“Likewise, Mr Vice-President.” Von Braun had tried hard to lose his German accent; in the end he had given up. However, his Germanic edges had rounded, his involuntary curtness lessened and his English acquired at times a strangely Southern lilt unless he was buried deep in complex technical or design issues. “I am sorry you don’t have time today to ‘do the tour’ of our facilities. I’m sure you would be impressed with the changes we’ve made since your last visit.”
“I’m sure I will be mightily impressed the next time I swing through Alabama,” Lyndon Baines Johnson guffawed. “But business before pleasure. Yesterday I was in Sacramento meeting with the West Coast Governors, this morning we stopped over at Houston to pick up your boss.”
It was not until he stepped inside the aircraft that the man standing at the Vice-President’s shoulder stepped out of the shadows.
“Good to see you again, Wernher,” smiled James E. Webb, the fifty-seven year old career Washington insider who had been appointed Administrator of NASA — the National Aeronautics and Space Administration — by President Kennedy in July 1961. In retrospect Kennedy’s nomination of a man who was the precise antithesis of a rocket scientist in the public imagination as the second head of NASA, had directly anticipated his Administration’s long term plan to put an American on the Moon.
NASA already had a man who was capable of designing a Moon rocket, von Braun; what it had lacked was a man with the unequivocal support of the incoming Administration and the wherewithal and connections in DC to fight NASA’s forthcoming battle for resources in Washington.
Von Braun took heart from his immediate chief’s cheerful, relaxed greeting but was not in any way misled into anything remotely resembling complacency. In deference to the Vice-President he did not digress to inquire after the wellbeing of Webb’s wife Patsey, or of his two teenage children Sarah and James (junior) aged respectively eighteen and sixteen.
Johnson led the two NASA men into the heart of the cabin where he invited them to join him around a small conference table; wordlessly, the trio settled in the comfortable chairs while staffers and flunkies brought coffee before retreating out of the immediate eye lines of the three.
James Webb spoke first.
A native of Tally Ho, North Carolina where his father had been superintendent of the Grantville County public schools, Webb had been commissioned into the Marine Corps as a pilot in the early 1930s before coming to Washington DC as secretary to Republican Senator Edward W. Pou of North Carolina between 1932 and 1934, and then as an assistant of O. Max Gardner, a former Governor of his State and a close personal friend of Franklin Delano Roosevelt Webb who had joined the Bar of the District of Columbia in 1936, was during the Second World War Webb the treasurer and vice-president of the Sperry Gyroscope Company in Brooklyn — a key supplier of aerial radar and navigational equipment employing over thirty thousand people — precluding his release for military service until 1944. After the war he had returned to DC to work for his old boss, Max Gardner, now President Harry S. Truman’s Undersecretary of the Treasury, and subsequently been appointed Director of the Bureau of the Budget in the Office of the President of the United States, having been recommended for the post by both Gardner and his boss, Treasury Secretary John Snyder. This meant that until he moved on to the State Department in 1949, Webb was the man who prepared the President’s annual budget for presentation to Congress. Although Webb had resigned from the State Department in 1952 and returned to private industry, he had never lost contact with the levers of power in Washington, serving on government committees, including the bipartisan President’s Committee to Study the United States Military Assistance Program in 1958 while still working for the Kerry-McGee Oil Corporation in Oklahoma. Nobody had been overly surprised when Webb’s name was first out of the hat when the incoming Kennedy Administration was looking for a man capable of giving NASA real clout in the corridors of the Capitol.
“Before the rebellion last week,” James Webb prefaced, “there was already a lot of idle speculation in the national press and on the TV and radio networks that the President’s stated intention to put an American on the Moon before the end of this decade, was,” the head of NASA paused, considering his options, “essentially aspirational rather than a hard statement of the Administration’s policy.”
Wernher von Braun’s heart sank.
“However, following consultations with Vice-President Johnson,” Webb looked to the nodding, severe-faced Texan who seemed content to let him do the talking at present, “NASA is to proceed on the basis of the most literal possible interpretation of the President’s publicly stated demand that the United States of America should send a man to the Moon and return him safely to Earth not later than December 31, 1969.”
Von Braun turned to Lyndon Johnson.
The two men exchanged long hard looks.
“I think the whole Moon Project is a dammed fool thing,” the Vice-President said eventually. “However, the President of the United States of America has spoken and if we are ever to be again what we once were, everybody must understand that when the American President speaks his words have substance and conviction. The World must trust that when an American President speaks he means what he says.”
Von Braun knew that there had to be a huge caveat so he waited patiently to learn what it was.
“Forget about tests and trials for six months from this date,” Johnson directed. “The American people won’t understand NASA burning public money like it was confetti at a time like this. Forget launches and fireworks but in six months time deliver to me NASA’s plans for a Moon rocket specifying what you need to do before you can build it and how much it is going to cost in real dollars.”
“NASA,” James Webb informed von Braun, “is now attached to the Office of the Vice-President.”
“As,” Lyndon Baines Johnson added, with soft-spoken relish, “is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Capitol Reconstruction Office and the Committee for the Continuance of Government,” he quirked a wry smile, “neither of which exist yet but sometime in the next couple of weeks will hit the ground running.”
Von Braun was so preoccupied absorbing this that his expression evidently became a little perplexed.
“This country is in a bad place, Mister Director,” Johnson told him rhetorically, “but if I have anything to do with it that is going to change. Whatever past reservation I have entertained about the ‘Moon Project’ I share the President’s conviction that America needs something to restore its belief in itself. We will go to the Moon this decade, gentlemen!”
Chapter 26
From the chill in the winter air in Washington Nick Katzenbach had expected the first early snows to be lying on the ground at Naval Support Facility Thurmont when he stepped down from the US Navy Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King which had brought him, three senior Department of Justice officials and thirty-nine year old Texan William Marvin Watson, whom the rumour mill suggested was about to be anointed the new White House Appointments Secretary.
‘You’re a long way from home,’ Katzenbach had observed wryly when he had encountered Watson in the VIP lounge at Andrews Air Force Base.
The former head of the Texas Democrats who had never been anything other than a staunch ‘Johnson man’ had smiled wanly.
‘We’re all a long way from home these days, Nick,” the other man had replied, far too shrewd an operator to be drawn further and besides, the moment the two men had laid eyes on each other that afternoon they had both joined up the dots. Kenneth Patrick ‘Kenny’ O’Donnell, White House Appointments Secretary — the de facto Chief of Staff to the President — had sustained minor shrapnel injuries during the siege of the White House but later suffered what seemed like a near total nervous breakdown. Notwithstanding that Kenny had been at the end of his tether long before the Battle of Washington; bringing in a Johnson man like Watson as his replacement would have been unthinkable just a week ago.