Rice University, September 12, 1962
This generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it—we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look to space, to the moon and the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag or conquered, but by a banner of freedom and peace.
—JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1962
Staying on schedule, President Kennedy left Cape Canaveral late on the afternoon of September 11, bound for Houston. The holiday atmosphere of the “space tour” was such that in a city of just over nine hundred thousand people, some three hundred thousand turned out to greet JFK upon his arrival. Addressing the adoring crowd, he said, “I do not know whether the people of the Southwest realize the profound effect the whole space program will have on the economy of this section of the country. The scientists, engineers, and technical people who will be attracted here will really make the Southwest a great center of scientific and industrial research as this nation reaches out to the moon. In this place in America are going to be laid the plans and designs by which we will reach out in this decade to explore space.” Among other things, Kennedy’s positive words were intended to repair damage from a gaffe Robert F. Kennedy had made while visiting the University of Indonesia, in Jakarta, the previous February. Asked by a student about the Mexican War of 1846–48, RFK replied, “Some from Texas might disagree, but I think we were unjustified. I do not think we can be proud of that episode.” Many Texans were furious at this sentiment, forcing the president to control the damage rather than risk losing votes in 1964.
Accompanying President Kennedy in Houston were Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Navy Secretary Fred Korth, Congressman Albert Thomas, and NASA administrator James Webb. Von Braun was also still in the entourage, constantly reassuring reporters that the moon flight would happen within the decade. “The people here realize the effect the space age will have on their city,” Kennedy told a crowd of well-wishers. “It is most appropriate that the manned spacecraft center should be located here in Houston, identified as the most progressive city in the area. From this place will be made the plans to take Americans to the moon—and bring them back.”
Kennedy spent that evening on the sixth floor of the Rice Hotel in downtown Houston. This was where he’d stayed exactly two years before, while preparing his speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, which successfully inoculated him from concerns over his Catholicism. This time, as he was ushered in, he was handed a welcome-back telegram from the Ministerial Association that read, “May God continue to guard and guide you in the leadership of our nation.” Anybody who telephoned the Rice Hotel after the president checked in was met with a switchboard operator saying, “White House.”
When Kennedy awoke on September 12, he read the very positive lead editorial in the Houston Press about the economic benefits of Project Apollo. “Sixty firms have moved into Houston–Harris County or expanded their activities here as a result of the opening of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Moonshot Command Post and Research Center,” the editorial boasted. “Twenty-five to thirty more have plans for Houston offices as yet officially undisclosed.” There was nothing Kennedy liked more than to read stories about how NASA was spurring business enterprise in the southern states.
After breakfast, Kennedy headed to Rice University, where a sun-drenched crowd of forty thousand eagerly waited at the football stadium to hear him speak about going to the moon. Even at ten in the morning, the weather was blazingly hot and humid, and the throngs of spectators fanned themselves madly as JFK arrived at the podium in a dark blue suit, with a white handkerchief in his breast pocket, white shirt, and blue tie, posing for photographs with NASA administrators before speaking. His hair shone reddish in the sunlike glare of camera lights. The Houston Press reported that “everyone perspired” in the “roaster” of a stadium, built in 1950, but the upbeat feeling was like that of a high-octane campaign rally. Only a single “I like Ike” sign, raised above the crowd’s heads, was a manifestation of protest.
The president’s speech had been drafted by Ted Sorensen, with important contributions from various NASA advisors and wordsmiths. Space-related articles in National Geographic were also consulted. But if the key phrasing of the speech belonged to Sorensen and NASA scribes, the spirit of raw aspiration was pure JFK. Knowing that his moonshot speech to Congress the previous year had been very buttoned down, Kennedy had decided that the Rice address would be a stem-winder, filled with the kind of soaring rhetoric that had thrilled the world in his “Ask Not” inaugural address. At Rice he would tie his patriotic belief in American exceptionalism directly to his prioritization of the manned space effort. A copy of the Rice speech, now kept at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, shows all the president’s last-minute handwritten tweaks. Because the Rice Owls were usually slaughtered every fall by the Texas Longhorns in a lopsided college football rivalry, Kennedy personally added a comical line in promoting his Apollo moonshot: “And they may as well ask: Why climb the highest mountain? Why 35 years ago fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?”
Dr. Kenneth Pitzer, president of Rice University, introduced Kennedy to the roaring crowd, naming the president a visiting professor and declaring the afternoon as the opening salvo of Rice’s semicentennial year. Pledging to expand Rice’s science programs to meet America’s Space Age needs, Pitzer committed the university to providing graduate-level instruction in geomagnetism, Van Allen radiation, auroras, and atmospheric structures. (The next year, Rice would become the first university to announce the opening of a graduate school in space science.) The Houston Press went so far as to deem Rice the “educational pilot plant” of NASA.
When Kennedy took the rostrum, smiling boyishly, the crowd went wild. He looked suntanned and relaxed, undisturbed by the heat. Sitting directly behind him onstage were Lyndon Johnson, Albert Thomas, and other government officials. While those who sat in the stands—including ten thousand Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts—heard the president’s message perfectly, the dignitaries ensconced on the speaker’s platform behind him could barely understand a word. For the TV cameras filming the speech in color, Kennedy was downright effervescent. “I can remember it clearly today,” Bob Gomel, then a Life magazine photographer, recalled fifty years later. “He has his fist clinched on the podium, and his delivery was so dynamic.”
Speaking with poetic grace, perfect timing, and flashes of Harvard wit, Kennedy delivered an oratorical masterpiece. There was purposeful masculinity to his well-crafted words. Positioning science and technological research at the forefront of American life, he began his speech by praising Houston as the $123 million home of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center. “We meet at a college noted for knowledge, in a city noted for progress, in a state noted for strength, and we stand in need of all three,” he said. “For we meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and unforgettable ignorance. The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.”
What made the speech so exquisite was Kennedy’s reflecting on fifty thousand years of recorded history, from cavemen to jet pilots to astronauts. The president mocked those timid citizens who wanted to stay still on Earth a little longer, who didn’t aim for the moon, joining ranks with “those who resisted the horseless carriage and Christopher Columbus.” Discoveries such as Newton’s law of universal gravitation were evoked, as were such inventions as the steam engine, electric lights, and the telephone. “This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers,” Kennedy said. “Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward. So it’s not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this City of Houston, this state of Texas, this country of the United States, were not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward—and so will space.”
The words were vintage Kennedy, a distillation of his evolved thinking on space since Sputnik. At their core was an insistence that the United States, no matter the financial cost, had to dominate space. “The exploration of space,” he said, “will go ahead whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time. . . . Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolution, the first waves of modern invention, and the first waves of nuclear power. And this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it. We mean to lead it.”
Displaying what astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson later called “politically uncommon fiscal candor,” Kennedy laid out the costs of the moon program. “This year’s space budget is three times what it was in January 1961,” he told the crowd, “and it is greater than the space budget of the previous eight years combined. That budget now stands at $5.4 billion a year—a staggering sum, though somewhat less than we pay for cigarettes and cigars every year.” Bringing the abstract down to earth, the president said that space expenditures would soon rise further, “from 40 cents per person per week to more than 50 cents a week for every man, woman, and child in the United States.” Although he acknowledged the risk of the undertaking, he believed America’s hopes for peace and security rested on its seizing world leadership in space.
The heart and soul of the Rice speech connected NASA to both America’s frontier tradition and the concept of American exceptionalism. Pride, prestige, and national defense were major factors, and beating the Soviets was a geopolitical imperative, but the United States couldn’t be defined by its Communist adversary. Instead, Kennedy explained at Rice, going to the moon presented the grand historic challenge of an unexplored frontier, and was the noblest illustration of the American pioneer spirit in the twentieth century. In winged words, the president delivered one of his most timeless sentiments, placing Apollo among mankind’s noblest aspirations: “We choose to go to the moon—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.”
Coming toward his conclusion, Kennedy posed an exciting challenge to the nation. “Many years ago, the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, ‘Because it is there.’ Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail, we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.”
At those words, the stadium erupted in applause. The president had once again thrown down the gauntlet, tying the nation’s very heart to the goal of reaching the moon. With its grand gestures and motivational words, his speech ranks among the most inspiring ever delivered by an American president, and those in the audience felt a part of history. Terry O’Rourke, a camera-carrying high school sophomore, had ridden his bike to Rice to hear his hero speak, and experienced a transformative moment. “I remember the times, it was before Mustangs and miniskirts,” O’Rourke recalled in 2002. “The Cold War was real. It was scary. John F. Kennedy did something. He took the horror of the Cold War and made something beautiful, a dream for all of us. He was like a coach giving calls to the team. He was young, but he knew what the hell he was doing.”
As Kennedy exited the stage, he nodded at Webb and the other effusive NASA administrators with a wide grin. “All right,” he said. “Now you guys do the details!”
IT WAS INSTANTLY clear that Kennedy had scored a winner. Broadcast on the radio and nightly news broadcasts, the speech had an immediate effect beyond Rice Stadium, and his declaration that “We intend to be first” was discussed in TV and print media as a significant doubling-down on his original moonshot appeal to Congress. The echoes of the oration continued reverberating in the culture, until by the twenty-first century it ranked as one of the high points of JFK’s presidency. Film clips from the address have been played so many times on TV over the decades that people are often tricked into thinking they remember the speech’s galvanizing importance on the day it was delivered. “I certainly remember it,” Neil Armstrong said of Kennedy’s Rice speech in 2001, “but it’s a bit hazy because I’ve heard recordings of it so many times since, that you’re not certain whether you’re remembering or you’re remembering what you’re remembering. . . . And, of course, it’s been colored by the fact I read so many stories of how that process actually occurred and what led to his conclusion to do that.”
The event remains a high-water mark in the history of Rice University and of Houston. Rice class of ‘63 graduate Paul Burka, an attendee who went on to become executive editor of Texas Monthly magazine, believed the “We choose to go to the moon” speech was eternal because Kennedy “encapsulates all of recorded history and seeks to set it in the history of our own time.” Rice student Jacob Scher, who also witnessed the presidential appeal firsthand, said Kennedy “blew me away.” Others, like Rice professor of chemistry Robert Curl, who won the Nobel Prize later in his career, recall being startled by the largesse of Project Apollo. “I came away in wonder that he was seriously proposing this,” Curl recalled. “It seemed like an enormous amount of money to spend on an exploration program.”
As Kennedy traveled from Rice down the Gulf Freeway to the temporary Manned Spacecraft Center’s Research Division complex on Telephone Road, more than forty thousand people stood along the route to wave and get a glimpse of him. Arriving at the center’s Rich Building (one of twelve Houston-area NASA sites), he was greeted by five of the Mercury Seven: John Glenn, Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, Gordon Cooper, and Deke Slayton. The astronauts escorted the president around the scientific displays and exhibits. Dr. Robert Gilruth, first director of the new Manned Spacecraft Center, along with associate director Walter Williams and the heads of Projects Apollo, Gemini, and Mercury, gave JFK a forty-minute briefing on the progress of research for the moonshot.
Enthralled by the space jewels he saw on his tour of the facility, Kennedy stayed twice as long as scheduled. At one point, he climbed into the cockpit of an Apollo Command Module mock-up, which had been designed to test the crew seats and instrument panels. Staring at a seventeen-foot-high lunar lander prototype, he seemed almost paralyzed with wonder. Shepard described to Kennedy the work of the “lunar excursion vehicle” (LEV; also called the “Lunar Bus”), praising the extraordinary effort of the Manned Spacecraft Center team. Surrounded by engineers, technicians, and computer specialists, Kennedy reiterated his pledge that the Apollo moon landing would happen within the decade. “To talk of placing a tremendous rocket outside the orbit of the earth, to send it to the moon to rendezvous, to go to the moon’s surface, to put men on the moon, to take them off, to rendezvous again, and bring them back to earth safely, and to talk about doing that in the next 5 or 6 years indicates how far and how fast we have come and how far and how fast we must go,” he said. “And back of all the extraordinary scientific and technical accomplishments which must be made to make this possible, of course, are the men who are involved, and particularly those who are at the point of the spear, those who must fly this mission into the most unknown sea.”
President John F. Kennedy emerging from inside a model of the futuristic NASA spacecraft during his tour of the new Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas.
Bob Gomel/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
At some level, both Kennedy’s Rice speech and the spontaneous remarks he delivered in front of the Mercury astronauts were responses to his Republican critics. At Rice, his lofty rhetoric, elevating the moonshot into the pantheon of human exploration and scientific advancement, was a slap at Barry Goldwater’s contention that NASA was a distraction from the more important military uses of space. On Telephone Road, his remarks were a counterweight to Dwight Eisenhower, who’d mocked Project Apollo’s breakneck pace. With the midterm elections looming, the former president was, that same day, out politicking for the first time since leaving the White House, stumping for Republican senatorial candidates.
Eisenhower and Kennedy were at a unique juncture in their strained relationship. A few weeks before, in The Saturday Evening Post, Ike had levied what amounted to his own personal platform for the nation’s future. Eisenhower didn’t neglect space in his state-of-the-nation manifesto, but while proclaiming his pride in John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, and the other Mercury astronauts, he came down hard on Kennedy’s multibillion-dollar budgetary expansion of NASA. In a repeat of his commentary at the Naval War College the previous year, Eisenhower lamented the amount of money that was, in his view, being wasted on Project Apollo. “By all means, we must carry on our explorations in space, but I frankly do not see the need for continuing this effort as such a fantastically expensive crash program,” he wrote. “From here in, I think we should proceed in an orderly, scientific way, building one accomplishment on another, rather than engaging in a mad effort to win a stunt race.”
Being criticized by the still popular Eisenhower put Kennedy in a political bind: realistically, he was unable to ignore his predecessor’s putdown, yet it would be foolhardy to confront it head-on. The Cold War had obviously put Americans in various camps, reflecting their attitudes toward Communist and especially Soviet influence in America. But even though that struggle overlapped with the space race in crucial ways, NASA’s space effort had yet to become a liberal or conservative issue as of 1962. In his speeches and press conferences, Kennedy strove to keep the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs above that political fray, and when he described the effort to put a man on the moon, it was invariably presented as a uniting, bipartisan endeavor. Now Eisenhower’s critical commentary, purposely given with the midterm elections in mind, gave millions of Republican-leaning Americans a fiscally pragmatic rallying cry: “Why the great hurry to get to the moon and planets?”
Eisenhower was undeniably right that removing the hurry from Project Apollo would lower NASA’s budgetary expenditures, and that was a fiscal argument with enough conservative voter appeal to divide popular support for space exploration. As newspapers began quoting Ike’s Saturday Evening Post opinions in editorials, Kennedy held his response for a moment when it would have the desired impact but also land softly enough that it wouldn’t alienate his White House predecessor. With tensions rising over the increasing Soviet military presence in Cuba, Kennedy needed Eisenhower’s (and by extension, the GOP’s) support when it came to defending the Monroe Doctrine and countering the threats arising in Castro’s Cuba.
After his Houston trip triumph, Kennedy made the last stop on his space inspection tour, visiting the McDonnell Aircraft factory in St. Louis, where the Gemini two-man space capsule was being built with Gus Grissom’s supervisory help. The visit was planned so carefully that it felt scripted. Air Force One landed at the aircraft plant, touching down just in time for a shift change, meaning that nearly ten thousand McDonnell workers were on hand to represent the blue-collar face of the aerospace industry. Escorted by MIT-trained physicist and company founder James Smith “Mac” McDonnell, with Webb and von Braun also in the entourage, the president inspected a Gemini capsule mock-up, watched production in a dust-free “white room,” and met with top company executives. The only impromptu segment of the two-and-a-half-hour visit was, oddly enough, the part that would normally have been written down in advance: Kennedy’s two-minute speech at the factory. Reiterating the most salient points from his Rice speech, Kennedy brought the enormous budget for Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo down to kitchen-table level, reminding his audience that each American was contributing forty cents per week—still possibly a strain for middle- or lower-income families, but that was the price of a truly national project. Through their contributions, he reminded them, “Every citizen of this country has a stake and is participating in this effort.”
In part, Kennedy’s space tour was designed to highlight how NASA was supporting the New Frontier economy, spurring growth not only in the public sector but also in private companies across America. Visiting McDonnell Aircraft was a great way to get that message across. Although less than two dozen years old, McDonnell was already America’s largest manufacturer of fighter jets—the two-seat F-4 Phantom II (a twin-engine, supersonic, long-range, all-weather fighter-bomber) was its newest wonder. The company, which had snared prime NASA contracts to develop and provide space capsules for both the Mercury and Gemini programs, was the biggest employer in greater St. Louis, and all McDonnell shareholders, even if they were Republican, could clearly see the benefits of Kennedy’s moonshot gambit staring at them from the bottom line. Furthermore, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had contracted McDonnell (which would merge with the Douglas Aircraft Company to form McDonnell Douglas in 1967) to produce various classes of missiles.
Another smart reason for Kennedy to have toured McDonnell Aircraft was that his administration was about to choose Grumman (the largest employer in Long Island, New York, whose specialty was jet aircraft such as the A-6 Intruder and the E-2 Hawkeye) to be the chief contractor on the Apollo lunar module that would bring the Apollo 11 astronauts to the moon. Kennedy and NASA would wait until November 7, after the midterm elections, to announce that Grumman had won the lucrative bid.
United Press International correspondent Alvin Spivak interpreted the president’s words during his stops in Houston and St. Louis in purely political terms: “By forceful implication, he endeavored to meet the challenge of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s question ‘why the great hurry’ in NASA’s ‘fantastically expensive space program aimed at the moon.’” Kennedy was aware that Congress was showing signs of balking at the ever-ballooning NASA budget, but his whirlwind tour through Alabama, Florida, Texas, and Missouri that September had given him (and a rapt TV, radio, and newspaper audience) firsthand knowledge of the way American taxpayers’ “40 cents per week” was being spent. To most of the voting public, funding Kennedy’s moonshot was a down payment on the future greatness of the United States.
McDonnell Aircraft contributed mightily to NASA’s manned space efforts. On September 12, 1962, after his Rice University speech, President Kennedy flew to St. Louis, Missouri, to speak with company employees.
Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston
JUST TWO DAYS after the Houston and St. Louis events, Kennedy attended the America’s Cup race in Newport, Rhode Island. Fresh from calling space the “new ocean” at Rice, he was happy to return to the real thing, the Atlantic. “I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it is because . . . we all came from the sea,” he said at a dinner for the America’s Cup crews. “And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins[,] the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it[,] we are going back from whence we came.”
Kennedy didn’t have the luxury of meditating on either the old ocean or the new ocean for long, because two of the most consequential long-term crises of his White House tenure had deteriorated during his robust space tour. In Mississippi, state officials were still defying the Supreme Court’s order to desegregate the University of Mississippi, while in Georgia, arsonists had burned two African American churches that had been active in the voter registration movement. Civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy were expressing their outrage. With great force, Kennedy condemned Jim Crow laws. In late September, Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered U.S. Marshals to help facilitate James Meredith’s registration at Ole Miss. When segregationists triggered a riot on the campus, JFK ordered in federal troops to restore law and order.
Even as opposition to the civil rights movement was threatening to blow open American society from within, another crisis was doing the same from without. In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs invasion the previous year, the United States had adopted various measures to destabilize Castro’s regime, including assassination plots, sabotage of the Cuban economy, and contingency plans to blockade the island. Convinced that a full-scale invasion from America was inevitable, Castro agreed to a Soviet offer to deploy intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Cuba. During the late summer of 1962, the USSR increased the delivery of military systems to the Caribbean island. In response, Kennedy asked Congress for standby authority to order 150,000 reservists to active duty for a year. Three days later, in the midst of JFK’s space tour, the Soviet Union lambasted the request as “an act of aggression,” warning that it would thwart any incursion into Cuba with war—even, it was implied, nuclear war.
Ensconced in the White House, Kennedy remained firmly committed to preventing acts of aggression against the United States by or through Cuba. At a press conference on September 13, he addressed the situation directly. “Let me make this clear,” he said. “If at any time the Communist build-up in Cuba were to endanger or interfere with our security in any way, including our base at Guantanamo, our passage to the Panama Canal, our missile and space activities at Cape Canaveral, or the lives of American citizens in this country . . . then this country will do whatever must be done.”