The American Experiment

by David M. Rubenstein

  DR: There was a person leading that program for the Germans named Wernher von Braun. He developed missiles that could actually go all the way from Germany to England?

  DB: Dr. Wernher von Braun was a genius rocket scientist of unbelievable magnitude, but he also did not flee Germany when Hitler came in, and instead took money from Hitler to test his rockets. They built the Peenemünde base along the Baltic, where they started testing what Hitler called the “vengeance weapons,” V-1s, V-2s, and V-3s.

  It is Wernher von Braun from Nazi Germany, in the middle of World War II, who’s able to fire a rocket over sixty-two miles up, which means breaking Earth’s gravity grip. It’s the beginning of humans being able to go into and out of space.

  Then he built this V-2 rocket that could arc upward around 210 miles. V2s launched from Holland rained down on London during World War II. Some of the rockets went astray, some were duds. But in late ’44, early ’45, the V-2 was quite a sophisticated missile developed by the Germans.

  DR: When World War II was toward the end and it was clear the Nazis were going to lose, did Wernher von Braun say, “I made a mistake. I was on the wrong side”?

  DB: Von Braun recognized that Hitler was doomed and he started hedging his bets. He forged some documents, took the V-2 missile blueprints, designs, and materials, and put them on train cars. He snuck out of Peenemünde with 137 Nazi engineers. They constituted von Braun’s top rocket scientist team.

  Von Braun’s team hid in the Bavarian Alps. Von Braun was determined to surrender to the U.S. Army, because his rockets were built by Jewish slave labor at the Dora campus, a subcamp of Buchenwald, under the most heinous conditions you can imagine. There were also some Italian POWs put to work, but mainly Jewish people.

  He was worried he’d be tried for war crimes in London, because he’d almost destroyed their city. And nobody wanted to live in Russia or work for Joe Stalin.

  So von Braun decided to cut a deal with America. He sent his little brother, Magnus von Braun, out on a bicycle. A private in the army from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, ended up training a gun on him, and Magnus said, “My brother is the great rocketeer Wernher von Braun.”

  Army intelligence checked it all out, and they found out it was true. Under a thing called Operation Paperclip, we brought all of those Nazi German rocket scientists to live in Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, as prisoners of peace, and to start building rockets for the U.S. Army out there, working in West Texas and New Mexico.

  DR: Not all the German scientists came here. A number of them were captured by the Russians. Then the Russians started developing their own missile technology?

  DB: That’s right. With von Braun, we had the future genesis of missiles, but the Red Army had also been able to capture a lot of engineering blueprints and Nazi rocketeers.

  The United States kept thinking Russia was behind in technology. We underestimated them. From 1945 to ’49 is the only time in U.S. history that a country has a nuclear monopoly. But by 1949 the Soviets get the atomic bomb and Russia develops the R-7, the world’s first ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile].

  By the time of the Korean War, we are recognizing slowly but surely, “Uh-oh, the Soviet Union is ahead of us on missiles.” So we send Dr. Wernher von Braun and his ex-Nazi rocket team to Huntsville, Alabama, to take over the Redstone Arsenal, and we start building rockets for military purposes and space exploration out of Huntsville, which overnight becomes Rocket City, U.S.A.

  DR: The United States, despite that effort, is shocked in 1957 when Sputnik is launched. How big was Sputnik?

  DB: You hear so much about Sputnik in October 1957. It’s the size of a beach ball. But it created a lot of commotion, the beep-beep-beep, the signals we picked up.

  It happened on Dwight D. Eisenhower’s watch. But Eisenhower was telling the truth in saying, “Let’s not overreact to Sputnik.” U.S. satellite technology was moving in a very good direction, and that’s true.

  But the Democrats saw this as an issue to hammer Eisenhower with. By late ’57 and early ’58, John F. Kennedy is talking about the missile gap with Russia, the space gap. Lyndon Johnson is maneuvering in the Senate to create NASA.

  In 1958, as a result of Sputnik, Eisenhower creates NASA as a civilian space agency. Guess who didn’t like the idea of NASA? A lot of army generals, air force birds, navy people, because they’re like, “Why are civilians going into space?” But the point for both Eisenhower and Johnson in 1958 was not to be seeming to militarize science and space exploration.

  DR: The Soviets were the first to launch somebody into space as well—Yuri Gagarin. What year was that?

  DB: Yuri Gagarin goes into space in April 1961, and John F. Kennedy starts promoting space in various ways. I have quite a letter that he wrote to a young person at Princeton University. A student wrote to him, and Kennedy says, “We’ve got to find a way to leapfrog the Soviets’ program instead of going, ‘You put Sputnik, we put Explorer, you put a dog in space, we’ll put a monkey in space.’ ”

  I went back and watched the four Nixon-Kennedy debates, and you could see John F. Kennedy scoring body blows on Nixon on two points. One is when Kennedy says to Nixon, “You told Mr. Khrushchev last year in your kitchen debate that the United States is number one in kitchen appliances and color television. I’ll take my TV in black-and-white. I want to be number one in rocket thrust.”

  Then, in another debate moment, Kennedy says, “If Nixon is elected, I envision a Soviet flag planted on the moon. I want an American flag planted on the moon.” So the campaign grabbed hold of the moon in ’60, but here in April ’61, the Soviets put Gagarin in space on Kennedy’s watch, not Eisenhower’s, and he is concerned and angry.

  John F. Kennedy did not like losing. He was a cold warrior. He never lost a political election in his life. He won Congress in 1946, ’48, ’50. He won in the Senate in 1952 and ’58, and he won the presidency in ’60. In one story, when he’s playing chess with an aide of his, Kennedy is about to get checkmated and he knocks the whole table over and says, “I guess we’ll never know who won.”

  He liked to win. And beating Russia became preeminent.

  DR: When he became president, he selected as the head of NASA James Webb. Who was he?

  DB: James Webb is a genius technocrat marine from North Carolina. He had an early understanding of radar, which emerged out of World War II. Many people said they didn’t want the NASA job. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson insisted that Webb take it.

  And Webb, in the 1960s, is a mastermind of congressional appropriations. He was able to raise $20 billion, or $185 billion in today’s terms, to go fund the Apollo project to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

  DR: Our first man in space was Alan Shepard. How long was he in space, and when did that happen?

  DB: Alan Shepard goes up on May 5, 1961, as a direct response to Gagarin. Kennedy played it so that if Shepard died in space—he went up for fifteen minutes that day—if he died, Lyndon Johnson was going to get blamed. But when instead Alan Shepard was a huge success, it became like folklore overnight. JFK saw the media raves, how the whole country prayed for Alan Shepard.

  There’s a direct correlation between Alan Shepard, May 5, 1961, and Kennedy’s speech to Congress on May 25, ’61. Shepard, a great American hero from New Hampshire, came from a family that was on the Mayflower, and he was one of the most interesting of all the astronauts to read about.

  DR: Kennedy makes that speech before Congress, but it wasn’t only about the moon. Was the moon the major part of that speech or it just happened to be mentioned?

  DB: It was a major part. But when Kennedy came to Capitol Hill to give in effect a “second inaugural” address, when he did the moon thing, he got very light applause, no cheering. When he left in the limo to go back to the White House, he told Ted Sorensen, his speechwriter, “I bombed.” He thought it would go over bigger.

  But Kennedy was wrong. The next morning, the Washington Post said it was great. Many Republicans sai
d, “We’ll fund going to the moon. It’s an American objective.”

  At NASA, everybody said, “Kennedy’s nuts. We have no way to get to the moon.” McGeorge Bundy, the national security advisor, had the temerity to go to JFK and say, “This is a grandstand ploy by you.” And Kennedy said, “Mac, you don’t run for president in your forties if you don’t have a certain kind of moxie.”

  DR: Where did the idea actually come from? Did somebody go to Kennedy and say, “You should do it by the end of the decade”?

  DB: That’s the key question. Probably Wernher von Braun.

  Jack Kennedy’s brother Joe Kennedy died in World War II in a navy aviation accident as a hero. They took a B-17 plane and flew it over the English Channel, aiming to go into France to blow up places where we thought V-1, V-2, and V-3 parts were. Instead Kennedy’s plane blew up in the sky. He basically died taking out von Braun’s hardware.

  And here it is 1953. Jack Kennedy and Wernher von Braun are judges for Time’s Person of the Year together in New York, and they get along fabulously. Kennedy didn’t hold his Nazi past against him, because they were twentieth-century men. Kennedy trusted in von Braun, and von Braun said, “We can go to the moon.”

  DR: It turns out that the Soviets really didn’t have a plan to get a man on the moon, is that right?

  DB: They were trying to get to the moon, but they didn’t know how to do it. They didn’t have the technology they were bragging about.

  In 1958, a guy named Jack Kilby and others at Texas Instruments down in Dallas created the transistor and the microchip, modern computers. NASA was the first beneficiary of new American computer technology in the sense that they were able to adapt it and adopt it. The timing worked really well for von Braun, Kennedy, the Cold War, computer chips, radar. What Kennedy did in a genius way was sell going to the moon like nobody’s business.

  DR: Was there any scientific reason to have humans go to the moon versus just have a spaceship go there?

  DB: When we land on the moon with Eagle, Neil Armstrong had to make a radical landing so we didn’t go into a crater, which a robot would not have been able to do, most likely, at least not in those days. Then, at one point, a valve part was broken, and Armstrong jammed a pen into it and saved the day. There are practical reasons humans are the greatest computers of all.

  Besides that, people don’t care as much about a robot or mechanical rovers. Humans, heroes going to space, is what the American people were funding.

  Kennedy framed it as beating Russia with the first human being going to the moon. He framed it in sports metaphors, and basically said, instead of a proxy war like Korea, what if we’re in a good healthy science competition to see who can go to the moon first?

  DR: As the race to the moon is going forward, did people come in to President Kennedy and say, “We can’t do it, it’s not worth it, it’s too expensive”?

  DB: Yes. Once Kennedy said we were going to the moon, at some meetings—and we have the Kennedy tapes to listen to, they’re spectacular—he will say, “So is going to the moon the number-one thing?” They’ll say, “It’s a lot of things. We want to do science and we want to do this satellite.” And he said, “Those can wait six months. I’m telling everybody we’re funding this to go to the moon.”

  Kennedy sticks with it. He calls the sky the new ocean, the new sea to be explored. And it’s not just going to the moon, it’s all the satellites we’re starting to put up, like Telstar in 1962, where we can start beaming images from the U.S. to Great Britain, or meteorological satellites. Kennedy would go all over giving speeches about spin-off technology, including in medicine—things like CAT scans, MRIs, affordable walkers, kidney dialysis machines, heart defibrillators. The technology that spun off from funding NASA hit the medical sector.

  DR: Speaking of technology, did those astronauts really drink Tang?

  DB: You hit the real key question. They drank Tang, but NASA did not invent Tang for the astronauts. It was a product on its own that capitalized on space mania. Everything started being marketed as “the new space age,” including Tang.

  DR: The most common question asked of astronauts, certainly by children, is, “How do you go to the bathroom?” What did NASA come up with for the astronauts?

  DB: Kathryn Sullivan, the first woman to walk in space, said the single most asked question is, “How do you go to the bathroom in space?” And it’s not a pleasant story to tell you. Now they’re finding ways to do it, but in those days, if you had to go, you would just go into a bag or tube or on yourself.

  DR: John Kennedy has to go to Texas for the reelection campaign. As he’s getting ready to go, he tours the Johnson Space Center in Houston?

  DB: He goes regularly to Texas. Albert Thomas was the congressman from Houston, and he was the head of congressional space appropriations.

  Kennedy is worried, with civil rights in the South, with James Meredith integrating Ole Miss, with problems in Alabama, that a lot of those conservative southern Democratic senators were going to denounce his Justice Department. So, as a trade-off for being quiet, so to speak, they would start getting big contracts in places like Houston, Huntsville, Biloxi, Hampton [Virginia], Jacksonville.

  Kennedy saw space as a way to create jobs in infrastructure and technology. FDR had the TVA and Grand Coulee Dam. Eisenhower had the interstate highway system and Saint Lawrence Seaway, which connected the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. That’s a big part of all this.

  DR: Did Lyndon Johnson lobby to have NASA headquarters put in Houston?

  DB: Lyndon wanted it desperately in Houston, and he got it. So much money went into Houston. Remember, Kennedy barely won Texas by a hair in 1960. So he was looking at ’64, running for reelection, and he needed Texas. Getting money into Houston was a big deal.

  DR: On his last day, in Dallas, did he not want to have an astronaut with him?

  DB: Gordon Cooper, one of the Mercury astronauts. There were six Mercury missions in the Kennedy years, and all six were successful. Cooper was going to come with Kennedy to Dallas, but he was detained for a NASA exercise and couldn’t be with Kennedy.

  When Kennedy was shot in Dallas, he was on his way to give a speech about space and technology, how we were beating Russia, why NASA was paying off. In the mid-’60s, NASA was getting about 4.4 percent of the federal budget annually. Today it’s a third of one percent or something like that. They used to say in NASA, “No bucks, no Buck Rogers”—meaning going to the moon is expensive.

  DR: One of Kennedy’s great legacies is the effort to get mankind to the moon, and that did succeed before the end of the decade. When did “moonshot” become part of our language?

  DB: My book is called American Moonshot, and the phrase now means a lot of things. It really means can-do-ism, engineering excellence, and the private sector, Congress, the White House, universities, all working together for a big goal, a moonshot goal, short of war.

  Everybody has different views of what the moonshot should be right now, but the actual phrase comes from baseball. There was a batter named Wally Moon for the Los Angeles Dodgers who would hit these towering home runs in the Los Angeles Coliseum. Then Vin Scully, the radio announcer, would say, “There goes the moonshot, over the left field fence.” In the late ’50s, that term “moonshot” started tracking. And in Houston, newspapers started calling it Moonshot Command Center.

  Today, Joe Biden talks about a cancer moonshot or, as I said, Buzz Aldrin talks about Mars as the new moonshot. There are people who think the new moonshot should be an Earth shot to deal with climate change. But it’s still part of our national discussion. How do we all work together for a grand objective?

  DR. FRANCIS S. COLLINS on the Human Genome Project

  and Scientific Research

  Director, the National Institutes of Health; Former Director, International Human Genome Research Institute

  “We are making progress at a pace now that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago, and that’s going to continu
e.”

  The biotech revolution of the past several decades had its original roots in the pea plant crossbreeding experiments of an Austrian monk, Gregor Mendel, in the 1850s and 1860s, though his value was not recognized until many decades later. Mendel was uninterested in promoting the fact that he had effectively discovered heredity. Not an unimpressive accomplishment for anyone, let alone a scientifically untrained monk.

  By contrast, the value of what Francis Crick and James Watson discovered in their Cambridge University lab in 1953 was recognized immediately as truly historic. They discovered the double-helix structure of DNA, and thereby the structure of life itself. The result for those two scientists was not only international acclaim, including a Nobel Prize, but the beginning of a global race to determine how best to understand and use genetics to enhance health, cure illnesses, and extend life.

  Part of that race involved sequencing all of the genes in the human genome and thereby giving the world the first complete genetic picture of a human. The U.S. Human Genome Project, begun in 1990, was funded largely by the federal government and was initially led by none other than the now legendary James Watson. But in 1993, he was succeeded by Dr. Francis Collins, a medical doctor and geneticist, who led the international project to its successful conclusion in 2003. (There was a race to map the human genome, and a private sector effort was led by Craig Venter. In 2000, President Bill Clinton announced that both efforts had succeeded essentially simultaneously in completing a draft map.) For this effort, Dr. Collins was later given the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

  The American-led effort to map the human genome was breathtaking not only in its complexity, but also in its success. The result was a whole new world in which genetic solutions could improve the human condition. One might think that was enough of a lifetime accomplishment to enable Francis Collins to run a few victory laps and settle easily into a less demanding life.