AFTER COOPER’S MISSION, the Kennedy administration revved up the publicity machine with creative verve. The quarter of a million people who lined the streets of Washington watching Cooper travel from the White House to the U.S. Capitol constituted one of four grand public receptions staged for the astronaut that week, along with others in Honolulu, Cocoa Beach, and New York, where people turned out in droves for a ticker-tape parade. At the Capitol, Cooper spoke to a joint session of Congress, receiving a standing ovation and delivering an eloquent speech that included a prayer he said he’d composed while in orbit. Although addressed to God, his prayer could just as well have been a pitch to the congressmen and senators who held NASA’s purse strings. “Help us in our future space endeavors,” he began, “that we may show the world that a democracy really can compete, and still are able to do things in a big way, and are able to do research, development and can conduct many scientific and very technical programs.” One senator called Cooper’s prayer “one of the most impressive things” he’d heard in seventeen years in Congress. Nonetheless, it did little to sway certain fiscally conservative members of Congress intent on slashing NASA’s budget.
That same month, Jack and Jackie Kennedy hosted the Mercury astronauts at the White House for drinks, hors d’oeuvres, and storytelling. And astronauts had an ulterior motive: a futile effort lobbying for more Mercury missions. “Is it true you’re all Republicans?” the president asked the gathered spacemen. “I don’t know what the hell we are,” Gus Grissom replied, to laughs. Pointing to his Oval Office rocking chair, the president asked Gordon Cooper to “Take a swing in this capsule”; Cooper happily agreed. Photographers clicked away. By the time the astronauts left the White House, their admiration for Kennedy had grown by leaps and bounds. However, once back in Houston for a meeting, the Mercury Seven found that they were in trouble for not having cleared their informal Oval Office chat with NASA officialdom.
A few weeks later, after the hoopla diminished, the Senate Republican Policy Committee circulated a scathing attack on the Gemini and Apollo programs. Questioning the costs of expediting them, the statement questioned whether “other aspects of human needs should be bypassed or overlooked in the one spasmodic effort to achieve a lunar landing at once.” The senators suggested that the excess funds could be better used for education, health care, and other challenges closer to home. Other criticisms from Republicans rose on military grounds, charging that while the USSR was almost certainly bolstering its ability to weaponize space, the United States was not. “To allow the Soviet Union to dominate the atmosphere 100 miles above the earth’s surface while we seek to put a man on the moon could be, in the opinion of many, a fatal error. . . . Intrinsic prudence, according to some, demands that we concentrate on the development of families of missiles operating in the suborbital and orbital areas rather than to devote such a large proportion of our efforts to lunar shots.” The point that drew the greatest attention, though, was that NASA was robbing the best and brightest Harvard, MIT, and Caltech computer specialists for its moon challenge, depriving other fields of needed expertise.
Kennedy and Johnson were right to be concerned about NASA budget slashes. Even though Cooper had kept a finger in the dike for a few weeks, by summer NASA had clearly lost some of its razzle-dazzle glamour on Capitol Hill. On July 1, the Washington Post reported that “the United States space program is receiving the first searching review of its aims and activities since its inception five years ago.”
The House Committee on Science and Astronautics combed through NASA’s projects and identified $490 million in cuts. Although the Senate Republican Policy Committee had suggested a slowdown of the moon program to save money, the House committee had carefully left intact most projects that were directly moon related, even as it failed to take into account certain technical aspects of mission planning. The space agency resisted with special vigor when the committee concluded that funding for unmanned lunar probes could be withheld given that manned flights would bring back the same data. A NASA official countered that it was impossible to build a landing craft without first knowing the characteristics of the moon’s surface. Pushing back from the bottom line, Webb warned that cuts of more than $400 million would impede the effort to land an American on the moon within Kennedy’s schedule.
Not to be outdone in the prolonged funding dispute, the pro-space lobby regularly trotted out senators and representatives to praise NASA in unqualified terms. Why punish the one federal agency, they would ask, that was overperforming? On the House floor, Congressman James Fulton of Pennsylvania elevated NASA administrators and astronauts into the pantheon of explorers alongside Columbus, Hudson, de Soto, Crockett, Boone, and Lewis and Clark. All these legends were considered “nuts” in their day, Fulton said, and he argued that the new breed of “nuts” in Kennedy’s New Frontier “will lead a great America in the conquest of outer space.” Fulton ended his appeal by saying he favored increased funding for Project Apollo “because it is in keeping with the pioneer spirit of this great nation.”
Out in the media landscape, where he’d become a familiar figure, von Braun also came to Kennedy’s aid in the budget debate. Building off his friendships with Walt Disney, Walter Cronkite, and other opinion makers, von Braun routinely leaked the false premise that the Soviets were winning the space race—a contention Khrushchev was also spinning weekly, for his own purposes. But in point of fact, the only thing NASA officials feared more than a competitive Soviet moon program was no lunar effort from them at all. If the USSR were to have admitted that they were actually behind the United States in space and missile technology, NASA’s exorbitant funding might have dried up in Congress.
Due to the Soviets’ secrecy, their actual intentions concerning the moon remained murky. Although Bureau of the Budget chief David Bell had concluded the previous November that there was no solid evidence for a USSR moon program, America’s intelligence services were unwilling to express such certainty. “We cannot say definitely at this time that the Soviets aim to achieve a manned lunar landing ahead of or in close competition with the United States,” read a CIA National Intelligence Estimate dated December 5, 1962, “but we believe the chances are better than even that this is a Soviet objective.” The report went on to reiterate that there was no firm evidence of any planning for a Soviet manned moon mission, whether in competition with the United States or not, but the agency couldn’t rule out that such a program existed.
When asked about racing to the moon against America, Kremlin officials routinely denied any such objectives. Nevertheless, Sergei Korolev and others in the Soviet space world intensely desired to defeat the United States in a head-to-head moon race. Korolev persisted in proposing various schemes to accomplish a lunar landing. With great conviction, Korolev wanted to develop a huge booster designed to hoist seventy-five tons into orbit. This ultimately became the N1 moon rocket. Korolev, a fine salesman, persuaded Khrushchev in 1962 to approve its development.
Bell’s report, if made public, would have blown a giant hole through the New Frontier narrative that the moon was the ultimate trophy in the superpower rivalry between free-world democracy and expansionist communism. As history has shown, although the Soviets were struggling in the rocketry realm, going to the moon remained an imperative. In early 1963, however, the Soviets were experiencing serious setbacks just trying to send an unmanned Luna vehicle to the moon, despite the fact that they’d landed a less sophisticated probe on the surface three and a half years before. In the first four months of 1963, three Luna craft were launched unsuccessfully. The first failed to escape Earth’s orbit, the second couldn’t find its orbit of the moon, and the last missed the moon altogether. Similarly, Mars 1, an unmanned flyby probe launched toward the red planet in November 1962, disappeared into space due to antenna malfunction, after flying more than sixty-six million miles. While proposals for manned missions to both the moon and Mars continued to be bandied about at the Soviet advanced research institution known as
OKB-1, the dismal results of these unmanned missions put a damper on enthusiasm, although Korolev continued to push for landing cosmonauts on the moon before the Americans.
While American agencies remained in the dark about true Soviet lunar intentions, the State Department was becoming increasingly anxious over the lack of progress toward nuclear treaties and agreements. One observer said that Soviet foreign policy was “in a state of perfect inertia. It isn’t moving for good or ill.” Americans had reason to hope that was the case. Concerning a proposal to ban nuclear weapons in space, the United States feared the Soviets were stalling until they had a nuclear bomb in orbit. On April 29, Secretary of State Dean Rusk abruptly canceled any further approaches to the Soviets about joint space collaborations, and the next week, on May 8, he gave the president a proposal specifically addressing the rampant fears, titled “U.S. Reaction to Soviet Placing of a Nuclear Weapon in Space.” Kennedy was more than receptive to the proposal’s core recommendation for implementation of “an active anti-satellite capability at the earliest possible time, nuclear and non-nuclear.” As military historian Paul Stares pointed out, the new policy was predominantly a preemptive move against any Soviet decision to arm space, with or without a treaty. “Moreover,” he writes, “it would provide insurance for possible domestic criticism that the administration had not taken necessary precautions.” Defensive or not, the plan still constituted a significant step in the militarization of space.
Greater progress was being made toward terrestrial nuclear arms control. On June 10, 1963, Kennedy delivered a remarkable commencement address at American University in which he announced that later that summer the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union would begin three-way talks aimed at reducing the proliferation of nuclear weapons and limiting atmospheric and underwater nuclear tests. It was a big step forward, but in fact only a piece of the larger picture JFK wanted to present with his speech, which encompassed “a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived—yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.”
Partially inspired by an open letter published by a consortium of college professors in the New York Times pleading for a nuclear test ban treaty with Russia, Kennedy’s speech was a clarion call, decrying the stockpiling of nuclear weapons, the potential for devastation and radiation poisoning, and the massive, wasteful expense. Calling on all nations and all peoples to “examine our attitude toward peace itself” and to cast off assumptions that peace is impossible, the speech advocated for a reexamination of American attitudes toward the USSR and the Cold War, and for trading existential struggle for peaceful competition. Eschewing pie-in-the-sky concepts of “universal peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream,” it called instead for “a more practical, more attainable peace . . . a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned.” While acknowledging that “no treaty . . . can provide absolute security against the risks of deception and evasion,” it can “offer far more security and far fewer risks than an unabated, uncontrolled, unpredictable arms race.”
“The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war,” Kennedy concluded. “We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough—more than enough—of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success. Confident and unafraid, we labor on—not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace.”
On the other side of the world, Khrushchev told aides that Kennedy’s speech was “the best speech by any president since Roosevelt.” But just as the Soviet leader was feeling good about Kennedy’s peace overtures, the U.S. president departed on the eighth international trip of his presidency. Visiting Cologne, Frankfurt, and Wiesbaden in West Germany, JFK enthused about NATO, and his meetings with the West German chancellor were meant to display U.S. resolve to keep NATO as its top foreign policy priority. On June 26, Kennedy capped his West Germany trip by delivering a rousing address to 450,000 people crowded into an enormous plaza in West Berlin, delivering his now-famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, advocating “the right to be free” over “the failures of the Communist system.”
The Berlin speech echoed through the Cold War landscape, heartening anticommunists everywhere. The West Berlin audience went wild with admiration for Kennedy’s bold loyalty to them; in a speech of fewer than seven hundred words, he’d assuaged their worst fears of abandonment while also shining a beacon to those on the other side of the wall, declaring that “freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free.” The speech immediately lifted the morale of those in the beleaguered city and informed the Soviet Union that despite the president’s recent call for a more peaceful competition, the battle for hearts and minds around the world would remain fierce.
In Berlin, on June 26, 1963, President Kennedy speaks before the Brandenberg Gate, telling the crowd in this divided German city, “Ich bin ein Berliner.”
Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images
On November 18, 1963, President John F. Kennedy watches the launch of a Polaris missile from the USS “Observational Island” military vessel off the coast of Cape Canaveral.
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“The Space Effort Must Go On”
The uncertainty in the United States at this time about the exact character of a Soviet program to send men to the moon is in retrospect understandable, since the situation in the Soviet Union was both complex and confusing.
—JOHN M. LOGSDON, JOHN F. KENNEDY AND THE RACE TO THE MOON (2010)
Five years after Sputnik and the creation of NASA and two years after Kennedy’s moonshot plans sailed through Congress on a May breeze, Project Apollo should have been an unassailable colossus, a point of national pride that was too big to fail. Project Mercury had been a stellar success, pushing America’s space capabilities forward in a remarkably short time span. In St. Louis, the larger, two-seat Gemini capsule was being built on Mercury’s model, and it would soon be launched into orbit atop a Titan II with 430,000 pounds of thrust. North American Aviation was designing and building major elements of the three-man Apollo spacecraft in Downey, California, that would soon inaugurate trips around Earth and then around the moon. Grumman, of Bethpage, New York, was developing the LEM. And MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was designing a vast array of new computer technology for NASA. At the Marshall Space Flight Center, the Huntsville engineers were constructing preliminary stages of the massive Saturn V rocket to power those Apollo missions, while NASA engineers and scientists elsewhere were perfecting the lunar orbit rendezvous approach that would eventually bring American astronauts to the moon’s surface. Apollo was clearly gathering momentum. If the program was successful, the United States would leapfrog over the Soviets in overall space achievement. America’s space probes had a far greater record of success, its satellite programs were more advanced, and, crucially, it had the money to keep moving forward. No one was certain of the record on the direction of the Soviet space program, but Khrushchev’s boasts of its superiority continued to intimidate most people in the West.
In the United States, pro-space politicians and administrators were facing widening pushback over NASA’s astounding costs, as other economic and military priorities were crowded out of budgets. The fact that Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, NASA’s biggest budget booster, died of a heart attack on January 1, 1963, suddenly made Webb’s lobbying on Capitol Hill much harder. The new head of the Senate Space Committee, Senator Clinton Anderson (D-NM), was more interested in environmentalism and nuclear power than an Apollo moonshot. Meanwhile, conservative congressmen continued efforts to chip away at the agency’s funding, supported by former president Eisenhower, who compl
ained to House Minority Leader Charles Halleck that “a spectacular dash to the moon” would “vastly deepen” America’s debt and be a “tax burden,” and represented “the antithesis of fiscal soundness.” Civil rights leaders such as Ralph Abernathy pointed to all the societal good that the same budget could do in fighting urban poverty in cities such as Detroit, New York, and Chicago. Criticism was mounting, too, from parts of the scientific community, which recognized that unmanned, research-oriented probes offered superior return on the dollar compared with manned missions. What perturbed Webb the most was that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was telling Washington lawmakers that Project Apollo had no “substantial military value,” thus making NASA a bull’s-eye for conservative-minded budget hurdles.
Throughout the summer of 1963, infighting over budgets roiled NASA, contributing to the resignation of D. Brainerd Holmes, director of the Office of Manned Space Flight and a reliable moonshot advocate. “The man-in-space program is in the throes of a management crisis,” Richard Witkin wrote in the New York Times, “that is deeply worrying a growing number of highly placed officials.” In NASA administrator Webb’s view, the greater worry was that if Congress cut NASA’s funding by any more than 5 percent, the moonshot could not occur within a decade—and Republicans in Congress were seeking cuts twice that size. When a top-tier NASA engineer was asked by a Republican skeptic what would be discovered on the moon, he sarcastically snapped, “Russians.”
There was no question that Kennedy, even more than Webb, insisted that U.S. dominance in all aspects of space be the primary objective of NASA, regardless of whether Soviet cosmonauts were moon bound or not. His philosophy was put on public display at a July 17, 1963, press conference. Apollo was a marvelous alternative to all-out war with the USSR or future proxy wars such as Korea. “The point of the matter always has been not only of our excitement or interest in being on the moon,” he said, trying to mute critics, “but the capacity to dominate space, which would be demonstrated by moon flight, I believe, is essential to the United States as a leading free world power. That is why I am interested in it and that is why I think we should continue.”
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