Kennedy provided the inspiration and financial support for the space program—and spurred rapid innovation. While trying to solve the problems of manned space flight, scientists laid the foundations for satellite television, global positioning systems, microchips, solar panels, carbon monoxide detectors and even the Dustbuster.
—WALTER ISAACSON, 2018
President Kennedy began 1963 in a boastful mood. Two weeks before the New Year, NASA’s Mariner 2 had succeeded spectacularly, becoming the first space vehicle to make meaningful contact with one of Earth’s neighboring planets.
Both the United States and the Soviet Union had wanted to be the first to achieve this landmark, and Venus, being on average the closest planet to Earth, was the logical target. In February 1961, the Soviets had launched the first Venus probe, Venera 1, but a communications failure sent it off course, and it missed by 62,000 miles. A subsequent attempt at a Venus landing was made in late August 1962, with Sputnik 19, but the craft failed to escape Earth’s orbit. Mariner 2, a 447-pound probe packed with measuring instruments sitting atop a two-stage Atlas-Agena rocket, was America’s response. Designed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it was completed on an astonishingly breakneck schedule and launched from Cape Canaveral just two days after Sputnik 19 and five days after an American predecessor, Mariner 1, failed in takeoff.
On December 14, after 110 days in space, Mariner 2 arrived at its destination, coming within 21,607 miles of Venus, scanning the planet with its pair of radiometers, and sending back valuable new information. Scientists had long presumed that Venus had a relatively benign environment, one that might even support life of the type found on Earth. Mariner 2 erased any such delusions. Its readings indicated blistering temperatures and extremely high atmospheric pressure. Continuing toward the sun, the probe also sent back new knowledge on solar wind and interplanetary dust.
As the first successful interplanetary probe, Mariner 2 marked a turning point, giving astrophysicists and astronomers a firsthand look at space and opening a new era of exploration that would see probes traveling as far as Pluto. Applauded by space scientists around the world, it was a win for the purely scientific side of space exploration, but it also put the United States firmly ahead of the USSR in the race to explore the solar system.
Kennedy was well aware of an interplanetary mission’s public relations value. On January 17, 1963, as a parallel to the visits of Mercury astronauts after their successful spaceflights, Kennedy fêted the lead scientists behind Mariner 2 at the White House. Standing next to a model of the probe, the president called the voyage “an extraordinary technical accomplishment by the United States,” one that indicated that there was a “broad spectrum of mastery in the field of space, other than the effort of the human probe.” The scientists surrounding JFK were still, in fact, in the thick of analyzing the data from Mariner 2, and the full results would not be announced until late February. Had science been the only consideration for the meeting, Kennedy might have waited until then, but he’d brought the scientists to the White House that day for a specific reason: he was submitting his next federal budget to Congress that very day, and asking Congress to appropriate yet more money for the NASA manned space program.
The total budget was larger than any proposed by any president in history (even by FDR at the height of World War II) and included a conspicuous increase for Apollo and Gemini. The overall earmark for space was $5.7 billion, of which $4.2 billion applied to 1964 and $1.5 billion to future years. The total for space in 1964 would rise 75 percent from 1963 and more than 300 percent over what had been budgeted for 1962. No mere blip after a decimal point, Kennedy’s space program would account for more than 3.5 percent of the nation’s total spending. By 1966, a whopping 5.5 percent of the federal budget would go to the moon program.
James Webb, a masterly Capitol Hill appropriations fund-raiser, was quick to promote the New Frontier budget as “austere,” framing the increase as a reasonable continuation of Congress’s nearly unanimous commitment in 1961 to put an American on the moon within a decade. Being number one in space was expensive, Kennedy said, and NASA would only continue to grow as the United States jockeyed to “maintain a position of world leadership in the exploration and utilization of space.” Showcasing the recent success of Mariner 2, Kennedy’s budget message read like a “State of Space” white paper:
Efforts are being concentrated in the continued development of the complex Apollo spacecraft and the large Advanced Saturn launch vehicle needed to boost the Apollo to the moon. A lunar orbit rendezvous approach will be used to accomplish during this decade the first manned lunar landing. Under this technique the Apollo spacecraft will be boosted directly into orbit around the moon, where a small manned lunar excursion module will be detached and descend to the surface of the moon. It will later return to the orbiting Apollo which will return to the earth.
The recent Mariner flight past Venus attests to the progress we are making in unmanned space investigations. Development of geophysical, astronomical, meteorological, and communications satellites will also continue. This budget provides for strong research efforts aimed at developing the technology needed for advanced space missions, including future manned space flight and unmanned explorations of Venus and Mars.
Kennedy’s hopes for heading off a budget battle were short-lived. In Congress, a strong cadre of fiscally conservative Republicans set out to block NASA’s astronomical growth, supported by a cabal of concerned Democrats. Former president Eisenhower continued to snipe that “anybody who would spend $40 billion in a race to the moon for national prestige is nuts.” In Fortune, journalist Arthur Krock charged the Kennedy administration with manipulating the press to cheerlead for NASA and other New Frontier initiatives. Furthermore, Krock charged Kennedy with exhibiting a “bristling sensitiveness to critical analysis” unmatched in U.S. presidential history. He even went so far as to suggest that JFK’s public relations blitz, anchored in flattering newspaper editors and TV moguls, was counter to Thomas Jefferson’s understanding of freedom of the press. “We have had limited success in managing news,” Kennedy sardonically countered Krock, “if that is what we have been trying to do.”
Krock’s criticism about White House’s press co-option was particularly biting because he’d been a reliably pro-Kennedy reporter throughout the president’s political career. Regarded as the dean of Washington journalists after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence in 1935 and 1938, Krock had promoted Kennedy’s first book, Why England Slept (1940), far and wide. Then, in 1946, at the request of his old sponsor, confidant, and friend Joseph Kennedy Sr., he’d helped promote the young JFK in his first run for Congress. Somewhere along the line, Krock’s relationship with the elder Kennedy soured, and now newspapers all over America were quoting his criticisms of the president. “The official [White House] release of information in the areas of nuclear and space exploration are not determined on whether the American public that pays is entitled to the facts,” Krock wrote. “Nor is safeguarding the national security the determining factor, though this is always the explanation for concealment. The controlling policy factor is whether the release will or will not improve our ‘world image,’ and give this government a lead in the psychological sector of the cold war.”
While JFK might not have disagreed with that last premise, he would certainly have protested Krock’s contention that he was disregarding national security, a preoccupation that was in fact central to his policy directives. To Kennedy, who was presiding over the most perilous period of the Cold War, “peacetime” didn’t exist in the usual sense, and every measure of national accomplishment (technological, military, economic, social, and moral) needed to be weaponized in the competition for geopolitical influence. Under the president’s direction, certain activities at NASA may have been concealed or, at other times, sugarcoated, but Krock was exaggerating the White House’s media manipulation. From Kennedy’s perspective, NASA had to generate a plethora of positive publicity in order to keep congressional appropriations rolling. The world could see the results of what had already been accomplished: in only two years as president, having given NASA the funding it needed, Kennedy had taken the United States from launching its first Mercury astronauts to exploring Venus, revolutionizing satellite communications and meteorological technology, and even creating new scientific disciplines such as bioastronautics and space medicine. Now Americans had to understand the importance of NASA’s next space steps, and that meant widespread publicity. It meant a new monthly column by von Braun in Popular Science, to help explain Apollo’s objectives. It meant photo spreads in Life magazine to highlight the family lives of the Gemini astronauts. It meant ticker-tape parades and Oval Office receptions for returning space heroes. As Arthur C. Clarke wrote and as Kennedy surely understood, “The eyes of all ages are upon us now, as we create the myths of the future at Cape Canaveral in Florida and Baikonur in Kazakhstan. No generation has been given such powers, and such responsibilities. . . . If our wisdom fails to match our science, we will have no second chance.”
The reality that eluded critics such as Eisenhower and Krock was that Kennedy’s New Frontier of technology had seized young Americans’ imaginations, and the further that NASA progressed toward the moon, the more their imaginations would soar with it. When Eisenhower gave his farewell address, for example, there were virtually no computer science programs at American universities. But by 1963, such departments had been established at Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Utah, the University of Illinois at Urbana, and the University of California, Berkeley. To be sure, some impetus for the surge came from federal funding provided by the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which itself was a response to Sputnik and the perceived education gap between U.S. and Soviet universities. As we have seen, Senator Kennedy had been a supporter of that legislation, calling the race for Cold War advantage “a race of education and research,” and now he was confident that advanced computer technology would extend the American edge over the USSR in communications satellites and space probes such as Mariner 2. Under Kennedy, it became tantamount to a national duty for students to study physics, mechanical engineering, and computer programming, and NASA’s high-profile advances were a constant reminder of what was possible. “Remember when NASA was advertising Tang as its big contribution to the civilized world?” recalled Bob Taylor of the Pentagon’s information processing agency, referencing the orange powdered drink that became associated with NASA astronauts. “Well there was a better example” in the computer science advances the agency made possible.
EARLY IN APRIL 1963, under intense congressional pressure to slash $700 million from the Apollo program, Kennedy asked Lyndon Johnson, in his role as head of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, to conduct a thorough review of NASA expenditures, objectives, and programs. Even though JFK and LBJ weren’t personally close, they were in complete alignment on the moonshot goal, and the vice president went right to work. What Kennedy treasured about Johnson was that he was in cahoots with the Southern bloc of Democratic senators such as Walter George, Richard Russell, and Herman Talmadge—powerful allies of Project Apollo. Before the review was completed, Johnson advised his boss to constantly argue that “our space program has an overriding urgency that cannot be calculated solely in terms of industrial, scientific, or military development.” If lawmakers criticized NASA, LBJ suggested they be called out as soft on communism. Timidity wouldn’t be tolerated. Johnson wanted Kennedy to go directly to the American people, alerting them that the “future of society is at stake” if the NASA budget was reduced.
On May 13, Johnson wrote Kennedy a personal note and attached a thoughtful memo that would serve as New Frontier artillery against lawmakers, journalists, and pundits who questioned the prioritization of Gemini and Apollo as national security imperatives. Johnson’s report brilliantly laid out how the moon landing would reap massive long-term benefits in international prestige, scientific breakthroughs, and economic benefits nationwide:
I. BENEFITS TO NATIONAL ECONOMY FROM NASA SPACE PROGRAMS
1. It cannot be questioned that billions of dollars directed into research and development in an orderly and thoughtful manner will have significant effect upon our national economy. No formula has been found which attributes specific dollar values to each of these areas of anticipated developments, however, the “multiplier” of space research and development will augment our economic strength, our peaceful posture, and our standard of living.
2. Even though specific dollar values cannot be set for these benefits, a mere listing of the fields which will be affected is convincing evidence that the benefits will be substantial. The benefits include:
a) Additional knowledge about the Earth and the Sun’s influence on the Earth, the nature of interplanetary space environment, and the origin of the solar system as well as of life itself.
b) Increased ability and experience in managing major research and development efforts, expansion of capital facilities, encouragement of higher standards of quality production.
c) Accelerated use of liquid oxygen in steelmaking, coatings for temperature control of housing, efficient transfer of chemical energy into electrical energy, and wide-range advances in electronics.
d) Development of effective filters against detergents; increased accuracy (and therefore reduced costs) in measuring hot steel rods; improved medical equipment in human care; stimulation of the use of fiberglass refractory welding tape, high energy metal forming processes; development of new coatings for plywood and furniture; use of frangible tube energy absorption systems that can be adapted to absorbing shocks of failing elevators and emergency aircraft landings.
e) Improved communications, improved weather forecasting, improved forest fire detection, and improved navigations.
f) Development of high temperature gas-cooled graphite moderated reactors and liquid metal cooled reactors; development of radioisotope power sources for both military and civilian uses; development of instruments for monitoring degrees of radiation; and application of thermoelectric and thermionic conversion of heat to electric energy.
g) Improvements in metals, alloys, and ceramics.
h) An augmentation of the supply of highly trained technical manpower.
i) Greater strength for the educational system both through direct grants, facilities and scholarships and through setting goals that will encourage young people.
j) An expansion of the base for peaceful cooperation among nations.
k) Military competence. (It is estimated that between $600 and $675 million of NASA’s FY [fiscal year] 1964 budget would be needed for military space projects and would be budgeted by the Defense Department, if they were not already provided for in the NASA budget.)
While Kennedy was very grateful to Johnson for his reassuring recommendations, he also turned to von Braun for a booster shot of fortitude. In early May, the president made a return visit to Huntsville for an earthshaking static firing of a Saturn booster stage. From a safe bunker, he watched the locked-down rocket roar, his greenish-gray eyes dancing like those of a delighted boy. “That’s just wonderful!” he shouted. “If I could only show all this to the people in Congress!”
If Kennedy couldn’t bring a Saturn rocket to Capitol Hill, he could at least project the excitement of another space shot, one that occurred the following week when Gordon Cooper took off aboard Faith 7 for the sixth and final launch of Project Mercury. Cooper, a native Californian and veteran air force pilot, was already a familiar face to the TV-watching public, having served as capsule communicator (CAPCOM) for Alan Shepard’s first suborbital spaceflight and for Scott Carpenter’s Aurora 7 mission. And Cooper could certainly barnstorm, a fact he showed off two days before liftoff by buzzing the NASA offices at Cape Canaveral in an F-102 jet. That stunt didn’t gain him any brownie points with Webb, but his gallant performance in space on May 15 more than made up for this irrepressible horseplay.
If Americans’ interest in Mercury had waned as launches, orbits, and splashdowns became semiregular events, Cooper’s spaceflight reignited the fascination by adding both duration and suspense. As planned, the journey would begin on May 15 and last almost a day and a half—more than all previous Mercury missions combined. As had become his habit, Kennedy watched TV coverage of the liftoff from his White House bedroom and Oval Office side room. Seven hundred fifty miles to the south, Cooper pretended he was on his own, actually falling asleep in the cockpit as he awaited countdown. At 8:06 a.m., Faith 7 executed a flawless takeoff, starting Cooper on a flight that would last more than thirty-four hours.
Throughout his mission, Cooper was connected by radio with two NASA flight directors (working in shifts) and with his fellow astronauts, and if all had gone according to plan, he may have been best remembered for an in-flight calmness that bordered on ennui. Instead, on the afternoon of May 16, during Cooper’s third-to-last orbit, Americans got a dose of tense drama when a short circuit deactivated the spacecraft’s automatic altitude and flight-control system. Instead of relying on autopilot for reentry, Cooper would have to take her down the old-fashioned way. “I had to initiate retrofire,” Cooper later explained, “use the window view for attitude reference, and control the spacecraft with the manual proportional system.” Despite carbon-dioxide levels rising, the unflappable Cooper’s reentry and splashdown were even more accurate than those of previous Mercury missions. With precision akin to hitting a floating bull’s-eye, Cooper brought Faith 7 down just 4.5 miles from the designated prime recovery ship, 81 miles south of Midway Island.
Six days later, Major Cooper was standing in the White House Rose Garden to receive his NASA Distinguished Service Medal from the president. The public ceremony was far more lavish than some of the recent homecomings from space, and Kennedy’s remarks on the occasion were clear, historically based, and partial to lunar expedition:
I know that a good many people say, “Why go to the moon,” just as many people said to Lindbergh, “Why go to Paris.” Lindbergh said, “It is not so much a matter of logic as it is a feeling.”
I think the United States has committed itself to this great adventure in the sixties. I think before the end of the sixties we will send a man to the moon, an American, and I think in so doing[,] it is not merely that we are interested in making this particular journey but we are interested in demonstrating a dominance of this new sea, and making sure that in this new, great, adventurous period the Americans are playing their great role, as they have in the past.
Flashing his trademark humor, along with his personal identification with the astronauts, JFK also made reference to Cooper’s piloting skills and meditative calm at the end of his mission. “One of the things which warmed us the most during this flight,” Kennedy said, “was the realization that however extraordinary computers may be, that we are still ahead of them and that man is still the most extraordinary computer of all. His judgment, his nerve, and the lessons he can learn from experience still make him unique and, therefore, make manned flight necessary and not merely that of satellites. I hope that we will be encouraged to continue with this program.” That hope would be tested throughout late spring, as Kennedy faced the first serious opposition to the expansion of America’s space program.
AFTER COOPER’S MISSION, the Kennedy administration revved up the publicity machine with creative verve. The quarter of a million people who lined the streets of Washington watching Cooper travel from the White House to the U.S. Capitol constituted one of four grand public receptions staged for the astronaut that week, along with others in Honolulu, Cocoa Beach, and New York, where people turned out in droves for a ticker-tape parade. At the Capitol, Cooper spoke to a joint session of Congress, receiving a standing ovation and delivering an eloquent speech that included a prayer he said he’d composed while in orbit. Although addressed to God, his prayer could just as well have been a pitch to the congressmen and senators who held NASA’s purse strings. “Help us in our future space endeavors,” he began, “that we may show the world that a democracy really can compete, and still are able to do things in a big way, and are able to do research, development and can conduct many scientific and very technical programs.” One senator called Cooper’s prayer “one of the most impressive things” he’d heard in seventeen years in Congress. Nonetheless, it did little to sway certain fiscally conservative members of Congress intent on slashing NASA’s budget.
That same month, Jack and Jackie Kennedy hosted the Mercury astronauts at the White House for drinks, hors d’oeuvres, and storytelling. And astronauts had an ulterior motive: a futile effort lobbying for more Mercury missions. “Is it true you’re all Republicans?” the president asked the gathered spacemen. “I don’t know what the hell we are,” Gus Grissom replied, to laughs. Pointing to his Oval Office rocking chair, the president asked Gordon Cooper to “Take a swing in this capsule”; Cooper happily agreed. Photographers clicked away. By the time the astronauts left the White House, their admiration for Kennedy had grown by leaps and bounds. However, once back in Houston for a meeting, the Mercury Seven found that they were in trouble for not having cleared their informal Oval Office chat with NASA officialdom.
A few weeks later, after the hoopla diminished, the Senate Republican Policy Committee circulated a scathing attack on the Gemini and Apollo programs. Questioning the costs of expediting them, the statement questioned whether “other aspects of human needs should be bypassed or overlooked in the one spasmodic effort to achieve a lunar landing at once.” The senators suggested that the excess funds could be better used for education, health care, and other challenges closer to home. Other criticisms from Republicans rose on military grounds, charging that while the USSR was almost certainly bolstering its ability to weaponize space, the United States was not. “To allow the Soviet Union to dominate the atmosphere 100 miles above the earth’s surface while we seek to put a man on the moon could be, in the opinion of many, a fatal error. . . . Intrinsic prudence, according to some, demands that we concentrate on the development of families of missiles operating in the suborbital and orbital areas rather than to devote such a large proportion of our efforts to lunar shots.” The point that drew the greatest attention, though, was that NASA was robbing the best and brightest Harvard, MIT, and Caltech computer specialists for its moon challenge, depriving other fields of needed expertise.
Kennedy and Johnson were right to be concerned about NASA budget slashes. Even though Cooper had kept a finger in the dike for a few weeks, by summer NASA had clearly lost some of its razzle-dazzle glamour on Capitol Hill. On July 1, the Washington Post reported that “the United States space program is receiving the first searching review of its aims and activities since its inception five years ago.”
The House Committee on Science and Astronautics combed through NASA’s projects and identified $490 million in cuts. Although the Senate Republican Policy Committee had suggested a slowdown of the moon program to save money, the House committee had carefully left intact most projects that were directly moon related, even as it failed to take into account certain technical aspects of mission planning. The space agency resisted with special vigor when the committee concluded that funding for unmanned lunar probes could be withheld given that manned flights would bring back the same data. A NASA official countered that it was impossible to build a landing craft without first knowing the characteristics of the moon’s surface. Pushing back from the bottom line, Webb warned that cuts of more than $400 million would impede the effort to land an American on the moon within Kennedy’s schedule.
Not to be outdone in the prolonged funding dispute, the pro-space lobby regularly trotted out senators and representatives to praise NASA in unqualified terms. Why punish the one federal agency, they would ask, that was overperforming? On the House floor, Congressman James Fulton of Pennsylvania elevated NASA administrators and astronauts into the pantheon of explorers alongside Columbus, Hudson, de Soto, Crockett, Boone, and Lewis and Clark. All these legends were considered “nuts” in their day, Fulton said, and he argued that the new breed of “nuts” in Kennedy’s New Frontier “will lead a great America in the conquest of outer space.” Fulton ended his appeal by saying he favored increased funding for Project Apollo “because it is in keeping with the pioneer spirit of this great nation.”
Out in the media landscape, where he’d become a familiar figure, von Braun also came to Kennedy’s aid in the budget debate. Building off his friendships with Walt Disney, Walter Cronkite, and other opinion makers, von Braun routinely leaked the false premise that the Soviets were winning the space race—a contention Khrushchev was also spinning weekly, for his own purposes. But in point of fact, the only thing NASA officials feared more than a competitive Soviet moon program was no lunar effort from them at all. If the USSR were to have admitted that they were actually behind the United States in space and missile technology, NASA’s exorbitant funding might have dried up in Congress.
Due to the Soviets’ secrecy, their actual intentions concerning the moon remained murky. Although Bureau of the Budget chief David Bell had concluded the previous November that there was no solid evidence for a USSR moon program, America’s intelligence services were unwilling to express such certainty. “We cannot say definitely at this time that the Soviets aim to achieve a manned lunar landing ahead of or in close competition with the United States,” read a CIA National Intelligence Estimate dated December 5, 1962, “but we believe the chances are better than even that this is a Soviet objective.” The report went on to reiterate that there was no firm evidence of any planning for a Soviet manned moon mission, whether in competition with the United States or not, but the agency couldn’t rule out that such a program existed.
When asked about racing to the moon against America, Kremlin officials routinely denied any such objectives. Nevertheless, Sergei Korolev and others in the Soviet space world intensely desired to defeat the United States in a head-to-head moon race. Korolev persisted in proposing various schemes to accomplish a lunar landing. With great conviction, Korolev wanted to develop a huge booster designed to hoist seventy-five tons into orbit. This ultimately became the N1 moon rocket. Korolev, a fine salesman, persuaded Khrushchev in 1962 to approve its development.
Bell’s report, if made public, would have blown a giant hole through the New Frontier narrative that the moon was the ultimate trophy in the superpower rivalry between free-world democracy and expansionist communism. As history has shown, although the Soviets were struggling in the rocketry realm, going to the moon remained an imperative. In early 1963, however, the Soviets were experiencing serious setbacks just trying to send an unmanned Luna vehicle to the moon, despite the fact that they’d landed a less sophisticated probe on the surface three and a half years before. In the first four months of 1963, three Luna craft were launched unsuccessfully. The first failed to escape Earth’s orbit, the second couldn’t find its orbit of the moon, and the last missed the moon altogether. Similarly, Mars 1, an unmanned flyby probe launched toward the red planet in November 1962, disappeared into space due to antenna malfunction, after flying more than sixty-six million miles. While proposals for manned missions to both the moon and Mars continued to be bandied about at the Soviet advanced research institution known as OKB-1, the dismal results of these unmanned missions put a damper on enthusiasm, although Korolev continued to push for landing cosmonauts on the moon before the Americans.
While American agencies remained in the dark about true Soviet lunar intentions, the State Department was becoming increasingly anxious over the lack of progress toward nuclear treaties and agreements. One observer said that Soviet foreign policy was “in a state of perfect inertia. It isn’t moving for good or ill.” Americans had reason to hope that was the case. Concerning a proposal to ban nuclear weapons in space, the United States feared the Soviets were stalling until they had a nuclear bomb in orbit. On April 29, Secretary of State Dean Rusk abruptly canceled any further approaches to the Soviets about joint space collaborations, and the next week, on May 8, he gave the president a proposal specifically addressing the rampant fears, titled “U.S. Reaction to Soviet Placing of a Nuclear Weapon in Space.” Kennedy was more than receptive to the proposal’s core recommendation for implementation of “an active anti-satellite capability at the earliest possible time, nuclear and non-nuclear.” As military historian Paul Stares pointed out, the new policy was predominantly a preemptive move against any Soviet decision to arm space, with or without a treaty. “Moreover,” he writes, “it would provide insurance for possible domestic criticism that the administration had not taken necessary precautions.” Defensive or not, the plan still constituted a significant step in the militarization of space.
Greater progress was being made toward terrestrial nuclear arms control. On June 10, 1963, Kennedy delivered a remarkable commencement address at American University in which he announced that later that summer the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union would begin three-way talks aimed at reducing the proliferation of nuclear weapons and limiting atmospheric and underwater nuclear tests. It was a big step forward, but in fact only a piece of the larger picture JFK wanted to present with his speech, which encompassed “a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived—yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.”
Partially inspired by an open letter published by a consortium of college professors in the New York Times pleading for a nuclear test ban treaty with Russia, Kennedy’s speech was a clarion call, decrying the stockpiling of nuclear weapons, the potential for devastation and radiation poisoning, and the massive, wasteful expense. Calling on all nations and all peoples to “examine our attitude toward peace itself” and to cast off assumptions that peace is impossible, the speech advocated for a reexamination of American attitudes toward the USSR and the Cold War, and for trading existential struggle for peaceful competition. Eschewing pie-in-the-sky concepts of “universal peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream,” it called instead for “a more practical, more attainable peace . . . a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned.” While acknowledging that “no treaty . . . can provide absolute security against the risks of deception and evasion,” it can “offer far more security and far fewer risks than an unabated, uncontrolled, unpredictable arms race.”
“The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war,” Kennedy concluded. “We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough—more than enough—of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success. Confident and unafraid, we labor on—not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace.”
On the other side of the world, Khrushchev told aides that Kennedy’s speech was “the best speech by any president since Roosevelt.” But just as the Soviet leader was feeling good about Kennedy’s peace overtures, the U.S. president departed on the eighth international trip of his presidency. Visiting Cologne, Frankfurt, and Wiesbaden in West Germany, JFK enthused about NATO, and his meetings with the West German chancellor were meant to display U.S. resolve to keep NATO as its top foreign policy priority. On June 26, Kennedy capped his West Germany trip by delivering a rousing address to 450,000 people crowded into an enormous plaza in West Berlin, delivering his now-famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, advocating “the right to be free” over “the failures of the Communist system.”
The Berlin speech echoed through the Cold War landscape, heartening anticommunists everywhere. The West Berlin audience went wild with admiration for Kennedy’s bold loyalty to them; in a speech of fewer than seven hundred words, he’d assuaged their worst fears of abandonment while also shining a beacon to those on the other side of the wall, declaring that “freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free.” The speech immediately lifted the morale of those in the beleaguered city and informed the Soviet Union that despite the president’s recent call for a more peaceful competition, the battle for hearts and minds around the world would remain fierce.