“American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race”, by Douglas Brinkley

 

576 pages, Harper, ISBN-13: 978-0062655066

An important – nay, vital – fact that one must realize when one picks up and reads Douglas Brinkley’s American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race is that this is a work of Presidential history and not of technical achievement (although there’s still a lot of that discussed within). Rather, Brinkley has in fact written a chronicle of the founding of NASA, of JFK’s evolving attitudes toward space initiatives, his reasons and motivations for pursuing the space race and how he and his Administration reacted to the many successes and not a few failures of the same. Talk of booster rockets and computer systems and space capsules and Tang are all left for other, different books.

Kennedy saw the space program as both an adventure producing heroes to be admired (the astronauts were his kind of guys) and a way to jump start American technology for the latter half of the 20^th Century (and incidentally, bring high tech to parts of the Democrat-controlled South). By the fall of 1963, Apollo was well on its way, Kennedy would look over the Gemini spacecraft under development in St. Louis, see the firing of an early version of the Saturn engine and check out the Manned Spaceflight Center in Houston. There he got into a long conversation with Gordon Cooper and invited him to accompany him to his next stop, but Cooper had to beg off (after all, he was participating in an important, long-scheduled test the next day).

The much cited Rice University speech – “We choose to go to the moon and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard” – is now, perhaps, as familiar as the Inaugural (or indeed any bit of public rhetoric since World War II), and marked the culmination of all of Kennedy’s efforts to get his pet project off the ground (as it were). Even those familiar with Kennedy and the Apollo Program will find fresh threads in Moonshot: for instance, while still in the Navy, Kennedy took private flying lessons, or the expression “Moonshot” itself, which was coined by Dodger announcer Vin Scully to describe not very deep fly balls hit by Wally Moon that nevertheless cleared the forty-foot high screen the Dodgers put up to prevent cheap shot home runs in the L. A. Coliseum, where the left field stands were only 250 feet down the line. FYI.

Brinkley’s central thesis is that the moon landing would have taken place much later without Kennedy’s determination to set a “hard” goal and carry it through, and that even after the initial cheering for a moon landing “before this decade is out”, Congress began to waver. Ike came out of retirement to oppose the Apollo Program, Goldwater wanted the Air Force to take over all space operations, and while LBJ was always strong for manned space flight he perhaps was not willing to go quite as boldly as Kennedy (he would as faithfully carry on Kennedy’s Apollo legacy as he did his civil rights legacy). What American Moonshot ultimately accomplishes is to parallel the progress in rocketry with Kennedy’s political career until they would interact so fatefully in 1961.