Were Changes in the Wind?

Responding both to President Kennedy’s concern over the increasing costs of the U. S. space effort and criticisms such as those in the August Reader’s Digest that there was too much emphasis on the lunar landing program at the expense of space efforts more directly relevant to national security, the White House in late September 1963 initiated a sweeping review of the U. S. civilian and military space programs and the balance between them. Representative Olin Teague a few days after Kennedy’s September 20 United Nations speech had written to President Kennedy, saying that he was “very anxious to know whether this national goal [being first to the Moon] was being abandoned or changed” and that he was “disappointed” at the sug­gestion of cooperation in the undertaking with the Soviet Union.1 National security adviser McGeorge Bundy replied on October 4 that he and White House congressional liaison Larry O’Brien had discussed Teague’s letter with the president. Bundy told Teague that Kennedy asked Bundy to contact Teague with “an interim answer to the important question which you raise” regarding the national security implications of the cooperative proposal. Bundy told the congressman that “the relation between national security and the space program is very clear and important in the President’s judg­ment, and he is currently engaged in a major review of the relative roles of different agencies. . . We can assure you that there will be new expressions of the Administration’s point of view.”2

What precisely was meant by the tantalizing term “new expressions” was not specified. But apparently there were some people advising President Kennedy that it was not necessary to continue the fast-paced effort to reach the Moon by the end of the decade; for example, secretary of state Dean Rusk in an October 3 meeting with the president suggested taking 15-20 years to reach the lunar surface. Others argued that more emphasis should be placed on human flights in Earth orbit carried out under Department of Defense auspices. NASA’s Webb saw Kennedy’s United Nations speech as “a slight withdrawal of support” for Apollo, a “slight testing of the sentiment

as to whether the program could stand without his strong support.” Webb saw the speech as reflecting a “feeling that this was just the beginning of a group around him [Kennedy] who wanted to withdraw support.” Who the members of this “group” were was not clear to Webb; he suggested in a 1969 interview that “I don’t know whether it meant Schlesinger and Sorensen or whether it meant the disarmament [and] arms control [advocates] or whether it meant Mr. McNamara. I would simply say those around him.”3