To the Moon Together: Pursuit. of an Illusion?

X resident Kennedy’s suggestion to Nikita Khrushchev at the June 1961 Vienna summit that the United States and the Soviet Union cooperate in flights to the Moon was made privately, and was not subsequently widely reported. The 1962 discussions on space cooperation were carried out on a low-key basis, with their results being made public only after agreement had been reached. In contrast, President Kennedy’s next cooperative initia­tive came in a most public fashion. Addressing the General Assembly of the United Nations on September 20, 1963, Kennedy said “in a field where the United States and the Soviet Union have a special capacity—in the field of space—there is room for new cooperation. . . I include among these possibili­ties a joint expedition to the moon.” “Why,” Kennedy asked, “should man’s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? . . . Surely we should explore whether the scientists and astronauts of our two countries— indeed of all the world—cannot work together in the conquest of space, sending some day in this decade to the moon not the representatives of a single nation, but representatives of all our countries.”[3]

Kennedy’s proposal came as a major surprise to all but a few people who had been involved in preparing his United Nations speech or had been advised by the president of his intent. The decision to include the proposal in the president’s speech was made just a day or two before September 20, although Kennedy had been mulling the idea for some time. The offer was the personal initiative of the president and a few of his closest advisers.

Responsible for drafting the UN address were presidential assistant Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and State Department official Richard Gardner. Schlesinger suggests that as the two “canvassed the scientific and technical agencies of the government, we discovered that specific proposals of American-Soviet cooperation seemed trivial compared to the enormities of the space age.” As they searched for more dramatic initiatives, “there swam into our minds the thought of merging the Russian and American expeditions to the moon.”2

Without clearing the idea with anyone else, Schlesinger included language proposing such a cooperative lunar mission in the speech draft “to see how it sounded.”3 Schlesinger says that he “had forgotten that the President had himself suggested this to Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961,” and thus was not “prepared for his quick approval.”4

Between the September 20 speech and his assassination two months later, President Kennedy continued to hope for a positive response to his proposal and, when it seemed to come in early November, to push NASA to come up with ways of turning the proposal into reality. Given all the practical diffi­culties of doing so, in addition to continuing skepticism within NASA and among many in Congress about the wisdom of the proposal in the first place, he may well indeed have been in “pursuit of an illusion”—the thought that the space arena might “be used as a means to swing the US and the USSR from competition to cooperation.”5 But certainly Kennedy was not prac­ticing what Walter McDougall has characterized as “benign hypocrisy”—a willingness to cooperate only in areas “where the United States was safely dominant.” McDougall suggests that Kennedy’s words about U. S.-USSR space cooperation “were just exercises at image-building.”6 The record sug­gests a different interpretation—that in 1963 Kennedy was quite serious in his hope that there were practical ways of making U. S. space projects, including the challenging undertaking of sending people to the Moon, an area for reducing U. S.-Soviet tensions and for developing habits of working together.