After a few customary laudatory comments, Kennedy remarked that “because of the Soviet progress in the field of boosters… we expected that they would be first in space.”
A few minutes later, a more provocative question: “The Communists seem to be putting us on the defensive on a number of fronts—now, again, in space. Wars aside, do you think that there is a danger that their system is going to prove more durable than ours?”
It was a question that got to the heart of the problem the administration faced: if spaceflight had become a test for political systems, was Communism the better political system? Kennedy’s response likely did not inspire confidence: “Our job is to maintain our strength until our great qualities can be brought effectively to bear.”
“As I said in my State of the Union Message,” Kennedy portentously explained, “the news will be worse before it is better, and it will be some time before we catch up.”56
The next morning, at the Capitol, members of the House Space Committee questioned NASA Administrator James Webb and Deputy Administrator Hugh Dryden. Representative James Fulton (R., Pennsylvania) stated succinctly: “Tell me how much money you need and this committee will authorize all you need.” Representative Victor Anfuso (D., New York) expressed a similar urgency: “I am ready to call for a full-scale congressional investigation. I want to see our country mobilized to a wartime basis because we are at war.… I want to see some first coming out of NASA, such as landing on the moon.” When the committee met the next day, Representative Carleton King (R., New York) surmised that there were three “dramatic successes” in spaceflight. The first, launching a satellite. The second, launching a person. The third, sending “the first man to the Moon and back.” The Russians were leading two to zero. To King, the next step was obvious.57
At Kennedy’s request, Sorensen arranged a meeting at the White House two days after Gagarin’s flight, on April 14. As Bobby Kennedy once remarked, “If [an issue] was difficult, Ted Sorensen was brought in.”58 And this issue was undeniably difficult: how should the US respond to the Soviet space shot? NASA’s top brass—Webb and Dryden—along with Bureau of the Budget Director David Bell and Science Advisor Jerome Wiesner joined Sorensen late that afternoon for a preliminary discussion. After the initial meeting, journalist Hugh Sidey arrived and was invited into the room to observe the discussion, a decision that highlights the Kennedy administration’s media savvy. Sidey’s behind-the-scenes account would appear in Life magazine the following week. The sympathetic article reassured the country that the president was working around the clock on the issue. In later years, Sorensen recalled that it was this afternoon, at this meeting, that the idea of sending humans to the moon started coalescing.59
Around 7:00 p.m., as the sun sank low in the sky, they took seats at the dark table in the Georgian-style Cabinet room, their footsteps softened by the thick green carpet. The room was compact, only slightly larger than the table positioned at its center. A portrait of George Washington looked down from above the mantel. A series of bookshelves on one side and a row of windows overlooking the Rose Garden on the other flanked the room.60
Kennedy joined the group at this point. His black leather chair, like that of all previous presidents, sat inches taller than all the others in the room. But today he took a different seat. Pulling out a chair marked with a brass nameplate that read “Secretary of the Interior, Jan. 21, 1961,” Kennedy sat, leaned back, and then rested his foot on the table.
“What can we do now?” he asked the assembled group.
Each in turn responded as Kennedy balanced on the back two legs of the secretary of the interior’s chair and “ran his fingers agonizingly through his hair.”
“Now let’s look at this,” Kennedy told the men gathered around him. “Is there any place we can catch them? What can we do? Can we go around the moon before them? Can we put a man on the moon before them?”61
Dryden, a “mild-mannered scientist who lurked behind gold-rimmed glasses,” deduced that a crash program in the style of the Manhattan Project might cost $40 billion.62
“How long will it take?” Kennedy asked. After hearing that decisions were one to three months away, he responded softly, “There’s nothing more important.” He left the room, then gestured to Sorensen to join him in the Oval Office to continue the conversation in private.63 “The decision wasn’t made then so much as the stage was set for the full-scale inquiry which would be necessary before a final and precise decision,” Sorensen later explained.64
The next Friday, April 21, a confidential report on the world public reaction to the flight landed on McGeorge Bundy’s desk at the White House. Kennedy had recruited Bundy as his special assistant for national security affairs. Gifted and driven, and in his early forties like the president he served, Bundy was one of the new administration’s “best and brightest.” He centralized the decision-making structure of the White House and then controlled much of the information that flowed in and out of the Oval Office.65
The report included translated news clippings from each continent. And as Bundy later reflected, he had quickly learned “the importance of the newspapers in the process of government.”66 The Kennedy White House released twice the number of news releases than previous administrations. Press Secretary Pierre Salinger held two daily press conferences.67 One of the first steps of his day was keeping Kennedy “informed” on international press coverage.68
Gagarin’s flight stole front-page headlines in newspapers and dominated radio and television broadcasts on each continent. International press coverage rivaled—if not exceeded—that of Sputnik almost four years earlier. Kuala Lumpur’s China Press put it simply: “It is evident that the U.S. is losing the space race with Russia.” Radio Bern suggested that “it is in the uncommitted or neutralist countries where the effects of the Soviet experiment will be felt the most.” A commentator on Bogotá’s Radio Continental humorously jested, “As a lady told me, ‘the Russian man-in-space feat is the greatest thing in the world, but I cannot pay much attention to it, because I have something on the stove.’” Throughout Africa, coverage was “prominent, spectacular, and often sensational,” according to the confidential report.69
The report also delineated the difference between international reaction to Sputnik and Gagarin’s flight: “Intrinsic human drama and interest are great if surprise is less.” Sputnik shocked the world public, but Gagarin impressed them. The tenor of commentary around the world championed the flight as an “epochal landmark in mankind’s progress.” Even so, the military implications were clear. As the report cautioned, “The possibility that the world may in fact face a period of decisive Soviet dominance is the uneasy thought that seems currently close to emergence.”70
Life magazine’s coverage of the mission surely did not ease American anxiety over the impact of Gagarin’s flight on US prestige. The magazine ran interviews with people from around the world such as Hazumi Maeda, a Japanese student, who reflected that “I knew Russia would do it first. Socialistic science is superior to that of the western nations.” Elisabeth Gulewycz, a secretary in Germany, responded with “This makes one realize Soviet boasts of ultimate superiority may not be groundless after all.” And Nabil Rashad, a young man from Egypt, commented simply, “The Americans are licked.”71
The American press responded in suit. An article in the Washington Post called the flight a “psychological victory of the first magnitude” and pointed out that “what people believe is as important as the actual facts, and many persons will of course take this event as new evidence of Soviet superiority.” New York Times columnist Harry Schwartz stated that “the Soviet Union won another round last week in the psychological and propaganda war for men’s minds.” He continued: “The West has still not fully grasped how complete is the Soviet dedication to what Madison Avenue might call Communist institutional advertising aimed at gaining acceptance of the product—Communist ideology—by men and women everywhere.” As Hanson Baldwin, the New York Times
military correspondent, warned, “The neutral nations may come to believe the wave of the future is Russian; even our friends and allies could slough away.”72
By the time Bundy could inform the president of the USIA report results, Kennedy and his advisors were already grappling with another new challenge to the nation’s international standing: a news story even more damaging to US prestige displaced the heavy coverage of Gagarin’s flight from international headlines. On April 19 Cuban leader Fidel Castro announced that Cuba had defeated a US-supported invasion at the island’s Bay of Pigs that had begun two days earlier. “The worst disaster of that disaster-filled period,” Sorensen surmised. Roughly fourteen hundred Cuban exiles, trained by the CIA, were no match for Castro’s military forces.73
That same day, Kennedy told Johnson that he wanted an accelerated review of the status of the US space program. Sorensen drafted a memo for Johnson outlining the request. The most revealing line of the memo asks simply: “[find a] space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win.” The key for the Kennedy administration was winning. How much would it cost, he asked. Were NASA employees and contractors working around the clock? Was the country making the “maximum effort”?74 Just one page long, the memo initiated an extensive and immediate review of America’s standing in spaceflight. By 10:30 p.m. that night, Johnson was on the phone with Edward Welsh, his assistant, requesting that he set up a meeting with NASA Administrator James Webb at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday morning. And he wanted a meeting with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara later that afternoon. Weekends were no reason to rest.75
On Saturday morning, Webb and Dryden came equipped with answers to the April 20 memo’s questions. An orbiting space laboratory would not be sufficient, they explained. Lunar flights—either orbital or a landing mission—had the potential to best the Russians. An accelerated space effort, they reported to Johnson, would cost the nation roughly $33.7 billion by 1970.76
Unlike NASA officials who detailed the benefits of a crewed lunar landing alongside an analysis of other potential programs, McNamara took the opportunity to analyze the political stakes in his Saturday afternoon meeting with LBJ: “All large scale space programs require the mobilization of resources on a national scale. Dramatic achievements in space, therefore, symbolize the technological power and organizing capacity of a nation.” Because of this, “Major achievements in space contribute to national prestige” and “constitute a major element in the international competition between the Soviet system and our own.”77
Both meetings that Saturday reaffirmed Johnson’s view that “communist domination of space could lead to control over men’s minds.” He shared this message at the beginning of a meeting that he held on April 24, laying out the stakes for the military representatives and leaders of industry and media gathered to share their reactions to Kennedy’s April 20 memo. Johnson highlighted the propaganda implications of spaceflight for the future of US leadership and asked for advice from the audience. Lieutenant General Bernard Schriever, head of the Air Force Systems Command and “Father of the Air Force missiles and space programs,” advocated for a moon landing for prestige purposes. Vice Admiral John T. Hayward agreed. As the Navy representative at the meeting and deputy chief of naval operations for R&D, he also encouraged practical applications of space technology, such as navigational and weather satellites. Wernher von Braun, rocket pioneer and director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, followed up on April 29 with a detailed letter that addressed Kennedy’s questions from a technical perspective. The United States could not compete with a space station, but there was a “sporting chance” of achieving the first soft landing of a radio transmitter station on the moon or a crewed mission around the moon. Better yet, “We have an excellent chance of beating the Soviets to the first landing of a crew on the moon (including return capability, of course).” Achieving a moon landing would require both the Soviet Union and United States to develop massive new rockets, leveling the playing field. It would also require “some measures which thus far have been considered acceptable only in times of a national emergency,” an ominous closing, foreshadowing the wartime-like national mobilization that would soon follow his recommendation.78
A few days later, political advisor Walter Rostow warned Kennedy that “we must now, I believe, face the fact that we are in the midst of one of the great crises of the postwar years. It is a worldwide crisis… at a period of up-swing in Soviet military and space capabilities; and it is colored by an image of American strength and determination fading relative to the Communist thrust.”79 At the same time, Sorensen observed an evolution in Kennedy’s thinking after the invasion. What the Bay of Pigs taught Kennedy was that “military ventures were not necessarily going to succeed.” Instead, world problems required another approach.80
It was the one-two punch of Gagarin’s flight boosting Soviet prestige followed in quick succession by the loss of US prestige because of the Bay of Pigs invasion that laid the groundwork for Project Apollo. As Sorensen noted, “It pointed up the fact that prestige was a real, and not simply a public relations, factor in world affairs.”81
That same day, April 28, Johnson provided an interim response to Kennedy’s April 20 request. His concise two-page review states frankly: “Other nations, regardless of their appreciation of our idealistic values, will tend to align themselves with the country which they believe will be the world-leader.” And “dramatic accomplishments in space are being increasingly identified as a major indicator of world leadership.” This simple formula made the stakes evident. Space spectaculars were not simply a sparring match taking place above the Earth’s atmosphere. They signaled leadership at a moment when the political landscape of the Earth was shifting, new countries were being born, and power was won through alignment. Warning the president that “if we do not make a strong effort now, the time will soon be reached when the margin of control over space and over men’s minds through space accomplishments will have swung so far on the Russian side that we will not be able to catch up, let alone assume leadership.” Sending Americans to the moon would not only be “an achievement with great propaganda value, but it is essential as an objective.” The report suggested that a lunar landing was feasible by 1966 or 1967, given “a strong effort.” Although two more weeks of discussions, recommendations, and reviews followed, the benefits of setting a moon landing as the national goal were clear.82
A week later, Johnson laid the groundwork for Senate support. If Kennedy’s announcement of a bold new space initiative was going to succeed, Congress would have to fund it. He assembled the chairman of the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences Robert Kerr (D., Oklahoma) and the ranking minority committee member Styles Bridges (R., New Hampshire) and their staff to meet with Webb, Dryden, and representatives from the Atomic Energy Commission, the State Department, and the Bureau of the Budget on May 3. Johnson had controlled the Senate with Kerr and Bridges as Senate majority leader during the Eisenhower administration. If he could win Kerr’s and Bridges’s support, the rest of the Senate would follow suit, he reasoned. Johnson set the scene: “We haven’t gone far enough or fast enough. We need a new look, and to know how much it will cost.” Johnson pushed on Webb: “You must not wait a month or Congress will have gone home.” Unsatisfied with Webb’s hesitant response, Johnson added, “We’ll wait a month if necessary for people to get guts enough to make solid recommendations… our purpose today is to have these important Senators get the benefit of consultation and for us to have the benefit of consulting them.”
Johnson also called members of the House of Representatives to ensure their backing of an accelerated space program. James Fulton (R., Pennsylvania), the ranking minority member of the Science and Astronautics Committee, discussed the matter with House Republicans and assured the vice president near-unanimous support. Owen Brooks (D., Louisiana), chairman of the House Science and Astronautics Committee, gave a similar response. He wrote Johnson that “the United States must d
o whatever is necessary to gain unequivocal leadership in Space Exploration.” In his mind, “We cannot concede the Moon to the Soviets, since it is conceivable that the nation that controls the Moon may well control the Earth.” Meanwhile, Kennedy was gauging the political feasibility of a major spaceflight program by consulting members of Congress. Once political support was in place, the next steps could be taken.83
The final decision hung in the balance, waiting for the results of America’s first attempt at a human space shot. Project Mercury flew a chimpanzee named Ham on a test flight in January 31, followed by additional crewless test missions that spring. When the time came to launch an astronaut on a suborbital trajectory, some members of Congress as well as the president’s advisors expressed concern about publicizing such a risky flight. But Kennedy recognized the larger political significance of carrying out the flight in full public view. NASA orchestrated the access of hundreds of domestic and foreign correspondents to the launch, ensuring that the mission would receive global news coverage.84
On May 5, 1961, after enduring several hours of weather and mechanical delays, Alan Shepard Jr. became the first American space traveler. At 9:34 a.m. EST a Redstone rocket lifted his Freedom 7 spacecraft off the launchpad and into a suborbital trajectory. Kennedy’s secretary retrieved him from an NSC meeting to watch the coverage. He crowded around a small television in his secretary’s office along with Johnson, Sorensen, Jackie Kennedy, and several others. If the flight failed, the next steps of America’s space program would have been put into question. But the brief flight—roughly fifteen minutes long—proved that the Mercury spacecraft was pilotable, that short exposure to weightlessness had negligible effect on the human body, and that the tracking system NASA had put in place around the world was viable. It signaled that the country might be ready for a bigger, bolder goal. Kennedy and the others around the small television “heaved a collective sigh of relief, and cheered.”85
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