Apollo: The Race to the Moon (11 page)

Back on the third floor of Dolley Madison House, Low was sailing ahead with his mandate to answer Glennan’s question—“What is NASA’s Manned Lunar Landing Program?” Although Webb was still barely aware of it, a growing cadre within NASA was assembling a detailed plan for the lunar landing mission. On St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1961, they convened at Wallops Island for a strategy session.

They were now working toward the goal of convincing Webb and Seamans to approve a lunar landing and then seek permission from the White House to let a contract for spacecraft Apollo “A,” which would just have the capacity to orbit the moon. Disher’s notes for the Wallops meeting take eighteen pages in his stenographic notebooks, a record. On the fifteenth page, he jotted down Silverstein’s marching orders. The first key date was April 10, when the Apollo Technical Liaison Groups would convene to be briefed by the lunar landing people on the status of their work.

These “Liaison Groups” had been formed back in November. At that time, they had been a way of tapping into the expertise of people at Ames and Langley and Marshall who weren’t part of the Space Task Group. Now, they were going to be used for the big push to get approval for a lunar program. So, Disher noted, between now and the meeting with Technical Liaison Groups, they were to do “missionary work.” Then, if the meeting went well, they would use the resources of Liaison Groups to help them write the specifications for the Apollo spacecraft.

Only five days after the Wallops Island meeting, Webb and Seamans met with the President to request appropriations for several items on the NASA wish list. A few, including funds for the second stage of the Saturn, were approved. But funds for the detailed design of the Apollo spacecraft were refused and put on indefinite hold.

The lunar enthusiasts, refusing to be deterred, gathered as planned a few weeks later for a three-day meeting of the Apollo Technical Liaison Groups. As they assembled in the old Administration Building, they could have had no idea how justified their optimism was. The day was Monday, April 10, 1961, and all the equations were about to change.

Chapter 5. “We’re going to the moon”

In the second week of April 1961, John F. Kennedy was enjoying a halcyon spring, a time that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., would later call the hour of euphoria. In fact, things were going so well that some of the new President’s admirers were beginning to worry. “The Kennedy buildup goes on,” James MacGregor Burns wrote in The New Republic that week. “He is not only the handsomest, the best-dressed, the most articulate, and graceful as a gazelle. He is omniscient; he swallows and digests whole books in minutes; his eye seizes instantly on the crucial point of a long memorandum; he confounds experts with his superior knowledge of their field. He is omnipresent. …He is omnipotent… . He’s Superman!” Burns disapproved. The buildup was too much, too fast. The drop, when it came, would be all the more precipitous. But Burns’s was a lonely voice. Ted Sorensen, Kennedy’s White House counsel, remembered the heady feeling that the new Administration could do no wrong. To Sorensen, just twenty-six years old, it still seemed as if they had “the magic touch.”

As that second week of April began, the glow was as bright and warm as ever. On Monday, the tenth, the President had invited the Boys’ Club “Boy of the Year” who was visiting the Oval Office to come with him to the season’s baseball opener at Griffith Stadium. The day was cold and overcast, and the hometown Senators lost to the Chicago White Sox 4 to 3, but the young man reported to the press that sitting next to Mr. Kennedy in the presidential box made him feel “fifty feet high.” Despite the chill, the young President remained hatless and coatless, as was his custom. Meanwhile the First Lady was acting as hostess to a lunch for 200 women newspaper reporters, which—Time reported—swept those tough career ladies off their feet.

On Tuesday, April 11, the Kennedys dominated the nation’s prime-time television ratings in an hour-long NBC special sponsored by Crest toothpaste. Reporter Sander Vanocur interviewed the First Lady; Ray Scherer interviewed the President. The First Lady was at once elegant and shy, talking earnestly about the difficulties of giving three-year-old Caroline and four-month-old John-John a normal childhood in the White House. The President talked about his hands-on management style and reflected on how much more subtle and complex judgments looked from inside the Oval Office than they had from Capitol Hill.

For the nationwide audience, it was one more moment in that magic Kennedy spring. In reality, this was its moment of apogee. Even as the program was being broadcast, Kennedy knew that his first major defeat as President was only hours away.

It was no secret that the Soviet Union was trying to put the first man into space. A month earlier, a Newsweek story had predicted that a Soviet manned shot would beat Alan Shepard’s suborbital Mercury flight, which now had been postponed until early May. On this very day, the intelligence warnings had become quite clear. A Soviet launch vehicle was on the pad. It was being prepared for immediate launch. It would be manned.

That morning, press secretary Pierre Salinger had been so certain that a launch was coming that he had prepared a special presidential statement. Later in the day, Wiesner asked Kennedy whether he wanted to be awakened during the night when the launch was detected. “No,” the President answered. “Give me the news in the morning.”

At 1:07 Eastern Standard Time on Wednesday morning, April 12, 1961, U. S. radar recorded the launch of an R-7 rocket from the Baikonur Space Center on the steppes of Kazakhstan in the south-central part of the U.S.S.R. Wiesner called Salinger at 1:30 to report the launch and again at 5:30 to tell him that Moscow had announced a successful recovery of the spacecraft, Vostok I. Its passenger, cosmonaut Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin, had completed one full orbit of the earth and was said to be feeling fine.

As four years earlier, when the Soviets put Sputnik into orbit, the nation looked at the skies and saw calamity. Perhaps Shepard would have beaten the Russians into space, were it not for a few minor technical delays. No matter. Appearances could have a reality of their own, the Washington Post editorialized in its Thursday edition: “In these matters, what people believe is as important as the actual facts, and many persons will of course take this event as new evidence of Soviet superiority.” An influential congressman from New York announced that he was ready to call for a full-scale congressional investigation—the American people must be properly alerted to the need for wartime mobilization. Abroad, an independent newspaper in Manila reported that the people in its part of the world “see in all this the supposed superiority of the Communist way of life, economic system, and materialistic philosophy.” Egyptian president Gamel Nasser had “no doubt that the launching of man into space will turn upside down not only many scientific views, but also many political and military trends.”

Overnight, a gap in Soviet and American rocket technology that had been years in the making became Kennedy’s personal failure. As a writer for the New York Times pointed out, such events would inevitably be compared with the President’s efforts to present himself as a “young, active, and vigorous leader of a strong and advancing nation.” As if to underscore how the youthful image could backfire, a political cartoon the day after Gagarin’s flight showed a gleeful Nikita Khrushchev bouncing a rock-sized spacecraft off the head of a confused and boyish John Kennedy.

A presidential press conference on Wednesday afternoon revealed to all the world the end of the honeymoon. People were tired of seeing the United States second, one reporter complained. What was Kennedy going to do about it? “However tired anybody may be, and no one is more tired than I am,” the President responded, “it is a fact that it’s going to take some time and I think we have to recognize it.” The news was going to get worse before it got better, he went on. He hoped that there would be some other area besides space where the United States could be first. But not space. In fact, Kennedy said emphatically, the nation would not try to match Soviet achievements in space, choosing instead “other areas where we can be first and which will bring more long-range benefits to mankind.”

As the world’s reaction to Gagarin’s flight built, it became clear that it didn’t make much difference whether there were other arenas in which the United States might be first. It didn’t make much difference that unmanned flights with scientific instruments were a more efficient way to explore space than manned flights. In a way that transcended any detached scientific assessment, a historic event had occurred, a soul-stirring step—and it was the Russians who had done it. “This is the end of an uncomfortable day,” Edwin Newman commented on Wednesday night as he closed a news special on Gagarin’s flight. “No matter how you add things up, today belonged to the Russians.”

Kennedy began to feel the same inexorable pull toward manned space flight that Eisenhower had felt in 1957. On Thursday afternoon, the President asked Sorensen to review the options for the space program. Sorensen scheduled a meeting for Friday, April 14, a day that Sorensen later came to regard as the single most crucial day in the decision to go to the moon. It was a small meeting in Sorensen’s office overlooking the South Lawn, with just five men talking and arguing for several hours: Sorensen, Wiesner, budget director David Bell, NASA administrator James Webb, and Webb’s deputy, Hugh Dryden.

Wiesner was opposed to trying to compete with the Soviets in what he regarded as technological stunts, just as he had opposed the attention that was being given to the United States’ own Project Mercury. But this afternoon was no longer the time to make that case. A consensus emerged that if the United States was going to try to compete, the options were extremely limited.

For the next few years, the Soviet Union had a lead in launch vehicles that the United States could not possibly close. The Soviets could put more weight into orbit, and weight was critical. The American launch vehicles that were going to be available for the next five years were going to limit the United States to small spacecraft flying in low earth orbit. To the five men gathered in Sorensen’s office, it seemed likely that the Russians were going to be the first to put crews of two and three into orbit, the first to establish a space station, the first to circumnavigate the moon. If the United States wanted to compete, it had to jump to the next step, to pick a goal that would use the next generation of space technology. As the meeting wore on it became clear to Sorensen that the United States had only one chance to be first, and that was a manned lunar landing.

Hugh Sidey, Life’s White House correspondent, was under the gun. His managing editor in New York had demanded to know how the White House planned to respond to Gagarin’s flight. Sidey, who enjoyed unrivaled access to the Kennedy White House, had asked to see Sorensen to try to find out. He arrived in the West Wing late Friday afternoon, shortly after the weary task group had assembled in the Cabinet Room to brief the President.

Sorensen came out to see him. No, he couldn’t answer Sidey’s question, he said, but he had some people who could. He took Sidey with him back into the Cabinet Room. Kennedy rehashed the discussion for Sidey’s benefit. “Now let’s look at this,” Kennedy said. “Is there any place we can catch them? What can we do? Can we go around the moon before them? Can we put a man on the moon before them?” The one hope, Dryden explained, was a crash program, like the Manhattan Project that had developed the atomic bomb. And even that would have only a fifty-fifty chance of beating the Russians. Sidey later described the moment: “Kennedy turned back to the men around him. He thought for a second. Then he spoke. ‘When we know more, I can decide if it’s worth it or not. If somebody can just tell me how to catch up… .’ Kennedy stopped again a moment and glanced from face to face. Then he said quietly, ‘There’s nothing more important.’”

As the meeting ended and the others were leaving, Kennedy turned to Sidey.

“Have you got all your answers?” he asked.

“Well, yeah,” Sidey said, “except, what are you going to do?”

Kennedy told him to wait, and disappeared into the Oval Office with Sorensen while Sidey looked over his notes in the secretary’s nook that connects the Cabinet Room with the Oval Office. After a few minutes Sorensen emerged. “ We’re going to the moon,” Sorensen said. It would have been an immense scoop, if Sidey could have used it. But he understood the rules well enough to know that this confidence was not supposed to show up in the next issue of Life.

Vostok I was not the only crisis on Kennedy’s mind that day. Even as he met with his advisers to talk about space, a brigade of soldiers composed of refugees from Castro’s Cuba was assembling at jumping-off points in Guatemala, awaiting Kennedy’s final approval for a landing at the Bay of Pigs. Two days later, at the last go/no-go decision point at noon on Sunday, he authorized the expedition to proceed to the beaches.

The Cuban brigade landed in the predawn darkness of Monday morning, beginning what Pierre Salinger would remember as the three grimmest days of the Kennedy presidency. From the first hours, Castro’s army responded to the invasion with unexpected efficiency. By the evening of the first day, the invasion forces were far behind schedule. By Tuesday morning, they were stalled and trying to hang on. By Tuesday afternoon, they were encircled by 20,000 Cuban army troops and the White House Situation Room began a deathwatch. At a midnight meeting that didn’t break up until two o’clock Wednesday morning, the President rejected last-minute proposals for U.S. intervention and accepted the inevitability of defeat. It was just a week to the hour since the flight of Vostok I.

On that disastrous Wednesday, as the world learned of the full extent of the Cuban debacle, President Kennedy called Vice President Lyndon Johnson to the Oval Office. The topic of the meeting was the space program. They conferred alone for about half an hour. The next day, Johnson received a memorandum from the President. “In accordance with our conversation,” Kennedy wrote, Johnson was to bring him answers to five questions. Number one on the list was, “Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to land on the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man? Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?” Kennedy wanted answers “at the earliest possible moment.”