[On July
18th, 1969, Senator Ted Kennedy was involved in a car accident
that left his female companion Mary
Jo Kopechne dead. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that Chappaquiddick incident
and four other Kennedy
family histories, leading up to a weekend post on cultural representations
of the family!]
On the Cold War
limits yet compelling possibilities of the famous “moon shot” speech.
On May 25th, 1961,
just a few months into his term of office, President John F. Kennedy delivered
a speech before a joint session of Congress. The speech contained a number of
sections and proposals, but it is Section
IX: Space that has endured in our collective memories, for it was in that
section that Kennedy famously and ambitiously argued, “I believe that this
nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out,
of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” A year and
a half later, on September
12th, 1962, at Houston’s Rice University, Kennedy fleshed out
that goal further in another, more focused speech, laying out in detail both the
histories and motivations that help explain why “we choose to go to the moon”
and some of the many steps that the government and nation (with the help of
scientists such as those at Rice) were taking to achieve that aim. While of
course Kennedy tragically did not live to see the culmination of those efforts,
NASA and the space program achieved his ambitious hopes with room to spare,
launching the first manned moon voyage in July 1969, just over 8 years after
the original speech.
If we examine
the full
text of Section IX, in which the moon proposal occupies only one of
thirteen paragraphs, what stands out most is just how fully Kennedy couches his
space program goals in the context of the Cold War. He opens the section by
arguing, “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.” That is, Kennedy isn’t
just linking the space race to other rivalries between the US and the Soviet
Union—he’s overtly arguing that whichever nation achieves its goals more
quickly and fully in the “adventure” that is space exploration might well
convince other nations and communities around the world to take its side in the
broader Cold War conflicts. It’s a kind of Domino
Theory motivation for space exploration, and Kennedy elaborates on it
throughout much of the section, such as his admission that because the Soviets
have a “head start,” “we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, [but]
we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last.” Perhaps
it’s inevitable that Cold War fears would drive even these most otherworldly
ambitions, but it’s still striking to see just how much Kennedy frames his moon
shot in those terms.
Despite those
historical limits, however, the section’s second half features a number of
compelling visions of the future. The moon proposal is only the first of four
such goals, which also include: accelerating development of the Rover nuclear
rocket, with the hopes of exploring “perhaps beyond the moon, perhaps to the
very end of the solar system itself”; accelerating “the use of space satellites
for world-wide communications”; and producing “at the earliest possible time a
satellite system for world-wide weather observation.” The latter two goals in
particular make clear that Kennedy was not thinking solely of a Cold War space
race, nor even indeed of space exploration at all, but rather of the multiple
layers of scientific and global progress that NASA and the space program could
help achieve. And in the section’s most beautiful lines, Kennedy acknowledges
precisely the global and human nature of those potential achivements: “But this
is not merely a race. Space is open to us now; and our eagerness to share its
meaning is not governed by the efforts of others. We go into space because
whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share.” In Kennedy’s
speech and moon shot ambitions, then, we see—as we do so often in American
history—the nation’s more contingent and narrow needs yet at the same time its
most ideal and inspiring visions.
Next
KennedyStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Kennedy connections you’d highlight?
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