On October 28, after thirteen nerve-racking days and a complex series of both public and back-channel communications, Kennedy and Khrushchev agreed on measures to bring a peaceful resolution to what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviet premier agreed to remove the missile bases from Cuba and allow on-site verification by UN inspectors. Kennedy promised that America wouldn’t invade Cuba, and secretly committed to removing U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey within a year. Essesntially, a trade of the two sets of weapons—U.S. Jupiters and Soviet IRBMs—ultimately ended the crisis.
A gaggle of customers in a California appliance store gather in the electronics department on October 22, 1962, to watch President John F. Kennedy deliver a televised address to the nation on the subject of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
The searing experience of contemplating nuclear war in real time had tempered both Khrushchev and Kennedy, who’d been stunned by how ready his army and air force officers were to go to war. “You will never know,” Kennedy confided to Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith, “how much bad advice I had.” The Cold War still held both leaders in its iron grip, but the experience of living with the specter of annihilation for thirteen terrifying days motivated the two men to open up a telephone hotline between Moscow and Washington, as well as to begin a thoughtful correspondence aimed at lessening global tensions. Chastened, they embarked on negotiations for what became the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, signed the following August to restrict atmospheric and underwater nuclear tests.
FROM THE BEGINNING of his administration, Kennedy’s attitude toward space exploration had evolved, although not in a straight line. Never blinded by the lure of the stars, he instead balanced his idealism with pragmatism, seeking a mission that would renew America. World War II and the Cold War, he knew, had aged the country. With instincts reinforced by his own life experiences, he realized that the United States needed youth and new frontiers. It needed energy, originality, optimism, and a sense of both individual achievement and teamwork. The Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs gave all that in spades. JFK always knew that his greatest potential legacy could accrue from ending the Cold War with the Soviets, but the moon mission was his backup plan, giving the possibility of a huge geopolitical win—an appealing prospect to a man who’d been raised to believe that second place was for losers.
But in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the president began questioning both his own moon mandate and the reasoning underlying the whole U.S.-Soviet space race. Growing tension existed in American space circles between those with scientific goals and those who simply wanted to beat the Soviets to the moon. Both sides had points to make, but with an annual government allocation that had grown from $500 million to $3.7 billion in just two years, they were encountering resistance in Congress. On November 5, the New York Times put the problem succinctly into a headline: “Space Goals Put Strain on Budget; NASA, for First Time, Must Tailor Projects to Funds.” The post-Gagarin days of blank checks were coming to an end, and NASA faced the prospect of its manned space program starving its work on communications satellites, meteorite studies, Mars probes, and other unmanned space science missions—the one area where the United States was verifiably ahead of the USSR.
The space agency was suddenly scrutinized for expenditures. Worsening the situation were rumors that Brainerd Holmes, NASA’s director of the Office of Manned Space Flight, was campaigning for a steep hike in the budget in order to put a man on the moon by 1966, four years ahead of the Kennedy-imposed deadline. If the expanded funding wasn’t forthcoming, then Holmes advocated concentrating all NASA’s assets only on the moonshot.
Some members of Congress felt they were being blackmailed by the forty-year-old Holmes, a formidable figure who had proved himself as something of a marvel in the complex field of missile development at RCA in the 1950s. Because his launches, however complex, always worked the first time, he was known as “One-Shot” Holmes. The year before, he’d quit the corporate world for the high-pressure job in Washington, DC, responsible for America’s efforts to put a man on the moon. On his desk, Holmes kept a rocket-shaped toy bank given to him by a friend, which he claimed would “keep me thinking of the taxpayers’ money.”
Now, in late 1962, Holmes suggested accelerating the Apollo program despite the added cost. He had heard President Kennedy, during his Rice University speech, call the challenge of reaching the moon “one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.” To One-Shot Holmes, that meant giving Projects Gemini and Apollo everything NASA had, and then some.
Interestingly, Holmes’s immediate superior, James Webb, heard the Rice speech differently. After listing some of the scientific and unmanned space shots on which NASA was working, Kennedy had actually said that the manned moon mission was “one which we intend to win, along with the others.” Refusing to forfeit the “others” even for the sake of Apollo, Webb was irritated by Holmes’s confusing press comments. Because of Holmes’s record of success, however, and the respect Webb accorded him, his stance had to be taken seriously. Webb wrote to the president describing the cost of moving up the date of the moonshot. Kennedy, wanting all the facts before weighing in on the increasingly contentious issue, asked David Bell at the Bureau of the Budget to give a candid assessment of the situation at NASA.
Meanwhile, it was still election season. On November 6, the Democrats lost seats in the House of Representatives, but maintained a comfortable majority (258 to 176), while in the Senate, their majority grew. Kennedy had avoided the midterm election jinx that has historically plagued presidents. In this election, the ranks of Kennedy Democrats in the Senate had grown. This was stupendously good news for the administration and for NASA. Most gratifying of all to the president was that his youngest brother, Edward “Ted” Kennedy, won a special election in Massachusetts to represent the state as its junior senator. It was the seat JFK had held prior to his election as president.
On November 13, David Bell presented the results of his assessment on NASA spending to the president, reporting that the agency was managed quite well by Webb and Dryden, with Projects Gemini and Apollo generally on track and waste being kept to a minimum. But one conclusion stood out: according to Bell, there was no moon race with the Soviets. For all their Sputniks and Vostoks, Bell saw zero evidence that the Soviets were constructing facilities for boosters and capsules capable of taking cosmonauts to the moon. Khrushchev’s space efforts were geared more toward an eventual USSR space station, not a moon walk.
While Bell’s report was largely supportive of the planned Apollo spending, its contention that the United States was the sole competitor in the moon race effectively bolstered Webb’s position. Poking a hole in Holmes’s moon-only argument, the report stressed the equal importance of “programs for scientific investigations in space, in which the United States from the start has been recognized as the world leader.”
“NASA takes the view,” Bell noted, that if reductions were to be made to the agency’s budget, they should be applied “at least in part to the manned lunar landing program.”
ON NOVEMBER 21, 1962, Kennedy summoned his space advisors to the White House for a frank discussion of the merits of space exploration and the moonshot. The transcript of the resulting arguments that day is invaluable to historians. While the president mostly listened, his comments mirrored his record over the course of his administration, seeing the adventure of space exploration from several strategic viewpoints. All the while, JFK looked for ways to tie NASA’s massive effort more closely with the economic health of America. In the end, he made his convictions and priorities clear.
The participants in the Cabinet Room included Webb, Wiesner, Bell, Dryden, Seamans, and Holmes. After a general discussion of a proposed $440 million supplement to the NASA budget, Webb allowed that in terms of accelerating the moon program, “we’re prepared to move if you really want to pu
t it on a crash basis.” Kennedy asked Webb pointedly whether he thought of the moon mission as the “top-priority program of the Agency.” Sensing that Kennedy was in no mood for vague indirection or double-talk, Webb responded bluntly:
JAMES WEBB: No, sir, I do not. I think it is one of the top-priority programs, but . . . [s]everal scientific disciplines that are very powerful begin to converge on this area.
PRESIDENT KENNEDY: Jim, I think it is the top priority. I think we ought to have that very clear. Some of these other programs can slip six months, or nine months, and nothing strategic is going to happen. . . . But this is important for political reasons, international political reasons. This is, whether we like it or not, in a sense a race. If we get second to the Moon, it’s nice, but it’s like being second any time. So that if we’re second by six months, because we didn’t give it the kind of priority, then of course that would be very serious. So I think we have to take the view that this is the top priority with us.
Although Bell had presented the president with CIA U-2 reconnaissance discounting the possibility of a Soviet moonshot, that hadn’t been enough to shake JFK’s focus and commitment. Having never lost an election himself, and having just retained his party’s congressional majority and elected his brother to the Senate, Kennedy had no intention of being second. And he never forgot that the Apollo moonshot wouldn’t happen without continuing public support demonstrated by robust budgets and tireless insistence on beating the Soviets. Webb continued to argue for prioritizing other, unmanned scientific ventures by appealing to Kennedy’s old-style, Ivy League faith in the academic elite:
WEBB: The people that are going to furnish the brainwork, the real brainwork, on which the future space power of this nation for twenty-five or a hundred years are going be to made, have got some doubts about it and . . .
KENNEDY: Doubts about what, with this program?
WEBB: As to whether the actual landing on the moon is what you call the highest priority.
KENNEDY: What do they think is the highest priority?
WEBB: They think the highest priority is to understand the environment and . . . the areas of the laws of nature that operate out there as they apply backwards into space. You can say it this way. I think Jerry [Wiesner] ought to talk on this rather than me, but the scientists in the nuclear field have penetrated right into the most minute areas of the nucleus and the sub-particles of the nucleus. Now here, out in the universe, you’ve got the same general kind of a structure, but you can do it on a massive universal scale.
KENNEDY: I agree that we’re interested in this, but we can wait six months on all of it.
The six-month time frame was Kennedy’s way of expressing priority: which NASA projects could wait six months and which might fail due to that much delay. Webb next tried to convince the president that the drawn-out time frame of the moonshot would eventually cost it public support, while a schedule of exciting if unmanned experiments would generate broader enthusiasm in Congress and beyond. Also, if evidence emerged that the Soviets weren’t actually racing America to the moon, the funding for Project Apollo would be put in a stranglehold. An animated disagreement ensued, ending only when JFK pulled rank. It remains unclear, however, whether Webb was speaking from the heart or playing devil’s advocate to draw Kennedy out.
KENNEDY: I would certainly not favor spending six or seven billion dollars to find out about space no matter how on the schedule we’re doing. I would spread it out over a five- or ten-year period. But we can spend it on . . . Why aren’t we spending seven million dollars on getting fresh water from saltwater, when we’re spending seven billion dollars to find out about space? Obviously, you wouldn’t put it on that priority except for the defense implications. And the second point is the fact that the Soviet Union has made this a test of the system. So that’s why we’re doing it. So I think we’ve got to take the view that this is the key program. The rest of this . . . we can find out all about it, but there’s a lot of things we can find out about; we need to find out about cancer and everything else.
WEBB: But you see, when you talk about this, it’s very hard to draw a line between what . . .
KENNEDY: Everything that we do ought to really be tied into getting onto the Moon ahead of the Russians.
WEBB: Why can’t it be tied to preeminence in space, which are your own . . .
KENNEDY: Because, by God, we keep, we’ve been telling everybody we’re preeminent in space for five years and nobody believes it because they have the booster and the satellite. We know all about the number of satellites we put up, two or three times the number of the Soviet Union . . . we’re ahead scientifically. It’s like that instrument you got up at Stanford which is costing us a hundred and twenty-five million dollars and everybody tells me that we’re the number one in the world. And what is it? I can’t think what it is. [Interruption from multiple speakers: “The linear accelerator.”] I’m sorry, that’s wonderful, but nobody knows anything about it!
Webb pointed out that only a full range of progress could usher in major advancements in space, but Kennedy bluntly wrested the argument back to his way of thinking:
KENNEDY: We ought to get it, you know, really clear that the policy ought to be that this is the top-priority program of the Agency, and one of the two things, except for defense, the top priority of the United States government. I think that that is the position we ought to take. Now, this may not change anything about that schedule, but at least we ought to be clear, otherwise we shouldn’t be spending this kind of money because I’m not that interested in space. I think it’s good; I think we ought to know about it; we’re ready to spend reasonable amounts of money. But we’re talking about these fantastic expenditures which wreck our budget and all these other domestic programs and the only justification for it, in my opinion, to do it in this time or fashion, is because we hope to beat them and demonstrate that starting behind, as we did by a couple years, by God, we passed them.
In their final exchange of the day on space, Webb unwittingly made Kennedy’s point for him.
WEBB: In Berlin you spent six billion a year adding to your military budget because the Russians acted the way they did. And I have some feeling that you might not have been as successful on Cuba if we hadn’t flown John Glenn and demonstrated we had a real overall technical capability here.
KENNEDY: We agree. That’s why we want to put this program . . . That’s the dramatic evidence that we’re preeminent in space.
When listening to this White House conversation, it is important to remember that Webb spoke nonstop and was difficult to turn off. When Kennedy cut Webb off by saying, “I’m not that interested in space,” he was cutting to the chase. Unlike with his public speeches, Kennedy wasn’t in a “New Ocean” feel-good science state of mind. He wanted to drill home to Webb that the moonshot should be sold as a serious Cold War national security priority.
In other words, Kennedy wasn’t merely arguing for the Apollo moon program. With a sweeping sense of history, he was arguing for a new era in which technological superiority was power. For the same reason that emperors of old paraded their armies in the streets, the president’s moon program was a showcase for America’s technological might, and its contracts with corporations such as McDonnell Aircraft, North American Aviation, Boeing, Chrysler, and others were a collaborative government–private sector project for the new technologies that would guarantee the American century. To voters, he presented NASA’s moonshot as a proof of national greatness. But at the same time, in internal discussions, he described it as a negotiating weapon in the Cold War struggle with Khrushchev: Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo as Olympian deterrents to contain Soviet expansionism.
On September 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy visited the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, one of twelve NASA sites in east Texas. He was presented with a model for the Apollo command space capsule.
Bob Gomel/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
19
State of Spa
ce Exploration
Kennedy provided the inspiration and financial support for the space program—and spurred rapid innovation. While trying to solve the problems of manned space flight, scientists laid the foundations for satellite television, global positioning systems, microchips, solar panels, carbon monoxide detectors and even the Dustbuster.
—WALTER ISAACSON, 2018
President Kennedy began 1963 in a boastful mood. Two weeks before the New Year, NASA’s Mariner 2 had succeeded spectacularly, becoming the first space vehicle to make meaningful contact with one of Earth’s neighboring planets.
Both the United States and the Soviet Union had wanted to be the first to achieve this landmark, and Venus, being on average the closest planet to Earth, was the logical target. In February 1961, the Soviets had launched the first Venus probe, Venera 1, but a communications failure sent it off course, and it missed by 62,000 miles. A subsequent attempt at a Venus landing was made in late August 1962, with Sputnik 19, but the craft failed to escape Earth’s orbit. Mariner 2, a 447-pound probe packed with measuring instruments sitting atop a two-stage Atlas-Agena rocket, was America’s response. Designed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it was completed on an astonishingly breakneck schedule and launched from Cape Canaveral just two days after Sputnik 19 and five days after an American predecessor, Mariner 1, failed in takeoff.
On December 14, after 110 days in space, Mariner 2 arrived at its destination, coming within 21,607 miles of Venus, scanning the planet with its pair of radiometers, and sending back valuable new information. Scientists had long presumed that Venus had a relatively benign environment, one that might even support life of the type found on Earth. Mariner 2 erased any such delusions. Its readings indicated blistering temperatures and extremely high atmospheric pressure. Continuing toward the sun, the probe also sent back new knowledge on solar wind and interplanetary dust.
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