Neil Armstrong was in a sports car on Interstate 10, en route from Pensacola to Houston, when he heard, also on the radio, that Kennedy had died. Crushed by the news, he went blank with sorrow. Although he had never met the slain president, his life since Glenn’s orbit was dedicated to fulfilling Kennedy’s moonshot challenge of May 25, 1961. In the coming years, as Armstrong trained for his moon mission, first going into space on Gemini VIII in 1965 and then famously on his Apollo 11 mission with Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins in 1969, he embraced Kennedy as a true visionary leader. Armstrong, who was reluctant to give interviews, revealed years later that Kennedy’s moonshot, in his opinion, had only a “50-50 chance” of an astronaut landing safely on the lunar surface; nevertheless, he was 100 percent into the challenge whatever the odds. Even though Armstrong was nominally a Republican, he never forgot Kennedy’s leadership in space, and praised the thirty-fifth president whenever asked, until his own death in 2012.
What Kennedy had miraculously done was bring together Americans on the political right and left in a collective we’re-all-in-it-together endeavor of great scientific merit. Just days after her husband’s assassination, Jackie Kennedy met with President Johnson in the Oval Office, along with the new First Lady, Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson. As a widow, her face impassive, Jackie had one must-do request: renaming the site of NASA’s space launches in Florida, from Cape Canaveral to Cape Kennedy. She reminded the new First Couple of her husband’s May 25, 1961, pledge to Congress and his September 12, 1962, recommitment at Rice University. In a 1974 interview at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, she recalled telling the Johnsons that afternoon that her primary post-Dallas worry was that American citizens would forget about the moon pledge. “I kept thinking, that’s going to be forgotten, and his dreams are going to be forgotten, and I thought, ‘Well, maybe they’ll remember someday that this man did dream that.’”
There was no need for her to worry. On November 28, President Johnson fulfilled Jacqueline Kennedy’s wish at the end of his Thanksgiving message to the nation. Via Executive Order 11129, NASA’s Civilian Launch Operation Center on the Florida coast, he said, would be renamed the John F. Kennedy Space Center. Taking the realization even a step further, Johnson ordered that the military-run Cape Canaveral station (station number one of the Atlantic Missile Range) also be part of the new Kennedy Space Center. To help differentiate the double honor, the Air Force renamed the military launch site Cape Kennedy Air Force Station. These were the first official actions taken by the U.S. government to permanently honor John F. Kennedy. All the Mercury and Gemini astronauts were thrilled by the designation, but privately, they worried that Johnson wouldn’t be as fully supportive of American moonshots, that unbearably Congress would direct Apollo funding elsewhere. “The loss of John Kennedy had been an incalculable one to the space program,” Gordon Cooper believed. “While Lyndon Johnson assured everyone that he was equally supportive, we knew he didn’t have the total commitment that JFK had.”
When Wernher von Braun first learned of Kennedy’s assassination, he was devastated. Like the other NASA mainstays, he stayed glued to CBS News that grim weekend, listening to his friend Walter Cronkite extrapolate on the Dallas tragedy and basking in a slow-burning rage. As fate would have it, von Braun had been scheduled to dine with President Kennedy at the White House three days later, on November 25 with his wife, Maria. Instead, November 25 was the day of the president’s funeral, and von Braun put an X on his calendar. In his daily journal of December 9, 1961 (kept by his executive assistant, Bonnie Holmes), he said that the “most important thing” for Kennedy’s moonshot to be achieved was to “make sure Mr. Webb holds the line.” With Kennedy now gone, Webb and von Braun, sometimes at odds with each other, forged an iron knot in the heart of NASA. “What a waste,” von Braun told Holmes of JFK’s death. “What a tragic loss of a friend and a great leader.” According to Holmes, it was the “one time I ever saw him actually cry. He was very moved.”
Refusing to be beaten down or derailed, von Braun continued to work on his Saturn V rocket, burning the midnight oil to keep up the pace, using Kennedy’s death as a spur to push even harder at the Marshall Space Flight Center to fulfill the moonshot dream. The most meaningful way to honor the martyred president, he realized, was to keep Project Apollo on track at his “Huntsville School.” The other honorifics were secondary to the moonshot itself.
SHORTLY AFTER PRESIDENT Kennedy was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, on November 25, 1963, the space program achieved a major milestone: orbiting its first hydrogen-fueled rocket. The Atlas-Centaur rocket (both stages designed by General Dynamics Astronautics) brought America that much closer to the moon. This rocket had been assigned by Kennedy and Webb the important task of eventually “soft landing” an unmanned surveyor craft on the moon to record what the surface was like. While Kennedy was being eulogized for being the youngest individual and first Catholic elected to the American presidency, molding a sweeping civil rights bill, launching the Peace Corps, and negotiating the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty during the most tension-filled years of the Cold War, his championing of NASA and his dream of going to the moon were treated as the most magic moments.
At the time of Kennedy’s death, the public most closely associated NASA with the manned spacecraft programs: Project Mercury (1958–63), which tested the ability of one man in up to several hours in Earth’s orbit; Project Gemini (1962–66), in which two-man crews in one spacecraft were assigned a variety of tasks, including rendezvous and docking in Earth’s orbit with a target vehicle and moving around outside the spacecraft itself; and Project Apollo (1960–72), in which three-man crews were set on progressively more ambitious missions, culminating in lunar landings. Although the road was bumpy, the American public had collectively decided to honor the martyred president by funding Apollo throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. Just as Kennedy had instructed, NASA astronauts were training to reach the moon by the end of the decade.
The Apollo 11 rocket on its mobile launch platform just after rollout from the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida, on its way to Launch Complex 39A on May 17, 1969. Apollo 11, the first manned lunar landing mission, was launched on July 16, 1969, with astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins on board.
Science & Society Picture Library/SSPL/Getty Images
CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite holds up the New York Times during the Apollo 11 telecast, July 20, 1969, at 10:11 p.m.
CBS Photo Archive/CBS/Getty Images
Epilogue: The Triumph of Apollo 11
“The Eagle has landed!”
NEIL ARMSTRONG, JULY 20, 1969
For the next four years after Dallas, President Johnson and NASA administrator James Webb defended Kennedy’s Apollo moonshot pledge even as the Vietnam War and great social programs such as Medicare and Medicaid vied for funding and attention. There was no learning curve necessary for Lyndon Johnson when it came to prioritizing the American moonshot as part of the Great Society. NASA during the LBJ-Gemini years tested von Braun’s first Saturn 1B launch vehicle and then his immense Saturn V, the launch vehicle for lunar missions. Johnson’s attitude was perfectly summed up in his Atlantic University dedication speech in Boca Raton, Florida. “We cannot be the first on earth,” he said on October 25, 1964, “and second in space.” Kennedy’s pledge of putting a NASA astronaut on the moon remained a national mandate even as a counterculture youth revolution rocked the nation. Just nine days after his Atlantic University speech Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in the U.S. presidential election. In space-budget terms NASA (pro-Johnson) had defeated the air force (pro-Goldwater).
From 1964 to 1969, whenever Congress considered gutting the Apollo programs, Johnson evoked the martyred JFK with don’t-you-dare political mastery. In an ironic way, Kennedy’s death guaranteed Apollo lunar landing appropriations; if he had lived, Congress might have forfeited the budget, deeming the “e
nd of the decade” schedule for the moonshot impossible. Instead, NASA continued to employ thirty-six thousand people, hired four hundred thousand contractors, and operated facilities worth $3.65 billion whose chief purpose was achieving Kennedy’s moonshot.
On March 23, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson watches the launch of Gemini 3 space capsule on television in his office at the White House. A framed portrait of John F. Kennedy sits atop the television set.
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President Johnson, working closely with Webb, ably oversaw the Gemini missions, which ended in November 1966. This second phase of Kennedy’s going-to-the-moon pledge was a success with regard to its primary goal of conducting manned spaceflight on a routine basis. Sixteen different astronauts flew in Project Gemini and spent a collective 1,940 man-hours in space. LBJ publicly expressed his pride in fulfilling JFK’s pledge not to throw in the towel on the promise of lunar exploration, following the safe return of Gemini 12 to Earth. “Ten times in this program of the last twenty months we have placed two men in orbit about the earth in the world’s most advanced manned spacecraft,” the president said on November 15, 1966, in a written statement. “Ten times we have brought them home. Today’s flight was the culmination of a great team effort, stretching back to 1961, and directly involving more than 25,000 people in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Defense, and other government agencies; in the universities and other research centers; and in American industry. Early in 1962, John Glenn made his historic orbital flight and America was in space. Now, nearly five years later, we have completed Gemini and we know that America is in space to stay.”
All ten of the manned Gemini missions between 1965 and 1966 took place after Kennedy’s death, with Johnson as president. The New Frontier technocrats at NASA were now part of the Great Society. Much of the core leadership group at NASA stayed the same; Robert Gilruth, Hugh Dryden, and Robert Seamans, for example, continued to push the moonshot forward. The indomitable James Webb, rambling on without embarrassment about every aspect of NASA, continued to prod Project Apollo forward during LBJ’s presidency. Every day, his steel-trap mind thought about Kennedy, whose picture adorned his office wall.
For Webb the “Kennedy effect” during the Johnson years was the belief that if the United States accomplished the moonshot, then the nation could “do something for grandma with medicine” as well. Only after January 27, 1967, when a Cape Canaveral launch accident on Apollo 1 killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White in a fire that engulfed the cockpit during a training exercise, did Webb get pressure to resign. “We’ve always known that something like this was going to happen sooner or later,” he told the press after the Apollo 1 debacle. “Who would have thought that the first tragedy would be on the ground?”
Newspaper stories about the Apollo 1 disaster mentioned how Grissom was an integral part of Kennedy’s space corps. Now that Grissom was dead, his Liberty Bell 7 mission in the summer of 1961 was treated in a more heroic fashion than ever before by a grieving public. Nobody bemoaned the lost Mercury capsule of yesteryear (in 1999 the Liberty Bell 7 was hauled from the Atlantic Ocean floor at a depth of more than 15,000 feet, courtesy of modern tracking equipment). Just a few days before Grissom died, he completed a first draft of a memoir called Gemini: A Personal Account of Man’s Venture into Space. In it, he wrote a line that JFK would have treasured: “The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.” Grissom was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery, not far from the eternal flame on President Kennedy’s grave.
By October 1968 President Johnson had grown weary of Webb, especially his over-the-top defense of NASA protocol after the ghastly Apollo 1 fire. Webb was in the White House with LBJ and opined that his sixty-second birthday was near and that he might retire at that time. Seizing the opportunity to get rid of Webb, LBJ immediately accepted this musing as a firm resignation. And the president insisted that they go to the Press Room and announce it before Webb left the building. A resentful Webb later said he never even talked with his wife about quitting NASA, and it was a real shock. As if to compensate for the rude act, President Johnson presented Webb with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
History has treated Webb well. When the USSR collapsed in 1991, the declassification of a cache of top secret Kremlin documents proved that the Soviets had never stopped plotting their own moonshot (as he had argued). Some NASA cynics mocked Webb during the Johnson years for insisting that the Soviets hadn’t thrown in the towel, that the lunar race was real. Webb was right. Only in late 1967, when the Soviets’ N1 moon rocket blew up on the pad, killing Russian engineers and designers, did the Kremlin stop competing. And Webb’s tireless work ethic and beat-the-Russians drive wasn’t forgotten within NASA culture. When the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston became the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in 1973, visitors were greeted by Webb’s words displayed on a giant wall: THE WORLD OF SPACE HOLDS VAST PROMISE FOR THE SERVICE OF MAN, AND IT IS A WORLD WE HAVE ONLY BEGUN TO EXPLORE. Webb died that very year and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, not far from President Kennedy and Gus Grissom.
Former president Dwight Eisenhower continued to squawk that fulfilling Kennedy’s moonshot pledge wasn’t wise. Always seeking to hold down expenditures, and insisting that to race the Soviets in space was foolhardy, in 1965 he carped to Apollo astronaut Frank Borman that Kennedy’s moonshot pledge had been “drastically revised and expanded just after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. . . . It immediately took one single project or experiment out of a thoroughly planned and continuing program involving communication, meteorology, reconnaissance, and future military and scientific benefits and gave the highest priority—unfortunate in my opinion—to a race, in other words, a stunt.” Eisenhower died in Washington, DC, on March 28, 1969, of congestive heart failure, never learning that Kennedy’s “stunt” became a grand historic reality when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon that summer.
It wasn’t, however, just well-known Republicans like ex-president Dwight Eisenhower and Senator Barry Goldwater (brigadier general in the air force reserve) who wanted to slash the Project Apollo budget after Kennedy’s death. Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, a Democrat, ran a campaign to cut the manned lunar expedition by 10 percent from the 1965 budget. His wholehearted proposal came within four Senate votes of passing, proof that a significant segment of Americans wondered whether the expensive drive to put an astronaut on the moon still made sense. It was noticeable that in states where NASA was spending big dollars (e.g., California, Texas, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi), lawmakers were more pro-moonshot than in places such as Arkansas and Nebraska, which had no particularly large share of the business enterprise pie.
Just five months after Kennedy’s death, the New York World’s Fair opened in lasting tribute to JFK. Early in his presidency, Kennedy had signed the bill authorizing $17 million for the federal pavilion at the fair whose theme was “Man’s Achievement in an Expanding Universe.” With Kennedy’s moonshot vision fresh on people’s minds, the most popular displays at the World’s Fair were General Motors’ Futurama; New York State’s Tent of Tomorrow; Westinghouse’s Time Capsule; and the Transportation and Travel Pavilion (with an elaborate tribute to Project Apollo, including a simulated moonscape)—all, in a sense, an homage to JFK’s Space Age imagination. Also prominently displayed at the fair was astronaut Scott Carpenter’s spacecraft Aurora 7, a relic that reminded visitors of JFK’s New Frontier heyday. Then there were the Lunar Fountain, the Fountain of Planets, and the Unisphere (an imposing hollow steel globe with longitude and latitude lines circled by three “orbits” symbolic of NASA space satellites) at the Queens, New York, fairgrounds. Clearly, Kennedy had penetrated the psyche of America with his New Frontier technology challenge.
On January 29, 1964, the very Saturn I rocket Kennedy had inspected that past November was successfully launched from Cape Kennedy. Without a hitch, it sent nineteen tons
into orbit during this test flight. On a corner of the massive rocket, when guards weren’t watching, von Braun had engraved the initials JFK, in honor of his one true political hero. Von Braun had waited for that Saturn success to write Jacqueline Kennedy a letter of condolence on the death of her husband and to stress his commitment to the lunar program. Until Kennedy’s moonshot pledge was accomplished, von Braun would politick, coax, cajole, and maneuver Project Apollo to be funded by Congress.
February 1, 1964
Dear Mrs. Kennedy:
In our elation over the successful launch of SA-5 last Wednesday—the fifth in a successful string of launchings of Saturn I rockets, but the first capable of going into orbit—I must tell you how happy and grateful we are that this test came off so well. All of us connected with this undertaking knew only too well how eagerly the late President had been looking forward to this launching, which would at last establish the long-awaited American lead in the capability of orbiting heavy payloads. The trust he had placed in us, and his confidence that we would succeed, offered great encouragement but placed on us an even greater sense of obligation. I am enclosing a picture taken in front of the towering SA-5 rocket at Cape Kennedy on November 16th. The model at the left depicts the upper part of the rocket which is now orbiting the earth once every 94 minutes. The unit in orbit has a length of 83 feet and a weight of 37,800 lbs.
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