Abstract
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, had, of course, many consequences. One of them was turning the U.S. space program, and particularly the lunar landing effort, into a memorial to the fallen president. There was essentially no chance that the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, would modify the goal set by President Kennedy in 1961, a goal that Johnson had himself so strongly recommended. To reinforce his commitment to President Kennedy’s space legacy, less than a week after the assassination Johnson announced that Cape Canaveral would be renamed Cape Kennedy and that the space launch facilities located there would be called the John F. Kennedy Space Center.1
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Notes
Roger D. Launius, After Apollo: The Legacy of the American Moon Landings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Burton I. Kaufman, “John F. Kennedy as World Leader: A Perspective on the Literature,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Summer 1993), 469.
I have drawn heavily from my analysis in The Decision to Go to the Moon in preparing the current chapter. See also Roger D. Launius, “Interpreting the Moon Landings: Project Apollo and the Historians,” History and Technology, Vol. 22 (September 2006), 228 for his assessment of my point of view.
Hugh Sidey, writing in Time, November 14, 1983, 69.
Roger D. Launius, “Kennedy’s Space Policy Reconsidered: A Post-Cold War Perspective,” Air Power History, Winter 2003, 18–19.
See Linda Krug, Presidential Perspectives on Space Exploration: Guiding Metaphors from Eisenhower to Bush (New York: Praeger, 1991) for a discussion of Kennedy’s language as he justified Apollo.
John F. Kennedy, “Commencement Address at American University,” June 10, 1963 at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=9266&st=&st1=
Richard M. Nixon, “Statement about the Future of the United States Space Program,” March 7, 1970, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=2903&st=&st1=
Richard S. Lewis, “The Kennedy Effect,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 1968, 2.
Garry D. Brewer, “Perfect Places: NASA as an Idealized Institution” in Radford Byerly, Jr., ed., Space Policy Reconsidered (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989), 157–173.
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© 2010 John M. Logsdon
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Logsdon, J.M. (2010). John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon. 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_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230116313_15
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