Reactions to the Proposal

Reactions to Kennedy’s proposal were quick to appear and mixed in charac­ter. The New York Times editorialized that the proposal showed that Kennedy was “courageous” and that he was “able and willing to seize the opportunity of the moment to exercise an imaginative political initiative.” In the same edition of the newspaper, reporter John Finney noted that Kennedy’s pro­posal had “caught many Government officials by surprise,” caused “bewil­derment,” and was seen by many in Washington as “the first step toward pulling out of the costly ‘moon race.’ ” The Times reported the next day that “Europe’s Press Praises Kennedy,” citing the Manchester Guardian’s charac­terization of the president’s proposal as a “minor master-stroke.” Two weeks later, the Times reported that Brainerd Holmes, who had left his position in NASA as head of manned space flight in June, thought that a coopera­tive lunar mission would be “a very costly, very inefficient, probably a very dangerous way, to execute the program.” The trade publication Missiles and Rockets was most negative, rejecting “such a naive internationalist approach to the lunar project. It can only harm the U. S. effort to the benefit of the Soviet Union.” The magazine characterized Kennedy’s proposal as “ill con­ceived,” potentially leading to the U. S. manned space flight program facing the prospect of “dwindling from one of the most exciting challenges ever accepted by a nation to an unimportant pawn in the Cold War to be sacri­ficed in the first gambit of appeasement.”33