American Moonshot

by Douglas Brinkley

  Full of marvel, Kennedy launched into a succinct dissertation on how medical space research would lead to better overall health care in America. He drove home the salient point that the auxiliary technological benefits of the $25 billion NASA moonshot were profound and diverse. “Examinations of the astronauts’ physical, and mental, and emotional reactions can teach us more about the differences between normal and abnormal, about the causes and effects of disorientation, about changes in metabolism which could result in extending the life span,” the president boasted. “When you study the effects on our astronauts of exhaust gases which can contaminate their environment, and you seek ways to alter these gases so as to reduce their toxicity, you are working on problems similar to those in our great urban centers[,] which themselves are being corrupted by gases and which must be clear.”

  Whatever new medical devices were commissioned by NASA and the air force to monitor an astronaut’s heart and brain wave activity, Kennedy said, would soon find application in general hospitals; they absolutely did. The implantable heart defibrillator, a tool to constantly monitor heartbeats, was developed by NASA and could deliver a shock to restore heartbeat regularity. Likewise, ophthalmologists would be able to help patients with eye defects using new laser-light protocols developed for space travel. Even simple everyday health-related objects (such as the special foam used for cushioning astronauts during liftoff, which was starting to be used in pillows and mattresses at hospitals to help prevent ulcers, relieve pressure, and ward off insomnia) were already benefiting patients. “This space effort must go on,” JFK exhorted. “The conquest of space must and will go ahead. That much we know. That much we can say with confidence and conviction.”

  Speaking about the “new frontier of outer space,” Kennedy ended his San Antonio oration by linking space, medicine, and the moonshot with an anecdote by Frank O’Connor, the Irish author of the recent memoir An Only Child. With great relish, the president recounted that O’Connor wrote about “how, as a boy, he and his friends would wander the countryside, and when they came to an orchard wall that seemed too high and too doubtful to try and too difficult to permit their voyage to continue, they took off their hats and tossed them over the wall—and then they had no choice but to follow them. This Nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space, and we have no choice but to follow it,” Kennedy said. “Whatever the difficulties, they will be overcome.”

  At JFK’s side in San Antonio was Gordon Cooper, perhaps the most popular of the Mercury Seven, after John Glenn. Children pined for the astronaut’s autograph. Local medical professionals clambered for a photo. In front of reporters, Kennedy and Cooper walked together, shaking hands hard and fast. At one point they joked about who had a darker Florida tan. “We were at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio and the president came over and asked me if I could go to Dallas with him the next day,” Cooper recalled. “He said he could use a ‘space hero’ with him on the trip. I couldn’t make the trip because some important systems tests were scheduled at the Cape for the next day: November 22, 1963.”

  From San Antonio that afternoon, the Kennedys flew to Houston, where more than ten thousand people greeted them at the airport. Thirty thousand more lined the route down Main Street to Texas Avenue, just to glimpse the effervescent First Couple waving from an open car. Upon the president and Mrs. Kennedy’s arrival at the downtown Rice Hotel, thousands of well-wishers mobbed them at the roped-off lobby entranceway. Bringing the Manned Spacecraft Center to Houston had made both Kennedys beloved in Space City, U.S.A. The hotel suite reserved for them had been specially decorated with masterworks of art loaned by local collectors, and their refrigerator stocked with caviar, champagne, and Heineken (the president’s favorite beer). This wasn’t the president’s first time in this hotel. Two of the great speeches of his career (his defense of Catholicism to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960 and the “We choose to go to the moon” oration at Rice University in 1962) were delivered after first checking in to the Rice Hotel.

  Bill Kilgarlin, the chairman of the Democratic Party in Harris County, Texas, expressed his hope to the press that all Houstonians abandon partisan political differences to embrace the First Couple with the utmost respect. This sentiment was echoed by the county’s Republican chairman, George H. W. Bush, himself a future U.S. president. Bush asked Houstonians, specifically Republicans, to extend a “warm and cordial welcome” to JFK for bringing the Manned Spacecraft Center to Houston, and he warned against protests. “I would strongly condemn this,” Bush said. “It would be a disgrace to the President and the high office he holds. There may be some nuts around who might do something, but they won’t be Republicans.”

  In the early evening, the Kennedys, followed by a pack of politicians, aides, and journalists, spoke at a League of United Latin American Citizens banquet. No sooner had they entered the Rice Hotel’s ballroom than a standing ovation erupted. The gala, carried live on local Houston television, culminated in the First Lady addressing the largely Hispanic crowd in Spanish to hearty applause and shouts of “Olé!” as a mariachi band played up-tempo Mexican folk songs such as “Volver, Volver” to close the event.

  Later that same night, the Kennedys were the special guests of honor at a testimonial dinner honoring Congressman Albert Thomas, held at the Houston Coliseum. Thomas’s support of the moonshot had been crucial to the president’s selling NASA’s lunar ambitions on Capitol Hill and jump-starting Houston’s current economic boom. Insisting that Apollo was on track, that the moon was within reach, JFK praised Thomas for having lassoed NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center for Houston.

  Kennedy and Thomas were right to celebrate. Starting in 1961, Houston had become synonymous with the very term progress: plans were now under way to build an Astrodome (the world’s first air-conditioned stadium) and the Galleria (a modern indoor shopping mall with an ice rink in the center). Sleek new “space age” edifices such as the Humble Oil Building were erected. Almost overnight, the NASA connection had lured corporations such as IBM and Bellcom to Houston to participate in the Apollo challenge. These Fortune 500 giants opened up Houston facilities, which created more jobs and generated more revenue to employees. By the time the Manned Spacecraft Center opened in Houston in 1962, more than 125 space-oriented firms and corporations had created offices in the Clear Lake area, including Honeywell, North American Aviation, General Electric, Lockheed Electronics Company, Sperry Rand, and Texas Instruments. As for the law firm orchestrating the construction of the Manned Spacecraft Center, it was—no surprise—Brown and Root, the big project builders synonymous with Albert Thomas.

  When Kennedy went off script to praise the city’s iconic role in space exploration, he tripped over one of his words. Referring to Thomas’s tireless efforts to bring NASA to Houston, he said, “He has helped steer this country to its present position of eminence in space. Next month when the United States of America fires . . . the largest payroll—payload—into space giving us the lead.” As he recovered in the midst of this awkward sentence, the president instantly picked up on his own flub and gave the audience a dose of humor: “It will be the largest payroll, too!” he exclaimed. “And who should know that better than Houston. We put a little of it right here.”

  There was no question that Texas was one of the big beneficiaries of the administration’s space program. The fingerprints of Lyndon Johnson were all over the gains for the state. Twenty-three sites had been considered by NASA, but Houston won out. Florida, to many objective space beat reporters, was the obvious place to have based the Manned Spacecraft Center. But Johnson—with help from Southern congressmen Overton Brooks, Olin Teague, and especially Albert Thomas still chairing the House Appropriations Committee—had executed an end run and scored big. “He [Kennedy] and I had a big argument about it, big fight,” Senator George Smathers of Florida recalled. “Johnson tried to act like he didn’t know. . . . It never made sense to have a big operation at Cape Canaveral and another big operation in Texas.
But that’s what we got, and we got that because Kennedy allowed Johnson to become the theoretical head of the space program.”

  After the Houston Coliseum event, a limousine took the Kennedys to the airport, for a 10:30 p.m. departure to Fort Worth. The long hours they had spent in San Antonio and Houston were memorable for the sincere enthusiasm they engendered from the public. The president’s full-bore commitment to Projects Gemini and Apollo was evoked at every event, as though he were pointedly reclaiming the New Frontier goal of manned flight to the moon and proudly giving it his signature once again. Unbeknownst to reporters, in his alligator-hide briefcase Kennedy carried a speech draft that, after some tweaking, he planned to deliver to the Dallas Citizens Council the next afternoon, at the city’s Trade Mart. It was anchored in large part around the New Frontier’s uncompromising belief in American space supremacy:

  We have regained the initiative in the exploration of outer space, making an annual effort greater than the combined total of all space activities undertaken during the fifties, launching more than 130 vehicles into earth orbit, putting into actual operation valuable weather and communications satellites, and making it clear to all that the United States of America has no intention of finishing second in space.

  This effort is expensive—but it pays its own way, for freedom and for America. For there is no longer any fear in the free world that a Communist lead in space will become a permanent assertion of supremacy and the basis of military superiority. There is no longer any doubt about the strength and skill of American science, American industry, American education, and the American free enterprise system. In short, our national space effort represents a great gain in, and a great resource of, our national strength.

  The Kennedys spent a comfortable night at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth. On the morning of November 22, over coffee, the president read a Houston Chronicle column joking that he might be met with violent protest in Dallas if he dared speak about anything except the joys of nautical sailing. Dallas, unlike Houston and San Antonio, didn’t benefit from NASA contracts; JFK was rather unpopular with archconservatives and libertarians there. “There will sure as shootin’ be some who leave and let go with a broadside of grapeshot in the presidential rigging,” the column by Saul Friedman threatened. In disgust, Kennedy threw the newspaper aside. Unlike San Antonio and Houston, with their many throngs of enthusiastic Kennedy supporters, Dallas was deemed by Friedman “a mecca for those who see all sorts of evils, conspiracies, and acts of treason in the federal government—and especially the administration of President John Kennedy.” Playing off this disturbing column, in defiance, the president added a line to his scheduled Trade Mart speech, shaming voices “in the land—voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality.” He added his hope that “fewer people” would listen to the John Birch Society–type paranoia and instead unify around manned spaceflight.

  After breakfast with the local Chamber of Commerce, in a gesture toward what looked good on TV, Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy flew from Fort Worth’s Carswell Air Force Base to Dallas’s Love Field, even though it was only a thirteen-minute flight. The president, full of enthusiasm for NASA, sat on the plane with Representative Olin Teague. “He wanted to go to the Cape for the Saturn launch in [January],” Teague recalled of their in-flight conversation. “He thought the space program needed a boost and he wanted to help.” On a more somber note, Kennedy told Teague he was planning to meet in Dallas, for the first time ever, the family of Wilford “Bud” Willy, the navy aviator who, with Joe Kennedy Jr., was killed in the air during World War II trying to destroy a Nazi missile compound in France. Sadly, Kennedy never had the chance to commiserate with the Willy family or evoke space exploration at the Trade Mart or watch the Saturn 1B launch from Cape Canaveral in January 1964.

  On November 22 at 11:55 a.m. CST, Jack and Jackie’s motorcade left Love Field in Dallas for a ten-mile trip through downtown in a convertible with the top down. The First Lady was ensconced at her husband’s left in the third-row seats in the presidential limo with Texas governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie, seated in front of them. Vice President Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, followed in another vehicle. If Gordon Cooper had taken the president up on his offer in San Antonio, he would have been riding with them on that fateful day. Thirty-five minutes later, three shots were fired as JFK’s convertible passed the Texas School Book Depository, across from Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas. Bullets entered Kennedy’s neck and head as he collapsed toward his wife. The governor was shot in the back but survived. At one in the afternoon, Kennedy was declared dead at Parkland Memorial Hospital. His lifeless body was rushed to Love Field and carried onto JFK’s beloved Air Force One. Before the plane left for Washington, DC, Lyndon Johnson took the oath of the U.S. presidency, administered by U.S. district judge Sarah Hughes. “That was a bad day, I’ll tell you,” Bob Gilruth of NASA recalled about the somber mood in Houston. “We cried. A lot of us stood in front of the television there and cried.”

  John Glenn was driving home from an exercise at Texas’s Ellington Air Force Base when he heard about Kennedy’s shocking death on the radio. His wife, Annie, at a department store in Houston, soon rendezvoused with her husband in tears. The Kennedys had become like family to them. “I called Bobby and Ethel [Kennedy] that night,” Glenn recalled, “and later represented the astronauts at the President’s funeral. In the days that followed, as the initial shock and grief receded, Annie and I sat back as we had after Pearl Harbor and assessed our responsibilities to each other and to the country, and what we might do. It was a time for soul searching.”

  Just three months after Kennedy’s death, John Glenn retired from NASA, announcing that he would run for a U.S. Senate seat in Ohio. “I always believed that serving in high public office and having the opportunity to help determine the future of the country was one of the greatest positions that anyone could aspire to,” Glenn explained. “Now, with JFK’s assassination, it was more important than ever before for good people to enter public life.” While Glenn lost in 1964, he eventually ended up serving in the Senate from 1974 to 1999, and even ran for U.S. president himself, in 1984.

  Robert Kennedy continued to push for Apollo following his brother’s death. Instead of sending soldiers to die in Vietnam, he believed, America needed to launch astronauts to the moon. It would be hard to exaggerate how personally close Bobby became with John Glenn during the Johnson years. Together with their wives they rafted down the Colorado River and cruised Florida waters. “We loved John because he was just a natural,” Ethel Kennedy recalled. “There was nothing phony baloney about him.” When Bobby announced he was running for president in early 1968, Glenn became one of his top campaign surrogates. When RFK was assassinated on June 5, 1968, in Los Angeles, Ethel, who had been at her slain husband’s side, telephoned Glenn back East, asking him to rush to McLean, Virginia, to help calm and comfort her children then living at Hickory Hill. “When we lost Bobby, John immediately went to the house to be a force of light for the children,” she recalled. “They all loved him. He stayed with them for days.”

  Over the decades following RFK’s death, Glenn kept in close contact with NASA, and in 1998, at age seventy-seven, he got his wish to go back into space. Though it had been thirty-five years since Friendship 7, Glenn was chosen to be part of the crew of the space shuttle Discovery. His participation allowed NASA scientists to study the impact of space travel on senior citizens. “Even on my Discovery voyage,” Glenn confessed, “I thought of myself as an ancient member of Kennedy’s space corps.”

  When Alan Shepard learned of Kennedy’s death, his devil-may-care attitude vanished. His first dejected instinct was to cancel all appointments and watch the TV coverage at his Houston home with his wife, Louise. That evening, he was slated to attend dinner at the Vanderhoefs’ mansion in the upscale River Oaks part of town but canceled. The Houston socialite Peter Vanderhoef recalled that his friend Alan was “too shook up to eat.” Shepard had advertised
Kennedy as a fellow “space cadet”; now he was gone. “He was devastated by Kennedy’s death,” Shepard’s biographer Neal Thompson wrote. “And more than a little worried. What will this do to the space program?” In the immediate years following Kennedy’s death, Shepard tried to earn an assignment for an Apollo moon mission, even though his health (Ménière’s disease) prohibited it. His persistence, in the end, paid off. In 1969 he underwent a new surgical technique for Ménière’s, and it worked miracles; NASA put him back in the mix. From January 31 to February 9, 1971, he commanded Apollo 14, NASA’s third successful lunar landing mission. His golfing on the moon was broadcast live on color television. At age forty-seven, he remains the oldest man to have walked on the moon.

  Scott Carpenter moped around “in a pall of grief” after hearing about the Dallas killing. Like Glenn and Shepard, the fourth Mercury astronaut in space grieved with his wife, Patty. “Before the assassination and before the war escalated in Vietnam a two-term Kennedy administration was a safe political assumption,” Carpenter recalled in his memoir. “It was logical to assume that NASA would get the country to the moon and back and even that John [Glenn] might have a shot at going. These hopes and assumptions presented among other things a comfortable family timetable for the Glenns. John could take part in the lunar expeditions and then turn to politics, a natural move for the Ohio-born Democrat—a move urged on him by two Kennedys, John and Robert. The man was, after all, the most popular and recognized man on the planet—a priceless asset for the Democratic administration. . . . The assassination changed everything.”

  In Moscow that evening, Nikita Khrushchev had just finished dinner when his telephone rang with the message that Kennedy had been shot. The Soviet premier turned ashen and crestfallen. When a short while later Foreign Minister Gromyko called back to offer details of the assassination in Dallas, he openly wept. He felt shortchanged without exactly knowing why. The KGB told Khrushchev it believed right-wing extremists, angry at the prospect of U.S.-Soviet détente, were responsible for the murder. Around that time, Robert Kennedy had been covertly working to set up a Kennedy-Khrushchev summit in coming months. The hope was that a NATO–Warsaw Pact nonaggression treaty could be brokered and, perhaps, joint efforts in outer space agreed upon. Khrushchev told his son that he was willing to take risks with President Kennedy, but with Lyndon Johnson as president, “everything will be different.”