Douglas Brinkley’s “American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race” (2019) tells the dramatic, deeply human story behind one of the most ambitious and inspiring feats in American history: the race to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to earth before the end of the 1960s. At its center is President John F. Kennedy, whose bold vision for space exploration helped galvanize a divided nation and channel Cold War tensions and energy into scientific innovation and national unity. In many ways, American Moonshot is as much about Kennedy—his unique style and determination—as it is about Project Apollo.
Brinkley’s narrative includes several key supporting figures who helped bring Kennedy’s space vision to life: early American rocketeer Robert Goddard, former Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, inaugural NASA director James Webb, and a coterie of buzz-cut, daredevil astronauts—“knights of American exceptionalism,” as Brinkley calls them. All serve as secondary players in the book’s central drama: Kennedy’s personal and political quest to reach the moon.
The book opens by placing Kennedy’s space ambitions within the broader geopolitical landscape of the early Cold War. In the shadow of World War II and amid the growing threat of the Soviet Union, the 1957 launch of Sputnik shocked the United States and created a sense of national urgency. One point Brinkley makes clear is that the American national security establishment was not caught off guard by early Soviet achievements in space. As early as 1954, CIA Director Allen Dulles had warned that the first country to launch a satellite would accrue “incalculable prestige and recognition.” Nevertheless, President Eisenhower and the 1950s GOP showed little interest in pursuing such costly “stunts,” which they saw as offering limited, if any, economic return—even after the space race began in earnest in the 1960s. “The frustrating truth,” Brinkley writes, “was that the United States had the technology and know-how to be first, but not the will.”
In the immediate aftermath of Sputnik, the U.S. Air Force launched the Man in Space Soonest (MISS) project in 1958, with the explicit goal of placing a human into space before the Soviet Union. MISS was short-lived, however, and was canceled later that year when space efforts were consolidated under the newly formed civilian agency, NASA.
When it came to Cold War competition, Brinkley argues that Kennedy saw both Truman and Eisenhower as feckless. In the late ’50s, Senator Kennedy sharply criticized Eisenhower’s “dithering, complacency, and weak-mindedness on space technology and science education.” Brinkley writes that Ike was “disconnected from the moment… and seemingly uninterested in the Space Age technology that was rapidly changing today into the future.” According to Kennedy, Eisenhower’s space policy amounted to: “start late, downgrade Russian feats, fragment authority, pinch pennies, think small, and shirk decisions.” Kennedy believed incrementalism would keep America perpetually behind in the space race. In Brinkley’s view, it was Kennedy’s political charisma that “galvanized a slumbering public” into accepting the open-ended and staggeringly expensive commitments needed to reach the Moon.
Not everyone was as smitten with Kennedy as the young Douglas Brinkley, who clearly idolized him as a boy and never lost his faith in Camelot. Critics ranged from fiscal conservative Republicans like Barry Goldwater to liberal civil rights leaders like Whitney Young, who decried the astronomical cost of a program that even Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara admitted offered few tangible benefits to national defense or the economy. Perhaps no one was more surprised by Kennedy’s bold lunar challenge than Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who recognized that significant limitations in the heavy lift rockets required for a moon mission made Soviet success highly unlikely.
Brinkley writes that “JFK was emerging as the poster president of the same military-industrial complex Dwight Eisenhower had warned about in his farewell address.” In retirement, Eisenhower dismissed the moonshot as “a mad effort to win a stunt race.” He added, “Anybody who would spend $40 billion [over 7% of GDP—roughly $400 billion in 2025 dollars, or an astounding $2 trillion if measured as a percentage of today’s GDP] in a race to the moon for national prestige is nuts.” The scale of the commitment was certainly staggering. By 1966, the moon program consumed 5.5% of the federal budget—roughly equivalent to the entire budget of today’s Veterans Administration, the fifth-largest federal agency by spending.
Kennedy, however, saw the moonshot as much more than a technological stunt. “Space [was] America’s Cold War Manifest Destiny, and the Mercury astronauts were its rough-and-ready trailblazers,” Brinkley writes. It was “another weapon of the Cold War, the sine qua non of America’s status as a superpower, a high-stakes strategy for technological rebirth, and an epic quest to renew the American frontier spirit.” Without Kennedy’s “daunting vow” to send astronauts to the Moon and return them safely in the 1960s, Brinkley argues, Apollo 11 would never have happened. Kennedy’s 1962 speech at Rice University—where Brinkley now teaches—“ranks among the most inspiring ever delivered by an American president,” and is “one of the high points of Kennedy’s presidency.”
Once the national challenge had been declared, the moonshot was divided into three separate but overlapping programs, each with its own mission and objectives. Project Mercury (1958–63) tested whether a single astronaut could survive and function in orbit for several hours. Project Gemini (1962–66) developed the capability for two-man crews to rendezvous and dock with other spacecraft and perform tasks outside the vehicle. Project Apollo (1960–72) involved three-man crews and culminated in six successful lunar landings from July 1969 to December 1972.
One of the earliest and most intractable technical challenges was developing a reliable heavy-lift rocket. In this effort, the United States turned to an unlikely source: Wernher von Braun, former head of the Nazi V-2 rocket program. “Hitler’s commitment to the V-2 advanced the pursuit of a moonshot by perhaps decades,” Brinkley writes. In The Rocket and the Reich (1995), historian Michael J. Neufeld observes that “the German Army rocket program and its Peenemünde center without a doubt changed the face of the twentieth century.” From September 1944 until the end of the war, the Germans launched 4,300 V-2 rockets, killing 9,000 and injuring 25,000—mostly civilians. By V-E Day, the United States was nearly a decade behind Germany in ballistic missile technology, but it was fortunate to capture von Braun before the Soviets did. He would go on to lead development of the massive Saturn V rocket, which Brinkley calls “one of the most ingenious technological innovations of the twentieth century.”
Brinkley is conflicted about Wernher von Braun’s role in the American space race. On one hand, von Braun was “the proud exemplar of German rocketry genius” who, after the war, embraced his former enemy and became “an engineering wizard-cum-media-maven” and a highly effective cheerleader for NASA. “Call him an ex-Nazi propagandist, P.T. Barnum-style marketer, or space visionary,” Brinkley writes, “but von Braun understood explicitly that space travel had to be couched in the spirit of American exceptionalism.” In the year after Sputnik, von Braun was feted in magazines as “half rocket scientist, half charming and cultured poet/raconteur, imbued with a deep affinity for all things American.”
On the other hand, Brinkley describes von Braun as “a pariah figure of sorts” who “shouldn’t be remembered as an American hero.” Nevertheless, Brinkley claims von Braun and Kennedy were a match made in heaven—“like twin doppelgängers cut from the same cloth”—sharing the same competitive spirit and media-savvy charisma. “Von Braun was perhaps closer to Kennedy in persona than any Democratic senator or congressman of the era,” he writes.
Their motivations, however, diverged. Von Braun was driven by a pure passion for space exploration, even if it meant aligning with Adolf Hitler to pursue his dream. Kennedy, by contrast, was a pragmatist. He saw the space race as a mission to renew and re-energize the American spirit. “It is not so much a matter of logic,” Kennedy said in May 1963, “as it is a feeling.” Among his motivations, Kennedy was also determined that his older brother had not died in vain during a high-risk mission to destroy German V-2 sites in World War II.
James Webb, the North Carolinian affectionately known as the “Mouth of the South” for his loquaciousness, is another notable deuteragonist in Brinkley’s cast of New Frontier heroes. “The indomitable linchpin of the Apollo effort,” Brinkley writes, Webb was “smart as a whip, liberal in approach, able to see the battlefield of American politics with perspicacity. He was a rare mixture of big-corporate mores, industrial procurement know-how, bipartisan political instincts, good-ol’-boy charm, and budget wizardry, all undergirded by the unimpeachable credentials of a valiant U.S. Marine.” That’s quite the endorsement. Brinkley also calls him an “indomitable salesman” for NASA in the 1960s (Webb was evidently very indomitable). In a more tempered assessment, Tom Wolfe, author of The Right Stuff, the best-selling 1979 history of the Mercury program, said Webb “knew how to make bureaucracies run.” (Webb would eventually be unceremoniously sacked by President Johnson in 1968 for reasons that remain unclear.)
A core theme of American Moonshot is John F. Kennedy’s ultracompetitive drive. “Kennedy was a prestige maven when it came to space-related issues,” Brinkley writes. “It was about winning boasting rights… Kennedy had no intention of being second.” For others, the space race was a distraction at best and an expensive stunt at worst. Thus, the moon mission had to be sold. Fortunately, the Apollo program had as its chief promoter one of the greatest salesmen of the twentieth century—or so Brinkley would have us believe.
Brinkley is unabashedly pro-Kennedy. He claims the president’s 1961 inaugural address—especially its famous exhortation, “Ask not what your country can do for you…”—launched a “new sense of national service and sacrifice [that] was nothing short of magical.” In the author’s uncritical assessment, Kennedy was “the most telegenic politician of his era, or perhaps any era,” and “by a long shot… the best communicator of his generation.” These were talents that his vice president and fellow moon race champion Lyndon Johnson “sorely lacked.” Kennedy’s ability to channel Cold War anxiety over Soviet rocketry into a no-holds-barred race to the moon was, Brinkley insists, “politically masterful.”
Still, Kennedy’s early months in office were rocky. On April 12, 1961, the Soviets put the first man in orbit – Yuri Gagarin’s 108-minute flight – just three months after Kennedy’s inauguration. A week later, the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion began. Brinkley calls it “a nasty one-two punch that damaged Kennedy.” Just weeks after this bruising start, Alan Shepard became the first American in space, reaching over one hundred nautical miles aboard Freedom 7. His 14-minute suborbital flight was brief, in triumphalist language that clouds its rather modest achievement compared to Gagarin’s first flight, Brinkley calls it “a burst of collective confidence, an outpouring of pride that the American century was alive and flourishing.”
Then, on May 25 – only forty-three days after Gagarin’s flight – Kennedy stood before Congress and pledged to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth before the decade’s end. “The moon had become the ultimate prize in the Cold War rivalry with the USSR over technological superiority and, by extension, global prestige,” Brinkley writes. It was a bold gamble. “If NASA failed, Kennedy failed. If Kennedy failed, America failed.” As usual, Brinkley is rapturous: “his brazen moonshot call was among the most courageous statements and greatest gambles ever made by an American president.” More sober-minded Republicans and conservative Democrats continued to feel it was all a waste of money and, even worse, risked humiliating failure on a global scale.
In Brinkley’s view, “Apollo was a marvelous alternative to all-out war with the USSR or future proxy wars such as Korea” – a form of symbolic competition that strained the Soviet economy while energizing America’s. It paid other dividends, too. According to James Webb, NASA gave the nation a basic capacity “to use science and very advanced technologies to increase national power.” More broadly, it reinforced confidence in the federal government – its ability to marshal vast resources and accomplish seemingly impossible goals when efforts were centralized and lavishly funded.
On the day of his assassination, Kennedy had been scheduled to deliver a speech to the Dallas Citizens Council in which he planned to declare: “There is no longer any doubt about the strength and skill of American science, American industry, and the American free enterprise system.” The moon program, he would argue, symbolized “a great gain in, and a great resource of, our national strength.” Ironically, Kennedy’s assassination helped ensure that his lunar dream remained politically untouchable. Although the Apollo program came under frequent pressure from budget hawks in Congress, it survived throughout the 1960s thanks in large part to what Brinkley calls the “Kennedy effect.” The martyred president’s vision had penetrated the American psyche, and millions now saw the space race not just as geopolitical theater, but as a tribute to his idealism.
Throughout American Moonshot, Brinkley interweaves political history, scientific development, and cultural commentary. He explores how the lunar mission became a national project that captured the imaginations of schoolchildren, engineers, and dreamers, while never losing sight of its contradictions – its Cold War origins, astronomical cost, and tendency to eclipse more immediate social concerns. The book closes not with the triumphant moon landing, but with Kennedy’s death, handing the fulfillment of his vision to others. In doing so, Brinkley frames Apollo not just as a technological milestone, but as the defining legacy of a president who knew how to inspire a restless nation. The space age, he argues, “teed up the technology-based economy the United States enjoys today.”
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