A hard rain september 19.., p.7
A Hard Rain: September 1962, page 7
And, of course, carrying the Lone-Star State was hardly incidental to the outcome of the upcoming mid-terms and his own hopes for re-election two years hence.
He worked his way into the speech assuredly.
“Despite the striking fact that most of the scientists that the world has ever known are alive and working today, despite the fact that this Nation's own scientific manpower is doubling every 12 years in a rate of growth more than three times that of our population as a whole, despite that, the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far outstrip our collective comprehension.”
The speech was one of Theodore ‘Ted’ Sorenson’s masterpieces. When JFK had read his friend’s first draft, he had known that long after people forgot the ‘think not what your country can do for you, think what you can do for your country’ trope, future generations would remember this fifteen minute peroration.
It was a tour de force; a discussion of the progress of human civilisation from first stumbling principles…all the way to the stars.
“…this city of Houston, this State of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward and so will space.”
The politics of the moment almost spoilt the symmetry of the intellectual construct; it could not be helped, carrying people with one was the art of the possible, it was not a perfect science.
“William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honourable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.”
And now, we reach the nexus of the argument.
“The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not…it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space.”
History was nothing if not for context.
“Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it; we mean to lead it for the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.”
The United States was going to become the world’s foremost space-faring nation; it was not an aspiration, it was a new statement of manifest destiny and Ted Sorenson’s pen gave it an epic heroically poetic flourish.
“We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people…I do not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours. There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic?” He paused a moment: “Why does Rice play Texas?”
Speaking to such a huge, anonymous audience the feedback loop was much as it would have been in the Coliseum in the glory days of the Roman Empire. Nuances were drowned out, thumb up or down was the only communal signature.
That was why it had been so important to deliver this message at a place like Rice University where it routinely collected the best and the brightest into its classrooms.
The President hardly paused for breath.
“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, and the others, too!”
And there it was, the message in a bottle that expressed a goal, a purpose for a generation searching for its own identity every time it paused, and looked back over its shoulder at the exploits of the Great Generation which had fought and won the Second World War.
“It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.”
The message had been delivered. The rest was information, more context. Meat upon the bone, absent a determined quest to gain the high moral ground.
He spoke of the great boosters that would power Americans up, and across the final frontier; of the triumphs to date of American science and industry, the numbers of satellites launched, the scale of the launch pads at Cape Canaveral, of the Mariner spacecraft on the way to Venus, and of navigational beacons in orbit safely guiding earthbound mariners.
“We have felt the ground shake, and the air shattered by the testing of a Saturn C-1 booster rocket, many times as powerful as the Atlas which launched John Glenn, generating power equivalent to 10,000 automobiles with their accelerators on the floor…”
With his audience prepared, he switched to hard economics.
This is what is in it for you, and your children and the generations to come.
“The growth of our science and education will be enriched by new knowledge of our universe and environment, by new techniques of learning and mapping and observation, by new tools and computers for industry, medicine, the home as well as the school. Technical institutions, such as Rice, will reap the harvest of these gains.”
Turning ever-more to specifics he continued.
“And finally, the space effort itself, while still in its infancy, has already created a great number of new companies, and tens of thousands of new jobs. Space and related industries are generating new demands in investment and skilled personnel, and this city and this State, and this region, will share greatly in this growth. What was once the furthest outpost on the old frontier of the West will be the furthest outpost on the new frontier of science and space. Houston, your City of Houston, with its Manned Spacecraft Center, will become the heart of a large scientific and engineering community. During the next 5 years the National Aeronautics and Space Administration expects to double the number of scientists and engineers in this area, to increase its outlays for salaries and expenses to $60 million a year; to invest some $200 million in plant and laboratory facilities; and to direct or contract for new space efforts over $1 billion from this Center in this City.”
A little disingenuously he commented, almost as an aside.
“…we do not now know what benefits await us. But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of withstanding heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun,” a boyish quirked grimace, “almost as hot as it is here today; and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out then we must be bold.”
He remembered to crack a joke, self-deprecating to a fault.
“I'm the one who is doing all the work, so we just want you to stay cool for a minute.”
Laughter in such a monstrous amphitheatre was deafening for a moment. It was time to wind up; to seal the deal.
“However, I think we’re going to do it, and I think that we must pay what needs to be paid. I don’t think we ought to waste any money, but I think we ought to do the job. And this will be done in the decade of the sixties. It may be done while some of you are still here at school at this college and university. It will be done during the term of office of some of the people who sit here on this platform. But it will be done. And it will be done before the end of this decade.”
There was just time to suggest that Rice would play a significant part in the coming adventure. Then, like a Vaudeville master of ceremonies, JFK worked the crowd one last time, keen to leave his audience wanting more.
“Many years ago, the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said: ‘Because it is there’."
One last charismatic smile.
“Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail, we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked...”
And the deed was done…
Chapter 13
Thursday 13th September 1962
State Department Auditorium
Washington, DC
USA
Ben Bradlee did not know if the White House had altered any of the questions it had originally planted ahead of that late afternoon’s press conference in the light of the gung-ho reception the President’s ‘Rice Speech’ had prompted, or the hysterical tone of the hellfire TASS announcement earlier in the week. The DC Bureau Chief of Newsweek wondered also, if his friend was going to specifically address the comments emanating from the office of the redneck Governor of Mississippi, Ross Bartlett, who seemed to want to promote an insurrection to block integration in his state’s public education system.
Heck, everybody north of the Mason-Dixon Line had got the message a hundred years ago!
The President had been working through a nightmare ‘docket’ that day; ever since he got back to DC on Tuesday morning in fact... He must have been bushed by the time he got back to the White House last night; not that one would have guessed it looking at him striding to the podium now.
These Presidential press conferences usually kicked off at mid-afternoon, or four o’clock at the latest; that gave the networks time to splice together their edits for the six o’clock news slots and time for the pen and ink merchants to get their copy to the editing desk in time to hit print deadlines for the first editions of their papers that night.
A six o’clock start caused those boys problems.
It could not be helped; it said everything that the only quasi-downtime the President had had today was lunching in the Executive Mansion with the Acting Secretary General of the United Nations, Dean Rusk and the US Permanent Representative to the UN, Adlai Stevenson, the two-time unsuccessful Democratic candidate for the Presidency in the 1950s. The United Nations was about to commence its 17th General Assembly and Stevenson had presented his entire delegation – ten in number – to JFK at the White House accompanied by around a score of guests and their State Department minders at noon that day.
While it was true to say that in one sense, the White House travelled with the President when he was out of DC, there was always a heap of administrative work, documents to sign and endless reading – JFK was an assiduous reader of everything that came across his desk – to catch up on, all of which had to be accommodated within a rigorous ‘catching up’ schedule the first day or two after he had been travelling. The President never stopped being the President, not for a single minute.
Ben Bradlee liked to stand in the wings, watching the crowd and intuiting how his friend’s words soothed, enlightened or enraged the hard-bitten hacks who made up the numbers. He had been told that up to four hundred accredited journalists, and of course, TV and radio reporters would be in the auditorium today.
“I have a preliminary statement,” JFK announced. “There has been a great deal of talk on the situation in Cuba in recent days both in the Communist camp and in our own, and I would like to take this opportunity to set the matter in perspective.”
There was an unmanufactured sharpness in those words, simmering irritation coming to the surface.
“In the first place, it is Mister Castro and his supporters who are in trouble. In the last year, his regime has been increasingly isolated from this Hemisphere…he has been condemned by the OAS, excluded from the Inter-American Defense Board, and kept out of the Free Trade Association. By his own monumental economic mismanagement, supplemented by our refusal to trade with him, his economy has crumbled, and his pledges for economic progress have been discarded along with his pledges for political freedom. His industries are stagnating, his harvests are declining, his own followers are beginning to see that their revolution has been betrayed…it is not surprising that in a frantic effort to bolster his regime he should try to arouse the Cuban people to charges of an imminent American invasion, and commit himself still further to a Soviet takeover in the hope of preventing his own collapse.”
Bradlee, having once worked for the CIA – a period of his career he preferred to consign to a mental room he rarely, if ever voluntarily revisited – was instinctively suspicious of the intelligence about Fidel Castro’s alleged unpopularity with his people. His own, granted informal, anecdotal sources told him there was no great groundswell of anti-regime protest, or resentment in Havana, quite the opposite. Basically, most Cubans were glad to see the back of the gangsters and ‘recidivist elements’ who had fled to Florida and it deserved mention that ever since his ousting in 1959, the Cuban dictator, Batista had been in anonymous exile in Portugal under the protection of António de Oliveira Salazar, one of Europe’s two surviving pre-war ‘strong men’.
Bradlee also noted that the President’s posture, normally relaxed seemed to be saying: ‘I am in deadly earnest, listen up!’
“Ever since Communism moved into Cuba in 1958, Soviet technical and military personnel have moved steadily onto the island in increasing numbers at the invitation of the Cuban government…that movement has been increased; it is under our most careful surveillance, but I will repeat the conclusion that I reported last week, that these new shipments do not constitute a serious threat to any other part of this hemisphere. If the United States ever should find it necessary to take military action against communism in Cuba, all of Castro's Communist-supplied weapons and technicians would not change the result or significantly extend the time required to achieve that result.”
Bradlee knew that his friend was not an advocate of recklessly waving a big stick in the way the majority of his military, and a disconcertingly large number of his civilian advisers advocated.
“However, unilateral military intervention on the part of the United States cannot currently be either required or justified, and it is regrettable that loose talk about such action in this country might serve to give a thin colour of legitimacy to the Communist pretence that such a threat exists. But let me make this clear once again: if at any time the Communist buildup in Cuba were to endanger or interfere with our security in any way, including our base at Guantanamo, our passage to the Panama Canal, our missile and space activities at Cape Canaveral, or the lives of American citizens in this country, or if Cuba should ever attempt to export its aggressive purposes by force or the threat of force against any nation in this hemisphere, or become an offensive military base of significant capacity for the Soviet Union, then this country will do whatever must be done to protect its own security and that of its allies.”
Around him, Bradlee could visibly identify the impact of these words. Seldom had any President in peacetime articulated his policy and intentions with such overpowering clarity.
‘Step on my toes, Fidel and very bad things will happen!’
As his thoughts roiled, Bradlee missed some of what the President said in the following minute.
“We shall be alert…as President and Commander-in-Chief I have full authority…to take such action and I have asked the Congress to authorize me to call up reserve forces… We shall continue to work with Cuban refugee leaders who are dedicated as we are to that nation's future return to freedom… We shall increase our surveillance of the whole Caribbean area.”
The Newsweek man blinked out of his thoughts.
“We shall neither initiate nor permit aggression in this hemisphere,” the President had said. He had continued: “rash talk is cheap, particularly on the part of those who do not have the responsibility, I would hope that the future record will show that the only people talking about a war or an invasion at this time are the communist spokesmen in Moscow and Havana…”
He added a sanguinary comment that “we will keep our heads.”
Immediately, questioners sought to pick holes in the President’s unambiguous earlier statement of intent.
JFK stonewalled this and a reference to the Monroe Doctrine under which the United States warned all other nations not to meddle in its ‘American’ sphere of influence.
Then, recognising the danger of appearing to qualify his earlier remarks he said: “I have indicated that if Cuba should possess a capacity to carry out offensive action against the United States, that the United States would act. I have also indicated that the United States would not permit Cuba to export its power by force in the hemisphere.”
