On the evening of Tuesday, April 11, 1961, President John F. Kennedy appeared on an NBC early-evening television program sponsored by Crest toothpaste. He and his wife Jacqueline talked with reporters Sander Vanocur and Ray Scherer about the difficulties of raising their small children. Kennedy mentioned that political events often appeared more complicated from inside the Oval Office than they did to the outside world. Even as he smiled and joked for the TV cameras, he knew from Intelligence reports that a significant defeat awaited him in just a few hours’ time. He went to bed that night with a sense of foreboding.
"There was an uproar: how did we get beaten by this supposedly backward country?"
Sure enough, the next day’s news was disastrous for him. Yuri Gagarin, a 27-year-old Soviet Air Force pilot, became the first human ever to fly in space, aboard a capsule named Vostok (‘East’). Kennedy hadn't taken space particularly seriously until now, but he was deeply agitated at the global response to Gagarin's flight. He paced his office at the White House, asking his advisors, "What can we do? 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, if he knows how." He deliberately made these remarks within earshot of Hugh Sidey, a senior journalist from Life magazine. All of a sudden Kennedy wanted to be seen as an advocate for space.
"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, if he knows how."
Dr John Logsdon, Director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, is a renowned expert on the history of NASA. He explains the impact of Gagarin's flight on the American psyche. "It was a sudden rebalancing of our power relationship with the Soviet Union, because of the clear demonstration that, if they wanted to, they could send a nuclear warhead across intercontinental distances, right into the heart of Fortress America. There was an uproar: how did we get beaten by this supposedly backward country?"
THE MOON RACE MEMO
Three days later Kennedy suffered an even more serious defeat. A 1400-strong force of exiled Cubans supported by the CIA landed at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba with the intention of destroying Fidel Castro's communist regime. Kennedy had approved the scheme, but Castro's troops learned of the operation well ahead of time and were waiting on the beaches. The Kennedy administration seemed to be faltering in its first 100 days, the traditional 'honeymoon' period during which a new president is supposed to shake things up and make his mark. Kennedy immediately turned to space as a means of reviving his credibility. In a pivotal memo of April 20, he asked Vice President Lyndon Johnson to prepare a thorough survey of America's rocket effort.
1. 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?
2. How much additional would it cost?
3. Are we working 24 hours a day on existing programs, and if not, why not? If not, will you make recommendations to me as to how work can be speeded up.
4. In building large boosters should we put our emphasis on nuclear, chemical or liquid fuel, or a combination of these three?
5. Are we making maximum effort? Are we achieving necessary results?