Searching for Moonlight in Tulsa and Vienna
No commitments have been made, but I believe it is going to be of great importance to develop the intellectual and other resources of the Southwest in connection with the new programs the Government is undertaking.
—JAMES WEBB TO LYNDON JOHNSON, MAY 23, 1961
As fate would have it, the first National Conference on Peaceful Uses of Space had been scheduled for May 26, the day after JFK’s speech to Congress, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Suddenly, the assembled aerospace industry leaders and technologists had a new focus, and a new impetus. Leading aerospace companies wanted a piece of the Apollo action. According to Business Week, the meeting hall was “seething with excitement,” with the three major television networks scrambling to provide live coverage. Ambitious scientists could be seen circulating among sharp-eyed industry leaders and excited government administrators. With Kennedy’s moon pledge, the New Frontier’s dining table was set, and every business executive and technologist in Tulsa was clamoring for a prime cut of the main course: congressional appropriations for space hardware.
Tulsa, a city built on the rising fortunes of the oil industry, had been chosen for the aerospace summit due to the influence of Oklahoma’s wily Democratic senator, Robert S. Kerr, the chair of the Senate’s Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences. When it came to promoting NASA and cutting taxes Kerr was Kennedy’s most valuable ally on Capitol Hill. Arranging for NASA to partner with the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce to sponsor this conference, Kerr had also induced Kennedy to address the participants via a telephone link from the White House. The president spoke for three minutes, his voice strong yet low-key. Noting that the conference’s subject “deals with the very heart of our national policy in space research and explorations, to which I devoted a good deal of my speech yesterday before the Congress,” he nevertheless downplayed the challenge the moonshot represented for the nation, instead focusing on the benefits of space research and the responsibility to maintain U.S. leadership in the field. The word moon was not uttered once by the president, but there was no mistaking the subtext. Everybody in Tulsa knew what JFK meant.
If Kennedy was subdued in tone, the participants were not. Senator Kerr led the cheerleading, his commitment to NASA having grown a thousandfold in the previous twenty-four hours. He envisioned Sun Belt cities—Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Oklahoma City, and Tulsa, in particular—becoming NASA boomtowns. “The costs will be tremendous,” a buoyed Kerr said of Project Apollo in his keynote address, “but the rewards will be unlimited.” Newsweek backed Kerr up, speculating that a moonshot would drive record profits at companies such as North American Aviation, Space Technology Laboratories Inc. of TRW, and Lockheed Missiles and Space Company.
Other speakers at Tulsa spoke of the various benefits to computer science and aerospace engineering. For Apollo to put an astronaut on the moon, new program management and systems integration approaches would have to transpire in the technocratic NASA culture. Dr. Abe Silverstein, NASA’s director of spaceflight, looked to ancient history in order to put the future into perspective. “Man has progressed,” he told the conference, “from the inside of the cave by accepting challenges.” Silverstein made clear to the conference that NASA was looking to buy technology in six distinctive areas: launch vehicles, command vehicles (which would also serve as return capsules), command capsule propulsion units, lunar landers and ascent stages (which return astronauts from the lunar surface to lunar orbit), communication and tracking networks, and ground infrastructure. The most critical components of the Apollo effort, Silverstein made clear, were the command/return vehicle and rockets designed to launch payloads into low Earth orbit.
Max Faget, principal developer of the Mercury capsule, was fixated in Tulsa on the idea that the new generation of space capsules shouldn’t be as claustrophobic as the tiny Mercury capsule. Envisioning a new spacecraft that was roomy and open, he decided that the base diameter for the Apollo capsule should be at least fourteen feet (approximately two and a half times Mercury’s diameter). Meanwhile, Apollo manager Robert Gilruth, hungry for corporate bids and proposals, promised to send 1,350 invitations to various representatives of government and industry for a conference to be held July 18–26 in Washington, DC.
Von Braun, speaking with gravitas as director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, spoke directly to the many space hardware suppliers in the audience. His Tulsa speech was technical in nature, describing the Saturn I rocket, which would launch that October. Von Braun had originally built the Saturn I to loft Pegasus satellites into orbit. But his rocket was, he said, an all-purpose military booster ideal for Kennedy’s moon challenge. Before long he sought to replace the Saturn I with a new derivative Saturn IB, which offered a more powerful upper stage and cutting-edge instrumentation.
After a full day of well-thought-out speeches by what United Press International described as “one of the greatest concentrations of space experts,” Webb took the stage to deliver an upbeat spiel that not only summed up the mood at the Tulsa conference but also raised the stakes on Kennedy’s initiative. While the president had said that America could put a man on the moon if the nation made a gangbuster effort, Webb contended that the country had to go to the moon. Offering the heaviest artillery of logic and imperative thinking about JFK’s lunar initiative to date, Webb suggested that for Congress to reject Project Apollo funding would be a gross dereliction of duty. “We have the scientists, we have the technology, we have the resources and we have the power and knowhow to do the job,” Webb told the audience. “Not to do it would jeopardize the nation’s future.”
Webb, full of gumption, would soon prove the indomitable linchpin of the Apollo effort, working with his two major deputies, Dryden and Seamans, to pull together the multiple strands and streams of American space research and align them into a single efficient and mighty effort. There was the Space Task Group, which was responsible for managing Project Mercury and would also assume the burden of overseeing the technical aspects of Project Apollo. In Pasadena, Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory was already scientifically studying and mapping the moon. Responsibility for launching rockets was being handled by NASA’s Office of Launch Vehicle Programs, Marshall Space Flight Center, and the U.S. Air Force. Ultimately, the list of contributors to the Apollo effort would include some twenty thousand companies and more than four hundred thousand individual citizens—practically if not literally stretching to the moon and back.
Somewhat surprisingly, President Kennedy sent Edward R. Murrow to represent the White House at the Tulsa conference. The former CBS News broadcaster had recently joined the administration as head of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). Murrow had taken the job on the stipulation that he’d be afforded a high degree of access to White House decision making, telling JFK, “If you want me in the landings, I’d better be there for the takeoffs.” At first glance, the president and Murrow seemed like an ideal pair to sell the moonshot to American taxpayers. Murrow had been raised in difficult economic circumstances in the state of Washington, where a first-rate public education left him with a nimble mind and remarkable communication skills. While Kennedy steadily matured during the course of his political career, almost willing himself into projecting self-assurance, Murrow seemed to have been born with an overflow of confidence. During World War II he had become famous reporting from London’s streets with a CBS Radio microphone during the harrowing Battle of Britain, describing in photo-clear language the carnage he was seeing. When Murrow said a building was on fire, you could almost smell the smoke. Throughout the war, he recruited a crackerjack team of foreign correspondents who collectively became known as the Murrow Boys.
Back home after the war, Murrow’s popularity skyrocketed as he expanded his media reach into the new medium of television. Although he was a product of commercial broadcasting, with all its dependence on advertisements and sponsors, he maintained his high standards and integrity in reporting the news, telling the truth as he saw it. On evening programs now hallowed in TV history, Murrow pushed past the corporate stance of cowardly neutrality and lashed out, most famously, at the reprehensible tactics of Joseph McCarthy, which led to the Wisconsin senator’s being condemned by lawmakers in the mid-1950s.
Murrow’s first major public appearance as USIA director came at the National Press Club in Washington the day before Kennedy’s moonshot speech. Discussing the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, he surprised the audience by speaking out against racial segregation in the South, including that in the nation’s capital. Murrow lamented the fact that America’s backward Jim Crow segregation policies forced accredited diplomats from African countries such as Ghana and Nigeria to live in a restricted way. “Landlords will not rent to them,” Murrow said, “schools refuse their children, stores will not let them try on clothes, beaches ban their families.” Emphasizing both the duties of our shared humanity and the damage such prejudice can cause in international relations, Murrow noted that the images of police violence against Freedom Riders in Jackson, Mississippi, that very week, broadcast to the world by newspapers and television, cost America “as much influence as anything the Soviets might do.” Clearly stating his own priorities just one day before Kennedy’s moonshot announcement, Murrow asked, “Is it possible that we concern ourselves too much with outer space and far places, and too little with inner space and near places?”
The Associated Press account of Murrow’s speech was carried in newspapers large and small. Out of an address of more than an hour on a range of topics, it highlighted his juxtaposition of America’s focus on space while civil rights inequities and systemic poverty existed even in the nation’s own capital.
Traveling to Tulsa, Murrow continued to be candid, preaching civil rights in front of space geeks. In a segment of the conference devoted to the use of satellites for global communications and weather forecasting, most of the speakers enthused about the potential benefits for humanity, if only the Americans and Soviets could agree on a peaceful satellite policy. But Murrow sounded a warning note, arguing that everything that seemed open and egalitarian about satellite communication also threatened to enable the spread of what he melodramatically called “filth” to households worldwide.
Shocking many attendees, Murrow continued to represent the argument that NASA was a distraction from the real societal problems America faced in 1961, though he also reluctantly admitted that Apollo offered the brightest hope for enhancing national pride. Murrow believed part of the risk of Kennedy’s space strategy was the uncertainty of whether the New Frontier America of outer space could really coexist with America’s troubled “inner spaces.” That, too, would be learned before the decade was out.
Just how committed Murrow was to civil rights became apparent in the coming weeks, when he challenged Webb over NASA’s having no African American astronauts. Webb told Murrow that astronauts needed to have very specific aeronautical qualifications, and there were no black test pilots. Taking the matter up with Kennedy directly, Murrow urged the White House to insist on diversity. “The first colored man to enter outer space, will, in the eyes of the world, be the first man to have ever done so,” Murrow wrote, cognizant that a vast majority of the world’s population was non-Caucasian. “I see no reason why our efforts in outer space should reflect with such fidelity the discrimination that exists on this minor planet.”
Despite genuine criticisms from the right (over cost) and left (over the diversion of resources from social justice and antipoverty initiatives), congressional leaders found it easy to move Kennedy’s moonshot idea toward a vote in July. The one expected Democratic adversary, the thorniest burr in the New Frontier saddle, was Senator William Proxmire. Complaining about the unnecessary emphasis on speed in NASA’s beat-the-Soviets goals, the Wisconsin senator claimed that the space race was warping the U.S. educational system by siphoning off scientific talent from America’s universities and by eating up funds that could be used to educate a new generation of scientists. He dismissed Kennedy’s idea that the space program itself was supposed to inspire students to pursue such careers; the increase in space activity during the 1950s and the torrents of publicity surrounding it had led in the opposite direction. “The Russians are now graduating some 125,000 engineers and scientists a year,” Proxmire said, “compared to our 45,000. That is in contrast with the situation 10 years ago when we were graduating about 55,000—more scientists then than we are now—and the Russians were graduating about 36,000. These statistics are of deep concern. What we have to do is concentrate on scientific education rather than on these spectacular leaps to the Moon as a first priority.”
The world of science also contained critics of Kennedy’s accelerated moon mission. U.S. News and World Report printed an interview with Dr. Hans Thirring, former head of the Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Vienna, who compared the idea of a manned moon voyage to attaining perpetual motion, moving the Rocky Mountains to another location, or turning an animal into a different species—“not an utter physical impossibility” but presented with “economic impossibilities.” From a purely empirical perspective Thirring felt Kennedy’s timeline for landing an astronaut on the moon infeasible. “I am quite sure it will not be done within the next 10 years,” he said. “And I think it very likely not to happen within the next 30 or 40 years.”
Thirring advocated for sending an unmanned vehicle to the moon first, and other notable scientists agreed with him. Dr. Robert Boyd, a British physicist who had worked closely with NASA since 1959, thought that a human in space was “really rather a nuisance.” Holding that the massive expenditure planned for the moonshot could be better spent on medical research, Boyd concluded that “I’m not saying that it’s unwise, for example, of the United States to do manned space flights. This may, in fact, be the best political thing they can do in the circumstances in which they find themselves. But just taking humanity as a whole and the question of what we would do if we were all sane men, I think we wouldn’t be spending money sending man into space. . . . Personally I am rather sorry that, frequently, science is dragged in as the justification for what I really regard as a political exercise.”
The arguments of Murrow, Proxmire, Thirring, and Boyd had merit. They pointed to the most daunting risk undertaken by Kennedy: by backing the moonshot with $20 to $40 billion, he seemed to be turning his back on poverty, civil rights, education, environmental conservation, and medical research. A similarly massive government expenditure in any of these areas would have made a huge near-term difference in people’s lives. By prioritizing the moon voyage, Kennedy was gambling on an even larger long-term boost, but he also had to accept the very real possibility of coming up short. If the Apollo program ended in embarrassment or tragedy, all the paeans to the nobility of having made one’s best effort wouldn’t stack up against the likelihood of what might have been accomplished if he had embraced another field as the heart and soul of the New Frontier, and with the nation’s full financial backing. This was the dark side of the moon program, the persistent voice whispering at the societal good that could have been accomplished by devoting more than $20 billion to, say, finding a cure for cancer or building high-speed trains from coast to coast.
But the attraction of the moon went beyond what Dr. Boyd had called “a political exercise” for JFK. It appealed to the president as a Kennedy, as someone who had absorbed his parents’ ultracompetitive attitude as well as the underdog outlook inborn from their Irish-Catholic heritage. Worries that the United States was lagging behind the USSR in space didn’t intimidate Kennedy; more likely, they had the opposite effect. Traveling Europe and the Pacific as a young man, JFK had seen firsthand the inspirational role America played in people’s everyday lives. Opinions of its culture might vary, but American exceptionalism was widely embraced, and was too valuable a commodity to lose. The president’s wartime role as a PT boat captain, part of a cadre chosen for quick thinking and leadership, gave him a natural bond with the NASA astronauts, who had been handpicked for those same qualities and more. Even his association with Hollywood, via friends such as Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, gave him an understanding of the need for patriotic heroes, manufactured or not. To Kennedy’s mind, Alan Shepard was the New Frontier’s John Wayne, an exemplar of American bravery and can-doism in the name of national greatness.
As the icing on the cake, Kennedy brought to the moonshot decision the experiences of his own political career. For fifteen years, he’d experienced Americans’ fascination with his youth, radiance, potential talent, and physical vitality. He represented America’s future without even uttering a word. And it was for these reasons that voters who met JFK were, even if they fought against it, instantly captivated by him. The most vivid experiences of his life—both his public life and the one he hid from the world (his poor health, philandering, Joe, the grislier details of the PT-109 incident)—carried him to the decision to go to the moon. His philosophy of courage was that life is short, bold steps forward are immortal, so act. Apollo, he understood, transcended party politics and regional differences. It was a story unto itself. Why not create a generation of space heroes? Why not use NASA as a venture to jump-start American technology? Even the eventual price tag of $20 to $40 billion, a staggering amount in 1961, was almost natural for Kennedy, who had seen his father, Joe Sr., spend vast fortunes to get what he wanted on Wall Street or in Hollywood, never with cause for regret.
FAITH THAT VON Braun and his team could develop the proper Saturn rocket for a moon launch was widespread in Kennedy administration national security circles. But the flight mode—how to land astronauts on the moon and bring them back alive—was still fiercely debated. “What was difficult for us were so many unknowns with getting there,” recalled Chris Kraft, then NASA’s sole flight director. “It sort of made us all question whether it was possible or not.”
Luckily, NASA wasn’t working in a vacuum. Earlier in the spring, a NASA committee had begun pondering the best general design for a possible lunar landing, and major U.S. aerospace firms had been doing cost analysis configuration control, and probability reports. A trio of prominent companies (Martin, Convair, and General Electric) had already started designing possible three-person Apollo capsules, hoping to secure a massive government contract if the mission was approved. Other companies were developing the onboard and ground-control systems that would be needed, including computers, navigation, flight control, thermal protection, and life support. Without a decision on the flight mode, however, nothing von Braun or others built would get off the ground in Cape Canaveral.
Within the space world, debate centered on the precise rocket staging, trajectory, and rendezvous needed to bring Apollo astronauts to the moon and back. NASA was weighing three primary options. Topping the list was direct ascent (DA), in which an enormous rocket would lift off from Earth and plow for the moon, landing and then blasting off for home once the job was done. Although this concept required the smallest number of orbital maneuvers, the big disadvantage was that the proposed Nova rocket would have to be substantially larger than any rocket that von Braun was working to build. Perfecting the rocket for a lunar mission would have proved a difficult enough challenge, but physically the rocket was deemed too gargantuan to produce at NASA’s new Michoud facility in Louisiana and too enormous to test at what eventually became the John C. Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.
The second alternative was the Earth orbit rendezvous (EOR) approach. For EOR, multiple boosters would launch spacecraft in rapid succession and they would be joined in Earth’s orbit into a full spacecraft. That ship would then fly to the moon, land, discard a module, and return home in a similar fashion to the DA method. Von Braun’s Huntsville team promoted this solution because it mitigated the necessity of contracting a huge Nova-class vehicle while they also built more Saturn rockets. The catch, however, was the multistage complexity of the orbital assembly.
The distant third idea was the lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR), a concept championed by Dr. John C. Houbolt of NASA’s Langley Research Center. While the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had proposed a modified rendezvous profile where refueling would occur on the lunar surface, the primary LOR profile was to conduct any refueling in Earth orbit (not on the moon). Under Houbolt’s plan, this type of sortie would use a powerful three-stage rocket to launch an assembly of three spacecraft into orbit: a modular command module (CM); a service module (SM), containing main propulsion, fuel cells, and attitude-control systems; and a lunar module (LM), a newfangled contraption to reach the moon’s surface. In lunar orbit, two astronauts would use the LM to land while one crewman remained with the combined command service module (CSM) in a “parking orbit” around the moon. Once scientific experiments on the moon’s surface were complete, the LM would ascend back to lunar orbit and rendezvous with the CSM, which would then fly the three-man crew back to Earth. The big advantage to this LOR approach over Nova was the single-vehicle launch. Furthermore, from a technical standpoint, the LOR payload had a much smaller mass, which made it possible to develop a rocket that would not be as colossal as Nova. The downside to LOR was that the astronauts had no means of escape should any rendezvous maneuver flounder. NASA understandably worried about the public relations abomination of dead astronauts floating around in a stable lunar orbit or if they got marooned on the moon.
As of 1961, Houbolt’s idea of docking two spacecraft in orbit was purely theoretical. NASA engineer Laurence K. Loftin Jr. summed up opposition to the LOR concept perfectly: “We thought it was too risky,” he said. “Remember in 1961 we hadn’t even orbited Glenn yet. We certainly had done no rendezvous yet. And to put this poor bastard out there, separate him in a module, let him go down to the surface and fire him back up and expect him to rendezvous. He didn’t get a second chance; it had to be dead right the first time. I mean that seemed like a bit much.”
The businesslike Loftin spoke for most NASA executives when he said the LOR was an engineering pipe dream—fine in the drawing room, but a probable disaster if implemented. “Houston’s first reaction to Houbolt’s suggestion was rather negative,” von Braun confirmed. “While conceding that in principle it should be possible to save launch weight by leaving part of the fuel required for the return flight in lunar orbit, rather than soft-landing it on the moon and carrying it out of the lunar gravitational field again, Houston felt that Houbolt’s equipment and weight assumptions for the lunar module had been highly unrealistic. For instance, his original LM concept did not have a pressurized cabin for the ascent stage and the LM guidance and control system for the tricky descent to the lunar surface was considered an inadequate rig ‘consisting of a plumb bob and a reticle.’”
For Glennan, Eisenhower’s NASA administrator, the fact that the agency was still debating how to bring an astronaut back alive from the lunar surface meant the game was over before it began, giving him reason to label Kennedy’s speeded-up moonshot as high-stakes folly. Poisoning the well on Capitol Hill against Apollo became Glennan’s hobby in retirement. Regularly, he’d tell NASA leaders and old cohorts that the president and von Braun were on ego trips. Lobbying Webb, Glennan said, “No, Jim, I cannot bring myself to believe that we will gain lasting ‘prestige’ by a shot we may make six to eight years from now. I don’t think we should play the game according to the rules laid down by our adversary.” Webb, rich in recent accomplishment and enjoying JFK’s full backing for his agenda, dismissed Glennan’s dissent as sour grapes. For Webb, going to the moon on a “crash” basis didn’t leave room for intellectual musings, Monday-morning quarterbacking, or go-slow Cassandras. His standard defense of Apollo was that while Kennedy’s moonshot was extremely audacious, so, too, had been the Panama Canal, D-day, and the Manhattan Project.
Twice in 1961, Houbolt, a tough-minded infighter, was almost fired for skipping proper channels and writing directly to Seamans about his LOR proposal. By the end of the year, Webb and von Braun leaned toward Houbolt’s lunar orbit rendezvous plan as the best option. What won both him and Kennedy over was that LOR required only one Saturn rocket. What he didn’t know until late in his presidency was that the official name of the jumbo Apollo moon rocket was Saturn V. In the next few months, Kennedy and Webb came to believe that von Braun’s Saturn I turned Saturn IB was his ticket to the moon. And if the United States truly wanted to land astronauts on the moon, LOR was the ticket to ride. Although Houbolt’s plan occasioned fierce, ongoing debate, by the summer of 1962 it became the decided strategy for the Apollo mission.
EVEN WHILE THE flight mode controversy raged, nearly everyone could agree on one thing: that von Braun’s eventual Saturn rocket would invariably have to be one of the most ingenious technological innovations of the twentieth century. Von Braun’s Saturn V moon rocket didn’t fly until 1967. At the time of Kennedy’s speech to Congress, von Braun was still building the Saturn I, the first of which flew in October 1961.
Just hours after Kennedy finished speaking to Congress, test pilot Joe Walker flew an X-15 rocket plane from Edwards Air Force Base in California, traveling five times the speed of sound. This was a new record for a vehicle operated by a human occupant (versus the rockets that carried Shepard and Gagarin, who had little or no control, respectively, over their flights). Almost without exception, the next day’s newspapers ran the summary of the president’s address next to the more immediately exciting news of the X-15 and its zooming pilot. To the air force, Walker’s record-breaking flight was further proof that the reusable X-15 was more important for the future of space exploration than von Braun’s single-use Saturn rockets. To Kennedy, who’d just staked his presidential reputation on the goal of a rocket-powered moon mission, the timing of Walker’s X-15 flight could not have been pleasing.
IN THE AFTERMATH of his May 25 speech, Kennedy turned his attention to his upcoming summit with Khrushchev in Austria, where sensitive topics such as the status of divided Berlin would likely overshadow his push for a U.S. moonshot. Still, his speech at least assured the world that the American commitment to space was second to none. Publicly, the Soviets feigned good wishes to the United States regarding its highly implausible lunar initiative, and some scientists working internationally suspected that Moscow was secretly delighted by it—and had even been maneuvering America into just such a plan. These scientists theorized that a laser-like concentration on the moon would distract American focus, funding, and brainpower from more practical military projects, such as aircraft carriers and ICBMs.
At the two leaders’ introductory luncheon on June 3, the day before the Vienna summit officially opened, Kennedy brought up the safe topic of Gagarin’s flight of two months before. Bursting with pride, Khrushchev described the flight, with a friendly tidbit about all of the trepidation the Soviet leaders had that the beloved cosmonaut would lose his mind from the effects of space. Instead, he noted, there was no problem, and Gagarin even sang folk songs among the stars. Inevitably, the two men began talking about the Americans’ grand design for a trip to the moon. “With respect to the possibility of cooperation in launching a man to the Moon,” noted the State Department’s official memo about the conversation, “Mr. Khrushchev said that he was cautious because of the military aspect of such flights.”
Just what Khrushchev meant by that was not recorded, but the notion succeeded in putting Kennedy on the defensive. He responded with an “inquiry” to Khrushchev “whether the US and USSR should go to the Moon together.” The world would have toasted these Cold War rivals collaborating on a moonshot, but Khrushchev demurred. “At first he said no,” according to the account of their conversation, “but then said ‘all right, why not?’” though his first answer was clearly his last. Asked later about the discussion by his son Sergei, Khrushchev admitted that “if we cooperate, it will mean opening up our rocket program to them. We have only two hundred missiles, but they think we have many more.” Khrushchev worried that Kennedy might launch a first ICBM strike if the disparity were revealed. “So when they say we have something to hide . . . ?” Sergei pressed.
“It is just the opposite,” his father said with a chuckle. “We have nothing to hide. We have nothing. And we must hide it.”
For the next two years, the president would periodically send up a trial balloon for the idea of a joint U.S.–Soviet moon venture, then back off and reiterate the national security necessity of being first to the moon. These inconsistencies, which space historian William Kay sorted into the categories of “competition” and “cooperation,” place the space race firmly in the context of the Cold War. Kay contends that it was in fact a two-pronged strategy designed to keep the United States on the positive side of world opinion by appearing (as in Vienna) to value peace above all else. Kennedy’s words were about peaceful coexistence in space while his actions were aimed at America’s winning the race. With Cold War competition running hot over Berlin, Cuba, and Southeast Asia, Kennedy could and did extend the bauble of outer space collegiality and collaboration as a means of ameliorating the very real aggressions that existed between Washington and Moscow—a peaceful gesture that sacrificed nothing on the broader scale, and couldn’t be interpreted as a sign of weakness.
The rest of the Vienna summit did not go as well as the luncheon. Khrushchev was domineering and unyielding on most subjects, especially about wanting the NATO nations to leave Berlin. When JFK tried to frame the division of the city in moral terms, he left the impression that the United States would take no offensive action in response to East Germany’s threats to cut West Berlin off from the West. This rhetorical error didn’t go over well. “Mr. Kennedy’s reaction was not unlike that of many Western officials who have negotiated with the Russians for the first time,” wrote James Reston of the New York Times. “He approached the conversations thinking he knew what to expect. But nevertheless, he was astonished by the rigidity and toughness of the Soviet leader.” Privately, the president mumbled to Reston, “He just beat the hell out of me. I’ve got a terrible problem if he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts.” That assessment, blunt and honest, was shared by other Washington insiders. Khrushchev had belittled Kennedy in Vienna by threatening to crush America in Berlin.
The summit had been a bust, and America’s geopolitical problems quickly got worse. In Berlin, giant construction machines were getting gassed up and wall-building materials were stockpiled along the border between East and West. In his May 25 speech, Kennedy had spoken of failure as a matter of missing an arbitrary deadline. During the grim hours after meeting Khrushchev in Austria, the president saw more clearly what failure could be. In this tense Cold War environment, a shooting war seemed just one poorly chosen word away. It turned out, however improbably, that Kennedy’s moonshot pledge had given the United States the upper hand over the USSR in the psychological game of one-upmanship. If the Americans were playing defense in Berlin, they were, by contrast, on the offense in the fields of manned space-reconnaissance aviation, satellites, ICBMs, and moonshots.