Why Is JFK So Deified?

[septimus]

Even today, there may be Americans who think the Apollo Program was a waste of money. (Perhaps that might be a good debate … if hindsight weren’t 20-20.) At the time it struck many people as absurd. The project to land a man on the Moon is considered one of the biggest and most expensive programs ever undertaken by the United States: among single efforts, only the Panama Canal and the Manhattan Project are comparable, and they had clear economic or military purpose.

The budget estimated for the effort was equivalent to about 800 Billion Dollars in present-day federal spending … and there was no guarantee of success.

Man would probably not have set foot on the Moon to this day without John F. Kennedy’s determination and charisma. Certainly such a thing is inconceivable in today’s political clime. The political hurdles were as difficult as the technical hurdles.

The political problems of maintaining a coalition of support to fund the program were just a difficult as were the technical problems that the engineers in the field were facing.

-Abelson: Diversion of talent to the space program … may delay conquest of cancer and mental illness.

-Whitney Young: To America’s thirty million poor people, the moon landing had little meaning, except perhaps to taunt a child with dreams of accomplishment the system places beyond his reach.

-JFK: 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.

• Launius: In 1961, the United States had spent exactly 15 minutes in space with a human being. And he is standing before the public, standing before congress and saying, "We’re going to go to the moon and we’re going to do it on this very tight schedule and demonstrate that we are the technological power of the world.

• McCurdy: I remember talking to Bob Gilruth, who became Director of the Johnson Space Center and he said when Kennedy made that speech, they didn’t have a CLUE about how to go to the moon.

• McCurdy: Eisenhower, from Gettysburg two years after he left office is still giving magazine interviews in places like the Saturday Evening Post where he was talking about how crazy this crash program was to go to the moon. And so were a lot of Republicans in his own party who were opposed to it and would have shut it down in those first few years if they could have done so.

• McCurdy: We were terrified and here you have a young, vigorous president coming forward and saying, “All this stuff you’ve been reading in comic books and pulp magazines for the last 20 years is going to come true. We’re going to go into space – we’re going to the moon.” It was incredibly galvanizing to the public at large. It was I think somewhat galvanizing to Congress and I think it scared the dickens out of the President when he got back to the White House and realized (laughs) what he had done.

• McCurdy: The first, firm estimate that you get on the Apollo program is 19.5 billion dollars … The War On Poverty, was annually 1.8 billion. Aid to elementary and secondary education annually 2 billion. NASA’s budget was going to go to 5 billion! It was going to take away all of the funds that Kennedy and Johnson together needed for their … War On Poverty initiatives. And that was a real problem for Kennedy. And I think he realized that almost immediately after seeing that Congress was prepared to appropriate the funds.

… [et cetera, et cetera]

Kennedy was surprised he was able to develop support for the project, was himself overwhelmed by the expense and difficulties, and actually tried to backpedal out of the project. One could criticise him for the whole effort! But to suggest his contribution to the moon landing was “to make a few speeches” is … misinformed.