39 Years Ago, Humans First Walked on the Moon. Today, I remember President Kennedy.

[Octafish]

On July 20, 1969, humans walked on another world for the first time. We did so because of the work of 400,000 or so men and women -- and the vision of one man, President John F. Kennedy.


Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, aboard Eagle,
the Lunar Excursion Module, begin their descent to the surface of the moon.
The photo was taken by Michael Collins aboard the Command Module, Columbia.

President Kennedy's rationale in challenging and directing the nation to land a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth was clear: He wanted to show the world that the United States would win the "space race" -- and overtake the Soviets who had been first to orbit a satellite, Sputnik 1, and first to put a man in orbit, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

Here's a great resource from NASA about President Kennedy and Apollo 11:

The Decision to Go to the Moon:
President John F. Kennedy's May 25, 1961 Speech
before a Joint Session of Congress

National Aeronautics and Space Administration
NASA History Office

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced before a special joint session of Congress the dramatic and ambitious goal of sending an American safely to the Moon before the end of the decade. A number of political factors affected Kennedy's decision and the timing of it. In general, Kennedy felt great pressure to have the United States "catch up to and overtake" the Soviet Union in the "space race." Four years after the Sputnik shock of 1957, the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had become the first human in space on April 12, 1961, greatly embarrassing the U.S. While Alan Shepard became the first American in space on May 5, he only flew on a short suborbital flight instead of orbiting the Earth, as Gagarin had done. In addition, the Bay of Pigs fiasco in mid-April put unquantifiable pressure on Kennedy. He wanted to announce a program that the U.S. had a strong chance at achieving before the Soviet Union. After consulting with Vice President Johnson, NASA Administrator James Webb, and other officials, he concluded that landing an American on the Moon would be a very challenging technological feat, but an area of space exploration in which the U.S. actually had a potential lead. Thus the cold war is the primary contextual lens through which many historians now view Kennedy's speech.

The decision involved much consideration before making it public, as well as enormous human efforts and expenditures to make what became Project Apollo a reality by 1969. Only the construction of the Panama Canal in modern peacetime and the Manhattan Project in war were comparable in scope. NASA's overall human spaceflight efforts were guided by Kennedy's speech; Projects Mercury (at least in its latter stages), Gemini, and Apollo were designed to execute Kennedy's goal. His goal was achieved on July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong stepped off the Lunar Module's ladder and onto the Moon's surface.

CONTINUED w LINKS…

http://history.nasa.gov/moondec.html

What JFK's innermost motives for the speech were, I can easily guess. He wanted to show the world that a free people could accomplish the impossible -- getting a man to the moon had been considered impossible since the dawn of history.

He also wanted, I believe, to show that if we could figure out how to the moon and back, we could face any problem on earth and solve it -- from ending hunger, poverty and ignorance to creating a lasting peace.

The space program would make an excellent example of what we could do, working together. Rather than building missiles and bombers and bombs, we invested in high technology that resulted in real benefits for us on earth -- from great jobs to scientific and engineering breakthroughs to improved communications to increased productivity. The computer you are using to read this is a direct result of investment in the space program needed to miniaturize computers. Imagine what we could have done if we had continued with that approach?



With the problems facing the nation and our world, we need a President with that can-do spirit again.

Lord knows we haven't had too many since November 22, 1963.

[meegbear]

1. That was a historic day ...

http://members.shaw.ca/rlongpre01/moon.html

[Octafish]

8. LOL!

I'm printing that out, on the best printer at work.



Three astronauts and one crook.

[raccoon]

2. That was when the Empire was at its apex. nt

[Octafish]

12. Vietnam was raging, too. Please check out Galbraith's ''Kennedy, Vietnam and Iraq''

I don't think, had President Kennedy lived, we'd have gone through that and the subsequent total militarization of the nation.



From the son of the tall fellow in the photo above:

Kennedy, Vietnam and Iraq

The evidence is clear: JFK decided to withdraw from Vietnam a month before he was assassinated. Setting the record straight is crucial as Baghdad continues to explode.

By James K. Galbraith
Salon.com
November 22, 2003

This week's crescendo of Kennedy commemoration has ranged from banal to lurid. The New York Times' Alessandra Stanley has pointed out how the event signaled the rise of modern television as our dominant medium for news. Forty years later, every vice of TV is on display: an obsession with glamour, sex, hearsay, computer simulation and sentimental appeals to authority; along with reckless disregard for evidence, complicated ideas, policies and organizations. Plainly, given the nature of the medium, access to even a small part of the underlying history of our defining trauma will be restricted to those who read.

Meanwhile, over in Iraq, crashing helicopters are giving resonance to a persistent mystery: What exactly was Kennedy planning to do, in the fall of 1963, about Vietnam? Some parallels between the two wars are uncanny. In both cases, U.S. intervention was driven by small, secretive, bellicose, conspiratorial factions within the government. In both cases, military intelligence was officially optimistic -- but the optimism was believed neither by its authors nor its readers. In both cases, the question of how and when to exit had to be considered early on -- and in light of an upcoming election campaign. In both cases, though details were energetically shielded from public view (and though neither North Vietnam nor Iraq had nuclear weapons), the specter of escalation to nuclear war hung over the conflict. The fate of millions depended (and today still depends) on how carefully and responsibly the decision-makers in Washington behaved.

In the Vietnam case, events took an ugly turn, beginning in November 1963, and spun out of control thereafter. As that happened, Kennedy's exit strategy disappeared from history for decades. What will happen to us in Iraq remains to be seen. To be sure, there are those who wanted us in and do not want us to leave; their next move will be interesting to watch. Now, as then, the government is divided, and neither faction is anxious to lose. So it is worthwhile to read the history of Kennedy and Vietnam now, partly for its own sake, partly for general lessons about neocolonial war, and partly with a view to understanding how the questions of national security and domestic politics play out in Washington.

I believe the evidence now available shows that Kennedy had decided, in early October of 1963, to begin withdrawing 17,000 U.S. military advisers then in Vietnam. One thousand were to leave by the end of 1963; the withdrawal was scheduled to be completed by the end of 1965. After that, only a military assistance contingent would have remained. The withdrawal planning was carried out under cover of an official optimism about the war, with a view toward increasing the effort and training the South Vietnamese to win by themselves. But Kennedy and McNamara did not share this optimism. They were therefore prepared to press the withdrawal even when the assessments turned bad, as they started to do in the early fall of 1963. This was a decision to withdraw without victory if necessary, indeed without negotiations or conditions. In a recent essay in Boston Review, I assemble this evidence in detail.

At one level, it isn't news. Certain facts -- that Kennedy wanted out of Vietnam, that he encouraged Sens. Mike Mansfield and Wayne Morse to keep criticizing his policy, that he told Kenneth O'Donnell that he would get out after the 1964 election, that he resisted all suggestions that main combat forces be sent to Vietnam -- have been known for decades. In my family, we know that JFK sent John Kenneth Galbraith (then serving as ambassador to India) to Saigon in September 1961 because, as my father has often put it, "Kennedy knew I did not have an open mind." JKG turned in a pessimistic report, reiterated in letters and discussions with the president thereafter.

Kennedy's decision document, National Security Action Memorandum 263, has been in the public domain for a long time. As early as 1972, Peter Dale Scott called attention to it, and to its (then still-classified) successor, NSAM 273, which Lyndon Johnson approved on Nov. 26, 1963. Arthur Schlesinger mentions the withdrawal in "Robert Kennedy and His Times," published in 1978. In 1992 Maj. John M. Newman, an Army intelligence officer and professional historian specializing in South Asia, published a book giving still greater evidence and detail. This provoked wide-ranging controversy, with objections flowing in from Walt Rostow, Noam Chomsky, and many others in between.

CONTINUED...

http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2003/11/22/vietnam/index.html

Had JFK served out two terms, ours would be a very different world today. I don't believe our republic would have descended into empire.

[redqueen]

15. That subject deserves its own thread. (nt)

[cobalt1999]

3. Allowing every idiot to use the psuedo-argument "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we...."

I remember that day. Amazing.

[Octafish]

14. It was an amazing day. Imagine what today'd be like if...?

Here's what I mean about JFK approaching the problems on earth with the same, ah, vigor he used in the space race:

Dodd and Dulles vs. Kennedy in Africa

“In assessing the central character ...
Gibbon’s description of the Byzantine general
Belisarius may suggest a comparison:
‘His imperfections flowed from the contagion of the times;
his virtues were his own.’”
— Richard Mahoney on President Kennedy

By Jim DiEugenio
From the January-February 1999 issue (Vol. 6 No. 2)

EXCERPT...

Kennedy and Africa

Needless to say, the Eisenhower-Nixon-Dulles decision on Indochina had an epochal ring that can be heard down to the present day. But there was another developing area of the world where Kennedy differed with these men. In fact it is in the news today because it still suffers from the parallel pattern of both Indochina and Indonesia, i.e. European colonialism followed by American intervention. In 1997, after years of attempted rebellion, Laurent Kabila finally ousted longtime dictator Joseph Mobutu in the huge African state of Congo. But Kabila’s government has proven quite weak and this year, other African states have had to come to his aid to prop him up. In late November, the new warring factions in that state tentatively agreed to a cease-fire in Paris brokered by both France and the United Nations. The agreement is to be formally signed in late December. If not, this second war in two years may continue. As commentators Nelson Kasfir and Scott Straus wrote in the Los Angeles Times of October 19th,

What Congo so desperately needs and never has enjoyed is a democratic assembly, one that can establish a constitution that will allow the country’s next president to enjoy sufficient legitimacy to get started on a long overdue development agenda.

There was a Congolese leader who once could have united the factions inside that country and who wanted to develop its immense internal resources for the Congolese themselves: Patrice Lumumba. As with Achmed Sukarno of Indonesia, Lumumba is not talked about very much today. At the time, he was viewed as such a threat that the Central Intelligence Agency, on the orders of Allen Dulles, planned his assassination. Lumumba was killed just before President Kennedy was inaugurated.

Yet, in the media commentaries on the current crisis, the epochal changes before and after Kennedy’s presidency that took place in the Congo are not mentioned. As with Indonesia, few commentators seem cognizant of the breaks in policy there that paved the way for three decades of dictatorship and the current chaos. One thing nobody has noted was that Mobutu came to absolute power after Kennedy’s death in a policy decision made by the Johnson administration. This decision directly contradicted what Kennedy had been doing while in office. Kennedy’s Congo effort was a major preoccupation of his presidency in which many of his evolving ideas that originated in 1951 were put to the test and dramatized in a complex, whirring cauldron. The cauldron featured Third World nationalism, the inevitable pull of Marxism, Kennedy’s sympathy for nonaligned leaders, his antipathy for European colonialism, and the domestic opposition to his policies both inside the government and without. This time the domestic opposition was at least partly represented by Senator Thomas Dodd and CIA Director Allen Dulles. This tortured three-year saga features intrigue, power politics, poetic idealism, a magnetic African revolutionary leader, and murder for political reasons. How did it all begin?


Kennedy Defines Himself

In 1956, the Democrats, always sensitive to the charge of being “soft on communism”, did very little to attack the Eisenhower-Nixon-Dulles foreign policy line. When they did, it was with someone like Dean Acheson who, at times, tried to out-Dulles John Foster Dulles. Kennedy was disturbed by this opportunistic crowd-pleasing boilerplate. To him it did not relate to the reality he had seen and heard firsthand in 1951. For him, the nationalistic yearning for independence was not to be so quickly linked to the “international Communist conspiracy.” Kennedy attempted to make some speeches for Adlai Stevenson in his race for the presidency that year. In them he attempted to attack the Manichean world view of the Republican administration, i.e. that either a nation was allied with America or she was leaning toward the Communist camp:

the Afro-Asian revolution of nationalism, the revolt against colonialism, the determination of people to control their national destinies....In my opinion, the tragic failure of both Republican and Democratic administrations since World War II to comprehend the nature of this revolution, and its potentialities for good and evil, has reaped a bitter harvest today—and it is by rights and by necessity a major foreign policy campaign issue that has nothing to do with anti-communism. (Speech in Los Angeles 9/21/56)

This was too much even for the liberal Stevenson. According to author Richard Mahoney, “Stevenson’s office specifically requested that the senator make no more foreign policy statements in any way associated with the campaign.” (JFK: Ordeal in Africa p. 18)

Kennedy objected to the “for us or against us” attitude that, in Africa, had pushed Egypt’s Gamel Abdul Nasser into the arms of the Russians. He also objected to the self-righteousness with which people like Dulles and Nixon expressed this policy. John Foster Dulles’ string of bromides on the subject e.g. “godless Communism”, and the “Soviet master plan”, met with this response from Senator Kennedy: “Public thinking is still being bullied by slogans which are either false in context or irrelevant to the new phase of competitive coexistence in which we live.” (Mahoney p. 18)

http://www.ctka.net/pr199-africa.html

We need to reignite the spirit of that amazing time, cobalt1999.

[Wilms]

4. Eight years.

Look at what we've accomplished in the last eight years.

Thanks Octafish.

[Octafish]

16. Rahm Emanuel: ''Mr President (sic), we will be forever in your debt.''

Thanks for giving a damn, Wilms.

Bush will leave successor as president with $482bn in debt

Elana Schor in Washington
guardian.co.uk, Monday July 28 2008

George Bush will leave his successor with the highest national debt in US history, the White House announced today.

The American budget deficit is projected to reach $482bn next year, breaking the previous record high of $413bn set in 2004. White House officials blamed the sagging economy for the new deficit figure, which does not reflect about $80bn in Iraq war costs.

Barack Obama and senior Democrats in Congress pointed to a different culprit: the billion-dollar tax cuts that Bush pushed through in 2001 and John McCain has vowed to extend if elected president.

"These have been years of unprecedented fiscal irresponsibility," Obama economic policy director Jason Furman said in a statement.

"Senator McCain is proposing to continue the same Bush economic policies that put our economy on this dangerous path and that will drive America even deeper into debt."

SNIP...

Republicans in Congress were largely silent at the release of the damning debt figures. But Rahm Emanuel, the No 3 Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, took a caustic jab at Bush. "Mr President, we will be forever in your debt."

CONTINUED...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/28/georgebush.usa

Hey, Wilms! You wouldn't happen to be in the Netherlands, would you?

[Wilms]

17. No. I'm soil surfing in Los Angeles, LOL! Waves are 5.4 on the Richter scale.

What's the happening in the Netherlands?

[NightWatcher]

5. if in the 60's it took us only 9 years to go to the moon, why did chimpy say it'd take 20 years?

I used to kid about the idea that the moon landing was staged, but the more the government lies to me, the more I am apt to believe that the grand vision of '69 was a lie too.

Now go ahead and make fun of my position, but havent they lied to us about everything else? And why, with the technology we have today, is it going to take 20 years to get BACK to the moon?

[cobalt1999]

9. The world is flat,

Evolution is false, we didn't land on the moon, 9/11 was done by the US government, and aliens are in contact with world leaders.

You are a fool to believe the conspiracy theorists.

[NightWatcher]

10. didnt say I believe, but I question

[cobalt1999]

13. Logically, then you would question any conspiracy theory

that required the support and silence of thousands of engineers, scientists, and astronauts.

Yet, somehow, that fact slips right past you and you "question" if we did or not?

I think you need to educate yourself on the science, engineering, and details of the space race.

[MadAsHell]

11. 20 years because ...

like all other things this administration pitches, it is not about really doing it. It is about how can they set up a smoke screen and make their bank rollers lots of money. You can make a lot more profit in twenty years than in nine.

[Thothmes]

20. NASA had virtually an unlimited budget for the project

NASA today must compete for its money with every other Government sponsored program, JMO.

[FogerRox]

22. Many of us watched the Apollo program with binoculars and telescopes

I personally saw the Christmas eve orbit of Apollo 8.

[msedano]

6. 3rd world, 1st world

The day before, I landed at my duty station near the Korea DMZ, B 7/5. The battery invited locals into the camp to view the moon landing--the village was unelectrified.

The day before, driving up to Bravo, i saw people plowing rice paddies using wooden plows and oxen, the air smelling of the human shit they use to fertilize. Waste not want not, or more to the point, Use waste want not.

The next day, one of those workers sat at the barstool with me watching one of my compatriots walking the moon's surface. The irony struck me, I've always wondered how the fellow took it?



Here are other stories of Bravo:
http://www.readraza.com/hawk/index.htm

[EFerrari]

7. My Silicon Valley development was brand new in 1963

and full of young families whose dads worked at NASA. They were all moon men. :)

[UTUSN]

18. K&R #4 n/t

[bonito]

19. K&R!

[WillyT]

21. Big K & R !!!

Thank you for that!!!

:bounce::yourock::bounce:

:kick: