American Moonshot

by Douglas Brinkley

  At the time Kennedy wrote this letter, Eisenhower was considering having NASA announce that a successful manned Mercury mission would close out America’s foray into manned space exploration. But as this letter to William Everdell indicates, Kennedy considered Mercury not an end, but a beginning. Incrementalism would keep Americans perpetually behind the Soviets in space, while bold space exploration and the seismic scientific upswings it could engender could be a new polestar of American technological superiority and national prosperity. While others disparaged the space race, JFK embraced it on grounds of national pride. While others concentrated on the military applications of rocketry, he saw the scientific benefit of aiming for the stars. The key was to find the goal that would not merely match but leapfrog the Soviet program.

  Unbeknownst to Kennedy, events were about to prove that the United States was not quite as technologically behind as he claimed, and that it might soon be in a position to make a historic leap.

  ON MAY 1, 1960, the more clandestine aspects of Cold War strategy—espionage and technology—were laid open to public view when an American U-2 spy plane was shot down in Soviet airspace. The U-2, built by Lockheed in 1955, was a top-secret, ultra-high-altitude single-jet aircraft able to gather intelligence day or night from an elevation of seventy thousand feet, where pilots needed to wear partially pressurized suits able to deliver an oxygen supply, much like astronauts’ space suits. U.S. pilot Francis Gary Powers was taking high-altitude reconnaissance photos when the Soviets detected the plane and fired three surface-to-air missiles, one of which hit its mark and caused Powers to crash in the Sverdlovsk Oblast, in the Ural Mountains.

  Assuming Powers had not survived the crash, the Eisenhower administration initially tried to cover up the U-2’s mission, putting out a press release claiming that the pilot, on a weather-gathering mission in Turkish airspace, had become incapacitated due to oxygen deprivation and had crashed in Soviet territory. Khrushchev soon revealed, however, that Powers was very much alive and had been captured by the Soviets, who also recovered part of his U-2. With egg on his face, Eisenhower was forced to admit guilt while Powers was convicted of espionage at a well-publicized trial in Moscow.

  The incident caused already tense U.S.–Soviet relations to deteriorate further, but it also provided clear evidence that the United States was not only keeping up with but perhaps even exceeding Soviet technology. At NASA facilities in Huntsville, Hampton, Pasadena, and Cape Canaveral, engineers cheered Lockheed’s triumph in producing an aeronautical marvel like the U-2, and confidence grew that American ingenuity would soon prevail over the Soviets in the space race. The technology, in fact, was already in development. Although Project Mercury was still a year away from its goal of putting a solo American in space using von Braun’s Mercury-Redstone launch vehicle, draft-room planning was already under way for a follow-up program that would attempt to launch a three-man team with his new Saturn rocket.

  In 1959, von Braun had named his new rocket program Saturn because the army had been forced to transfer what he called “its cherished Jupiter missile” to the air force. “Saturn,” he simply said, “was the next outer planet in the solar system.” But in naming the proposed manned missions the Saturn rockets would support, Dr. Abe Silverstein, NASA’s third in command as chief of Space Flight Programs, had more transcendent themes in mind. Having named Project Mercury after the fleet-footed messenger of the Roman gods, he turned again to a book on Greco-Roman mythology for inspiration, and the winning name jumped out at him: Apollo, the god of music, medicine, prophecy, light, and progress. “I thought the image of the god Apollo riding his chariot across the sun,” Silverstein recalled, “gave the best representation of the grand scale of the proposed program.” Silverstein proposed the name to his superiors, and on July 28, 1960, NASA deputy administrator Hugh Dryden told a planning conference audience of government, aerospace, and academic representatives that “the next spacecraft beyond Mercury will be called Project Apollo.” Over the following days, conference attendees would learn more about Apollo’s potential missions, which included ferrying astronauts to a space station, orbiting the moon, and eventually making a manned lunar landing.

  IN JULY 1960, Jack Kennedy secured his party’s nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. Even detractors admitted that the Massachusetts senator had run a flawless, media-savvy campaign, but the bad blood that had developed between him and Johnson on the campaign trail had spilled over into the convention. Suspicious that JFK was spreading rumors that LBJ’s serious heart attack in 1955 made him unfit for the White House, the retaliatory Texan tried to beat him to the punch, telling a Chicago Daily News reporter that Jack was a “little scrawny fellow with rickets” who suffered from Addison’s disease and took regular injections of cortisone—a nasty string of invective, but not entirely inaccurate. Bobby Kennedy, an expert at putting out brush fires, lambasted the Johnson campaign for spreading smears against the PT-109 hero. The counterattack worked, and LBJ was forced to apologize. With cool efficiency, Kennedy then chose Johnson as his running mate, in part to balance the ticket—the northeastern Irish Catholic offset by the Protestant Texas Hill Country rancher. In personality, education, religion, style, region, and expertise, the two were near-complete opposites, causing soon-to-be Republican nominee Richard Nixon to characterize the relationship as “an uneasy and joyless marriage of convenience.” When it came to the importance of the United States’ being first in space exploration, however, they were on the exact same page.

  In his acceptance speech on July 15, Kennedy declared, with the shining ring of both antiquity and the future, that the “New Frontier” had arrived. Somehow his aspirational words threw open a lever. Unlike the New Deal, his administration wouldn’t focus on the federal government’s helping people, but rather on people helping the United States achieve new greatness. Kennedy’s animating spirit and his call for a federally funded technological revolution boded well for NASA. “The New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises,” Kennedy said. “It is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them. It appeals to their pride, not to their pocketbook—it holds out the promise of more sacrifice instead of more security.”

  Whatever the New Frontier would be exactly, it seemed it would be anchored, in part, in a new age of space exploration—a concept that appealed to the younger generation immensely. The Mercury Seven astronauts being ballyhooed in Life and Time magazines were all relatively young Americans. Southern California, where the Democrats held their convention, had become the epicenter of a burgeoning youth movement that liked rock and roll, surfing, convertibles, and space. Such giant aerospace corporations such as Northrop Corporation (now Northrop Grumman), Douglas Aircraft Company (later McDonnell Douglas), TRW Inc. (now Northrop Grumman), Lockheed Corporation (currently Lockheed Martin), North American Aviation (now Rockwell), and Hughes Aircraft Company (later Raytheon and Boeing) were based in the metropolitan Los Angeles area. Pasadena was also the home of Caltech (the Jet Propulsion Laboratory), while Santa Monica was where the RAND think tank was headquartered.

  And Kennedy himself was the Hollywood-like leader of a new generation that was starting to dominate American society. Surrounding Kennedy was a team of action-oriented intellectuals, mostly in their thirties, like speechwriter Ted Sorensen, Robert F. Kennedy, Harris Wofford, Pierre Salinger, and Ken O’Donnell. Like the Mercury Seven astronauts, the Kennedy team exuded a sense of self-possession, glamour, celebrity, and patriotism, and embodied the political rise of the World War II junior officers. “Even before Kennedy took office,” historian William Leuchtenburg noted, “they were all riding high, those days, on their own bravado, their own idealistic temerity of purpose, young people had begun to appropriate him for their own, and he, in turn, had shown an affinity for them.”

  Science and space were crowd-pleasers in Los Angeles, and they continued to play a role in the campa
ign after the Republicans, at their convention in Chicago, nominated Richard Nixon, as expected. Nixon in turn selected Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Kennedy’s former opponent from Massachusetts, as his running mate. With both tickets supporting the already popular NASA, space exploration itself was not a particular bone of contention, but the optics of the space race were, with Kennedy declaring that the United States had lost its lead due to Eisenhower’s and Nixon’s fecklessness.

  While the “space gap” would be a Kennedy talking point throughout the campaign, it took a backseat to the alleged “missile gap” that he continued to hawk. In late July, CIA director Allen Dulles had had enough. Presenting Kennedy (July 23) and Johnson (July 28) with classified intelligence gathered from U-2 reconnaissance and on-the-ground sources, he assured them that the missile gap was a Cold War myth, and that the United States was in fact considerably ahead of its enemy in ICBMs. Kennedy, however, chose to disregard CIA and Pentagon evidence and continued mining the missile gap for political advantage and to advocate for accelerated deployment of Polaris and Minuteman missiles. Nixon and Lodge, who had received the same briefing from Dulles following their nomination, fumed. “I could expose that phony in ten minutes by displaying our high-altitude photographs and explaining the quality of information we are getting,” Nixon raged. “I can’t do that without destroying our source, and Kennedy, the bastard, knows I can’t.”

  According to Ted Sorensen, soon after the convention, Kennedy read Allan C. Fisher Jr.’s article “Explaining Tomorrow with the Space Agency” in National Geographic. While much of the article evaluated NASA’s accomplishments over its two years of existence, there were prose riffs about how space was the “strongest of oceans” and Earth a “relatively small island” in a “solar sea,” which Kennedy liked. “This is year three of the Space Age, and a vast new environment, the solar system,” Fisher wrote, “lies open to mankind’s assault.” Although Kennedy and Sorensen didn’t get to write a speech premised on the National Geographic article, they would use it down the line as a conceptual springboard for New Frontier space speeches. In particular, JFK was attracted to a story von Braun told Fisher about Benjamin Franklin watching the rise of history’s first gas-filled balloon in Paris. A skeptic asked Franklin what possible use the balloon was to mankind. Franklin answered, “What good is a baby?” When thinking about NASA’s justification for going to the moon, Kennedy would sometimes retell this Franklin anecdote.

  On the campaign trail, the forty-three-year-old Kennedy used space the same way he used the missile gap: as a metaphor for American technology falling behind that of the Soviets. “The people of the world respect achievement,” Kennedy told a crowd in Portland, Oregon, on September 7. “For most of the twentieth century they admired American science and American education, which was second to none. But they are not at all certain about which way the future lies. The first vehicle in outer space was called Sputnik, not Vanguard. The first country to place its national emblem on the moon was the Soviet Union, not the United States. The first canine passengers in space who safely returned were named Strelka and Belka, not Rover or Fido, or even Checkers,” the last a reference to Nixon’s infamous cocker spaniel.

  Forced to defend the Eisenhower administration’s technological accomplishments without benefit of its best intel, Nixon instead touted NASA’s successful 1959 launch of Echo 1, a one-hundred-foot, self-inflatable aluminized balloon satellite. A predecessor of active-repeater communications satellites like 1962’s Telstar, Echo 1 functioned as a kind of orbital mirror, bouncing radio-television beams off the Earth’s surface to facilitate long-range communications. While a successful idea, Echo 1 paled by the standards of mid-1960, when the Soviets launched Korabl–Sputnik 2 and its canine passengers, the aforementioned Belka and Strelka. Unlike their martyred predecessor, Laika, these Russian dogs survived, returning to Earth after a day in space, during which they were heard barking as they apparently spotted Echo 1 through a window. One year after the mission, Strelka gave birth to a litter of puppies, one of whom, named Pushinka (“Fluffy”), was gifted to Jacqueline Kennedy as a flattering gesture of goodwill by Khrushchev.

  While Kennedy was able to distort the facts to support his missile gap and space gap stances, he had less initial success in addressing the fact of his religion. Bigots from coast to coast argued that a Catholic in the White House wouldn’t uphold America’s constitutional separation of church and state, instead placing the dictates of the Vatican above the national interest. The Minnesota Baptist Convention declared that both Catholicism and communism were “serious threats” to America. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking and a crony of Nixon’s, told Time that having a Roman Catholic as president was unacceptable. To rebut these smears, Kennedy spoke on September 12 before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, insisting that his Catholicism shouldn’t be a major issue in the election. Pointing out that nobody had cared about his religious affiliation when he served in the navy during World War II, Kennedy pivoted to say that too many American “old people” couldn’t “pay their doctor bills” and families were being forced to “give up their farms.” Brushing aside the religion issue, Kennedy then turned visionary, saying that he saw an America “with too many slums, with too few schools, and too late to the moon and outer space.” The speech was televised live and proved to be a campaign turning point.

  On stump speeches around the country, Kennedy spoke of leadership being about unruffled boldness and tenacious daring for greatness. “I am tired of reading every morning what Mr. Khrushchev is doing,” Kennedy said in Syracuse, New York. “I want to read what the President of the United States is doing.” Singling out Nixon by name, JFK lamented that Republicans were tepid on funding technology gambits. “We have been repeatedly reassured by Mr. Nixon—in glowing, sugar-coated terms—that we have nothing to worry about in arms, science and space,” Kennedy observed. But Nixon, he said, had “a tendency to react instead of act.”

  During a series of four televised debates—the first presidential debates ever in American history—both candidates promised a new era and a sharp turn from Eisenhower’s methodical style, but Kennedy seemed to embody change. While Nixon presented himself as an old-style politician of finesse, JFK appealed to voters who wanted a man of action, in touch with the moment and possessed of the charisma and vision to move democracy forward by thwarting communism. “I look up and see the Soviet flag on the Moon,” Kennedy goaded Nixon at the October 21 debate. “Polls on our prestige and influence around the world have shown such a sharp drop that up till now the State Department has been unwilling to release them.” Pushing this theme of GOP complacency further, Kennedy mocked the vice president as a weak-kneed Cold Warrior. “You yourself said to Khrushchev, ‘You may be ahead of us in rocket thrust, but we’re ahead of you in color television,’” Kennedy chided Nixon, hoping to get a rise. “I will take my television in black and white. I want to be ahead of them in rocket thrust.”

  Optics mattered in the end. A majority of Americans watching on TV believed the calm and collected Kennedy won the debate; Nixon, by contrast, had kept glancing at the camera, as if it were an invader. Those listening on the radio gave the nod to Nixon, where his makeup-free, sweaty lip didn’t offend.

  The palpable enthusiasm for Kennedy continued through October, yet no one could predict what would happen on Election Day. Kennedy unleashed Lyndon Johnson to sharply criticize the Republicans’ downgrading of space through incompetence, complacency, foot-dragging, indifference, and budgetary restrictions. Speaking as both the Democratic vice presidential candidate and chairman of the Special Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences (aka Space Committee), Johnson charged that it was only the Democrats’ ceaseless prodding that had brought NASA to the brink of success with Project Mercury and other endeavors. “The Republican presidential candidate has not at any time assisted in this prodding,” LBJ said of Nixon. “It was only when he himself was prodded by the forthcoming elec
tion that he recognized publicly the importance of active work in this field.”

  On Election Day, polls showed the two candidates in a dead heat. Votes were counted long into the night. Eventually, Kennedy won the nail-biter with 303 electoral votes to Nixon’s 219, and by only 0.1 percent of the popular vote. The next day, NASA administrator Glennan lamented in his diary, “It seems to be all over,” knowing full well that JFK would want one of his New Frontiersmen to lead NASA. That November, Glennan continued his work at NASA, scheduling research and rocket launch dates, and awaited the new president’s first move on the civilian space program.

  The four televised Kennedy-Nixon debates of October 1960 were watched by millions of Americans. On October 21, the upstart Kennedy chided Vice President Nixon that the United States was losing the space race to Khrushchev. “I look up and see the Soviet flag on the moon. Polls on our prestige and influence around the world have shown such a sharp drop that up till now the State Department has been unwilling to release them.”

  CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images

  Part III

  Moonbound

  Ham, the astrochimp, in 1961, celebrating his space feat.

  Obtained from multiple sources

  10