American Moonshot

by Douglas Brinkley

  Nobody paid much attention to Kennedy’s theatrics. Journalists denigrated the letter as the act of a publicity-hungry young politician who was good at turning a phrase. The Truman administration turned to McMahon to counter Kennedy’s alarmism. The Connecticut senator dismissed the young Massachusetts congressman’s civil-defense siren call as novice humbuggery. The United States, McMahon retorted, simply couldn’t afford to devote the necessary time and expense to the levels of civil defense Kennedy proposed.

  Kennedy was playing to the public’s still clear memories of the attack on Pearl Harbor of eight years before. Even though a Soviet sneak attack on Western Europe or North America was unlikely, it was plausible, especially considering the tensions over divided Berlin. In coming years JFK endorsed the idea of the federal government’s printing pamphlets warning the public about post-explosion radiation hazards, and having schoolchildren learn how to seek shelter if a nuclear flash occurred. But his well-intentioned civil-defense mantra was too simplistic. While building superhighways to escape American cities quickly in the event of a Soviet attack had public works merit, defense strategists such as McMahon knew that actually preventing World War III would be a much more complicated endeavor. It would take the slog of intense U.S.-Soviet diplomacy, and it would also require the United States to build multistaged rockets and hydrogen bombs. And this would mean the United States’ developing a sophisticated ICBM program capable of delivering nuclear warheads over long distances. If the USSR could blow America up fifteen times over, America had to build a missile deterrent that would wipe out the USSR fifty times. If the Soviets were mobilizing science and technology in peacetime, so would the Americans. McMahon’s thinking framed the Cold War until the USSR’s collapse in 1991.

  As the national debate unfolded, Kennedy moved beyond his initial civil-defense stance and took a similar but more conventional tack, arguing that the best way to avoid atomic war was for the United States to build up its troop levels; throw billions into modernizing the army, navy, and air force; and stay on a permanent wartime footing.

  Unusual for two Democratic leaders, Kennedy and McMahon agreed that President Truman, one of their own, was partly to blame for Stalin’s atomic advancements. But their thinking was part of an anticommunist fervor that swept across the country in 1949. When, on October 1, 1949, the Chinese Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek fell to the Communists under Mao Zedong, Americans woke up believing that Stalin and Mao were intent on burying U.S. capitalism.

  THE DOUBLE WHAMMY of the Soviet nuclear bomb and the Chinese Communist Revolution reinforced Kennedy’s tough-minded anticommunist side. The fact that his father despised Stalin made his political stance that much easier. At the same time, Jack realized that it was far wiser, politically, to couch his anti-Sovietism in terms of advancing global peace rather than stoking fears of an impending nuclear war. He knew that communism had to be resisted, whether one sought peace through disarmament or through massive military deterrence. American relations with the Soviets, JFK believed, had to be a mixture of aggression and accord.

  In April 1950, while Kennedy was approaching his third congressional race, President Truman received National Security Council Paper Number 68 (NSC-68), a top-secret report that argued for a massive buildup of the U.S. military and the nuclear arsenal to counter the Soviet threat. This document laid the groundwork for American Cold War policy for the next two decades.

  On November 7, 1950, Kennedy beat Vincent Celeste to win a third term in Congress. Throughout the Korean War, which had started earlier that year, JFK regularly called for enormous increases in the U.S. military budget. An avatar of constant vigilance against communism, he applauded Truman for authorizing the development and deployment of U.S. thermonuclear missiles, B-52 bombers, supercarriers, tanks, and other heavy weapons. But Kennedy considered Truman’s foreign policy feckless, and he regularly criticized the president for weakness against the Soviets, the stalemate in Korea, and a general unwillingness to stop the “onrushing tide of communism from engulfing all of Asia.” To the surprise of Democratic liberals, Kennedy distanced himself from the revered George C. Marshall and State Department hands such as John Fairbank and Owen Lattimore for allowing the Nationalist government of China to collapse. Although Kennedy was a traditional liberal on domestic issues such as Social Security, the minimum wage, taxes, and education, he was a pronounced anti-Soviet, pro-military hawk like few other congressmen in his party. Just as nobody—not even Senator Joe McCarthy, a family friend—could accuse JFK of being weak on communism, nobody could accuse him of being a party regular. “I never had the feeling,” Kennedy said privately, “that I needed Truman.”

  In April 1950, von Braun and his group of around 125 German scientists and engineers brought to the United States by Holger Toftoy under Operation Paperclip were transferred from Texas to the Army’s Redstone Arsenal, in Huntsville, Alabama, home of the newly renamed Ordnance Guided Missile Center (OGMC). Overall, a thousand personnel were assigned to help von Braun develop what soon became the Redstone rocket. Situated in the Tennessee River Valley, surrounded by rolling hills and caves, Huntsville was a garden paradise compared with arid El Paso. There was no ambiguity about what their mission was building: tactical ballistic missiles of mass destruction, not spaceships. Toftoy, then a brigadier general, would soon command von Braun’s team in Alabama. (In early 1956, the newly formed Army Ballistic Missile Agency [ABMA], under Major General John Medaris, would take charge of the entire Huntsville operation.)

  Speculation was rampant in 1951 that Kennedy would run for Senate the following year. Fresh from a five-week European tour, the young congressman testified before the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees on how best to defend Europe against Soviet influence and control. That May, he introduced a bill seeking to restrict U.S. companies from trade with “Red China,” and in early fall he embarked on an extended trip to Asia, visiting Hong Kong, India, Vietnam, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and Thailand. In addition to burnishing his foreign policy credentials, Kennedy’s travels confirmed his belief in the necessity of containing communism.

  Around Capitol Hill, Kennedy continued to be best known as the House’s resident playboy. The Washington Post teased that the “current emotional heat wave on Capitol Hill is attributed to bachelor Representative John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts.” According to the newspaper, women working in the U.S. Capitol “peek their heads around corridors and have heart palpitations when word spreads that the young lawmaker is approaching.” Always smiling boyishly, his teeth a bright white, Kennedy inspired more than workplace crushes; his personal magnetism was an asset in selling the Democratic Party brand. The question hovering over the PT-109 heartthrob was whether he’d ever marry. Then, in May 1951, he met Jacqueline Bouvier at a dinner party and was smitten—though that didn’t stop him from chasing other women. “I knew Jack and he was a playboy,” recalled John Lane, a senior aide to Senator McMahon. Lane and Kennedy were similar in age, both Irish Catholics from New England, educated at first-rate colleges, and brimming with the ambition to make good in Washington. “A nice guy,” Lane continued, “riding around in the Cadillac convertible with the top down, living it up in Georgetown, because I lived it up there too at the same time.”

  Though Kennedy lived with a certain esprit and had found a way to use his youthful verve to draw in voters on his own terms, he worked hard to develop a more heavyweight reputation in the halls of Congress. As to his fans among the women at the Capitol, the Post added that Kennedy “assiduously dodges them with an inimitable Irish grin and sticks to his legislative duties.” Even if his team—or his father—wasn’t directly responsible for the addition of that sentence, they could have pointed to the frothy Post article as a template for hundreds of Jack Kennedy profiles to come: he was as charming as a matinee idol, but also a staunch anti-Soviet orator. Nevertheless, Kennedy didn’t earn the gravitas he sought in the House, where he chafed at the need for legislative patience. He knew you had
to be in Congress many years before you had real power and influence, or an opportunity to play a historic role on substantive legislation.

  Congressman Kennedy remained constantly aware of his father’s expectations, which had pointed at the White House since his sons were in swaddling clothes. The pressure to succeed may have been paternal, but the need to act quickly came from Jack himself. Friends who knew him in the House said he treated his life as though death were knocking, making the most out of every day. In this, his health was a major factor: in addition to the digestive and neurological maladies he’d endured since childhood, and which still resulted in occasional hospital stays, he also had near-constant back problems, causing bouts of blinding pain and sometimes necessitating the use of crutches. Additionally, he’d been diagnosed in 1947 with Addison’s disease, a dysfunction of the adrenal gland that can cause fatigue, abdominal and muscle pain, and depression, among other symptoms.

  In his way, Kennedy seemed to have turned his pessimism about his longevity into optimism for all he wanted to accomplish, as soon as possible. And while it’s true his father prodded him to advance in politics, regularly providing money and meddling, Joseph Kennedy’s supposedly overbearing influence has been overblown. “Sometimes you read that [Jack] was a reluctant figure being dragooned into politics by his father,” recalled Charles Bartlett, a close friend of Jack’s who became a syndicated newspaper columnist. “I didn’t get that impression at all. I gathered that it was a wholesome, full-blown wish on his part.”

  Jack Kennedy’s political drive was, in part, a reaction to the early deaths of his older brother, Joe Jr., and his sister Kathleen (“Kick”), who’d died in an airplane crash in 1948 at the age of twenty-eight. Close in age, these three Kennedy children had been inseparable in their youth. At thirty-four in 1951, JFK may indeed have felt he was living on borrowed time. Hungering for greatness and steeped in history, he grew eager to move beyond the stultifying House of Representatives.

  WHILE KENNEDY DELIBERATED his future, the United States was taking steps that would bring it closer to space.

  During World War II, three arsenals centered on the town of Huntsville had manufactured and stored ordnance for the U.S. military: the Huntsville Arsenal, the Huntsville Depot, and the Redstone Ordnance Plant. After V-J Day, these facilities were consolidated to form the Redstone Arsenal, which in June 1949 became home to the new Ordnance Rocket Center, the army’s headquarters for rocket research and development. Once von Braun had been transferred, he discovered that he loved being in northern Alabama. Huntsville was ideal for von Braun’s purposes: the Army already had well-equipped laboratories, large assembly structures, and a dependable firing range. But it wasn’t a place where he could fire large booster rockets into the sky. For that his Redstone rockets would be shipped on giant barges on the Tennessee River, which flowed into the Atlantic Ocean. Coinciding with von Braun’s move to Alabama was a new rocket launchpad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, where his “babies” would be launched toward the stars. He was frustrated that the U.S. Army was building rockets “at a tempo for peace.” Nevertheless, he remained dutiful to the Army and had a born-again Christian conversion, which gave him faith in the future. “We are,” von Braun enthused upon resettling, “going to make history here.” A further frustration for him was that his novel Mars Project, anchored in the uplifting prose of Jules Verne (but larded with empirical science), struggled to find a publisher; it was turned down by nineteen for being “too fantastic.” Nevertheless, von Braun remained convinced that landing on the moon was doable in his lifetime. And he believed Mars was reachable in the mid-twenty-first century.

  Redstone became the namesake for a new class of von Braun–designed suborbital ballistic missiles that were direct descendants of the V-2 rockets, and Huntsville became an epicenter of Cold War industrial mobilization. In a strange twist, von Braun and his team were tasked with essentially building V-2s with nuclear warheads on them to be shipped to U.S. Army bases in West Germany. Faced with UN forces fighting a North Korean military armed and sponsored by both the USSR and China, the United States had to master military rocketry and begin full-scale production before attempting to make manned space voyages a reality.

  Because America had no usable missiles, the Korean War became a showplace for the air force to prove its new-kid-on-the-block importance. More than one thousand U.S. fighter pilots served in the conflict, and the most effective plane proved to be the F-86 Sabre jet, which could fly at forty-five thousand feet and was armed with machine guns for use in aerial engagements. Because the Truman administration couldn’t risk escalating the war by bombing the mainland Chinese airstrips where North Korea based its Soviet-made MiG-15 fighter jets, those American pilots were kept busy, and fought magnificently. Thirty-nine U.S. pilots attained ace status, downing five or more enemy planes, and three of these brave fliers would go on to become NASA astronauts who intersected poignantly with Kennedy’s career: Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, and Wally Schirra.

  ALTHOUGH OTHER POLITICIANS typically campaigned for Senate in their forties or fifties and usually boasted a distinguished political record, thirty-five-year-old Jack Kennedy was determined to make his bid for the Senate in 1952, taking on popular Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. He could have waited for 1954 and run against the more vulnerable of Massachusetts’s senators, Leverett Saltonstall, but he was loath to waste two years. JFK was fired up, and 1952 would be his year. His younger brother Robert would, for the first time, be his campaign manager. Joe Sr. started working the phones and called Connecticut senator Brien McMahon, who was going after the Democratic presidential nomination after Truman announced that he would not seek another term.

  “McMahon was home ill when Joe Kennedy called him,” recalled John Lane. “I walked in when he was talking to him on the phone. He hangs up and he says, ‘Joe is going to enter Jack.’ I said, ‘Jack Kennedy for the Senate? Really? . . . My God!’ But he said, ‘I’d rather have a Kennedy in the Senate than a Lodge.’”

  Gruff in the way of a friendly bear, McMahon was far unlike Jack Kennedy in temperament, but the self-described Cold War Democrat had staked out much the same ground as Kennedy, and he was someone the younger politician watched closely. In 1952, McMahon was well prepared for the presidency, his only worry being the glass ceiling of his Catholic faith, which had perhaps foiled the candidacy of New York governor Al Smith in 1928. On that score, McMahon thought perhaps he might just be the one to finish the job and win the White House—but it was not to be. Just as he started his campaign, pitching a platform of ensuring world peace through fear of atomic weapons, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and withdrew to wage a more personal battle. He died three months before the election.

  Kennedy’s Senate opponent, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., was a moderate Republican from one of New England’s most prominent families. Lodge’s grandfather had been Theodore Roosevelt’s sturdiest ally in the Senate, and one of his brothers, John Davis Lodge, was currently the governor of Connecticut. Henry Lodge himself, then fifty, was a seasoned politician who had resigned from the Senate during his second term to serve in World War II, where he earned a chestful of medals for valor under fire in France and Germany. Hollywood handsome, dapper, and with a fine patrician accent, he was a formidable presence on the American political stage. Next to Lodge, almost any rival would have seemed callow, and the young Jack Kennedy seemed especially green.

  But Kennedy, with three successful congressional races under his belt, waged an exemplary fight. The embodiment of poised drive, he traveled tirelessly throughout his home state, appearing before small groups that added up to hundreds of thousands of voters who could go home and say, “I met John Kennedy today.” The Saturday Evening Post reported that Kennedy was “being spoken of as the hardest campaigner Massachusetts ever produced.” Meanwhile, by backing Dwight Eisenhower, a moderate, over the conservative Robert Taft for the Republican presidential nomination that year, Lodge alienated the right wing of his party; they
would stay home on Election Day. In addition, during campaign season, he was often elsewhere in the country, playing the elder statesman. Although both candidates used advertising extensively and spoke whenever possible before large Massachusetts crowds, the personal style of the Kennedy team made a difference, with brother Robert ably serving as Jack’s campaign manager and Joe Sr. exercising his phenomenal fund-raising prowess. Channeling the spirit of the times, Kennedy praised the Strategic Air Command decision to deploy Convair B-36 Peacemaker and Boeing B-47 Stratojet long-range nuclear bombers on “Reflex Alert” at overseas bases such as the purpose-built Nouasseur Air Base in French Morocco, placing them within unrefueled striking range of the Kremlin.

  The 1952 campaign ground on. In late July, after he’d withdrawn from the Democratic presidential race, Brien McMahon listened to the national convention on radio from his hospital bed in Hartford and heard the Connecticut delegates award him all their votes on the first ballot. Once the other states voted, Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois was chosen as the Democratic standard-bearer. From his sickbed, McMahon told the convention leaders by telephone that if Stevenson won, he should immediately instruct the Atomic Energy Commission to mass-produce thousands of hydrogen bombs. A few days later, McMahon was dead. He never got to see his dream of the United States testing its first thermonuclear bomb, which occurred just months later, on November 1, 1952. In some respects, McMahon’s death was John Kennedy’s gain. As John Lane later recounted, “Kennedy told me later that if McMahon hadn’t died he [Kennedy] probably would have never gotten a chance” to run for president in 1960.