President John F. Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, and others watching Alan Shepard’s flight, May 5, 1961. (NATIONAL ARCHIVES)
“Shepard’s flight dramatically illustrated the difference between the American and Soviet systems,” according to Thomas Sorensen, deputy director of the USIA and Ted Sorensen’s brother. “The lesson was not lost on the world.”86 To amplify this message, the USIA distributed a thick packet of material filled with scientific background pieces and photographs to the international press in advance of the flight. The USIA tracked the use of the material in eighty-three countries. BBC London picked up NBC coverage of the flight, opting to broadcast, even in British classrooms, the American network’s coverage instead of its own.87 Nearly fifty countries broadcast the USIA film Shadows of Infinity on television during the day of the launch. Models of Freedom 7 went on display in Europe and Asia. Foreign newspapers published articles under Shepard’s byline that were provided by the USIA. Vice President Lyndon Johnson shared a film about the flight on his diplomatic tour of South Asia. At the same time, Secretary of State Dean Rusk screened the film in Oslo at a NATO conference.88
On May 8, the Monday following the flight, Shepard traveled to Washington for a ceremony at the White House. In the Rose Garden, Kennedy stressed “the fact that this flight was made out in the open with all the possibilities of failure,” arguing that “this open society of ours which risked much, gained much.” As Webb handed Kennedy the case holding a Distinguished Service medal for presentation to Shepard, it fell to the terrace. In quick response, Kennedy picked up the medal, adding “and this decoration—which has gone from the ground up—here!”89
After a week of exhaustive work at NASA and DoD, a set of recommendations was ready for Johnson’s review the day after Shepard’s ceremony. Without crossing out one section or editing one point, Johnson sent the document to Kennedy. In a sharp about-face of Eisenhower-era space policy and even previous Kennedy-era assessments such as the Wiesner Report, Webb and McNamara recommended that “this nation needs to make a positive decision to pursue space projects aimed at enhancing national prestige.” They fully recognized that major space feats have marginal “scientific, commercial or military value” and are “economically unjustified,” and they noted that the prestige resulting from space successes was “part of the battle along the fluid front of the Cold War.” The central point came through clearly: space successes “lend national prestige.” Ultimately, Webb and McNamara recommended that the United States send humans to the moon for this reason. In a May 10 meeting at the White House, Kennedy agreed.90
President John F. Kennedy congratulates astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr., the first American in space, and presents him with the NASA Distinguished Service Award, May 1961. (NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION)
Six weeks after Gagarin became the first human space traveler, Kennedy stood at the Speaker’s rostrum in the House of Representatives chamber in the Capitol Building’s south wing before a joint session of Congress. Members of Congress sat before him in a semicircle on tiered platforms while television audiences watched from their homes. Uncharacteristically, Kennedy deviated from his prepared text. The address itself was also uncharacteristic. Billed as the second “State of the Union,” Kennedy spoke on the nation’s urgent needs, including economic and social progress at home and abroad, increasing funding for overseas information programs, and the importance of military buildup and disarmament negotiations. Project Apollo would be the last “urgent need” on this list.
“If we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take,” the president explained. Kennedy then went on to propose that the United States should commit itself to sending a man to the moon and returning him safely back to Earth “before this decade is out.”91 This goal, he emphasized, could persuade people in other countries to choose American “freedom” over Soviet “tyranny.” He continued: “Now it is time to take longer strides—time for a great new American enterprise—time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth.” He added the last phrase of this sentence to the printed text with his pen.92 Before he closed, he urged everyone to carefully consider the commitment to lunar exploration.93
On the drive back to the White House, Kennedy expressed doubts to Sorensen. He interpreted Congress’s applause as “less than enthusiastic.”94 Kennedy may have been right to suggest that this commitment should not be entered lightly. Project Apollo would become the largest open-ended peacetime commitment in the country’s history. It outstripped the Panama Canal, Eisenhower’s interstate highway system, and even the Manhattan Project.95 But there was no need for apprehension. Lyndon Johnson had made sure that the president’s proposal, which he had orchestrated over the past six weeks, would be accepted by Congress. Johnson, ever the “master of the Senate,” ensured bipartisan support of Project Apollo by meeting with members of Congress. Congress endorsed Kennedy’s call for Project Apollo and the more than half-billion-dollar supplemental budget for NASA in the near term.96 “The ‘moon shot’ was the making of America’s superiority in space, and all the scientific, diplomatic, and national security benefits that followed,” Sorensen later concluded.97
5
JOHN GLENN AND
FRIENDSHIP 7’S “FOURTH ORBIT,”
1961–1963
Friendship Seven, Munchea Com Tech. We read you.
—JERRY O’CONNOR, AUSTRALIAN COMMUNICATIONS TECHNICIAN
The lights [in western Australia] show up very well, and thank everybody for turning them on, will you?
—JOHN GLENN JR., MERCURY ASTRONAUT, FRIENDSHIP 7 MISSION, 1962
Two days after Kennedy proposed sending Americans to the moon, the USIA sent Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 spacecraft to the International Air Show in Paris. USIA Director Murrow explained that “the prestige race against the Soviets is a contest with no small importance. Over a million people at the world’s largest international exposition on aviation and space will see this symbol of the latest American space success.”1 He was quick to point out that Freedom 7 would be on display at the same site where Charles Lindbergh completed the first solo airplane flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. An impressive crowd of 600,000 visitors saw the small spacecraft in Paris. From France, Freedom 7 was sent to Rome, where it became the major draw for more than a million people at the International Science Fair. The USIA put a positive spin on the story of human spaceflight. “Two young men soared into space early this year,” a USIA report to Congress read. “One was a Russian, one an American. The Russian was the first one up, but the American’s achievement was more widely heard and even more widely believed.” This distinction between the US and Soviet programs is idiomatic of the USIA under Murrow’s leadership. What set the United States apart from the Soviet Union, the agency stressed again and again, was “openness.”2
Not long after Freedom 7 debuted at the air show, Kennedy flew to Paris himself to meet with French president Charles de Gaulle on May 31. “The public ceremonies were much more helpful to Kennedy than the private discussions,” and the meetings were “a case study in symbol over substance,” according to biographer Robert Dallek.3 Kennedy’s objective for the visit was to restore his credibility at home and abroad after the Bay of Pigs and to put Franco-American unity on display ahead of his upcoming discussions with Khrushchev in Vienna. Appearing in photos next to de Gaulle, Kennedy advanced his image as a world statesman. Both Kennedy and Khrushchev arrived in Vienna aware that the future of Berlin—a city that had been divided between East and West since the end of World War II—would be the primary focus of the summit, but they also discussed spaceflight. Informally during a meal, K
ennedy suggested that the US and the USSR join together in sending humans to the moon. At first Khrushchev responded with “No” and then half-jokingly yielded: “All right, why not?”4 Khrushchev then offered First Lady Jackie Kennedy a puppy from one of the dogs that flew in space. Although nothing came of Kennedy’s invitation to cooperate on Apollo, and little came from the summit in general, a puppy named Pushinka with outer-space pedigree arrived at the White House that summer, a gift from the Soviet premier.5
In his yearly report to Congress, Kennedy highlighted that touching Shepard’s spacecraft became a fetish for visitors at the exhibits and that the United States was lauded for the “openness” of its human space program. Overseas audiences, he continued, achieved “a high degree of self-identification with one of the greatest adventures of our time.”6 The spacecraft, small, black, and bell-shaped, evidenced the scars of atmospheric reentry on its black corrugated skin. When seen up close and in person, Freedom 7 rendered spaceflight more tangible for these audiences.7 Additional requests for the Freedom 7 capsule exhibit came from cities throughout the world. USIS posts in Bonn, Turin, Karachi, Athens, London, and Kabul asked the agency to display the capsule in their cities. Foreign audiences were enthusiastic about the spacecraft display, but criticism within the United States swelled. The domestic public and members of Congress questioned NASA for exhibiting the capsule abroad before it was exhibited within the United States. This tension between prioritizing the domestic and foreign audiences was something that government officials would face for years to come.8
Even after the Freedom 7 flight and exhibits, a USIA poll conducted in August 1961 noted that Western European nations were confident in the United States’ world leadership but believed in the superiority of the Soviet Union’s military and space program. The success of Shepard’s mission, and the approach to openness in NASA and USIA programming, boosted the status of American space efforts, but in 1961 the United States was still seen as trailing behind a string of Soviet space firsts.9
The image of American space capability would change considerably on February 20, 1962. That morning, long before dawn, astronaut John Glenn prepared for the first American orbital spaceflight. As he sat inside his compact Friendship 7 spacecraft, atop an Atlas rocket, the launch time was pushed back again and again. Glenn’s mission had already been postponed multiple times. “The anticipation became a story in itself,” he said. With the added delays, news coverage dramatized the mission, contributing “to a kind of soap opera… will he be launched, or won’t he?” Likely for propaganda purposes, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin publicly expressed worry for the “serious psychological and moral pressure” the delays were putting on Glenn. But at 9:47 a.m. on February 20, the countdown ended and the rocket launched, at first arcing over Bermuda and then placing Friendship 7 on an orbital trajectory. Glenn circled the Earth three times. As he passed over the global network of tracking stations, telemetry sent signals to the ground, including biometric data and the condition of the spacecraft. He conducted experiments in concert with the stations, testing physical strength and vision in space. Just under five hours after liftoff, Friendship 7 splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean. The flight had faded the stenciled American flag and the words “United States” and “Friendship 7” that were painted on the spacecraft before launch, signs of the hazards of spaceflight.10
President John F. Kennedy and astronaut Lieutenant Colonel John Glenn Jr. look inside space capsule Friendship 7, February 1962. (NATIONAL ARCHIVES)
Time magazine heralded the Friendship 7 mission for putting the United States “back in the space race with a vengeance” and giving “the morale of the US and the entire free world a huge and badly needed boost.” Even the Communists’ “peace dove” artist, Pablo Picasso, the article proclaimed, was moved to say, “I am as proud of [Glenn] as if he were my own brother.”11 The article stressed the importance of the openness of the mission and how everyone from “Queen Elizabeth to Bedouins in the Middle East” could follow the progress of the flight. Voice of America broadcast the flight in Hindi, Russian, Chinese, and a score of other languages. Public diplomats believed that the radio programming of the flight captured the largest audience in the history of radio broadcasting.12
Domestically and abroad, John Glenn’s orbital flight created a public relations boon for government elites hoping to promote the strength of the US space program. Sorensen called it “a turning point in many ways.”13 The USIA sent coverage of the Friendship 7 flight to TV stations in seventy-four countries; in Italy alone, thirteen million people viewed the telecast.14 The Los Angeles Times encapsulated the far-reaching enthusiasm for the flight when it noted that convicts at San Quentin’s death row and Pope John XXIII followed the flight while the chambers of the House and the Senate emptied so that members could watch the television coverage. “In Grand Rapids, Mich.,” it noted, “a judge and jury interrupted a trial to watch the latest developments from Cape Canaveral. They watched on a stolen television set that had been brought to court as evidence in a case.”15
In his weekly report to President Kennedy, Murrow noted that the press, from Africa to Asia, heralded the openness of the space program. Emphasizing the central role of the USIA in this prestige boost, Murrow explained that the heavy coverage was in large part a result of the extensive distribution of USIA material—including a fifteen-minute documentary, color photo exhibits, press packets, and motion picture footage for newsreels—before the flight.16 Murrow, seeking to capitalize on the overwhelming response, devised his plan for an elaborate global tour of Glenn’s spacecraft. He wrote to President Kennedy suggesting that “we can make a terrific impact abroad by exhibiting Colonel Glenn’s ‘Friendship 7’ space capsule in key countries.”17 Murrow saw the exhibition of the capsule as a valuable strategic “weapon” in the psychological battlefield of the cold war.18
In the year following his flight, the Soviet Union sent Yuri Gagarin on a diplomatic tour of more than twenty countries. The political importance of each stop ensured back-to-back appearances, receptions, and ceremonies. “Too much politics, and nothing for ourselves; we did not even see an elephant,” Gagarin remarked in India. But a million people came out to see him in Calcutta alone, a windfall for the Soviet government. After years of propaganda trips, Gagarin said he would sometimes “close my eyes and see endless queues of people with blazing eyes, shouting greetings in foreign languages.” What the Soviet Union did not send around the world, however, was spacecraft hardware. Even information about the rocket designers was kept secret.19
At first, Murrow hoped to display the Friendship 7 in a number of international cities, including Moscow, suggesting that “if the Soviets agree, the world will note their failure to show their capsules even to their own people, whereas we are willing to show ours even to the Russians.” He believed that international audiences would see the capsule as an American effort to share scientific and engineering information, not as political propaganda. By displaying technological hardware, as opposed to sending Glenn on a tour “like a trained seal,” the US space program would distinguish itself from Soviet space publicity, according to Murrow.20
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the USIA displayed technological hardware so that the “facts spoke for themselves.” USIA officials hoped that technology, unlike cosmonauts, would not be interpreted as a form of propaganda and could therefore more effectively carry the agency’s political message.21 This tension—namely, serving political objectives with “apolitical” objects—speaks to the relationship among science, technology, and foreign relations in the early cold war. With roots in nineteenth-century Enlightenment thought, this complicated relationship stems from a dual identity of science and technology as both tied to objective truth and as instruments of progress.22 In the 1950s and 1960s this view of science and technology was advanced in academic circles and played out in development projects around the world, shaped US foreign policy, and influenced the relationship between the United States and the worl
d. During the Kennedy administration in particular, in large part through the encouragement of Walter Rostow, a key modernization theorist as well as Kennedy’s deputy special assistant for international affairs, the government invested in an elaborate array of modernization programs. The planning, execution, and later evaluation of the Friendship 7 international exhibition are a part of this larger story of the role and impact of modernization theory on the use of science and technology in US foreign relations.23
A USIA space exhibit in West Pakistan, 1962. (NATIONAL ARCHIVES)
Colloquially dubbed “The Fourth Orbit,” a humorous acknowledgment that the international exhibition would be the fourth time the capsule circled the Earth, the tour of Glenn’s spacecraft was the first large-scale space diplomacy program hosted by the USIA. During its three-month world tour Friendship 7 visited more than twenty cities and was seen by roughly four million people, while another twenty million people watched television programs broadcast from the exhibition sites. A US Air Force cargo plane emblazoned with the words “Around the World with Friendship 7” and a map of the continents that the capsule visited that summer carried the small craft from country to country. John Williams, a member of NASA’s Cape Canaveral staff and the head of the Friendship 7 exhibit, joined the tour to answer questions from curious audiences around the world.24 Polls, exhibit exit interviews, newspaper clippings, photographs, films, and reports reveal the myriad ways in which politics and culture, through spaceflight and diplomacy, intersected on Friendship 7’s “fourth orbit.”25
The USIA and the State Department selected the exhibit locations based on a variety of criteria. The capsule visited countries that were of foreign relations significance to the United States, cities that were near American tracking station facilities, and countries where the little capsule could make the greatest impact. But the selection process was not simply one-sided. Internal correspondence at the Science Museum London reveals some of the foreign interests and motivations for exhibiting Friendship 7. At the Science Museum, a staff member observed that “the exhibition should arouse great interest and may be a means of acquiring further material for permanent exhibit.”26 Building a relationship with NASA through the Friendship 7 exhibit, museum staff hoped, would give the museum greater leverage to acquire future space artifacts, which were sure to draw large crowds in the coming years. H. R. Calbert, keeper in the Department of Astronomy at the Science Museum, wrote to NASA and the USIA requesting the exhibition of the capsule at the museum. The Science Museum staff worked with the USIA to plan an elaborate exhibit that included film screenings, posters, a soundtrack from Cape Canaveral of the liftoff, and a projector with color transparencies. Museum staff from around the United Kingdom wrote to Science Museum London, requesting that the capsule visit their museums as well.27 The relationship between US information programs and the communities they aimed to influence was dynamic and often symbiotic. The correspondence between the USIA and Science Museum London highlights the intricacies of the interplay of US and foreign interests in the support and execution of spaceflight exhibits.28
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