My Amazon Review of Douglas Brinkley's "American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race"

 Space: Kennedy’s New Frontier

Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley has written a terrific book about America’s race to the moon and John Kennedy’s crucial role in it. The book is part history of the American space program and its antecedents and part biography of President Kennedy. I lived much of that history while growing up. As a teenager I was one of the thousands who wrote letters to rocket scientist Wernher von Braun offering up my plan for combining liquid and solid fuel stages in missile development. Later I stood and cheered John Glenn in his 1962 ticker tape parade up Broadway after his successful Mercury mission. And I can never forget showing up I my orderly room at Fort Bragg after returning from leave to watch Neil Armstrong walking on the moon on grainy portable black and white TV set. Brinkley evocatively brought back all of those memories.

Brinkley starts his history by discussing the role of America’s first rocketeer Robert Goddard whose experiments in the 1920s inspired many into thinking that going to the moon was not a pipe dream. He spends much time on the German rocket program during World War II where von Braun was a leading scientist in developing the V-1 and V-2 rockets. It is also clear that he was a war criminal in using slave labor to build those rockets. Von Braun gets picked up by the U.S. Army in Operation paper clip and with Cold War tensions rising he is expunged of his past sins and becomes America’s leading rocketeer.

In the late 1950s Kennedy was a politician on the make. The Cold War was heating up and America was shocked by Russia’s 1957 launch of Sputnik. His leading issue was the missile gap, which later was proved to be non-existent, but it elects him president. In 1961 with Russian moves on Berlin, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and Russian success in manned orbital flight, Kennedy makes a decision for America to go to the moon by the end of the decade and thus was born the Apollo program. The space program became a critical asset in America’s fighting the Cold War.

Kennedy owns the space program and he befriends America’s new heroes, the astronauts where the names of Glen, Grissom, Shephard and others would become household words. The glamour of the astronauts and Kennedy’s personal magnetism gave form to the new frontier in space and supports his poll numbers. With his strong political support the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) formed by Eisenhower is flooded with money which by the mid-1960s accounts for 5% of all federal spending. However, at the outset, Kennedy didn’t fully realize what a herculean systems engineering task that would lie ahead and required a great deal of luck as well.

Brinkley recounts the role of NASA administrator James Webb in organizing the moon effort. Webb with both government and industry experience molds the agency to do his bidding in a very efficient manner. Because he previously worked for Kerr-McGee Oil, He knows Senator Robert Kerr well and as a consequence Kerr becomes a leading supporter of the space program. Kerr along with Vice President Lyndon Johnson (a big supporter from Day 1) and Houston Congressman Albert Thomas make the appropriations flow and they also bring the space program headquarters to Houston. Brinkley also highlights the role of private contractors in making the moon landing a success. North American Aviation built the rocket engines, Boeing the airframe, McDonnell Aircraft the space module and Grumman Aviation the lunar lander.

Of course the moon program was not without its critics. From the Right came howls that it was too costly and if the money were to be spent it should be spent on military applications and from the Left came criticism that the money should have been spent on poverty programs. Despite the criticism the moon program continued as tribute to the martyred president.

My one quibble with the book is that Brinkley only has one mention in passing on Theodore von Karman who founded Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and rocket engine maker Aerojet-General. Von Karman was a true pioneer in space flight. Nevertheless Brinkley shows that the America of the 1960s had the ability to come together to do great things. Would that be true today? I would humbly suggest that instead of an amorphous Green New Deal we have a focused Green Moonshot modeled after the space program.

The full amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R363LCWKUWOTX1/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv