.-USSR space cooperation was resurrected, even as planning for setting the goal of a lunar landing before the Soviets was in its final stages. On May 18, Jerome Wiesner sent the president two papers “on possible cooperative projects in space to be explored with the Soviet Union.” One of these papers was a memorandum for the president from the Department of State dated May 12 summarizing the work that had been carried out in the February – April time period; the other was the April 13 report on possible cooperative initiatives. The State Department memo listed ten possible areas of coopera­tion, ranging from “reciprocal ground-based support for space experiments” to “coordination or cooperation in manned exploration of the moon.” It suggested that the initial approach to the Soviet Union should offer “a range of choice as to the degree and scope of cooperation they wish to embark on” and should be “unpublicized and low-pressure.” The paper also suggested that “we should not exclude from our list a mention of the possibility of cooperating in the most ambitious projects related to manned exploration of the moon and investigation of the planets.” This was so because such an omission would leave the United States “open to a Soviet initiative which would make them proponents of large-scale international cooperation, thus aligning them with a wide-spread sentiment. . . that such ventures should be undertaken cooperatively on behalf of all mankind.” The paper noted that “our recent astronaut flight [the May 5 suborbital mission of Alan Shepard] and the crystallization of plans for the expansion and acceleration of our space program have served to place us in a relatively favorable posture for an approach to the Soviets.” Wiesner asked Kennedy, “would you like me to do anything more about this?”22

Kennedy did indeed want these possibilities explored. According to one of those involved in preparing Kennedy for the summit meeting, the president did not have “any definite plan of procedure in mind.” Rather, “he wanted to keep himself flexible with a minimum of fixed positions, so as to be able to explore fully any openings that might emerge” during his conversations with the Soviet leader.” However, “the president did have in mind certain concrete possibilities for improving relations should the opportunity for pro­posing them arise. One that he considered might be particularly fruitful was cooperation in space.”23

Beginning in mid-May, Kennedy pursued both formal and informal paths to explore Soviet interest in space cooperation.24 As the agenda for the sum­mit meeting with Khrushchev was being planned, the president directed Dean Rusk to raise the possibility of space cooperation, including a joint lunar mission, with Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko. Gromyko’s May 20 reply echoed the Soviet line—that without progress towards gen­eral disarmament, “all cooperation in the field of rocket research and any exchange of information about Soviet rocket technology is inconceivable.”25

Kennedy did not accept this response as definitive. Beginning in the after­math of the Bay of Pigs crisis, the president had established a secret, back-chan­nel line of communication with the Soviet leadership. His brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, developed a relationship with Georgi Bolshakov, a mid-level agent of the intelligence service of the Soviet Army, the GRU, who was working under the cover of being a Soviet reporter in Washington. In the weeks before the summit, Robert Kennedy and Bolshakov met privately several times. The attorney general used the GRU agent to communicate President Kennedy’s thinking on what might be accomplished at a summit meeting directly to the Kremlin, and to receive back messages from the Soviet leadership, particularly with respect to the possibility of a summit agreement on a nuclear test ban as a step toward arms control. The Soviet response, which had been approved by the Presidium, left little hope for a successful summit unless the United States was willing to address the issue of the future status of Berlin after the Soviet Union signed a peace treaty with the commu­nist-controlled German Democratic Republic (East Germany).26

On May 21, following Gromyko’s negative response, Robert Kennedy added an inquiry to the Kremlin about the possibility of space cooperation to his conversations with Bolshakov. There was no response to this suggestion, and the president proceeded with announcing the lunar landing project in his address to Congress on May 25.