Skyward with James Webb
Webb’s legacy is measured by Apollo, which stands today as a virtually unparalleled example of U.S. technological brilliance, as the moment when the human species took its first journey to another world.
—W. HENRY LAMBRIGHT, POWERING APOLLO: JAMES E. WEBB OF NASA (1995)
The poet Marianne Moore famously said that a poem should not mean but be. That was John F. Kennedy’s approach to his inaugural address, one of the most memorable in American history. En route from Palm Beach to Washington that January 1961, Kennedy worked with Ted Sorensen to draft, on a yellow legal pad, a new opening for his upcoming speech. Once at his Georgetown house, he grappled with polishing the poetic words that would illustrate the passing of the torch from a generation of leaders born in the nineteenth century to one that embraced the new Space Age.
Inauguration Day dawned with a frigid wind ripping through the nation’s capital, the ground covered in snow from a storm the previous night. But as if on cue, the sun shone boldly down as a coatless Kennedy took the oath of office as the thirty-fifth president. The youngest man ever elected to the White House, he looked vibrant and vigorous as he stood to speak, confident in the power of oratory to move the masses toward public service. Kennedy’s high-toned thirteen-hundred-word oration lived up to expectations. “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike,” he proclaimed, “that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”
The most memorable line in the address was arguably “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” This urging of a new sense of national service and sacrifice was nothing short of magical. Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn boasted that the speech was “better than anything Franklin Roosevelt said at his best—it was better than Lincoln.” Having proudly voted for Kennedy, von Braun, who attended the inauguration, was transfixed by the powerful oratory. Watching on TV sets in Cape Canaveral, Huntsville, Hampton, and Pasadena, NASA employees, like everybody else, had their morale uplifted by oratory worthy of Abraham Lincoln. “I was so proud of Jack,” Jacqueline Kennedy gushed. “There was so much I wanted to say! But I could scarcely embrace him in front of all those people so I remember I just put my hand on his cheek and said ‘Jack, you were so wonderful.’”
THE CAMPAIGN BEHIND him, Jack Kennedy faced responsibility for righting the ship he’d charged Dwight Eisenhower with destabilizing. If there really was a missile gap and a space gap, they were now his problems to fix.
That February, however, the New York Times reported that Kennedy’s own defense study had concluded that there was no missile gap with the Soviets. All JFK’s taunts at Ike had been overdrawn. The facts were that when Eisenhower left the White House, the United States had one hundred sixty operational ICBMs to a paltry four R-7s in the Soviet arsenal. Kennedy now gladly accepted this reality. Later in 1961, Corona satellite intelligence indicated that Khrushchev, expectations aside, had only six ICBMs. Kennedy and Johnson’s campaign swipes that Eisenhower and Nixon were the architects of a national security missile strategy of “drift, delay, and dilution” had clearly been off base. Furthermore, America’s three coastal launch sites (Cape Canaveral, Florida; Vandenberg Air Force Base, California; and Wallops Island, Virginia) were already operating around the clock to further spaceflight advancement. Each of these sites had technical facilities, a control center, and the most modern of launchpads.
What Kennedy learned was that Eisenhower had actually done an able job of building up U.S. defenses. When Ike was inaugurated for his first term in 1953, the air force still used piston-driven bombers, and navy strategy focused on basing ships around the Pacific. By the time he handed the reins over to JFK, the United States had developed reconnaissance and communication satellite capabilities. And there were nuclear submarines—including the USS George Washington, deployed the very month Kennedy was elected and able to carry sixteen nuclear Polaris missiles. Five generations of rockets—starting with the early Vanguard, and then onward with ICBMs like Atlas and Titan—were born in the Eisenhower years. The army had teams designing heavy-launch Saturn rockets, while the air force, not to be outdone, had made headwind with its Space Launching System (SLS), experimenting with a myriad of launch configurations using solid-fuel boosters and hydrogen/oxygen upper stages. The Strategic Air Command had more than fifteen hundred jet bombers capable of dropping hydrogen bombs on America’s enemies. And in just a few weeks, the United States would fly a three-stage Minuteman from Cape Canaveral.
The more Kennedy learned from conversations with top brass at the Pentagon, including Robert McNamara, his new secretary of defense, the more obvious it was that the United States hadn’t ceded space to the Soviets in the 1950s. There were WS-117L (for “weapons systems”) reconnaissance satellites and MiDAS (Missile Defense Alarm System) missile-detection satellites that allowed America a half-hour advance warning of an incoming Soviet ICBM attack. There were all sorts of weather satellites (with military applications), and collaborations among NASA, the army, the air force, and the navy that were highly effective. But ways to intercept Soviet missiles and spy on the Kremlin were defensive in nature. Although Kennedy accepted the intelligence findings, he still believed there existed a fierce ongoing battle for global prestige between the United States and the Soviet Union. That’s where manned space still mattered. The publicity windfall of a Mercury Seven astronaut in space would be great for America’s image abroad. The United States had to lead from strength (or at least the perception of it) to prove to the world that it had the collective will to be the leading spacefaring nation.
Nevertheless, the United States clearly was in a far stronger position against the Soviets than Kennedy had alleged, and than much of America feared. From a political perspective, this news was inconvenient for Kennedy—some Republicans faux-congratulated him on ending the missile gap after only eighteen days in the White House. In private, Kennedy would deadpan, “Who ever believed in the missile gap anyway?”
As for space, Kennedy’s primary goal was to deny the Soviets any more Sputnik-like propaganda victories. But on entering office, he had no clear plan for how to reconfigure NASA to accelerate its progress. For perspective, he turned to Jerome B. Wiesner, director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). An electrical engineer who had developed microwave radar and nuclear weapon components during and after World War II, Wiesner became an unpaid advisor to Kennedy following his work on the influential 1958 Gaither Report, lending insight on space, technology, medicine, the environment, and other science-related issues. Shortly after the election, Kennedy asked him to chair an urgent task force to decide NASA’s future direction, and to submit his results before Inauguration Day.
The “Report to the President-Elect of the Ad Hoc Committee on Space” (dubbed the Wiesner Report) was handed in on time, on January 10, 1961. In it, Wiesner’s task force concluded that Project Mercury was of exaggerated value to the United States and should eventually be discontinued. Convinced that the Soviets had a huge lead on NASA in the man-in-space business and fearful that a hurry-up approach could lead to mission failure and loss of life, the Wiesner Report advised avoiding a “ghastly situation of serious national embarrassment” by utilizing only unmanned probes for future U.S. space exploration. This recommendation against manned space exploration created a seismic wave of dejection within the NASA bureaucracy.
“The Wiesner Report,” historian Roger E. Bilstein surmised, “aroused real concern among NASA personnel; there was a definite feeling that the report was neither fair nor carefully prepared.” Von Braun was livid over the report’s recommendations that the incoming president “stop
advertising Mercury as our major objective,” and that after the Mercury missions, the manned space program should be discontinued. Why in God’s name, von Braun wondered, would the United States allow the Soviets to be the only nation to put men in space and reach for the moon?
Among its recommendations, the Wiesner Report urged replacement of NASA administrator Glennan with a new leader who would focus on the nonmilitary aspect of space exploration. The report was a slap in the face to Glennan himself but also, he believed, to the experts at NASA. Nevertheless, he chose to maintain a gentlemanly silence. When Glennan appeared at a press conference in Chicago, reporters peppered him with questions about the report, but all such attempts, he proudly recorded in his diary, “met with complete failure.” What did please Glennan was that Hugh Dryden, his number two and someone in whom he had full confidence, would be staying on as acting NASA administrator until a permanent successor could be found.
Tension at all levels of NASA was causing rifts and bickering, even before the Wiesner Report was officially released. The Mercury Seven worried that they’d just undertaken a grueling yearlong training regimen for nothing. The astronauts couldn’t believe NASA was pondering whether humans were needed in space when computers and cutting-edge technology could operate the flights automatically. Adding insult to injury, the Seven were supplanted in the news by a trained ape: a chimpanzee named Ham, who’d been launched into space on January 31, having been trained to pull a lever on cue as a test of an astronaut’s (or “astrochimp’s”) ability to perform tasks in space.
Ham, born in the thick-forested mountains of Cameroon, was trained at NASA’s primate program, based at Holloman Aerospace Medical Center in New Mexico (the facility’s acronym giving the chimp his name). It was a rather mind-boggling journey for a primate, from the jungles of Africa to the New Mexican desert to outer space. Ham’s sixteen-and-a-half-minute flight aboard a Mercury-Redstone 2 encountered several glitches, including the fact that the spacecraft soared to 157 miles, rather than the intended 115. The mission was termed a success, however, and Ham survived flight impact in pretty good physical shape. While his journey paved the way for a manned flight in coming months, for the time being it only depressed the Mercury Seven to see that a good-natured chimp, one who could communicate through sign language and establish long-lasting friendships, had seemingly proved Wiesner’s point that astronauts weren’t necessary.
A MONTH AFTER the election, Kennedy had discussed NASA with the one member of his team who was bursting with ideas about space: Lyndon Johnson. Having championed NASA in the Senate during the Eisenhower administration, LBJ was now tasked with finding a suitable successor for Glennan. Kennedy had already delicately sidestepped trial balloons from several quarters, including Johnson himself, that his vice president was available to run the space agency in his spare time. It was one of several balloons floated by the restless veep-elect, who was beginning to feel like not only a caged tiger, but a marginalized one. Another idea involved carving out a role negotiating New Frontier legislation in the Senate—not merely by presiding over the Senate (as is one of the vice president’s duties), but by being intimately involved in moving Kennedy’s proposals into law. This idea baffled everyone, especially those who had read the U.S. Constitution, and was quickly quashed. Acting to put Johnson’s skills to good use, Kennedy made the hard-charging Texan chairman of the National Aeronautics and Space Council (aka the Space Council), where he would have oversight of both military and civilian space activities.
In the wake of the Wiesner Report, the role of NASA administrator was anything but a hot property, and in fact was the last major post to be filled in the Kennedy administration. Many qualified candidates opted to remain in the lucrative private sector rather than accept responsibility for a two-year-old government agency that not only was in transition, but lacked a clear vision or mandate on just where that transition might lead. Johnson struggled to find the right man. In all, seventeen candidates politely declined Kennedy’s offer. The eighteenth also wanted to take a pass, but Kennedy wouldn’t let him dodge public service.
That candidate was James Webb, a respected fifty-five-year-old North Carolina lawyer and Truman Democrat who knew little about rocketry but a lot about managing big government budgets, being adaptive, and profiting from intersections of the military-industrial complex. Even his detractors knew he was an uncommonly reassuring presence in any situation. Webb was the perfect person to lead America on a path toward what historian Walter A. McDougall has called “technological anticommunism.” He had graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1928 with an AB degree in education. He served as a pilot in the Marine Corps from 1930 to 1932, then as secretary to U.S. representative Edward Pou. To better position himself for work in government, he enrolled at George Washington University Law School, receiving his JD in 1936.
During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Webb was vice president of the Sperry Gyroscope Company in Brooklyn, New York, supplying flight navigation systems and airborne radar devices to the armed forces and developing lasting friendships with top leaders of the New Deal industrial mobilization order. In early 1944 he was granted permission to leave Sperry to reenlist in the marines, where he became commander of First Marine Air Warning Group (first as captain, then as major). Confidence in Webb’s leadership abilities was so great that he was tasked with running the American radar program for the planned invasion of the Japanese mainland, which proved unnecessary after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
After the war, President Truman asked Webb to serve first as budget director and then as undersecretary of state for Dean Acheson. In Acheson’s opinion, nobody was better at budget issues or big-picture thinking than Webb, though he’d also been responsible for cutting the United States’ early ICBM and satellite programs in the spirit of fiscal responsibility. At the end of the Truman administration, Webb left Washington to make a fortune with the oil company Kerr-McGee, in Oklahoma, and became a board member of McDonnell Aircraft.
Seldom does the American system produce such a competent government infighter as Webb. Smart as a whip, liberal in approach, able to see the battlefield of American politics with perspicacity, he was a rare mixture of big-corporate mores, industrial procurement know-how, bipartisan political instincts, good-ol’-boy charm, and budget wizardry, all undergirded by the unimpeachable credentials of a valiant U.S. Marine. Webb had an appealing face, bright blue eyes, broad Southern accent, and a penchant for folksy homilies—indeed, nothing about him seemed Ivy League; nevertheless, he was often one step ahead of the so-called best-and-the-brightest types that showboated around Washington.
As the Cold War had set in during the Truman years, Webb gained traction in official Washington for clear-mindedness, loyalty, and managerial effectiveness. Gregarious and a natural marketer, he could talk a blue streak with business friends from Raleigh to Reno. If you asked Webb a question, he’d start yapping, answering the original question five minutes later. His chattiness earned him the nickname the “Mouth of the South.” While Robert Kennedy mistakenly derided him as a prattling “blabbermouth,” just about everybody else in Washington considered him the exact kind of infighter you’d want as a government foxhole ally, or with whom to spend a twelve-hour day and shut the building down late.
In January 1961, the fifty-four-year-old Webb was in Oklahoma City at a dinner honoring his friend Robert S. Kerr, a smooth, old-style oil-and-gas patch power broker who had just taken over as chairman of the U.S. Senate’s Space Committee following LBJ’s departure to serve as vice president. A petroleum industry millionaire, Kerr was intrigued about the financial aspects of space technology and was a reliable rubber stamp for anything the new vice president wanted done in the Senate. When LBJ had earlier asked Kerr for advice on the best person to helm the U.S. space program, his answer was immediate: James Webb.
At the dinner event, Webb was passed a note asking him to immediately take a call from Wiesner, Kennedy’s science adv
isor. On the phone, Wiesner informed Webb that he was needed immediately in Washington, to meet first with LBJ and then with JFK himself. Uninterested in the NASA job, but feeling hemmed in, Webb dutifully boarded a private plane, which whisked him to the capital that very evening.
Webb profoundly understood the implications of the Wiesner Report, knowing that the fierce battle then under way between Wiesner’s skeptical “nay” and Johnson’s fervent “yea” could determine the future of the NASA manned space program. When Kennedy met privately with Webb in the Oval Office, he straight-out asked him to head NASA. Webb, like all the other choices, demurred. This time, however, the president refused to take no for an answer, promising Webb that he’d have the power to shape NASA in dramatic ways. NASA, JFK persisted, didn’t need a scientist in charge but “someone who understands policy . . . great issues of national and international policy.” Kennedy continued: “I want you because you have been involved in policy at the White House level, State Department level.” Under pressure, Webb reluctantly agreed. “President Kennedy said, ‘I want you for this reason,’” Webb later recalled. “And I’ve never said no to any President who has asked me to do things.”
Many in the space community worried that the Wiesner Report meant Webb would be only a caretaker, slowly backing the United States out of the manned-space business. But they’d misread Kennedy, who, while calling the report “highly informative,” chose to just file it away after taking one of its motifs to heart: that failed missions and dead astronauts would be public relations disasters for his administration. Managing that risk meant hiring pragmatic managers, and in that regard, Johnson and Kerr had keen instincts: Webb was the ideal choice for the job, viewing NASA as an extension of the large government projects that had given birth to the atomic bomb, ballistic missiles, and the Polaris submarine. Webb strove from day one to make NASA the “perfect organization,” and under his leadership and indomitable salesmanship, it emerged as the most efficient government agency of the 1960s—a well-oiled, high-octane hub where government, industry, and academia worked as a harmonious team. Drawing upon his experiences at the Bureau of Budget and the State Department, Webb became the master of the new field of space age management. Indeed, as Tom Wolfe wrote in The Right Stuff, Webb became “one of the ablest and most distinguished of the off-the-ballot politicians, a man who could make bureaucracies run.”
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