The first successful V-2 launch in New Mexico occurred in May 1946, the rocket soaring to an altitude of sixty-seven miles; it was deemed a failure. Over the next five years, about seventy V-2 tests were conducted at White Sands, two-thirds of them successfully. Barely a day went by when von Braun wasn’t daydreaming about Mars and the moon. During the early Cold War, he managed to design his first trajectories for a potential flight to the moon and started hunting for funding allies in Washington. Work associates knew that when von Braun got a faraway gleam in his eyes, he was daydreaming about a lunar voyage, bringing his imagination to bear on the thousands of necessary steps.
Nevertheless, the conundrum that had existed since the 1920s still haunted rocket engineers: long-range rockets were ideally suited to be used as weapons. With World War II over and geopolitical competition with the USSR already under way, interest and investment in rocketry as a military asset surged, while interest in and funding for peaceful applications such as manned space exploration and satellite telecommunications continued to lag. Attempting to alter this vast imbalance, Lieutenant General Ira Eaker, deputy commander of the Army Air Force, wrote the War Department in May 1946 requesting budget support for dozens of top secret test launches. The plan was to use modified and unmanned V-2s in what he described specifically as a “scientific endeavor” to explore space for peace. In truth, these V-2 tests were aimed at providing the United States with guided missile technology, deemed essential to deter the Soviet Union from overplaying its postwar hand in Europe. But massive U.S. budget cuts of 1946–48 ended many potential missile projects.
Eaker, the son of tenant farmers in Texas, had become a single-engine pilot during World War I and in 1930 made history by piloting the first transcontinental flight using in-flight refueling. A serious writer on military aviation, he coauthored the highly respected This Flying Game (1936), Winged Warfare (1939), and Army Flyer (1942). While Eaker was commanding the American air effort in Europe during World War II, he improved the strategy of precision daylight bombing, which allowed for round-the-clock attacks against the enemy. Even though he was known mainly as a hardened, no-nonsense commander of bomber groups, his 1946 proposal to the War Department saw a moon voyage as a practical measure concomitant with the United States leading the world in space technology, although he admitted it was a largely unknown field. “If we may assume that the future of air conquest will bring with it a conquering of outer space,” he wrote, “then clearly this experience and the enthusiasm which this project will generate will be very beneficial in the long run.” Apparently the feeling in Washington was that the proposal was a highly fungible waste of money; space wasn’t going to be the next domain of airpower.
AROUND THE TIME von Braun’s group surrendered to the U.S. Army, Jack Kennedy was in San Francisco, reporting for the Hearst syndicate on a conference called to negotiate the charter of the new United Nations, an organization designed to foster global peace and cooperation. When he returned east, his father arranged for him to spend the summer touring war-ravaged Germany with fellow Irish American James Forrestal, President Truman’s navy secretary. It was apparent to Kennedy that London was pummeled, Paris disgraced, Rome tarnished—the old European capitals he had visited with Lem Billings before World War II were dysfunctional compared with cosmopolitan San Francisco and New York City. Somewhat paternally, Forrestal tutored Kennedy on the postwar national security imperatives facing the United States and how the decisions of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference held in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944 guaranteed that the U.S. dollar would be the reserve currency of the postwar world.
Meanwhile, Joseph Sr. commissioned a lecture bureau to schedule speaking engagements for Jack, met with local Massachusetts politicians to lay the groundwork for his son’s future, and hired a team of political veterans to organize a congressional campaign in Massachusetts’s Eleventh District (which included Cambridge, the home of Harvard University). In early 1946, Jack publicly announced his run for the seat. He wasn’t experienced in retail politics and he wasn’t local, either, but he quickly took up residence in the heavily Republican district to begin his run as an anticommunist liberal. According to Joseph Kennedy biographer David Nasaw, the patriarch acted as Jack’s behind-the-scenes campaign manager, marketing him as a “fresh-faced, charming young war hero, with a bit of glamour and a wholesome down-to-earth quality, a Harvard man and a man of the people, a book-writing intellectual who was everyone’s friend.”
The Kennedy family formed a devoted juggernaut on the front lines of the 1946 campaign, and Jack reciprocated by giving it his all. He didn’t want to let his siblings down, and he knew the campaign was his audition for a run for higher office down the line. Some people were already touting him for the Massachusetts governorship, the position that had long eluded his maternal grandfather, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, the popular two-term Boston mayor.
And yet, Jack knew that he wasn’t the typical Bay State politician. On paper, he had little in common with a predominantly working-class electorate in factory cities of the Eleventh District, people who were eking out a low-paid livelihood. He was also a practicing Roman Catholic (which was not necessarily an asset), he wasn’t married, and he didn’t belong to any local clubs or civic groups in his district. Hair tousled and clothes casual, Kennedy was also a private man, preferring to keep to himself or pass the time with his best friends. Pandering to voters wasn’t really in his makeup. With smiling ease, he could be full of good conversation while never completely connecting with anyone or revealing a thing. Nevertheless, during the course of the 1946 campaign, a persona was forged at the overlap between JFK’s authentic self and the fresh-faced leader for whom voters hungered. Having rushed headlong into politics, he milked his sardonic charm, terrific drive, unforgettable smile, and unique sense of irony that connected him to a wide range of idiosyncratic audiences through laughter.
Self-assured and pleasant, Kennedy clung to his abiding sense of intellectual aspiration, resisting the politician’s instinct to dumb down his rhetoric for a broader audience. Amid the well-worn traditions of Boston’s Democratic circles, Jack was in danger of being deemed professorial. On this first campaign, he honed his meet-and-greet skills, but avoided pandering. “It was said,” marveled Tip O’Neill, who later represented the Eleventh District, “that Jack Kennedy was the only pol in Boston who never went to a wake unless he had known the deceased. He played by his own rules.”
On the campaign trail, Jack was full of intoxicating kick-and-go. Recognizing that politics was a learning process, he spent long days canvassing for votes throughout the district, leaving himself only six hours a night for sleep. While his father lavished the campaign with more money than all the other candidates combined, and used his influence, high and low, in every conceivable way, Jack was proving his mettle in face-to-face interactions. The spoiled scion, as it turned out, was a sincere candidate with something fresh and cogent to say about postwar America. What Kennedy understood was that the economy was the most overwhelming concern for voters. On a theoretical level, citizens wondered whether the Great Depression would grimly pick up again where it had left off before wartime industrialization. On the more practical level of daily life, people struggled with shortages of housing, food, and other basic necessities, and worried that events such as the massive labor union strikes occurring that year could unravel the fragile postwar economy.
Two other issues, lying just under the surface of the race in 1946, were the performance of President Truman and the direction of the Democratic Party itself. A year after the death of Franklin Roosevelt elevated him to the presidency, Truman seemed a dreary placeholder compared with his dynamic predecessor. The man who had made the epochal decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan the previous August was now largely perceived as an ineffective leader, with an approval rating of only 37 percent. Beyond the presidency, the entire Democratic Party was having difficulty defining itself after the nearly thirteen-y
ear Roosevelt presidency. Taking a dim view of Truman’s inability to excite the public and his uneven defense of labor, many Democrats glumly accepted in 1946 that the spirit of the New Deal was over, while others clung to its promise. After going so far as to tell the president to remain on the sidelines in these midterm elections, Democratic Party leaders distributed radio spots to congressional candidates featuring voice clips of the late FDR, tacitly admitting that their past still overshadowed their present. While Democrats scrambled for some kind of new governing vision, the Republicans grasped the upper hand by embracing a staunchly anti-Soviet, anticommunist posture that became the defining issue of the times.
It was the beginning of the decades-long geopolitical Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. After their joint victory in World War II, festering distrust coalesced quickly into opposition. In March 1946, with the Soviets consolidating their control over Eastern Europe, Winston Churchill delivered a speech in which he declared, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” Stalin was the new Hitler, in this view, willing to purge his own citizens, bent on expansionism and the creation of a Communist world order. Holding back the tide would require a unified West and the continuing presence of American military might in Western Europe.
Among many Americans, including Kennedy, suspicion of the Kremlin metamorphosed into a creeping paranoia, igniting a Red Scare against alleged Communist infiltrators at many levels of American society. The furor swept up both voters who were rightly concerned about the Soviet threat and those who were easily led by their fears. The murkiness of the line between reason and hysteria and the whisking away of serious deliberation bothered many old New Deal Democrats. But any liberal candidates who attempted a nuanced discussion were attacked as being soft on communism. It seems incredible in retrospect that in 1943, Stalin had been Time’s “Man of the Year,” an ally against Hitler, but a few years later he was rightfully vilified in the United States and elsewhere.
As for the new Democratic congressional candidates of 1946, Jack Kennedy was uniquely prepared for the Red Scare, having lived under the same roof as one of its earliest anticommunist mouthpieces, Joseph Kennedy Sr. A rock-ribbed political pragmatist, Jack unabashedly supported containment of the Soviet Union and a strong arm against domestic Communists. He was willing to stand up to big labor and steer clear of alliances with groups that might define (or, worse, constrain) his ambition. Unleashing his inner Churchill, Kennedy lashed out at everything from the gulag concentration camps in Siberia to the Kremlin’s repression of journalists. In October, he gave a speech to the Young Democrats of New York, scolding Henry Wallace, the former vice president and recently dismissed secretary of commerce, for espousing pro-Soviet views. Later, in a Boston radio broadcast, he recounted what he had told the group about Soviet totalitarianism. “I told them that Soviet Russia today is a slave state of the worst sort,” he recounted. “I told them that Soviet Russia is embarked upon a program of world aggression. I told them that the freedom-loving countries of the world must stop Soviet Russia now, or be destroyed. I told them that the iron curtain policy and complete suppression of news with respect to Russia, has left the world with a totally false impression of what was going on inside Soviet Russia today.”
Choosing to distance himself from Truman, Kennedy epitomized the new liberalism that historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. yearned to see in the postwar atmosphere. Schlesinger, who had been in Joe Jr.’s class at Harvard, was within six months of Jack’s age. Having won literary praise for his 1945 history The Age of Jackson, he was back at Harvard as a teacher when he began thinking about his next book, a study of liberalism in the modern era. Schlesinger wasn’t pondering Kennedy when he wrote The Vital Center, but the iconoclastic young Democrat fit the bill. In the first place, he was not an obsessive New Dealer. Schlesinger had no patience with those hanging on to the old era. Having come to reject the idea that humans could be perfected if they received enough government help and kindness, he realized that they could, through an equal and opposite reaction, be cowed into subservience by dictators. To form a bulwark against extremism, Schlesinger called for a tough new liberalism that would extend civil rights but give no truck to totalitarians, whether fascists on the right or Communists on the left.
Yet there was a pivotal difference between Kennedy and others (notably Richard Nixon, then a candidate for Congress in California) who were tough on communism, and an even bigger difference with the political philosophy Schlesinger was then formulating. Even as he consolidated his staunch anti-Soviet views, Kennedy retained his bright-eyed idealism. A romantic at heart, he believed, like Thomas Jefferson, in human beings’ inherent perfectibility, and he brought the priority of peace to every discussion of foreign affairs.
As one of the youngest candidates running for federal office in 1946, Jack Kennedy offered something other than life experience. Instead, the war hero presented himself as a reflection of his times. The fight against fascism had shaped Kennedy and his generation, forging in them a fortitude and resilience no parental wisdom, no college education, no career experience ever could have. “The war made us get serious for the first time in our lives,” he said. “We’ve been serious ever since, and we show no signs of stopping.” He also knew that the dawn of the Atomic Age had amplified that seriousness in a way no previous generation had ever had to face. In coming years, the United States would conduct more than a thousand nuclear tests, in the Pacific Ocean on Amchitka Island, in Alaska, in Colorado, Mississippi, Nevada, and New Mexico. “What we do now will shape the history of civilization for many years to come,” he said in his first major speech. “We have a weary world trying to bind up the wounds of a fierce struggle. That is dire enough. What is infinitely far worse is that we have a world which has unleashed the terrible powers of atomic energy. We have a world capable of destroying itself.”
That November 5, 1946, at age twenty-nine, Jack Kennedy was elected as the U.S. representative for the Eleventh Congressional District near Boston. The Democrats that year mustered only 188 seats. Out in California, navy veteran Richard Nixon was swept into Congress on a Republican wave, along with 245 other members of the GOP.
JACK KENNEDY’S PUBLIC career was born amid the postwar reality of atomic bombs, ballistic missiles, and the still-unrealized threat of intercontinental long-range rockets. He favored an international body to oversee atomic weapons, largely as a way of maintaining America’s monopoly by dissuading other nations from building their own nuclear arsenals. But as far as Kennedy and most other politicians were concerned, rockets were simultaneously the V-2 past and the Flash Gordon future. In a country trying to regain a sense of normalcy, it seemed that the only group really focused on rocketry was the military, including the U.S. Air Force, a new division of the armed forces that had been established in the fall of 1947 via the National Security Act. Like the Army, this branch had benefited from having sponsored hundreds of Paperclip scientists and engineers. The Air Force was keenly interested in the Luftwaffe’s technology pertaining to transsonic and supersonic aerodynamic research.
The previous autumn, Wernher von Braun had made his first public speech in America, to the El Paso Rotary Club. “It seems to be a law of nature that all novel technical inventions that have a future for civilian use start out as weapons,” he said, before going on to predict a future where rocketry took its proper role of propelling satellites and space stations into orbit and enabling missions to the moon and beyond. Von Braun got a thundering ovation and was cheered by the support, but as usual, his ideas were ahead of their time. Before his space dreams could take flight, rocketry would enter new and even more dangerous territory with the postwar development of the first intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The only sensible thing for von Braun to do was, once again, to lie low and develop his ballistic missiles in Fort Bliss–White Sands for U.S. Army purposes while keeping a moon and Mars voyage as a long-term
interior motive. In 1946, the Army Signal Corps succeeded in bouncing radio waves off the moon and received the reflected signals back on Earth. This was a stunning achievement, for it established that radio transmissions through space and back to Earth were possible. This public discovery didn’t mean anything to Kennedy, running for Congress. But to von Braun, it was proof that such signals could in the very near future be adapted to control manned and unmanned spacecraft alike.
Congressional candidate John F. Kennedy leans back in a chair under a shelf that holds up a 1946 campaign poster (The New Generation Offers a Leader) and photos of his parents, Joseph and Rose, in his office-room at the Bellevue Hotel, Boston, Massachusetts.
Yale Joel/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
Part II
Generation Sputnik
Election night, November 1, 1952, when John F. Kennedy won a seat to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts. He would be reelected to the Senate in 1958.
Yale Joel/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
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