Nobody had seen Kennedy’s unprecedented proposal coming. Representatives from around the world cheered enthusiastically, many seeing the idea as a salve for strained East-West relations and a step toward deescalating the Cold War. In the wake of the pacifistic nuclear test ban and hawkish “Ich bin ein Berliner,” JFK was believable in both roles: the peacemaker and the strong voice for Western democratic values. The historian Walter A. McDougall suggested that Kennedy’s UN speech (and other statements about U.S.-Soviet cooperation in space) “were just exercises in image-building.”
Beyond the UN General Assembly Hall, reactions were less enthusiastic. In Washington, the speech landed with a jolt, stunning senators and congressmen of both parties. White House advisors, the Joint Chiefs, and the CIA were flabbergasted. This wasn’t a trial balloon in a freewheeling press conference, but an outright proposal to Khrushchev, with the world as a witness. In response, however, Khrushchev was silent. When asked about Kennedy’s overture, the strong-minded Gromyko demurred with a polite comment about the president’s fine overall dramatic delivery. The Soviets’ official TASS news agency was less diplomatic, lampooning aspects of Kennedy’s speech.
With no response from Moscow, Kennedy quickly backed away from his daring overture. At his next press conference, on October 9, he was asked whether he would continue to champion a joint U.S.-Soviet mission to the moon. Characteristically, the president explained his current attitude in some detail:
We have received no response to our—to that proposal, which followed other proposals made on other occasions. As I said, our space program from the beginning has been oriented towards the peaceful use of space. That is the way the National Space Agency was set up. That is the position we have taken since my predecessor administration. I said this summer that we were anxious to cooperate in the peaceful exploration of space, but to do so, of course, requires the breakdown of a good many barriers which still exist. It is our hope those barriers, which represent barriers of some hostility, some suspicion, secrecy and the rest, will come down. If they came down, of course, it would be possible for us to cooperate. So far, as you know, the cooperation has been limited to some exchange of information on weather and other rather technical areas.
We have had no indication, in short, that the Soviet Union is disposed to enter into the kind of relationship which would make a joint exploration of space or to the moon possible. But I think it is important that the United States continue to emphasize its peaceful interest and its preparation to go quite far in attempting to end the barrier which has existed between the Communist world and the West and to attempt to bring as much as we can the Communist world into the free world diversity which we seek. So the matter may come up, but I must say we have had no response which would indicate that they are going to take us up on it.
Throughout the NASA bureaucracy, morale was shaken for weeks over the thought that Kennedy was using Project Apollo as a bargaining chip with the Soviets. A group of GOP hawks in Congress moved to forbid the use of NASA funds for any cooperative effort toward a moon mission with the USSR. CIA chiefs lamented Kennedy’s pell-mell, flip-flopping attitude. Columnists in major newspapers attempted to explain the president’s turnaround, offering every possible point of view. None of them need have bothered. The proposal seemed dead on arrival.
Throughout 1963, Kennedy had been frustrated by the lack of confirmable intelligence on whether the Soviet Union was still planning a moonshot. CIA director John McCone could never provide Kennedy with a confirmation one way or another. It was a Cold War mystery. Not until October 1 did JFK get proper intelligence community feedback. In a classified CIA document titled “A Brief Look at the Soviet Space Program,” Kennedy was informed that Khrushchev was “unquestionably planning manned lunar landings . . . but there is no evidence that the program is proceeding on a crash basis.” Such vagueness frustrated Kennedy. The implication by default was that there was indeed a race to the moon. Unbeknownst to the CIA was that the Soviets were already designing a huge booster to carry out a lunar landing. While there were timetable and budget debates going on among the Kremlin leadership in 1963, by 1964 the Soviet Union officially approved a moon voyage. Contemporaries of Kennedy who argued that the United States wasn’t truly in a moon race of some sort were proved wrong in the annals of history.
If Kennedy was frustrated by the CIA’s lack of sureness, the agency was starting to worry about Kennedy’s untrustworthiness. Too often for its liking, JFK had sent up peace flares trying to end the Cold War, in disregard of the intelligence agency’s recommendations. His comments about a joint U.S.-Soviet moonshot were seen as reckless. The Pentagon wasn’t militarizing space just so that Kennedy, playing God, could hand Khrushchev an early Christmas gift. A queasy feeling was circling around the corridors of the CIA that Kennedy could not be trusted with national security secrets. On October 3, 1963, just after Kennedy received “A Brief Look at the Soviet Space Program,” and Arthur Krock wrote a column in the New York Times quoting sources at the CIA as saying, “If the United States ever experiences [an attempted coup to overthrow Kennedy], it will come from the CIA and not the Pentagon.” Krock led readers to believe that Kennedy’s life might be in peril, and that the CIA represented a “tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone.”
When media interest over a joint moonshot quickly receded, Congress renewed the battle over the NASA budget. Those who wanted to remove as much as a billion dollars from NASA and use it for air force space projects continued their campaigns. Budget hawks who wanted to strip NASA simply to save money continued their policy march. From his Pentagon perch, Secretary of Defense McNamara continued to carp that the moonshot didn’t help national security an iota. Others were agitated by reports that aerospace industry suppliers were producing substandard prime components for some NASA vehicles. NASA’s doubters might have succeeded in slashing the budget on one pretext or another, but for the quiet power of Texas congressman Albert Thomas, who blocked the way, protecting space investments especially in his Houston district. In the end, the initial request of $5.7 billion was knocked down to $5.3 billion, a number that Webb considered rock bottom for a successful Apollo mission by 1970. And the Space and Information Division of North American, Inc., went on a public relations blitz to help NASA, proudly announcing that Apollo capsules were already being “hand-tooled” in sync with Kennedy’s moonshot deadline. “I don’t know of any technical problem that will stop us from reaching the moon in this decade,” Harrison Storms, president of the division, told the New York Times. “We have answers to all the main [technical] questions.”
On October 25, Kennedy finally received an official answer from the Kremlin about his UN proposal of a joint moonshot, and it was as surprising in its own way as Kennedy’s overture had been. With a tone of mockery, Khrushchev not only rejected the idea of cooperating on a lunar voyage but announced that his country wasn’t interested in a moonshot at all. If Khrushchev was telling the truth, this apparent collapse of the competition gave NASA’s congressional opponents new ammunition. Why continue to fund a hell-for-leather moon race if no one else was running? The calculated answer that quickly emerged was that Apollo had to continue on schedule to show that America wasn’t influenced in the least by Moscow’s ploys. But when a supplementary appropriations bill was passed in December, the NASA budget would be reduced by another $300 million. Still, Khrushchev helped NASA out more than he ever realized.
Instead of sticking to his story, Khrushchev became his own worst enemy. On November 1, at a Moscow reception for Prince Souvanna Phouma of Laos, he boasted that his country had just launched the earth-controlled Flight 1 unmanned satellite, whose aim was to perfect rendezvous protocol in space. This was the same type of technology Project Gemini was trying to master. When asked about Kennedy’s UN offer for a joint U.S.-Soviet lunar voyage, Khrushchev unleashed a barb at Kennedy that backfired: “What could be better than to send a Russian and an American to the moon together, or better
yet, a Russian man and an American woman?” he said, to general laughter. This dig at the fact that NASA had yet to put a woman in space, as the Kremlin had with Valentina Tereshkova, came only one week after the Soviets declared they were bowing out of the Cold War competition to the moon. It seemed that Khrushchev was yanking America’s chain on all accounts. The Soviet leader, trying to be cagey, neither accepted nor rejected Kennedy’s joint space proposal. Furthermore, if the Russians were engaged in perfecting a Gemini-like rendezvous, they were likely still secretly planning a Soviet moonshot. Inadvertently, Khrushchev’s joke gone awry also helped NASA push through its recommended budget on Capitol Hill.
DESPITE VOCAL DOMESTIC opposition, Kennedy’s UN proposal proved a propaganda windfall for democracy versus communism, winning hearts and minds much as his Peace Corps idea had a few years before, and leaving a humanitarian glow in its wake. Dean Acheson had famously deemed the president’s successful navigation of the Cuban Missile Crisis “an homage to plain dumb luck.” Whether by luck or design, the net effect of Kennedy’s UN speech was to make America look like a peaceful giant on the world stage, and apparently cause the USSR to quit the moon race—all while NASA protected most of the funding it needed for Project Apollo.
Although talk of a joint U.S.-Soviet moon mission had gone nowhere, Kennedy didn’t quite let the dream go—and neither did the fickle Khrushchev, who made vague comments on October 31 indicating some residual interest. The Soviet premier’s remarks were far from firm, but JFK reacted to the slight sense of encouragement by issuing a National Security Action Memorandum directing Webb to create proposals on accommodating cooperation with the Soviet Union in outer space, including on lunar landings.
That early November, Kennedy had his last private meeting with Webb. “I have to tell you, I think that the Secretary of Defense will not want to support the [space] program as having substantial military value,” Webb grumbled to the president about McNamara’s downplaying of Project Apollo’s value. “So you’re going into a campaign [1964] with me saying it has very important technological benefits for the military, and the Secretary of Defense being unwilling to say it.” Kennedy knew that Webb and McNamara were at odds. “Well, is there anything personal between you?” Kennedy began. “Don’t let it get personal.” This was wise advice. If the moonshot were to be accomplished, NASA and the Department of Defense would have to get on the same page, promoting the effort as the “American way” in action. To Webb’s delight, Kennedy firmly sided with him over McNamara in the feud between the two loyal New Frontiersmen.
21
Cape Kennedy
The great achievement of the men on the moon is not only that they made history, but that they expanded man’s vision of what history might be. One moon landing doesn’t make a new heaven and a new earth, but it has dramatized the possibilities of doing so.
—JAMES RESTON, NEW YORK TIMES, 1969
On November 16, 1963, John F. Kennedy traveled to Cape Canaveral to be briefed on Project Apollo and evaluate the progress being made on the Saturn C-I booster rocket. The first two-stage Saturn was slated to test-launch before Christmas—the date was eventually moved to January 29, 1964—marking the inaugural time the upper stage would be tested. Walking around under the behemoth, Ray-Ban sunglasses covering his eyes, head tilted upward in astonishment at the sheer height and girth of the engineering marvel, JFK beamed with pride. The Saturn C-I would soon carry the biggest payload that any nation had ever launched into space, breaking the record held by Sputnik 7 and 8. Robert Seamans, the deputy administrator of NASA, who was with the president on the inspection tour, felt that “for the first time [Kennedy] began to realize the dimensions of these projects.”
While Kennedy chatted with the ebullient von Braun, who was also at Florida’s Space Coast that day, trading jokes and gossip, the president felt his spirits soar. They had come a long way since 1953, when they first met in New York City for Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” television show, to making space travel the talk of America.
Furthermore, Kennedy was pleased that von Braun wasn’t tolerating Jim Crow segregation or white supremacist banter at the Marshall Flight Space Center in Alabama; if only his friend Senator George Smathers of Florida would be similarly enlightened on civil rights.
The highlight of Kennedy’s Cape Canaveral visit was taking a helicopter ride with Gus Grissom and Gordon Cooper around the Atlantic beachfront and mangrove thickets along the Banana River and the Intracoastal Waterway to see the new launch complex. Goofing around with the astronauts, clowning as if they were school chums, the president de-stressed from the pressures of official Washington. Jokes were made about the nightlife of Cocoa Beach and the number of contractors getting rich from the NASA space program. The final frontier, Kennedy enthused, truly was outer space, for, as Arthur C. Clarke wrote, NASA was building “the myths of the future at Cape Canaveral.” The easy camaraderie JFK had with the Mercury Seven, whom he honored with the Collier Trophy that October for aeronautical and aerospace excellence at a White House Rose Garden ceremony, felt uncontrived. He and his “knights of space” were tied together by the going-to-the-moon sweepstakes, which was anchored around American innovation audacity and a fierce determination to win the Cold War rivalry against the Soviet Union. From Kennedy’s aerial perspective that day, Cape Canaveral had grown into a teeming technological campus invested in the future. “We gave him a first-class bird’s-eye view of the new Moonport,” Cooper recalled, “where one day in the not-so-distant future a Saturn would sit with a manned Apollo space craft atop it.”
As Kennedy climbed the stairs of Air Force One, ready to fly south to Palm Beach, he suddenly reversed course, trotting back down to the tarmac to have a private word with Seamans. “Now, be sure that the press really understands [Saturn],” the president told the NASA leader. “I wish you’d get on the press plane that we have down here and tell the reporters there about payload.”
When JFK arrived at Palm Beach that evening for dinner with his ailing father, who had suffered a stroke two years before, he was filled with excitement about all things Apollo. As if brainwashed by NASA’s public affairs office and von Braun, the moonstruck president wanted to talk about little else besides space. No longer was he a bit worried about the United States’ being behind the Soviets in payload-lifting capacity. The president’s visit to Cape Canaveral had reinforced his faith in exactly what a gargantuan, well-funded, centralized federal government project could achieve in breakneck time. “Learning as he stood before the Saturn 1 booster on November 16 that the United States was about to take the lead in lift capability,” the historian John Logsdon explained in a 2011 article in the Space Review, “seems to have convinced the president that the space program was on a positive path.”
After his Florida visit, Kennedy headed to Texas for a two-day, five-city, pro-space-image-building swing. Many pundits believed that the post–Civil War Democratic “solid South” might turn against the president in 1964 because of his Justice Department’s fulsome embrace of the nonviolent civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. At scheduled appearances in San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth, Dallas, and Austin, JFK planned to preach the gospel of Apollo, which was popular with conservative and moderate Democrats, while avoiding the minefield of civil rights liberalism. His Texas stops would not only mark the first “pre-campaign” trip for the Kennedy ’64 reelection effort, but also offer a welcome change of scenery for both Kennedys. Jackie Kennedy had given birth prematurely that August. The baby, named Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, died of respiratory problems less than two days later. The First Lady, devastated by the death, had spent most of the ensuing months in seclusion, mothering Caroline and John-John, nearly six and three, respectively. The Texas trip was her grand reentry into public life, her time to reconnect romantically with her husband, to recapture the glow of their genuine love story.
On November 21, Kennedy spoke at the Brooks Air Force Base for the dedication of the Aerospace Medi
cal Health Center, in San Antonio. The complex of buildings was erected not far from where celebrated aviators Charles Lindbergh and Claire Chennault learned to master the skies while training at Kelly Field and Randolph Field. With Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, Governor John Connally, and Senator Ralph Yarborough in the welcoming party, the president praised the cutting-edge medical innovations being pioneered at the well-funded air force facility. “Many Americans make the mistake of assuming that space research has no value here on earth,” he said. “Nothing could be further from the truth. Just as the wartime development of radar gave us the transistor, and all that it made possible, so research in space medicine holds the promise of substantial benefit for those of us who are earthbound.” The term space medicine had been coined in 1948 by Dr. Hubertus Strughold, a former Nazi physician who immigrated to the United States after World War II as part of Operation Paperclip. Mainly working out of Randolph Air Force Base, Texas, Strughold believed that space exploration would revolutionize health care in America.
What Kennedy understood was that astronauts weren’t the only ones helped by space medicine research—everybody was. From Mercury through Gemini to Apollo, space medicine contributed to radiation therapy for the treatment of cancer; foldable walkers (constructed from lightweight metal developed by NASA); personal alert systems (devices worn by individuals who might require immediate emergency medicine or safety assistance); CAT and MRI scans (devices used by hospitals to look inside the human body, first developed by NASA to take better pictures of the moon); muscle-stimulant devices (to prevent muscle atrophy in paralyzed patients); advanced types of kidney dialysis machines; and dozens of other protocols and innovations.
American Moonshot Page 46