Why We Went to the Moon

There was history and poetry and raw power waiting out in the stars -- to be assembled and shaped and used for the glory of the U.S. It was everything John Kennedy loved. It was why he was in the Oval Office.

And on the soft, clear evening of April 14, 1961 -- two days after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin went into his triumphal orbit and three days before the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion -- Kennedy tilted back on the hind legs of a leather chair in the Cabinet Room and, I believe, decided to send Americans to the moon. I watched it happen in one of those unusual episodes when Kennedy opened a window on the inner White House for an outsider. Maybe he understood that, as astronomer Michael Hart wrote, the moon landing would "be forever remembered as one of the greatest achievements of the human race." I think Kennedy, steeped in history, saw himself beside Thomas Jefferson sending Lewis and Clark to explore the West, and with Theodore Roosevelt building the Panama Canal.

The timing and rationale of the decision are disputed by historians and other experts. Many feel Kennedy's commitment was a desperate political maneuver to lift himself out of the calamity of the Bay of Pigs and rally a nation nervous from escalating tension with the Soviet Union in Berlin.

But I saw something more that night, when Kennedy's novice government still thought it would win at the Bay of Pigs, still had not encountered Nikita Khrushchev's table pounding at the Vienna summit in June. I saw a very young American awed by the romance of the high frontier. I saw him brush aside the doubts and point this nation toward great adventure.

"What can we do now?" he asked his assembled experts, noting that the Soviet edge in big rockets enabled Gagarin to circle the earth. "Is there any place where we can catch them? Can we leapfrog?"

The answers were less than reassuring. NASA Director James Webb was not certain we could beat the Soviets to the moon. Chief NASA scientist Hugh Dryden thought it might take a program like the atom bomb's Manhattan Project and cost $40 billion. (The entire federal budget was then $98 billion.) Budget Director David Elliott Bell asked where the money would come from. Staff aide Ted Sorensen brought up the financial needs of earthly social programs. Science adviser Jerome Wiesner, sucking on a cold pipe, wasn't sure a manned lunar landing made good scientific sense.

Kennedy knew nations do not rally behind cost accountants. "If somebody can just tell me how to catch up," he scolded. "Let's find somebody -- anybody. I don't care if it's the janitor over there, if he knows how." Feet on the table, Kennedy pulled a piece of rubber off his shoe sole, which was built up to ease his back ailment. He ran his hands through his hair, tapped his teeth with his fingernails. He was only 43 and holding the world in his hands, and it was slippery. But he relished the challenge.