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When they tucked Alan Shepard into Freedom 7 down at Cape Canaveral, Kennedy gratefully broke up a grim National Security Council meeting and led the group to a television set in Secretary Evelyn Lincoln's office. The President, a skeptic about military hardware, expected the worst. He watched in silence, hands thrust deep in his pockets. Von Braun's rocket belched flame, rose steadily out of sight. Shepard's capsule drifted up through space and down again in 15 minutes, but that was enough to lift Kennedy's heart. An aide stuck his head in the office door and announced, "The astronaut is in the helicopter." Only then did Kennedy seem to believe. A smile crept slowly across his face, and he murmured, "It's a success."
When he tried to pin a medal on Shepard, the President dropped it and joked that it had come from the ground up, just like the astronaut. But he had another point, one that echoes loudly this week. "This flight was made out in the open with all the possibilities of failure," he said. "Because great risks were taken, it seems to me that we have some right to claim that this open society of ours, which risked much, gained much."
With that charge--risk much, gain much--the heavenly parade was on. In February 1962 John Glenn became the first American in orbit. He lapped the earth three times in five hours and splashed down happy and a huge hero. "We have a long way to go in the space race," Kennedy said. "We started late. But this is the new ocean, and I believe the United States must sail on it and be in a position second to none."
They came one by one--Carpenter, Schirra, Cooper, Young, McDivitt, White, Conrad--counterweights to Bull Connor with his dogs in Birmingham and Lester Maddox and the ax handles in Georgia. When the Viet Cong began to move through the jungle shadows in Southeast Asia, American spacemen were taller and more visible than ever. They became the one secure thread binding a nation becoming more divided.
A week before his death, Kennedy visited the Cape, where the first stage of the Saturn rocket, the moon launcher, was in place. He stood beneath the monster, rocking back on his heels, and fell silent for a long minute. Even then, off to the side, his aides were arguing about how to land on the moon. But Kennedy was beyond the engineers and accountants. And he put his vision in words just the day before he died. "Frank O'Connor, the Irish writer, tells in one of his books how, as a boy, he and his friends would make their way across the countryside, and when they came to an orchard wall that seemed too high and too doubtful to try and too difficult to permit their voyage to continue, they took off their hats and tossed them over the wall--and then they had no choice but to follow them. This nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space, and we have no choice but to follow it."
What a joy it was. As Lyndon Johnson waded deeper and deeper into the disaster that was Viet Nam, he clung more and more to the contrails of his space explorers. "Thank God," he muttered once, "I've still got my astronauts."