The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by William Manchester

  Space exploration is another matter. Here there are no extenuations. Whatever the glory or lack of it attending that decision, all must go to Kennedy, and with each passing year the scales tip farther against him. By 1961 the space race no longer had any bearing on national security. Paradoxically, the very fact that the Russians had larger rockets was evidence of their technological inferiority. Americans had found a way to design H-bomb warheads which were only a fraction of their former size and weight. Therefore they had no need of powerful rockets to send them toward their targets. Soviet scientists required enormous boosters—over 800,000 pounds of thrust—because their H-bombs remained crude and big. That meant that in this early phase of space exploration they had power to burn, charges which could hurl much heavier satellites into orbit, but that was all it meant, and it wasn’t much. In later phases the superiority of American technology would pay off. Everyone in the White House knew it; so did everyone in the Kremlin.

  The man on the street did not know it. As far as he could see, the Russians were showing America their heels, and somehow that was menacing to the free world. It was useless to explain to him that three out of every four satellites now in orbit were American, that in contrast to the clumsy Sputniks and Luniks the United States had launched whole families of Vanguards, Discoverers, Explorers, Pioneers, Samoses, Tiroses (weather), Transits (navigational), Midases (infrared detector of missiles), and Echos (communications). What counted in the public’s eye was that the Russians were more spectacular. They had been first in orbit, the first to hit the moon and then to photograph it, the first to put a satellite in orbit around Venus with devices to radio back information about it. It was now clear that they were going to beat U.S. scientists to manned space flight. They had already put dogs into orbit, and now the first vehicle to put a man up was standing by on a launch pad near the Aral Sea, the site Francis Gary Powers had been trying to photograph on his ill-starred flight the year before.

  This had nothing to do with either American security or the pursuit of knowledge. It was a matter of face or, as someone unkindly called it, of astropolitics. Given Kennedy elitism there was probably no question that the United States would have risen to the challenge anyhow, but the cold war had a lot to do with it. Like Acheson and Dulles—and Richard Nixon—Kennedy believed that the whole world was watching the rivalry between the two superpowers, and that destiny hung on the outcome of every contest between them. The thought that the Soviet Union might be more admired by the emerging nations in Africa and Asia was unbearable. In some vague way the freedom of mankind was at stake. This is clear from the memoirs of Theodore C. Sorensen. To Kennedy, Sorensen writes, the “space gap” which the new administration had inherited symbolized the country’s lack of “initiative, ingenuity, and vitality.”

  He was convinced that Americans did not fully grasp the world-wide political and psychological impact of the space race. With East and West competing to convince the new and undecided nations which way to turn, which way was the future, the dramatic Soviet achievements, he feared, were helping to build a dangerous impression of unchallenged world leadership generally and scientific pre-eminence particularly.

  In this view, the fact that the United States had superior weapons systems didn’t count for much, because they didn’t seem superior: “Other nations… assumed that a Soviet space lead meant a missile lead as well; and whether this assumption was true or false, it affected their attitudes in the cold war.” Here, surely, was the triumph of image, the notion that in the huts and villages of the Third World peasants, weighing which way they would turn, were awaiting the latest word from outer space. The extraordinary implication was that Soviet rocketeering feats, if unchallenged, would be a greater blow to American prestige than anything else—greater, say, than oppressed American Negroes wrecking the centers of U.S. cities in riots of frustration.

  This wasn’t much of an improvement on the fantasies of John Foster Dulles, and Sorensen makes it clear that in this instance, unlike that of Vietnam, Kennedy was no reluctant convert: “The President was more convinced than any of his advisers that a second-rate, second-place space effort was inconsistent with this country’s security and with the New Frontier spirit of discovery.” Like Cuba, this had been one of his major themes in 1960. Campaigning in Manhattan, he had said: “These are entirely new times, and they require new solutions. The key decision which this [Eisenhower’s] administration had to make in the field of international policy and prestige and power and influence was their recognition of the significance of outer space…. The Soviet Union is now first in outer space.” In Pocatello, Idaho, he had charged: “They [other nations] have seen the Soviet Union first in space. They have seen it first around the moon, and first around the sun…. They come to the conclusion that the Soviet tide is rising and ours is ebbing. I think it is up to us to reverse that point.” And in Oklahoma City five days before his election he had cried: “I will take my television black and white. I want to be ahead of them in rocket thrust.”

  On Monday of the second week in April, UPI began to move a story on the persistent Moscow rumor that Soviet rocketeers had sent a man into space and recovered him. Although that was premature, Tuesday evening the CIA reported that the flight was scheduled for that night. As Washington slept, Moscow’s radios greeted the new day there with the slow, moving strains of the Russian patriotic anthem, “How Spacious Is My Country.” It was followed by the momentous announcement: “The world’s first spaceship, Vostok, with a man on board, has been launched on April 12 in the Soviet Union on a round-the-world orbit.” To follow it, Russian children were released from classrooms, clerks from shops, workmen from factories. In the beginning they were silent, stunned. It seemed incredible that somewhere above them a fellow countryman could be soaring past the stars at 18,000 mph.

  His name was Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, a twenty-seven-year-old Soviet major who had been chosen to be Russia’s first “cosmonaut.” Gagarin had been launched at 9:07 A.M. Moscow time—1:07 A.M. in Washington—and at the time his niche in history appeared to be somewhat greater than it was. There are events whose chief significance lies in the popular response they evoke at the time. The reaction to the Orson Welles Martian broadcast of 1938 was one; so were the Wanna-Go-Home riots of 1946 and the support for the Bricker amendment in the early 1950s. Now people, and not just Russian people, were hungry for heroes. The Soviet Union gave them Gagarin. After 108 hours of flight, 89 of which were spent actually in orbit, he descended from his altitude of 188 miles to become a prized propaganda asset. Standing on the tomb of Lenin, he received a twenty-gun salute. A Moscow square was named after him, then a glacier. Soviet artists set to work designing a commemorative stamp bearing his picture. In Russian newspapers his name was printed in red. Adoring Soviet journalists christened him Gaga. One wrote breathlessly of him that “his eyes were shining as though still reflecting spatial starlight.” In Red Square Khrushchev made a speech comparing him to Columbus. A nationwide Soviet radio broadcast carried a conversation between Khrushchev and the cosmonaut, whose most improbable revelations were “While in outer space I was thinking about our party and our homeland,” and “When I was going down, I sang the song, ‘The Motherland Hears, the Motherland Knows.’”

  Americans gnashed their teeth. “Kennedy could lose the 1964 election over this,” a space administrator said, and a NASA scientist said, “Wait until the Russians send up three men, then six, then a laboratory, start hooking them together and then send back a few pictures of New York for us to see.” At Cape Canaveral a bitter astronaut told a reporter, “We could have got a man up there. We could have done it a month ago if somebody at the top two years ago had simply decided to push it.” At four o’clock that afternoon Kennedy faced a tumultuous press conference in the New State Department auditorium. He was asked: “Mr. President, a member of Congress said today he was tired of seeing the United States second to Russia in the space field. I suppose he speaks for a lot of others…. What is the
prospect that we will catch up with Russia and perhaps surpass Russia in this field?” The reply was defensive: “However tired anybody may be, and no one is more tired than I am, it is a fact that it is going to take some time [to catch up]…. We are, I hope, going to go in other areas where we can be first, and which will bring perhaps more long-range benefits to mankind. But we are behind.” Columnist Hugh Sidey commented that this “seemed hardly in the spirit of the New Frontier.” One news magazine reported that the nation’s mood was one of “frustration, shame, sometimes fury,” and predicted: “Only a spectacular and extremely difficult bit of racketeering, say a manned trip around the moon, will top Russian spacemen in the eyes of the world.”

  In fact, Kennedy learned that evening, it had to be the moon or nothing; on lesser objectives the Soviet lead was too great to overcome. The President had called a 7 P.M. meeting in the Cabinet Room to search for alternatives. One by one his advisers spoke up—Jerome Wiesner; James Webb, NASA head; Dr. Hugh Dryden, Webb’s distinguished deputy; David Elliot Bell, director of the Bureau of the Budget; and Sorensen. The scientists had Kennedy at a disadvantage. Space was not his forte. He knew less about this issue than any other, hadn’t been briefed on the projects at Cape Canaveral, and lacked the science background necessary to sort out scientific options and priorities. After Wiesner, Webb, and Dryden had spoken the President muttered gloomily, “We may never catch up.” He said, “Now let’s look at this. Is there any place we can catch them? What can we do?” He did know that three half-built U.S. rockets would produce over a million pounds of thrust each when finished. He asked of them: “What about Nova and Rover? When will Saturn be ready? Can we leapfrog?”

  Dryden told him there was only one hope, and it would take a crash program similar to the Manhattan Project. That might put an American on the moon in ten years. It would be a gamble, though. And it would cost at least twenty billion dollars—perhaps twice that. The President was silent. Then he said, “The cost, that’s what gets me.” He looked hopefully at Bell, but there was no comfort there; Bell said that exploring space was a very expensive business. Kennedy asked, “Can’t you fellows invent some other race here on earth that will do some good?” But nothing else had the fascination of a flight to the moon, and after drumming his fingernails on his teeth he asked Wiesner and the NASA men to take another look at the figures. Rising to go, he said, “When we know more, I can decide if it’s worth it or not. If somebody can just tell me how to catch up. Let’s find somebody—anybody…. There’s nothing more important.”

  Three weeks later the American people showed that their judgment confirmed his. After twenty-eight months of delays and breakdowns, the first vehicle in NASA’s Project Mercury rose from the gantries at Cape Canaveral. As a hundred million viewers held their breath, a tall, slender white Redstone rocket slowly climbed into the sky, emitting a widening vapor trail. Its passenger was naval Commander Alan B. Shepard Jr. The country was elated. On turnpikes and freeways drivers pulled over to the shoulder and turned up their car radios. An Indianapolis judge declared a recess so everyone in the courthouse could watch the picture on a television set which police had seized as part of a burglar’s booty. The nation was eavesdropping on the exchanges between Freedom 7, as Shepard’s space capsule was called, and his control in Florida. He was in outer space for fifteen minutes. His flight was nothing like Gagarin’s complex trajectory, but for the moment Americans didn’t care. As his capsule descended beside the carrier Lake Champlain, swinging widely beneath its parachute, the sailors cheered wildly. “It’s a beautiful day,” were his first words back on earth. “Boy, what a ride!” His ride to glory had only begun. New York gave him its biggest ticker tape welcome in history as of then. A new school in Deerfield, Illinois, was named for him. Greeting cards went on sale for admirers to send Shepard. Derry, New Hampshire, his home town, with a population of 6,987, staged a parade in his honor. People came from all over New England to march in it; Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and National Guard troops passed in review while jet fighters roared overhead. Senator Styles Bridges in an eloquent speech described New Hampshire’s pride in the new hero. Legislators debated renaming Derry “Spacetown, U.S.A.”

  None of this was lost on the White House, just then smarting from the Bay of Pigs defeat. On May 25 the President stood before Congress with a special message on “urgent national needs,” his second State of the Union address in four months. He wanted “an estimated seven to nine billion dollars additional over the next five years” for the space program. He knew he was asking a lot, he said, but “These are extraordinary times. We face an extraordinary challenge.” To him the issue was a matter of patriotism: “I am here to promote the freedom doctrine.” He said: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.”

  Congress approved by a thundering margin. Simultaneously ground was broken for expansion of facilities at Cape Canaveral and a mission control center in Houston. The aerospace industry was on its way.

  ***

  In July, Air Force Captain Virgil I. Grissom completed a flight similar to Shepard’s. The Russians sent Major Gherman S. Titov whirling around the earth seventeen times in August, and in November NASA orbited a male chimpanzee and recovered him after two trips around the earth; while up, the chimp responded to various lights by pulling levers which released sips of water or banana-flavored pellets. NASA then announced that the pilot of the first U.S. human orbital flight would be the oldest of the seven astronauts who had been chosen from 110 candidates, Marine Lieutenant Colonel John H. Glenn Jr. By then the tremendous popularity of the Mercury Project had been established. It was evident that if Glenn made it back he would be America’s first aerospace superstar, a second Lindbergh. Teams of journalists explored his childhood in the tiny hamlet of New Concord, Ohio, and returned with reams of data which captivated the nation. As a boy he had been an avid reader of Buck Rogers. He had admired Glenn Miller and had played a loud trumpet himself in the New Concord band. As strict Presbyterians the Glenns had held that cigarettes were sinful, and New Concord was a Presbyterian stronghold; boys from surrounding towns called it “Saint’s Rest.” Glenn and his chums had taken a pledge never to use profanity. Once while singing “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here,” one besotted boy, throwing caution to the winds, had recklessly continued with the phrase, “What the hell do we care?” Now, a quarter-century later, the blasphemer told eager journalists how the future astronaut had rounded on him: “Johnny came up to me, white-faced and righteous, and told me to stop. I think he was ready to knock my block off.” In 1962 Glenn’s faith remained strong; he assured interviewers that he believed in “a power greater than I am that will certainly see that I am taken care of.”

  After ten frustrating postponements he lifted off the pad at 10 A.M., Tuesday, February 20, 1962. His departure was like Shepard’s, but magnified many times. A great spurting gout of yellow-white flame licked out from the Atlas D rocket, casting weird shadows on the flat, sandy scrubland of Cape Canaveral. For four incredible seconds the rocket just hung there, balanced over its gantry. Then it ascended, gaining in momentum until it disappeared into the deep blue overarching sky. Glenn said, “Lift-off. The clock is operating. We’re under way.” From the Project Mercury Control Center the deep, calm voice of Lieutenant Colonel John “Shorty” Powers, NASA’s public affairs officer, explained the next step to the country. It was the separation of the rocket and the capsule, Friendship 7, at the precise angle which would put Glenn in orbit. As it happened Glenn cried: “Capsule is turning around. Oh, that view is tremendous! I can see the booster doing turnarounds just a couple of hundred yards behind. Cape is go and I am go.”

  The temperature in the capsule had risen to 108 degrees, he noted, but the air-conditioning in his suit kept him cool. He had been instructed to explain his every sensation—the audience, after all, was paying for the trip—and he began
by reporting that he had no feeling of speed. It was “about the same as flying in an airliner at, say, 30,000 feet, and looking down at clouds at 10,000 feet.” Over the Atlantic he spotted the Gulf Stream, a river of blue in the gray sea. Over the West Coast he made out California’s Salton Sea and the Imperial Valley, and he could pick out the irrigation canals near El Centro, where he had once lived. His first twilight was awesome: “As the sun goes down it’s very white, brilliant light, and as it goes below the horizon you get a very bright orange color. Down close to the surface it pales out into a sort of blue, a darker blue, and then off into black.” The stars were spectacular. “If you’ve been out on the desert on a very clear, brilliant night when there’s no moon and the stars just seem to jump out at you, that’s just about the way they look.” Approaching Australia he radioed, “Just to my right I can see a big pattern of light, apparently right on the coast.” From a tracking station below, Astronaut Gordon Cooper explained to him that this was the Australian city of Perth. Its 82,000 inhabitants had turned on all their light switches, to welcome him and test his night vision. Glenn replied, “Thank everybody for turning them on, will you?”

  Glenn made other tests himself, exploring his weightless state. He swallowed some nutritious tablets and some applesauce which he squeezed out of a tube. No problems there, he reported: “It’s all positive action. Your tongue forces it back in the throat and you swallow normally. It’s all a positive displacement machine all the way through.” He jiggled around as best he could to see if he could bring on giddiness or space sickness. There was none of it; “I have no ill effects at all from zero G. It’s very pleasant, as a matter of fact. Visual acuity is still excellent. No astigmatic effects. No nausea or discomfort whatever.” An amateur photographer, Glenn had brought a camera along. Instead of putting it on a shelf after he had taken some pictures through his window, he just stuck it out in the air, and there it stayed, suspended. Changing rolls, he let the film slip. He quickly reached for it, but as he explained to the enchanted millions, “instead of clamping onto it, I batted it and it went sailing around behind the instrument panel, and that was the last I saw of it.”