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 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:

I was the last person to sit in President Kenney’s famous rocking chair. When it was sold at auction at Sotheby’s in New York several years ago, I was very tempted to bid. But I didn’t. At the auction the chair sold to Burt Bachrach, the musician, for more than $400,000.
Barbara took from the president’s desk drawer the photos of his children, Caroline and John-John, playing in the office – long before these wonderful pictures were ever released to the public. She gave us matches with the presidential seal, and I still have them.
On the president’s desk was the simple typed schedule for the day. I meant to ask Barbara if I could have it, which I’m sure would have been no problem. In the past I’ve often wished I had this important souvenir, but now I know the memories of that day are more important than anything I could have taken from the Oval Office.

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.