The story
behind the “other” JFK space speech
By John Martin
Meek
In the spring of 1961 the U.S. space program
finally began to come together after a series of disasters often portrayed in
television documentaries with rockets blowing up on the launching pads and other
mishaps, while the Soviet Union’s space program appeared to be one where
everything worked.
Not long after it took office the Kennedy
Administration and its New Frontier program became tarnished by the ill-fated
Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Trying to recoup from this fiasco and the Soviet
space successes begun with the launching of Sputnik during the Eisenhower
presidency, Kennedy desperately needed something to gain political capital both
at home and abroad.
Moreover, there was concern
worldwide that the space race between our country and the Soviets was becoming a
competition about which country could hurl a nuclear bomb the longest distance,
i.e., an arms race.
Someone conceived the idea of a conference on
what space could do for America that was not of a military nature. I don’t
remember where the idea originated. It could have been the Tulsa Chamber of
Commerce or somebody in NASA. Whatever, the decision was made to hold the first
such event in the home state of U.S. Senator Robert S. Kerr of Oklahoma,
chairman of the Senate Aeronautical & Space Sciences Committee and my boss.
I’m sure Senator Kerr wanted President Kennedy
to come to Tulsa to keynote the First National Conference on the Peaceful Uses
of Space. Why JFK did not take this very legitimate reason to come to Oklahoma
is puzzling. It’s a mystery to me because when the president did go to Oklahoma
in the fall of 1961 it was to dedicate an insignificant piece of highway near a
small hamlet called Poteau, where Kerr had bought 50,000 acres for one of
several Angus cattle ranches he owned. The White House press corps had a ball
making fun of JFK’s trip to Oklahoma after the word leaked that it was all about
the president kissing Bob Kerr’s ass to get what he needed to kick start the New
Frontier. Considering their brilliant political minds, perhaps both Kennedy and
Kerr wanted it that way.
Two or three weeks before the Tulsa conference,
the White House asked our office to prepare a draft of remarks for the president
to use in his keynote address via telephone.
I wrote several pages which Ruth, my secretary,
retyped and made several copies as usual with carbon paper and onionskin paper
for the duplicates. The original copy went to Burl Hays, Senator Kerr’s
administrative assistant, to be cleared with the boss and others before going to
the White House.
Unknown to me, because I had not yet received
my top secret security clearance, one major reason JFK was not going to Oklahoma
was that the day before the Tulsa conference he planned to make a somewhat
unprecedented address to a Joint Session of Congress.
Why, the media wondered after it was announced,
a major address to Congress at this time?
We soon knew the answer. It was a
long speech that laid out many plans JFK had for his administration. But, near
the end, there was a bombshell. The president proposed that this country launch
an effort to send U.S. astronauts to the moon and bring them back safely in that
decade – in other words, before 1970.
Since it was the first address of a Joint
Session of Congress for JFK, I wanted to be there and easily obtained a ticket
to be in the House gallery for the speech. So when I heard the proposal for the
moon trip, it explained why the president was not on his way to Oklahoma.
With many of the nation’s space experts
gathered in Tulsa, including Senator Kerr, no doubt the buzz at the conference
changed dramatically as the country shook its head and wondered how the NASA
program so far behind the Soviets could possibly get a man on the moon ever –
never mind the time frame of the nine years left in that decade.
The next morning I was in my office as usual,
feeling somewhat miffed that Senator Kerr was holding forth at the Tulsa
conference and I, as his press secretary, was sitting at my desk in what was
then called the New Senate Office Building.
It was very quiet. Then the phone rang, and
Ruth said someone at the White House wanted to talk to me. It was Kenny
O’Donnell, the president’s appointments secretary, and he wanted to know if I
would like to come to the White House to be with the president when he addressed
the Tulsa conference via telephone.
I hung up the phone and started out the door,
telling Ruth where I was going. As an afterthought, I came back and got an
onionskin carbon copy of the speech.
Outside I took a cab to the White
House and was quickly escorted past the desk of Evelyn Lincoln, JFK’s secretary,
right into the Oval Office. The president was alone and greeted me as if I were
Senator Kerr and not his press secretary. He said we were going to the Signal
Corps radio studio in the basement.
When we passed the open door to
the press office, JFK stopped to talk to a secretary about her recent vacation.
I was impressed with the informality of a place about which I had read in many
books and probably placed just short of Heaven.
In the basement we went to a
little cubicle that was the broadcast booth. It had a microphone on a small
table and two chairs. The Army Signal Corps guys were in civilian clothes and
also seemed very much at ease with their Commander-in-Chief.
The president and I sat down next
to each other and he asked me how the conference was going in Tulsa.
“Oh, sir,” I said. “It’s going
great.”
That was a bald-faced lie. I had
no more information on what was happening in Tulsa than the president did. But I
did know that with the space program growing by the billions, the present and
future NASA contractors were not going to pass up an opportunity to schmooze
with the chairman of the Senate space committee and other heavy-hitters who
would be there.
Then another question from JFK.
“Okay, where’s the speech?”
The Signal Corps guys looked at
each other. They did not have the speech, so one of them got on the phone to the
press office. The press office did not have the speech.
Now, lest I look really stupid,
obviously I had with me a copy of the draft of the speech I had written that had
gone days before to Senator Kerr’s administrative assistant. In my mind that
draft would have been worked over by other staff members and the senator
himself. Then, as I would later learn as a speechwriter for another White House
occupant, those who loved to have input into a speech by the president of the
United States were of an endless number.
I said, “Mr. President, I have a
copy of the speech,” and I gave him my onionskin carbon copy
It was about four pages
double-spaced and stapled at the upper left-hand corner. He took it, tore the
pages apart and spread them out on the little table. What followed is the most
remarkable feat in public speaking I have ever seen as a person who has taught
this skill to corporate and all sorts of executives for 25 years.
When the Signal Corps officer gave
the president the signal to start talking, he would glance down at the page on
the table then look up and speak it word-for-word or, even more remarkable,
update what I had written to make it fit with his moon trip speech to Congress
the day before.
Forty years later I have no
trouble putting what he did in perspective. It was such an outstanding
performance that to this day I still find it somewhat unbelievable even in the
context of remarkable performances by Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
But let’s think for a moment about
what would have happened if I had not turned at the door of my office and gone
back to get a copy of the speech.
It is my opinion that President
Kennedy would, without a moment’s hesitation, given one hell of an
extemporaneous address to the Tulsa conference – one that would have put to
shame those unremarkable words I had written in my draft copy for him. Give Ted
Sorenson all the credit that pleases you for crafting many of JFK’s famous
speeches. But at this point in his life he had no trouble expressing himself
very well on his own.
As we got up to leave the
broadcast booth, a Signal Corps officer handed me a little box that contained a
reel-to-reel tape of the speech. Today this little piece of tape is one of my
most treasured of many souvenirs collected in my career and rests in my safety
deposit box at the Wells Fargo branch office where I live.
We then took the elevator back to
the floor on which the Oval Office was located. As we stepped off the elevator
I reached out my hand to say goodbye. I later realized visitors with the
president of the United States usually do not take the initiative in ending a
meeting with him. The president decides when it is time for his guests to go
when he indicates the visit is over.
But this would not be my only
meeting with JFK. Twice more I was invited back to the White House on what were
somewhat historic occasions.
My next visit was more than two
years later at a time when the Kennedy Administration was perceived to have not
fulfilled its promises to improve civil rights, and much pressure had been
brought on the White House to do something.
It was in the summer of 1963 and a
large group of lawyers had been summoned to the White House Rose Garden to hear
the president outline his plans to start doing something about segregation and
civil rights abuses in the south.
Again, there was an unexpected
call to my office one hot and muggy summer afternoon. I was asked to come to the
White House to represent my senator in a presentation by the Oklahoma delegation
to the president.
(In the meantime, Senator Kerr had
died of a massive coronary on January 1, 1963. His successor, former Governor J.
Howard Edmondson, had asked me to stay on his staff as press secretary and
legislative assistant for the space committee where he had taken Kerr’s place --
not as chairman but as the lowest ranking member.)
It turned out the presentation
item was a little antique sea chest and it was in our office. Grabbing it, I
took a cab to the southwest gate. Without anyone among the uniformed Secret
Service officers at the gate on in the White House looking inside the chest, I
quickly was ushered into the Oval Office. The president came in from the Rose
Garden ceremony, the presentation was made (with me looking at the camera
instead of at him) and that was that.
My final trip to the White House
during the Kennedy Administration was on November 21, 1963.
Again, out of nowhere a call came
from the press office and I quickly took a cab to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The
reason for the call was that Ben Blackstock, executive director of the Oklahoma
Press Association, was there to invite JFK’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger,
to be the major speaker at OPA’s annual meeting in January, 1964, in Oklahoma
City.
The only problem was that Salinger
and other senior Kennedy Administration officials had left on a trip to the Far
East. Andrew Hatcher, Salinger’s deputy and the first African American to work
in the pressroom, was in charge.
While we waited, Barbara
Gamarikian, one of Salinger’s assistants, came over to Blackstock and me.
“The president is about to leave
for Texas,” she said. “Why don’t we go see him off.”
Barbara took us outside to where
we could see the president just a few feet away in the Oval Office talking to
Admiral Tazewell Shepherd, his Navy aide. As we waited for the president to join
us, a huge fly fell right into the ointment.
Sarah McClendon, now in her 80s
and still on the job as a White House correspondent, somehow had dodged the
Secret Service and joined our little group.
It was a gray, cool and overcast
day with a slight misty rain falling. As we waited Mrs. Kennedy came out of the
White House from the South Portico and walked to the waiting Marine One
helicopter. My memory was that instead of being escorted by an usher with an
umbrella, she held a newspaper over her head to catch the light rain.
The president finished his
business with Admiral Shepherd and walked out of the Oval Office through one of
the French doors. He started toward Ben and me as planned, then saw the short
figure of Sarah McClendon standing behind me.
It is far too complicated to
explain here, but JFK’s trip to Texas never was planned as a joy ride. Vice
President Lyndon Johnson and the state senior U.S. senator, Ralph Yarborough,
were feuding and Washington was abuzz with rumors JFK would dump LBJ for the
1964 campaign. Sarah ran a little news bureau that represented some Texas
papers, and the last thing John F. Kennedy wanted that morning was to be
anywhere near a woman already heavy on his case.
The president smiled and waved at
Ben and me, and headed alone to the waiting helicopter. Almost exactly 24 hours
later, he would be pronounced dead of gunshot wounds in a Dallas hospital.
Sarah went back to the pressroom
and Barbara took Ben and me into the Oval Office. These things happened:
It would be four years before I
again would be asked to write a speech for a president of the United States.
My boss at the Democratic
National Committee called me in and said he needed a draft of a speech for
President Johnson to make at a White House event the next evening. I asked him
about the subject of the speech. He said it should cover what the president was
trying to do for the country.
He said he needed the draft in two hours.
Speech writing never has been my favorite kind of work, but in two hours the
draft was done.
The next day the White House called to say
President Johnson liked the way I wrote, and invited me and a date to be there
that evening when he would be making he speech.
It was an honor to hear President Johnson speak
the words I had written. But I could not help thinking about that day in the
little broadcast booth in the White House basement when President John F.
Kennedy spoke into a Signal Corps microphone the following words:
President John F. Kennedy's Remarks Via Telephone
From The White House To
Participants at the First National Conference
on Peaceful Uses of Space
in Tulsa, Oklahoma
May 26, 1961
Gentlemen,
Ladies,
I appreciate
this opportunity, with the invitation of Senator Kerr, who is Chairman of the
Space Committee of the Senate, to open the First National Conference on Peaceful
Uses of Space. And I regret very much that I am unable to participate
personally in this conference and in the discussions in which you will be
engaged.
Your conference
subject deals with the very heart of our national policy in space research and
exploration, to which I devoted a good deal of my speech yesterday before the
(Joint Session of) Congress. All of us in the United States and in all nations
can derive many benefits from the peaceful application of space technology.
The impact of
this new science will be felt in our daily lives. It can bring all people
closer together, to improve communications. It can help control the weather and
the climate around us.
We can safely
predict that the impact of the space age will have a far-ranging effect with our
industry, and in our labor force, on medical research, education, and many other
areas of national concern.
The keystone of
our national policy is space research. As defined in the act which established
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, "its function is the
preservation of the United States as a leader in aeronautical and space science
and technology, and in the application thereof to the conduct of peaceful
activities within and outside the atmosphere."
These are the
words in the Act of the Congress, the preservation of the role of the United
States as a leader, and it is to meet that responsibility that I have suggested
a great national effort in the field of space for the American people (to land
U.S. astronauts on the moon and return them safely).
We are dedicated
to the accomplishment of this objective and I am determined that this nation
will continue to be a pioneer in the new frontier of space.
I am
delighted that the people of Tulsa have taken the initiative, in the heart of
our country, in making this important meeting possible, and that the response
has been so widespread. It indicates the forward spirit of this city, and this
state, and our country. And I hope this conference will establish a precedent
as the people of America move forward into space.
