Chasing the Moon

by Robert Stone

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  UNLIKE THE PREVIOUS candidates who had been approached for the job, the man President John Kennedy finally engaged to run the nation’s space agency in 1961 was neither an engineer, nor a scientist, nor an academic. Thirty years earlier at the University of North Carolina, James Webb had considered a career in science education. However, when at age fifty-four he was named NASA administrator, Webb was an experienced Washington insider, having served as President Truman’s director of the Bureau of the Budget and later as his undersecretary of state. Webb’s experience in the federal government and in private industry gave him a rare combination of management, legislative, and legal insight. In addition, he was an astute observer of personal interrelationships, a keen listener with the ability to quickly perceive others’ concerns and motivate them to do their best. It turned out Webb was the perfect person for the job, even though when he was sworn into office neither he nor President Kennedy had any idea that within a few weeks Webb would be faced with the massive challenge of overseeing a program to put a human on the Moon.

  Webb had been raised in a politically progressive home, where love of learning was valued more than the pursuit of wealth. In his early twenties he took a job as secretary to the powerful chair of the House Rules Committee, which provided invaluable insight into the inner workings of Washington. He was fortuitously situated at the fulcrum of legislative action during President Franklin Roosevelt’s historic first one hundred days, not only observing how deals were made but actively participating in the process. Two years later his government work with the aircraft industry led to an executive position at Sperry Corporation, an important supplier of military and civilian aircraft-navigation equipment; he eventually served as treasurer, secretary, and a vice president.

  In the months immediately before Sputnik, while working as the director of an oil company, Webb created the Frontiers of Science Foundation, an initiative in Oklahoma conceived to train a new generation of secondary school and university science educators and expand statewide technological development. And in the immediate aftermath of the Sputnik panic, it turned out to be remarkably prescient, as the quality of scientific and mathematical instruction in the United States came under increased scrutiny. President Eisenhower gave the Oklahoma program attention in a televised speech in which he emphasized the importance of science education throughout the country.

  Now as head of the nation’s space program, Webb saw it as a responsibility of his position to motivate and educate the youth of America about the science and technology that would define their future. NASA partnered with the World’s Fair Corporation to create a Space Park adjacent to the Hall of Science. There, beneath shadows cast by full-size Atlas, Titan II, and Agena missiles, fairgoers could inspect mock-ups of the new Gemini capsule scheduled to be piloted into space in the coming year. They could also gaze at the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module, which was being designed and manufactured a few miles away, at the Grumman Aircraft Engineering plant in Bethpage, Long Island.

  The American effort to get to the Moon was the largest peacetime government initiative in the nation’s history. At its peak in the mid-1960s, nearly 2 percent of the American workforce was engaged in the effort to some degree. It employed more than four hundred thousand individuals, most of them working for twenty thousand different private companies and two hundred universities. Webb had to oversee a system that could effectively monitor the various NASA branch offices and contractors, ensure that public and political support for the lunar program was sustained for an entire decade, and keep everything moving ahead, on budget and on schedule, to meet Kennedy’s end-of-decade goal with as yet unproven—and sometimes not yet invented—technology. Still, during his tenure at NASA, the man famed in Washington circles for “managing the unmanageable” remained largely invisible to the public. James Webb avoided personal publicity. While overseeing America’s quest to the Moon, he was never featured on a single news-magazine cover.

  Webb’s presence at the opening of the Hall of Science framed NASA’s ambitious pursuit of the lunar prize as more than an exercise in global politics. The New York World’s Fair’s official motto was “Peace through Understanding,” but implied in many of the corporate exhibits and displays was a second theme: “Faith in Technology.” The optimistic glimpses of the world yet to come reflected the national zeitgeist of the Kennedy years, coinciding with the heady period when humans first entered outer space. It was a time when it was assumed the United States would undertake big challenges and successfully meet them. General Motors’s popular Futurama exhibit took visitors on a trip to the year 2024. Highly detailed models depicted modernist underwater cities, massive space stations in rotation as they orbited the Earth, and the first human colonies on the Moon. It was an extension of what Wernher von Braun, Collier’s, and Walt Disney had forecast a decade earlier.

  If rockets to the Moon and the exploration of the planets were to be a part of life in the near future, surely it seemed possible that the twentieth century’s other, more earthly challenges could be solved as well. The technological optimism on display at the World’s Fair aligned with James Webb’s own bigger vision for NASA. He believed that achieving the lunar-landing mandate could serve as an instructive test case to demonstrate how an effectively managed, innovative, large government program could partner with private industry and educational institutions to better America’s standard of living and its quality of life. It would lead the way for other large, non-military government programs that might revitalize the cities, establish a mass-transportation infrastructure, reduce environmental pollution, or discover new alternative sources of energy. In this regard Webb was a very different kind of space-age visionary. He wasn’t driven by a need to solve a theoretical problem or fulfill a personal dream of traveling into space. Instead, he believed the application of government power and resources could transform the nation through what Webb came to refer to as “space-age management.”

  By the time the Hall of Science opened, popular forecasts of a greater technological future were coinciding with Lyndon Johnson’s outline for his Great Society, in which no child would go unfed and no youngster would go unschooled. When the World’s Fair first opened its gates on a rainy April morning, President Johnson marked the occasion with a speech that contrasted the fair’s vision of hope for the future with the unavoidable realities of poverty, prejudice, crowded cities, diminishing resources, and the erosion of the country’s natural beauty. But at the United States Pavilion, Johnson’s words were drowned out by chants of “Freedom Now” and “Jim Crow Must Go” from a small group of well-organized demonstrators. In response, some in the VIP area demanded of the New York police, “Do something!…Take them out of here!” before the demonstrators were physically dragged away to patrol wagons. New York policemen arrested more than three hundred activists at the World’s Fair demonstrations that morning.

  James Webb, Lyndon Johnson, and the protestors who turned out in the rain all believed in the federal government’s benevolent power to effect changes to improve society. The dreams, hopes, and expectations for the promising future on display at the New York World’s Fair were built on a collective faith in technology. Though difficult political and social issues faced the nation, the mood of the country remained optimistic—despite the recent tragedy in Dallas. Intimations of cynicism and disillusionment about established national institutions were still rare in the mid-1960s. For the moment it seemed possible that innovative space-age management solutions might prove effective when adapted and applied to some of the nation’s other daunting challenges.

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  WHEN HE WAS sworn in to oversee NASA, Webb stood out in an administration populated with younger faces, patrician accents, and Ivy League pedigrees. Solidly built at five foot nine inches, Webb didn’t have the athletic, aristocratic presence of Kennedy and von Braun or the towering height of Johnson, but
his stance, unflinching gaze, and frequently raised chin telegraphed self-assurance. He spoke rapidly, directly, and often at length, usually inserting a disarming smile and making one-to-one contact with a flash of brilliance in his eyes.

  Like Kennedy, Johnson granted Webb near-complete autonomy over the massive budget under his control. However, in contrast to Kennedy, who viewed NASA’s focus almost exclusively in terms of beating the Russians to the Moon, Johnson was sympathetic to Webb’s belief that within a few years NASA’s overall efforts would establish to the world the nation’s preeminence in space, not merely the fact that it could accomplish one dramatic feat. In Webb’s definition, preeminence included not only the high-profile human missions but also engaging in planetary science with robotic probes, establishing a network of weather and communications satellites, and fostering scientific education and technological innovation.

  As a manager, Webb avoided the latest ideas promoted by elite business schools. Rather, he preferred theories and philosophies of administration that he had discovered in practice, often championing ideas that had gone out of fashion or were overlooked. While vice president at Sperry, he explored human-relations-centered management concepts, including the ideas and writings of Mary Parker Follett, a turn-of-the-century theorist, political scientist, and lecturer. Webb referred to Parker as “a brilliant woman” and “high spirit” who emphasized the importance of building group relationships, conflict resolution, and executive leadership that focused on working with others rather than exerting arbitrary power over them. By the time of her death in 1933, Follett’s theories had fallen out of favor, yet Webb continued to mine her work and recommend her ideas while at NASA.

  His own leadership at the space agency was marked by an agile “keep-’em-guessing” technique he termed “planned disequilibrium,” a process that fused multiple coalitions of forces into a cohesive but essentially unstable whole, which Webb then had to keep headed in the desired direction. Understandably, working under such fluid, stressful, and unpredictable conditions exerted a toll, but many also flourished in this environment, and they tended to be young, competitive, intelligent, and highly motivated.

  Overseeing an agency that depended on a workforce largely trained in the sciences and engineering put Webb in a delicate position, given his non-technical background. He resolved this during his formative years as NASA administrator by establishing a decision-making triad with two other space-agency veterans: Robert Seamans, a former MIT engineering professor who was named his associate administrator, and Hugh Dryden, a noted physicist and science administrator who served as deputy administrator. Webb interacted comfortably with engineers, contractors, and the different NASA center directors, but he could occasionally surprise a meeting by asking the participants to consider a more flexible approach to solving a problem. Nevertheless, under Webb’s guidance, the individual NASA centers instituted different management systems designed around their needs. For example, at the Marshall Space Flight Center, von Braun communicated with his top managers by circulating a once-a-week compendium, which collected the various managers’ concise weekly progress reports supplemented with von Braun’s informal thoughts and suggestions.

  Out of necessity, NASA and the Pentagon had to work in close collaboration. The launch facilities at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station were used for the pre-Apollo flights, and in 1963 NASA formally established its own independent Launch Operations Center—later renamed the Kennedy Space Center—adjacent to the military installation. The recovery of NASA’s spacecraft also required the active participation of U.S. Navy vessels and aircraft. But it was seldom an easy partnership. In contrast to the Pentagon’s embrace of rational systems analysis under the leadership of defense secretary Robert McNamara during the 1960s, Webb’s agile and far less rigid planned-disequilibrium approach raised eyebrows. Since NASA’s creation in 1958, there had been many in the Pentagon—and in the Air Force, especially—who believed America’s space program should be under military control. And after NASA’s appropriations grew to exceed 4 percent of the national budget, McNamara’s dismissive attitude about the civilian space program led Webb to believe the secretary of defense privately thought, “How [can] anything as big as this be well run unless I’m running it?”

  Webb hadn’t seen combat during World War II. He was to have been part of the Marine Corps air assault on Japan, which was called off after the atomic bombs ended the war. But he was no stranger to physical risk, having survived four midair engine failures while a young pilot in the Marine Corps reserve. Like most of the war veterans involved in the early space program, he knew that risk was unavoidable whenever a human being was placed on a rocket and hurled into space. Still, he had a keen awareness of the potential repercussions of any public failure. Precisely how much risk Webb deemed acceptable was defined early in his tenure, before the first piloted Mercury flight. Webb clashed with Kennedy’s science adviser, Jerome Wiesner, who argued that NASA should spend another year launching primates into orbit before launching the first American astronaut. Webb passionately disagreed. If the Russians were already flying men into space, he said, the United States couldn’t be seen wasting time with monkeys. “Our people [have] to learn to live with risk and make damned sure that every effort [is] made to avoid casualties.”

  Wiesner and Webb passionately disagreed once again, a year later, about the risk involved with the lunar-orbit-rendezvous option. Calling it “the worst mistake in the world,” Wiesner believed the plan was a blueprint for disaster. During Kennedy’s two-day tour of NASA facilities in 1962, Wiesner and Webb argued about it in front of the press while touring the Marshall Space Flight Center. Eventually Kennedy had to intervene, humorously attempting to defuse the conflict by explaining, “Webb’s got all the money and Jerry’s only got me.”

  Overseeing a relatively new government agency accorded a huge portion of the federal budget, Webb took pains to protect NASA’s public image from any suggestion of waste, influence, or abuse of power. This extended to his daily behavior. He refused the government limousine assigned to him by the General Services Administration. Instead, he traveled to Capitol Hill in a modest black Checker, similar to the ubiquitous metropolitan taxis of the era. Concerned that Wernher von Braun’s lucrative public-speaking schedule might give an appearance that he was profiting personally from his NASA fame, Webb instructed him to drastically reduce his lecture schedule and waive an honorarium whenever he spoke at a university.

  Webb’s busy schedule took him to NASA’s many field centers and contractors’ facilities, forcing him to spend much of his working day traveling by air, so, early in his tenure, Robert Seamans suggested NASA replace its aging prop plane with a new business jet. Webb objected. “We’re not getting any fancy jets in this organization! As soon as you do that, every congressman who is involved in our program will want to borrow the jet. No jets!” Instead, Webb agreed to upgrade to a slower Grumman Gulfstream I, a widely used twin-turboprop business aircraft, the back of which Webb had outfitted with a small four-seat conference area. This became his airborne office. When heading to one of the field offices or to Cape Kennedy, he might invite an influential congressman along and use the opportunity to subject his guest to a twenty-five-thousand-foot-high persuasion offensive. He would often strengthen his pitch for congressional support by asking a noted NASA scientist or astronaut to accompany them and give an impassioned explanation of why the project in question should be funded.

  During the course of his first months at NASA headquarters, Webb realized NASA’s public-relations efforts were woefully ineffective, and if public and congressional support were to be sustained for an entire decade they would need to be rethought. Through his North Carolina connections in Washington, he made an appeal to a fellow Carolinian who was already familiar with the space program and NASA’s public-affairs efforts.

  Julian Scheer had been a respected journalist for The Charlotte News, where he had c
overed the early years of the civil rights movement, the rise of far-right white-supremacist organizations, presidential campaigns, college sports, and the first Mercury launches. But Scheer had recently left his job to write a novel based on what he had observed while covering the struggle for civil rights. He had already co-authored a nonfiction book, First into Outer Space, with a young aerospace engineer and was now eager to capture in fiction his impressions of what he considered the other big American story of the 1960s.

  Considered by many the best public-relations person in 1960s Washington, D.C., as NASA’s head of public-affairs veteran journalist Julian Scheer worked with the news media to sustain public interest in the country’s space program. The author of many books for children, Scheer posed outside NASA’s Washington headquarters in 1965, the same year one of his books won a Caldecott Honor Award.

  Scheer’s experience covering the early Mercury flights had been both exhilarating and frustrating. He saw how the television networks and Life magazine were receiving favored access from NASA’s public-affairs officers, while he and hundreds of other print journalists were left to cobble together stories working from little more than bland official press releases. And when covering Scott Carpenter’s Aurora 7 flight in May 1962, Scheer had been among the reporters struggling to obtain accurate information from NASA spokesperson Shorty Powers during Carpenter’s troubled reentry and recovery. Carpenter had landed 250 miles from his intended splashdown point; however, members of the press were kept uninformed about his status for more than a half hour, uncertain whether Carpenter had survived the fiery reentry. In fact, recovery aircraft had picked up Aurora 7’s radio beacon during the descent, and Carpenter’s heartbeat monitor indicated he was alive and well. After that frustrating experience, Scheer decided to quit The Charlotte News and finally write his novel.