Setting up Mercury tracking stations was a complicated undertaking that required more than agreements and hardware; it also required a multipronged public relations approach that targeted both local populations and government officials. NASA ran into significant challenges in Africa, in particular. It was here that America’s troubled race relations intersected with a powerful decolonization movement. Strategically, after 1957 the USIA increased programming and tailored material for the region, including films and radio features on the accomplishments of African Americans to counteract news stories about racial oppression in the US. The overall messaging stressed America’s support of African countries’ independence. Secretary of State Dulles called Africa “the coming continent” and explained that “we were anxious to do all we could.”65
US government officials made sure to avoid using the term “tracking station” in Africa because studies had shown that the phrase had a militaristic connotation there.66 The use of military uniforms or titles by US officials, even during the Mercury flights, was prohibited. There was also general concern within the State Department over Western African criticism of American “colonial” presence in the region. Tensions arising from the tracking stations could strain the overall US position in Africa. On the other side of the continent, in Zanzibar, Communist demonstrations threatened the establishment of a station there.67 Making matters more difficult, Moscow Radio broadcast anti-tracking features in Africa that suggested the United States was using the facilities as military bases. Peking Radio also contributed to the controversy over the NASA stations by emphasizing the “military dangers” of such “bases” in broadcasts to East Africa. Many newspapers in East Africa carried news stories about a “secret” US military base.68
On October 19, 1960, just a few weeks after Nigeria gained independence from Great Britain, the US reached an agreement to build a tracking station outside Kano. Nigeria was pro-West, and by that time the United States already had a history of funding development programs in the country, primarily focused on agriculture. But any sign of American empire, however informal, raised apprehension about the country’s larger intentions in Nigeria. To address these concerns, USIA, NASA, and State Department officials made sure to highlight the collaborative operation of the tracking stations between NASA and the host government. NASA hired and trained local personnel, while the USIA undertook a targeted information campaign, including film screenings, the distribution of issues of National Geographic, and a moderate publicity buildup.69 As one official described the situation, the United States government should “ascertain which marginal activities can be Nigerianized in interest vital [to] political factors involved.”70 The tracking stations adopted an “open-door” policy and became tourist attractions, information centers, and a counternarrative to America’s troubled race relations.71
By 1960, the USIA determined that the United States had steadily regained prestige, although the Soviet Union still outstripped the nation in terms of space exploration. In other words, the Soviet Union was winning the space race. The effects of Soviet space accomplishments spread to other fields, including Soviet science and technology, military power, and general status. USIA officials believed that the world public saw the Soviet Union in a very different light after Sputnik. Before 1957, America had the lead in science, technology, and production; Soviet satellites and robotic probes evidenced the USSR’s ability to challenge that lead. The United States, according to USIA Director George V. Allen, must “push forward vigorously with space exploration” to maintain international confidence in American leadership. The space race had broad implications; it factored into “almost every aspect” of the relationship between the United States and the world.72
Eisenhower formed a presidential committee to assess the USIA and America’s global image and appointed as its leader Mansfield Sprague, the former counsel to the secretary of defense. A substantial section of the lengthy Sprague Report was titled “The Impact of Achievements in Science and Technology upon the Image of the United States Abroad.” Scientific and technological prowess, according to USIA public opinion data, denoted both power and progress to overseas audiences. American science had the added benefit of symbolizing US values, including freedom, democracy, and pluralism. The report recommended that the president encourage federal agencies to evaluate the “international political-psychological factors” of scientific and engineering programs when allocating funding. Scientific and engineering programs promised a dual benefit: first as “status symbols in the East-West conflict, direct indices of power,” and second as “promises of directly meaningful, applicable, useable instruments of progress.”73
These conclusions mirrored what Henry Kissinger identified in 1955 as the “new diplomacy” but were updated for the current post-colonial moment. As the recommendations of the report read, “In both the new countries and the older ones going through the crisis of modernization, formal and traditional diplomacy of the predominantly government-to-government type often plays a limited role.” The implications of this evolving geopolitical landscape required psychological strategy, an understanding of “public opinion in all countries, open and closed, old and new.” Scientific and technological programs, especially stunning feats of prowess, were increasingly viewed as essential for securing global leadership in the rapidly evolving cold war world order.74
The Sprague Committee predicted that the 1960s “may prove to be one of the most convulsive and revolutionary decades in several centuries.” Scientific and technological progress lay at the core of this revolution, according to the report. With half of the world’s population living “under conditions of hunger, disease and ignorance,” and the Soviet Union pressing for global domination, the report stressed that the United States must use economic, diplomatic, and informational instruments to contain Soviet expansionism and steer this new scientific revolution.75
To many people within the US government, not just the members of the Sprague Committee, the world seemed on the threshold of a scientific revolution. National Academy of Sciences Executive Director Hugh Odishaw compared the Space Age to the Copernican revolution and suggested that it could change “man’s concepts of man.”76 Philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt considered the launch of Sputnik “second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom,” and expressed concern about the larger implications for the future of the human condition.77 USIA Science Advisor Goodwin had come to see science, and US science in particular, as the defining feature of twentieth-century society. Equating the early cold war era with the Copernican revolution and the scientific revolution, Goodwin argued that the best way to win the confidence of newly independent nations would be to demonstrate how the United States was the driving force behind the contemporary scientific revolution.78
The potential of spaceflight to fundamentally reshape society excited theorists and politicians alike. With widespread social and political upheavals already under way, especially the emergence of new states in the postcolonial world, spaceflight could be an instrument for shaping the ideology, aspirations, and allegiances of other nations, many theorized. The vision of a looming scientific revolution would undergird the framing of the space program’s significance and broader meaning for the coming decade. In the 1960s US government officials would continue to question and reevaluate the impact of space exploration on international public opinion, the role of science and technology in foreign relations, and the best way to achieve geopolitical influence.79
4
IF WE ARE TO WIN THE BATTLE,
1960–1961
What is prestige? Is it the shadow of power or the substance of power?
—PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1961
John F. Kennedy identified and leveraged the political power of image. It propelled his skyrocketing political trajectory and informed his approach to foreign relations. During the 1960 presidential campaign he presented himself as vigorous and charming, polished and self-assured, and mos
t importantly as the forward-looking antidote to the sluggish economy and the staid policies of the Eisenhower administration. From staging public appearances to courting journalists, he carefully mediated his public persona even before he officially announced his presidential bid.1 One journalist called Kennedy “the only politician a woman would read about while sitting under the hair dryer,” suggesting that he was seeking office more as a celebrity than a politician.2 But Kennedy did “not just look good in the media,” historian Alan Brinkley has argued. “He used the media, carefully, consciously, calculatedly, not only in his campaigns but throughout his presidency.”3
Kennedy’s astute sense of the role of image in politics had been reinforced in late September 1960. Just a few weeks ahead of the presidential election, Kennedy flew to Chicago to debate his opponent, Vice President Richard Nixon. This would not only be the first televised presidential debate in history; it was also the first time that two candidates from major opposing parties came together to face off in person. The afternoon ahead of the broadcast, Kennedy prepared at the Ambassador East Hotel. He flipped through flashcards and then tossed them to the floor once he had mastered a subject. The potential rewards were too high not to prepare, not to rewrite the opening remarks his aides composed, not to think through answers to potential questions.4 Nixon, on the other hand, did not break from his strenuous campaign schedule ahead of the debate. As Nixon’s media advisor said derisively, “I was told to brief him on the most important telecast of his life while riding over to the studio in an automobile.”5
Eisenhower had counseled his vice president not to debate the charismatic Democratic challenger. Nixon was already well-known throughout the country, respected and leading in the polls. A televised debate risked raising Kennedy’s prominence. But Nixon was confident. A practiced debater, he had famously held his ground with Soviet premier Khrushchev at the “kitchen debate” in Moscow in 1959, championing the fruits of a capitalist consumer society such as dishwashers and color television sets. To Kennedy’s “surprise and joy,” Nixon agreed to a series of televised debates.6
Beginning at 9:30 p.m. eastern time, CBS Studios in Chicago broadcast the debate. Between seventy and eighty million people tuned in, roughly two-thirds of the adult population of the country. As CBS president Frank Stanton bluntly remarked, “Kennedy was bronzed beautifully… Nixon looked like death.” Even more harshly, Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley exclaimed about Nixon, “My god! They’ve embalmed him before he even died.”7 Not only had Nixon declined the producer’s offer for a makeup artist touch-up; he was still recovering from an infected knee that had required hospitalization. Nixon stood gangly in his oversized gray suit, the edges fuzzed into the studio’s gray background. In stark contrast, an afternoon prep session on the roof of his hotel left Kennedy even more tan than usual. He stood in a dark tailored suit, confident and polished.8
“That son of a bitch just lost the election,” Nixon’s running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge, remarked after the debate.9 Although historians disagree about who “won” that night, public opinion polls showed that to television viewers at least, Kennedy was the victor. Radio listeners had a different opinion. The spectacle of the televised debate altered the nature of politics long after the Kennedy administration. Not only a definitive event in the presidential election, the debate buttressed Kennedy’s already well-developed sense that image matters in politics. The image of a poised candidate on the television screen gave the Kennedy campaign a much-needed boost that carried it through to November. Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy’s counselor and speechwriter, commented that along with the subsequent debates in the series, Kennedy’s performance that night was “a primary factor in Kennedy’s ultimate electoral victory.”10
Kennedy was “a man who perhaps better than any other president in our history, understood how foreign opinion worked, what molded it, what shaped it and how to shape it,” observed USIA Acting Director Donald Wilson.11 What he understood less, at least during his tenure in Congress, was the proper direction of America’s space program. As journalist Hugh Sidey put it, “Of all the major problems facing Kennedy when he came into office, he probably knew and understood least about space.”12 Before the spring of 1961 he treated spaceflight as a talking point, drawing on spaceflight to depict the current Republican administration as incompetent and ill-prepared to protect the interests of the United States.13
Kennedy had joined the U.S. House of Representatives in 1947 and then the Senate six years later. In the eight years he served as the junior senator from Massachusetts, he paid little attention to the US space program. Instead, his focus remained firmly fixed on defense and foreign policy. As a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, he concentrated on national security and stressed the importance of international public opinion, especially in the midst of the decolonization movement. In 1960, the year Kennedy won the presidential election, eighteen new nations were established. The political map of the globe was being redrawn. Within this new world order, Kennedy ascribed to the tenets of NSC-68: the Soviet Union was an expansionist force that the US had to contain wherever its influence spread. As he described it, “This is not a struggle for supremacy of arms alone—it is also a struggle for supremacy between two conflicting ideologies: Freedom under God versus ruthless, godless tyranny.”14 Within this geopolitical landscape, Kennedy maintained, the United States must be proactively engaged internationally, confronting Communist influence where it emerged. And in Kennedy’s view there was a direct correlation between supremacy and national prestige. Winning the hearts and minds of people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America soon guided his foreign policy agenda.15
It was not until space, and Soviet space feats in particular, became an undeniable currency for international prestige that Kennedy included the US space program within his larger grand strategy framework. On the Senate floor in mid-August 1958, Kennedy warned of national complacency, comparing the US situation to Britain’s loss of Calais four hundred years earlier. Worried that “the periphery of the free world [would] be nibbled away” and that the “balance of power” in turn would “gradually shift against us,” Kennedy drew on history to argue for a call to action. It was in this speech that he first used the phrase “missile gap.” The United States, he said, “could have afforded, and can afford now, the steps necessary to close the missile gap.” In Kennedy’s able hands the phrase became a useful political tool, even if it was not based on anything but Khrushchev’s exaggerated claims.16
Over the next two years, Kennedy would focus on American prestige in many of his speeches: the loss of it, how to regain it, how to win it. In impassioned addresses in small and large cities across the country, Kennedy cast space exploration and the “missile gap” as embodiments of what was problematic about the Eisenhower administration: passivity, lack of vitality and vision, staid and ineffectual leadership. Although he kept his speeches short—most were five minutes in length, with the longer rally speeches stretching only to twenty minutes—they were frank, they were factual, and they conveyed confidence. Underlying all his speeches, whether they were about unemployment or national security or urban housing, were the themes of “prestige,” “progress,” and national security. And Kennedy included “It is time to get this country moving again,” which he repeated so often that it became his slogan.17
“We failed to recognize the impact that being first in outer space would have,” Kennedy explained at a campaign stop in Canton, Ohio, in late September 1960. He warned the crowd gathered in the Municipal Auditorium that in the eyes of the world, the Soviet Union “was on the march… it had definite goals… it knew how to accomplish them… it was moving.” What made matters worse is that it looked like the US was “standing still.” Now the country needed to overcome “that psychological feeling in the world that the United States has reached maturity, that maybe our high noon has passed… and that now we are going into the long, slow afternoon.”18 He had a similar message for voters at a high school
auditorium in Pocatello, Idaho: “They [the international public] have seen the Soviet Union first in space… they [have] come to the conclusion that the Soviet tide is rising and ours is ebbing.” For those gathered at New York University in October 1960, Kennedy argued that “the key decision which [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.”19
Although he did not articulate a plan for the US space program, “space race” rhetoric and calls for renewing global stature helped him communicate a major campaign message: “a new leader for the 60s.” As he accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidency at the Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles on July 15, 1960, Kennedy galvanized his party with rhetoric of a “New Frontier” and described the cold war as “a race for mastery of the sky and the rain, the oceans and the tides, the far side of space and the inside of men’s minds.”20 Early the next morning, Kennedy asked Lyndon Johnson, the prime competitor in the Democratic primaries, to be his running mate, recognizing that the Senate majority leader would secure southern votes and balance the ticket. Johnson eventually agreed.21
Shortly after Kennedy accepted his party’s nomination, Central Intelligence Agency Director Allen Dulles briefed him on the current status of national security. There was little evidence—even highly classified evidence—that there was in fact a “missile gap.” After meeting with Dulles and other defense officials, Kennedy reported to Sorensen that “the briefings… were largely superficial anyway and contained little… not read in the New York Times.”22 A thorough assessment of the status of Soviet strategic attack capabilities would not be available until much later in the year. Roughly a month after Kennedy’s briefing, a US photoreconnaissance satellite made its first successful flight. Additional missions followed, by 1961 confirming that a missile gap did not exist. But Kennedy was a political opportunist and observed the advantages that the “missile gap” idea bestowed on his campaign.23 Nixon received the same briefing. Furious and frustrated that Kennedy chose to ignore the evidence, Nixon seethed. “I could expose that phony in ten minutes.… I can’t do that without destroying our source, and Kennedy, the bastard, knows I can’t.”24
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