American Moonshot

by Douglas Brinkley

  Glenn’s record-breaking flight had positioned him well for Mercury, but he had other deficits besides his education: he was a little heavy and was near NASA’s age limit. On the plus side, he was also one of the few marines with an interest in the program—important because corps brass had informed NASA that they expected at least one marine to be chosen for the Mercury team. There was also a certain fund of decency in Glenn’s overall character that military leaders admired. There was never a calculated love of battle, grandstanding, medals, or glory. Instead, Glenn exhibited, often with a self-deprecating smile, a Midwestern devotion to duty, honor, and country. While waiting to hear from NASA, he lost forty-one pounds, intent on being in shape should he get the call. He also tried, without success, to turn his hodgepodge of college credits into a degree from Muskingum.

  WHILE GLENN WAS dieting madly, Kennedy was preparing for Election Day 1958 in a curious way. From Labor Day to the first Tuesday in November, he spent only seventeen days in Massachusetts, mostly to rest and relax at Cape Cod. Two-thirds of his time were spent in other states or in Washington, DC. He had become a national figure, and that became part of his senatorial appeal in his home state. He oversaw a well-oiled staff that offered up surrogates, rather than the candidate himself, to do his campaigning. JFK continually referred to himself not as the senator from Massachusetts, but as the “senator of New England.” As it turned out, Kennedy could do no wrong in Massachusetts, coasting to a second Senate term with 74 percent of the vote. Winning the race so handily seemed just another step on the way to the 1960 presidential election. Doubters of his political chops were forced to admit to having underestimated his talent.

  What might be called Kennedy’s presidential years, in fact, started right after the 1958 election. Free and easy with the press, he was unquestionably aiming for the White House and positioned as the front-runner. His political persona rose so steeply that it was no longer easy to see the line between the man and the image he had created. Long gone were the days when he arrived to give a speech disheveled and harried, quickly tucking in his shirt on the way to the dais. Now he was the crisp Ivy Leaguer, radiating self-esteem and eminently comfortable with himself. Nearly all politicians choose which part of their personalities to project and which to leave at home, but Kennedy had edited himself with unusual precision, becoming one of the most unique and recognizable public figures of the late 1950s. Perhaps he was “sold like a box of Wheaties,” as Adlai Stevenson had said about attempts to market Kennedy as a national leader. If so, there were few constituent complaints about him from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

  But in truth, voters didn’t know the real JFK. Even though he exuded confidence and political combativeness, he camouflaged a lot, including his precarious balance of vigor and infirmity, which necessitated prodigious use of prescription medicine. But the well-rounded image Kennedy projected as the nation’s potential next president was convincing because it was a real part of the truth about himself. His questioning intelligence and keen alertness were integral to his being. As the 1958 election receded, he faced two years in which to reach Americans and sell them on the hawkish humanitarian he had become. Nobody feared he would ever capitulate to the Soviets. JFK may have been a product, but in yet another contradiction, he also seemed the least artificial senator in Washington. “I have never seen anybody in my life develop like Jack Kennedy did as a personality and as a speaker, and as an attractive person, over the last seven, eight years of his life,” Democratic senator George Smathers from Florida recalled. “It was a miracle transformation.”

  Smathers was in a position to know. First elected to the U.S. Senate in 1950, he was widely considered Kennedy’s best friend in Washington. Tall and handsome, and the former captain of the University of Florida basketball team, he often partied with Kennedy in both Georgetown and Palm Beach. Smathers was pleased that Cape Canaveral was in his state—he would talk a blue streak with Kennedy about aerospace industries of tomorrow—but when it came to civil rights, unlike Kennedy, he was a determined segregationist, one of the Dixiecrats who had signed the 1956 Southern Manifesto, which denounced the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling as a “clear abuse of judicial power.”

  As for NASA, Kennedy’s view was exactly in sync with Smathers’s: no more Soviet “firsts” in space. But Kennedy didn’t try to bring space business to Massachusetts the way Smathers did in Florida. In fact, he practically rushed into 1959 largely oblivious to the beehive of activity around Project Mercury, though one bit of space-related news undoubtedly caught his attention because of its implications for the upcoming Democratic primary battle. In November 1959, at President Eisenhower’s request, Lyndon Johnson gave an important speech on space at the United Nations. Kennedy believed that by accepting Ike’s request, Johnson had aligned himself with the president and with policies that had birthed Kennedy’s favorite subject: the alleged missile gap. At his own public appearances, JFK argued for a smarter approach to the Soviet rivalry. “It is not necessary that we match the Russians missile for missile, invention for invention,” he said in a Detroit speech. “If the Russians succeed in sending a man to Hell, there is no need for each of our defense agencies to clamor the next morning for a new appropriation to match them. But neither can this challenge be met by men of little minds and little vision—by those who fix weapons policies as a part of our budgetary policies. The Democratic Party rejects the principle of a cheap, second best defense—and it intends to see that we have the money and brainpower necessary to do the job.”

  Influenced by a 1958 CBS News two-hour television special titled Shooting for the Moon (hosted by Walter Cronkite and starring Wernher von Braun), Kennedy leaned toward a beefed-up NASA but hedged his bets in public, not wanting to alienate the army, where some still had bitter emotions over Eisenhower’s ABMA transfer. Nevertheless, he was understandably proud that the United States notched some productive successes in early 1959, including the launch of communications and weather satellites and, on March 3, the launch of Pioneer 4, which made the first successful flyby of the moon by a U.S. spacecraft. These were important steps toward a goal on which nearly every American public official in the post-Sputnik era agreed: getting an American astronaut into space soonest. What mattered to Kennedy was that NASA wasn’t window dressing for a lack of commitment in space exploration; he wanted to ensure that the new agency was well funded and results oriented.

  Every time NASA administrator Keith Glennan circulated around the Senate looking for increasing NASA appropriations, Kennedy essentially said, “Well, of course, uncap the faucet.” JFK understood that in the realm of global prestige, NASA astronauts were going to be seen as knights of American exceptionalism—when a Mercury astronaut eventually broke the shackles of Earth to soar into space, average citizens in India, Venezuela, or Portugal weren’t going to debate whether NASA (civilian) or the U.S. Air Force (military) deserved the credit. The buzz would be that America had pioneered into the galaxy, proving definitively that democratic capitalism was superior to state-run communism. And Kennedy agreed with the House Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration conclusion that “outer space is fast becoming the heart and soul of advanced military science. It constitutes at once the threat and the defense of man’s existence on earth.”

  More so than President Eisenhower or even Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy was a prestige maven when it came to space-related issues: it was about winning boasting rights. Refusing to be first in space, JFK would say, telegraphed the wrong signals to Third World countries debating the political virtues of democracy over communism. Given this beat-the-Soviets attitude, he offered blanket endorsements of all things NASA related and marketed a doomsday scenario due to the missile gap with the Soviets. According to Kennedy, the USSR could destroy “85 percent of our industry, 43 of our 50 largest cities, and most of the nation’s population.” As historian Yanek Mieczkowski explained, for Kennedy the term missile gap encompassed “Sputnik, the Gaither
Report, military decline, vanishing prestige, and deep-seated worry that the U.S. under Eisenhower had reached second-place status.” When convenient, Kennedy used missile gap as a general term for the chronic Eisenhower malaise for falling behind the Soviets. But he knew he also needed an optimistic catchphrase in which to bundle his better-days-are-a-comin’ rhetoric. As NASA stories circulated in the public press, he circled around “the New Frontier” as his uplifting New Deal/Fair Deal–type moniker.

  Space and ballistic missile technology became the rage in the 1950s and 1960s. Here radar echoes were absorbed in an anechoic chamber so that engineers could bounce echoless beams off the nose cone of an ICBM model.

  Ralph Morse/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

  8

  Mercury Seven to the Rescue

  Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.

  —CELEBRITY PSYCHIC CRISWELL, AT THE BEGINNING OF THE ASTRO-FICTION FILM PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959)

  The thought of manned spaceflight, especially of landing on the moon, seized the American imagination in the days of consternation following Sputnik. Once NASA was established, astronaut mania swept the land. Although the timing of the Mercury rollout emanated from Cold War concerns, the public enthrallment with space grew as much out of its frontier heritage and football fanaticism. In popular publications, test pilots were called “space cowboys” or “space jocks.” Space exploration was marketed by Collier’s and National Geographic as a heart-racing adventure performed by brave test pilots willing to risk their lives to be pioneers in space. The days of the Wrights’ lowly twelve-horsepower engine had been replaced by the loud thrust of space-bound rockets. Questing held a “mystical lure of the unknown,” historian Ray Allen Billington wrote about postwar America, because it answered the “call of the primitive, the dominance of the explorer impulse.”

  NASA wasn’t inventing the notion of the space frontier in the late 1950s for it was already part of the national DNA. Somehow going to the moon seemed to be part of America’s destiny. Science-fiction novels were called “space-opera Westerns,” and Disneyland in California had Frontierland (Wild West) next to Tomorrowland (space). When von Braun contributed a series of articles to Collier’s, his first effort was titled “Crossing the Last Frontier.” In the wind-up to announcing the Mercury Seven astronauts NASA used words such as frontier, adventure, pioneer, challenge, and explorers to stoke the public enthusiasm. Designer David Clark and pilot Scott Crossfield convinced NASA to make the astronaut space suits silver to give them a futuristic look.

  While dozens of top military aviators made the NASA “consideration” list to become Mercury astronauts in early 1959, only seven would be selected. Those eventually chosen to “conquer space” needed three characteristics shared by Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Theodore Roosevelt, Jimmy Doolittle, and Charles Lindbergh: drive, self-reliance, and guts. (The only European NASA regularly evoked in its public relations blitz was Christopher Columbus, an honorary American for “discovering the New World” in 1492.)

  Because the winning seven would be going into space alone, in one-man capsules, the phenomenon reminded some citizens of Buck Rogers and the Lone Ranger. For others Mercury astronauts were great team players, like baseball stars Al Kaline and Ernie Banks. NASA basically tested, then overtested, its 160 serious applicants to discover if they had a genuine “pioneering spirit,” or “the right stuff,” as Tom Wolfe so memorably titled his New Journalism classic about Project Mercury.

  On April 9, 1959, the so-called Mercury Seven, the test-proven astronauts chosen after a two-month selection process, were introduced to America at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC. Although Eisenhower had initially been inclined to keep the identities of the seven men low-key, if not secret, NASA’s announcement that afternoon became a PR coup, complete with simple but effective stagecraft: as Administrator Keith Glennan addressed a packed press briefing in Washington, DC, a curtain was pulled open, revealing the seven astronauts, all clad in civilian clothes befitting NASA’s status as a civilian agency. “It is my pleasure to introduce to you,” Glennan said, “Malcolm S. Carpenter, Leroy G. Cooper, John H. Glenn, Jr., Virgil I. Grissom, Walter M. Schirra, Jr., Alan B. Shepard, Jr., and Donald K. Slayton . . . the nation’s Mercury Astronauts!” When asked who wanted to be the first space traveler, each man raised his hand, eliciting loud laughs even from the hard-bitten reporters.

  Appealing to a youthful audience hungry for adventure, the handsome astronauts—three from the air force (Cooper, Grissom, and Slayton), three navy (Carpenter, Schirra, and Shepard), and one marine (Glenn), all possessing stoically all-American faces atop lean and rangy frames—received a standing ovation and an outpouring of adulation, becoming overnight heroes. Their camaraderie was palpable. Ranging in age from Glenn (at thirty-seven) to Gordon Cooper (thirty-two) and all standing shorter than five feet eleven, they were almost interchangeable. All were white and male—a given in this chauvinist, pre–1960s civil rights/women’s movement era. All had a patriotic avidity for space adventure, held college diplomas (Glenn using the combination of Muskingum and Patuxent as a fudge); were seasoned jet test pilots, with a proven record of aviation proficiency; could barrel-roll or figure-eight loop; knew aircraft mechanics inside out; possessed an unwavering devotion to beating the Soviets; and had the mental and physical requirements to handle zero gravity. Even though pilots were killed in crashes caused by mechanical or structural malfunctions, none of the chosen astronauts obsesssed about mortality. They were masters of the sky, prepared to be masters of space. “We didn’t know what was going to happen,” Glenn later recalled. “We were making up the music as we went along.”

  The press gushed enthusiasms for these new instant space cadet heroes in no uncertain terms. Leading the charge was the New York Times’s James “Scotty” Reston, who was enthralled by all things Project Mercury. “Those gloomy students of the American character who think we’ve lost the hop on our fast ball should have been around here this week when seven young American men dropped into Washington on their way to outer space,” he marveled. “Somehow they had managed to survive the imagined terrors of our affluent society, our waist-high culture, our hidden persuaders, power elite and organization men, and here they were, aged 32 to 37 and all married, in the first stages of training for the first manned rocket flights into space. . . . [W]hat made them so exciting was not that they said anything new, but that they said all the old things with such fierce conviction.”

  Among the other shared attributes of the “Magnificent Seven,” as the press soon dubbed them, was their ability to survive Dr. Randy Lovelace’s endurance tests in New Mexico, which included swallowing a two-foot rubber hose, parachuting at night, cycling in place past the point of lassitude, and having jets of ice water gushed into their eardrums at ten-second intervals. Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins best described the Lovelace experience as being “poked, prodded, pummeled, and pierced” in a hellish torrent where “no orifice is inviolate, no privacy respected.” Psychologists also administered thirteen varied “personality and motivation” tests to the chosen astronauts. And at the Lewis Research Center, the Mercury astronauts completed disorientation flights on a three-axis space simulator.

  What made the Mercury Seven story so powerful was the bedrock faith the men had in one another. Even though these aviators were all super-achievers with competitive drives and immoderate egos, they bonded like brothers. To avoid duplication, each of the men took on special responsibilities. Cooper and Slayton mastered the art of booster-monitoring the Redstone rockets (army missiles built by Chrysler) and the Atlas (air force missiles by Convair). Shepard put his navy background to work interacting with the branch’s spacecraft recovery forces, based in Norfolk. The most trusted astronaut on cockpit layout issues was Glenn. Always tinkering with gadgetry, Grissom was the flight control maestro. Schirra was responsible for the life-support systems, incl
uding oxygen intake procedures while in space. And Carpenter, who liked radio communications, was the chief navigator of the Seven. “I’d go so far as to say that the most significant achievement of the space program was a concept of teamwork,” Schirra believed. “A guy like Chuck Yeager is thus really out of place in my profession. I hesitate to snipe at Yeager, but he asks for it. He boasts about not being a team player.”

  The public ate it up. Barely a week went by without a major story praising the Mercury Seven and predicting grand American achievements in space. Life magazine bought the exclusive rights to their personal stories. There was great national pride in the openness of NASA compared with the secrecy of the Soviet space program, and a sense of shared adventure that trickled down to the army of technocrats, physicists, engineers, and rocket scientists underpinning the Mercury program. In the culture at large, space was the place. Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon became popular again. Architect and designer Eero Saarinen, best known for the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, created curvy womb chairs that made sitters feel space-capsule snug. The aesthetic interior of new art museums, the so-called ice-white cube look, grew out of NASA culture. “Scientist alone is true poet he gives us the moon,” Beat Generation bard Allen Ginsberg prophesied in Kaddish and Other Poems. “He promises the stars he’ll make us a new universe if it comes to that.”

  With the media frenzy came rekindled interest in the life and legacy of Dr. Robert Goddard, whose patented innovations had been used in designing engines for the Atlas, Thor, Jupiter, Redstone, and Vanguard rockets—the oomph that boosted NASA to space. On May 1, 1959, the NASA facility in Greenbelt, Maryland, was named the Goddard Space Flight Center in long-overdue appreciation of this undersung genius. As Goddard’s biographer Milton Lehman put it, the rocketeer had “opened the door to the Space Age.”