Other Explanations

Historian Roger Launius has been somewhat critical of explaining Kennedy’s space decisions as the result of “an exceptionally deliberate, reasonable, judicious, and logical process.” He finds such an explanation as overly “neat and tidy.” Launius suggests that the strength of the rational choice model “is its emphasis on Kennedy’s Apollo decision as a politically pragmatic one that solved a number of significant problems,” and that its weakness is “its unwavering belief that individuals—and especially groups of individuals— logically assess situations and respond with totally reasonable consensus actions.” He adds that “since virtually nothing is done solely on a rational basis this is a difficult conclusion to accept.” Launius also wonders whether Kennedy’s attraction to the race to the Moon was a reflection of his “quint­essential masculinity.”11

I agree; of course other considerations than logic were involved in deci­sions related to the race to the Moon. The question is whether a rational approach was the predominant influence on policy choice in the 1961-1963 period, even as politics and personalities also played a part. I believe the preceding narrative suggests that this indeed was the case. A rational deci­sion process can address both solving current problems as well as finding a way to achieve longer-term goals. Certainly the immediate stimulus to the decision to go to the Moon was the threat to U. S. global leadership posed by the world’s reaction to Soviet space successes at the same time as the United States looked weak in its conduct of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Kennedy’s desire to regain his personal prestige and his administration’s momentum were also problems addressed by the Apollo choice. Finding a way at the same time to move away from current problems and to pursue a worthy goal is an opti­mum policy-making objective, and Kennedy’s space strategy was well-crafted to achieve this outcome. John Kennedy shared with others in his family an intensely competitive personality, and that characteristic certainly influenced the way he interpreted the U. S.-Soviet space relationship. He constantly used references to “a race,” the need for “winning” and being “first” in both his public and private comments on space.12 As Manned Spacecraft Center director Robert Gilruth commented, “he was a young man; he didn’t have all the wisdom he would have had. If he’d been older, he probably would never have done it.” It was a combination of Kennedy’s youthful faith in the future, his fundamentally competitive personality, and his broader concep­tion of the national interest that made him willing to accept the costs and risks of the lunar enterprise.

In 1964, political scientist Vernon van Dyke suggested that Kennedy’s need to restore national pride, which van Dyke characterized as “a need for national achievement and national morale” and as “gratification stem­ming from actual or confidently anticipated achievement,” was the basic motivation for the decision to initiate the U. S. lunar landing program. John Kennedy came to the White House believing that by the force of his per­sonality combined with forward-looking government actions he could “get this country moving again”; the combined shocks of the world reaction to the Gagarin flight and the Bay of Pigs fiasco challenged this belief. While restoring national (and perhaps personal) morale was indeed one of President Kennedy’s goals, it seems to me that he saw pride in American society and its achievements not primarily in domestic terms but more as an element of U. S. “soft power”—the ability of the United States to “obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admir­ing its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness.”13 In Kennedy’s thinking about Project Apollo, both pride and power were elements of a policy initiative aimed primarily at influencing other nations of the world. As he said in his May 25, 1961, speech announc­ing the decision to go to the Moon, “no single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind.”

Surprisingly, most historians of the Kennedy presidency give only passing attention to JFK’s space choices, even though Kennedy himself once char­acterized his decision to initiate Project Apollo as “among the most impor­tant decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.”14 An exception is the work of Michael Beschloss, who in 1997 characterized Kennedy’s lunar landing decision in a way that fits well with the more negative general assessment of Kennedy as president quoted earlier. Beschloss suggests that Kennedy “could easily tolerate the Gagarin success,” but after the collapse of the Bay of Pigs invasion, “he was desperately in need of something that would divert the attention of the public and identify him with a cause that would unify them behind his administration.” According to Beschloss, Kennedy’s April 20, 1961, memorandum to Vice President Johnson asking him to lead a review of the space program was “redolent of presidential panic.” Kennedy’s May 25 speech announcing the acceleration of the U. S. space effort asked for “the most open-ended commitment ever made in peacetime. . . and represented a high moment of the imperial presi­dency.” Beschloss argues that the proposed commitment was “a measure of Kennedy’s aversion to long-range planning and his tendency to be rattled by momentary crises,” and that “Kennedy’s desire for a quick, theatrical reversal of his new administration’s flagging position, especially just before a summit with Khrushchev, is a more potent explanation of his Apollo decision than any other.” Beschloss concludes that “Kennedy’s political objectives were essentially achieved by the presidential decision to go to the Moon, and he did not necessarily think much about the long-term consequences.”15

I believe the record of how the lunar landing decision was made gives only modest support to Beschloss’s analysis. Words like “desperately” and “panic” do not seem to me to describe Kennedy’s state of mind as he consid­ered whether to use a “space achievement which promises dramatic results” as a tool of his foreign policy. Both in the weeks before the Gagarin flight, especially during the March 22-23 review of the NASA budget, and during his own inquiries as Lyndon Johnson’s space review was underway, Kennedy heard a wide variety of views on the value of a prestige-oriented space effort. Beschloss suggests that it was the Bay of Pigs failure that convinced Kennedy to move forward with a space initiative. But on April 14, before the invasion began, Kennedy met with his space advisors and commented that “there’s nothing more important” than getting the United States into a leading posi­tion in space. Kennedy’s final approval of the acceleration of the space effort came on May 10; the summit meeting with Khrushchev was not finally set until a week later. Even then, Kennedy sent out feelers regarding a possible agreement at the summit meeting on U. S.-Soviet cooperation in going to the Moon; this is inconsistent with assertion that the need for a “quick, the­atrical reversal” of Kennedy administration fortunes before the summit was a key factor in Kennedy’s space decisions.

In summary then, I conclude that President Kennedy’s commitment to a lunar landing program as the centerpiece of an effort to establish U. S. space leadership was the result of thoughtful consideration, particularly given that it was reiterated a number of times between May 1961 and November 1963. The commitment was publicly embellished with rhetorical flourishes, but at its core was a Cold War-driven but rational policy choice.

The commitment also reflected values deeply embedded in the national psyche. When I wrote The Decision to Go to the Moon over forty years ago, my analysis of that decision reflected what Launius has correctly character­ized as “a fundamentally liberal perspective on U. S. politics and society” and a celebration of “the use of federal power for public good.” I suggested then that the Apollo decision reflected assumptions at the core of Western liberal philosophy. That man can do whatever he chooses, given only the will to do it and the techniques and resources required, is a belief that reflects motivations and characteristics basic to Western and particularly American civilization—a will to action, confidence in man’s mastery over nature, and a sense of mission. Specific decisions on what a government should do are made by its leaders, and ideally reflect a lasting conception of the national interest rather than more parochial concerns or the specifics of their char­acter. Through such decisions, the values and aspirations of a society can then be expressed through state action. John Kennedy embraced this activ­ist perspective; in his much-respected June 1963 commencement address at American University, he suggested that “our problems are man-made— therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable.”16

I would today revise my 1970 assessment, but only somewhat. The liberal perspective— that it is appropriate for the Federal government to under­take large-scale programs aimed at the public good—has been embraced by American presidents such as Woodrow Wilson, notably Franklin D. Roosevelt with his New Deal initiatives, John F. Kennedy and, after Kennedy, by Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama, as well as by the more progressive elements of the U. S. political community. Other presidents and the more conservative elements among U. S. intellectuals, media, and most probably the major­ity of the general public are, in contrast, skeptical of both the appropriate­ness and the feasibility of large-scale government programs aimed at societal improvement. So the proposal to focus massive government resources on a lunar landing effort in fact reflected only one of the two dominant strains in American political thought, the one that sees government steering of U. S. society as legitimate.

Conservative thinking as it applies to the commitment to Apollo was best articulated by historian Walter McDougall in his 1985 prize-winning study . . . the Heavens and the Earth. McDougall suggests that Kennedy’s pro­posal that the United States send Americans to the Moon “amounted to a plea that Americans, while retaining their free institutions, bow to a far more pervasive mobilization by government, in the name of progress.” The lunar landing decision was part of JFK’s assumption that some areas of “private behavior, when they involved the common security and well-being of the country” should be “susceptible to political control,” expressed through a “growing technocratic mentality.” He suggests that Project Apollo and the other initiatives proposed by Kennedy in his first months in office resulted in “an American-style mobilization that was one step away” from the Soviet approach to a planned society. To McDougall, “the commitment to go to the moon did more than accelerate existing trends in space. It served as the bridge over which technocratic methods passed from the military to the civilian realm.”17

Some justification for McDougall’s concern about the impulses behind the lunar landing decision can be found in the language used in the May 8, 1961, report signed by James Webb and Robert McNamara that recom­mended setting a voyage to the Moon as a national goal. In portions of the report embodying themes first suggested by McNamara assistant John Rubel, the report argued that the diffusion of U. S. research and development efforts during the 1950s, especially in the national security sector, had had “a strong adverse effect on our capacity to do a good job in space.” While the report did not suggest “that we apply Soviet type restrictions and controls upon the exercise of personal liberty and freedom of choice. . . we must create mechanisms to lay out and insist on achievement.” This call for concentra­tion of effort was also found in Wernher von Braun’s April 29, 1961, letter to Vice President Johnson responding to the questions President Kennedy had asked in his April 20 memorandum. Von Braun concluded his letter by noting that “in the space race we are competing with a determined opponent whose peacetime economy is on a wartime footing. . . I do not believe we can win this race unless we take some measures which thus far have been consid­ered acceptable only in times of a national emergency.”

Overall, however, McDougall’s analysis is derived more from his overall conservative perspective than from the facts of the situation in 1961-1963. While those charged with implementing the lunar mission individually went to extraordinary lengths to achieve success, neither John Kennedy’s nor James Webb’s management approach called for strong centralized control. The policy and budget decisions that steered Apollo in its early years were made through the normal decision-making process, not in a war-time or Soviet style. It was not the decision to go to the Moon that “militarized” civilian decision-making and led to such initiatives as President Johnson’s Great Society and James Webb’s attempts to use the space program as an instrument of change with respect to the U. S. educational and research systems. Those impulses stretched back to the activist presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Both Johnson and Webb were committed New Dealers who used their positions in government to take actions that in their view would be for the common good.

The debate over the appropriate role of the federal government in under­taking large-scale efforts on behalf of the U. S. citizenry is a continuing one, and a full discussion of that role is well beyond the scope of this study. What can be discussed, however, is what lessons can be drawn from the Apollo experience, and particularly from the way it was initiated by President John Kennedy, should there be a desire to begin another very expensive multiyear government initiative.