Kennedy's Urgent National Need

Sixty-four years ago today, President Kennedy proposed the United States land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.

The space segment of President John F. Kennedy’s speech to Congress on May 25, 1961 titled, “On Urgent National Needs.” Original source: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.

— President John F. Kennedy, May 25, 1961

Senator John F. Kennedy (D-MA) was not alone in his presidential ambitions. With Dwight Eisenhower term-limited, the White House was a tempting target for any ambitious politician. The Democrats and Republicans had plenty of them.

Kennedy joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January 1957. From there he was able to comment on foreign policy issues at a time when the Cold War was as chilly as ever.

It was in that context that, on August 14, 1958, Kennedy delivered a speech on the Senate floor about what he viewed to be a ”missile gap” between the military launch capabilities of the United States and the Soviet Union. Kennedy did not originate the idea — that was now-retired US Army James M. Gavin, who’d left the service in January 1958 to write a book, titled War and Peace in the Space Age, about what he called the “missile lag.”

The “missile lag” describes a period, and it is one that we are now entering, in which our own offensive and defensive missile capabilities will so lag behind those of the Soviets as to place us in a position of great peril.

Kennedy cited Gavin as his source and added, “The most critical years of the gap would appear to be 1960-1964.”

During his 1960 presidential campaign against the Republican nominee, Eisenhower’s vice president Richard Nixon, Kennedy tried to tie Nixon to the so-called gap.

But the gap didn’t exist.

With the passage of time, and declassification of documents, we now know that the “gap” myth originated with defense analysts who made intelligence estimates based on inadequate data. By the late 1950s, Eisenhower had ordered U-2 flights over Soviet territory, which showed the Soviets had nowhere near the missile capability feared.

According to Robert Dallek in his 2003 book, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, the Eisenhower administration tried to warn Kennedy during the campaign there was no gap, but was reluctant to share too much classified information to prove it. At the same time, polls suggested that Kennedy could have an advantage over Nixon if he appeared stronger against the Soviets.

In early February 1961, just days after Kennedy was sworn into office, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara leaked to the press on background that the gap never existed. First press secretary Pierre Salinger and then Kennedy himself denied the reports; Kennedy said he hoped to have a “preliminary study” completed soon. Some Republicans charged that the Kennedy campaign had concocted the gap as a baseless allegation to win votes.

The “missile gap” media frenzy had quieted by April 12, 1961, when the Soviets orbited Yuri Gagarin in the first crewed human spaceflight. Newspaper articles proclaimed a new gap, not with nuclear-tipped missiles but with rocket boosters launching men into space. This “gap” was defined by the thrust of US rockets compared to Soviet boosters; one Associated Press columnist commented, “The United States has never been able to match the Soviet payloads pound for pound.”

Associated Press military affairs reporter Bem Price’s analysis after Yuri Gagarin orbited Earth, as it appeared in the April 13, 1961 Denton, Texas Record-Chronicle. The column was printed in newspapers across the United States.

While Gagarin orbited the earth, CIA-backed rebels prepared to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, in an attempt to overthrow Soviet-backed prime minister Fidel Castro and his communist regime. The attack began on April 15, and failed miserably.

Within a week, Kennedy had suffered two very public political embarrassments. In his 2010 book John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon, Dr. John M. Logsdon wrote that Kennedy’s closest advisors found him to be “anguished and fatigued,” and “in the most emotional, self-critical state.” Kennedy’s brother Robert reportedly told the president’s top appointees, “You got the president into this. We’ve got to do something to show the Russians we are not paper tigers.”

On April 20, Kennedy sent a memo to Vice President Lyndon Johnson, charging him with “making an overall survey of where we stand in space.”

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?

Johnson’s written reply came eight days later, on April 28. He wrote that, “the Soviets are ahead of the United States in world prestige attained through impressive technological accomplishments in space.”

Manned exploration of the moon, for example, is not only an achievement with great propaganda value, but it is essential as an objective whether or not we are first in its accomplishment — and we may be able to be first.

The US launched its first human into space, Alan Shepard, on May 5, 1961. That was only a 15-minute suborbital flight, but the nation finally had put a person into space. It was a modest success, but Kennedy could build on it.

Twenty days later, on May 25, Kennedy addressed Congress and the nation with a speech titled, On Urgent National Needs. The speech was not just about the space program. In fact, the moon part was near the end of a 47-minute delivery that was largely a shopping list of new programs Kennedy wanted Congress to fund to show strength in the face of Soviet achievements.

Kennedy framed his moon challenge in the rhetoric of global prestige. He wanted to win the hearts and minds of those wondering if Soviet-style communism was the way forward.

… [I]f we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take.

After his man / moon / end-of-decade line, Kennedy said:

No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.

This wasn’t a proposal to boldly go, although that became the public rhetoric. It was to show the world that the US was superior to the Soviet Union. The “prestige” justification appears throughout Kennedy administration documents and audio recordings.

If you watch the video clip at the top of this column, you’ll note that the congressional audience didn’t applaud the crewed lunar mission proposal. There was a smattering of applause for accelerating the Project Rover nuclear engine program. The most applause came after Kennedy departed from his prepared remarks to ask Congress to seriously consider the time and costs involved. In his view, it was better not to go at all than to make a half-hearted effort and finally give up. That, they applauded.

A mythology has built up over the decades that Kennedy was a visionary who wanted to unite humanity in a grand adventure to the stars. That rhetoric certainly was used, but Kennedy administration documents and recordings suggest his concern in the spring of 1961 was “prestige,” not science and not exploration. He wanted “dramatic results in which we could win.” The moon program was a “propaganda” effort to reap global “prestige,” to show the Soviets that “we are not paper tigers.”

This speech began the transformation of NASA from an aerospace research-and-development agency into a tool of global soft power. In the decade ahead, NASA became a significant national employer, creating 400,000 jobs, most of which were through government contractors. Project Apollo built up an infrastructure here in Brevard County and across the US, in places such as Houston and Huntsville. These places became economically dependent on NASA, an unintended consequence of Kennedy’s prestige program.

On May 25, 1961, sixty-four years ago today, no one asked, “What do we do with all this once we’re done?” The main concern was how the US could look superior to the Soviet Union. Sixty-four years later, the federal government still struggles to answer that question.