American Moonshot

by Douglas Brinkley

  In the mid-1930s, the president of Harvard described his method of “fishing” for students from families with an annual income above five thousand dollars—this at a time when Jack himself would soon be receiving as much as fifty thousand dollars per year from a trust fund set up by his parents. But even if his prep school background and income hadn’t made Jack a shoo-in, his father’s new position as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission under President Franklin Roosevelt probably would have. It couldn’t have hurt, too, that one of the reference letters submitted with Jack’s Harvard application was written by Harry Hopkins, one of FDR’s closest advisors. “I feel that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university,” Jack wrote in his application. And in fact, Harvard accomplished both those goals.

  Kennedy started at Harvard in the fall of 1936, and by his junior year his innate interest in history had led him to studies in government, political science, and foreign relations. Yet still he rebelled against leading too proscriptive a life. Life in Cambridge was a steadying influence, but the prankster playboy ways Kennedy had developed at Choate still occupied his weekends, when he would typically journey to New York City for parties and nightclubbing. By this point, his family had created a new home base, in the town of Hyannis Port, a village on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts. Jack thrived on that peninsula during the summer months, swimming and sailing, or driving along the Atlantic coast in a convertible with other hellcats from the wealthy towns nearby.

  DURING KENNEDY’S SCHOOL years, rocketry was a popular fad in Germany—in comics, in novels, and in cinema. In the German public’s imagination, it seemed that it would be just a matter of time before space travel became an empirical reality. Yet for all the optimism about rockets, there was a creeping concern within Weimar Germany that the nation was leaning increasingly toward fascism, particularly after the 1930 election.

  In 1930, eighteen-year-old Wernher von Braun arrived at the Technische Hochschule Berlin, enrolling in the college’s engineering school but focused entirely on studying mechanical engineering, with an eye on rocketry. His hero was Dr. Hermann Oberth, a high school science teacher in Romania and rocket theoretician who had made a splash in the Central European media. “Oberth was the first, who when thinking about the possibilities of a spaceship, grabbed a slide-rule and presented mathematically analyzed concepts and designs,” von Braun recalled. “I, myself, owe to him not only the guiding star of my life, but also my first contact with the theoretical and practical aspects of rocketry and space travel.”

  Von Braun met Oberth a couple of times in 1930. The rocketry concepts developed by Oberth would remain imprinted on von Braun’s spongelike mind even as he diverged from his hero over one of the most important issues facing their scientific community: the militarization of rocketry by the German government.

  In January 1933, Adolf Hitler, an Aryan racist genocidal provocateur against Jews, Slavs, and countless others, was appointed chancellor of Germany and quickly consolidated power. In this charged atmosphere, the rocketry community was divided. Some distrusted Hitler’s Nazi Party outright. But the young von Braun led a contingent that saw full-bore cooperation with the military as the path to space rocketry success. With Oberth having returned to his home in Romania, von Braun entered enthusiastically into the German Army’s new rocket program. On December 18, 1934, von Braun launched two advanced A-2 rockets, named Max and Moritz (after German comic characters), to altitudes of 6,500 feet.

  Both Kennedy and von Braun were primed with an inevitable sense that they would be called to military duty if World War II erupted. Each was patriotic and wanted to serve his country. By the late 1930s, global events were setting the stage for a cataclysmic conflict between fascism and democracy. The difficult, somber early years of the Great Depression were giving way to a gathering crisis in Europe, as the world careened toward the measureless suffering of another Great War. Recognizing that the United States might soon be drawn into the European conflict, and also yearning for government funding, Robert Goddard tried to interest President Franklin Roosevelt’s top generals and admirals in the development of long-range military rockets, but most of America’s military leaders considered his ideas marginal or even crackpot. Even the engineers at the NACA, in Hampton, Virginia, had to abandon more visionary aerodynamic experiments in favor of practical military aviation advancements. However, when a NACA delegation toured Germany in 1936, they were flabbergasted by the sophistication of the Third Reich’s aeronautical technology and enthusiasm for rocketry.

  Major Jimmy Doolittle was also aware of Germany’s daunting aviation hardware. Born in Alameda, California, in 1896, Doolittle became interested in space science as a boy. By the time of World War I, Doolittle was an accomplished U.S. Army Air Corps pilot, serving as a flight instructor in Ohio. After the war, he flew a de Havilland DH-4 in the first cross-country flight, from Jacksonville Beach, Florida, to San Diego. Besides being a brave pilot, Doolittle was a master of aviation technology, having earned a doctorate in aeronautical engineering from MIT, and helped develop new flight instruments that let pilots navigate through fog, cloud banks, darkness, and rainstorms. He was also the first U.S. pilot to recognize the psychological effects of flight, especially how a pilot’s hearing and vision were affected by high altitudes. As a civilian in the 1930s, he routinely shattered aviation speed records.

  In 1937, Doolittle went to Germany on Shell Oil business and was stunned to learn that Hitler was mass-producing modern fighter planes and bombers at a frightening rate. Touring airplane factories such as Junkers, Heinkel, Dornier, Messerschmitt, and Focke-Wulf, Doolittle realized that the United States was way behind the Germans. Once back in America, he met with Army Air Corps leaders, sounding the Paul Revere–like alarm. In October 1938, Doolittle traveled to the New Mexico desert to discuss rocket propulsion with Goddard. While other military men held a low opinion of rocketry, Doolittle wrote a memo praising Goddard, detailing how a rocket could be used in warfare. The memo ended with a reference to Goddard’s spaceman reputation, admitting that while “interplanetary transportation” was a dream of the very distant future, “with the moon only a quarter of a million miles away—who knows!”

  For the most part, Goddard was protective of his work during the 1930s. Frank Malina from Caltech tried to convince Goddard to join a rocketry project at his university, but he refused. In a September 1936 letter, Goddard wrote disparagingly of Malina to Caltech’s Robert Milikin. Goddard commented that he had tried to help Malina with some of his questions, but “I naturally cannot turn over the results of many years of investigation, still incomplete, for a student’s thesis.”

  IN THE SUMMER of 1937, just before his sophomore year at Harvard, Jack Kennedy traveled through England, France, Italy, Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands in an automobile with a school friend named Lem Billings. Avoiding first-class travel to accommodate Billings’s modest budget, the two met and mingled with people from outside Kennedy’s typically upper-crust milieu. To speak with people beyond the tourist areas, Kennedy insisted that they pick up hitchhikers, especially in countries where publicly conversing with an American was deemed a bit risky. Seeking libertine pleasures was also built into the itinerary.

  In Germany, the rise of fascism intrigued both Jack and Lem.

  Despite newspaper reports on the human rights abuses of Hitler’s government and the overt militarism that fueled German economic growth, admiration for the Nazis was common among the U.S. and British upper classes in the mid- to late 1930s. Many American intellectual-corporate elites believed Hitler’s rule had led to efficiencies in business and factories and to social stability. Both Joe Kennedy Sr. and Jr. shared these views. Joe Sr. was astonished that the hyperinflation of the early 1920s, which left the German market shattered in economic depression, had been replaced in the 1930s by robust economic growth. An equally impressed Joe Jr. thought that Germany had bested the United States in railways, aviation, medici
ne, forestry, and, quite ominously, social engineering.

  One reason for Jack’s European trip that summer was to judge for himself the situation in Germany since Hitler’s rise—an admirable independent-mindedness, considering his father’s and Joe Jr.’s strong opinions. Arriving in cities such as Berlin, he immersed himself in local culture, observing closely and jotting down impressions in his diary. By the time he and Lem arrived in Munich in August, trade unions and all political parties other than the Nazis had long since been dissolved. By rebuilding the military, including the Luftwaffe (air corps), and moving German troops into the disputed Rhineland, Hitler had abrogated the Treaty of Versailles. Meanwhile, military pacts were being formalized with Italy and Japan. The Dachau concentration camp was already in operation. Jews were being segregated and stripped of their most basic rights, and Romanies (Gypsies), Slavs, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals faced daily persecution. Hitler was actualizing the Aryan supremacy theories first spewed in his book Mein Kampf, which he wrote while in jail for treason.

  During the trip, Jack was amazed by the quality of Germany’s new roads, train depots, and dams but he scorned the outward trappings of Nazi fanaticism. Fueled by German beer, he and Lem mocked their way through the Nazi “Heil Hitler” as they made their way across the country. On one occasion, traveling near Nuremberg, Jack “had the added attraction of being spitted on” for his antics. Nevertheless, his overall impression was positive. “The Germans really are too good,” he wrote in his journal. “It makes people gang up against them.” Lem, in his own diary of the trip, recounted the conclusion drawn by two Ivy League travelers while speeding down the autobahns in their Ford Cabriolet: that the broad new highways had a military purpose first and foremost. They knew increasingly, in their guts, that another world war was likely.

  Back in the United States, fierce debates were erupting between internationalists and isolationists. President Roosevelt had no inclination to think about rockets as ballistic missiles—the whole concept seemed remote and ridiculous. The isolationists, including Charles Lindbergh and carmaker Henry Ford, were a diverse group, loud and well organized, and encompassing those who acutely remembered the horrors of World War I and those who hoped for German domination of Europe—which, by 1938 and early 1939, seemed more than possible. In March 1938, Roosevelt appointed Joseph Kennedy Sr. as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, hoping that America’s most famous Irish-Catholic businessman could influence millions of Irish Americans to drop their ethnic enmity and support Britain in the European conflict to come. More selfishly, FDR thought Kennedy could be an asset for his own reelection bid in 1940 (for an unprecedented third term).

  As Jack Kennedy’s interest in foreign affairs deepened, the timing of his father’s appointment couldn’t have been better. On July 4, 1938, the Harvard undergraduate sailed to England with brother Joe Jr., staying and working at the American embassy in London. There, Jack learned in a visceral way how European nations responded to Hitler’s aggression against smaller countries such as Czechoslovakia.

  After spending the fall semester of 1938 back at Harvard, Jack left for an extended overseas tour early in 1939. For the next few months, his experiences traveling in western Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East, as well as working at the American embassy in London, would substitute for his Harvard coursework. By the time he arrived in London, his father’s ambassadorship was tenuous. During his early tenure, Joseph Sr. had often expressed isolationist sentiments under the guise of arguing for peace. In at least one case, the State Department had felt compelled to intervene, quashing his remarks before they went public. The Roosevelt administration was aghast. Joe Sr. apparently failed to understand that any opinions he expressed as ambassador had to remain within the bounds of the Roosevelt administration’s foreign policy—a policy that was then walking a fine line. Given the strength of isolationist sentiment in America, official policy on developments in Europe remained guardedly neutral. But this was not the position of the president, who privately believed that the United States could not hope to remain aloof from a European conflict and who was working to subtly shift public opinion. Nazi-appeasing rhetoric from the American ambassador to Great Britain could do real damage, convincing fascist leaders that the United States would remain on the sidelines. To the surprise of some in the administration, FDR chose to retain Kennedy in his post. Among other things, he was reluctant to overreact: European diplomatic matters were delicate enough in the late 1930s without the turmoil that would ensue from the removal of a high-level appointee. In 1940, however, Joe Sr. went too far yet again, and FDR fired him.

  While working unofficially on minor assignments at the London embassy, Jack made two visits to the Continent, including to the Soviet Union, Germany, and Poland—traveling to the last just a few weeks before the Nazis invaded it. He also attended the coronation of Pope Pius XII in Rome, where his family was granted a private papal audience. These experiences, aided by Joe Sr.’s State Department connections, proved a vitally important part of Jack’s education, but it was clear he was already in his element. Friends of the family were impressed by how much he knew about Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon, and the rise and fall of great powers. U.S. ambassador Charles Bohlen, Jack’s mentor while in Russia, noted, “We were all struck by Kennedy’s charm and quick mind, but especially by his open-mindedness about the Soviet Union, a rare quality in those pre-war days. . . . He made a favorable impression.” That September, Kennedy was in the Visitors’ Gallery in the British House of Commons as Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced war on Hitler’s Germany for attacking Poland with planes, tanks, and infantry. “For a twenty-two-year-old American,” historian Richard Whalen wrote, “it was a unique opportunity to look behind the scenes as the stage was set for the Second World War.”

  Back at Harvard that same September 1939, Jack was fully engaged intellectually with regard to a Europe on the brink. Initially, he struck an isolationist posture like that of his father, authoring an unsigned Harvard Crimson editorial, “Peace in Our Time,” which implored the United States not to overreact to the Polish defeat by entering the hostilities. Especially problematic was his naïve belief that Hitler would disarm if allowed to run a puppet Poland and have a free hand in Eastern Europe. But as he worked on his honors thesis, “Appeasement in Munich,” which detailed Neville Chamberlain’s failed policy toward Hitler, his thinking shifted decisively.

  In June 1940, Jack graduated cum laude with a bachelor of science degree. Later that year, his thesis was published in book form under the title Why England Slept, with a glowing introduction by Henry Luce, the Time magazine publisher, who was a close friend of Joseph Sr. With help from other family friends, it became a bestseller. For Jack, the book marked the start of an unending process of edging away from his father politically while continuing to benefit from the massive help Joe Sr. could provide. In this political realignment, Jack, the new interventionist, was not alone: with disdain for Hitler’s aggression on the rise, American isolationism was ebbing, and it was Jack, not his statesman father, who had correctly read the tides of history.

  WHAT JACK HAD learned during his European trips in the 1930s was that military technology was a priority for the Nazi regime, and so was secrecy about the many projects undertaken. The disarmament provisions of the Treaty of Versailles meant that the German military had mastered the art of both concealment and opportunism, seizing on the treaty’s catastrophic omission of rocketry to leapfrog their enemies technologically.

  Future American president John F. Kennedy sits at a typewriter in 1940, holding open his published Harvard thesis, Why England Slept.

  Hulton Archive/Archive Photos/Getty Images

  After World War I, several nations were vying to see who could develop and test the first jet airplane. Italy won with its successful prototype in 1940—or so it thought. Unknown to the Italians, a German Heinkel jet had already been flying for a year. Equal secrecy was accorded to the German Army Ordnance’s r
ocket development group, headed by Dr. Walter Dornberger, a hardworking artillery officer who had been captured by U.S. Marines during World War I and spent two years imprisoned in France. After the war, he studied mechanical engineering in Berlin as a junior officer. In April 1930, Dornberger was appointed to Weapons Testing of the German Army (Reichswehr) specializing in ballistics and munitions, tasked with clandestinely designing a solid-propellant rocket that could be mass-produced and transcend the range of traditional artillery.

  One of Dornberger’s primary assistants was the young Wernher von Braun. Years later, Dornberger recalled how impressed he was by von Braun’s opportunistic zeal, calculated shrewdness, and “astonishing theoretical knowledge.” Von Braun was soon leading Dornberger’s research team at the German military’s rocket artillery unit at Kummersdorf, about thirty miles south of Berlin. It was here that von Braun began developing and testing the first of his Aggregat series of rockets, the A-1 and A-2.

  By the mid-1930s, Dornberger and von Braun’s rocketry work had attracted the support of the Luftwaffe, Nazi Germany’s newly formed air force. And the project enjoyed support from the top ranks of the army. In 1936, Colonel Professor Dr. Karl Becker, head of the Research and Development Division of the German Army’s Ordnance Department and a longtime rocketry supporter, gave Dornberger some advice: “If you want more money, you have to prove that your rocket is of military value.”

  Dornberger and von Braun drew up the specifications for a game-changing ballistic missile. Their description was based on an extra-long howitzer, like the monumental German weapon used against Paris near the end of World War I. Then the longest-range artillery weapon known, it was capable of lobbing massive shells to a target eighty miles away. Looking for even more destructive capability, Dornberger and von Braun planned a single-stage rocket-propelled missile that would be launched vertically and then programmed in flight to an elevation angle of forty-five degrees. The rocket they envisioned would carry nearly one hundred times the weight of the explosives in one of the advanced howitzer shells and have a range twice that of the big gun. Designed for “arrow stability,” the rocket would be limited in length to not more than forty-two feet, which would allow it to be transported in a single piece, either by truck on normal roads or on a single railroad car; also, its over-the-fins diameter needed to be below nine feet, so it could fit through all European railroad tunnels. It was quickly calculated that a burnout speed of 3,600 miles per hour would be required for the rocket to achieve its military objectives.