Abstract
As John F. Kennedy’s election as president was finally confirmed shortly after noon on November 9, there were seventy-two days before his inauguration—”seventy-two days in which to form an administration, staff the White House, fill some seventy-five key Cabinet and policy posts, name six hundred other major nominees” and “to formulate concrete policies and plans for all the problems of the nation, foreign and domestic, for which he soon would be responsible as President.”1
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Notes
Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership (New York: Wiley, 1960).
Richard E. Neustadt, “Staffing the President-Elect,” October 30, 1960, 3–4, Pre-Presidential Files, Box 1072, JFKL. This staffing approach, which to a large degree Kennedy adopted, was strongly criticized by another eminent scholar of the presidency, James McGregor Burns, in his Running Alone: Presidential Leadership—JFK to Bush II: Why It Has Failed and How We Can Fix It (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
For a full account of Sorensen’s involvement with John F. Kennedy, see his two books cited above. For Salinger, see Pierre Salinger, With Kennedy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1966). O’Donnell collaborated with David Powers, another member of the “Irish mafia,” and Joseph McCarthy to write Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye’ (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1972). For Schlesinger’s assessment of Sorensen, see A Thousand Days, 208.
This account of the space issues facing President-elect Kennedy is by design very selective. For more comprehensive accounts of the early years of the U.S. space program, see John M. Logsdon, The Decision to Go to the Moon: Project Apollo and the National Interest (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1970); Walter A. McDougall, … the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1985); James R. Killian, Jr., A Scientist in the White House (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977); George B. Kistiakowsky, A Scientist at the White House: The Private Diary of President Eisenhower’s Special Assistant for Science and Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976); Vernon van Dyke, Pride and Power: The Rationale of the Space Program (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964); Robert A. Divine, The Sputnik Challenge: Eisenhower’s Response to the Soviet Satellite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Robert L. Rosholt, An Administrative History of NASA, 1958–1963 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1966); and David Callahan and Fred I Greenstein, “The Reluctant Racer: Eisenhower and U.S. Space Policy” in Roger D. Launius and Howard E. McCurdy, eds., Spaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).
Logsdon, Decision, 51–52. For a comprehensive and even-handed biography of Wernher von Braun, see Michael Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 2007).
White is quoted in David N. Spires, Beyond Horizons: A Half Century of Air Force Space Leadership, Revised Edition (Colorado Springs, CO: Air University Press, 1998), 54.
James R. Killian, Jr., special assistant for science and technology; Percival Brundage, director, Bureau of the Budget; and Nelson A. Rockefeller, chairman, President’s Advisory Committee on Government Organization, Memorandum for the President, “Organization for Civil Space Programs,” March 5, 1958, in John M. Logsdon et al., eds., Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program, Volume I: Organizing for Exploration, NASA SP-4407 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1995), 638.
Alison Griffith, The National Aeronautics and Space Act: A Study of the Development of Public Policy (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1962), 14.
Roger D. Launius, “Introduction,” in the The Birth of NASA: The Diary of T. Keith Glennan, NASA SP-4105 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1993), xxi. Glennan dictated his observations on the issues and personalities involved in the start up years of NASA. He intended the diary only for his children, but NASA prevailed on him to have it published, and the result is fascinating reading.
Loyd Swenson, Jr., James M. Grimwood, and Charles C. Alexander, This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury, NASA SP-4201 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1966), 102.
See Roger E. Bilstein, Stages to Saturn: A Technological History ofthe Apollo/ Saturn Launch Vehicles, NASA SP-4206 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1980), chapter 2, for the origins of the Saturn vehicles, and chapter 4 for the origins of the F-1 engine.
John Finney, “Air Force Seeks Top Role in Space,” The New York Times, December 11, 1960, 68.
Glen P. Wilson, “How the Space Act Came to Be,” Appendix A to NASA History Division, Legislative Origins of the National Aeronautics and Space Act of1958, Monographs in Aerospace History, Number 8, 1998, 62; Killian, Sputnik, Scientists, and Eisenhower, 137–138; and Divine, Sputnik Challenge, 147–148.
For a fascinating account of the origins and evolution of the U.S. ICBM program, see Neil Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in the Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon (New York: Random House, 2009)
The first U.S. attempt to launch a satellite called Vanguard, which was the approved U.S. IGY entry, failed on December 6, 1957. Vanguard was even lighter than Explorer 1, weighing only a little over 3 pounds.
“Minutes of Meeting of Research Steering Committee on Manned Space Flight,” May 25–26, 1959, in John M. Logsdon, ed., with Roger D. Launius, Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program, Volume VII: Human Spaceflight: Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, NASA SP-2008–4407 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2008), 447–448.
President’s Science Advisory Committee, “Report of the Ad Hoc Panel on Man-in-Space,” December 16, 1960, in Logsdon et al, Exploring the Unknown, Vol. I, 408–412.
Also, Robert C. Seamans, Jr., Project Apollo: The Tough Decisions, NASA Monographs in Aerospace History No. 31, SP-2005–4537 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2005), 7–8.
George M. Low, “Manned Lunar Landing Program,” October 17, 1960 in Logsdon with Launius, Exploring the Unknown, Volume VII, 457.
W.H. Lawrence,”Kennedy Assigns Johnson to Head Two Major Units,” The New York Times, December 21, 1960, 1.
Randall B. Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 336.
William Lawrence, “Kennedy Confers on Plans to Spur Space Research,” The New York Times, December 27, 1960, 1.
Ken Belieu, Memorandum for Senator Johnson, “Governmental Organization for Space Activities,” December 17, 1960, Vice-Presidential Security Files, Box 17, LBJL.
Michael Bechloss, “Kennedy and the Decision to Go to the Moon,” in Launius and McCurdy, Spaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership, 54. A February 2, 1961, memorandum from C. Berg of the Bureau of the Budget notes that Wiesner had informed the NASA staff that he “disassociates” himself from the content of his task force’s report. NHRC, Folder 012457.
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© 2010 John M. Logsdon
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Logsdon, J.M. (2010). Making the Transition. In: John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230116313_3
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