Operation Moonglow

by Teasel Muir-Harmony

  20. Murrow to Kennedy, February 27, 1962, Box 91, Folder “USIA, 1/62–6/62.”

  21. “Free World Media Treatment of First U.S. Orbital Flight,” March 5, 1962, Box 7, Folder Office of Research, “R” Reports, 1960–32, “R-20–62,” Research Notes (hereafter Entry 1029) RG 306, NARA; Osgood, Total Cold War, 176–180.

  22. Ronald E. Doel and Zuoyue Wang, “Science and Technology in American Foreign Policy,” in Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, 2nd ed., ed. Alexander DeConde, Richard Dean Burns, and Fredrik Logevall (New York: Scribner, 2001), 253.

  23. For discussions on modernization theory and cold war foreign policy, see Gabrielle Hecht and Paul Edwards, “The Technopolitics of Cold War: Toward a Transregional Perspective,” in Essays on Twentieth-Century History, ed. Michael Adas (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010); David Engerman, Nils Gilman, Mark Haefele, and Michael Latham, eds., Staging Growth (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). For a thorough analysis of the history of science diplomacy in the cold war, see Wolfe, Freedom’s Laboratory.

  24. USIA Microfilm Microcopy No. NK-10A, Roll No. 14, USIA Press Releases: Africa, JFKL; USIA Microfilm Microcopy No. NK-10A, Roll No. 1, USIA Press Releases, Far East, JFKL.

  25. This chapter follows the voyage of the capsule to exhibit sites and examines the precedents that this major tour set for future approaches to space diplomacy throughout the 1960s. As historian Stuart McCook has proposed, “Following something, as it moves around the world, in and out of particular places, and doing a contextually rich analysis of what happens as it moves” is a methodologically rich tool for doing global histories of science. Following the “fourth orbit” tour provides the opportunity to integrate the history of official planning and decision making with the experiences of those at whom public diplomacy was aimed. McCook, “Introduction: Global Currents in the National Histories of Science: The ‘Global Turn’ and the History of Science in Latin America,” Isis 104, no. 4 (2013): 776; USIA Acting Director Donald Wilson to NASA Administrator James Webb, October 9, 1962, Box 37, Folder “Records Concerning Exhibits in Foreign Countries, 1955–67,” Records Concerning Exhibits in Foreign Countries, 1955–1967, RG 306, NARA.

  26. Handwritten internal correspondence, April 24, 1962, Nominal File 655, “Special Exhibition: Col. John Glenn’s Capsule,” Science Museum London, London, United Kingdom (hereafter SML).

  27. Plans for the arrangement of the Friendship 7 exhibit, Nominal File 655, “Special Exhibition: Col. John Glenn’s Capsule,” SML; USIA Press Release, May 9, 1962, Nominal File 655, “Special Exhibition: Col. John Glenn’s Capsule,” SML. See correspondence in Nominal File 655, “Special Exhibition: Col. John Glenn’s Capsule,” SML.

  28. Scholars of the history of public diplomacy often focus on US government elites and decision makers while minimizing the role of foreign participants in these programs. See Laura Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Cull, The Cold War; Wilson Dizard Jr., Inventing Public Diplomacy (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004); Osgood, Total Cold War.

  29. USIS London to USIA, May 1, 1962, Box 257, Folder “Outer Space, 14.B.5, Outer Space Exhibits, Jan–May, 1962, Part 2 of 2,” Office of the Special Assistant to the Secretary of State for Atomic Energy and Outer Space, 1960–62, RG 59, NARA; USIS London to USIA, May 15, 1962, Box 257, Folder “Outer Space, 14.B.5, Outer Space Exhibits, Jan–May, 1962, Part 2 of 2,” Entry A1 3008-A, RG 59, NARA.

  30. USIS Paris to USIA, May 21, 1962, Box 257, Folder “Outer Space, 14.B.5, Outer Space Exhibits, Jan–May, 1962, Part 2 of 2,” Entry A1 3008-A, RG 59, NARA; USIS Paris to USIA, May 20, 1962, Box 257, Folder “Outer Space, 14.B.5, Outer Space Exhibits, Jan–May, 1962, Part 2 of 2,” Entry A1 3008-A, RG 59, NARA.

  31. Edward Murrow to Madrid USITO, May 17, 1962, Box 257, Folder “Outer Space, 14.B.5, Outer Space Exhibits, Jan–May, 1962, Part 2 of 2,” Entry A1 3008-A, RG 59, NARA.

  32. Cathleen Lewis, “The Birth of the Soviet Space Museums: Creating the Earthbound Experience of Space Flight During the Golden Years of the Soviet Space Programme, 1957–68,” in Showcasing Space, ed. Martin Collins (London: Science Museum, 2005), 142–158.

  33. See Swenson, Grimwood, and Alexander, This New Ocean, 436; Wilson to Webb, October 9, 1962, Box 37, Entry A1 1039, RG 306, NARA.

  34. Memorandum from the Apollo 11 Operations Office to Mr. Loomis, August 6, 1969, Box 15, Entry P 243, RG 306, NARA.

  35. USIS Paris to USIA, May 20, 1962; Philip Hopkins, Director, Smithsonian National Air Museum, to Shelby Thompson, Director, Office of Technical Information and Education at NASA, April 10, 1962, Box 38, Folder “General Correspondence Jan.–June, 1962,” Entry A1 1039, RG 306, NARA; Wilson to Webb, October 9, 1962.

  36. The USIA had been sending jazz musicians around the world to mollify negative impressions of American civil rights progress while US political elites pushed for domestic civil rights reforms in part to win over the hearts and minds of the international public. See Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights; Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Brenda Gayle Plummer, ed., Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1988 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Westad, The Global Cold War. On USIA space-related programming and race, see Cull, The Cold War, 212.

  37. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 159.

  38. Cull, The Cold War, 212.

  39. USIA Microfilm Microcopy No. NK-10A, Roll No. 14.

  40. Edward R. Murrow, Director of the USIA, to USITO Lagos, May 25, 1962, Box 257, Folder “Outer Space, 14.B.5, Outer Space Exhibits, Jan–May, 1962, Part 2 of 2,” Entry A1 3008-A, RG 59, NARA.

  41. USIA Microfilm Microcopy No. NK-10A, Roll No. 14.

  42. “Glenn’s Capsule Convinces Cairo,” Washington Post, June 11, 1962, A24.

  43. Egypt had been a battleground of Soviet and American aid since the mid-1950s. Because it was a neutral country, Egyptian leaders had played the United States against the Soviet Union for years in order to reap the greatest amount of development support without committing to political alliance. But the United States’ support of Israel was widely unpopular in Egypt, which complicated the subject of American foreign aid for many people in the country. Quotation from Al-Akhbar. Edward R. Murrow, Director of the USIA, to President John F. Kennedy, February 27, 1962, Box 91, Folder “USIA, 1/62–6/62,” Papers of President Kennedy, National Security Files, Departments and Agencies, JFKL; Robert J. McMahon, “The Illusion of Vulnerability: American Reassessments of the Soviet Threat, 1955–1956,” International History Review 18, no. 3 (1996): 591–619.

  44. USIS Tokyo to USIA Washington, June 18, 1962, Box 257, Folder “Outer Space, 14.B.5, Outer Space Exhibits, June–December, 1962, Part 1 of 2,” Entry A1 3008-A, RG 59, NARA.

  45. “‘Friendship 7’ Capsule,” Times of India, June 27, 1962, 9.

  46. USIS Bombay to USIA Washington, July 12, 1962, Box 257, Folder “Outer Space, 14.B.5, Outer Space Exhibits, June–December, 1962, Part 1 of 2,” Entry A1 3008-A, RG 59, NARA.

  47. Microcopy No. NK-10A, Roll No. 1.

  48. Microcopy No. NK-10A, Roll No. 1; Paul Dench and Alison Gregg, Carnarvon and Apollo: One Giant Leap for a Small Australian Town (Kenthurst: Rosenberg, 2010), 18–24; Hamish Lindsay, Tracking Apollo to the Moon (Singapore: Springer-Verlag, 2001), 72–75.

  49. USIS Tokyo to USIA Washington, June 4, 1962, Box 18, Entry A1 1039, RG 309, NARA.

  50. Microcopy No. NK-10A, Roll No. 1; USIS T
okyo to USIA Washington, June 18, 1962; USIS Tokyo to USIA Washington, September 4, 1962, Box 258, Folder “Outer Space, 14.B.5, Outer Space Exhibits, June–December, 1962, Part 2 of 2,” Entry A1 3008-A, RG 59, NARA; USIS Tokyo to USIA Washington, June 4, 1962.

  51. Microcopy No. NK-10A, Roll No. 1.

  52. “30,000 Koreans View ‘Friendship 7’ Exhibit,” July 7, 1962, Microcopy No. NK-10A, Roll No 1.

  53. “Seoul Makes Plans for ‘Friendship 7’ Exhibit,” July 9, 1962, Microcopy No. NK-10A, Roll No. 1.

  54. Wilson to Webb, October 9, 1962.

  55. Dizard, Inventing Public Diplomacy, 5.

  56. Although the agency was criticized for not devising a satisfactory way to measure its influence, no sufficient measures had been taken within the first twenty years of its operation to change this fact. See Report to the Congress, “Telling America’s Story to the World—Problems and Issues,” United States Information Agency by the comptroller general for the United States, March 25, 1974.

  57. Report to the Congress from the President of the United States, United States Aeronautics and Space Activities, 1962.

  58. Quoted in Osgood, Total Cold War, 176.

  59. Based on the extraordinary turnout at all the exhibit sites, the extensive coverage in the press, and the enthusiastic comments that appeared in the USIA reports and in local press, it is clear that the display of Friendship 7 was a significant event. Although the USIA reports are undeniably positive, they should be read with a critical eye. Even though these reports do not discuss any opposition to the exhibition of Friendship 7, it does not mean that none existed. Although these observations may not provide us with an unbiased picture of the reception of these exhibits, it is clear that they became popular events where people came together and were exposed to American scientific and technological information. See Osgood, Total Cold War, 170–180.

  60. John Glenn Jr. to McGeorge Bundy, November 4, 1963, Box 308, Folder “Space Activities, General 10/63–11/63,” Papers of President Kennedy, National Security Files, Subject Files, JFKL.

  61. Harold McConeghey to Mr. Battey, October 17, 1962, Box 12, Folder “USIA: 1962—Proposals & Suggestions from all elements on Science prog,” Entry P 243, RG 306, NARA.

  62. The Friendship 7 spacecraft was not a traditional instrument of power: its power lay in a particular interplay between US government officials and world publics, between producers and consumers of American public diplomacy. Gabrielle Hecht and Michael Thad Allen, eds., Technologies of Power: Essays in Honor of Thomas Parke Hughes and Agatha Chipley Hughes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 10–11.

  63. Department of State memo, August 17, 1965, Box 28, Folder “SP 10 Astronaut Travel,” Entry P 243, RG 306, NARA.

  64. Simon Bourgin report on the astronaut overseas tour, September 1, 1965, Box 28, Folder “SP 10 Astronaut Travel,” Entry P 243, RG 306, NARA.

  65. Department of State memo, August 17, 1965; Bourgin report on the astronaut overseas tour; Burnett Anderson to Donald Wilson, December 4, 1963, Folder “SP 10 Astronaut Travel,” Entry P 243, RG 306, NARA.

  CHAPTER 6: “THE NEW EXPLORERS,” 1963–1967

  1. “Elton Stepherson, Jr.,” Washington Post, December 5, 1987, B7.

  2. For a history of the State Department’s jazz tour program, see Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World.

  3. Arthur Bardos to USIA Washington, July 7, 1964, Box 29, Entry P 243, RG 306, NARA.

  4. Art Simmons, “Paris Scratchpad,” Jet, September 10, 1970, 33; Jacob Gillespie, oral history interview by Charles Stuart Kennedy on February 4, 2010, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project.

  5. Michael Krenn, Black Diplomacy: African Americans and the State Department, 1945–69 (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2015), 140.

  6. Investigating space exploration and foreign relations activities in Africa, Asia, and South America offers a lens into some of the ramifications of the reorientation of the cold war front and a corrective of claims that science played a minimal role in the Johnson administration’s foreign policy. See Ronald E. Doel and Kristine C. Harper, “Prometheus Unleashed: Science as a Diplomatic Weapon in the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration,” Osiris 21, no. 1 (2006): 66. Studies that treat the political history of Project Apollo and situate it within the context of other 1960s government programs established to achieve “good ends” focus primarily on the domestic implications of the broadening of US government power. Walter McDougall’s history of space exploration is one notable example. See McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth. See also Roger D. Launius, “Interpreting the Moon Landings: Project Apollo and the Historians,” History and Technology 22, no. 3 (2006): 225–255.

  7. Report to the Congress from the President of the United States, United States and Aeronautics Space Activities, 1964, 72.

  8. USIS Tananarive Field Message no. 18, undated, Box 29, Entry P 243, RG 306, NARA.

  9. USIS Tananarive Field Message no. 18.

  10. USIS Tananarive Field Message no. 18.

  11. USIS Tananarive Field Message no. 18.

  12. USIS Tananarive Field Message no. 18.

  13. USIS Tananarive to USIA Washington, June 29, 1964, Box 29, Entry P 243, RG 306, NARA.

  14. USIS Tananarive Field Message no. 18.

  15. USIS Tananarive Field Message no. 18.

  16. “A Guide to the United States’ History of Recognition, Diplomatic, and Consular Relations: Burundi,” State Department, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/countries/burundi.

  17. Jacob Gillespie, interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy, February 4, 2010, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, https://adst.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Gillespie-Jacob-1.pdf.

  18. Gillespie interview.

  19. Robert Dallek, “Johnson, Project Apollo, and the Politics of Space Program Planning,” in Spaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership, ed. Roger D. Launius and Howard E. McCurdy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 71–72.

  20. Johnson, Vantage Point, 285–286; Dallek, “Johnson, Project Apollo, and the Politics,” 68–91.

  21. Doel and Harper, “Prometheus Unleashed,” 66–85.

  22. Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line, 174; David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

  23. Hubert Humphrey speech on space policy, March 19, 1965, FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. XXXIV, Energy Diplomacy and Global Issues, Document 31.

  24. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 206–211.

  25. USIS Tananarive to USIA Washington, June 29, 1964, Box 29, Entry P 243, RG 306, NARA.

  26. NASA established Project Ranger in December 1959. The program was plagued by a series of failures, but on July 31, 1964, the Ranger 7 spacecraft successfully photographed the moon before a planned crash into the lunar surface. These images became important to scientists planning the Apollo missions and in geological studies of the moon. Don E. Wilhelms, To a Rocky Moon: A Geologist’s History of Lunar Exploration (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993), 94–101.

  27. The USIA also produced a film on Ranger 7 that was shown with great results to university students in Pakistan. The American Embassy in Karachi observed that “it is believed that films such as this appeal to all groups, particularly the young, and make a lasting impression of U.S. leadership in the field of space research.” US Embassy Karachi to State Department, November 13, 1964, Box 3147, Entry 1613, RG 59, NARA; Report to the Congress from the President of the United States, United States Aeronautics and Space Activities, 1964.

  28. Lyndon Baines Johnson to Rear Admiral Ramon Castro Jijon, August 6, 1964, Box 3147, Entry 1613, RG 59, NARA. For the most part, respondents in nineteen countries and major cities believed that Soviet Union space activities, nuclear strength, and scientific development outpaced those of the United States. The one exception was in Turkey, where US superiority held. Dean R
usk to Hubert Humphrey, April 29, 1965, Box 9, Entry 3008D, RG 59, NARA.

  29. Asif Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945–1974 (Military Bookshop, 2011), 407–408.

  30. Taubman, Khrushchev, 617.

  31. Henry Tanner, “Khrushchev Ouster: Reaction in Moscow,” New York Times, October 25, 1964, E4.

  32. Siddiqi, Sputnik, 421–460.

  33. Deputy Vasily Mishin, quoted in Siddiqi, Sputnik, 447.

  34. Voskhod 1, launched on October 12, 1964, carried three crew members, which made it the first multipassenger human spaceflight mission. Report to the Congress from the President of the United States, United States Aeronautics and Space Activities, 1964.

  35. John Finney, “US Now Leads in Two Major Aspects of Space Race: Rendezvous and Endurance: But It Still Lags in Rocket Power,” New York Times, December 16, 1965, 29.

  36. For a comprehensive history of Project Gemini, see Barton C. Hacker and James M. Grimwood, On the Shoulders of Titans: A History of Project Gemini (Washington, DC: NASA, 1977).

  37. “Gemini 4,” Times of India, June 5, 1965, 6.

  38. Report to the Congress from the President of the United States, United States Aeronautics and Space Activities, 1965.

  39. Research and Reference Service, “World Press Reaction to Gemini IV Space Flight,” R-74–65, June 11, 1965, Box 25, Entry P 142, RG 306, NARA.

  40. United States Information Agency, “World Press Reactions to Gemini IV Space Flight,” June 11, 1965, Box 25, Office of Research: Research Reports, 1960–1999 (hereafter Entry P 142), RG 306, NARA.

  41. Rusk to Humphrey, April 29, 1965.

  42. “Spaceman Jr. Romp, Snooze in White House,” Chicago Tribune, June 19, 1965, 2; “A Conversation About the U.S. Space Program with Former President Lyndon B. Johnson as Broadcast During the CBS News Coverage of Man on the Moon: The Epic Journey of Apollo, CBS Television Network, July 21, 1969, Box 4, Entry A1 42, RG 306, NARA.