American Moonshot

by Douglas Brinkley

  In Moscow, Khrushchev had his own headaches and systemic problems. Recent high-profile successes had been offset by equally dismal failures. Equally dispiriting was that Sergei Korolev, director of the Soviet rocket program, was suffering from several serious health problems and required frequent hospitalization. (He would die of botched surgery in January 1966.) Khrushchev’s budget difficulties made NASA’s woes seem pedestrian. The fact was, competing with the United States in space was a backbreaking endeavor for the Soviets, with financial limitations stymieing any thought of competing on a moonshot in real life rather than on the battlefield of propaganda. “He told me many times we cannot compete with America when their economy is several times bigger than ours, so we have to choose some directions,” recalled Sergei Khrushchev, the leader’s son. “And his direction was housing and agriculture, not the moon. If he could be the first on the Moon for free he would be happy to do this, but he was not ready to pay for it.”

  Hunting for a possible way out of the space-race paradigm, the Kremlin began sending out feelers that summer. During a visit to the Soviets’ top-secret Star City space-training facilities, British physicist and radio commentator Sir Bernard Lovell was asked to meet with members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences about a sensitive topic. Was the United States serious, they asked, about a joint moon mission with the USSR?

  Lovell, creator of the Jodrell Bank Observatory near Goostrey, Cheshire, had been commentating on astrophysics in Great Britain since the 1920s. Often critical of American claims of space superiority, he was known to be deeply impressed with the Soviets’ Kosmos series of satellites, whose purpose—military or scientific?—had perplexed U.S. intelligence and piqued its suspicions. Flexing his international clout, Lovell wrote to Webb on July 23, 1963, specifying that he had been requested to do so by those in the Kremlin who were “interested in an international program to get men to the moon.”

  Although Kennedy and Khrushchev had uncomfortably batted around the idea of a joint American-Soviet moon mission at their June 1961 Vienna summit, this back-channel suggestion came as a shock to Webb, who was immediately apprehensive. He wasn’t alone. Despite the urge toward peaceful coexistence in JFK’s recent American University speech, many in the administration, including Secretary of State Dean Rusk, had no interest in initiating joint space talks with the Soviets, both for strategic and political reasons. State Department diplomats insisted it was too dangerous to act on Lovell’s feeler until (and unless) it was more formally communicated. Were the proposal to leak beyond the small coterie who knew about it (which included Johnson, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, assistant NASA deputy administrator Hugh Dryden, and select State Department officials), they worried it could damage the president’s 1964 reelection effort.

  Kennedy wasn’t so sure. Over the next months, as the space program remained in flux over congressional funding and U.S.-Soviet diplomacy wrestled with decisions of global consequence, he began to balance Apollo’s potential value as a Cold War checkmate against the potentially greater value of using it as a bargaining chip toward peace. If conducting a joint mission meant helping to end the Cold War and ushering in an era of peace, the president was ready to put aside his pride and perhaps clasp hands with his Russian counterpart.

  Although Kennedy was pragmatic to the core, his peace bell had been rung back in June, when he attended an eighteen-minute attack simulation at the North American Air Defense (NORAD) operational center and United States Space Command, an airspace monitoring and early-warning facility located deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, near Colorado Springs. As JFK watched a simulated Russian strike on the United States that afternoon, he turned solemn and was visibly shaken. “The bombers were stopped, but the intercontinental missiles came on and erupted in white ovals as they struck American cities,” wrote Time White House correspondent Hugh Sidey, who had accompanied the president to Colorado. “Muttered one Air Force officer: ‘We have no way to stop them.’”

  Kennedy was haunted by the insider knowledge that if such a devastating thermonuclear attack were actually to occur, America would have no choice but to launch its own nuclear missiles, setting off a worldwide armageddon. During Kennedy’s first year in the White House, the Soviets tested the “Tsar Bomba,” the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, at Novaya Zemlya. If such a bomb were to hit New York or Chicago, the death toll would be in the millions. Faced with that doomsday scenario, Kennedy viewed the prospect of giving up a chunk of national prestige by pursuing a joint U.S.-Soviet moon mission as eminently sensible. Saving the world may have been the paramount consideration, but it wasn’t the only one. Kennedy knew that a joint venture would save massive amounts of money for both superpowers. It would give NASA access to the Soviet space program, pulling back an Oz-like curtain that the CIA had been trying to pull back for years, with very limited success. If the collaboration came to pass, it would also bring both Kennedy and Khrushchev eternal acclaim, and almost certainly a shared Nobel Peace Prize.

  But the president knew that the risks were also enormous. Any suggestion of collaboration would inevitably invite attacks suggesting that JFK was opening himself and the country to a KGB trick meant only to trip up ongoing U.S. moonshot plans. Allowing the Soviets access to the NASA space program would also risk exposing hard-earned satellite secrets, private-sector research, classified intelligence, and computer technology, and it could put the Pentagon’s military programs at risk. At the nuts-and-bolts level, the challenges of merging the very different engineering approaches and technologies of the United States and the USSR would likely prove difficult and would amplify mission risk. While the Kennedy administration recognized the technological virtues of the Sputniks between 1957 and 1961 and the Vostoks between 1961 and 1963, the idea that NASA could easily integrate the varied Soviet components into Apollo was unlikely. Furthermore, the payload capacity of von Braun’s Saturn V dwarfed any rockets the Soviets were developing.

  The timing, however, made the bold idea somewhat appealing. On August 5, after years of hard work and immense frustration, the Soviet Union, United States, and Great Britain had finally agreed on language for the Limited Test Ban Treaty, signed in Moscow, prohibiting nearly all nuclear weapons testing, with only underground tests excepted. Having so recently faced the real possibility of nuclear conflict over the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy was relieved and even ecstatic to be able to offer a measure of relief to a worried world. “It is rarely possible,” he said in urging congressional ratification of the treaty, “to recapture missed opportunities to achieve a more secure and peaceful world.” History, Kennedy knew, had seen many episodes where events outran diplomacy, igniting war between nations despite their leaders’ desire to avoid it. Kennedy was determined not to let that happen in the nuclear age.

  CHANGE WAS IN the air that summer. On August 28, a coalition of civil rights groups staged the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, drawing a crowd of some 250,000 marchers to the nation’s capital, an event that culminated in Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, one of the signature moments of the civil rights movement. At a White House meeting after the march, Kennedy spoke to King about the power of nonviolent protest. Although still wary of the potential for civil rights demonstrations to spark violence, the president had been impressed with King’s speech, which aligned with his own mounting desire to put the power of his office behind the causes of peace and human rights. In an official statement, Kennedy praised “the deep fervor and quiet dignity” of the thousands of activists “both Negro and white,” adding that the desire for equality was “neither novel nor difficult to understand.”

  In late August and September 1963, Kennedy was in the rare position of presiding over a time when the arc of the moral universe seemed to be bending toward justice, and maybe even global peace. By averting military showdowns in Cuba and Berlin, he’d received global kudos as a peacemaker, and his leadership on the Limited Test Ban Tr
eaty received similar acclaim. Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who’d won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 for his “Reverence for Life” philosophy, wrote Kennedy from Gabon, Africa, describing the treaty as “one of the greatest events, perhaps the greatest” in history. “Finally,” he wrote, “a ray of light appears in the darkness in which humanity was seeking its way.” If Kennedy could now persuade his nation to truly join hands with its communist adversary and begin exploring not only outer space but their shared humanity, he would be a statesman for the ages.

  Congress still had to ratify the nuclear test ban treaty, which wasn’t a given that fall of 1963. Senator Barry Goldwater, always the hawk, tried to argue that the test ban was weak on Soviet verification, but his skepticism was a minority opinion. After a month of hearings, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved the treaty, followed three weeks later by the full Senate. On October 7, a proud JFK added his signature.

  The Cold War, the president believed, was at a potential thawing point. Some national security analysts were telling him that the Soviets were on the verge of abandoning plans to send a human to the moon, so Khrushchev didn’t have very much to lose. Below the radar, back-channel communications had continued since Lovell’s July outreach to Webb. On September 11, Dryden attended a prearranged meeting in New York City with the Soviets’ authority on space negotiation, Anatoli Blagonravov, who with the Kremlin’s approval once again mentioned joining forces for a moonshot. In late August and early September, eager to judge whether this was just talk among lower-level officials, Kennedy asked an array of Russian experts if they thought the Kremlin proposal was serious; many did.

  With great force and conviction, Webb took the more tradional Cold Warrior position. He was convinced that Project Apollo was on track, aimed squarely at the moon, and needed no Soviet help whatsoever. To Webb, the most disturbing possibility was that the Soviet overture was a sly red herring, a KGB disinformation campaign aimed at tricking Congress into cutting NASA’s budget. “No bucks, no Buck Rogers,” as the saying went—but also “no race, no rush.” Even though the overall federal budget had been passed on August 11, Congress had the prerogative to make adjustments, meaning that the question of NASA’s budget dragged on, becoming a cauldron of hot debate and crowded hearings as summer turned to fall. In that contentious atmosphere, Webb and other top NASA officials considered the timing of the Soviet proposal to be inconvenient at best and destructive at worst. By early September, Johnson and McNamara had advised Kennedy to steer well clear of the Lovell-Blagonravov proposal, and warned against any public discussion of a joint mission.

  On September 18, 1963, Kennedy had a private conversation with James Webb in the Oval Office about the Apollo program. Thinking of the future, the president wondered aloud whether the U.S. moon landing could happen during his tenure in the White House, were he to be reelected in 1964. “No, no,” Webb said. “We’ll have worked to fly by though while you’re president[,] but it’s going to take longer than that.” Webb then described in no uncertain terms what NASA would be able to deliver to the country by 1968: “A basic ability in this nation to use science and very advanced technologies to increase national power.” That, according to Webb, would be the single most important achievement of the New Frontier space program.

  The president, as was his style, probed Webb further about how NASA was using science and advanced technology to increase national power vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. At one juncture, Kennedy point-blank asked, “Do you think the lunar, the manned landing on the moon is a good idea?” Webb, for the umpteenth time in the past nineteen months, reassured him with a “Yes, sir, I do.”

  Listening to the tape of this Kennedy-Webb conversation provides a marvelous window into the president’s ability to simultaneously look at space from political, scientific, economic, and national security perspectives. He’s concerned that the moonshot has lost its glamour. At one juncture, the president asks, “If I get reelected, I’m not—we’re not—go[ing] to the moon in my—in our period are we?” Webb again answered, “No,” and Kennedy replied, his voice slightly sulky, “We’re not going . . . yeah.” Behind closed doors, talking only to Webb, Kennedy reveals his understandable concern that he gambled by putting the lunar voyage at the heart and soul of the New Frontier. But the conversation also divulges his resolve not to retreat from his brazen pledge of May 25, 1961. Webb does his part to buck up JFK’s once-soaring faith in all things NASA. “Why should one spend that kind of dough to put a man on the moon?” Kennedy asks, and answers himself. “But it seems to me . . . we’ve got to wrap around in this country, a military use for what we’re doing and spending in space. If we don’t, it does look like a stunt.” Webb tells Kennedy, “I predict you are not going to be sorry, no sir, that you did this.” Kennedy agrees, recognizing that his American moonshot would be a huge part of his legacy. “I think,” Kennedy said, ending the conversation about his reelection fortunes in 1964, “this can be an asset, this program.”

  At the time of the Webb meeting Kennedy had already decided to raise the idea of a joint U.S.-Soviet moonshot in his upcoming UN speech. While others within the administration deemed that idea ludicrous at best and anti-American at its core, Kennedy had moved beyond the simple Cold War polarity of his congressional years. As he’d made clear at American University, his thoughts were on a far larger geopolitical realignment, and his hopes were pinned on Soviet-American disarmament talks. To get there, he needed to be flexible. Even though he himself had framed winning the race to the moon as essential for America’s national pride, he was willing to possibly sacrifice the win if doing so built a bridge for peace.

  Quite simply, Kennedy, unlike many of his top foreign policy advisors, had stopped viewing the U.S.-Soviet rivalry as a terminal condition. National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy thought this was the best state of mind for the president to have. He wrote Kennedy a memo arguing that the moonshot could be used for two purposes: to press for joint space initiatives with the USSR or be a “spur” to unleash American technological dynamism. Bundy didn’t want Kennedy to feel boxed in by his “end of the decade” challenge. In this memorandum, Bundy mused that “if we cooperate, the pressure comes off” regarding a moon landing by 1970. “We can easily argue that it was our crash effort in ’61 and ’62,” he wrote, “which made the Soviets ready to cooperate.”

  ON SEPTEMBER 19, the day before Kennedy was to speak at United Nations headquarters in New York, Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko made the first move toward rapprochement in an uncharacteristically forthright address to the General Assembly. Startlingly, he was poised to move on the issue of banning nuclear arms in space, disagreement over which had vexed U.S.-Soviet negotiators since 1957. Stating in the clearest terms that “the Soviet Union is ready” to “ban the placing into orbit of objects with nuclear weapons on board,” Gromyko dropped his nation’s longtime insistence that the United States remove short- and medium-range missiles from foreign bases as part of any agreement.

  As Kennedy prepared to take his turn addressing the UN delegates, Bundy pressed him to remain mum on the subject of a joint moon initiative. The moonshot was America’s destiny alone, he argued. Also, in the wake of his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, NATO allies would think the president a turncoat if he suddenly considered such a bizarre collaboration with the Kremlin. However, like Albert Einstein, JFK believed that imagination can be more important than knowledge. Why not float a trial balloon at the United Nations and inventory the response?

  When Kennedy arrived at UN headquarters, he was suffering such acute back pain that his physician, Admiral George Burkley, was accompanying him. He limped noticeably as he approached the podium at the General Assembly. Even with regular cortisone shots, his Addison’s disease was getting the best of him.

  At the outset of his September 20 address, Kennedy quoted from the letter Albert Schweitzer had written him heralding the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which had by that time already been signed by more than one hu
ndred countries. “Today,” he said, “the clouds have lifted a little so that new rays of hope can break through.” Celebrating those rays without ignoring the remaining thunderclouds would be the topic of his address. When Kennedy listed the recent positive diplomatic developments between the United States and Soviet Union, he was met with rounds of thunderous applause from the delegates. “The world has not escaped from the darkness,” he continued. “The long shadows of conflict and crisis envelop us still. But we meet today in an atmosphere of rising hope, and at a moment of comparative calm. My presence here today is not a sign of crisis, but of confidence.”

  About halfway through his address, Kennedy pivoted to space, disregarding the advice of Bundy, and of all the other skeptics in his administration. Ted Sorensen, who’d helped write the address, had been privy to its controversial language in advance:

  In a field where the United States and the Soviet Union have a special capacity—in the field of space—there is room for new cooperation, for further joint efforts in the regulation and exploration of space. I include among these possibilities a joint expedition to the moon. Space offers no problems of sovereignty; by resolution of this Assembly, the members of the United Nations have foresworn any claim to territorial rights in outer space or on celestial bodies, and declared that international law and the United Nations Charter will apply. Why, therefore, should man’s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet Union, in preparing for such expeditions, become involved in immense duplications of research, construction, and expenditure? Surely we should explore whether the scientists and astronauts of our two countries—indeed of all the world—cannot work together in the conquest of space, sending some day in this decade to the moon not the representatives of a single nation, but the representatives of all of our countries.