We would never be the same again.

So, strange turn of fate, rival JFK set the moonshot in motion back in ’62. By ‘69, Dick Nixon presided over the top television moment of the twentieth century. I remember it. It was July 20. Better than a Roman circus. During the worst days of Vietnam.

We lived in Houston by then. We were still the new kids in town. Our TV set was a black and white model, Magnavox, with a circular dial to change the channel. There were thirteen regular channels and a U. That was for UHF, which was supposed to be the thing of the future, but that worked out about as well as eight-track tapes. It was all analog, with lots of static and guesswork. And that was the level of the technological prowess that supposedly put a man on the moon. Not because it was easy; because it was hard. Most of the time, anyway. Right, Jack?

We had watched the launch, as we had watched so many launches before, rocket men with cool suits lifting off from Cape Canaveral, which became Cape Kennedy and then, Cape Canaveral again, because the locals liked their name and because they were Republicans. We had gotten used to rockets and liftoffs. But the lunar landing was spectacular. It was popcorn and Dr. Pepper in front of the TV, and lots of science questions for Daddy to answer.

He always knew. How did they do this and that? Why can’t they do that over there? It all made science class very interesting. And technology. And over-achievement.

Daddy was ecstatic. His father, Ted F. Stone, had plowed the field with a mule. He had seen the first motorcars and the first Ford 8N tractor. Ted had even flown airplanes, but Clayton’s boys could go to Jupiter, if they wanted. Open the pod bay doors, HAL, and HAL would do it. Maybe. 

And maybe, HAL would fuck you.

Over-achievement and conquest had become the necessary elements of middle-class, upwardly-mobile, sexually active self-respect. We walked out into the warm July twilight after Neil Armstrong’s one small step with the feeling that everything had changed. We had lost our planetary virginity. We had boldly gone where no man had gone before. We had triumphantly planted our flag in a new world. As a species, we were little boys, no longer.

As the evening grew dark, we played capture the flag at the junior high, the way we had done every sultry Houston summer night up until then but, that night, it was different. Oh, what a night. As the stars appeared, we became keenly aware of somehow owning them. All we had to do was put our mind to it and we could go to any one of them and plant our flag. Destiny spread open before us. We just had to study a lot, go to college, compete to be the best at everything, and never count the cost.

Kennedy had set the ball rolling for the moon landing with a moving speech at Rice, back in ’62. That would have been six years after Mom and Dad had graduated. The speech was written by Ted Sorensen, and delivered, as always, with charm, by the reigning monarch at Camelot.

The man could talk. It’s why they hated him, and it’s why they loved him. If he had been mediocre, he might have died of old age. A law was made a distant moon ago here; July and August cannot be too hot. That was not the speech. This was the speech: 

But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. That got some good people killed, I think. 

Ted Sorensen wrote the inaugural address, too. Back when the general public was capable of listening to complete sentences. Ted Sorensen tried to resign from Lyndon’s cabinet on November 23rd of ’63. Lyndon made him (and everyone else except Bobby) stay on for a few months, for appearances. But Ted Sorensen was the first to leave. He left, because he could see what he could see. He was believed to have been Kennedy’s soul.

Years later, when asked if he had written the most famous line (Ask not what your country can do for you…), his answer was, Ask not… Clever boy. His second most memorable Kennedy speech was the moon speech at Rice. It had a profound impact on ten-year-olds in the ‘60’s. Even if Santa didn’t really exist, Superman really did, and you could be him, if you broke your balls and made it happen. I don’t know if Sorensen understood that Rice never beat Texas. Never ever.

All Texans know that. Rice is for thinkers. And thinking is for losers.

That isn’t exactly true. Since their first contest in October of 1914, Rice has played Texas 103 times, and lost 71 times. Rice has won 18.8 percent of the games, most of them, long, long ago. That was a bad average if you were the guy sitting on top of the rocket waiting to be delivered to the moon by the very best aeronautical technology 1969 had to offer. Odds were better at Russian roulette. With five bullets in the chambers.

Maybe the line about Rice was ad lib. Sorensen didn’t usually paint his boss into corners like that. But science wasn’t giving better odds than that, comrade. The moon by the end of the decade was a huge gamble. Most of the astronauts were engineers and physicists. When asked by a journalist what he was feeling as he sat in the tip of the Saturn V rocket, one of the Apollo astronauts said, scared to death. It’s the only vehicle every created that was 85% fuel. That was like sitting on a huge stick of dynamite. Even intercontinental jet flights, the next closest thing, in terms of human
fireball potential, is only 15% fuel.

Superhero Alan Shepherd put it this way. There you are, listening to the countdown. It’s all on TV, and you know that every piece of your spaceship was built by the lowest bidder. That was to get the most out of those 135 billion dollars. To enshrine the market system.

The Soviets didn’t have bidders. They just built their goddam rockets. Their program was secret, not public. Their rockets were stripped down, not comfortable. Their objective was to put a colony on Mars, not a man on the moon. They were even thinking of closed loop life support systems, space ships with potato gardens, recycled water and on-board compost heaps.

The Soviets wanted to colonize Mars so that there would be a seed of Soviet humanity preserved from the imminent global thermonuclear holocaust. Then, after a few centuries, they could recolonize the earth, by then emptied of Wall Street capitalists and other enemies of the people, comrade. For the US, space travel was just a very important football game. And a way to develop defense technology without calling it defense technology.

JFK said what he said at Rice University, on September 12, 1962. That was five months after the failed invasion at Playa Girón, and just a month before the Caribbean Crisis. That was four years after NASA had been created and settled at Clear Lake, on the southwest side of Houston, where there are no clear lakes, just murky swamps and billions of mosquitoes.

September 12, 1962 was also 28 years and 364 days before the 9/11 holocaust. Doing it on the date of the universal emergency phone number was a clever touch. Not very jihadi, though. It looked more Ivy League. Clever Bonesmen knew their Shakespeare and their Sophocles. They also knew what 9/11 meant to millions of illiterate Americans.

The whole suburb of Clear Lake was NASA. Still is. All those children of scientists and astronauts went to public school together. I guess it was a security issue, but it was also an elite thing. Clear Lake was hero-town. Boys were encouraged to wrestle, climb too high and drive too fast, so that the ones who didn’t crash and die and donate their hearts for transplant could be like their dads, someday. Girls in Clear Lake were encouraged to look pretty, get their hair done up high and smile for the camera, so they could be like their moms.

Kennedy went and said all that inspiring stuff at Rice Stadium, stationary battleship in the Houston sunset, built by LBJ partners in crime, Brown and Root, later acquired by Halliburton, of which Dick Cheney would become CEO. The man with no heart, waiting for a donor to die, he was the grand dragon of corporate profit protection long before becoming Vice President to the Most Ignorant Man to Ever Occupy the Oval Office Before Trump.

Kennedy was still trying to seduce the Texas oilmen in ’62. He was having better luck with drop-dead-beautiful blonds. On his next trip to Texas, the Texans took him out.

Rice was the smart place. It was a bit of an anomaly, in Houston. Kennedy’s speech was a promise to Texas, that 135 billion dollars would be spent there on high-tech hardware. JFK was sucking up to Lyndon’s crowd. Sucking hard. JFK hated that, but if he could get them to eat out of his hand, then he didn’t need Lyndon anymore.  

The speech at Rice had nothing to do with space travel, comrade. It was a promise to Texans that, even without Lyndon, he could keep them happy. Even without a long, nasty, expensive war in Vietnam, there was pork for Texas. Plenty of pork. Ribs and bacon and ham for everybody. But Texans were greedy. They wanted NASA and an expensive Asian war.

Traditional Texicans weren’t into the fairy tale. No Camelot, no Round Table. They wanted a goddam trail ride coming right down US Highway 290 from Brenham with barbecue (prepared by black people dressed in starchy white uniforms) and lots of free beer. That’s how it rolled. They kept their rockets, they made their wars, and they shot JFK.

Kennedy’s speech was also a message to Nikita that America was going to get so rocket savvy that Sputnik (launched on a glorious red October dawn in 1957, comrade) would become an insignificant plaything. An extraordinarily insignificant and thus invincible force… That was a line from Zinoviev’s The Yawning Heights, Soviet political satire from 1976. Give it a read if you are looking for a good yawn. Sputnik was only about two feet in diameter. It was a dopey smurf of a spaceship with three silly antennas going, beep, beep, beep. Damn thing had the world on its head.