At Marshall, Kennedy also visited the principal hangar where a Saturn 1 booster was housed. As von Braun used rocket models to give Kennedy a short, impromptu lecture, the camera-courting president positioned himself at the best angle to allow photographers to capture both him and the giant rocket behind him. Von Braun, however, kept moving closer to the president, inadvertently botching the photo op. One journalist blurted out, “Look at von Braun trying to upstage the President!” The assembled officials broke out in laughter. Miscues aside, it was evident at Huntsville that Kennedy had grown personally fond of von Braun. In the way he exuded controlled optimism while maintaining a subtly detached air, von Braun was perhaps closer to Kennedy in persona than any Democratic senator or congressman of the era.
The next leg of Kennedy’s space tour was to the NASA Launch Operations Center on Cape Canaveral. Quite spontaneously, Kennedy asked von Braun to travel there with him on Air Force One, so they could talk shop. He boarded without even a travel kit. On the plane, a reporter asked Kennedy who was going to win the LOR debate. “Jerry’s going to lose it, it’s obvious,” JFK joked, referring to Jerome Wiesner. “Webb’s got all the money, and Jerry’s only got me.” Kennedy was being funny; weeks earlier, LOR had been chosen, and there was no turning back.
At Cape Canaveral, the president inspected perhaps the most sophisticated high-technology government facility in the world in a two-and-a-half-hour walk-around. To his pleasure, the massive NASA funding he’d pushed for was being put to full use, with lunar expedition planning clearly in high gear. Watching the president move quickly around the facility, inspecting the assembly shop and educating himself about predetermined launch loads, spacecraft component separation, heat shield verification, and other minutiae of space preparation, one missile technician cried out, “Who said John Glenn is the fastest American alive? Jack Kennedy has him beat a mile!”
Even in Florida’s stultifying coastal humidity and mosquito hordes, Kennedy didn’t wilt. Beaming confidence and joviality, he gave a brief pep talk, proclaiming, “We shall be first!” On a helicopter tour with Gordon Cooper and Gus Grissom as seatmates, as ABC News space correspondent Jay Barbree recalled, the two Mercury astronauts pointed out the key infrastructure highlights of the growing moonport. “They showed him where one day a monster called Saturn V would stand on its launch pad,” Barbree wrote. “Here the name Apollo was gaining substance with every passing day.”
President John F. Kennedy (center) with Vice President Lyndon Johnson (right), listening intently to Dr. Wernher von Braun (left) explain the models of the Saturn C-1 booster rocket during their inspection tour of the Space Flight Center.
Bob Gomel/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
Part IV
Projects Gemini and Apollo
President John F. Kennedy spoke before a huge crowd at Rice University’s football stadium on September 12, 1962, in Houston, Texas, on the nation’s space effort.
Robert Knudsen. White House Photographs. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston
17
“We Choose to Go to the Moon”
Rice University, September 12, 1962
This generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it—we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look to space, to the moon and the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag or conquered, but by a banner of freedom and peace.
—JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1962
Staying on schedule, President Kennedy left Cape Canaveral late on the afternoon of September 11, bound for Houston. The holiday atmosphere of the “space tour” was such that in a city of just over nine hundred thousand people, some three hundred thousand turned out to greet JFK upon his arrival. Addressing the adoring crowd, he said, “I do not know whether the people of the Southwest realize the profound effect the whole space program will have on the economy of this section of the country. The scientists, engineers, and technical people who will be attracted here will really make the Southwest a great center of scientific and industrial research as this nation reaches out to the moon. In this place in America are going to be laid the plans and designs by which we will reach out in this decade to explore space.” Among other things, Kennedy’s positive words were intended to repair damage from a gaffe Robert F. Kennedy had made while visiting the University of Indonesia, in Jakarta, the previous February. Asked by a student about the Mexican War of 1846–48, RFK replied, “Some from Texas might disagree, but I think we were unjustified. I do not think we can be proud of that episode.” Many Texans were furious at this sentiment, forcing the president to control the damage rather than risk losing votes in 1964.
Accompanying President Kennedy in Houston were Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Navy Secretary Fred Korth, Congressman Albert Thomas, and NASA administrator James Webb. Von Braun was also still in the entourage, constantly reassuring reporters that the moon flight would happen within the decade. “The people here realize the effect the space age will have on their city,” Kennedy told a crowd of well-wishers. “It is most appropriate that the manned spacecraft center should be located here in Houston, identified as the most progressive city in the area. From this place will be made the plans to take Americans to the moon—and bring them back.”
Kennedy spent that evening on the sixth floor of the Rice Hotel in downtown Houston. This was where he’d stayed exactly two years before, while preparing his speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, which successfully inoculated him from concerns over his Catholicism. This time, as he was ushered in, he was handed a welcome-back telegram from the Ministerial Association that read, “May God continue to guard and guide you in the leadership of our nation.” Anybody who telephoned the Rice Hotel after the president checked in was met with a switchboard operator saying, “White House.”
When Kennedy awoke on September 12, he read the very positive lead editorial in the Houston Press about the economic benefits of Project Apollo. “Sixty firms have moved into Houston–Harris County or expanded their activities here as a result of the opening of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Moonshot Command Post and Research Center,” the editorial boasted. “Twenty-five to thirty more have plans for Houston offices as yet officially undisclosed.” There was nothing Kennedy liked more than to read stories about how NASA was spurring business enterprise in the southern states.
After breakfast, Kennedy headed to Rice University, where a sun-drenched crowd of forty thousand eagerly waited at the football stadium to hear him speak about going to the moon. Even at ten in the morning, the weather was blazingly hot and humid, and the throngs of spectators fanned themselves madly as JFK arrived at the podium in a dark blue suit, with a white handkerchief in his breast pocket, white shirt, and blue tie, posing for photographs with NASA administrators before speaking. His hair shone reddish in the sunlike glare of camera lights. The Houston Press reported that “everyone perspired” in the “roaster” of a stadium, built in 1950, but the upbeat feeling was like that of a high-octane campaign rally. Only a single “I like Ike” sign, raised above the crowd’s heads, was a manifestation of protest.
The president’s speech had been drafted by Ted Sorensen, with important contributions from various NASA advisors and wordsmiths. Space-related articles in National Geographic were also consulted. But if the key phrasing of the speech belonged to Sorensen and NASA scribes, the spirit of raw aspiration was pure JFK. Knowing that his moonshot speech to Congress the previous year had been very buttoned down, Kennedy had decided that the Rice address would be a stem-winder, filled with the kind of soaring rhetoric that had thrilled the world in his “Ask Not” inaugural address. At Rice he would tie his patriotic belief in American exceptionalism directly to his prioritization of the manned space effort. A copy of the Rice speech, now kept at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, shows
all the president’s last-minute handwritten tweaks. Because the Rice Owls were usually slaughtered every fall by the Texas Longhorns in a lopsided college football rivalry, Kennedy personally added a comical line in promoting his Apollo moonshot: “And they may as well ask: Why climb the highest mountain? Why 35 years ago fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?”
Dr. Kenneth Pitzer, president of Rice University, introduced Kennedy to the roaring crowd, naming the president a visiting professor and declaring the afternoon as the opening salvo of Rice’s semicentennial year. Pledging to expand Rice’s science programs to meet America’s Space Age needs, Pitzer committed the university to providing graduate-level instruction in geomagnetism, Van Allen radiation, auroras, and atmospheric structures. (The next year, Rice would become the first university to announce the opening of a graduate school in space science.) The Houston Press went so far as to deem Rice the “educational pilot plant” of NASA.
When Kennedy took the rostrum, smiling boyishly, the crowd went wild. He looked suntanned and relaxed, undisturbed by the heat. Sitting directly behind him onstage were Lyndon Johnson, Albert Thomas, and other government officials. While those who sat in the stands—including ten thousand Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts—heard the president’s message perfectly, the dignitaries ensconced on the speaker’s platform behind him could barely understand a word. For the TV cameras filming the speech in color, Kennedy was downright effervescent. “I can remember it clearly today,” Bob Gomel, then a Life magazine photographer, recalled fifty years later. “He has his fist clinched on the podium, and his delivery was so dynamic.”
Speaking with poetic grace, perfect timing, and flashes of Harvard wit, Kennedy delivered an oratorical masterpiece. There was purposeful masculinity to his well-crafted words. Positioning science and technological research at the forefront of American life, he began his speech by praising Houston as the $123 million home of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center. “We meet at a college noted for knowledge, in a city noted for progress, in a state noted for strength, and we stand in need of all three,” he said. “For we meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and unforgettable ignorance. The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.”
What made the speech so exquisite was Kennedy’s reflecting on fifty thousand years of recorded history, from cavemen to jet pilots to astronauts. The president mocked those timid citizens who wanted to stay still on Earth a little longer, who didn’t aim for the moon, joining ranks with “those who resisted the horseless carriage and Christopher Columbus.” Discoveries such as Newton’s law of universal gravitation were evoked, as were such inventions as the steam engine, electric lights, and the telephone. “This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers,” Kennedy said. “Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward. So it’s not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this City of Houston, this state of Texas, this country of the United States, were not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward—and so will space.”
The words were vintage Kennedy, a distillation of his evolved thinking on space since Sputnik. At their core was an insistence that the United States, no matter the financial cost, had to dominate space. “The exploration of space,” he said, “will go ahead whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time. . . . Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolution, the first waves of modern invention, and the first waves of nuclear power. And this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it. We mean to lead it.”
Displaying what astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson later called “politically uncommon fiscal candor,” Kennedy laid out the costs of the moon program. “This year’s space budget is three times what it was in January 1961,” he told the crowd, “and it is greater than the space budget of the previous eight years combined. That budget now stands at $5.4 billion a year—a staggering sum, though somewhat less than we pay for cigarettes and cigars every year.” Bringing the abstract down to earth, the president said that space expenditures would soon rise further, “from 40 cents per person per week to more than 50 cents a week for every man, woman, and child in the United States.” Although he acknowledged the risk of the undertaking, he believed America’s hopes for peace and security rested on its seizing world leadership in space.
The heart and soul of the Rice speech connected NASA to both America’s frontier tradition and the concept of American exceptionalism. Pride, prestige, and national defense were major factors, and beating the Soviets was a geopolitical imperative, but the United States couldn’t be defined by its Communist adversary. Instead, Kennedy explained at Rice, going to the moon presented the grand historic challenge of an unexplored frontier, and was the noblest illustration of the American pioneer spirit in the twentieth century. In winged words, the president delivered one of his most timeless sentiments, placing Apollo among mankind’s noblest aspirations: “We choose to go to the moon—we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”
Coming toward his conclusion, Kennedy posed an exciting challenge to the nation. “Many years ago, the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, ‘Because it is there.’ Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail, we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.”
At those words, the stadium erupted in applause. The president had once again thrown down the gauntlet, tying the nation’s very heart to the goal of reaching the moon. With its grand gestures and motivational words, his speech ranks among the most inspiring ever delivered by an American president, and those in the audience felt a part of history. Terry O’Rourke, a camera-carrying high school sophomore, had ridden his bike to Rice to hear his hero speak, and experienced a transformative moment. “I remember the times, it was before Mustangs and miniskirts,” O’Rourke recalled in 2002. “The Cold War was real. It was scary. John F. Kennedy did something. He took the horror of the Cold War and made something beautiful, a dream for all of us. He was like a coach giving calls to the team. He was young, but he knew what the hell he was doing.”
As Kennedy exited the stage, he nodded at Webb and the other effusive NASA administrators with a wide grin. “All right,” he said. “Now you guys do the details!”
IT WAS INSTANTLY clear that Kennedy had scored a winner. Broadcast on the radio and nightly news broadcasts, the speech had an immediate effect beyond Rice Stadium, and his declaration that “We intend to be first” was discussed in TV and print media as a significant doubling-down on his original moonshot appeal to Congress. The echoes of the oration continued reverberating in the culture, until by the twenty-first century it ranked as one of the high points of JFK’s presidency. Film clips from the address have been played so many times on TV over the decades that people are often tricked into thinking they remember the speech’s galvanizing importance on the day it was delivered. “I certainly remember it,” Neil Armstrong said of Kennedy’s Rice speech in 2001, “but it’s a bit hazy because I’ve heard recordings of it so many times since, that you’re not certain whether you’re remembering or you’re remembering what you’re remembering. . . . And, of course, it’s been colored by the fact I read so many stories of ho
w that process actually occurred and what led to his conclusion to do that.”
The event remains a high-water mark in the history of Rice University and of Houston. Rice class of ‘63 graduate Paul Burka, an attendee who went on to become executive editor of Texas Monthly magazine, believed the “We choose to go to the moon” speech was eternal because Kennedy “encapsulates all of recorded history and seeks to set it in the history of our own time.” Rice student Jacob Scher, who also witnessed the presidential appeal firsthand, said Kennedy “blew me away.” Others, like Rice professor of chemistry Robert Curl, who won the Nobel Prize later in his career, recall being startled by the largesse of Project Apollo. “I came away in wonder that he was seriously proposing this,” Curl recalled. “It seemed like an enormous amount of money to spend on an exploration program.”
As Kennedy traveled from Rice down the Gulf Freeway to the temporary Manned Spacecraft Center’s Research Division complex on Telephone Road, more than forty thousand people stood along the route to wave and get a glimpse of him. Arriving at the center’s Rich Building (one of twelve Houston-area NASA sites), he was greeted by five of the Mercury Seven: John Glenn, Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, Gordon Cooper, and Deke Slayton. The astronauts escorted the president around the scientific displays and exhibits. Dr. Robert Gilruth, first director of the new Manned Spacecraft Center, along with associate director Walter Williams and the heads of Projects Apollo, Gemini, and Mercury, gave JFK a forty-minute briefing on the progress of research for the moonshot.
American Moonshot Page 39
