We Chose to Go to the Moon: JFK’s Speech 50 Years Later

Even the most iconic moments in American history can start to seem a little shopworn after a while. The flag-raising at Iwo Jima? Seen the picture a million times. FDR’s “nothing to fear but fear itself” speech? Isn’t that a bumper sticker?

The same overfamiliarity is true, to a lesser extent, of President Kennedy’s historic speech before a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961 in which he set the U.S. on the path to a lunar landing by the end of the 1960s. “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 Earth,” Kennedy said. Eight years later, the nation did just that.

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It’s the 50th anniversary of that speech, and NASA is doing its best to make hay out of the occasion. Stories about the speech lead the agency’s website, with pictures and clickable videos for anyone who wants to relive the day one more time. There’s a breaking-news page about NASA’s next manned spacecraft as well — a supersized Apollo-like pod called the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), that will be capable of flying crews of at least four astronauts up to orbit or into deep space. It’s been more or less known since 2004 that some version of the MPCV would replace the space shuttle after it files its last mission this summer. But just yesterday — in a too-cute bit of timing — NASA announced that yes, that was now formally, officially, double-definitely true.

Still, NASA can be forgiven its spin, since, when it comes to the manned space program, there’s so little other good news. After the shuttle is mothballed, the U.S. will be effectively grounded, dependent on hitching rides with the Russians just to get back and forth to the American-built International Space Station.

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The Obama administration does have a manned program of sorts, one that relies pretty much on outsourcing the design and construction of rockets to private industry while NASA works on the MPCV. But even if the new crew module is successfully built — sometime in 2016, NASA promises — it will sit in a hangar unless the rockets are ready to lift it. And once they are, there is no certainty about where American astronauts will go except on milk runs to the station, though the White House does promise vaguely that exotic destinations like the moon, Mars or an asteroid are possibilities. In today’s USA Today, lunar astronauts Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan — who know a thing or two about taking big risks and accomplishing big things — speak their minds in an op-ed piece that blasts the White House for its celestial aimlessness. For NASA, that’s clearly off-message, and yet it’s hard to argue with what the Apollo vets are saying.

None of this makes a good contrast with the crispness and clarity of Kennedy’s call, but none of that should make us look back at him too gauzily either. It was no secret that JFK’s moon commitment was as much a political undertaking as a scientific one; indeed, the politics part had the edge. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the U.S. was in the process of taking a bad technological beatdown at the hands of the Soviet Union. In 1957, Sputnik became the first satellite in orbit; in April of 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first human in orbit — and both of them wore the hammer-and-sickle insignia. The U.S. followed with its pipsqueak Explorer satellite and its popgun suborbital flight of Al Shepard, and while they were nice, they were clearly second-tier.

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According to the new book John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon, written by space policy expert John Logsdon of George Washington University and reviewed this week by The New York Times, Kennedy was flat-out desperate to catch up with the Soviets — particularly in the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which also occurred in April of 1961. Chief adviser Ted Sorensen later described Kennedy as “anguished and fatigued” and “in the most emotional and self-critical state I had ever seen him.”

As Logsdon reports it, little brother Bobby Kennedy was sent to crack heads and get the U.S. into the space race pronto. “All you bright fellows. You got the president into this. We’ve got to do something to show the Russians we are not paper tigers,” Bobby is said to have said at one meeting. “If somebody can, just tell me how to catch up. Let’s find somebody — anybody. I don’t care if it’s the janitor over there.” The next month, long before the janitor or anyone else had figured out how in the world to fly to the moon, JFK went before Congress and promised to do it.

Even after that, however, Kenndy had his doubts — never mind the unflinching Presidential certainty that figures in so many of the historical retellings of the era. NASA, to its credit, has linked to the transcripts of recorded conversations between Kennedy and then-NASA Administrator James Webb, which were just posted online by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. The conversations took place in November of 1962, after Americans had at last orbited Earth but well before they were ready for a lunar trip.

“I think this can be an asset, this program,” Kennedy confided to Webb. “I think in time, it’s like a lot of things, this is mid-journey and therefore everybody says ‘what the hell are we making this trip for?’ but at the end of the thing they may be glad we made it.” However, in the transcript of a later conversation, in September of 1963, Kennedy seemed as if he was asking the same questions the critics were.

Kennedy: Do you think the lunar, the manned landing on the moon is a good idea?

Webb: Yes sir, I do.

Kennedy: Why?

Webb: Because…

Kennedy: Could you do the same with instruments much cheaper?

Webb: No sir, you can’t do the same.

Two months after that, on November 21, 1963, Kennedy delivered a speech in which the resolve was back. “This nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space and we have no choice but to follow it,” he said. “Whatever the difficulties, they will be overcome.” One day after that, he was dead.

There’s no telling what would have happened if Kennedy had lived and been reelected — if he would have folded his hand as the manifold crises of the 1960s made space look like an unaffordable indulgence. There’s no telling either what would have happened if his assassination hadn’t made his moon program an untouchable monument to his presidency — something that Congress and later presidents dared not tamper with until the landing was achieved.

What is clear is that no president since Kennedy has been willing to stake so much of his political capital on so audacious an exploratory goal — and then restate his commitment even when the critics started to howl. As a result, our manned exploration of space has turned into more of a lazy amble — 30 years of the shuttle and perhaps ten more years of the space station, while the moon, which is never more than 252,000 miles (405,000 km) away, seems to grow more and more distant all the time. We don’t have to go to the moon. However, as Kennedy said, we can “choose to go to the moon.” It’s not an easy choice, but it would be a brave one.

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