It was Abraham Lincoln who authorized the first transcontinental railroad during the Civil War. How audacious. By the time I was born, architecturally stunning train stations bustled at the heart of almost every American city, and as a child I would marvel at the mighty locomotives pulling the nation forward in their billowing wake. I’m old enough to remember with fondness the original Penn Station in New York City, which was modeled on one of the great ruins of Rome. While those ruins remain today, the old Penn Station does not—having been demolished in the 1960s, ostensibly in the service of progress.
I still love taking the train, but I now have to leave New York through the new Penn Station, one of the most dispiriting public buildings in America. It’s a warren of dirty underground hallways, and it embodies the opposite of audacity; it is utilitarian, cost-beneficial, and utterly uninspired. Comparing the old Penn Station to the new, Yale architecture professor Vincent Scully Jr. lamented, “One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat.” And while I like to ride Amtrak’s high-speed Acela line, it is also a bit disappointing—a reminder that the United States long ago lost its lead on rail to the great trains of Europe and Asia.
My work often takes me to Washington, D.C., and as I pull into the beautifully renovated Union Station, I begin to feel better. I emerge to see the mighty Capitol dome, and I wonder: If we were building the Capitol today, would we make it so bold and beautiful? Its stateliness embodied the audacity of a nation. In its chambers were passed laws of sweeping import. More recently, it has been largely a house of small-mindedness, as politicians have maintained power by essentially promising to take government out of the business of big ideas.
American greatness has largely been driven by audacity. Thirteen far-flung colonies challenged, and defeated, the mighty British army. A Constitution written more than two centuries ago has outlined a stable form of government. A multiracial and multiethnic nation is a source of strength. A free and open society has allowed us to push the boundaries of human knowledge and exploration.
I often think about this national proclivity toward boldness when I step out on the porch of my favorite fishing cabin and look to the sparkling night sky. Seeing all those stars and a brilliant moon, I reflect on how, during my childhood, the idea of travel into the heavens existed only in the imagination of fiction writers such as Jules Verne. But then we sent a man to the moon, launched robotic explorations to Mars, and, with the Voyager spacecrafts, have now sent beacons of our species beyond the bounds of our own solar system. How audacious.
Today the space dreamers that capture public attention are private-sector mavericks such as Elon Musk and Richard Branson, whose goals keep us relatively close to Earth. Although NASA still boasts brilliant scientists and determined public servants, it increasingly has faded from public view into just another quiet governmental bureaucracy. Somehow the desire for bold exploration has ebbed among our elected officials.
I remember a time when roads were bumpy and often unpaved. Then we built a network of highways that opened up the United States to the ease and convenience of travel that had been unimaginable, until it became a reality. The investment in our infrastructure has had incalculable benefits to commerce and mobility. How audacious we were. But now I see crumbling roads and bridges wherever I go. Time has taken its toll on the concrete and asphalt beds, but it has taken an even bigger toll on our national ambition.
It is remarkable that today we have a world of information at the swipe of a finger and global positioning satellites orbiting overhead that tell us exactly where we are. There was a time, not so long ago, when a phone was just about summoning a voice on the other end of a line. But smart men and women in government, academia, and industry foresaw a world of a globally connected network of computers. In a few short decades, this audacious spirit has transformed all aspects of modern life, even if we now take it for granted.
It would behoove us to remember that America was conceived and built by risk-takers and explorers. We have been a land of movement, new thoughts, and unbridled audacity. One of the hallmarks of our national character is that we have, in the past at least, been quick to adapt to change. We have even thrived in eras of great transformation. For most of my lifetime, this has been a two-way conversation between government and society at large. We expected ourselves and those we elected to office to dream big and experiment, without fear of the failures that are invariably part of tackling tough challenges. This mindset led us to construct the Panama Canal; conquer the Great Depression; build highways, dams, and airports; create a social safety net; make progress on racial justice; lead a burgeoning scientific revolution; and so much more. Much of this was led by the government, no matter how unpopular that idea is with some politicians today. But there was a time when this role for government was considered a bipartisan mission.
It is true that big actions can also have big unintended consequences. The transcontinental railroad not only opened up the frontier, but it also sped the subjugation of the Native Americans and the exploitation of Chinese immigrant labor. Our highway system helped spur the primacy of the automobile, with its attending urban sprawl and pollution. The era of dam building provided water for us to drink and grow our crops, generated electricity, and protected against floods, but we now know that many dams also had severe environmental consequences. We cannot be afraid to act big, but we also cannot be afraid to reassess and address problems that may arise.
Unfortunately, in recent years, that can-do spirit has become nearly extinct in Washington, even as the engine of ingenuity burns bright in the entrepreneurial sectors of our citizenry. When did we accept a can’t-do spirit from so many of our national leaders?
I am not sure when this erosion began. But these days the mission to the moon feels like more of a mission accomplished, if you’re an optimist. A cynic might call it a dead end. Space may soon be a playground for the wealthy, but it is no longer a horizon of national importance. If you had told me that I would outlive the first great era of human space exploration, I never would have believed it. When the next era begins, and it most surely will, I’m not likely to be here to witness it. Will my children? Will my grandchildren?
When President John F. Kennedy came to Houston in September 1962 to issue a call to explore space, I was a young reporter excited to cover a big national story. I remember thinking that the real unknown was whether we could do it. I would never have thought to wonder whether we would care once we had. The Soviet Union was beating us in a great race for dominance, and in reality this was the biggest driver for our commitment. We as a nation felt vulnerable and lacking in self-confidence. But President Kennedy and his speechwriter Ted Sorensen crafted an inspirational call to action: The United States was going to the moon. And the president made it seem that all of us would be going along for the ride.
“But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? . . . 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.”
The president called it a choice, but it felt like a patriotic duty, full of optimism with a dash of dread at the thought that we might fail. For those of you who were not yet born, who did not live through it, this moment must now seem pregnant with portent in ways we could never have imagined. Who knew that this vibrant young president would be slain on a trip back to Texas a little more than a year later? Who could have imagined that after a handful of landings on the moon, no human from any country would thus far get close to doing it again? How naive would you have seemed if you said in September 1962 that the Cold War would be over in about thirty years without a single direct shot being fired between the United States and the Soviet Union?
Trying to summon that day in Houston, I keep returning to an image: The grass at Rice Stadium, the site of the speech, was damp. I remember it wasn’t raining, and for years I thought perhaps it had been watered. But when I checked recently, I found out that the temperatures hit the nineties that day. And in Houston the heat dances with the devil of humidity. However, I don’t remember it being hot. Perhaps that was because the president, well poised in his dark suit, seemed immune to it.
I was about to hear a speech calling for human beings to slip the bonds of Earth, and a shiver of remembrance shot through me. Five years earlier, I also had been standing on wet grass pondering the heavens. Sputnik, the first manmade satellite, had been launched by the Soviets in 1957. It was the shock to our national confidence that would culminate in Kennedy’s speech and the race to the moon. But while Sputnik scared American policymakers, it awed me and many of my fellow countrymen. We were told that you could see it in the night sky as it passed overhead, a dot of light in orbit. One clear evening I headed out to search for it. As my bare feet stepped on the dew-dropped lawn of the house that Jean and I had just bought, I looked up and there it was.
Standing there at Rice Stadium, remembering Sputnik, I also thought of a far more distant moment, the first memory I have of my life. I was about four years old and in the yard at my maternal grandmother’s house in Bloomington, Texas. “Put your hands in the dirt, Danny,” I remember her saying. “Feel the richness of the dirt and then look to the stars.” The dirt was indeed rich, and as I grasped at it, I remember looking up. The sky above was cloudless and twinkling, and it seemed unending. I was of this land, was the message from Grandma Paige. And yet I believe I sensed, even then, that there would be other horizons to ponder.
Audacity is not without risk, and exploration has always been about uncertainty as well as knowledge. It’s about forging forward in the face of likely disappointment, even death. Kennedy knew this. He ended his speech with this exhortation: “As we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.”
When we did land on the moon by the end of the 1960s, there was a sense that we were just beginning. A piloted mission to Mars was surely just around the corner. Boys across the country dreamed of being astronauts. (Sadly, at the time, it was a career goal that seemed implausible for girls.) Even I, into my fourth decade of life, hoped to travel into the great void—perhaps to be the first journalist in space. I feel a bit self-conscious to reveal now that I tried to keep myself in especially good physical shape in the late 1960s and 1970s, thinking, Who knows? I might get the call to strap on a spacesuit.
That, of course, didn’t happen. And more broadly—and importantly—most of the predictions for piloted spaceflight never came true. The timeline for a trip to Mars still stretches onward with its own uncertain horizon. Our national will has changed. We seem to find money for tax cuts for the wealthy and foreign wars, but not enough for the exploration of space.
In the decades since the moon landing, the biggest stories around human spaceflight have been the tragedies, not the triumphs. In 1986 came the shock and catastrophe of the Challenger space shuttle explosion, which killed all seven crew members aboard, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Kennedy’s warning that the journey into space would be “hazardous and dangerous” was tragically written against the blue sky in plumes of smoke and debris. As I sat at the anchor desk that day covering the breaking news, struggling, along with a shocked nation, to understand what had happened, I remember showing viewers the haunting pictures of the high school students in Concord, New Hampshire, who had gathered to see their teacher go into space. The memory still moves me.
A teacher heading into space had also inspired schools across the country to bring television sets into the classroom so that children could watch the Challenger launch live. And that night, when President Ronald Reagan addressed the nation, he had a special message for these young eyewitnesses to tragedy. “I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.”
President Reagan promised to continue the “quest in space,” and indeed, after a moratorium, the space shuttle program was renewed, but another tragedy would hit with the explosion of the Columbia space shuttle in 2003 and the deaths of seven more astronauts. Today we have largely retreated from piloted spaceflight, aside from the orbiting International Space Station. We understand that the difficulties of sending men and women to Mars have proven more substantial than we nonengineers might have thought all those years ago. And in the past few decades, unpiloted space exploration has led to far greater scientific discoveries than the Apollo mission ever produced. Even some scientists think that sending people into space isn’t worth the cost and risk.
And yet the core of that speech by Kennedy in Houston was about something much bigger than debating a NASA budget or even space exploration. I keenly felt that day that we as citizens were being asked to embrace a larger purpose, one in which failure was not only an option but perhaps was also likely. The risk, however, was one we needed to take, together, as one nation—for ourselves, our species, and our planet Earth, with its wet grass underfoot. President Kennedy understood that there is something in the human character that can rally to big causes. A nation is strengthened when it can focus on a purpose. This impulse can be harnessed to ill effects, like wars of conquest. Or it can be used to turn unlikely dreams into reality.
At the same time the United States was closing in on the moon, the country embarked on a mission back on Earth that couldn’t have been more different in spirit or objective. Whereas the space race was one of sharp national competition, this other effort would be deeply collaborative. The goal was to eradicate the deadliest killer known to man: smallpox. Like our voyages to the moon, this unprecedented public health mission was grounded in the audacious belief that our government could do something seemingly impossible, something that would change the course of human history.
In the twentieth century alone, an estimated three hundred million people had died of the disease, and we were determined to eliminate it entirely. The United States had been declared free of smallpox in 1949 after a major vaccination campaign. But the disease lingered, mostly in places we called the Third World at the time. The hope was that with proper determination and strategic deployments of public health workers, the entire world could be freed of a scourge that had been killing people by the millions since at least the time of the pharaohs in ancient Egypt. But there were many skeptics.
The effort was led by an unassuming epidemiologist from Ohio, D. A. Henderson (born just 150 or so miles away from a fellow Buckeye, Neil Armstrong). He had led a U.S.-sponsored vaccination program in West and Central Africa to great success. And many at the World Health Organization (WHO) took notice. There was a vote to see whether they should launch a global campaign, and the organization decided to do so by the slimmest of margins. The head of the WHO was livid, worried that the mission would be doomed to failure, much as what had happened with an earlier effort to eradicate malaria. So Dr. Henderson persuaded the United States to lead the effort to make sure his nation would feel responsible for success.
After a global campaign comprised of countless doctors, nurses, public health workers, and volunteers, smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980. It remains the only disease to have been fully defeated in the history of the planet. There is now hope that two more diseases could be added to the list: Guinea worm disease, whose eradication is being led by former president Jimmy Carter, and one of the plagues of my own childhood, polio.
The eradication of smallpox has been called the greatest medical event in human history. But the science behind it was relatively simple and well known. There had actually been a form of a smallpox vaccine since the eighteenth century; what was required was the ability to dream big, to work with others, and to see the destiny of the United States as improving the lives of those beyond our borders. This is the America of which I am exceptionally proud.
We see such ingenuity in America, from our great research universities to the proverbial garages of Silicon Valley, to all the decent men and women who go to work each day trying to make the country better as teachers, labor leaders, researchers, doctors and nurses, reporters, social workers, and so much more. We see incredible innovation in the private sector, but without governmental leadership, we are being held back. We do not need a heavy hand, just wise policies and an understanding that some things are so big or risky that only the government can be the catalyst for action.
One of the greatest challenges of our time is the need to generate abundant and nonpolluting energy. Early dreamers learned how to harness the wind to power their ships; later we learned the power of steam, and then fossil fuels. But today we see the dangers of our warming planet. Bold leadership could rally the nation to a revolution in clean energy. Already, governmental policies on energy efficiency and rebates for renewables have had a real effect. We need much more, but distressingly the current political tides seem to be carrying us in the opposite direction. I cannot fathom the shortsightedness of this policy. It should be clear to our political leaders that a new energy strategy could be the next technological revolution America could lead. But we are ceding the momentum to others such as China. Our planet and our national prosperity are already suffering from the decline in our leadership.
At a time when we desperately need to think boldly about the challenges before us, we find many of our politicians arguing that we need to be less ambitious. We hear from too many in Congress about why action is difficult, why something cannot be done. Many of our government agencies have now been turned over to people who are actively seeking to undermine the mission of those agencies. And our national needs go unaddressed. It is impossible to try to freeze ourselves in the status quo, and even more impossible to return to some mythic and misremembered glorious past. We need to remain a nation of new ideas and new initiatives, or we will cease to be the strong and daring country I know and love.