by Scott Farris
The worst setback had been the bungled Bay of Pigs operation in which U.S.–trained and –financed Cuban refugees failed miserably in their attempt to invade Cuba and overthrow Fidel Castro. But there were also Communist gains in Laos, and on April 12, the week before the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Soviet Union announced it had launched the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin, who orbited the Earth and landed safely.
It was such a rough start to his administration that Kennedy joked to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., his in-house historian, that if Schlesinger ever wrote a book about the Kennedy administration, its title would need to be “Kennedy: The Only Years.” Yet the initial difficulties had not created a political crisis. Public opinion actually rallied around the young president; in early May, his job approval rating soared to 83 percent, with only 5 percent expressing disapproval. Kennedy could only shake his head in wonder. “Jesus, it’s just like Ike. The worse you do, the better they like you.”
Politics certainly played some role in Kennedy’s decision to commit the nation to a moon program, but then politics always plays a role in any decision made by any elected official. Kennedy had deeper motivations. Since writing Why England Slept as a young Harvard graduate, Kennedy had contemplated how democracies, forever in thrall to public opinion that is generally more interested in short-term benefits than long-term sacrifice, could match the achievements of dictatorships, which are not so constrained.
Kennedy’s decision to go the moon “reflected an almost messianic, expansive drive, one resulting in a sense of destiny and mission, which has for a long time been part of the American world view,” wrote John M. Logsdon, the scholar who has done the most in-depth study of Kennedy’s role in Project Apollo. Kennedy would not have committed so much of his own personal prestige, let alone national prestige, on such an extraordinarily difficult and expensive undertaking if he did not possess “an assumption of American exceptionalism”—that America, more than any other nation, was both capable of undertaking and entitled to claiming such an extraordinary feat.
The challenge was also rooted in two liberal philosophies to which Kennedy generally subscribed—the classical liberal philosophy which holds that humanity can do whatever it chooses to do if it has the will and the resources, and the contemporary politically liberal belief that celebrates “the use of federal power for public good.” The United States, Kennedy believed, “was rightfully the exemplar for other nations, and that meeting challenges to the U.S. position as the leading world power justified the use of extensive national resources to achieve success.”
The U.S. space program, however, had not been particularly successful by the time of Kennedy’s inauguration. Early American rockets had displayed an alarming tendency to explode. When the Soviets successfully launched the first man-made orbiting satellite in 1957, Kennedy had charged that Sputnik’s success was an example of Eisenhower’s failed leadership. Now, with the Russians having excited the world by putting Gagarin into orbit, it was Kennedy’s leadership that was in question.
Where weeks before, Kennedy had debated whether to cut NASA’s budget, now he called in his science advisors and asked if there was anything that could be done to catch and surpass the Soviets in space travel. Kennedy’s advisors reported back that the one project that could thrill the world’s imagination and which was feasible under the technology already available was to send a man to the moon and then bring him safely back to Earth. The estimated cost, Kennedy was told, would be between $20 billion and $40 billion. In context, the total federal budget for 1961 was $97 billion.
Kennedy was appalled by the price tag, but with the Bay of Pigs debacle occurring the week after Gagarin’s flight, he decided he had no choice but to announce the moon program to restore American prestige. Further, he had been buoyed by American astronaut Alan Shepherd’s successful suborbital space flight on May 5, 1961. It restored some of his faith in NASA. He would commit the United States to a moon shot. “All over the world we’re judged by how well we do in space,” Kennedy told aides. “Therefore, we’ve got to be first. That’s all there is to it.”
Kennedy later said that if his advisors had been able to come up with a “scientific spectacular” on Earth that would have been as dramatic as landing on the moon, he would have supported that too, but his chief science advisor, Jerome Wiesner, doubted that was true. “I think he became convinced that space was the symbol of the twentieth century,” Wiesner said. “It was a decision he made cold bloodedly. He thought it was good for the country.”
A president’s State of the Union address is normally an annual affair, but Kennedy, arguing “these are extraordinary times,” decided to give what he billed as a second State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961, less than four months after his first State of the Union. Kennedy spent the first part of his speech requesting additional defense expenditures and announced that within two weeks he would be meeting in Vienna with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev for their first (and what would be their only) summit.
These announcements drew cheers, but congressional members went wild with approval when Kennedy then announced, “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. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind.”
Kennedy was correct. Without need of a presidential commission, Kennedy had identified a national goal that seemed worthy of the United States’ best efforts. It would be a competition that would prove the superiority of democratic capitalism. It would once again demonstrate America’s extraordinary technical know-how. It would feed the public desire to believe in a better future, made easier by technology. And it tapped into the American frontier myth. Once again, Americans would be discovering unknown lands—for space, as the original (and short-lived) television program named Star Trek would note three years later, is “the final frontier.”
The rest of the world was almost as enthusiastic as Congress had been. Meeting with Habib Bourguiba, the president of Tunisia, Kennedy asked whether it was wiser for the United States to spend money putting a man on the moon or to increase foreign aid. Bourguiba replied, “I wish I could tell you to put it in foreign aid. But I cannot.”
While polls showed many Americans were concerned about the cost of a moon program, Kennedy had caught the spirit of the times, and most Americans seemed to agree with Kennedy and his impulsiveness of youth that sending a man to the moon would be “clearly one of the great human adventures of modern history.”
Kennedy remained more involved in Project Apollo than generally realized. He ordered multiple reviews of the program to be reassured that the benefits justified the cost—an assumption about which he and others had increasing doubts. The New York Times editorialized in 1963, for example, that the moon program had never been “sufficiently explained or sufficiently debated.”
Kennedy himself sometimes had a difficult time explaining the rationale for the project. In his lengthiest justification for Project Apollo, a speech before forty thousand people at Houston’s Rice University on September 12, 1962, Kennedy said, ” We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”
Kennedy didn’t help clarify the purpose of the moon mission when he suggested that questioning why men should go to the moon was like questioning why Lindbergh should have flown solo across the Atlantic or why Hillary climbed Mount Everest. He then flippantly asked (the question appears scribbled in his own handwriting on his speech manuscript), “Why does Rice play Texas?”
By late 1963, winning the space race seemed less important than it had when Project Apollo was launched. The United Stat
es had already begun to match Soviet achievements in space, most notably when John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth on February 20, 1962. The peaceful resolution of the Cuban missile crisis and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty ratified in the summer of 1963 had reduced Cold War tensions, and “a spectacular space achievement had lost some of its urgency.”
It is doubtful that Kennedy would have ever seriously considered cancelling or even postponing the moon mission. His assassination on November 22, 1963, meant he never had the chance to reconsider the commitment he made, nor did it give him the chance to see the commitment fulfilled. Landing a man on the moon became one more way to extol Kennedy’s memory, and the launch site was renamed Cape Kennedy in his honor. Then, on July 20, 1969, Armstrong set foot upon the moon, beating Kennedy’s self-imposed deadline by five months and eleven days. Nearly a half-century later, still only one flag flies on the surface of the moon—that of the United States—one of the purest expressions of American exceptionalism.
The effort had cost U.S. taxpayers $25.4 billion—the equivalent of more than $150 billion in 2013 dollars—making it the largest peacetime government-directed engineering project in history, dwarfing construction of the Panama Canal and perhaps even the development of the interstate highway system.
There were critics who thought the expense had not been worth it. After five successful lunar landings, President Nixon canceled three other planned missions and cut NASA’s budget by 75 percent. Historian Walter McDougall suggested Project Apollo fit too well with Kennedy’s stated philosophy of subsuming individual priorities for the national well being, and Project Apollo “served as the bridge over which technocratic methods passed from the military to the civilian realm.”
But in the heady months and years after Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind,” such critical perspective was a minority view. Except for giving wiseacres a line to complain about modern technological ineptitude—“If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we . . .?”—it was generally considered an extraordinary moment of pride for America—and for humanity.
American diplomat U. Alexis Johnson said Project Apollo did more for American prestige abroad than anything since winning World War II because the United States had proved its intentions in space were peaceful and for the benefit of all mankind. Beleaguered by race riots, assassinations, a war in Vietnam, urban decay, and many other woes, without the moon landing, there would have been little for Americans to celebrate in the late 1960s.
What is seldom remembered is that Kennedy was prepared for Project Apollo to be a joint venture with the Soviet Union. In his inaugural address, Kennedy had called on the nations of the world “to explore the stars together,” and when he met Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961, just ten days after announcing his moon challenge, Kennedy suggested the United States and the Soviet Union cooperate on the project. He contacted Khrushchev again in 1962, following Glenn’s flight, to again urge cooperation in space, and repeated the idea of American-Soviet space cooperation in a speech to the United Nations in September 1963. But Khrushchev, who said he doubted there were any good practical reasons to go to the moon, especially given the expense, said there could be no cooperation in space until there was some agreement on nuclear disarmament first.
Reagan would receive a similar response from the Soviets twenty-five years later when he proposed the Soviets work with the United States to codevelop Reagan’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a project derided by critics as “Star Wars,” after the space fantasy film series of that name, but which Reagan considered to be every bit as noble a mission as Project Apollo or perhaps more so, because Reagan hoped SDI would end the possibility of nuclear war.
Defense was one area where Reagan unhesitatingly was willing to spend billions of new dollars and to organize all the government’s collective will, skills, and efforts. SDI was also, like Kennedy’s moon challenge, an instance where Reagan alone initiated the effort. He had first discussed the concept of a missile defense system in an otherwise routine speech on defense spending on March 23, 1983. As with Kennedy’s moon challenge, it caught almost everyone off-guard; Reagan had not even bothered to clear the idea with the Pentagon, even though his proposal would reverse three decades of official U.S. nuclear policy.
The idea then disappeared from public discussion for two years until March 1985, when Reagan requested $25 billion in new funding over five years to begin development of a global missile shield. The technology to be used was unspecified, but the experts tasked with developing the project talked about a “multi-tiered system” that would use some combination of lasers, heat-seeking missiles, and other technologies, some of which were nowhere near reality yet.
Oddly, though such a system would require significant leaps forward in technology, it was widely assumed at home and abroad that the United States was capable of developing such a system. Polls found two-thirds of Americans believed American scientists were capable of developing such a defense system, and up to two-thirds of Americans supported development of SDI—if it was foolproof.
The immediate debate after Reagan proposed SDI was about how he had gotten the idea in the first place. One story told by an aide said Reagan had been stunned to learn during a tour of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) in 1979 that the United States had no missile defense system, but such a story makes Reagan sound remarkably ill-informed, which seems unlikely. The debate over the development of antiballistic missiles had been huge news in the 1960s while Reagan was governor. There was also a group of conservative activists, led by Wyoming senator Malcolm Wallop, that in the summer of 1979 began promoting the concept and urging candidate Reagan to advocate a space-based missile defense shield.* Another theory was that SDI was one of the ideas Reagan supposedly got from a movie, either Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain or a movie in which Reagan himself had starred, playing a Secret Service agent who protected an invention called the “Inertia Projector.”
* The author worked for Senator Wallop in 1979–1980 as a junior press aide.
What few seemed to ask was why Reagan made the proposal, and a key answer is his devotion to American exceptionalism. An article by Professor G. Simon Harak, published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, said Reagan was playing “the role of a prophet” in calling on America to develop SDI. When Reagan said, “I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete,” he was, in a sense, urging America to take the lead in abolishing nuclear weapons as atonement for being the nation that developed them.
Further, he was continuing his theme of restoration; in this case, a restoration of America as Eden. Reagan’s long-held notion that America was “virgin land,” protected from the Old World by two vast oceans, had been shattered with the development of long-range missiles topped with nuclear warheads. In announcing his vision of a missile defense shield, he was expressing the hope that with long-range systems for delivering mass destruction no longer able to reach America, the nation could again become “an invulnerable sanctuary, its sacred soil inviolate,” which would then free America to resume its ordained mission in the world, which was the spread of liberty. In its duality of purpose, Reagan’s SDI speech was “at once isolationist and internationalist.”
Although $30 billion was spent on its development, SDI was never deployed, though the research did lead to the development of localized antimissile defense systems. The “Iron Dome” developed by Israel was, in part, the beneficiary of SDI research. The development of SDI was also used by Reagan as a threat and promise in his negotiations with Gorbachev. Gorbachev, demonstrating his own faith in American exceptionalism, believed the United States was capable of deploying a missile shield and altering the balance of power, but he also believed it would be extraordinarily expensi
ve. So Gorbachev declined Reagan’s offer to share SDI technology and continued to urge the United States to abandon the project. The arms reduction agreements eventually reached between Gorbachev and Reagan took a great deal of steam out of the SDI project, and the rationale for the project disappeared with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
That the United States could become invincible from attack and yet not abuse that power, Reagan had no doubts. In justifying SDI, Reagan noted that the United States after World War II had stood alone as the only nuclear-weapon nation and the world’s sole superpower, but through the Marshall Plan and the rebuilding of Germany and Japan had showed its intentions were entirely peaceful.
While many Americans enjoyed the feeling from the Reagan years that it was good to be back on top again, American exceptionalism as sometimes articulated during that time could be aggressive and obnoxious. Some of the worst examples occurred when the Olympic Games were held in Los Angeles in 1984, and were seemingly choreographed to assist in Reagan’s reelection that year.
U.S. News and World Report had proclaimed, Patriotism Is Back in Style in one of its headlines, but it was difficult to distinguish patriotism from jingoism. With a substantial number of the world’s finest athletes absent, as the Communist bloc nations boycotted Los Angeles in retaliation for the United States’ boycott of the Moscow games four years earlier, American spectators and news media nonetheless played up every American victory in even the most obscure of sports as an event of “national significance.” The constant chants of “USA! USA!” were so noisome that journalist William Greider compared the packaging of the Los Angeles games to “Hitler’s celebration of Arian youth at the Berlin Games in 1936.”