50 years ago, Kennedy reached for stars in historic Rice address

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy urged the nation to travel to the moon. His challenge came true on July 20, 1969, when astronauts landed and Neil Armstrong walked on its surface the next day. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy urged the nation to travel to the moon. His challenge came true on July 20, 1969, when astronauts landed and Neil Armstrong walked on its surface the next day. Photo: Ted Rozumalski Photo: Ted Rozumalski Image 1 of / 27 Caption Close 50 years ago, Kennedy reached for stars in historic Rice address 1 / 27 Back to Gallery

What a glorious day it was when President John F. Kennedy took the podium at Rice University at 10 a.m. on Sept. 12, 1962, 50 years ago this week, to thunderous applause from over 40,000 enthusiastic spectators. Although the humidity was doing its stuffy best to tamp down the fun, attendees madly fanning themselves while wiping perspiration from their brows with handkerchiefs, hopes were high that Kennedy would inspire a new generation to beat the Soviet Union to the moon. The success of Mercury astronauts - Alan Shepard on Freedom 7, Gus Grissom on Liberty Bell 7, John Glenn on Friendship 7, and Scott Carpenter on Atlas 7 - had fueled a public mania for all things NASA. Days before the Rice visit, Kennedy had visited the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and the NASA Launch Operations Center on Merritt Island in Florida. The press had called it - including his all-important stopover in Houston - Kennedy's Space Tour. He came to Houston to shift the space race from low to high gear. "NASA had great hopes that the Rice speech would generate a frenzied public demand to go to the moon," former director of the Johnson Space Center George Abbey said. "The stakes - congressional appropriation of funds - were high."

For NASA, Kennedy was the right president at the right time. Yet his decision to prioritize space exploration was surprising. As a U.S. senator from Massachusetts from 1953 to 1960, Kennedy seldom mentioned space. It wasn't his bailiwick. His primary national security concern was the missile gap with the Soviets. But when on April 12, 1961, the Kremlin announced that cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had successfully orbited Earth, Kennedy - fueled with hubristic determination - grew defiant. He instructed his advisers to develop a space program that would guarantee "dramatic results" that could be rubbed in Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev's face.

A few weeks later, NASA handed Kennedy a doable initiative that would shout U.S. space superiority so loudly that Lenin's bones would rattle from the grave: a lunar landing program. The successful orbits of U.S. astronaut John Glenn on Friendship 7 fueled Kennedy's ambition. Kennedy, an avatar of American exceptionalism, latched with zeal onto the mammoth idea of landing on the moon. His historic visit to Rice University would be the sell-job to the American public. "I think (Kennedy) became convinced that space was the symbol of the 20th century," White House science adviser Jerome Wiesner posited. "It was a decision he made cold-bloodedly. He thought it was good for the country."

Houston was the great beneficiary of Kennedy's decision to prioritize NASA's Project Apollo, which ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers $25.4 billion (about $150 billion today). How Houston won the NASA bid lays squarely on the shoulders of Rep. Albert Thomas. Anxious to bring pork dollars to Houston, he mercilessly lobbied the Kennedy administration for the Manned Spacecraft Center to come to his 8th Congressional District. Even before Kennedy's May 25, 1961, address to Congress where he famously said "I believe we should go to the moon," Thomas had invited key NASA officials to Houston to cut a deal. George Brown, of Houston's Brown & Root construction company, also made an irresistible pitch for the new manned spacecraft center. Cognizant that NASA coming to Houston would be a local jobs engine, Brown, chairman of the Rice Board of Trustees, offered NASA 1,000 acres of wildlife-rich pasture at Clear Lake that Humble Oil had recently donated to the university. NASA's key location requirement was that the space center had to have a "mild climate permitting year-round, ice-free water transportation; and permitting out-of-door work for most of the year." Houston, a gateway to the Gulf of Mexico, easily fit this criterion.

Brown, a huge Houston booster, had been a longtime financial supporter of Vice President Lyndon Johnson. That gave the Houstonian an inside track with the Kennedy administration. The president owed Texas something, it seemed, for delivering 24 electoral votes to him in his razor-close 1960 White House race against Republican nominee Richard Nixon. Without Texas, it's safe to say, JFK wouldn't have been president. Rep. Thomas, a master Capitol Hill operator, saw how to close the deal. Throughout 1962, Thomas refused to support a few Kennedy-backed bills pending before Congress. A quid pro quo was in the offing. In full Machiavelli mode, Kennedy casually told the congressman that NASA head James Webb was "thinking of building a manned space center, perhaps - only perhaps - in Houston." But Kennedy it seemed first needed support for his pending bills. With a calculated change of heart, Rep. Thomas supported Kennedy's bills, and in return Kennedy rewarded Houston with the Manned Spacecraft Center (renamed the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center after LBJ died in 1973).

The stage was set for Kennedy to come to Rice University, which had donated the Clear Lake land to NASA, to deliver a motivational speech about space exploration. The most frequently quoted line from the address -"We choose to go to the moon!" - caused the stadium to erupt in raucous cheers, as if the Owls had scored a touchdown. A copy of the speech is now on display at the Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. The document is particularly interesting because of Kennedy's handwritten additions, including his famous rationale for moon exploration: "Why does Rice play Texas?"

Kennedy's oration was front-page news around the country. Pundits saw it as another Ted Sorenson-penned speech drenched in terrestrial aspiration. But for all of its soaring rhetoric, the Rice address was grounded in pragmatism. Kennedy made the case to taxpayers that NASA needed a $5.4 billion budget. Kennedy also did a tremendous job of connecting the moonshot to Houston in ways that thrilled locals. "We meet at a college noted for knowledge, in a city noted for progress, in a state noted for strength," he said. "And we stand in awe of all three." What Kennedy did so brilliantly that day was frame the moonshot as being instrumental for U.S. security reasons.

The Rice speech has lived on in history because in it Kennedy threw down the gauntlet that America would land on the moon before the decade's end. And he posed an exciting challenge to the nation. "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," Kennedy concluded. "He said, 'Because it is there.' Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and 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."

Following the Rice speech, Kennedy toured the new Manned Spacecraft Center site in Houston. Within months, the address grew in stature. Clips from it have been played so many times on TV that many people are tricked into thinking they remembered the speech's importance at the time it was given. In 2001, I was lucky enough to interview Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong about the impact Kennedy's words had on him personally. He offered a cautionary quote. "I certainly remember it," he said of the Rice speech, "but it's a bit hazy because I've heard recordings of it so many times since, that you're not certain whether you're remembering or you're remembering what you're remembering. … And, of course, it's been colored by the fact I read so many stories of how that process actually occurred and what led to his conclusion to do that."

Historian Daniel J. Boorstin has correctly written that Kennedy championed "public discovery" via NASA. Kennedy's Rice address represents the oratorical high mark of this outreach. On the very day that Kennedy was killed in November 1963, he was preparing to deliver a major address at Dallas Trade Mart about the need to fund lunar exploration.

The magnitude of the Rice speech only hit home on July 24, 1969, when the Apollo 11 command module Columbia successfully splashed into the Pacific, making Kennedy a can-do visionary. At Apollo Mission Control in Houston, on the big electronic board, just after the astronauts were retrieved from sea, was posted Kennedy's goal for the world to read. It was mission accomplished. As a last tribute, Cape Canaveral was renamed, at Jackie Kennedy's request, the John F. Kennedy Space Center.

Douglas Brinkley is a professor of history at Rice University and author of "Cronkite."