Quote of the Day (JFK, on the Race to the Moon)

“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. 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. We propose to accelerate the development of the appropriate lunar space craft. We propose to develop alternate liquid and solid fuel boosters, much larger than any now being developed, until certain which is superior. We propose additional funds for other engine development and for unmanned explorations--explorations which are particularly important for one purpose which this nation will never overlook: the survival of the man who first makes this daring flight. But in a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon--if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.”—President John F. Kennedy, “Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs,” May 25, 1961

In 1992, historian Michael Hart wrote a history in which he ranked the 100 most important people in history. John F. Kennedy made it to #81--something that probably astonished American historians of the last few decades, who have tended to consider him a good but not great chief executive. (They would have been especially surprised that Abraham Lincoln, long at #1 or #2 in all the Presidential polls, well ahead of JFK, did not make the elite 100 people worldwide.)

Hart named JFK to his list not because of his civil-rights advocacy, or for steering the U.S. past nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, or for becoming the first non-Protestant to become President. No, JFK earned the ranking for pushing through the manned space program.

In an age of greater fiscal austerity and of fading memories of the Cold War, Kennedy’s call for a manned landing on the moon has lost considerable luster. Historian John Logsdon, whose new book on Kennedy and the space program was featured prominently in John Noble Wilford’s New York Times article on the anniversary of this event yesterday, conceded in the article that the “impact of Apollo on the space program has on balance been negative.” Even the liberals who formed the core of Kennedy’s political base came to feel, a decade after his rallying message to Congress, that the money might have been better spent on matters close to earth--notably, anti-poverty programs.

I’m somewhere halfway between Professors Hart and Logsdon in how I consider Kennedy’s clarion call. On the one hand, the manned lunar landing undoubtedly did divert federal money from more cost-effective, unmanned space efforts, not to mention social programs. On the other hand, only a project so audacious--and one with underlying tensions with the Soviet Union very much in play--could have engaged the public’s attention so tenaciously.

In the end, I think, we celebrate the lunar landing--and Kennedy’s part in pushing for it--for a reason from anything related to something as mundane as scientific results. No, this might have been the last time, for the last several decades, that Americans would see that their country could a) conquer a challenge once it had been identified, or b) lead other nations in an area that, for more than a century, had been a strength: technological know-how.