As May 5 dawned, the air hung thick and clammy at Cape Canaveral as the launch of Shepard’s Mercury-Redstone rocket, Freedom 7, was delayed time and again by weather and mechanical problems. The millions watching on TV grew more anxious every second. Residents of his hometown, East Derry, New Hampshire, could barely sit still. Wearing a close-fitting silver space suit, Shepard was eventually strapped into his module atop the seven-story rocket. NASA technicians fastened ventilation hoses to Shepard and fed him pure oxygen. For over four hours, Shepard still managed to exude a dashing aura, telling those calling the shots, “I’m cooler than you are—Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?” That phrase, “light this candle,” would became associated with Shepard forever.
On May 5, 1961, members of the Kennedy administration gathered in the White House office of the president’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln to watch the liftoff of Alan Shepard aboard a Mercury-Redstone rocket. Left to right: Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Admiral Arleigh Burke, and President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy were thrilled when Shepard’s Freedom 7 capsule successfully splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean.
Cecil Stoughton/White House Photographs/The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston
President Kennedy was in a White House meeting when word arrived that the delays were over and the countdown to liftoff had begun. With tense anticipation and bated breath, he moved into the office of his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, where a television was tuned to the broadcast from Cape Canaveral. Kennedy’s wife, Jackie, joined him there, and at 9:34 a.m. they watched as Shepard’s rocket rose from the launchpad without a hitch, sending him hurtling into history.
In all, Shepard spent 14.8 anxious minutes aloft, peaking at an altitude of 115 nautical miles. When it came time during his descent, at 7,000 feet above Earth, his capsule’s red-and-white parachute opened. He splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean 302 miles from Cape Canaveral. Still strapped inside the Freedom 7 capsule, waiting to be rescued by helicopter and praying not to meet Victor Prather’s fate, Shepard proved the American space program was on track. It all seemed strange and magical, yet astoundingly real.
Back at the White House, the president evinced an odd kind of reverie, watching intently while aware of the whispered banter around him. It had been a long twenty-three days since Yuri Gagarin’s flight, but suddenly Kennedy was back on top. Only when a White House aide told JFK that Shepard was aboard the helicopter and had been pronounced A-OK by NASA physicians did the president allow himself to say, “It’s a success,” with a smile. America’s post-Sputnik space prayers had been answered. Seeing that capsule land in the Atlantic was one of the greatest thrills of Kennedy’s life. For his part, Shepard enthused, “Boy, what a ride!” as he was whisked to the USS Champlain four miles away.
After doctors checked Shepard’s blood pressure, heart rate, breathing, and psychological state, he guzzled down a glass of orange juice and was given a tape recorder to capture his thoughts and feelings. Joking around, he said, “My name is José Jimenez . . . ,” a reference to comedian Bill Dana, and then started rambling about every detail of his voyage until he got a shore-to-ship phone call from the president himself.
“Hello, commander,” Kennedy said.
“Yes, sir.”
“I want to congratulate you very much.”
“Thank you very much, Mr. President.”
“We watched you on TV, of course,” JFK continued. “And we are awfully pleased and proud of what you did.”
The key phrase in this brief exchange was “We watched you on TV.” In that, the Kennedys hadn’t been alone. Across the country, some forty-five million TV viewers had watched what the Houston Chronicle dubbed “the greatest ‘suspense drama’ in the history of TV.” The experience bonded the entire nation, rekindling the collective American spirit like nothing since V-J Day at the close of World War II.
A steadied and reassured Kennedy understood that the public needed Shepard as a reason to cheer for the nation in peacetime. While only a momentary respite from the existential dread of the Cold War and the domestic upheaval of the civil rights era, the coast-to-coast celebrations for Shepard were as real as postwar victory parades; yet, such celebrations were also profoundly different, marking not just victory and relief, but excitement over taking the first steps into an almost unimaginable future. Great presidents (Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR) think about what the world will look like a hundred years into the future. At a time of insecurity, Kennedy finally understood the power of space exploration to unite the nation. “I think [Kennedy] became convinced that space was a symbol of the twentieth century,” White House science advisor Wiesner reflected. “It was a decision he made cold-bloodedly. He thought it was good for the country.”
After a weekend of debriefing and further medical tests, Shepard was flown to Washington at the president’s invitation and given the red-carpet treatment. His motorcade, which consisted of nothing more than Shepard and his wife in one open car and the other six Mercury astronauts in several cars following, turned into a thunderous spontaneous parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, with a quarter of a million people crowding the streets and sidewalks to celebrate. Washington bureaucrats were overwhelmed by the outpouring of genuine affection for Shepard, with the local newspaper observing that Americans had been hungry for a triumph like Shepard’s enthralling leap into space.
At a White House ceremony, Kennedy had the honor of presenting Shepard with NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal. In a funny and clumsy moment, JFK accidentally dropped the medal from its velvet box, prompting a visibly displeased Jackie Kennedy to mutter, “Pick it up, Jack!” On cue, the president and Shepard both bent and reached for the medal, almost bumping heads. Kennedy grabbed it first, then, smiling, presented Shepard “this decoration, which has gone from the ground up.” The spontaneous line brought the house down. “We had a big laugh out of that,” Shepard recalled. Kennedy played host to Shepard for the rest of that day, seeing at close range the astounding power of space to propel the hearts of America. For his part, Shepard recalled in an oral history that he was “even more thrilled at that moment in talking to [Kennedy] than I had been after the flight.”
For a week following Shepard’s whirlwind visit to Washington, Americans were still celebrating Freedom 7 with champagne and slaps on the back. It was a burst of collective confidence, an outpouring of pride that the American century was alive and flourishing. The scar of defeat and shame that Yuri Gagarin had left had vanished. Kennedy became fast friends with Shepard, whom he saw as the masculine personification of the New Frontier. Instead of cowboy hats and six-shooters, the unshrinkable New Frontier heroes wore silvery fabric and rubbery space suits along with round helmets with wide visors. The well-spoken Shepard explained that his bond with Kennedy was based on a shared willingness to take high risks to “meet the challenge” of beating the Soviets in space. In this regard, Freedom 7 was an update on the PT-109. “Thus Alan Shepard became a great national hero in the spring of 1961,” historian Steven Watts explained in JFK and the Masculine Mystique, “as the embodiment of the Kennedy male spirit.”
That spring, Kennedy had truly gotten his baptism by fire in space politics. Gagarin’s mission had jolted him into an acceptance of the Mercury program’s enormous political value for the New Frontier. Beefing up NASA was now a priority. Von Braun and a first-rate cadre of other experts had given the president the perspective to think clearly about American prospects in space, and Shepard’s successful flight had proved the viability of manned spaceflight, putting even the moon in range. The Soviet news agency TASS’s rote criticism of Shepard’s flight as “very inferior” in every regard to Gagarin’s unrivaled mission only reinforced the fact that the United States had dented the Soviet armor. Be that as it may, Kennedy issued a proactive statement, charging that Shepard’s flight had provided “incentive to everyone in our nation” concerned with space exploration “to redouble their ef
forts in the vital field.” In a press conference later, Kennedy, basking in the Shepard glow, promised that the federal government would oversee a “substantially larger effort in space.”
Just days after Shepard’s mission, Kennedy and Johnson assembled a who’s who of New Frontiersmen; representing NASA were Webb, Dryden, Seamans, and Silverstein. They met with a half-dozen top Pentagon officials, toward the goal of offering Lyndon Johnson their final recommendations in response to Kennedy’s April 20 memorandum. This was the first time NASA and Defense Department officials helped in this type of task force. Everything, from communications satellites and ICBMs to Project Mercury, was discussed. The elephant in the room was whether the United States should commit itself to a lunar landing. After hours of back-and-forth, Robert McNamara instructed Seamans, Deputy Director of Defense John Rubel, and Willis Shapley of the Bureau of the Budget to draft a series of recommendations for Johnson to then submit to Kennedy. Webb, determined to make sure NASA didn’t get bigfooted by the Pentagon, insisted that he maintain a hand in drafting the document; McNamara agreed. “In choosing the lunar landing mission as the central feature of its recommended program, the group had no firm intelligence regarding whether the Soviet Union has already embarked on a similar program,” historian John Logsdon wrote in The Decision to Go to the Moon about the Webb-McNamara Report. “Much in the same way as national defense programs are formulated the group evaluated Soviet capabilities not intentions, and decided the United States could probably beat the USSR to the moon.”
The very fact that NASA and the Department of Defense were gladly collaborating was a breakthrough for Kennedy. A consensus had been brokered by McNamara and Webb that admitted that the point of Project Apollo was prestige (proving U.S. technological excellence over the Kremlin’s). There really weren’t military imperatives for a lunar voyage. However, without the air force’s SAMOS (Satellite and Missile Observation System) imagery and electronic intelligence satellites, the air force and the CIA’s Corona imagery intelligence satellite, the air force’s MIDAS early warning satellite, and the Naval Research Laboratory’s GRAB (Galactic Radiation and Background) electronic intelligence satellite, the Kennedy administration wouldn’t have had the confidence that an American moonshot was doable anytime soon.
Less than two weeks after the outsized excitement of Shepard’s White House visit, Kennedy reserved a long span in his appointment schedule for a much more private meeting with Victor Prather’s widow, Virginia, and her two small children, Marla Lee and Victor III. Still tormented by the deaths of the PT-109 sailors under his command during World War II, Kennedy wasn’t constituted to forget NASA’s other hero that May, posthumously awarding Prather the navy’s Distinguished Flying Cross. Taking Prather’s children outside, he encouraged them to play with his own children’s toys and swing set. “He talked to them just like their daddy used to,” Virginia Prather said.
The president was a father and politician above all else, full of empathy and concerned about the well-being of his countrymen. To him, space exploration was about people, and that is how he could understand it, in his own way. The American spirit had been roused by brave men like Prather and by the Shepard mission, and Kennedy planned to capitalize on this national ardor for winning the space race without delay.
On May 8, 1961, Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American in space, received a medal at the White House from the hands of President Kennedy in the presence of his wife, Louise.
Paul Slade/Paris Match/Getty Images
President Kennedy at the joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961, making his historic American pledge: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.”
Courtesy NASA
12
“Going to the Moon”
Washington, DC, May 25, 1961
At a basic level, the president’s Apollo decision was to the United States what the Pharoah’s determination to build the pyramids was to Egypt.
—ROGER D. LAUNIUS, APOLLO’S LEGACY: PERSPECTIVES ON THE SPACE RACE (2019)
On the afternoon of May 25, 1961, members of Congress assembled in a joint session at the Capitol, eager to hear John F. Kennedy’s highly anticipated special address on “Urgent National Needs.” The White House had billed the Thursday event as a second State of the Union address, a privilege to which first-year presidents are entitled but rarely exercise. Over four months into the new administration, with a crisis in Cuba and a deteriorating political situation in Laos, Kennedy was clearly eager for a reset, prompting press speculation that May 25 would be a comeback address, redirecting the president’s high-minded optimism and undeniable energy after the double wallop of Yuri Gagarin and the Bay of Pigs. With his “Ask Not” inaugural still fresh in the public’s mind, many reporters intimated that something large and unprecedented might be coming—and they were right. “As far as President Kennedy and the space program are concerned, he didn’t really get his mind around it until Gagarin went into orbit,” Robert Seamans, the deputy administrator of NASA, recalled. “And I guess you can say that President Kennedy also went into orbit.”
In the forty-three days between the Gagarin flight of April 12 and the scheduled May 25 speech to U.S. lawmakers, the administration had narrowed American options in space until they pointed squarely at the moon. If Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight had fizzled, it’s unlikely JFK would have prioritized a lunar voyage—but, as noted, it had been an astounding success. Kennedy had asked his top advisors to consult with a wide array of space scientists and technocrats on every analysis of cost, risks, manpower, alternatives, and administrative responsibility. Lyndon Johnson, the loudest voice calling for a U.S. lunar voyage, had harangued the experts to forget caution and to think big, telling them in a meeting, “You’re the people who have to initiate this. Say what you think ought to be done. You may not get all you want but we can’t do anything unless you come forward with your proposals.”
Kennedy’s big question was what a moon landing would cost in money and time. The ballpark answer, twenty to forty billion over a six- to eight-year period, was appalling to him, but he intuited that Congress would lack the nerve to obstruct a moonshot with the public still euphoric over Shepard’s triumph. For Kennedy, who had digested the Webb-McNamara recommendation on May 8, going to the moon was starting to win out as the heart and soul of the New Frontier: a combination of heroic journey, national security imperative, scientific windfall, global prestige booster, and potentially transformative technological and economic boon.
Early that May, Kennedy had invited the Mercury Seven astronauts to the Oval Office, along with NASA public affairs officer Paul Haney, and a few others. Playing contrarian, Kennedy probed the astronauts with tough questions. Were manned space missions really essential? Couldn’t robots or monkeys perform equally well? How would a system of tracking stations work? At the core of Kennedy’s big decision was the precise purpose of a manned voyage to the moon. He kept asking NASA hands: What is the desired effect of manned space? “JFK was obviously prepping himself for questions he would get should he go ahead with his lunar proposal,” recalled Paul Haney. “As usual, Alan Shepard and John Glenn supplied most of the answers.”
Indeed, many respected American scientists questioned whether manned spaceflights would produce any benefit above what could be obtained through the use of probes, satellites, and other automated devices. Kennedy’s NASA supporters dismissed the argument that astronauts were extraneous to the hard science of the trip by countering that even if the moonshot didn’t discover anything dramatic about the lunar surface, the collective effort would inevitably reveal a vast amount about human beings, and about the human race. For the rest of his presidency, Kennedy would counter such arguments by pointing out that back in 1903, the Wright brothers were told not to attempt flight at the windy beach just south of Kitty Hawk; however, they disregarded the skeptics, and the
ir first controlled, sustained flight birthed modern aviation.
What Kennedy concluded after weeks of cogitation was that rarely did a leader get the opportunity to oversee an epoch of what historian Daniel Boorstin called “public discovery.” Even if a manned Apollo flight to the moon wasn’t strictly necessary for collecting scientific data, the very act of trying would revolutionize technology.
From that perspective, though, there was no particular imperative behind the accelerated push for a NASA moonshot. The process of human discovery could have accommodated the steady, workmanlike development of rocketry, which was on track to deliver moon-ready technology by the late 1970s or 1980s. And the moon, having already waited millions of years, seemed in no rush to welcome its first visitors. But politics did not have the same patience. Kennedy knew that by mid-May 1961, the moon had become the ultimate prize in the Cold War rivalry with the USSR over technological superiority and, by extension, global prestige. That lunar sphere in the sky, whose meteor-pocked face had smiled down on every human who’d ever lived and whose phases had given mankind its first calendar, was now a stopwatch counting down to victory or ignominious defeat. With no way to prepare for a moonshot out of the public eye, there was also no possibility of saving face if the other side reached the goal first. If NASA failed, Kennedy failed. If Kennedy failed, America failed.
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