Apollo: The Race to the Moon (10 page)

The palace intrigue that was worrying Robert Seamans down on the ground floor of Dolley Madison House could have been taking place on Mars as far as George Low’s little task force on the third floor was concerned. Oblivious to the new Administration, Low’s team plunged ahead with its plans to go to the moon.

John Disher recorded events in the stenographic notebooks he carried everywhere. His book for the fall of 1960 reveals that the first meeting of George Low’s working group convened on Friday, October 21, 1960, at 2 P.M. From then on, the pace steadily accelerated. By November 8, Disher’s notes reveal, they were talking about spacecraft weights. On the twenty-second of that month, they met with Milt Trageser of M.I.T. about the requirements for the navigation and guidance system.

At the end of November, Faget called with encouraging news from his latest visit to the Marshall Space Flight Center: “M.S.F.C. is eager,” Disher recorded, meaning that von Braun would throw his weight behind a lunar landing. By December, the group began discussing the question of artificial gravity. Would it be needed on a lunar mission? If so, should it be continuous or periodic? And what about radiation from solar flares? Could a solar flare be predicted? What were the odds that a big one would occur during a mission? What would happen to the crew if it did?

Low’s people also worried during these first weeks about the nature of the lunar surface. Was it firm and rocky? Or was the surface covered with several feet of fine dust, so that a spacecraft coming in for a landing would sink without a trace? There were advocates for both positions, and nobody really knew. At least finding a flat landing place didn’t seem to be a problem, Disher noted: “Good pick of landing sites this side of moon.”

Everything was new. Low’s group held few formal meetings, but they would call in people who looked as if they knew something about the problem at hand, quiz them, and then add the information to their growing store of data. The committee itself kept expanding to include others in NASA who were becoming interested.

By the thirteenth of December, they had a piece of paper with a Proposed Flight Schedule on it. It was presumptuous, trying to define a time schedule for a task they still only barely understood. This first, almost completely uninformed but prescient estimation showed the circumlunar missions taking place in 1967–1968 and the lunar landings taking place in 1969–1970.

On Thursday, January 5, 1961, Low’s group faced its first major review by top NASA officials. On the basis of the review, they would decide whether to pursue the lunar mission aggressively under the new Administration or to table it instead and take a less ambitious, more self-protective stance. Low and his confederates gathered at lunchtime on Tuesday to rehearse their presentation on Silverstein.

First, they decided, no more of the “man-on-the-moon” language they had been using—it was too slangy, too likely to be ridiculed. “Manned lunar landing” would be the phrase for what they wanted to do. It was also obvious to Silverstein that they had better not pretend to be farther along than they really were. In fact, Silverstein said, they ought to emphasize that this was not a coordinated set of presentations. This was known around NASA as “the country-boy treatment,” Disher explained later. “You could have been spending your life on it, but you go in and say, ‘This is just something we threw together.’ It helped disarm people sometimes.”

Low followed his instructions (the minutes of the review specify that the nine presentations were only a “first cut”), and Glennan gave Low what he wanted, a go-ahead for lunar landing work to continue. Glennan even made the group legitimate, converting them into the “Low Committee” with a mandate to answer the question “What is NASA’s Manned Lunar Landing Program?” For Low’s people, it was exhilarating. At the same time that Bob Seamans was fretting about NASA’s future as an agency and John Kennedy was wishing that he could get rid of Mercury, John Disher thought that they were halfway to putting a lunar landing program on NASA’s schedule.

Bob Seamans knew things that other people didn’t, and they didn’t improve his spirits as the inauguration approached. Administrator of NASA is a political appointment. In new administrations, people are supposed to be eager to accept such appointments, but this was not the case for the NASA post. “The Administration was getting a little desperate,” Seamans recalled, “because quite a few people had turned the job down.” By Lyndon Johnson’s recollection, a total of seventeen men had said they weren’t interested in running NASA. “Of course,” Seamans continued, “we knew that too”—that people were refusing the NASA job—“and that was another thing that was demoralizing. You said to yourself, ‘Why would anybody turn it down? It must mean that the plans for NASA are being pulled in.’” There was an alternative explanation, Wiesner would later point out. Lyndon Johnson, the new chairman of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, was doing the recruiting, applying the full-bore LBJ treatment which so many people found off-putting. When Wiesner checked with some of the candidates later to find out why they had turned down the job, they seldom mentioned fears about the future of NASA. “Mostly,” Wiesner said, “the people would report to me that they didn’t want to work for Lyndon Johnson.” Either way, NASA seemed to be the agency that no one wanted to run.

The inauguration came and went, and still there was no NASA administrator. Finally, Kennedy called in Wiesner and told him to do something—this was getting to be an embarrassment. Wiesner, seeing that the pool of qualified scientist-managers had been pretty much depleted by the refusals, turned to a man who wasn’t a scientist but had been in and out of Washington for more than twenty years, most prominently as Truman’s director for the Bureau of the Budget and later as undersecretary at the State Department. His name was James E. Webb.

From that moment on, NASA seems to have been watched over by a solicitous Providence. Time and again, seeming misfortune turned out to be the best thing that could have happened, or the right person turned up at the right time, or a malfunction that would have been disastrous on one mission happened on another where it was not disastrous. The first instance of NASA’s serendipity was that only because Kennedy was indifferent to space did Jim Webb end up in the administrator’s position. If the earlier candidates had known that four months later NASA would become a custodian of the nation’s honor, most of them would probably have snapped up the job. If the men in the White House had known, they would not have chosen anyone like Jim Webb.

This was the era when Robert McNamara came to the Pentagon, Robert Kennedy came to the Justice Department, and McGeorge Bundy came to the White House—a new generation of leaders. Jim Webb could hardly have been more unlike these other New Frontiersmen. Stocky and voluble, Webb at fifty-five was from a different generation than most of the others in the new Administration, and from a different world. Instead of Harvard and wire-rimmed glasses, clipped accents and dry wit, Jim Webb was University of North Carolina and rumpled collars, cornpone accent and down-home homilies, a good old boy with a law degree.

Webb wasn’t about to accept the NASA job just because it had been offered, any more than the first seventeen had. After Wiesner called him, Webb flew to Washington and spent a weekend talking to trusted associates about the prospects for space under the Kennedy Administration. “By the time Monday morning came I had a pretty good picture of what was going on”—namely, that Wiesner and the men around him were dead set against the manned space program. Webb had decided that he “would not take the job if I could honorably and properly not take it.”

But he had an appointment to talk to Lyndon Johnson that Monday morning at the office Johnson still kept in the Senate Office Building. “When I arrived at the Vice President’s office, Hugh Dryden was already there,” remembered Webb. “He’d been invited by the Vice President to meet me there. So I talked this over with Hugh. We got away from all the secretaries, and I said, ‘Hugh, I don’t really think this is the thing for me to do.’ He said, ‘I don’t either. I don’t really believe you’re the right one, or that you’d want to do this.’” Then another acquaintance, Frank Pace, came into the anteroom for a meeting with Johnson. “Frank,” Webb said, “Hugh and I don’t think I’m the right one to do this. You’ve been in the missile business. Do you agree with that?” Pace vigorously agreed. “All right,” Webb said to Pace, “you’re the messenger. When the Vice President comes in, instead of my keeping my appointment, we’ll be outside. You tell him I’m not the right one.”

Webb and Dryden retreated into the echoing corridor outside Johnson’s office and waited. After a few minutes, Pace abruptly emerged. “He came out like he was being ejected from the office,” Webb remembered. “The Vice President just threw him out.”

Webb was marched into Johnson’s office and given the full Johnson treatment. As soon as he got out of there, he called his friend Clark Clifford, an influential Kennedy adviser, and said, “Clark, you’ve got to try to get me out of this.” Clifford laughed and replied, “I’m the one who recommended you. I’m not going to try to get you out of it.” Finally, when Webb said that he would not accept the job “except by direct invitation of the President,” an appointment with Kennedy was arranged for that afternoon. Webb got no promises from the President that the United States was going to make a major effort in space. But in the end, Webb found he could not “honorably and properly” refuse.

Though the manner in which Webb came to NASA was not auspicious, a case can be made that James E. Webb was the Kennedy Administration’s most effective appointment. He would have his share of problems and make his share of mistakes, but in Jim Webb NASA got that strange Washington hybrid, the politician-manager—a man who could run a large organization and know where all the bodies were buried. He was also a man who could play congressional appropriations committees with the finesse, the hard-eyed calculation, and, when circumstances required, the deviousness of a Lyndon Johnson himself. The role he played at NASA until his resignation in the fall of 1968 was indispensable. Many of the engineers of Apollo, often men with little use for politicians, will tell anyone who asks that of all the people who got the United States to the moon by the end of the decade, Jim Webb was among the most important.

People could get badly burned if they paid too much attention to the North Carolina accent and the country-boy pose. “You must remember,” a close colleague once said, “that Jim is a very complex fellow, and he has many hats. He jams on his lawyer hat, then he pulls his Marine flyer hat down over his ears. Then his businessman hat. What he said with one hat on doesn’t always agree with what he said with another.” Jim Webb was one of those men who could keep two contradictory ideas in his mind at the same time with no trouble at all.

Webb never tried to make technical decisions himself, but he would sometimes override a technical decision for nontechnical reasons. Despite this, and even because of it, he eventually won the respect of most of his engineers. To Ken Kleinknecht, an engineer’s engineer, this politician (“a talker” is Kleinknecht’s label for such persons) always remained a little exotic and incomprehensible. “I could listen to him talk for forty-five minutes, and when he got finished, you know, I really didn’t know what he’d said. But you listened every minute!”* And Kleinknecht thought Webb made good decisions. Kleinknecht remembered when Webb canceled a seventh Mercury flight, a three-day orbital mission by Shepard. “We weren’t very happy about it,” Kleinknecht recalled. “But Webb argued, ‘If you do it and it’s successful, it doesn’t mean a hell of a lot. If we were to have a failure, we couldn’t recover. It might stop the manned space program.’ And you know, he was a hundred percent right.” For Kleinknecht, thinking back over a career that took him from manager of Project Mercury through troubleshooting the first launch of the shuttle, “Webb was the greatest thing that ever happened to NASA.”

[* Webb enjoyed talking. A colleague from another agency who regularly had lunch with Webb once bet his secretary that he could get through an entire lunch without saying a word. He succeeded, substituting grunts for hello and goodbye. It was one of the best lunches they’d had together, Webb remarked cheerily as his guest left: “I learned so much.”]

Jim Elms called Webb a “politician in the best sense of the word.” He told a story in later years that encapsulated what he meant. It happened after the lunar program had been approved and Elms was down in Houston as Gilruth’s deputy. They were trying to get the Control Center built. Fresh out of industry and not understanding how government funding worked, Elms and Earl Hilburn had laid out the Control Center on the assumption that I.B.M. computers were going to be installed—at that time, only I.B.M. was making the kind of equipment they needed. But when the Control Center was half built, one of the other computer companies got wind of this and started to raise a fuss. This was all the more inconvenient because the General Accounting Office had just issued a directive saying that no one was to buy I.B.M. equipment except via a competitive bidding process. But if NASA went through the competitive procurement process, the entire Apollo program schedule would slip disastrously.

A nonpolitician would have bought the I.B.M. computers and embroiled NASA in a scandal, said Elms. A careful, cover-your-ass politician would have followed the rules, let the program slip a year, and blamed his subordinates. What Jim Webb did was to call in the chief executive of every major computer company in the United States, including the one who was complaining. As each came to his office, Webb told him (as Elms reconstructed it, in a convincing drawl), “I want to thank you very much for comin’ here. You know, I got a problem I’m facin’, and I want to share it with you. President Kennedy has said we are to get to the moon in the decade and get back, and Mr. Elms and Mr. Hilburn here have persuaded me that if we don’t buy some computers from Tom Watson Junior, we ain’t gonna be able to do it! And the G.A.O. said if I buy those computers from Tom Watson Junior they’re gonna put me in jail!” Webb then put it to his guest: Was he prepared to come back in two weeks and sign a fixed-price contract for the computer? With that, Webb sent him off to be briefed on the Control Center’s computer requirements by Elms and Hilburn, who were waiting next door. “And they came back in a couple of weeks,” Elms chuckled, “including the chap who was so upset. They shuffled around a little bit and they said, ‘What you’d better do is buy computers from Tom Watson here.’” The computers were installed on schedule and nobody’s nose was out of joint. That, said Jim Elms, is a politician.