Kennedy Heard to Push on Space Race

President Kennedy went toe-to-toe with the chief of NASA to try to convince him that beating the Russians to the moon should be the agency’s priority, newly released White House tapes showed Wednesday.

Kennedy and NASA Administrator James Webb had a long and sometimes abrupt exchange in a November 1962 meeting in which Kennedy stressed the Cold War political importance of winning the space race.

“We hope to beat them to demonstrate that, starting behind, as we did by a couple of years, by God we passed them,” Kennedy said in the 73-minute tape released by the John F. Kennedy Library.

The conversation breaks no new historical ground but is rare and fascinating for its candor, said Maura Porter, an archivist at the library.

“You don’t get someone like James Webb who was willing to make an argument [with the president] in a pointed way,” Porter said.

Former NASA Deputy Administrator Robert Seamans, who was at the meeting, said Webb wanted to shield NASA’s scientific goals from politics.

The meeting came 18 months after Kennedy’s challenge to the nation to put a man on the moon.

The president asked Webb if he considered the moon landing NASA’s top priority.

“No sir, I do not,” Webb replied. “I think it is one of the top priority programs.”

Kennedy responded that it should be the top priority.

Webb cited unknowns about surviving weightlessness and said scientific study should be focused on gaining “preeminence in space,” not just a moon landing.

Kennedy eventually adopted Webb’s opinion, pushing for broad research goals, said John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University.