You have been overwhelmed with condolences from all over the world at the tragic death of your beloved husband. Like for so many, the sad news from Dallas was a terrible personal blow to me. We do not know a better way of honoring the late President than to do our very best to make his dream and determination come true that “America must learn to sail on the new ocean of space, and be in a position second to none.”
With deepest sympathy—Wernher von Braun
Within a few days von Braun received a handwritten response from JFK’s widow, composed on her personal stationery. It read:
February 11, 1964
Dear Dr. von Braun
I so thank you for your letter—about the Saturn—and about my husband.
What a wonderful world it was for a few years—with men like you to help realize his dreams for this country—And you with a President who admired and understood you—so that together you changed the way the world looked at America—and made us proud again.
Please do me one favor—sometimes when you are making an announcement about some spectacular new success—say something about President Kennedy and how he helped turn the tide—so people won’t forget.
I hope I am not the only one to feel this way—It is my only consolation—that at least he was given time to do some great work on this earth, which now seems such a miserable and lonely place without him.
How much more he could have done—but I must not think about that.
I do thank you for your letter.
Sincerely,
Jacqueline Kennedy
Restlessly during the five and a half years between Kennedy’s assassination and Neil Armstrong’s moon walk, von Braun never forgot Jacqueline Kennedy’s request. More than ever, von Braun started going to church regularly (as did Jackie). At public forums, von Braun evoked Kennedy every chance he could, proud they were hitched in history as surely as Thomas Jefferson was to Lewis and Clark. Von Braun was determined to be remembered as Kennedy’s space leapfrog avatar, not as the V-2 mastermind who built rockets constructed by forced labor from German concentration camps. For her fortieth birthday, in 1969, the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis gave Jackie Kennedy, his bride as of October 20, 1968, the perfect gift: a jeweled pair of Apollo 11 globe earrings in memory of Jack.
On November 9, 1967, von Braun’s Saturn V moon rocket made its first successful launch from the pad at the Kennedy Space Center. The spacecraft achieved an altitude of over 11,185 miles and a reentry speed of greater than 7 miles per second. The mission qualified both the Saturn V and the command capsule for further Earth-orbiting missions. If Kennedy had lived, he would have known on this day that the moon was truly in reach by the end of the decade. Von Braun’s Huntsville team not only designed the Apollo rockets that brought Americans to the moon but, later, also oversaw the development of the space shuttle propulsion system.
NASA was lucky to have a rocket engineer as talented as von Braun to work on Apollo. But he shouldn’t be remembered as an American hero. His direct role in the Nazi concentration camp labor programs, where thousands perished under inhumane conditions, makes him a pariah figure of sorts. As historian Michael J. Neufeld ably summarized in the German Studies Review: “Von Braun made a Faustian bargain with the German Army and National Socialist regime in order to pursue his long-term dream of exploring space, and late in World War II found out what that bargain meant. His career, however admirable in many other aspects, serves as an exemplary warning of the dangers of the amoral pursuit of science and technology in the twentieth century—and the twenty-first.”
As the Apollo 11 launch approached in the early summer of 1969, Democrats Bill Moyers (LBJ’s former press secretary) and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (future U.S. senator from New York) asked Richard Nixon, who had taken office that January as the nation’s thirty-seventh president, to name the spacecraft the John F. Kennedy. Presidential assistant Stephen Bull wrote White House advisor H. R. Haldeman about the possibility, noting that it might be “good politics,” and interpreted far and wide as an “act of graciousness.” Nobody important in the Nixon White House cottoned to the idea. Bryce Harlow, Eisenhower’s former White House assistant, fumed about the federal government’s having “gone far enough” in “Kennedyizing” NASA space ventures. White House advisor John Ehrlichman warned that if Nixon “fell prey” to naming the rocket after JFK, “the next step will be renaming the moon” after Kennedy “because NBC thinks it would be a good idea.” Haldeman decided “positively!!”—as he wrote in the margins of the Bull memo—against the Kennedy honorific. Not only did Richard Nixon not name the rocket after the man who defeated him in the 1960 presidential election, but he refused to evoke Kennedy in the days before or after the Apollo 11 lunar voyage.
Jackie Onassis smiles at photographer while her husband, Aristotle, admires the syrtaki skill of some of his friends dancing (in background) at a party celebrating the former First Lady’s fortieth birthday. She is shown wearing the Apollo 11–themed earrings presented to her by her husband two days before.
Bettmann/Getty Images
In the hot summertime of 1969 NASA’s three-staged Saturn V rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral. That July 16, the Apollo 11 crew headed to the moon, and Kennedy’s dream inched even closer to reality. Retreat wasn’t an option for there was no turning back. To honor the state of Texas, the three astronauts, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins, had brought a Lone Star flag with them on the mission. Armstrong also brought along a wing fragment extracted from the Wright brothers’ famous Kitty Hawk plane as a good luck charm; in doing so he forever linked NACA aviation history with NASA space exploration.
On July 20, a gangly LEM dubbed Eagle descended forward on a flat lunar field named Sea of Tranquility. In a moment of high tension radioed live into living rooms on Earth, the astronauts reported that their descent engines were kicking up dust. The first words spoken on the moon were “contact light” from Aldrin. This referred to an Eagle sensor that had lit, as anticipated, inside the lander. This was followed by Armstrong saying the iconic “Houston . . . Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
At the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center, all the technicians erupted in spontaneous cheers. Time itself, it seemed, had stopped the second Armstrong had uttered those unforgettable words. The score was the United States had landed, and the USSR had not—game over. It was as if a new millennium had opened up for the world to embrace with awe and wonder.
While Armstrong and Aldrin walked the lunar surface, Collins had been left piloting the Columbia command module around the moon. On his silent trip along the far side, he wrote, “I am absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.”
When Apollo 11 command module Columbia returned to Earth on July 24, 1969, having successfully completed its mission, von Braun’s life’s work had been accomplished and Jacqueline Kennedy’s request fulfilled. Watching the televised Apollo event from their home in Cape Cod were Jack’s ecstatic elderly parents. It was as if their son had won his moonshot bet with history. The 528 million moon-mad global citizens who watched the historic spectacle on TV delighted in the human achievement. It was as if America’s sins in Vietnam had been forgotten for a while. The astronauts wandered only a few hundred feet from the Eagle. But they opened up the moon for future travelers. “This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the creation,” President Nixon enthused to the astronauts with a broad grin of satisfaction. “As a result of what you’ve done, the world has never been closer together before.”
NASA had beaten by five months President Kennedy’s pledge to put a man on the moon by the decade’s end. After more than eight days in space, the Apollo astronauts splashed into the Pacific. At Mission Control in Houston, a sentence from JFK’s May 25, 1961, special message to Congress flashed on the large headquarters screen: “I believe that this nat
ion should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” An Apollo 11 logo also appeared on the NASA screen, offering the greatest honor of John F. Kennedy’s public career: “Task Accomplished July 1969.”
At around that time, an unknown citizen had left a lovely bouquet of flowers on Kennedy’s Arlington grave with a thoughtful card that read simply: “Mr. President, the Eagle has landed.”
The three astronauts chosen for Apollo 11, the first manned lunar landing mission. From left to right: Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, born in Montclair, New Jersey, in 1930; Michael Collins, born in Rome, Italy, in 1931; and Neil Armstrong, born in Wapakoneta, Ohio, in 1930. These space heroes made President John F. Kennedy’s dream a reality.
Ralph Morse/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Acknowledgments
Every fall semester at Rice University I teach two classes: “Twentieth-Century American Presidents” and “The United States in the 1960s and 1970s.” My students are always pleased to learn that John F. Kennedy’s famous space oration on September 12, 1962, was delivered at Rice’s football stadium and that astronaut Neil Armstrong said “Houston. Tranquility Base here,” on July 20, 1969, when the lunar module Eagle reached the moon. Local pride in all things NASA remains understandably strong in Greater Houston, and especially at Rice, where we have a first-rate Space Institute. One of my undergraduate students, an apprentice rocket scientist, Sam Zorek, helped me collect oral histories and better understand the complicated engineering aspects of space exploration. Immense thanks to Rice colleagues Erin Baezner, Beverly Konzem, Kathleen Canning, Carl Caldwell, David Ruth, Lora Wildenthal, Marie Lynn Miranda, Allan Matusow, and David Leebron. Campus historian Melissa Kean pointed me to a recently discovered batch of NASA documents at Rice’s Fondren Library, which I fruitfully mined.
When lecturing at Rice on the American space program, I love to recount the parting gesture of Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin. Just before climbing up the stairs of the Eagle to leave the moon, Armstrong asked Aldrin if he had deposited the NASA-sanctioned mementos they planned to leave behind. Aldrin, grateful for the reminder, reached into his shoulder packet, pulled out a package, and placed it on the lifeless lunar surface. Inside the packet were shiny medals honoring two Soviet cosmonauts: Yuri Gagarin (the first human to orbit the Earth, who had died in a 1967 MiG-15 crash) and Vladimir Komarov (killed in 1967, when his Soyuz 1 parachute didn’t open on descent from space). Also left behind by Armstrong and Aldrin was an Apollo 1 patch commemorating Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee (who had perished in the Apollo 1 on-ground accident of 1967) and a gold olive branch pin, symbolic of the peaceful nature of Apollo 11. This NASA satchel still rests there in the lunar dust.
By honoring the deceased cosmonauts, NASA was encouraging Soviet citizens to proudly participate in the epic American moonshot. And for good reason. Without the prod of Vostok and Voskhod scientists and engineers, Kennedy simply could not have convinced Congress to fund Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo. Between 1969 and 1972, NASA orchestrated five more Apollo missions, with a total of twelve men walking the moon’s surface, repeatedly fulfilling Kennedy’s dream, even collecting 840 pounds of moon rock. Kennedy’s other hope, that the U.S. and Soviet Union could collaborate in space exploration together, had to wait until Richard Nixon left the White House and Gerald Ford was president. On July 15, 1975, Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft launched from Earth within hours of each other. In two days’ time they docked. To all appearances, the Cold War space race between the United States and the Soviet Union had ended in partnership.
Reminiscent of NASA during its halcyon years, there was a lot of teamwork in the writing of this book, which took years of research. Most important were the archivists and staff of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum (Boston, Massachusetts); Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum (Austin, Texas); John Glenn Center at Ohio State University (Columbus, Ohio); Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University (Menlo Park, California); National Archives (Fort Worth, Texas); the National World War II Museum (New Orleans, Louisiana); the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (Daytona Beach, Florida); the National Air and Space Museum (Washington, DC); the Marshall Space Flight Center (Huntsville, Alabama); the Canaveral Research Center (Cape Canaveral, Florida); and the NASA History Office (Washington, DC). The first-rate collection of NASA documents at the University of Houston–Clear Lake, in Texas, was especially helpful. Likewise, my friend Mitch Daniels of Purdue University hosted me on campus, where I studied the papers of Gus Grissom and Neil Armstrong in the Special Collections Library.
Beginning in the summer of 1962, Kennedy installed a secret taping system in the White House, presumably to aid in the writing of a White House memoir someday. Up until his death, Kennedy would tape White House conversations, including some on space policy. The Kennedy tapes, safeguarded by the National Archives, were a tremendous boon in writing this book. As were the fine oral histories and space artifacts housed in the JFK Presidential Library. The John F. Kennedy Library Foundation—especially my friend Executive Director Steven M. Rothstein—helped me better understand the intertwined relationship between JFK, computer science, and modern technology.
Throughout my writing and research I spoke about JFK’s space policy with members of the president’s family. Ethel Kennedy and Congressman Joe Kennedy III had invited me to lecture on the American moonshot in 2015 and 2016 at their summer compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, for a gathering of distinguished guests. In 2017 I co-edited JFK: A Vision for America with the former president’s nephew Stephen Kennedy Smith, who proofread this book. Other members of the family who helped me include Rory Kennedy, Max Kennedy, Caroline Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Christopher Kennedy, Jean Kennedy Smith, and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.
Back in 1999 my book John F. Kennedy and Europe was published (with an introduction by the legendary speechwriter and counselor to our thirty-fifth president, Theodore Sorensen). At that time Ted suggested that a book about JFK’s leadership in space policy was needed. He was right. I began conducting interviews for this book in 2001, starting with Neil Armstrong and John Glenn. Over the years I’ve learned much from conversations with dozens of participants in the early years of NASA. Special thanks go to Sean O’Keefe (former administrator of NASA and my Sonoma County, California, camping friend) and George Abbey (the former director of Johnson Manned Space Center and a colleague of mine at Rice) for being sounding boards. NASA historian Bruce Odum—based in Huntsville, Alabama—offered me great insight on early rocketry.
John Logsdon, professor emeritus of political science and international affairs at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, edited an early draft of this book. He was the founder in 1987 and longtime director of GW’s Space Policy Institute. His John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon (2010) and The Decision to Go to the Moon (1970) were foundational readings. He is a true gentleman.
I’m deeply indebted to Roger D. Launius—chief NASA historian from 1990 to 2002—for twice proofreading my entire manuscript. I’ve never known a scholar more generous with his time. Nobody knows more about NASA history than Launius. He is a national treasure. Two of his most recent books—The Smithsonian History of Space Expedition (2018) and Apollo’s Legacy (2019)—were indispensable.
Cold War historian Yanek Mieczkowski, the author of Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment (2013), and a first-rate academic historian, gave this manuscript a close proofread. Michael J. Neufeld, author of Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (2007), thoroughly edited my chapters pertaining to the V-1 and V-2 on two different occasions. The National Air and Space Museum is blessed to have such a fine intellectual as Neufeld serving as senior curator.
The honor roll of friends who helped me out in this project include Brian Lamb, Steve Scully, David Rubenstein, Jamie Kabler, Rodney Krajca, Marie Arana, Emma Juniper, Ian Frederick-Rothwell, Ben
Riley, Melissa Schnitzer, Leslie Berlin, Mark Baily, Jon Meacham, Paul Hendrickson, Mark Winkleman, Walter Isaacson, Scott Hubbard, Duvall Osteen, David Gergen, Nate Brostrum, Chip Wiser, Neal Thompson, William Webster, Andrea Lewis, Ben Barnes, John Csepegi, Patt Morrison, Kyle Longley, John Lewis, Clayton Maxwell, Ted Deutch, Geoffrey Cowan, Jill Krastner, Larry Temple, Orly Jaffe, Helen Galen, Linda Forehand, Cynthia Barrett, Meredith Cullen, Irwin Gellman, James Denham, Ted Widmer, Mark Updegrove, Dennis Fabisak, Kathryn Hillhouse, Jessica Lowenthal, Luke Nichter, Kabir Sehgal, and Louis Paul.
It’s been a joy working with the New-York Historical Society, established in 1804, on all things related to U.S. presidential history. The director, Louise Mirrer, is a brilliant historian and friend, who is a pleasure to collaborate with on POTUS projects. Others at NYHS who deserve thanks include Dale Gregory, Alexander Kassl, Jennifer Schantz, and Alliy Drago. For nearly two decades Washington’s Speakers’ Bureau has organized my public lectures. Great thanks to Bernie Swain and Harry Rhoods Jr. for finding ways for me to travel around our nation to lecture on U.S. presidential history and leadership.
I serve on the board of trustees of Brevard College in North Carolina. The president, David Joyce, arranged access for me to visit the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute, which has a partnership with Brevard. This was a Kennedy-established NASA watch spot from which Gemini and Apollo missions could be tracked. An amazing place to look at the stars high in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It is likewise an honor to serve on the National Council for History Education’s (NCHE) Board of Directors. Together we’ve explored new ways to teach U.S. space history in public schools.
American Moonshot Page 49