“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 …”

 

What was John Fitzgerald Kennedy really thinking?

That ringing declaration in support of “Project Apollo” -- now almost a half century old -- is, of course, John Kennedy’s most controversial legacy; a President faced with unprecedented Earthly challenges at the same time that he was proposing the 20th Century’s most extraordinary political and technological undertaking: an actual human journey to the Moon!

If you think you know “why” President Kennedy committed this Nation to undertake a project so expensive, so unprecedented … so obviously “irrelevant” to Earthly human needs … you need to think again; by the time you finish reading this, I guarantee that your opinion re the urgent relevance of “Apollo” – if not all of NASA – to a range of current crises, will never be the same.

We forget (those of us who know it happened – to be differentiated from those among us who find it so unimaginably difficult in retrospect, that they actually believe it never COULD have happened …) how audacious Kennedy’s proposal really was, for 1961; such things had barely moved off the funny pages even then, from “Dick Tracy and his Mooncar” to “Buck Rogers” … and here was a President of the United States proposing that Americans could – should! -- actually “go to the Moon!”

Kennedy’s pressing terrestrial problems involved not only an escalating Cold War, with an ever more menacing arch-enemy from the 1950’s, the Soviet Union -- which threatened to go “hot” at any moment, ultimately ending the world in literal nuclear annihilation (and almost did, in October, 1962) – but equally grave challenges at home: growing crises of long-standing racial inequality, chronic unemployment, regional economic stagnation, lagging educational opportunities, outright urban collapse in major cities -- and even the basic inefficiencies of government itself (in its ability – then, as now -- to apparently DO anything about these daunting, growing issues …).

In accepting his Democratic Party’s 1960 nomination for the presidency, Kennedy boldly called his initiatives to confront these major challenges, “The New Frontier”—

“…we stand at the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of unfulfilled hopes and dreams. It will deal with unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus ….”

And, just as a palpable hunger exists now for fundamental “change” -- to successfully confront, after decades of political “gridlock,” our own rising geopolitical and domestic problems -- so Kennedy’s “New Frontier’ was his answer to the equally daunting international and domestic crises of his day, starting with outcompeting an entire, highly organized international “political religion” -- communism -- which threatened to not only physical attack this Nation with nuclear weapons without warning, but ultimately, threatened to “seduce and then enslave” billions of impoverished peoples also seeking new opportunities and hope around the world.

Today, almost all of John Kennedy’s “unattainable political agenda” – including the banishment of communism -- so boldly proposed under the heading of “The New Frontier,” has been achieved (even as newer, and in some perceptions, graver problems have arisen …).

At the time however, because of stubborn Republican (and conservative Democratic) opposition, particularly to strong domestic “change,” John Kennedy himself did not live to see most of his New Frontier enacted; the majority of Kennedy’s economic and social reforms were only passed and implemented by Congress after his assassination … championed by his own Vice-President and successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson -- who promptly renamed Kennedy’s New Frontier “The Great Society.”

As a young man growing up in the midst of Kennedy’s heady revolution, who’s family had experienced first-hand the negative effects of the racial discrimination endemic in the 1950’s, who himself had to overcome a definite lack of governmental educational assistance to achieve his own hopes and dreams, it’s probably no great secret to this audience which program of Kennedy’s “New Frontier” reached out and touched my life – and, as I will demonstrate, ultimately the lives of everyone -- in a most profound and unique manner:

The Space Program.

To a kid who discovered “science fiction” at the age of ten, where “the impossible” was repeatedly just a page turn away, the idea in my early teens that an actual, elected President of the United States was going to send human beings to the surface of another world – and “before this decade is out …” -- was unimaginably inspiring; I mean, what could NOT be accomplished … if a young President could actually make that happen!?

Who else could then have imagined that, just a few years later, at the tender age of 23, that man would find himself actually advising “the most trusted man in America,” Walter Cronkite, and, at the Tiffany Network, CBS, on John Kennedy’s most far-reaching New Frontier vision – “Project Apollo” -- human beings sent specifically to leave “American footprints”—

On another world!

In retrospect, the most frustrating experiences I probably had as I attempted to carry out my “mission” at CBS -- advising a major television network on the science, as well as historical context, of this extraordinary 20th Century Presidential vision -- was the deep cynicism over, and repeated lack of fundamental comprehension of, “Project Apollo” … not only among my network colleagues at CBS, but in ALL the major media covering the Moon landings! No matter what I said, in trying to explain the deeper societal and historical implications behind President Kennedy’s commitment to Apollo (like, his September 20, 1963 address to the United Nations -- where the President publically revealed for the first time that the United States was considering going to the Moon with the Russians!), all the producers that I worked with or met, all the network correspondents … even the veteran “print” reporters, who had covered space from the beginning … all stubbornly refused to see any “greater meaning” to what we all were covering; in their minds, stripped of the surficial glamour of “landing on another planet” … Kennedy’s Moon Program was simply the misdirected, almost irrelevant (and VERY expensive …) legacy of “a Cold War obsessed President.”

In recent years, in a broader policy assessment of Apollo, several writers have come to somewhat different conclusions: that, Kennedy’s surprising commitment to an aggressive manned spaceflight program in the 1960’s did lead to some equally surprisingly positive economic and social impacts on those other, simultaneous domestic challenges at home. W. Henry Lambright, Professor of Public Administration and Political Science at Syracuse University, has written an excellent profile of James E. Webb, Kennedy’s hand-picked NASA Administrator (and the man directly responsible for Apollo’s stunning political and technological success) -- called “Powering Apollo.” In the book, Lambright describes one of Webb’s own major long-range visions for NASA’s impact on society, beyond the space program:

“…using universities to strengthen regional economies and moving the United States toward … a ‘Space Age America’ …."

As immediate down payment on this “regional economic development strategy,” even as Apollo was being formulated, Webb deliberately placed NASA’s most massive and heavily-funded facilities in the South – in a thousand-mile-long swath from Texas, through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, into Florida.

According to Lambright, writing in “Managing America to the Moon”:

“… under the first NASA Administrator, T. Keith Glennan, the decision had been made to contract out most of NASA's work to industry and universities. Webb continued this pattern, and often pointed out that 90-95 percent of NASA's Apollo work was spent outside government [emphasis added]….”

Paraphrasing University of York sociologist, Brian Woods’ independent, 2003 analysis of several key Webb decisions in those early NASA years--

“… indeed, Webb's leadership (with a bit of help from Lyndon Johnson …) unquestionably led to the location of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Texas, and the careful building of this ‘southern crescent’: a political maneuver which not only assured NASA powerful congressional support for years to come, but directly infused literally billions of dollars into depressed economies all across the South, thus addressing one of Kennedy’s prime targets of domestic economic policy – ‘southern regional economic stagnation’; by locating NASA facilities right across the southern tier, at a time when these areas were trying to escape from an agricultural based economy and into the 20th Century, Webb managed to make key members of the Congress ‘direct stakeholders in Apollo’ ….”

This deliberate placement of several major NASA facilities and research centers in the South, also gave the federal government – armed with non-discriminatory hiring standards, and a fundamental economic lever – an ability to directly influence racial discrimination, through enforced hiring practices at NASA (and among its NASA contractors …), all across this “southern crescent.”

As part of this collateral, specific, long-range plan for “positive domestic impact” from the space program, Webb also created the NASA “Sustaining University Program [SUP]” -- which heavily funded research facilities on campuses during the 1960s across the nation (but, again, especially in the South), seeking to replenish the national ranks of scientists and engineers (on which NASA’s own short-term success heavily depended) through local fellowships and grants. In this way, Webb hoped someday to harness local colleges and universities to other public goals and national problem-solving tasks … long after the successful completion of Apollo.

Much has been said and written about the unquantifiable aspects of Apollo – the so-called “student inspiration factor.” Needless to say, I’m a prime example; without John Kennedy’s clear call to “leave this planet for another world” – if only for a few days -- I have no doubt that my own life would have been significantly different ….

Others have also tried to grapple with this intangible … and have failed to greater or lesser degrees; how can you put a number on the ability of an idea … an “impossible dream” … to lift a kid above “the mundane,” to power him or her through life with the realistic hope that they can accomplish something previously thought “impossible” in their own lives, by getting a better education, by getting that first job … or, by literally “reaching for the stars?!”

You can’t.

But, that doesn’t mean you stop trying ….

In the early 1990's, two decades after my unique “Apollo experience,” I had the privilege of bringing together a team of local volunteers in the development of a "space-age" education project called “The Enterprise Mission” -- deliberately set amid the mostly minority population of an inner-city school (Dunbar Senior High, just off Capitol Hill) in downtown Washington D.C.

The experiment was built around the concept of "student involvement in real-time mission planning and data acquisition," during various NASA exploratory missions -- such as "Hubble," and the ill-fated "Mars Observer"; translation – using the famed “Starship Enterprise” and her multi-racial crew as “the model” (from my long association and friendship with Gene Roddenberry, and my advising “Star Trek”), and a direct connection with NASA -- we created at Dunbar the first multi-disciplinary “starship,” to--

“Boldly go where no students had gone before …!”

Starting as an after school extracurricular activity, and using donated computers from several manufacturers across the country as well as official NASA imaging-enhancement software, "The Enterprise Mission" and "becoming a crew member of the 'U.S.S. Dunbar'" eventually became an accredited course in the Dunbar magnet school curriculum. Over the years, scores of senior NASA Headquarters and Goddard Space Flight Center personnel enthusiastically participated in the program, including installation of a student satellite data link direct to NASA-Goddard, and on-site briefing of the “student crew” by actual NASA engineers, management personnel and scientists attached to various on-going NASA missions.

In 1991, then-NASA Administrator Admiral Richard Truly and education advocate, First Lady Barbara Bush, both came to Dunbar for personal briefings by the “crew” of the “USS Dunbar”; in the waning moments of a world without the Internet, the students took the initiative to even locate the proper protocols for “piping a Navy Admiral aboard a starship” -- and greeted Admiral Truly (to his surprise …) with the appropriate full honors ….

This remarkable experiment -- the original "ENTERPRISE Mission" -- was ultimately nominated for a White House "Point of Light" award for “outstanding contributions to education.”

Students want to be inspired by their education; in fact, they need to be. The simple statistics tell the story: over 7000 students, nationwide, drop out of school every day; over 1.2 million each year do not return to graduate with their own peers. The majority readily admit that the single, overriding reason is—

They’re bored.

Our experience in Washington was a real eye-opener in this regard; in an inner-city school, in a city where the murder rate rocketed in 1991 to the highest in the Nation, where -- when we said goodnight, we couldn’t help wondering which student might literally be shot in a drive-by before returning to school the next morning – and in a physical school building constantly guarded by metal detectors, security guards and daily hand-gun searches … one thing became overwhelmingly apparent:

The students immediately “got” what we were doing.

As we began, still surrounded by hanging wires and gaping ceiling panels, we knew we were “on to something” when several members of the “crew,” totally unasked, showed up on that first weekend, volunteering to help us literally build our “starship” (converting a former storage area into the future “Briefing Room of the USS Dunbar”). We were even more convinced when the kids kept showing up, even during holidays, to help us finish all the installations.

Then, when we began conducting actual “daily briefings” – after school, mind you -- on “the relationships between the daily school curriculum (history, science, English …) and various events occurring in the news, viewed from around the world live on their own NASA satellite dish …” we, regrettably, had to actually turn some students away!

Conceived before the Internet made most of the things we dreamed up really practical (like, the ability to look up ANY data “in the ship’s computer” – i.e. on the Net -- during an actual “briefing” ; the ability to communicate with student “away teams” via live television, literally a world away; the ability to combine “exercises” taking place on the “USS Dunbar” with those of other “student crews” on other “starships” ... anywhere on Earth .. or, someday, off it!), the experience unmistakably showed our Dunbar “crew” what the future of education could someday be--

If “educators” took their heads out of the sand, and decided to listen to what students have to say about their own, increasingly boring, irrelevant – and failing -- educational institutions!

All confirmed by the emotional letters I’ve received over the years since, from the Dunbar students themselves … who participated in – and still remember -- our pioneering “voyages.” All affirming that, even in this first “primitive” incarnation … The Enterprise Mission truly made a difference in their lives ….

The larger lesson here is also blatantly apparent: students need to dream “big dreams,” they need to see that the future -- both their own, and that of their society … their entire world, in fact – can realistically be better than today ….

And, they need to see how – if properly equipped and motivated -- they too can play a meaningful role in making that future come about … even if their school is in the middle of a “war zone,” in downtown Washington DC!

Jeffrey Bennett is also an educator, with a B.A. in Biophysics from the University of California at San Diego, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Astrophysics from the University of Colorado, currently specializing in mathematics and science education. Shortly after President George Bush announced his “Return to the Moon ... and on to Mars” Program for NASA and the Nation, in 2004, Jeff Bennett published an Op-Ed piece in the Denver Post.

Here is Jeff’s independent attempt to quantify this crucial “inspiration factor”—

“ … while inspiration is generally considered priceless, let's try to put a value on it anyway, just for the sake of argument. For example, suppose that building a Moon base as a stepping stone to Mars and beyond provides only enough inspiration to cause an additional 1% of the U.S. population to go on to get a college degree. This is a pretty conservative assumption, especially when you consider that the percentage of the U.S. adult population (over age 25) with a 4-year college degree has already

risen from 7.7% in 1960 to about 26% today. (Yes, I do think much of that can be traced to Apollo, but that's a different argument.) Statistical studies of income show that, over a lifetime, the average college graduate earns some $1 million more than a high school graduate. Now run the numbers:

“If an additional 1% of the U.S. population of 300 million people gets a college degree, that's 3 million more people earning college graduate salaries rather than high school graduate salaries. Over their lifetimes, these people earn an additional $1 million each.

The total economic impact is then 3 million people times $1 million each, or $3 trillion.

“This $3 trillion return is roughly 20 times the estimated cost for the Moon base. That's an investment that's hard to beat, even if the cost has been underestimated by a factor of 2 or 3 or 4...

“As President Kennedy said in 1961, ‘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 are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win...’ The Moon should never have been a one-shot deal. It's time to go back and complete a dream that has been on

hold for more than 30 years. The future depends on it [emphasis added].”

“… the future depends on it ….”

For those used to thinking in such “grand terms,” like President Kennedy (and his best-known alter-ego and speech writer, Ted Sorenson), it must have been apparent early on that a call to do something as “encompassing and impossible” as Apollo, couldn’t help but have much broader, long-term social consequences. There is now hard evidence that this – and NOT a mere “short-term propaganda win” over the Soviet Union -- was what Kennedy actually expected to achieve by championing Apollo ... exactly as I argued all those years ago!

At our recent Enterprise Mission Washington DC National Press Club briefing on “the hidden discoveries and benefits of the space program,” we revealed White House, State Department and NASA memos that now prove that my efforts at CBS to explain Kennedy’s ringing call to send humans to the Moon, as something “far MORE than merely Cold War competition” were, in fact, correct! These documents now clearly demonstrate that -- despite all that has been drummed into us for the last 40 or so years in terms of the glib “Cold War explanation” -- Kennedy’s decision on and surprisingly firm political commitment to Apollo was NOT driven “primarily by Cold War competition with the Russians” … but by motivations demonstrably now far, far larger—

The foundation for this new analysis can be found, not surprisingly, in Kennedy’s own historic address to that Joint Session of Congress, May 25, 1961 … if you just seriously look—

“ … finally, if we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take …

“Now it is time to take longer strides -- time for a great new American enterprise – time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth [emphasis added]….”

“… the key to our future on Earth ….”

As we further detail in our New York Times Bestseller, “Dark Mission: the Secret History of NASA,” these newly-published documents reveal that, within days of his ringing challenge to the American people, the Congress and the Soviets in Washington, Kennedy was actually, urgently, trying to sell Nikita Khrushchev (then head of the Soviet Union), at their first Summit in Vienna, on the daring idea of joint US/USSR space exploration programs!

Including—

Going to the Moon, not in competition … but together!

To add further substance to this major historical revision, we have the first-person testimony of none other than Sergei Khrushchev, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s son, in the October, 1999 issue of American Heritage Magazine:

“…that same August [1963], Kennedy sent Father a proposal about joining Soviet and American forces for a flight to the moon. He had first mentioned the idea in Vienna, in June 1961, but at the time Father hadn’t replied [emphasis added]….”

This, of course, not only tosses into the ashcan of history all the “real-politic reasons” we’ve been given for Kennedy engaging in an expensive space race with the Russians -- it raises profound political, diplomatic and economic questions regarding the President’s real, underlying motivations for going to the Moon at all!

What was John Fitzgerald Kennedy really thinking?

Obviously, from this documentation, and despite his repeated public rhetoric regarding American’s “winning the race to the Moon,” the President privately thought a joint lunar effort with the USSR was the only real way to proceed! Consistent with this analysis, the documents now reveal that Kennedy tried repeatedly to get Premier Khrushchev to go along with this radical idea; on the record, we have at least five attempts by Kennedy, across the three full years of his Presidency -- in secret NSC memos and discussions in the White House, and in equally clandestine diplomatic efforts with both Khrushchev, and even meetings with the Washington Ambassador from the Soviet Union, Anatoly Dobrynin -- to quietly convince the Premier to undertake a joint manned mission to the Moon!

It is clear from these remarkably persistent initiatives, long before his going public at the United Nations in September 1963, that the President in fact saw “a combined journey to the Moon” as vastly more significant and far-reaching than “achieving an American propaganda coup over the Soviet Union, by going there alone ….”

And, in mid-November 1963, according to Sergei Khrushchev’s personal recollections -- after literally years of determined efforts by the President to convince him to accept this 180-degree reversal of the then public perception of “an all out race” … Nikita Khrushchev finally did agree!

Again, according to his son … this time on PBS:

“… in the August of 1963, President Kennedy met with the Soviet Ambassador Dobrinyin, and then he spoke to the United Nations. He offered once more to join the efforts, and at that time my father was very serious. I walked with him, sometime in late October or November, and he told me about all these things. He told me that we have to think about this and maybe accept this idea …

“He thought also of the political achievement of all these things, that then they would begin to trust each other much more ....”

However, just days later … John Kennedy was killed.

In 1999, Sergei Khrushchev looked back:

“… the Cold War might have ended in 1969 … an American astronaut and a Soviet cosmonaut might have stepped onto the moon’s surface together.

“But life turned out differently. In November 1963 John F. Kennedy died, and a year later, in October 1964, my father was removed from power. The leaders who replaced Father hurried to “correct his mistakes” by giving a new impetus to the arms race and producing tens of thousands of tactical nuclear weapons. By 1989 the Soviet army had seven thousand nuclear cannon.

“The Cold War was prolonged by twenty years [emphasis added] ….”

This indisputable chronology now makes clear what Kennedy’s “secret agenda” -- via a vis Apollo – really was from the beginning: not only the first, historic manned mission to the Moon … but a radical “end run” on the decades-long, hopelessly stalemated international situation vis a vis the Soviet Union. An imaginative attempt to diffuse -- if not completely end -- the long “Cold War,” decades sooner than it eventually ended; to usher in a new era of unprecedented cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union, beginning in space … literally on the surface of another world … but ultimately, designed to spread around this world.

A radical, imaginative effort that ultimately, we now know succeeded … only to be killed by John Kennedy’s own, untimely death.

For those who have not lived long enough to remember the frightening nightmares of those years for all us kids -- the pointless “duck and cover” exercises in the middle of the day; the recurring wail of air raid sirens in “mock Russian bomber drills” in the middle of the night; the recurring images on TV of “atom bombs blowing entire cities into smithereens …” – there is no imagining the almost physical lifting of the burden with the real ending of the Cold War, in 1991.

Or the haunting thought I had, when I first found these extraordinary documents confirming my deepest-held suspicions of Kennedy’s real thinking on Apollo, echoing exactly those of Premier Khrushchev’s son:

That -- were it not for the sudden murder of this young President on that Dallas afternoon -- the long nuclear nightmare of the Cold War could realistically have ended a full generation earlier … replaced by “who knows what” -- if Kennedy had also lived to be the architect of that new, unwritten future!

It is testimony to the lack of imaginative thinking in Washington, on how to end (not merely “win”) our current “war on terror” – the so-called “clash of civilizations” -- which presents us now with the same dismal prospects that once confronted Kennedy, for “more unending nightmares for countless generations of Americans to come ….”

What is clearly needed, then, is some of the imaginative thinking that President Kennedy displayed in creating a radical new way to peacefully end our own generation’s “unending, overriding nightmare …” A proposal that could realistically bring the West and the vast majority of Islam peacefully together … in some overarching “common cause, or project” … for the long-term betterment of both great cultures, and the effective isolation of the tiny group of ultimate fanatics currently driving all the fear.

A New Frontier … of Hope.

Perhaps, in seeking the overwhelming benefits of such a joint collaboration, we should look spaceward once again and ask—

“Why, despite his public rhetoric, was John Kennedy so obviously determined privately to send young astronauts and cosmonauts jointly to the Moon!?

“What, in his mind, could be waiting there … which might unify a world?

“And why, after years of stubbornly declining, was Premier Khrushchev suddenly persuaded to agree …?”

The answers may surprise -- and save -- us all.

www.enterprisemission.com/newfrontier.htm