James Reston of the New York Times recoiled from the TV rendition, calling the televised news conference “the goofiest idea since the hula-hoop.” Among other things, Reston felt that the president’s exposure would overwhelm that of his opponents, disrupting the political system. The editors of the Shreveport Times agreed with that stance and went further, insisting that “the real factor in all of this is the dignity and prestige of the office of the presidency of the United States, the bringing it down to the point of a periodical show.” The chance for Americans to see their president doing his job regularly was exactly what the Los Angeles Times found admirable about the broadcasts, even if they were “undisguised exercises of the Presidential power.” The editors pinpointed the mood of a nation fascinated with its young president: “Whatever the doubts his advisers and well-wishers—or even those who hoped he would come a cropper—had about the televised press conference, they know now that television must have been invented for the use of this President.”
ON A PARALLEL track, TV might have been invented for the use of space explorers. Throughout history, earthly explorers to unknown locales had returned with copious sketches and maps in order to give their sponsors a sense of their new discoveries. Space, however, made it much more of a challenge to answer the perennial question “What’s it like there?” Not even the most advanced space scientists could answer that question before the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957 and began to learn the answers firsthand. Some of the earliest Soviet satellites sent photographic and even television imagery back to Earth, though not in real time. The Americans soon followed, committing to live broadcasts from Cape Canaveral.
For the three major American TV networks, NASA space events offered hours of gripping drama, charismatic personalities, constant action, and stunning visuals. As an added bonus, there were no fees like those they typically paid to broadcast sports and entertainment events—NASA supplied the feeds from space (first audio, later video) for free—though covering blastoffs, touchdowns, and other terrestrial aspects of the flights remained expensive (to lessen the burden, the networks soon formed a pool and cooperated on the NASA video feeds). Another innovation was the taping of NASA’s launch rehearsals, which gave the networks an on-hand supply of riveting action footage.
The use of shared footage put more pressure on the running commentary that would distinguish each broadcaster’s programming. ABC News entrusted its space coverage to the serious-toned Jules Bergman, an eminent journalist from New York City who had been academically trained in scientific reporting. NBC News relied in the late 1950s on Roy Neal, a reporter-producer educated at the University of Pennsylvania. With a longtime interest in rocketry, Neal had been the network’s specialist in the subject since the beginning of the decade; he was also a leader in the effort to arrange pool coverage among the networks. Frank McGee, who learned aerospace jargon technology with enthusiasm, became the Peacock Network’s space anchor once Neal moved into the ranks of broadcast producers. CBS News, for its part, initially entrusted space coverage to Charles von Fremd, a Yale graduate in his thirties. Von Fremd was ambitious, but not as ambitious as his colleague Walter Cronkite, who started covering Mercury missions with Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 flight. Ever since Cronkite had written about the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II for United Press International, befriending flyboys stationed in Great Britain and accompanying a bombing mission over Germany, he’d seized military aviation and space exploration as his special beat.
NASA space exploration was a major story of the early 1960s, but covering it came with a caveat: the anchor at the launches had to have a confident grasp of complex concepts and keep hundreds of facts close at hand. The reward might be tempting (high ratings and association with the space program), but the risk of a career-ending blunder on the airwaves loomed even higher with sharp reporters. Cronkite conquered this difficulty first by making a serious study of space and rocketry. More cleverly, he filled notebooks with well-organized details of the topics in question and was an expert at consulting his notes without the camera catching him at it.
Unlike Murrow and the many CBS News correspondents he inspired, Cronkite wasn’t known for courting controversy; instead, he favored an objective reporting of the day’s events. Writing later about Cape Canaveral as it was in the 1960s, he noted that “while the eyes of the rest of our population might have been downcast as the nation dealt with a succession of problems—civil rights, assassinations, Vietnam—it seemed that everyone at the Cape was looking up, up into the skies that invited their conquering touch.” Few could discern Cronkite’s personal opinions on most topics, but it was clear that NASA’s missions had particular appeal to him. In fact, even after being named anchor of CBS Evening News in 1962, he made the unconventional decision to continue hosting the network’s live coverage of space launches.
The time lines of NASA development and TV’s infiltration of American life coincided almost precisely. This convergence meant that fifty million people could see their tax dollars at work, watching the moonshot draw closer to success with each ensuing launch. No exploration in human history had been so democratic. In exchange for a massive expenditure, Americans as individuals became stakeholders in the grand drama, partners in the adventure along with the astronauts and engineers, and the president himself. Kennedy, for his part, acted a dual role: as the man whose vision had lit the fuse beneath Apollo and, simultaneously, as one of the millions of Americans glued to the TV coverage of the program. Americans watched their president on TV viewing TV broadcasts of space launches that they themselves had paid for. The combination of Kennedy, television, and space had the desired effect. As the leading French space scientist (and proud Marxist-Leninist) Roger Bonnet later recalled, he’d initially been a cheerleader for the Soviets to win the manned-space race, then changed his mind when, under Kennedy, the Americans adopted “an open policy” of space information that made Shepard’s flight and the Mercury program feel like they belonged to the world.
An April 1960 poll revealed that across Europe, a majority of citizens believed the Soviet Union was the undisputed leader in space, after years of “competition without war.” Echoing this finding, a contemporaneous statistic from the U.S. Information Agency reported that only 7 percent of French citizens polled believed the United States would overtake the USSR in the coming decades. Then came Kennedy’s May 25 speech, which framed manned spaceflight as the barometer for America’s capacity to mobilize resources and win the Cold War battle “between freedom and tyranny . . . the battle for men’s minds . . . the minds of men everywhere who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take.” There was a democratic openness to NASA’s space launches. Under Webb’s leadership the space agency didn’t shield its activities until success was guaranteed, as the Kremlin did. Like Kennedy, NASA astronauts stood up before the cameras and laid it all on the line. By contrast, in the Soviet Union, where obsessive secrecy was the governing ethos, even the phone book was classified.
BUILDING ON KENNEDY-INJECTED momentum, NASA was preparing for the second televised Mercury launch in the third week of July. With an appropriations vote on the president’s moon initiative pending in Congress within weeks, the need for a smooth, successful mission was paramount. In the pilot’s seat would be Virgil Grissom, a curmudgeonly pillar of tenacity, unpretentiousness, and midwestern work ethic. The Liberty Bell 7 capsule in which he would take his projected fifteen-minute flight was more sophisticated than Shepard’s Freedom 7, and among the new astronaut’s missions would be personally testing the spacecraft’s reentry.
Grissom hailed from Mitchell, Indiana, where as a boy he’d delivered newspapers and picked cherries and apples for twenty-five cents per tree. With his spare cash, young Virgil took flight lessons at the local airport, dreaming of becoming a military pilot. During World War II he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps, improving his piloting skills in Texas and Florida. After the war, Grissom used the GI Bill to enroll at Purdue University,
where he earned a BS degree in mechanical engineering. While at Purdue, he acquired the nickname “Gus” during a card game, when someone misread “Gris” on the scorecard.
Married and with a young child, Gus Grissom reenlisted in the air force after college and was assigned to Presque Isle Air Force Base in Maine, becoming a member of the Seventy-Fifth Fighter Interceptor Squadron. Officers were impressed with his superlative airmanship and how he made an airplane tame and obedient, and he was soon sent to Korea to fly F-86 Sabres, usually in a “finger four” formation, in which the lead plane fired at enemy aircraft while the rest provided cover. “I usually flew wing position in combat,” Grissom recalled, “to protect the flanks of other pilots and [to] keep an eye open for any MiGs that might be coming across.” All told, he flew one hundred low-flying combat missions, cutting North Korean bridges and roads and engaging Russian-built MiG-15s in aerial combat without even once sustaining a hit on his own plane.
With a chest full of medals, including the Distinguished Flying Cross, Grissom returned to America to become a flight instructor at Bryan Air Force Base, Texas. The general impression of Grissom from his superiors was that he had unflappable grit, a natural feel for flight, and an easy camaraderie. Fellow Mercury Seven astronaut Gordon Cooper described the five-foot-seven Grissom perfectly as “a little bear of a man and a country boy, but when it came to flying he was steady and no nonsense.” After successful stints at the Air Force Institute of Technology at Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and at the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California, he was a natural pick for the Mercury program.
There was, however, a hiccup, or perhaps a sneeze. While undergoing a series of medical examinations as part of the program, it was revealed that Grissom suffered from hay fever, which took him out of the running to be the first American in space, clearing the way for Shepard. Grissom, devoid of envy, patiently waited his turn until July 21, when, hay fever be damned, the decorated air force test pilot suited up to become the second American astronaut to reach suborbital space. At last the air force had one of its own headed into the galaxy.
Just after seven that morning, Grissom was hustled into the capsule atop a towering eighty-three-foot-tall Redstone by his backup, John Glenn. The U.S. Weather Bureau meteorologist thought the conditions were optimal. Glenn gave Grissom a go-get-’em pat good-bye, and then seventy hatch bolts were torqued down. The launch went off without a hitch. Soaring to an altitude of 118 miles, Grissom traveled 302 miles in fifteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds. With more time aloft than his predecessor in space, Grissom had time to peer through his capsule’s window and radio back reports of stars as pure as diamonds against an ethereal blue universe. Back at Cape Canaveral, Shepard was serving as capsule communicator, and the two astronauts traded brief awestruck commentary about the beauty of the Earth before heavy cloud cover hindered Grissom’s view. The amazement with which Gus tried to convey his space experience was endearing: “I can see the coast,” he radioed back, “but I can’t identify anything.”
Reentry went smoothly for Liberty Bell 7, with the craft traveling thirty miles per hour faster than had Shepard’s Freedom 7. But once the capsule splashed down in the Atlantic, a technical malfunction caused the side door to blow open, sending seawater gushing in. The same type of disaster had killed Victor Prather. Grissom felt the capsule begin to sink. Without waiting for the two navy helicopters assigned to retrieve him, he scrambled out. Minutes of life-or-death drama ensued. When the choppers arrived, Grissom began trying to help the first one attach a cable to the capsule, which was also supposed to be retrieved, but ocean water started entering his space suit through the open collar. Panicking, Grissom waved for help, but the airmen on the helicopter misconstrued his message. Fortunately, the crew of the second helicopter recognized his predicament and quickly lowered a rescue hoop, hoisting him to safety. Abandoning the effort to lift the water-filled Liberty Bell 7, both helicopters returned to a nearby navy ship. When asked by a journalist how he felt, Grissom replied, “Well, I was scared a good portion of the time; I guess that is a pretty good indication.”
TV viewers didn’t see any of the difficulties, because live video of the retrieval wasn’t available. As the news anchors struggled to sort out what was happening, CBS and NBC each ran the “rehearsal” footage, shot days before, which showed a picture-perfect operation, with two helicopters flying low over open water, one of them carrying the Liberty Bell 7. On NBC, the video feed then reverted to moving images of mission control, also prerecorded. Within a couple of minutes, an announcer from New York interrupted the coverage to say, “A moment ago, you saw some pictures of a helicopter lifting a space capsule out of the water. Those were films made of the trial runs, the practice and training for this program, and were not actual scenes of Grissom being lifted out of the water at this time.” The live coverage then continued, but there was an obvious delay, with no confirmation of Grissom’s safe return. So it was that the NBC announcer from New York interrupted a second time to clarify that the film of the technicians in mission control had also been shot in advance.
Uneasy viewers were confused and suspicious. What they saw was at odds with what they were hearing. Eventually, live reports from the navy ship told the full story and confirmed that Grissom was unharmed. The confusion, however, was widely criticized, with wags calling it “the great Cape Canaveral tape caper.” Recognizing that they’d betrayed their obligation to present news truthfully and endangered public trust in their NASA programming, the two guilty networks were contrite. “It won’t happen again,” promised Richard Salant, president of the CBS News division. “We know we can’t juxtapose fact and fiction.”
That morning, John F. Kennedy had been in his bedroom at the White House when aides informed him that coverage of the Liberty Bell 7 mission was about to begin. Turning on the TV set, he watched with nervousness, amazement, and, finally, joy. Once Grissom was safely aboard the USS Randolph, Kennedy placed a telephone call to the astronaut of the moment. Still drenched, Grissom chatted with the president. Photographer Dean Conger of National Geographic was on duty and documented the historic call with his camera. “That was the last thing he wanted right then,” Conger recalled. “[Grissom] still had his space suit on . . . probably full of sea water.”
From Kennedy’s perspective, the Liberty Bell 7 voyage was astounding, the excitement irresistible, and yet, by then, the Mercury suborbital program was already something of a relic. Grissom’s flight was significant but, as a baby step, only slightly more ambitious than Shepard’s launch of ten weeks before. Grissom himself, sloughing off having almost drowned on reentry, “was angry about being blamed for his space craft having sunk,” astronaut Wally Schirra recalled. “Gus was a tiger.”
Just hours after Kennedy’s telephone call to Grissom aboard the Randolph, he signed a bill to enlarge NASA’s manned space programs, especially to achieve an Apollo lunar voyage. Praising Grissom, he authorized NASA to spend more money in the coming year; the world paying close attention to space. “Once again we have demonstrated the technological excellence of the country,” Kennedy said. “As our space program continues . . . it will continue to be this nation’s policy to use space for the advancements of mankind and to make free release of all scientific and technological results.”
OVER THE SUMMER, anyone involved in NASA, along with companies such as North American Aviation (Los Angeles), Grumman (Bethpage, New York), and McDonnell Aircraft (St. Louis), was learning to translate Kennedy’s leapfrog strategy into giant strides forward, wheeling and dealing for federal contracts. Under JFK, the United States, for better or worse, truly was becoming the Republic of Technology. “Ever since Kennedy declared his intent to go to the moon, all hell has broken loose here,” von Braun wrote to his father. “At the moment, we are working on plans which put in the shade everything we have done before and against which even our [early-generation] ‘Saturn’ pales.”
For a time during th
e summer, von Braun was under consideration to direct Project Apollo. Certainly, he had the engineering know-how, government experience, and leadership skills to do the job. In fact, many Americans, then and since, believed that he did run the project, a testament perhaps to his incessant promotion of space exploration on television, in publications, and at personal appearances. But according to Michael Neufeld, von Braun’s biographer, his chance of assuming the Apollo directorship may have fallen victim to the opinion of NASA veterans resentful of his “big-spending and self-promoting ways.” Von Braun remained in Huntsville, heading the Marshall Space Flight Center, exultant in his excitement to build a moon rocket. Director or no, von Braun remained, with John Kennedy, a most effective salesman to put a moon launch over with the American public.
The specter of a lunar voyage caused a disruption to von Braun’s rocket program, where the enormous Saturn C-1 rocket was then being readied for initial testing in the fall. Even though it was the biggest rocket ever constructed in the United States, von Braun knew, as he’d suggested to his father, that NASA’s new directive made the C-1 immediately obsolete. What would replace it, though, was dependent on which of the three competing flight mode options was ultimately selected: direct ascent, Earth orbit rendezvous, or lunar orbit rendezvous. That decision, in turn, would determine what kind of vehicles would ride his rockets into space, and that decision would have to be taken into consideration in determining the final rocket design. All von Braun knew that summer was that whatever option was selected, the launch rocket would need to be far larger and more powerful than the C-1.
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