Everyone has oceans to fly, if they have the heart to do it. Is it reckless? Maybe. But what do dreams know of boundaries?
—AMELIA EARHART
The first hundred days of Kennedy’s presidency, while dazzling in style compared with the Eisenhower era, were short on tangible accomplishments, beyond the establishment of the Peace Corps on March 1, 1961. National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy famously compared the young administration to the Harlem Globetrotters novelty basketball team: a collection of experts capable of anything they chose to do; they only had to decide. Therein lay the difference and the reason that the Kennedy team hadn’t “made a basket,” as Bundy put it in the April 3 issue of The New Republic: they had to decide, with constancy, which policy opportunity to fight for first.
Absent the urgency of a historical moment, we’ll never know where Kennedy might have chosen to focus his attentions, because on April 12, 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to journey into outer space. Taking off from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard Vostok 1, a two-module spacecraft propelled by a modified version of the mammoth R-7 rocket that had launched Sputnik, Gagarin completed a single low orbit with no serious problems, returning to Earth just 108 minutes after liftoff. The bracing New York Times headline said it all: “Soviet Orbits Man and Recovers Him; Space Pioneer Reports: ‘I Feel Well’; Sent Messages While Circling Earth.” With that jarring Soviet success, Kennedy’s political honeymoon ended abruptly.
The Soviets had chosen their first cosmonaut wisely. Air force major Gagarin was extremely photogenic, whip smart, fearless, physically fit, and a delightful extrovert with a constant twinkle in his eye. He looked every inch the Soviet hero, with a life story to back it up. Born on a collective farm in the village of Klushino (renamed Gagarin after his death in a 1968 airplane crash) and trained as a foundryman at a steel plant near Moscow, he, along with his family, had been battered by the famine and privation of World War II. After induction into the Soviet Army, he attended aviation school and rose through the ranks of the Soviet Air Force. In 1960, he was among thousands of candidates screened for the cosmonaut program, during which a Soviet Air Force doctor evaluated his personality: “Modest; embarrasses when his humor gets a little too racy; high degree of intellectual development evident in Yuri; fantastic memory; distinguishes himself from his colleagues by his sharp and far-ranging sense of attention to his surroundings; a well-developed imagination; quick reactions; persevering, prepares himself painstakingly for his activities and training exercises, handles celestial mechanics and mathematical formulae with ease as well as excels in higher mathematics; does not feel constrained when he has to defend his point of view if he considers himself right; appears that he understands life better than a lot of his friends.” Rising through the selection and training process, he became one of the Sochi Six, an elite, Mercury-like group selected for special manned space training.
The Kremlin well knew the immense geopolitical benefit of beating the United States in technological know-how. Laika the dog had become posthumously famous as the first Earth creature in outer space, symbolizing Soviet technological prowess to countries around the globe. Nikita Khrushchev, a fine propagandist, knew that his first cosmonaut would drive the USSR’s prestige even higher, his mission ranking with the voyages of Ferdinand Magellan and Christopher Columbus in the history of human exploration. “The road to the stars is steep and dangerous,” Gagarin later admitted. “But we’re not afraid. . . . Spaceflights can’t be stopped. This isn’t the work of one man or even a group of men. It is a historical process which mankind is carrying out in accordance with the natural laws of human development.”
As Major Gagarin prepared for his takeoff that April, he was unusually quiet—though not nervous, as judged by his heart rate. The thought that he might be soaring to a fiery death occurred to him but didn’t haunt him; how his private life would irrevocably change if he returned to Earth as a space pioneer did. Their imaginations inflamed by state media, the Soviet people would see him as the living embodiment of Communist excellence. Self-aware and self-contained, Gagarin knew fame would be a double-edged sword.
While the Vostok 1 rocket was similar to that used for Sputnik, the space vehicle mounted at its tip was far larger, weighing 5 tons compared with Sputnik’s minuscule 184 pounds. It included the cramped capsule into which Gagarin was strapped (or suspended, as he later recalled) and another module containing retrorockets intended to guide the vehicle back to Earth. Fearing that the effects of zero-gravity conditions would cause their cosmonaut to become lightheaded or incoherent, the Soviets had designed Vostok 1 to be piloted by ground personnel, with Gagarin taking control only in case of emergency. Video and radio communications monitored his mental state throughout the mission, satisfying experts at flight control that his faculties were unimpaired.
Gagarin’s 108 minutes in flight were nearly all above the sixty-two-mile (one-hundred-kilometer) mark recognized as the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space. With all the aerodynamics working as planned, he completed a single orbit of Earth and then headed toward touchdown in a rural area near the Volga River. After reentry the capsule properly deployed its parachute, but still slammed to the ground with such force that its six-thousand-pound bulk bounced several times before coming to rest. Fortunately, Gagarin was not on board: he had ejected at seven kilometers (4.4 miles), parachuting safely into a farmer’s field. The fact that the Soviets had not engineered a means for Gagarin to return inside his space vehicle was one indication that the Kremlin was rushing to get its man into space first, however rudimentary his mode of return.
For many years, the Soviet Union guarded the secret of Gagarin’s parachuting from the capsule. The Fédération Aéronautique International (FAI), the official body recording aerospace records, required that for a record to be awarded the pilot must land with the vehicle. To maintain the Soviet record that Gagarin had landed with Vostok 1, the Kremlin perpetuated a lie until the 1990s. In addition, to preserve the exaggeration that Gagarin had circumnavigated the Earth, the Soviets fabricated the locations of the launch and landing; in reality, the orbit was not quite the entire circumference of the Earth.
In April 1961, the U.S. government did not know about Gagarin’s fudges and in-flight tribulations. Kennedy dutifully sent a telegram to Soviet premier Khrushchev, congratulating him on the historic launch, but the president was shaken by the fact that the Soviets had beaten America in the manned-space race. He feared, as his naval aide put it, that he was “walking on thin ice” and that the GOP and the press would excoriate him for the Soviet win. At an afternoon news conference, when asked about the Soviet space juggernaut, Kennedy responded with a sprightly, half-distraught air, acknowledging that indeed “we are behind” on manned spaceflight, but refreshingly, he refused to heighten expectations for NASA. “However tired anybody may be—and no one is more tired than I am,” he said in a wistful tone, “it is a fact that it is going to take some time.”
Kennedy’s honest answer lacked the inspirational rhetoric of his “Ask Not” inaugural address, perhaps reflecting the fact that he’d yet to recognize space as the marquee goal of his New Frontier, and as the most visible American way to win the Cold War. On the campaign trail it was easy to mock the Eisenhower administration for the “missile gap.” But he was now commander in chief. The sheer financial cost of Mercury and Apollo was daunting. Understandably, he wanted to ponder his space policy options in his first months in the White House without feeling hemmed in. Recalling a meeting held on the very day Gagarin orbited Earth, speechwriter Ted Sorensen later noted that JFK “had no real grasp of the enormous technology involved and remained skeptical about the cost and importance of space missions.” The president, however, knew that putting a man in space was the new sine qua non of global prestige. Forced to dwell on Gagarin for even a few seconds, Kennedy turned testy, swatting the conversation away. Yet for the next couple of weeks he filled his black aviation bag with NASA reports for bedtime reading.
Time magazine’s Hugh Sidey, perhaps the top White House correspondent in the spring of 1961, with frequent access to Kennedy in the Oval Office, called the president’s disposition to Gagarin’s accomplishment “disturbing.” When the space race was evoked, the conversation petered out. Overall, Sidey admired JFK—unobjectively so, critics carped—but he also knew that Kennedy’s long-standing criticism of Eisenhower’s go-slow approach to space had hit reality after his own inauguration. Once armed with CIA intelligence that the United States was in fact ahead of the Soviets in the less-newsworthy but tangibly more significant development of ballistic missile technology, Kennedy had adopted much the same cautious position toward space as his predecessor. Rather than focusing on headline-grabbing space launches, Kennedy was looking elsewhere for measurable accomplishments—mainly, fixing an economy burdened with rising unemployment, slumping profits, and depressed stock prices in order to define the New Frontier as being about economic prosperity.
Nonetheless, Gagarin’s flight was a public relations disaster that was hard to ignore. Just hours after Webb learned of the Soviet feat, he wrote Keith Glennan, his predecessor, about his nagging concern that the American system lacked a galvanizing ingredient: “My own feeling, in this, and many other matters facing the country at this time, is that our two major organizational concepts through which the power of the nation has been developed—the business corporation and the government agency—are going to have to be reexamined and perhaps some new inventions made.” Webb believed there was no talent deficiency per se in the Kennedy administration, NASA, the U.S. military branches, the private sector, or academia—only a lack of a grand collective goal that transcended mere containment of Soviet expansionism.
Kennedy may have been somewhat aloof at that point but, realizing that the United States would have to send a Mercury astronaut into space soon, he asked Webb to have NASA work double shifts. Following this direct order to grind out a solution, engineers at Huntsville and Hampton tested timetables, calculations, and probabilities. Under pressure from the president, NASA narrowed the field for its first manned mission to two candidates. Either John Glenn or Alan Shepard, each training hard and competing in Virginia and Florida, would be the first American in space, and he’d get there soon.
When Shepard first learned that Gagarin had rocketed into orbit, he was livid. On March 24, NASA had scrubbed his planned mission due to a technical problem. Shepard, by training and personal disposition, wanted to beat the Soviets, not play second fiddle. It frustrated him that Eisenhower’s old science advisor George Kistiakowsky had spooked the president by warning that NASA wasn’t yet ready for manned space, and that if a Mercury astronaut were prematurely launched on a Redstone rocket, the attempted suborbital flight would be “the most expensive funeral man has ever had.” Chris Kraft, the first NASA flight director, summed up the post-Gagarin frustrations at Cape Canaveral perfectly: “I didn’t like it worth a damn,” he recalled. “But the only thing to do was get back to work and do our jobs.”
Unable to endure any more asleep-at-the-wheel criticism amid the mounting national self-doubt that followed Gagarin’s flight, Kennedy faced the fact that the New Frontier needed a defined space policy. While the world lionized “Ga-Ga” (as Gagarin was affectionately nicknamed), the American public was troubled and astonished by the Soviet feat, and felt diminished by the USSR’s space propaganda win. “Of course, we tried to derive the maximum political advantage from the fact that we were first to launch our rockets into space,” Khrushchev admitted in his memoirs. “We wanted to exert pressure on the American millions—and also influence the minds of more reasonable politicians—so that the United States would start treating us better.”
Life magazine canvassed people from around the world, finding that in all corners of the globe, people knew the score: USSR, 1; United States, 0. An African student in Paris told Life that “the Americans talked a lot. Russia kept silent until success came. The results speak for themselves.” (When flying over Africa, Gagarin had acknowledged citizens of the continent “trying to break the chains of imperialism.”) A German office worker said, “This makes one realize Soviet boasts of ultimate superiority may not be groundless after all.” An Egyptian youth summed it up: “The Americans are licked.” None of those interviewed by Life mentioned the undeniable and very dull fact that U.S. Earth satellites, while lacking a cosmonaut with a movie star’s smile, were even then netting essential astrophysical data for future space exploration. Nor did they know that the Saturn 1 rocket that von Braun’s team was developing at Huntsville, with its first-stage thrust of 1.5 million pounds, was technologically far superior to the Soviets’ guided-rocket capabilities.
At home, even though Kennedy maintained a 70 percent approval rating in the polls, there was an almost tangible sense of an administration slipping backward and losing support. Even in the first hundred days, Kennedy was already eyeing his reelection effort in 1964. For history’s sake, he needed to validate his razor-close win over Nixon in 1960. In part, that was a natural continuum for a hard-driving, ambitious politician. But that competitive imperative also sprang from JFK’s desire to make the United States the world’s sole superpower and guarantor of global peace.
ON APRIL 14, Kennedy addressed the issue of NASA with considerably more vigor, convening a meeting of space advisors Webb, Wiesner, Sorensen, and Dryden, as well as David Bell, his administration’s budget director. Bell’s job was to remind Mercury enthusiasts in the group that every dollar spent on space took a dollar away from domestic programs that affected men, women, and children in real time. Or, alternatively, every space dollar raised taxes on all Americans. There was a slim overlap of what the nation could not afford to miss and what the country could actually afford to do. All presidents deal with the same conundrum all day long, across an array of issues, but in the case of space, the potential costs were gargantuan.
Because Time correspondent Hugh Sidey was present for much of the meeting, Kennedy gave something of a theatrical performance that afternoon, as he tilted his chair back precipitously, ran his fingers through his thick hair, and laid out his dilemma. Whenever Gagarin was mentioned, the president would bristle. “Is there any place we can catch them?” he asked, according to a record of the conversation. “What can we do? Can we go around the moon before them? Can we put a man on the moon before them? What about Nova and Rover? When will Saturn be ready? Can we leapfrog?”
Sometimes in history, a single word or concept can trigger a blinding flash that illuminates a presidency or the life of the nation. Leapfrog, a word Kennedy first used in his 1960 letter to Princeton University student William Everdell, became that kind of word, taking on a life of its own in NASA culture. Rather than suggesting NASA should skip the methodical steps needed to thoroughly and safely achieve plans already in place, the president was pushing for an audacious goal beyond manned-orbital spaceflight, where the Soviets already owned bragging rights. “If somebody can just tell me how to catch up,” JFK implored at the meeting. “Let’s find somebody—anybody. I don’t care if it’s the janitor over there, if he knows.” Picking arguments apart, asking probing questions, Kennedy sought allies for his bold contention that the next NASA move had to be very dramatic. But with Lyndon Johnson away in Africa and Asia, the president was deprived of the fervid support his vice president would likely have offered for something as phenomenal as a moonshot.
“It was not much of a discussion,” Sidey recalled, noting that the others present sidestepped JFK’s leapfrog question by asking for more time to ponder. But Kennedy didn’t have more time. The bell of history had rung. It was time to lead.
One day before the meeting, an aide had reminded the president that Franklin Roosevelt had announced in the first year of World War II a production schedule of fifty thousand airplanes annually, a target the corporate manufacturing sector said would be impossible to achieve. But the goal was met—and exceeded. Later, though knowing little himself about the science of nuclear physics, Roosevelt created the Manhattan Project, teaming America’s best and brightest scientists under the leadership of J. Robert Oppenheimer to invent the atomic bombs used against Japan.
While the cause of victory in war could inspire the kind of government-business partnerships, patriotic dedication, and at-all-costs inspiration that drives fast, far-reaching technological advances, huge peacetime infrastructure projects could also harness a nation’s ability to achieve the seemingly unachievable. In its fast-paced history, the U.S. government had completed the Erie Canal in 1825, the Panama Canal in 1914, and the Hoover Dam in 1935—each of them beginning as an engineering challenge and ending as a symbol of national indomitability and excellence. Conquering these supposedly impossible tasks lifted the nation’s spirits, advanced knowledge within an array of professions, and produced immediate innovation-based economic benefits that justified their high federal price tags.
As a governmental expenditure, the multibillion-dollar leapfrog that Kennedy sought didn’t fit neatly into either the wartime or infrastructure category. It would not immediately open economic floodgates as rural electrification or hydropower dams might. It could not keep America safe from military attack like the production of fifty thousand warplanes. It might be considered a third category, exploration, but the U.S. government had rarely been interested in funding epic journeys simply to fill in maps of Earth or sky. It might also be considered a type of big-stick diplomacy in the vein of JFK’s idol, Thomas Jefferson, who used the Lewis and Clark Expedition and other missions to the American West as part of an ongoing struggle with Spain west of the Mississippi. “Jefferson’s expeditions and much-publicized explorers had been the masks of his conquest,” wrote historian Julie Fenster, “the tools of diplomacy that allowed the stakes to rise without forcing a military response.”
Aware of historical timing, Kennedy sought a manned-space leapfrog that would transform the goal of expanding human knowledge (like Lewis and Clark) into irrefutable proof of American exceptionalism—humbling the Soviet Union without turning the Cold War into a shooting war. If the mission he sought could, in effect, lead to long-term peace with the Kremlin, it would more than cover whatever cost it incurred. Being in the White House only three months hadn’t given Kennedy enough time to reorient NASA policy; but he was poised to do exactly that.
According to Ted Sorensen, the April 14 meeting was where “Kennedy began to really get the feel of what this whole thing might mean to the Presidency and to the United States.” Now the mission would truly begin: Finding the right space strategy to once again uncork America’s spirit of scientific achievement, engineering ingenuity, and global leadership.
KENNEDY’S MEETING ON space took place on a Friday evening, breaking up at dusk. About an hour later, the night plunged directly into disaster when a small fleet set sail from Nicaragua, bound for a swampy inlet on Cuba’s southern coast known as Bahia de Cochinos: the Bay of Pigs.
Launched five days after Gagarin’s flight, the hastily conceived Bay of Pigs invasion, planned under Eisenhower, was an attempt by “Brigade 2506,” comprising fifteen hundred Cuban exiles armed, trained, and funded by the CIA, to topple the Communist government of Fidel Castro, which had itself overthrown the pro-U.S. Batista regime two years before. Overly complex and poorly conceived, with little margin for setbacks, the invasion was doomed from the outset. News of the plans leaked within the Cuban community of southern Florida and was soon transmitted to Castro’s government. The counterrevolutionaries came under immediate fire as they began their landing, soon finding themselves outmanned and outgunned by the twenty thousand troops and air support Castro had ordered to the beaches. In and around the Bay of Pigs, Brigade 2506’s hopes dwindled after just one day, although the battle lasted officially for three. Hundreds were killed on both sides, including some Americans, and more than a thousand Cuban Americans were taken prisoner. The debacle was a demeaning defeat for the anti-Castro forces, for the CIA, and ultimately for the White House, where Ted Sorensen recalled Kennedy as “anguished and fatigued” and in “the most emotional, self-critical state I had ever seen him.”
On Monday night, April 17, Kennedy hosted a gala at the White House, maintaining a cool and graceful demeanor for guests while still seething inside. Soon enough, though, he retreated to the Rose Garden in his white tie and tails, unable to maintain the charade any longer. In the span of one stinging week, the young president had been thoroughly embarrassed both militarily and scientifically. To some extent, it was his own fault: he’d been ill prepared, governing as though through a sideview mirror, and his lack of resolute leadership had been successfully exploited by the Soviet Union and its client state, Cuba.
By itself, the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion may not have influenced American space policy. However, following on the heels of the Gagarin flight, it made for a nasty one-two punch that damaged Kennedy. The press poured criticism down on him. He was plagued with the inexorable pressure of time. After stumbling into the Cuban mess, he was learning the hard way, in the course of a crucial thirty-day span, that the federal government didn’t lead itself. His political survival dictated that he become more involved in and closely attached to the foreign policy issues that defined his sense of the United States and its position in the world. At one White House meeting, his brother Robert, the attorney general, ripped into the CIA. “All you bright fellows,” RFK said. “You got the president into this. We’ve got to do something to show the Russians we’re not paper tigers.”
THE FUROR OVER the lopsided Bay of Pigs defeat continued for months, and as Kennedy surely suspected in the Rose Garden on April 17, it would go on to stain his legacy forever. On April 19, when Cuban forces mopped up the last remnants of Brigade 2506, the president scheduled a meeting with Vice President Johnson and Webb. Reflecting on the April 14 meeting about space policy, JFK asked LBJ to investigate the status of NASA’s programs and his opinion on the best possible leapfrogging mission. A five-point memo issued by the president for Johnson on April 20 laid out two overriding concerns: settling on the right mission and ensuring that NASA and related agencies were capable of delivering an all-out, do-or-die effort to make that mission happen. That memorandum stands as a clear manifesto of the president’s thinking in the aftermath of Gagarin’s flight:
1. Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the Moon, or by a rocket to land on the Moon, or by a rocket to go to the Moon and back with a man. Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?
2. How much additional would it cost?
3. Are we working 24 hours a day on existing programs? If not, why not? If not, will you make recommendations to me as to how work can be speeded up?
4. In building large boosters should we put emphasis on nuclear, chemical or liquid fuel, or a combination of these three?
5. Are we making maximum effort? Are we achieving necessary results?
If Kennedy’s impatience could be read in his April 20 memorandum, Johnson’s steadfast ambition could be as easily read in the dateline on his response: April 28, only eight days after receiving the president’s requests for answers. Most of Johnson’s quickly compiled memorandum told JFK why NASA was important in terms of international relations, making the salient point that “dramatic accomplishments in space are being increasingly identified as a major indicator of world leadership.” Johnson had cast a wide net compiling his response, receiving important input from not only Webb, Dryden, and NASA deputy administrator Robert Seamans, but also von Braun, science advisor Wiesner, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, air force general Bernard Schriever, navy admiral John Hayward, budget director Bell, and three nongovernment leaders: George Brown of engineering and construction firm Brown and Root, Donald Cook of American Electric Power, and Frank Stanton of CBS. Johnson’s evaluation contended that the United States had greater resources than the USSR for attaining space supremacy, but that the country lacked the willpower and drive to marshal those resources in a dramatic fashion. But one point in the April 28 memo from Johnson seemed to capture Kennedy’s full attention:
Manned exploration of the moon . . . is not only an achievement with great propaganda value, but it is essential as an objective whether or not we are first in its accomplishment—and we may be able to be first. We cannot leapfrog such accomplishments, as they are essential sources of knowledge and experience for even greater successes in space. We cannot expect the Russians to transfer the benefits of their experiences or the advantages of their capabilities to us. We must do these things ourselves.
Johnson’s “Evaluation of Space Program” document was thought provoking. However, Kennedy hadn’t asked if or why America needed a major goal in space; he had asked which and how. The vice president’s memo allowed that circumnavigation of the moon and a manned trip there could be accomplished by 1966 or 1967, but then it slid back to a recommendation that less complicated NASA goals could be attained more rapidly.
Although everybody of importance at NASA and among the president’s cabinet and scientific advisors weighed in on what Kennedy should prioritize, it might well be that a letter from von Braun, dated the day after Johnson’s memo, made a better and more persuasive argument. A genius at cutting to the chase, von Braun named and ranked four possible goals for the space program, including establishing an orbiting space laboratory (“we do not have a good chance of beating the Soviets”), circumnavigation of the moon, and placement of a radio transmitter on the lunar surface (“a sporting chance”). Von Braun saved his highest grade, “excellent chance,” for landing a crew on the moon. “The reason,” he explained, “is that a performance jump by a factor 10 over [the Soviets’] present rockets is necessary to accomplish this feat. While today we do not have such a rocket, it is unlikely that the Soviets have it. Therefore, we would not have to enter the race toward this obvious next goal in space exploration against hopeless odds favoring the Soviets.”
Von Braun was the “somebody—anybody” whom Kennedy had sought at the April 14 meeting. Ever since they served together helping to select Time’s Man of the Year in 1953, they had been political allies of sorts, tied together by a shared repugnance for Eisenhower’s low-key response to the Soviet technological advances in space. Von Braun was the ally who could bring the kind of burning vision and take-charge aggressiveness to space exploration that JFK himself was intent on bringing to government. In that respect, he was similar to J. Robert Oppenheimer, who provided scientific leadership to Roosevelt’s Manhattan Project. Sensing his opening to build a moon rocket, von Braun gave clear and concise answers to the president’s five questions about how the United States could leapfrog the Soviets in space. In the most formidable example of can-doism NASA had available, he stated that the technological journey would be tough, but a moon landing was attainable. To get to the moon, NASA would have to develop a launch vehicle far more powerful than von Braun’s eight-engine Saturn; but it could be done—and von Braun, having worked on the Nazis’ hyperaccelerated V-2 program during the war, knew precisely what could be expected of scientists on a grueling round-the-clock schedule. “We were being rushed—as usual,” von Braun recalled, “by Russia’s great strides.” But, he contended, “with an all-out crash,” he believed NASA could accomplish landing men on the moon in 1967–68.
Having received the consensus from Johnson, Webb, Dryden, and von Braun that a moonshot was a difficult but credible option, Kennedy continued to consider his next move as other developments battled for his attention. Internationally, the fallout from the Bay of Pigs fiasco had yet to subside, even as he and his brother were secretly arranging a summit meeting with Khrushchev, to be held in Vienna on June 4. Domestically, the Congress of Racial Equality had begun grabbing headlines with its so-called Freedom Riders campaign, organizing mixed-race groups of young people to travel by bus from Washington, DC, to New Orleans as a way of protesting the nonenforcement of Interstate Commerce Commission rules prohibiting racial discrimination in interstate travel. Like the rest of America, the president watched television coverage with dismay, as the Freedom Riders faced beatings and other violence at the hands of white bigots in Southern states.
Preoccupied with these and other matters, Kennedy contemplated America’s lunar future only in fleeting moments as NASA continued to prepare for the more immediate future of a manned Mercury flight. For over a year, Americans had been hearing that such a mission was close, but the success of Gagarin’s flight had upped the ante. In response, NASA made the bold but risky decision that it would encourage television and radio coverage of the eventual launch, offering a vivid contrast to the secrecy insisted upon by the Soviets, who were fearful of the optics should their launches fail. JFK himself dreaded the risky launch for the same reason, fearing that any technical malfunction, glitch, or human tragedy broadcast to the world would be blamed on his White House.
A new launch date of May 5 was announced. On May 4, Lieutenant Commander Victor A. Prather, a navy flight surgeon working for NASA, prepared for one final test of the full-pressure Mark IV space suits that had been created for the Mercury astronauts by B.F. Goodrich. The day began hopefully. Prather and another scientist, Malcolm Ross, flew in a Strato-Lab V balloon to a height of 113,740 feet (21.5 miles), a manned-balloon altitude record for decades to come. The flight lasted nearly ten hours and ended as planned, with a smooth landing in the Gulf of Mexico. There, Prather’s copilot, Ross, was plucked from the water by a navy helicopter after almost falling back into the sea while trying to grasp the sling lowered for him. When it was Prather’s turn, the same problem occurred. The sling had been designed for people in wetsuits or street clothes, not cumbersome twenty-five-pound space suits. With little room to hold on, Prather slipped, fell, and was pulled under as water rushed into the open face guard of his suit. Navy divers couldn’t get to him in time, and he drowned—giving NASA, and Kennedy, a reminder of the deadly peril of rushing astronauts into space prematurely.
EVEN THOUGH PRATHER’S flight ended tragically, it had also fulfilled its mission, allowing NASA to send one of the Mercury Seven into suborbital flight the very next day, certain of the Mark IV space suit’s efficacy at high altitude.
That first American in space would be Alan Shepard Jr., a physically fit, towheaded navy test pilot from New Hampshire, whose ancestors had come to America aboard the Mayflower. Proud of being an eighth-generation New Englander, he had grown up on the family farm and attended a one-room elementary school. Obsessed with model planes, at age twelve he built a full-size glider, strapped himself in as if he were Orville Wright at Kitty Hawk, and took flight, sailing at an altitude of some four feet before crashing.
Shepard grew committed to becoming a top-tier military aviator in the mold of Jimmy Doolittle. When airborne, he had calm judgment and the gift of unflappable concentration. During World War II, he studied at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, earning his bachelor of science degree in 1944. The next year, he began flight training at Corpus Christi, Texas, and Pensacola, Florida, perfecting the art of aircraft carrier aviation. By 1950 he was admitted to the highly competitive Patuxent River Naval Test Pilot School in Maryland, where he became a military aviation superstar. Going on to test the F-3H Demon, F-8U Crusader, F-4D Skyray, F-11F Tigercat, and F-5D Skylancer, as well as in-flight refueling systems, the flinty Shepard was a standout. Whether it was night-landing on an aircraft carrier in the Atlantic; breaking speed records at Moffett Field, California; or serving as an operations officer for the 193rd Fighter Squadron aboard the carrier USS Oriskany in the western Pacific, he was always the right man for the job. Like JFK, Shepard made no excuses for his eye for the ladies, even as he stayed married to a lovely woman whose lot was to make her peace with his flirtations. Five feet eleven inches with blue eyes, he was nicknamed the “Icy Commander” for his detached and intimidating persona. “He was hard to get to know,” astronaut Gene Cernan said of Shepard. “But once you cracked the surface, he was your friend for life.”
As May 5 dawned, the air hung thick and clammy at Cape Canaveral as the launch of Shepard’s Mercury-Redstone rocket, Freedom 7, was delayed time and again by weather and mechanical problems. The millions watching on TV grew more anxious every second. Residents of his hometown, East Derry, New Hampshire, could barely sit still. Wearing a close-fitting silver space suit, Shepard was eventually strapped into his module atop the seven-story rocket. NASA technicians fastened ventilation hoses to Shepard and fed him pure oxygen. For over four hours, Shepard still managed to exude a dashing aura, telling those calling the shots, “I’m cooler than you are—Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?” That phrase, “light this candle,” would became associated with Shepard forever.
On May 5, 1961, members of the Kennedy administration gathered in the White House office of the president’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln to watch the liftoff of Alan Shepard aboard a Mercury-Redstone rocket. Left to right: Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Admiral Arleigh Burke, and President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy were thrilled when Shepard’s Freedom 7 capsule successfully splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean.
Cecil Stoughton/White House Photographs/The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston
President Kennedy was in a White House meeting when word arrived that the delays were over and the countdown to liftoff had begun. With tense anticipation and bated breath, he moved into the office of his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, where a television was tuned to the broadcast from Cape Canaveral. Kennedy’s wife, Jackie, joined him there, and at 9:34 a.m. they watched as Shepard’s rocket rose from the launchpad without a hitch, sending him hurtling into history.
In all, Shepard spent 14.8 anxious minutes aloft, peaking at an altitude of 115 nautical miles. When it came time during his descent, at 7,000 feet above Earth, his capsule’s red-and-white parachute opened. He splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean 302 miles from Cape Canaveral. Still strapped inside the Freedom 7 capsule, waiting to be rescued by helicopter and praying not to meet Victor Prather’s fate, Shepard proved the American space program was on track. It all seemed strange and magical, yet astoundingly real.
Back at the White House, the president evinced an odd kind of reverie, watching intently while aware of the whispered banter around him. It had been a long twenty-three days since Yuri Gagarin’s flight, but suddenly Kennedy was back on top. Only when a White House aide told JFK that Shepard was aboard the helicopter and had been pronounced A-OK by NASA physicians did the president allow himself to say, “It’s a success,” with a smile. America’s post-Sputnik space prayers had been answered. Seeing that capsule land in the Atlantic was one of the greatest thrills of Kennedy’s life. For his part, Shepard enthused, “Boy, what a ride!” as he was whisked to the USS Champlain four miles away.
After doctors checked Shepard’s blood pressure, heart rate, breathing, and psychological state, he guzzled down a glass of orange juice and was given a tape recorder to capture his thoughts and feelings. Joking around, he said, “My name is José Jimenez . . . ,” a reference to comedian Bill Dana, and then started rambling about every detail of his voyage until he got a shore-to-ship phone call from the president himself.
“Hello, commander,” Kennedy said.
“Yes, sir.”
“I want to congratulate you very much.”
“Thank you very much, Mr. President.”
“We watched you on TV, of course,” JFK continued. “And we are awfully pleased and proud of what you did.”
The key phrase in this brief exchange was “We watched you on TV.” In that, the Kennedys hadn’t been alone. Across the country, some forty-five million TV viewers had watched what the Houston Chronicle dubbed “the greatest ‘suspense drama’ in the history of TV.” The experience bonded the entire nation, rekindling the collective American spirit like nothing since V-J Day at the close of World War II.
A steadied and reassured Kennedy understood that the public needed Shepard as a reason to cheer for the nation in peacetime. While only a momentary respite from the existential dread of the Cold War and the domestic upheaval of the civil rights era, the coast-to-coast celebrations for Shepard were as real as postwar victory parades; yet, such celebrations were also profoundly different, marking not just victory and relief, but excitement over taking the first steps into an almost unimaginable future. Great presidents (Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR) think about what the world will look like a hundred years into the future. At a time of insecurity, Kennedy finally understood the power of space exploration to unite the nation. “I think [Kennedy] became convinced that space was a symbol of the twentieth century,” White House science advisor Wiesner reflected. “It was a decision he made cold-bloodedly. He thought it was good for the country.”
After a weekend of debriefing and further medical tests, Shepard was flown to Washington at the president’s invitation and given the red-carpet treatment. His motorcade, which consisted of nothing more than Shepard and his wife in one open car and the other six Mercury astronauts in several cars following, turned into a thunderous spontaneous parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, with a quarter of a million people crowding the streets and sidewalks to celebrate. Washington bureaucrats were overwhelmed by the outpouring of genuine affection for Shepard, with the local newspaper observing that Americans had been hungry for a triumph like Shepard’s enthralling leap into space.
At a White House ceremony, Kennedy had the honor of presenting Shepard with NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal. In a funny and clumsy moment, JFK accidentally dropped the medal from its velvet box, prompting a visibly displeased Jackie Kennedy to mutter, “Pick it up, Jack!” On cue, the president and Shepard both bent and reached for the medal, almost bumping heads. Kennedy grabbed it first, then, smiling, presented Shepard “this decoration, which has gone from the ground up.” The spontaneous line brought the house down. “We had a big laugh out of that,” Shepard recalled. Kennedy played host to Shepard for the rest of that day, seeing at close range the astounding power of space to propel the hearts of America. For his part, Shepard recalled in an oral history that he was “even more thrilled at that moment in talking to [Kennedy] than I had been after the flight.”
For a week following Shepard’s whirlwind visit to Washington, Americans were still celebrating Freedom 7 with champagne and slaps on the back. It was a burst of collective confidence, an outpouring of pride that the American century was alive and flourishing. The scar of defeat and shame that Yuri Gagarin had left had vanished. Kennedy became fast friends with Shepard, whom he saw as the masculine personification of the New Frontier. Instead of cowboy hats and six-shooters, the unshrinkable New Frontier heroes wore silvery fabric and rubbery space suits along with round helmets with wide visors. The well-spoken Shepard explained that his bond with Kennedy was based on a shared willingness to take high risks to “meet the challenge” of beating the Soviets in space. In this regard, Freedom 7 was an update on the PT-109. “Thus Alan Shepard became a great national hero in the spring of 1961,” historian Steven Watts explained in JFK and the Masculine Mystique, “as the embodiment of the Kennedy male spirit.”
That spring, Kennedy had truly gotten his baptism by fire in space politics. Gagarin’s mission had jolted him into an acceptance of the Mercury program’s enormous political value for the New Frontier. Beefing up NASA was now a priority. Von Braun and a first-rate cadre of other experts had given the president the perspective to think clearly about American prospects in space, and Shepard’s successful flight had proved the viability of manned spaceflight, putting even the moon in range. The Soviet news agency TASS’s rote criticism of Shepard’s flight as “very inferior” in every regard to Gagarin’s unrivaled mission only reinforced the fact that the United States had dented the Soviet armor. Be that as it may, Kennedy issued a proactive statement, charging that Shepard’s flight had provided “incentive to everyone in our nation” concerned with space exploration “to redouble their efforts in the vital field.” In a press conference later, Kennedy, basking in the Shepard glow, promised that the federal government would oversee a “substantially larger effort in space.”
Just days after Shepard’s mission, Kennedy and Johnson assembled a who’s who of New Frontiersmen; representing NASA were Webb, Dryden, Seamans, and Silverstein. They met with a half-dozen top Pentagon officials, toward the goal of offering Lyndon Johnson their final recommendations in response to Kennedy’s April 20 memorandum. This was the first time NASA and Defense Department officials helped in this type of task force. Everything, from communications satellites and ICBMs to Project Mercury, was discussed. The elephant in the room was whether the United States should commit itself to a lunar landing. After hours of back-and-forth, Robert McNamara instructed Seamans, Deputy Director of Defense John Rubel, and Willis Shapley of the Bureau of the Budget to draft a series of recommendations for Johnson to then submit to Kennedy. Webb, determined to make sure NASA didn’t get bigfooted by the Pentagon, insisted that he maintain a hand in drafting the document; McNamara agreed. “In choosing the lunar landing mission as the central feature of its recommended program, the group had no firm intelligence regarding whether the Soviet Union has already embarked on a similar program,” historian John Logsdon wrote in The Decision to Go to the Moon about the Webb-McNamara Report. “Much in the same way as national defense programs are formulated the group evaluated Soviet capabilities not intentions, and decided the United States could probably beat the USSR to the moon.”
The very fact that NASA and the Department of Defense were gladly collaborating was a breakthrough for Kennedy. A consensus had been brokered by McNamara and Webb that admitted that the point of Project Apollo was prestige (proving U.S. technological excellence over the Kremlin’s). There really weren’t military imperatives for a lunar voyage. However, without the air force’s SAMOS (Satellite and Missile Observation System) imagery and electronic intelligence satellites, the air force and the CIA’s Corona imagery intelligence satellite, the air force’s MIDAS early warning satellite, and the Naval Research Laboratory’s GRAB (Galactic Radiation and Background) electronic intelligence satellite, the Kennedy administration wouldn’t have had the confidence that an American moonshot was doable anytime soon.
Less than two weeks after the outsized excitement of Shepard’s White House visit, Kennedy reserved a long span in his appointment schedule for a much more private meeting with Victor Prather’s widow, Virginia, and her two small children, Marla Lee and Victor III. Still tormented by the deaths of the PT-109 sailors under his command during World War II, Kennedy wasn’t constituted to forget NASA’s other hero that May, posthumously awarding Prather the navy’s Distinguished Flying Cross. Taking Prather’s children outside, he encouraged them to play with his own children’s toys and swing set. “He talked to them just like their daddy used to,” Virginia Prather said.
The president was a father and politician above all else, full of empathy and concerned about the well-being of his countrymen. To him, space exploration was about people, and that is how he could understand it, in his own way. The American spirit had been roused by brave men like Prather and by the Shepard mission, and Kennedy planned to capitalize on this national ardor for winning the space race without delay.