Abstract
On Monday April 10, 1961, John F. Kennedy threw out the opening day baseball pitch as the Washington Senators played (and lost to) the Chicago White Sox on a chilly and damp afternoon. Baseball was not the only thing on the president’s mind that day. Sometime early in the game, Kennedy’s deputy press secretary Andrew Hatcher told him that the United Press International news service was about to report that the Soviet Union had successfully recovered the first human to orbit the Earth. Kennedy asked Hatcher to check on the report; he had known for several weeks from intelligence briefings that such a launch was imminent. The Soviet Union had successfully completed one-orbit missions of a spacecraft carrying a dog as a passenger on March 9 and March 25. It was almost certain that the next step would be a mission with a human on board. Hatcher reported back a few innings later that the news reports “have not materialized” and that “elaborate Russian plans to make this anticipated announcement have been abandoned for today.” Also, said Hatcher, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) “could not confirm or deny the report” of the Soviet launch.1
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Notes
Memorandum from Edward R. Murrow to McGeorge Bundy, “Recommended U.S. Reaction to Soviet Manned Space Shot Failure,” April 3, 1961, NSF, Box 307, JFKL. In a handwritten note on Murrow’s memo, Bundy said “tell him I agree.”
For details of the Gagarin flight, see Asif A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo: the Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945–1974, NASA SP-2000–4408 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2000), chapter 7. For information on the decoding of the television transmissions from the Soviet spacecraft, see Sven Grahn, “TV from Vostok” at http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/trackind/TVo stok/TVostok.htm.
Logsdon, Decision, 101 and Harry Schwartz, “Soviet Feat Aids Propaganda Aim,” The New York Times, April 13, 1961, 16.
Harry Schwartz, “Moscow: Flight is Taken as Another Sign That Communism is the Conquering Wave,” The New York Times, April 16, 1961, E3.
Hanson Baldwin, “Flaw in Space Policy: U.S. is Said to Lack Sense of Urgency in Drive for New Scientific Conquests,” The New York Times, April 17, 1961, 5.
James R. Kerr, “Congressmen as Overseers: Surveillance of the Space Program” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1963), 402, cited in Logsdon, Decision, 103.
The Washington Post story is quoted in House Committee on Science and Astronautics, Toward the Endless Frontier: History of the Committee on Science and Technology, 1959–1979 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1980), 86. See also The New York Times, April 15, 1961, 3; Seamans, Project Apollo, 17; and James E. Webb, “Memorandum for Mr. Kenneth O’Donnell, The White House,” April 21, 1961, WHCF, Box 652, JFKL.
Glenn T. Seaborg with the assistance of Benjamin S. Loeb, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Test Ban (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981), 31.
This is the title of a book by Trumbull Higgins, The Perfect Failure: Kennedy, Eisenhower, and the CIA at the Bay of Pigs (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989). Every history of the Kennedy presidency contains a detailed analysis of the Bay of Pigs failure, the decisions that led to it, and its aftermath. They will not be repeated here.
Sorensen, Counselor, 316–317; Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963 (Boston, MA: Little Brown and Company, 2003), 367. The Robert Kennedy quote is from an interview with Walt Rostow, at the time of the Bay of Pigs on McGeorge Bundy’s national security staff, in Strober and Strober, Kennedy Presidency, 349.
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© 2010 John M. Logsdon
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Logsdon, J.M. (2010). “There’s Nothing More Important”. 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_6
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