By 1960, John F. Kennedy had embraced Lyndon B. Johnson’s use of space as a cudgel—and his contention that “control of space means control of the world.”
Lyndon B. Johnson, at left, among the onlookers at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on July 16, 1969, as a Saturn V rocket carried the Apollo 11 spacecraft into the vast regions of space.Lyndon Johnson did not blend easily into a crowd.
On October 4, 1957, within hours of learning that the Soviet Union had put the first satellite, the Sputnik, into orbit, Johnson—then the Senate Majority Leader—seized on the issue of space exploration. Before the evening was out, he was working the phones, talking to aides, sketching out plans for an investigation of the anemic U.S. program.
As chairman of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, a White House advisory group, Johnson moved quickly to “dominate Washington space activities,” asapprovingly put it. Kennedy, preoccupied with Cuba, Southeast Asia, and other matters, paid the issue little mind—until April 12, 1961, when a Russian, Yuri Gagarin, became the first person in space. “If somebody can just tell me how to catch up,” Kennedy beseeched his staff.
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