PRESENTER: Very briefly. Doug Brinkley is the chair
of humanities and professor of history at Rice
University, which you know. And you'll hear about
why tonight that's particularly important. He is also a CNN
presidential historian, a contributing editor
to the Vanity Fair, literally seven honorary
doctorates, and numerous books. But this is absolutely
my favorite. And in so many ways, it's
so insightful in so many different elements. While he came from Texas, Fred
came from across the river in Cambridge. Fred is the professor
of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School
and is the author and editor of nine books, including
the Pulitzer Prize winner Embers of War: The
Fall of an Empire and the Making of
American Vietnam. So that book is amazing. But speaking of what's
coming up that Fred-- and you can't tell anyone yet. This is just our little secret. But Fred is going to
have a two-volume series, a definitive book on
John F. Kennedy-- books on John F. Kennedy. So we'll have him
come back for that. So with that, join me for our-- welcome these two
special people. [APPLAUSE] FREDRIK LOGEVALL: It's
absolutely wonderful to see all of you here
and to have this chance to share the stage
with Doug Brinkley. And I think of the fact that
on May 25, 1961, as Doug writes about in this marvelous
book, President Kennedy issued basically a challenge. And he didn't live
to see that challenge met, that challenge realized. But eight years later,
some half a billion people, maybe upwards of
600 million people, saw that extraordinary
moment when Neil Armstrong took those first steps. I, alas, did not see them. I was a little guy
about this big. And I was in Sweden
at the time, where it was the middle of the night. So I don't have
that recollection. Doug was also a little guy. I think he's going to talk
about maybe that he did see it. But it's an
extraordinary moment. And this book speaks
to how this happened. And it's an incredible story. And I'm just thrilled
to have this opportunity to be here tonight and to
be part of this endeavor. And I guess I want
to start, Doug-- in a sense, I think
it was inevitable that you would write this book. As he lays out in the
early pages of this book, there is your childhood
in Ohio that, in a sense, made you the person who
should write this book. There is the fact
that the president gave a very important speech. We may hear a snippet of
this speech in a little while here at an institution
where Doug Brinkley is now a distinguished professor,
that is to say Rice University. And then on I think what
you call a kind of lark, Doug sought the opportunity to
interview a certain very famous figure, got that interview. Was this book just meant-- was it foreordained that
you would write this book? DOUG BRINKLEY: That's why
he teaches at Harvard, because he's right. It was foreordained. Because I grew up in Perrysburg,
Ohio, a small town near Toledo. And Neil Armstrong was
from Wapakoneta, Ohio. Now these are two cities
you don't often hear about, Wapakoneta, Perrysburg. So you can imagine, I was nine
years old, going on nine soon. And my mom and dad were
really space fanatics. I started collecting all
of the plates for Apollo and little astronaut things. And I knew about Gemini
at nine years old. I was a space geek. Also, Ohio was what we like to
call the mother of presidents. There were seven US
presidents from there. So down the road
from my house was in Fremont, Ohio,
Rutherford B. Hayes' home. So presidential history
and space were big for me. And so I remember
watching it on television. And it's just seared into my
mind when Neil Armstrong walked down the ladder and said,
that's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. He had wrote that line himself. He had test marketed it to an
audience of one, his brother. [LAUGHTER] And his brother
said, no, man, bingo. Go for it. It's pretty good. It's hard to beat the
one line when you really try to come up with
something better, and maybe if he hadn't said man,
if he said for person now in the 21st century. So I got to then later know
Neil Armstrong a little bit because I reached out to him. I'd written a biography
of Dean Acheson, including doing research
here at the Kennedy Library about Acheson's role
with JFK and Cuban Missile Crisis, book on James
Forrestal, secretary of Navy and secretary of defense. And I had the temerity
to autograph and write each of those two,
my first two works. And I got a PO box
to Neil Armstrong and wrote him a
blind letter saying, I'd be interested
in interviewing you. I don't have a particular
book project in mind, but I grew up in Perrysburg
and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I got back a polite
card from his assistant that said, Mr. Armstrong
will read one of your books, meaning not two. And he doesn't do interviews. As you might know, he
was very much media shy. But we'll keep you in mind, kind
of a polite blow off letter. I forgot about it until
I got asked by NASA to do the oral history interview
for Neil Armstrong, which he never did, in 2001. The date was signed
for a few days after 9/11, as it turned out,
in September, late September of 2001. And I watched the
trade towers collapse. I was positive with all
that death, carnage, and airports shut that
this interview was going to be canceled
because he wasn't keen on doing at any rate. He felt he owed one to
NASA for turning 70. And lo and behold, a
chief person at NASA said, no, he's coming. Neil Armstrong doesn't
cancel anything. You must not know him. He flew his own plane from Ohio. He flew and landed at Johnson
Manned Space Center, Flight Center in Houston and
just walked off, came in, and we did the interview. And at that time I
realized that some way I was going to do a book that
connected space and Apollo 11, and as I mentioned,
at Rice University where Kennedy gave the famous
September 12, 1962 speech. So as you said, it all
came together for me in the writing of this book. FREDRIK LOGEVALL: That's
totally fascinating. And one of the
things that comes out in the book, which you'll
all see when you read it, which you all will, is
that I think it highlights the importance of individuals. Just in class this
morning, I talked about structure, and
agency, and history, and how it is that, obviously,
impersonal forces matter. But there are also moments
in which individuals make a really important difference. And what comes through
beautifully in the book is the degree to
which, in this case, individuals matter,
not just the president, although maybe we'll start
with John F. Kennedy. He's important in
this story, isn't he? I mean, if you think
counterfactually, if you remove him
from the story, maybe this doesn't happen, or it
doesn't happen on the schedule that it does. DOUG BRINKLEY: Exactly. Look, John F. Kennedy put
a lot of political capital on going to the moon. I mean, it's pretty radical
when you think about it. I mean, here he is in early '61. He's giving his
famous inaugural. And then he has the Bay of Pigs. And then Yuri Gagarin goes
into space, Soviet cosmonaut. But Kennedy, to go from-- April, not sure. And on May 25 going to a joint
session of Congress, saying, we're going to put a man on the
moon by the end of the decade and bring him back alive. People were flabbergasted,
particularly NASA people. [LAUGHTER] NASA was created in 1958. And everybody at
NASA of that era was like, you got
to be kidding me. We don't have the technology. This is crazy. John F. Kennedy's
father, Joe Kennedy, called the White House to get
through to an assistant of JFK and said, god damn it,
I knew Jack would do something reckless like this. Are you kidding me? Because we didn't
have the technology. And it's a pretty
brazen statement to say, we're going to do this
by the end of the decade. And it wasn't clear. Is it good politics
when you're not going to be president when it
would happen in the late 1960s? Even if you're a two-termer, it
may not happen on your watch. So many steps we had
to get to go there. A big fear of all the
presidents I write about-- Eisenhower, Kennedy, and
Johnson-- was dead astronauts. Just because we know this
summer Apollo 11's a success and we made it to the moon
doesn't mean they knew it. And what I found out from this
book about John F. Kennedy, how much of a creature of
the World War II era he was, where we
did big things-- FDR, the Manhattan Project,
and Grand Coulee Dam, and the WPA bridges
and projects. And of course, he
wasn't very keen-- there's no great lineage
with Kennedy and Truman. And Eisenhower, Kennedy
was a critic of. So he's going back to
a new deal, but not a new deal that's
that big, as FDR's grand federal expenditures. So putting your money
on space and technology is a pretty good idea in 1961. And Time magazine in
1960 chose scientists as the men of the year. And NASA was getting good press. We needed to beat the Soviets. But the fact that Kennedy did it
and said we're going to do it, it became this
marvelous salesperson for going to the moon. No other politician
can give a speech like, we choose to
go to the moon, not-- this is extraordinary oratory. And it wasn't just
about going to the moon. It was about promoting science
education, STEM, in schools, the history of
exploration, uplifting of the American spirit,
beating an adversary in a peaceful competition. Going to the moon
wasn't about war. It was a peaceful
competition with Russia. So it all came
together in hindsight. And that's what we
do as historians. We could say Kennedy picked
a difficult number going to the moon. And we did it. And so it's triumphal in a
way, because Pearl Harbor is a disaster. We remember that day. 9/11's a disaster, Kennedy
assassination a disaster. For those big, epic
moments, the Apollo 11, the walking on the
moon still lives on. And we all celebrate
the moonshot. We're all looking for a
new moonshot time we all can work on something
grand together instead of bickering and arguing
with each other all the time. FREDRIK LOGEVALL:
Why do you think-- let's pursue this a
little bit further in terms of his motivations. Because something
you said certainly jibes with my own research. I think that he had come to
believe John F. Kennedy even before he became president,
that in the nuclear age war is an impossibility,
especially among great powers. We have to do whatever we can
to avoid that kind of conflict. Yet, as you also
demonstrate in the book, and is very consistent
with my own findings, he's extremely competitive. And it's been instilled
in all of the Kennedy kids since they were little. Ted later talked about this. Bobby talked about this. Eunice talked about this. Jack himself mentioned
this, that Joe Kennedy Sr. had said to them,
second place is no good. So there is a sense
of competition that I think is here. And you talk about this. On the other hand,
war is impossible. So would it be
fair to say, Doug, that a key motivation
here is that here's a way to win in a very important
geopolitical sense, but maybe without
the attendant risks? Talk a little bit more
about his motivations. DOUG BRINKLEY: Perfectly said. That's why he's the definitive
biographer of John F. Kennedy. That's exactly
it, that he really was a peace advocate, John
F. Kennedy in many ways, and not just because he
did the nuclear test ban treaty in his presidency. But he knew that nuclear
war was not an option. And it was renewed on him
and the Cuban Missile Crisis, obviously. And this idea of going into
another Korean War situation of just fighting what will
become Vietnam automatically, just going to proxy
war, proxy war. But yet, he doesn't
want to lose. And he is an anti-communist. And once the Soviets
put Sputnik up in 1957, Kennedy is running
on the missile gap with Russia and the space gap,
and that we've got to be first, that no use being second. And it comes part of
that family background. There's one story you've
probably stumbled upon, where Kennedy is playing chess. And he's about to
get checkmated. And he topples over
the table and says, I guess we'll
never know who won. [LAUGHTER] I say that he
didn't like losing. And the thought that
we are losing in space bugged him as a senator, but
now when the Soviets put up the first person ever, human
in space ever on his watch. And then I still think
there's a pragmatism to him. And we talk about
his romantic streak. But once Alan Shepard
goes up on May 5, '61, that wasn't a dead astronaut. That was a space hero. Alan Shepard came back,
and everybody cheered. America pulled together. And Kennedy now is reassured
that manned space was possible. And greenlit, continual
manned space efforts with Mercury program-- there were the famous
Mercury Seven astronauts. Only one didn't go up
during Kennedy's presidency, Deke Slayton, who never
went up in Mercury. Kennedy was the first
Mercury mission and the last. All six of the space
heroes came back alive. They were successes. So the astronauts became
Kennedy's space cadets, the space corps. And like his PT-109
experience in war, where courage and
risk, and you're in the middle of battle zone,
and anything can happen, he admired these astronauts,
not superficially, not just as props, as men. Kennedy liked the
cut of their jib. And of course, John
Glenn in particular becomes nearly an adopted member
of the extended Kennedy family. I talked to Ethel Kennedy. And she told me that when
her husband was killed in Los Angeles, she had called
John Glenn and to go look after her kids at
Hickory Hill in Virginia. That's how close the
family was to Glenn. Bobby Kennedy and John Glenn
became almost like brothers. And so this is a real thing
for Kennedy, the astronaut, and space age, and also the
romance of the sea, the ocean that he had. He was able to call
space the new ocean and understood that
it was going to be something special to explore. FREDRIK LOGEVALL:
On the business about the will to win, just
to echo what Doug had said, when Jackie came into his
life, when they were courting and then after
they were married, it turns out she's really good-- she's really good at board
games and at a lot of games. And he did not like the fact
that she would always or almost always win at these games. So it squares with
what you're saying. DOUG BRINKLEY: Yes. FREDRIK LOGEVALL: One of the
things that you bring out-- and maybe it's
another motivation in the causal hierarchy. Maybe it doesn't rise as high
as the things you've mentioned, but there's also a domestic,
political motivation. Or you talk about how
southern senators were in a sense, if I remember
correctly, placated by the fact that a lot of NASA money would
be spent in their states. There's a certain domestic
politician at work too, isn't there? DOUG BRINKLEY: Absolutely. That's what my biggest takeaway
from doing this research that I had no idea of, is that the
technological, tech corridors that get created. You know about MIT, and Stark
Draper, and all the computer specialization here and
what Massachusetts did. But this southern strategy
of Kennedy and Lyndon, incidentally right after
Alan Shepard went up-- President Kennedy's
sitting in a limo with Minow of communications. And Vice President
Johnson and Alan Shepard, they're all in a car
together, limo ride. And they start to
have a conversation. And the gist of it was-- the comment was made by Minow-- if you know what? To Alan Shepard-- if you
didn't come back alive, Kennedy, the president, would
have blamed you, Lyndon, for the disaster. Because Kennedy was
the head of the space policy at that juncture. And then Minow, people laughed. And then the line became, no,
if Alan had died in space, Lyndon would be
the next astronaut. [LAUGHTER] The point being, we always
talk about Jack Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson not seeing eye to eye. They did see eye to eye
on space exploration. Kennedy and Johnson both
were behind NASA in the '50s. Both believed in it. And where Johnson
works with Kennedy and James Webb had
a NASA well, is they recognized they
barely won South in 1960. Texas they win by a hair, as
most of you probably know. What about 1964? And the reason why the South
in '64 is nerve wracking is civil rights, that going on
in the South there was blue dog Democrats and still senators. But this is pre-Lyndon's Civil
Rights Acts of '64 in '65. But Kennedy is getting
behind civil rights. So what do you do in Alabama,
or Mississippi, or Florida, and where you're not liking the
progressivism of the Kennedy administration? One good way is
pork, tech money. And Johnson was able to
finagle getting a lot of money into Oklahoma and Texas. The head of space
appropriations in the Senate is Senator Kerr of Oklahoma. And Kerr is the where
James Webb of NASA was working when he got
hired by Kennedy to run NASA. And in Congress, the head
of space appropriations is Albert Thomas. Guess where Thomas is from? Houston, Texas. And we can talk all we want
about presidential leadership and strategy, politics, but you
need money to go to the moon. Billions of dollars it would
have cost to go to the moon. And so they started getting
money, which I really think was smart, into San
Antonio, Houston, Huntsville, Alabama, Pearl River region
of Mississippi, Louisiana and border, New Orleans,
Jacksonville, Brevard, North Carolina, Hampton, Virginia,
flooding the southern zone not just with jobs that comes
with NASA projects and not just space hardware contracts,
but building tech corridors. My university, Rice University,
we are the great beneficiaries. We're a top university now. We created space science due
to NASA coming down there. And we're promoting
astronauts all the time. So the South, those democratic
senators in the South said, all right, we'll
keep a little bit muted about your civil rights if
I'm getting $150 million into this community or that. And so it was a great
public works project, building tech corridors
all over the country, like Pasadena and Cleveland. Also but a lot went into what
they were calling the Southwest or Gulf South, and
in particularly Houston, which is
the giant beneficiary of Kennedy's policy. FREDRIK LOGEVALL:
You're mentioning here that there are other people
who matter in this story. They don't matter to the
degree that the president does, but they matter. And of course,
Wernher von Braun, as we were saying
before we came on stage, is just endlessly interesting. And you bring out
the degree to which he is a very significant
figure in this story. Talk a little bit about him. DOUG BRINKLEY: Don't
know how many of you remember the name
Wernher Von Braun, but he was the one who built
the Saturn V Apollo rocket that took us to the moon. He was a rocket
genius extraordinaire, and a rocket engineer is
what they were called. But he was from Germany. And I kind of compare
Jack Kennedy's upbringing and von Braun. Both came from wealthy families. Von Braun's came from a
German aristocratic family in the Weimer Republic era. But in 1930s when
the rise of Hitler, some German rocket
scientists fled Nazi Germany. Von Braun stayed. He was a big opportunist and
was fanatical about someday going to the Moon, and
Mars, and building rockets. You've got to know
that in World War II, we had yet to go into outer
space with a projectile. We had high altitude
balloons that got up, but Von Braun is
the one who creates how to go in outer space during
World War II along the Baltic and Germany, Hitler's
top secret base. As we put a lot
of money and hope on the Manhattan Project
for atomic weapons, Hitler put it into missiles. And von Braun develops
eventually the V-2. And the V-2 rocket
is the beginning of the age of missiles
that we're all living in. And the V-2, they would
move in on launcher pads. And they fired it into London. You had 5,000 V-2 missiles that
arc over 210 miles in the air, launched from, say, the
Netherlands and London. And if you go in
London, the word V-2 still resonates because the
city could have been destroyed. There was a fear. Luckily, this was
late '44, early '45. And the Third Reich
ran out of gas. Hitler commits suicide. And the genius rocketeer,
nobody close to him in missile technology
anywhere in the world, gets captured by US Army. Von Braun-- it's a longer
story than I could do now-- he created in the book. But he forged some documents. He was in the SS. And they used slave
labor at the Dora camp, a subcamp of Buchenwald. So there could have been war
crimes against Wernher von Braun. But he decided, I don't want
to be captured by the Russians and have to work on
my rocketry in Russia. London, because I bombed the
hell out of Great Britain, they may actually do war crimes. So they sent his
younger brother, Magnus, to look for the US
Army and surrender. And they had hidden
in a mineshaft all of their
blueprints for rockets, war materials, everything. They blew open, they
dynamited, then closed the cave and basically said
to the United States, we'll give you everything. We'll move to America. We'll work for you. Just let us come
there and be American. And we'll do everything for you. And the Truman
administration greenlit it in a thing called
Operation Paperclip. And we moved all these Nazi
rocket engineers and scientists to Fort Bliss, Texas, which
is right on the Mexico border by the White Sands
Proving Ground, which is near Roswell, New
Mexico, where Dr. Robert Goddard, the great
American rocket scientist, was conducting his desert
launches of early rockets. And von Braun worked
there from 1945 to 1950. He was called a
prisoner of peace. They allowed him to go
marry a German woman, but he was always
under surveillance. And then he moved to
Huntsville, Alabama in 1950 to work at the
Army's Redstone Arsenal. This is where the moon rockets
are built by von Braun. Kennedy first meets
Wernher Von Braun in 1953 when they are chosen. Young Senator Kennedy just
won from Massachusetts in '52. So he's kind of like
a hot, new politician. And von Braun were the judges
for Time's Person of the Year. But Henry Luce, who had
written the introduction to why England slept, Luce got
them together as the judge. It was a stunt for-- talked to the media
to promote Time. And they got along famously. And in fact, von
Braun later reflected that he told his wife, that
guy's going to be president someday, about Kennedy. But more importantly,
he said Kennedy kept talking about his brother
being killed in World War II, trying to take out
Soviet missiles or parts in underground caves in France. And Operation Aphrodite is
where Joseph Kennedy Jr., they packed him in a plane with
dynamite and [INAUDIBLE].. And it was like a drone. And it was aiming to
take out the missile capacity of these parts,
vengeance weapons of Hitler that von Braun had created. And his brother blew up
in the air and was killed. So here's Kennedy talking
about how his brother died trying to take out
the vengeance parts that Von Braun had created. And yet they were able to
get over any resentment and became a team in
developing going to the moon. FREDERIK LOGEVALL:
As you're sensing, I think, in this
response, this part of the book I found
absolutely riveting. And I think you'll
find the same. And even though I teach this
stuff, it's really new, this, and there's much here that I
don't know, and the connection to Joe Kennedy Jr. And what
happens to Joe Kennedy Jr., the explosion is so great over
the channel that there's no-- they don't find any part
of either Joe Kennedy Jr. or his co-pilot. And of course it's right as
you indicate in the book. It's when, as you say a
moment ago, when this Nazi war machine is running out
of gas, and in fact the very target that
they were going to hit, as I think you point
out in the book, turns out to have been
a useless mission-- DOUGLAS BRINKLEY: Yes. FREDERIK LOGEVALL: --or
a superfluous mission. We thought that we would
play a couple of brief clips. And so we're going to do that,
a couple of minutes each. They're probably
self-explanatory, but I'll just say a
word or two about them. The first is a short bit from
the speech at Rice University, September 12, 1962, mere steps
from our distinguished author's faculty office. Maybe he'll say
something about that. And the second is
the 21st of November. So it's a couple months later. And it's in the cabinet
room in the White House. And there's several
participants, but the two that we will hear
in the second clip-- let's hope this works-- is the president. And we're going to hear
also from Jim Webb. I'll just say this
about the second clip. It's about 10 or
12 minutes long, if you listen to
the whole thing. But it's worth it. So if you're enticed
by these two minutes, listen to the rest of it,
because it's worth doing. So if we could roll
the first of the tapes. And I wonder if we should-- is it going to be playing here? Should we step out of the way? Oh, it's up there. OK. JOHN F KENNEDY: But
why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why
climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago,
fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon! We choose to go to the
moon in this decade and do the other things,
not because they are easy, but because they are hard,
because that goal will serve to organize and measure
the best of our energies and skills. Because that challenge is one
that we're willing to accept, one we are unwilling
to postpone, and one we intend to win, and
the others too. [APPLAUSE] But we shall send to the
moon, 240,000 miles away from the control
station in Houston, a giant rocket more
than 300 feet tall-- the length of this
football field-- made of new metal alloys, some
of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing
heat and stresses several times more than have ever
been experienced, fitted together with a precision
better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment
needed for propulsion, guidance, control,
communications, food, and survival, on an untried
mission to an unknown celestial body, and then return
it safely to Earth, re-entering the atmosphere at
speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about
half that of the temperature of the sun-- almost as hot as
it is here today-- and do all this, and do
all this and do it right, and do it first, before
this decade is out-- then we must be bold. FREDERIK LOGEVALL: The only-- [APPLAUSE] The only thing that's
jarring to our ears today is that Rice would
not play Texas. [LAUGHTER] If they did, and Doug
can speak to this, I don't think it would be a
pretty result. But at the time, they did play each other. So the second clip,
and I want to say before we roll the second
clip, is that in the book, this particular meeting
is covered in depth. It's an absolutely fascinating,
contentious meeting. It gets more-- in
some ways, I think it gets more testy after
we're going to cut it off. I just didn't think that we
should roll the whole thing. We have too short a time. But read about it
also in the book. So if we could roll number two. JOHN F KENNEDY: Do
you put this program-- do you think this program
is the top priority program of the agency? JIM WEBB: No, sir, I do not. I think it is one of the
top priority programs, but I think it's very
important to recognize here that as you have found what
you can do with a rocket, as you find how you can get out
beyond the Earth's atmosphere and into space and
make measurements, several scientific disciplines
that are very powerful have begin to
converge on this area. JOHN F KENNEDY: Jim, I think
it is the top priority. I think we ought to
have that very clear. If you-- some of these other
programs can slip six months or nine months and nothing
particularly is going to happen that's going to make-- but
this is important for political reasons, international
political reasons, and for-- This is, whether we like it
or not, in a sense a race. If we get second up
to the moon, it's nice, but it's like being
second anytime, so that I-- if we're second by six months,
because we didn't give it the kind of priority,
then of course that would be very serious. So I think we have
to take the view this is the top priority of it. It certainly is mine. JIM WEBB: But the
environment of space is where you're going
to operate the Apollo and where you're going
to do the landing. JOHN F KENNEDY: No, but I
know all these other things and the satellite-- the
communications and weather and all-- they're desirable,
but they can wait. JIM WEBB: Oh, no. I'm not putting those-- I'm talking now about
the scientific program to understand the space
environment within which you've got to fly Apollo and
make the landing on the moon. SPEAKER 1: That's
part of the problem. JOHN F KENNEDY: Is that saying--
well, no, but wait a minute. Is that saying that
the lunar program, to land a man on the moon, is
the top priority of the agency, is it? JEROME WIESNER: And the
science that goes with it. JIM WEBB: Well,
I-- yes, if you-- JOHN F KENNEDY: No, but
I mean the science-- JEROME WIESNER:
That is necessary. JOHN F KENNEDY: The science-- going to the moon is the
top priority project. Now, there are a lot of
related scientific information and development that will come
from that, which are important. But the whole thrust of
the agency, in my opinion, is the lunar program. The rest of it can wait
six or nine months. JIM WEBB: Well, the trouble-- Jerry's holding up his land-- let me say one thing. [LAUGHTER] FREDERIK LOGEVALL:
So you get a taste. I mean, one of the things,
Doug, that I find interesting about this last
clip, and I think we talked a little bit
about this earlier, but Webb, Webb is not
shy about interrupting. He speaks his mind. Kennedy gives it back to him. This goes on for
10 or 12 minutes. It's pretty amazing. DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:
It's really amazing. Webb is one of the
great technocrats ever. But Bobby Kennedy called
him a blabbermouth, and some people call him
the Mouth of the South. And Jack Kennedy had no problem,
as some of you probably know, with that kind of give and take. And here's somebody working
for him, lay it on me. Here's what I think. What do you think? That's what a leader does. You just witnessed
a leader in action on both of those
communicating to the public and pushing your policy
with your own staff and challenging it. Webb gets concerned
that Kennedy, if you're going that moon
crazy, that Kennedy is not as focused on-- the big debate, guys,
that really is going on in the Kennedy years
is, Eisenhower called going to the moon a stunt. He was anti the Apollo program. Ike kept calling it a stunt. McGeorge Bundy, national
security advisor, said to John F Kennedy, this
moon, going to the moon thing, it's a grandstand ploy. People are going to
perceive it as you being grandstanding
about going on the moon. And Kennedy said
to Mac or to Bundy, you don't run for
president in your 40s if you don't have moxie. Meaning, people were wondering--
you have to remember, guys, the technology is not there
for the moon for the president to be using that much of
his political power on it. But what Kennedy knew
is that the big word, if I had to pick one word
from this book Kennedy likes is leapfrog. We've got to
leapfrog the Soviets. If we just go, you put up a
cosmonaut, we do an astronaut, you do a co-- we're not going to win. There'll be maybe
a parity to it. But going to the moon would be
a big win, because Kennedy found out, it was from Von Braun and
others but particularly him, they don't have-- it's a starting ground. It's like go on a race. The Soviets and
developed a satellite. They put a dog in space early. The dog couldn't
come back alive. It melted, dehydrated
in the space. And so there was still
a danger of just putting an astronaut in
space, but Kennedy knew if we can focus
big and leapfrog it all, we would have the success
that we have with Apollo 11, and the point that
the American moon shot is a point of national
pride, that our country did it, we planted an American
flag on the moon. And we didn't do it for military
reasons, we did it for peace, and we did it for all mankind. [APPLAUSE] FREDERIK LOGEVALL: It's always
tempting in sessions like this to-- and I guess I'm going to
bite, to ask to ask an author, is there something
that surprised you? One or two things that
surprised you in the course of doing this? DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:
Yeah, I really didn't realize how much Kennedy got
personally involved with space. In the sense, in the '50s,
he would make jokes about it. Well, one thing that you
have to keep in mind, guys, is that a big part of
my book, everybody's fighting for the money. Army wants to put
the rockets up. Navy wants to put
the rockets up. Air Force wants to. Rivalry between the three. Eisenhower bet on the Navy
building vanguard missiles. So when you see on film clips
of NASA rockets collapsing, those were Navy
vanguard rockets. Kennedy is putting his money on
Von Braun and the army rockets. Going to the moon was
a big army success. But one of the ways to
split the rivalry up is to trade off astronauts. Here's a Navy aviator. Navy. John Glenn was a Marine. And the Marines had
no rocket program, but we're putting
a marine in space. So each of those
service branches got a test pilot up to feel
part of the Apollo project. The other thing
that was interesting was, these are all white men
in an era of civil rights. And in retrospect,
we should have had a woman as one of the
Mercury astronauts or Gemini. And we should have
been able to put an African-American into space. It wasn't in the mix back then. Edward R Murrow was pushing for
what you call a person of color to be one of the
Mercury astronauts, not just for equity reasons but
to send a message to the world that America did that. But instead, the
NASA decided you have to stick with the
trained fighter test pilots of the Korean War era. And those were white men
with engineering degrees from places like
Purdue and the like. MIT is where Buzz
Aldrin got his is PhD. And so I write is my book,
with our world today, it's very gender
conscious, I did not know until I did this book that
there was Mercury 13 women that trained to be astronauts. And they went through all of the
endurance tests in New Mexico by Dr. Randy Lovelace. And they were incredible pilots. And the doctors,
physicians, thought women would be the
perfect astronauts because the capsules, if you see
Alan Shepherd's little capsule. So physiologically
smaller, less oxygen, he had blood
statistics, endurance. He had all of the things that
a woman should go into space, but unfortunately we let the
Soviets beat us in that first. They put the first woman
into space, Russia. Sally Ride is our first
American female astronaut. She doesn't go up to 1983
in our space program. So I thought that's a missed
opportunity in America, to be first in those
glass ceiling-shatterings. But alas, it didn't
happen that way. But now I go all over. I just spoke to a woman who was
the first woman spacewalker. And women astronauts
are populated in NASA and also are working
for new private sector companies like Jeff
Bezos's Blue Origin or with Elon Musk and
Branson and the like. So it's a very fertile
field for young women here with an interest in science,
technology, engineering, computer science,
those spaces now. Women are all over
NASA right now, working on going
into space, and we've had many female astronauts. FREDERIK LOGEVALL:
Absolutely fascinating. One of the things that surprised
me as a reader of the book, and I don't know
whether, Doug, this was also surprising to you, but
Kennedy flirted with the idea-- I guess a question for you
is, how serious this was, but he flirted with the
idea of maybe joining forces with the Soviets
on this endeavor. This notwithstanding the
fact, as we discussed earlier, that he is an extremely
competitive guy, that this is a Cold War, that he's had
a setback at the Bay of Pigs, he needs to recapture momentum. But he at least toyed with this. DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:
It's a great point, and you can read about it
more, because it's complicated. But Khrushchev and Kennedy
would each taunt each other that maybe we should
do things together. And then it would disintegrate. Maybe joint space. The best line of these games was
from Nikita Khrushchev's son, who is our oral history
eyewitness saying that he spoke to
his father about, "will you go to the
moon with America? Would you be interested?" He said, "no, we can't do
joint space with Americans." And like, "why not Papa?" And he said, "because they'll
find out what we don't have." We forget Khrushchev blustered
his technology a lot. Putin does that today too. They bluster it all. And if we did joint, our
American intelligence officers, military people would
get to see how primitive some of their technology was. We were overestimating
some of their capabilities. One of the other beautiful
parts of this competition, which I actually almost gets shivers
just thinking about it, that I didn't know
on your don't know thing is, when we landed on the
moon, right before they left, they're about to leave the moon,
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, Armstrong said to Buzz,
"did you leave the packet?" And Armstrong said, "oh yeah." And Armstrong went back on foot. The last thing they
did, in that packet were medals to honor the
Soviet cosmonauts who had died in their space program. So in the moon right
now are Soviet medals by the American site that
NASA decided to honor. Because without the Soviet
spur, and their cosmonauts, and their technological
work, we wouldn't have been motivated to do it. But the fact that
they thought to do that I found very impressive. And of course by 1975, when
Gerald Ford's president, you have a docking in space with
the Russian and United States. And it's clearly that
there is no space race. The United States, at least
this phase of it, won. Nobody's gone back to the moon. We're talking about going
back to the moon now. Vice President pence was
in Huntsville, Alabama last week saying, in four or
five years, we might go back. Buzz Aldrin thinks we need to
do the moonshot should be a Mars shot. But it's back in
conversation now, partially because of
the 50th anniversary. There's also a group of
people quite credibly, and they may be right, who
says the new moonshot has to be an earth shot. Climate change. We've got to do a big
thing on attacking climate change together. [APPLAUSE] And so we'll see how things go,
but the very term "moonshot" has come to represent collective
American can-doism in the best sense any word could convey. FREDERIK LOGEVALL:
We're going to, in a few minutes, don't get
up quite yet for questions, but we're going to be opening
this up for all of you in a few minutes. I want to talk a
little bit, Doug, before we get to that point
about the end of the story as far as JFK is concerned. It's poignant and
powerful in the book, when you talk about the fact
that the last fateful trip to Texas in November of 1963
had a connection to this space program. Can you just say a little bit
about what those last days were about in this regard? DOUGLAS BRINKLEY: Well, I didn't
fully answer the joint space-- Kennedy went to the UN and
toyed with the idea of Russia and the United States
going to the moon, and he got a lot of
blowback about it, but it was just this
constantly telling-- Kennedy wanted the world to know
we are doing this for peace, for science, for exploration,
not to militarize the moon. And of course, it
was a non-starter, in the Kennedy years,
US-Soviet going together for a lot of reasons. At the time of his death, he
was on a space tour, basically. The day before he
was killed in Dallas, John F Kennedy was in San
Antonio, Texas at the Brooks Air Force Base, talking
to the Space Medicine Center that just opened. And in promoting
all the applications of going to the moon that we
were developing for health care, including
foldable walkers, to kidney dialysis machines,
to CAT scans, and MRI. The spin-off medical technology
of tests to go into space have had giant benefits
on our health care sector and modern medical miracles. At San Antonio, he
invited Gordon Cooper, one of the Mercury astronauts,
to come with him to Dallas. And he said, "I need
a space hero up there. They don't love me
in Dallas as much as Houston and San Antonio. And Cooper got called
off to do a NASA meeting and didn't get to be
with Kennedy in Dallas in that open convertible. But from San Antonio,
he then went to Houston, and Jackie Kennedy's at
his side for this trip. And they go speak-- he stays at the Rice Hotel,
and then they just clean up, and then they go for
an Albert Thomas, the head of the congressional
space committee talk. And Kennedy does a
flub in his oratory, because he says with
Albert Thomas there, "and here in Houston, you are
the benefits of the payroll-- I mean payload." And he said, "All right, but
you're getting the payroll here in Texas too in Houston." And then they left
Houston and of course went to Dallas-Fort Worth. One interesting
thing-- he was going to meet the family in Texas
for the first time of the pilot that died with Joe Kennedy
Jr. He was from Texas, and they were going to meet. And of course that
never happened. But on his way to the Trade
Mart when he was killed, he was about to give a hunk
of this big important speech about space exploration,
about how many communications satellites,
meteorological satellites. He was doubling,
tripling, quadrupling down on space at the time
that he was killed. FREDERIK LOGEVALL:
One of the things you do towards the end
of the book that I think is very powerful, you
suggest, Doug, that the-- and I'm paraphrasing,
so please correct if this is not what you intend,
but you suggest that the lunar program, the moon program,
was not justified primarily at least, because of the
tangible benefits that it brought, although those
were obviously considerable. But you talk about how it really
spoke to something else, which of course has for me, and
I think for all of us, contemporary
resonance here today. And that is, you say it
spoke to national purpose, that Kennedy, I
think you're saying, he was able to bring this
sense of national purpose, on some level, bring together
left and right to very powerful ends. And I don't know if you have
a further thought on that and maybe if we can
still achieve something like this today? DOUGLAS BRINKLEY: I hunger
for presidential leadership like John F Kennedy. You watch the "Choose
to go to the moon" clip that we played a little
bit ago, and it's like my gosh, it's so refreshing. It's almost riveting television
to hear somebody talk to us in such a smart
and inspiring way. We just haven't had
that of that degree. And then this
bipartisan thing, when we'd all do things together? I mean, this is not a democratic
Kennedy Democrat success, going to the moon. It's American success. At one point in my
research, I found that Kennedy had the Mercury
astronauts come in to the Oval Office, and he had his
famous rocking chair, and he was joking about it. "This is my space
capsule" kind of thing. And then he said to
all those astronauts, "I hear you're all Republicans." And most of them were. And John Glenn was
an independent, who gets recruited
to be a Democrat. But they all, "Uh-oh,
he just said that." And then Gus Grissom
said, "We don't know what the hell we
are, Mr. President." And they all kind of chuckled. Kennedy didn't care if they
were Republican or not. It meant zero difference to him. They were Americans. He fought in World
War II besides. He wasn't asking people
on his PT-109 boat whether they were
Republican or Democrat. That didn't matter. We were all pitching
in together. This is an American enterprise. I miss that in America. And hopefully, we can
get that back and get out of this grotesque political
theater we're in right now, where everybody's scoring points
on the other side every second and all of that. [APPLAUSE] And the government
can be overblown. One of the great things about
NASA is they budgeted well. They appropriated
federal spending. They brought in academia. They brought in private sector. Companies benefited. They worked it so it was
a really smart project, going to the moon, Apollo. Not only was it
successful, but as I said, it had all the
spin-off benefits. FREDERIK LOGEVALL:
In my own manuscript, I've been working
lately on the mid-1950s, and I wrote a pretty extensive
section on his 1956 book Profiles in Courage, on
which he had important help. But in terms of the
conception of the book, the main arguments, the main
themes, I suggested in my book that they are John
F Kennedy's own. And just to Doug's point, what's
powerful among other things in that book,
Profiles in Courage, is the degree to
which he is speaking about the need for
bipartisanship. And of course he brings in
the examples in that book, if you know the book, of
senators in American history who have shown that. And I think for
him in that book, those who show
particular courage are those politicians
who will not simply respond to what their
constituents need in their districts
or in their states, but who look to the
national interest. And so I think that is
something he probably didn't practice perfectly. I'm sure he made his own
mistakes in that area, but I do think Doug
is correct that that's something that's there. And it has the ring of
truth when, as Doug says, he doesn't care if these
astronauts in his presence are Republicans or Democrats. Maybe the last question
from me, and then we're going to open things up
here, you're going to hear, Doug, maybe you're already
hearing the following, I suspect. But as you continue to
talk about this book, some may say, $25
billion, give or take, that could have been
spent on a lot of things in American society. There were needs,
housing, education, anti-poverty programs. What do you say to that? DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:
It's a great question. Kennedy was thinking about
doing what Lyndon Johnson called the War on Poverty, and
went with technology and the moonshot. And once Kennedy is killed,
one of the dramatic moments at the end of my book
is when Jackie Kennedy comes to see Lyndon and
Ladybird for the first time after Dallas, and wants to
make sure Kennedy's dream is alive of going to the moon
and the space program. And Johnson for the
first thing he does is name Cape Canaveral
the Kennedy Space Center. And to give Lyndon Johnson
credit, during the '60s, they very easily could have
gutted Gemini and Apollo. He had to defend it a
lot, Lyndon Johnson, because of his war in Vietnam,
because of Medicaid, Medicare, Great Society expenditures. And it was getting
tough to get the budget through on Capitol Hill. Now, Apollo in the mid-'60s,
due to the Kennedy effect of getting the budgets
going, had about a 4.4% of our taxpayer
dollars per year. 4.4% went to NASA for space
and to go to the moonshot. Today, NASA is like a 1/3 of 1%. That's how much it gets cut. And so the fact that
it's stayed prioritized-- and the critics of what you said
are from the right and left. Barry Goldwater did not
like the moonshot Apollo, because he thought that money
should go into the Air Force. He was a big Air Force
guy, Barry Goldwater. I mean, if you go to
the Air Force Academy, it's the Barry Goldwater
Visitors Center, and he was a Brigadier General
in the Air Force and the like. Goldwater wasn't keen on it. Walter Mondale was
totally opposed to going to this, funding,
keeping this space stuff funded on the more liberal
side of the equation. The point being,
it has its critics. And the worst thing is
when Apollo 1 disaster occurs in 1967. The first Apollo blows
up at Cape Canaveral pad. Grissom dies, and White and
Chaffee, three just on a test. Not even dying in space or
on launch, just doing a test they die. And so there became
movement, what are we doing? We're not ready for the moon. We can't even get a lift off. But there was so much energy
that Kennedy had put into it and enough public will that
we continued with Apollo and were able to do that
Apollo 11 on Nixon's watch. Richard Nixon was
president with Apollo 11. I found out in my research
that Bill Moyers, speechwriter for LBJ, whom many of you know,
and Daniel Patrick Moynihan were lobbying hard to have
the rocket called the John F Kennedy. And I read the memo. It's at the Nixon Library,
where HR Haldeman, Nixon's like, "This is an
NBC news stunt to Kennedyize. Enough Kennedy. No, no, absolutely not." And Nixon never mentioned John
F Kennedy that entire summer, never invoked him
in any speeches. But you know who did
mention John F Kennedy? NASA. Because once we retrieved
Armstrong, Aldrin, and Michael Collins, the three
Apollo 11 astronauts, the first thing we did when
they were safe on Earth is at mission control,
put up Kennedy's pledge to go to the moon of May 25,
1961, and then underneath it, something John F Kennedy
would have loved-- "task accomplished." And both the mother and father
were alive, Rose and Joe, for that day. Joe Kennedy would
die later in 1969, but they were alive
for the moonshot. Dwight Eisenhower
had died early '69 and wasn't alive to see
that it wasn't a stunt but it was an accomplishment. FREDERIK LOGEVALL:
Marvelous story. So we want to make it now
possible for you to pose a question to our author. And you'll see mics. I already see a gentleman here. There's one on the
left, one on the right. I would ask that
you put a question mark at the end of the sentence,
and that you keep it brief. Yes, sir. AUDIENCE: First, thank you
for coming and your students. The first book I read was
The Magic Bus, which I hope is still available for
purchase, perhaps here. DOUGLAS BRINKLEY: I have a fan,
A Magic Bus fan right there. AUDIENCE: Very good. Being of a certain age, I
remember the moon landing. And I'm wondering whether
we've ever really recovered from the assassination. In my particular case,
I was in basic training at Fort Polk, Louisiana when
they had the moon landing. I was in the day room,
watching it on television, and the door to the
day room was open, and I could see the moon
reflected in the glass. And meanwhile outside it, one of
the north floor to south floor, there were two of them, we
were sending troops to Vietnam. I wonder how Kennedy would
have felt about that. And listening to what
we've heard today, I wonder how far we
really have come, and whether we really
have recovered. Question mark. DOUGLAS BRINKLEY: Thank you. Well, what's very
important, and we have America's foremost
expert on the Vietnam War history, what is important to
remember is, Apollo 11 took place during the Vietnam War. And a lot of the world was
angry at the United States for the Vietnam War. I mean, France had pulled out
of the integrated Military Command at NATO. Our country was divided
between hawks and doves. And so it's kind of odd in '69. And this summer will also be the
50th anniversary of Woodstock, and the counterculture
and the turmoil, that this event occurred
at that kind of moment. Again, I think there was a
residual effect of Apollo from World War II. In many ways, it is the
beginning of modern technology. From NASA tech it
goes to Silicon Valley to digitalization and beyond. It was almost like
a World War II program in the middle
of the Vietnam era. But I don't know if
our country's ever recovered from the Vietnam War. I mean, it was the
beginning of the division and the distrust of
the federal government. Kennedy-- pick the
presidents after FDR. We know he's big government,
but Lyndon Johnson-- I mean, Eisenhower did the
interstate highway system. And St. Lawrence Seaway,
Kennedy and the moonshot, and Lyndon and government
with Medicaid, Medicare, Great Society. Nixon created the
Environmental Protection Agency and Endangered Species Act. And you know Jimmy
Carter created FEMA and the Department of Energy. And then Reagan. The Reagan Revolution
started telling people the federal
government's the problem. And once you start talking
about the federal government being a problem, it builds. And I think, incidentally,
Ronald Reagan was a very good and
effective two term president. So I'm not questioning
that, but it started a feeling
of the deep state that you hear about today,
that the federal government's the bad guy, because that's
who you have to write taxes to. And nobody wants to pay taxes. And then we started getting
true stories about why were we in Vietnam, waste of money,
Kissinger lied to us, McNamara lied to us. People lie, and there
became a distrust of the federal government. And so I don't know. One of the challenges today
for an Earth shot or a moonshot is to have people
believe in government. And right now, we will
see very low opinion of-- Congress has like a 15% or
20% approval rating at best. Congress, our representatives. And in the Kennedy era,
congressmen and senators were big deals. And they did what was
right for the country. They weren't so highly partisan. So I think it's important to
put that 50 year anniversary into the context of Vietnam. So thank you for raising that. FREDERIK LOGEVALL: I think
it's a very important point. It seems to me that
what John F Kennedy did, among other things, I think he
inspired Americans to believe. And this goes to
Doug's last point. He inspired Americans to believe
that politics and government can respond to society's
moral yearnings, can respond to the
hopes of Americans. And I think, as Doug
has pointed out, his successors held to that too. I don't mean to
suggest for a moment that this is just
John F Kennedy. He did it perhaps
more than most. And that's, as I think
you suggested earlier, is something that we
need to get back to. I'll just say a quick point. If the moonshot is a kind
of high watermark for John F Kennedy as a leader, Vietnam,
to go to the question, is certainly a much
more problematic legacy for the president, as I think
I've said on this very stage. I do think on the great what
if, in my personal view, if John F Kennedy survives
the Dallas shooting, I think he avoids the kind
of large scale Americanization of the war that
his successor embarked upon. But nevertheless, John
F Kennedy expanded US involvement very
dramatically during his 1,000 days as president,
certainly complicated the mission for Lyndon Johnson. And that's something that
we have to reckon with. Let's go to this side here. Please, yes. AUDIENCE: Going back
to 1961 and the speech, I'm wondering about, especially
with you just mentioned about Draper sponsoring
some of this event, how much his confidence
was influenced by successes with
the ICBM program and things like Project Corona,
the spy satellites which were reasonably
successful space shots? DOUGLAS BRINKLEY: Yeah,
let me say something positive in that,
well, look Kennedy, his space advisor was from MIT. Many people in
Massachusetts were angry that Kennedy didn't do a manned
Space Center in Massachusetts and put more of the money here. But it's tough to have done
that to your home state. It's hard enough saying we're
going to the moon, let alone you're putting the money
back to your home state, to be fair to Kennedy on that. But the Bay State
was putting into it, because the harbor here would
have been exactly what they could have used, like they had
Houston with the ship channel and able to move things. So it was a viable
alternative coming here. But I think the big thing
about the spy satellites and Corona and all,
Eisenhower wasn't wrong that when Sputnik went up, Ike
kind of low-keyed it and said, hey, we got a lot. We have U2 planes
being developed. We have spy satellites. We don't we don't need to
be jarred by Russia's BS. We're doing things really
well, and we actually are ahead making better
satellites soon to come. So Eisenhower wasn't
wrong, and Kennedy was briefed by Allen Dulles
after he got nominated, and Lyndon too. They were briefed after the
Los Angeles convention in 1960 by Allen Dulles and the CIA. And they showed them all
the papers from these spy satellites that we were actually
ahead of Russia in satellite technology and missiles. And Kennedy, the big
question is, did Kennedy process that,
because he shouldn't do that on the campaign trail. And if you go to the
Kennedy-Nixon debates, which I had to go back to,
they're fascinating, but I think Kennedy, some
of his best punches at Nixon was when he was saying that
you spoke to Khrushchev, the famous kitchen
debate, when Nixon debated Khrushchev about who has better
appliances, kitchen appliances. And Kennedy said, you
had told Khrushchev that we're beating them in
appliances, kitchen appliances. Well, I'll take my TV
in black and white. I want to be number
one in rocket thrust. And then he insinuated
that, in one of the debates said if Nixon's elected, I
see a Soviet flag planted on the moon, not an American
one, in one of the debates. But what Kennedy knew
and found out quickly when he was president,
we were doing pretty well on the tech front. NASA created in '58,
civilian, but our technology and satellites
were coming along, and he recognized
that really Eisenhower did a pretty good job of
keeping America defense-ready and doing R&D on ICBMs and
intermediate range missiles. And the Jupiter
missiles you guys will hear about if you're
a Cuban Missile Crisis person, that are on Turkey,
that we put there on Turkey, those were the junk missiles
of Wernher Von Braun. He built them for
defense purposes. They weren't that effective,
and we put them on the border there with Turkey. And during the Cuban
Missile Crisis, where the United
States of course does the deal to eventually
get rid of those, the Soviets don't build
the launching things there. So keep in mind
with the moon, it's a lot about missile
technology, spy satellites. And out of all of this
technology, GPS of today, global positioning systems is
pioneered by NASA/ I don't like to say "invent things,"
because I found out in my book, like everybody says that
Velcro was created by NASA. I found out it
isn't, nor is Tang. Velcro was a Swiss
gentleman in World War II who would do alpine hikes with
his border collie sheep dog or whatever. And it would get
burrs in its fur, and he created Velcro to get
the burrs off the dog's fur. But what is true is NASA
uses it and applies it in the space program, and
now Velcro, it's ubiquitous. Much of the tech-- radar being created
is important, guys. MIT computer
technology is gigantic. The computer system
of going the moon is done right here in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. A woman, Miss Hamilton,
was the pioneer in it, in Stark Draper's laboratory
and the work that they did there at MIT is phenomenal. And the Draper family, a
great American family, and I appreciate all that they've
done for the Kennedy Library but also for America in general
by funding and pioneering and hiring the right people
to do the right amount of R&D in order to be in space. So thank you to
the Draper family. FREDERIK LOGEVALL:
DOUGLAS BRINKLEY: Let's go to this side, please. [COUGHING] AUDIENCE: Something you
may not be aware of-- I guess I'm going to have to
go on with this, pardon me-- is that the US Department
of Transportation's National Research Center is in Cambridge. But that was originally intended
to be a NASA research center, and when John Volpe,
governor of Massachusetts, became Secretary, the first
Secretary of Transportation, he swung the bucks, the
transportation bucks to here. I was a fledgling
engineer, newly arrived in Washington, DC, and
watched with rapt attention when the moon landing happened. And I was thrilled, and
I've followed the space race ever since, and I've read
a lot of books about it, and I'm really looking
forward to this. My question is, when
John F Kennedy declared that we were going
to go to the moon, had he consulted with
scientists and engineers, so he had some feeling that
this was a doable thing? Or did he actually, as you
implied, spring this on NASA? DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:
No, great questions. And I did not know that
about transportation. Very interesting to me. Thank you for educating
me about that. But in my book, I write a
lot and they have them here at the Kennedy Library, the
memos of '61 going back, where Kennedy tells Lyndon
Johnson "gimme answers." "What can we do? I want the leapfrog. Give me big answers." And it gets spread. All of our experts
start weighing in on it. Later Kennedy comes
in, he decided to go with the very
radical going to the moon, but Lyndon Johnson
thought it was doable. Wernher Von Braun
thought it was doable. Webb thought it was doable. They're just the big names. But under them, they
talked to the engineers, and they didn't
know how, but what they knew from intelligence
is it would be, again, this fair start, that
we didn't think the Soviets-- And one of the important
things, that the Soviets were trying to go to the moon,
some people it's like a myth that we weren't
really in a race. When the Soviet Union
dissolved in 1991, and when East Germany,
German unification occurred and we got
archives over there, we now have the Soviet archives. They were trying
to get to the moon right up until they had
failures in '67, '68. They were right on it. They were about ready to put
tortoises on the moon right before all this happened,
but they had a major disaster of their own in Kazakhstan. And that's where a lot
of the Soviet money-- I'm talking about the Southern
states getting money for space. In Russia, Kazakhstan
got the money, because that was a
way for Khrushchev to help a region that
needed some economic lift. And so it's really interesting. Also your point that you
mentioned you're an engineer, and it just dawned on
me, I wanted to tell you. So in my oral history of Neil
Armstrong, he is Mr. Engineer-- Purdue, engineer, engineer. There's no better example of
an engineer than Armstrong. And he spent his whole
life, including to me, but to everybody that
we don't honor engineers enough in American history. So I'm honoring the
engineers tonight. [APPLAUSE] But I'm a humanities guy,
and I'm not an engineer. And I tried to get him off
of that engineer mind of his, and I said, "Mr. Armstrong, did
you go out and just stand up there and look up at the moon
and see it glowing up there and say, 'My goodness, I'm
going to be standing there, looking at earth'"? "No." He wasn't messing with me. His mind just didn't
work that way. An interesting, though,
little side thing, do you guys remember the writers
Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff book, and Norman Mailer wrote
a book on going to the moon? Armstrong thought Mailer's
was pretty interesting, only because he was talking in
Mailer's book about the dangers of technology. And mailer put himself as
the main figure in the book, but I did get him to
say that about any of those kind of
space things, he thought Mailer raising some of
the problems with technology was quite interesting. And also, he was
very self-effacing. James Michener had a pseudonym
for a pilot in the Korean War. He was with Armstrong's ship
out in the Korean War, James Michener, the great
writer, and noticed it. I don't have time
tonight, but Armstrong was an exceptional pilot. You can't read about a better
pilot than Neil Armstrong, what he could do with planes. And the reason he went to Purdue
and Gus Grissom went to Purdue. And young people here,
this is pretty cool, if you go to college,
Purdue was the first one to give you-- if
you went there, you could take a class in
aviation history about planes and earn your pilot's
license in the classes. So a lot of these guys that
loved airplanes wanted to go to Purdue, because they
could get their pilot's-- I mean, I'm talking
about 18-year-olds that want a pilot's license. It would be part of
their degree program that when they leave
college they could fly. And so Purdue produced so
many of our astronauts, because they have an airport
on the campus for students. FREDERIK LOGEVALL:
Isn't it nice? Isn't it nice, ladies and
gentlemen, to have just a, shall I say, an
extolling of expertise? I mean, it comes
through in this book. And in this day and age,
I think at least for me, it just resonates. It's not to say that
experts don't get it wrong. As Doug indicated, I've spent
a lot of my career researching the Vietnam War, and
there are lots of experts who got that story wrong. But nevertheless, John F
Kennedy had a commitment to fact-based discourse
right to the end, and I think it
matters a great deal. Sir? AUDIENCE: So the Third
Reich ran out of gas, huh? That's a pretty provocative
way of putting it. But in '67, there was an
International Outer Space Treaty convened. As of this year, 108 countries
have signed on to it, including the United States. It prevents weapons
of mass destruction from being deployed in space,
but not conventional weapons. And after that, in
'79, there was actually a moon treaty that was
proposed and written, and only 10 countries
signed on to that. The United States
is not one of them, but that would prevent any type
of weapons and military bases on any celestial bodies,
including the moon. Now, the president
has recently proposed and has gotten funding
for a new space force, not an international
one but a United States one, which brings these
questions back to mind. Do we need a treaty that would
prohibit the militarization of space, and including
conventional weapons as well as any celestial bodies? Now, you can opine based on your
historical knowledge on what JFK might have done and
also look into the future, but we have to be considering
that these space programs do contain and are implicitly
designed for militarization at some point too, don't we? DOUGLAS BRINKLEY: Yes, we do. If you don't know,
there are two things that the Trump administration
is promoting right now and many more, obviously,
but two just quickly. Space Force, which I don't
think is a very good idea. It leads to what
you're suggesting, militarization of space. And it's not very practical,
because the Navy doesn't want a new branch, Army
doesn't, Air Force doesn't. So I don't think Space Force
is going to get much momentum. Then there's this thought
in the next four or five years of going to the moon again
and doing the south pole of it, and in a way bring in
the private sector, some of these space groups
that might get contracted out. That to me is more
promising, as long as it's done in
the name of peace. What we don't want to be
doing is militarizing space. And while I'm opposed
to the Space Force just personally,
not as a historian, as a human looking
at this, I'm more inclined to see how we could go
back to the moon in a way that would have a positive effect. Maybe even a joint visit to
the moon with other countries. But I think that might
be a more fertile ground for us to explore, and
we do need a treaty. FREDERIK LOGEVALL: Yes. AUDIENCE: Good evening. I'm a researcher from
Boston University, and I'm writing a
paper, and I wanted to answer the question if,
aside from the competition and trying to beat
the Soviets, if there was a moral compass guiding
America's actions in the Apollo space program? DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:
Great question. Yeah, only to the degree,
first off, that Kennedy-- I'll just pick him-- he truly did not want
to militarize space, even though it is
about militarization. In many ways, going
to the moon is a fig leaf for
rocket development and weapons of destruction,
but most of the astronauts, not Neil Armstrong who stayed very
engineer-focused, but many, I'd maybe not say
most, but maybe most, came back not thinking
about the moon. They thought that
was their mission, but seeing Earth, that
blue-green marble floating out there, how there are no borders. Bill Anders, the astronaut's
famous Earth Rise photograph that helped trigger the
environmental movement. And when we talk
about NASA today, the leading people
on climate change have come out of NASA, like
James Hansen and others. NASA is doing weather
forecasting, and I mean, it's not just we're
shooting rockets up. NASA's a very interesting
government agency that needs funding. And yes, I think
whether it's Whole Earth Catalog or the birth of the
Environmental Protection Agency and all, it came
out of a moral idea that we need to
protect our planet and how vulnerable we are and
how lonely it is out there. Meaning, we went to the
moon, and it's lifeless. Incidentally, we still
don't know really how the moon was created. Some people think
two planets clashed, and a planet hit into Earth,
and it created this moon. But what we did find out from
all that moon rock and moon soil of the various
Apollo missions was the composition of
minerals and the like, the deposits we got, were
very much like Earth. We thought it would be a little
more different than Earth, but there was nothing
that we discovered that wasn't
Earth-like, meaning it is like a direct
connector to our planet. And remember guys, since
the beginning of time, the moon sets the ocean tides. It's why we have our calendars. It's everything. And the thought of all these
brilliant Aristotles, Platos, Shakespeares staring at the
moon and writing about it, and now we were actually
there, is a pretty big thing in world history
that we're going to be celebrating this summer. FREDERIK LOGEVALL:
I'm still trying to get my mind around you asking
Neil Armstrong that question and him saying "no." How can you look at that? So yes, and let me say it since
we're running close to the end, just remember to be concise. We'll move over to this side. Thank you. AUDIENCE: OK, this is a question
I'm glad I have the two of you both for this one, because it's
about Kennedy's speech in 1961. And that one is when
he says "go to the moon and do the other things." And I've always wondered what
the other things could be. And you guys are the best
people to ask that of right now, probably. So do you find out
anything about what the other things could be? DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:
Well one of the things that I write about in the book
is, this isn't just the moon, although you heard that
argument with Webb. Kennedy is saying
lunar is number one, but we were doing probes
of Venus, for example. We were doing Mars probes. I mean, the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory out in Caltech in Pasadena has
been pioneering in the Mars rovers and the like. And so the idea was to study
all of the solar system with our new
technology, not just the moon but all of the others. That's how I would
interpret that. And I write about Mariner
and all of these other-- you said something
that's very important. John F Kennedy really
believed in science, believed in scientists,
believed in space exploration, because it enhanced science. Public discovery is
what Kennedy was about. And he was interested
in the ocean also. He wanted to deal with
desalinization of ocean water to create fresh water for an
arid world and all of this. It never caught on
like the moonshot, but he had other pet
projects like this. To have created a freshwater
system out of ocean water, like Kennedy was
constantly talking about would have been a
great initiative. We're doing it a little
bit in California now, but it's so expensive
without federal largesse to help that technology along. AUDIENCE: Whenever you
talk about or think about President
Kennedy's legacy, one of the names that always
at least pops up into my mind is someone you wrote
a definitive biography about, Walter Cronkite. And I was wondering if you
could comment upon the coverage that Cronkite gave that evening,
when Armstrong stepped foot on the moon. Thank you. DOUGLAS BRINKLEY: Great. I have a photo of Cronkite. And Cronkite was considered the
eighth astronaut of the Mercury 7. He was a bonanza of PR for NASA,
because Cronkite in World War II was the dean of Air Force. He was embedded with the
UP, UPI it used to be. Some people called it
the old United Press Services, wire services. Learned all of the Air
Force pilots, et cetera. So aviation, when he
came back after World War II in the Korean War period, he
took on a beat nobody wanted-- space. And he was grew up in Houston,
Texas, Walter Cronkite. And so he got to know
a lot of the early NASA people by the late '50s, but
also pilots from World War II, and Air Force
people, and all this, and he had a great Rolodex. And he is a fanatic
about space, Cronkite. And like John F Kennedy,
he loved sailing. You'd be amazed at how
many people like sailing in the ocean that have
become space buffs. It's remarkable how many. But without Cronkite,
that night of Cronkite, it was just classic coverage. I wrote in my book, out of
all the things Cronkite did, his hours and hours of
coverage of Apollo 11 was the maestro
moment of his career, because he had so well
educated himself and had so many contacts, and they
re-created things at CBS. It was really a
marvel of television. FREDERIK LOGEVALL:
Let's do this. This may be a mistake, and I
may get in trouble for this. Let's do a lightning round. And so what I'm going
to have the four of you do, because then maybe
we can get you all in, is to pose a 20
second question each. Either Doug can
remember them all, because we're going to
take them all at once, or I can jot down what they ask. But let's start
over here, please. Brief. AUDIENCE: First of all, I wanted
say that I've been watching you on CNN for years,
and I can't believe I'm in the same room with you. So it's wonderful. My quick question is, I wasn't
born before the moon landing. So I mean, but I certainly
know the global and historical importance of that. But recently China
has landed a craft on the dark side of
the moon, and SpaceX is talking about going to Mars. So I wanted to
basically hear your view on the future of space
exploration in our country. FREDERIK LOGEVALL: OK. Hold that one. Yes, sir. AUDIENCE: On the question
of an earth shot, there are a number of nominees--
climate change, infrastructure, health care. Is there any that
among those three or any other possible
earth shots which one would have the best
chance of developing a sense of national purpose
that would be bipartisan? FREDERIK LOGEVALL:
OK, excellent. Yes? AUDIENCE: I worked
on the Apollo program at MIT under Dr. Draper. And I was there. FREDERIK LOGEVALL: Wonderful. [APPLAUSE] AUDIENCE: And I
was there when we lost Grissom, White, and
Chaffee in the capsule one fire. And I wondered if you
could say a little more about the impact of that
on both the schedule and the motivation. FREDERIK LOGEVALL: Finally, yes. AUDIENCE: My question is
an earth shot question, so to speak. Is there any-- do you see any
opportunity for NOAA to become as big a-- National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Association-- to be sort of the leader in
a new American inspiration and a new political practicality
of distributing resources to areas that need
to be developed? DOUGLAS BRINKLEY:
OK, great questions. I like the idea of never
letting somebody stand at the mic at the end, so we got
everybody in the conversation. With the China question, China
is doing a great job right now in space exploration. They're putting a lot
of their energy into it. And they are exploring
the dark side of the moon. And if we do a
national thing, it may be a space race
with China, let's hope it can be done in a way that's
not militarized but in a way that it's a friendly
competition. Mars is still out there
on everybody's mind. NOAA, amazing operation. In fact, former head of NOAA
was the first woman, Kathryn Sullivan, she was
recently head of NOAA, and she was the first
woman spacewalker. There's a great
connection to NOAA. I would think the
oceans is a moonshot, cleaning of the
world's oceans is one that I would think everybody
would want to get behind. [APPLAUSE] And NOAA could take a great lead
in the United States on that. That's an amazing--
it's funny, you say NOAA and NASA are both
remarkable government agencies. And Gus Grissom
and Chaffee, White, that was a shocking
event when they all died and whether Apollo
could be canceled. It led, in fact, to Webb
by '68 got muscled out by Lyndon to head NASA. Some people blamed him. It was inevitable that
it was going to happen. They always thought the
deaths would occur in space, but here it was on the ground. But it didn't defund
or derail Apollo, but really, for people like Neil
Armstrong, it's not hyperbole. He figured he had a 50-50
chance of surviving Apollo 11. That's how brave these
Apollo astronauts were. Imagine your family right after,
oh, Apollo 1, all of them die. And now you're having
your loved one go up, the wives of those astronauts. Did I miss one of them? One last one? FREDERIK LOGEVALL: No, I think
you got them all, including the earth shot. You get a sense,
ladies and gentlemen, of why Doug Brinkley
is celebrated, why you need to read this book. I want to thank all of you
for coming this evening, and please join me in thanking
Doug Brinkley for this. [APPLAUSE] DOUGLAS BRINKLEY: Yes. That was great. Wonderful.
