Chasing the Moon

by Robert Stone

  Scheer had been working on his book for only a few days when Webb approached him with a request. Based on everything Scheer had seen and experienced while covering the space program, Webb asked, what kind of a revised public-affairs program would best benefit the public, the press, and NASA? Despite all the fine talk of its open program, Webb believed that what NASA was trying to accomplish for the country wasn’t being conveyed effectively. Project Gemini was about to be introduced, and Webb thought this was an opportunity to build upon the public’s interest and strengthen support leading forward to Apollo. He envisioned the average American following the nation’s Gemini astronauts as they confronted a series of advancing challenges, each of which would have to be mastered before taking the next step to the Moon. Plans called for Project Apollo to follow swiftly after the final Gemini mission. The first flights to the Moon would commence soon thereafter, leading to the eventual lunar landing before the end of the decade. Webb wanted Scheer to think about how his skills and knowledge as a journalist and storyteller might be applied to strengthen public engagement.

  He gave Scheer a month to compose a new integrated public-affairs plan. After reading his proposal a few weeks later, Webb immediately called Scheer. “I accept your offer to go to work for me,” Webb said. He told him writing that novel could wait. If the job interested him, Scheer would report directly to Webb at NASA headquarters. In return, Webb promised, he would do everything he could to back up Scheer’s strategic plan.

  Once installed in his new Washington office, Scheer attempted to correct the problems he had personally encountered while covering the Mercury launches. He determined that much of the ineffectiveness of NASA’s messaging led back to Shorty Powers, the ubiquitous public-affairs officer who had become a minor television celebrity. When Scheer had Powers removed, Webb did not question the decision, despite the uproar. Upon leaving NASA and the Air Force a year later, Powers became the first space-age personality to cash in on his fame, signing a long-term contract with Oldsmobile. Throughout the mid-1960s, Shorty Powers’s second act was appearing in a long-running series of television ads showing him behind the wheel of an Oldsmobile Jetstar 88, touting the rear trunk’s “spacious payload bay” or revving up the Rocket V8 engine to “take this baby downrange.”

  With his arrival in Washington, Julian Scheer brought the flavor of a metropolitan newsroom to NASA’s Washington headquarters. To enter his office was to be surrounded by constantly ringing telephones. Scheer would juggle calls while reclining behind his messy desk covered in piles of magazines and newspapers. “He’d lean back with a cigarette curling up into one eye and somehow he managed never to blink,” recalled Brian Duff, who worked with Scheer at NASA. “He’d say, ‘I’ll tell you one goddamned thing,’ and he’d scratch his stomach at the same time and you’d think, ‘This guy is tough as nails!’ ”

  Smart, witty, irreverent, and media savvy, Scheer was described by The Washington Post as “the best PR man in Washington.” When he realized that the astronauts were generally uncomfortable confronting the press, Scheer gained their trust and respect by encouraging them to be as authentic as possible in public and preventing any attempts to script their comments.

  Among his former colleagues in the press Scheer was well regarded; however, tensions arose when he believed their work was irresponsible. Scheer had a particularly contentious relationship with ABC’s Jules Bergman, who would use ruses to obtain network exclusives. In one such instance, Bergman worked around Scheer’s office when attempting to arrange a meeting between Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts at a hotel bar, where his ABC News camera crew was waiting to record the exchange. When Scheer found out, he called the meeting off and made sure that when the astronauts and cosmonauts finally met a few days later at a space conference, the event was open to all the world’s press.

  Jointly, Webb and Scheer agreed that NASA’s open program should send a message to the world: “We’re not the Soviets. In America we do things out in the open.” Scheer’s redefined public-affairs group now made an effort to provide journalists with as much accurate and timely information as could be provided. However, since ensuring continued public support was a central objective, NASA’s open program was still far from transparent. Space-beat journalists who saw their role as more than astro-cheerleaders would become frustrated when pursuing investigative stories. Even former journalists working in NASA’s public-affairs office occasionally misunderstood the nuance. During one internal presentation, a public-affairs staffer projected a glass slide that read: “NASA has an open program because it respects the public’s right to know.” Immediately, James Webb interrupted the presentation and demanded, “Destroy that slide.” The slide was removed, and shortly afterward the sound of breaking glass was heard in the background as the order was literally carried out. “NASA has an open program because it is good public policy to have an open program,” Webb explained. “I’m not in the business of the public’s right to know. There are others, like the attorney general, who will take care of that.”

  Nevertheless, within NASA some resisted Scheer and Webb’s more open approach. Engineers and members of the military worried that openness would endanger the secrecy of American technology or open NASA to another possible public humiliation like the failed Vanguard launch. Some of the astronauts, protective of their sanitized heroic public image, feared the press might report they occasionally used inappropriate language and weren’t the Boy Scouts depicted in Life magazine. Between the agency’s efforts to craft a truthful narrative that would sustain the public’s support and the press’s hunger for drama and exclusives, a tension arose that would be tested repeatedly.

  Assured that human space exploration would continue to generate interest well into the next decade, Hollywood producers began looking for viable space-related properties. Inevitably, Julian Scheer’s office was approached whenever a film crew requested NASA’s technical assistance or permission to shoot on location. Frank Capra, the Hollywood filmmaker renowned for directing Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life, had become interested in the American space program while making a promotional short film for an aerospace contractor. He thought it the perfect subject for a Columbia Pictures big-studio feature based on a space thriller written by aerospace journalist Martin Caidin. Marooned followed the story of a Mercury astronaut stranded in space when his retro-rocket fails to fire and the emergency-rescue mission that is improvised to bring him home. When Scheer learned the book had been optioned, he tried to prevent NASA from offering any assistance, as the story’s plot relied upon the failure of existing technology and the drama was driven by the possibility of an astronaut’s death in space. As Scheer expressed in an internal memo, “It would be better for the agency’s standpoint if this picture was never made.”

  A far more promising film project was being planned under the direction of Stanley Kubrick, who had released Dr. Strangelove only weeks after Kennedy’s assassination. Scheer learned that Kubrick was collaborating with Arthur C. Clarke on an ambitious, optimistic epic about humanity’s destiny in space three decades hence. In the preceding year and a half, Clarke had partially recovered from his near-fatal case of polio, though he still suffered lingering weakness in his limbs. But after almost a year of rehabilitation, he was once again able to travel for extended visits to the United States.

  Kubrick and Clarke met for the first time over lunch in a Midtown Manhattan restaurant on the same day that the New York World’s Fair opened; the conversation lasted close to eight hours. Clarke discovered that while growing up in the Bronx, Kubrick had been an avid reader of Amazing Stories, and he shared with Clarke an optimistic belief in science. Clarke was impressed with Kubrick’s near-insatiable desire to understand almost everything, from technology to music, and art to philosophy. It was a unique meeting of two avidly curious and creative minds.

  A few days after their first meeting, Clarke and Kubri
ck traveled to Flushing Meadows to see corporate visions of the future. At the General Motors Futurama, they saw models of the rotating space stations and lunar colonies, which they would later reinterpret in the epic film they were already discussing. Clarke had jokingly begun referring to their project as How the Universe Was Won; a year later it was given the tentative title Journey Beyond the Stars; and finally, when released four years later, it was known as 2001: A Space Odyssey. It would become not only one of the most celebrated films in the history of cinema but the most fully realized version of the space-age vision that von Braun had introduced in Collier’s.

  As Kubrick and Clarke explored story ideas for their epic during the spring of 1964, they met for long conversations at the Guggenheim Museum and took extended walks through Central Park. Clarke introduced Kubrick to specialists in many areas of space science, including a twenty-nine-year-old astrophysicist from Harvard named Carl Sagan, whose career had been altered when he read Clarke’s first book. Clarke also introduced Kubrick to two Marshall Space Flight Center staffers, author Frederick I. Ordway and illustrator and designer Harry Lange, whom Kubrick quickly hired to serve as consultants on his film. At Marshall, Lange had been head of von Braun’s future-projects department. His NASA illustrations of imaginary future space vehicles were often used as persuasive visual props whenever von Braun was making a pitch for space funding on Capitol Hill. He once joked that Lange’s art was so effective that it actually produced money in a town where everybody only spent it. Although he had no experience as an art director for the movies, Lange was responsible for nearly the entire look of Kubrick’s epic, from the design of space vehicles and costumes to the spaceship interiors. When framed by Kubrick’s lens, Lange’s eerie, efficient, antiseptic environment—an extrapolation of the techno-optimism marketed at the New York World’s Fair—intimated the film’s larger philosophical ideas. As humans ventured into outer space, Kubrick and Clarke suggested, they entered a realm where they would be forced to confront their finite biological destiny. Machines with emerging consciousness, like the film’s HAL 9000 computer, were far more suited to deep-space missions than were the film’s vulnerable human astronauts, whom HAL attempted to eliminate as an exercise of evolutionary superiority. And Homo sapiens themselves, when placed in contact with a greater alien intelligence, would transition to a different and superior living entity—not unlike the future of humankind depicted in Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End.

  During his two-year-long preparation before the cameras began rolling, Kubrick sent a note to one of his NASA-connected advisers, assuring him that the space agency would be delighted when the film finally appeared on the screen. Kubrick, always averse to revealing details about his films while in production, even invited a member of Scheer’s NASA public-relations staff and a small contingent of NASA officials to visit the film set at MGM’s studio outside London. Afterward, George Mueller, NASA’s head of the Office of Manned Space Flight, jokingly referred to Kubrick’s office as “NASA-East” and made a personal request that, once Kubrick had finished, he give him the model of one of the film’s spaceships to decorate his Washington office.

  Unknown to Clarke, Kubrick, and NASA, on the West Coast another Hollywood writer-producer was outlining a proposal for an ambitious science-fiction adventure series, set on a starship in the twenty-fourth century. It was conceived with the aid of a careful reading of Clarke’s most recent book of nonfiction, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible, which led to thinking about many of the ideas and inventions—like a matter transporter—that were eventually seen in the television series. The same week that Clarke and Kubrick first began exploring their ideas for 2001, Gene Roddenberry sent three copies of his outline and two dollars to the Writers Guild of America to register the name of his series: Star Trek.

  When it appeared on television in 1966, Star Trek was very much a projection of mid-1960s American culture and values, mixing Kennedy-era idealism, Cold War politics, and pervasive sexual stereotypes. It celebrated the superiority of American democratic values while suggesting that other points of view should be entertained. But perhaps the series’ most influential message was simply an assurance that humanity would have a future and would eventually prevail over the petty conflicts and divisions of the present day by harnessing the power of technology for the betterment of all.

  As Mercury transitioned to the Gemini era and the World’s Fair celebrated the new space age, American support for its space program was far less robust than might be assumed from the popular media. Opinion polls at the time revealed that Americans thought favorably about the space program but consistently cited it as one of the first programs that should be cut in the federal budget. Unknown to the American public, CIA intelligence reports indicated that the Soviet Union had no current plans for a crewed lunar-landing program. If these top-secret accounts were correct, the United States was engaged in nothing more than a race with itself. When John Glenn was contemplating a run for the Senate during Lyndon Johnson’s first year as president, the former astronaut observed that the threat of possible Soviet domination of space no longer motivated congressmen to unwaveringly approve NASA’s budget.

  The Soviet space threat briefly resurfaced during the run-up to the fall 1964 presidential campaign, as Lyndon Johnson prepared to face off against Senator Barry Goldwater. When outlining his proposed anti-communist strategy in Southeast Asia, Goldwater criticized the Apollo program as an extravagant waste of money that could be more wisely spent on the military. Johnson, worried that he might be vulnerable to being characterized as “soft on communism,” used the occasion of a notable American accomplishment in the space race to return to the panicky rhetoric he’d used during the aftermath of Sputnik.

  In the White House Cabinet Room, Johnson welcomed NASA officials to a public event marking the successful conclusion of the Ranger 7 probe’s mission. As it zoomed toward the Moon, Ranger transmitted a series of images from its four moonward-facing cameras, creating a dramatic sequence of shots that ended with its final impact. Both Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick stayed up past midnight in New York to watch the live broadcast of the press conference as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory released the first photos. Johnson celebrated Ranger’s success by announcing that the United States had now pulled ahead of the Soviet Union in the space race. He referred to Ranger 7 as a “peace weapon,” and in a public conversation with a NASA JPL scientist, Johnson warned that if the United States wavered in its commitment to Apollo, the nation’s position of leadership in a global battle for survival would be endangered. A leading Democratic House member echoed the clarion of alarm when he predicted that a Goldwater victory would return American space policy to the pre-Sputnik era.

  When holding the Oval Office, Lyndon Johnson’s rhetoric about the American space program never approached the stirring words of his predecessor, but in many respects his support was even more decisive—dating back to the role he played in Kennedy’s decision to go to the Moon. Not only would America’s space effort answer the Soviet threat, but Johnson saw it as a benevolent way for the federal government to fundamentally transform the country’s economy and foster job opportunities in engineering and manufacturing, particularly in the American South, then so politically important to the Democratic Party. In tandem with these changes, Johnson thought the space program would spearhead government efforts to enforce equal opportunity. In a speech titled “The New World of Space,” Johnson announced, “The shackles of Earth are being broken and the resulting freedom will affect us all….Because the space age is here, we are recruiting the best talent regardless of race or religion, and, importantly, senseless patterns of discrimination in employment are being broken up.”

  In November, Johnson easily won the election, carrying forty-four states and winning 61 percent of the popular vote. During the campaign, Democratic strategists had painted Goldwater as a dangerous extremist, particularly after he incautio
usly alluded to the possible use of low-yield atomic weapons against North Vietnam. Johnson, on the other hand, had campaigned as someone who could act decisively against foreign aggression, based largely on the actions he took three months before Election Day. In the hours after Johnson had celebrated the success of Ranger 7 in the Cabinet Room, the USS Maddox, a United States Navy destroyer on a mission to gather intelligence off the Vietnamese coast, was chased and attacked by three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats. This series of events and those that followed—including reports of a second nonexistent attack two days later—were known as the Gulf of Tonkin incident. They ultimately led to the legal justification for American troop involvement in Vietnam and the military escalation that followed. Johnson’s actions received widespread public support, and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed in the Senate with only two opposition votes. However, Johnson’s presidential legacy, the future of the American space program, and the ultimate course of American history were irreparably impacted as a result.

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  THE INTENSE ACTIVITY of NASA’s Gemini program—ten crewed flights over less than two years—occurred simultaneously with the escalation of the Vietnam War and some of the most momentous years of the struggle for civil rights. All three stories accelerated the evolution of television news during the 1960s, and how they were visually portrayed on home screens affected the public’s emotional perception of the issues.