Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox Page A

and they didn’t improve his spirits as the inauguration approached. Administrator of NASA is a political appointment. In new administrations, people are supposed to be eager to accept such appointments, but this was not the case for the NASA post. “The Administration was getting a little desperate,” Seamans recalled, “because quite a few people had turned the job down.” By Lyndon Johnson’s recollection, a total of seventeen men had said they weren’t interested in running NASA. “Of course,” Seamans continued, “we knew that too”—that people were refusing the NASA job—“and that was another thing that was demoralizing. You said to yourself, ‘Why would anybody turn it down? It must mean that the plans for NASA are being pulled in.’” There was an alternative explanation, Wiesner would later point out. Lyndon Johnson, the new chairman of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, was doing the recruiting, applying the full-bore LBJ treatment which so many people found off-putting. When Wiesner checked with some of the candidates later to find out why they had turned down the job, they seldom mentioned fears about the future of NASA. “Mostly,” Wiesner said, “the people would report to me that they didn’t want to work for Lyndon Johnson.” Either way, NASA seemed to be the agency that no one wanted to run.
    The inauguration came and went, and still there was no NASA administrator. Finally, Kennedy called in Wiesner and told him to do something—this was getting to be an embarrassment. Wiesner, seeing that the pool of qualified scientist-managers had been pretty much depleted by the refusals, turned to a man who wasn’t a scientist but had been in and out of Washington for more than twenty years, most prominently as Truman’s director for the Bureau of the Budget and later as undersecretary at the State Department. His name was James E. Webb.
    From that moment on, NASA seems to have been watched over by a solicitous Providence. Time and again, seeming misfortune turned out to be the best thing that could have happened, or the right person turned up at the right time, or a malfunction that would have been disastrous on one mission happened on another where it was not disastrous. The first instance of NASA’s serendipity was that only because Kennedy was indifferent to space did Jim Webb end up in the administrator’s position. If the earlier candidates had known that four months later NASA would become a custodian of the nation’s honor, most of them would probably have snapped up the job. If the men in the White House had known, they would not have chosen anyone like Jim Webb.
    This was the era when Robert McNamara came to the Pentagon, Robert Kennedy came to the Justice Department, and McGeorge Bundy came to the White House—a new generation of leaders. Jim Webb could hardly have been more unlike these other New Frontiersmen. Stocky and voluble, Webb at fifty-five was from a different generation than most of the others in the new Administration, and from a different world. Instead of Harvard and wire-rimmed glasses, clipped accents and dry wit, Jim Webb was University of North Carolina and rumpled collars, cornpone accent and down-home homilies, a good old boy with a law degree.
    Webb wasn’t about to accept the NASA job just because it had been offered, any more than the first seventeen had. After Wiesner called him, Webb flew to Washington and spent a weekend talking to trusted associates about the prospects for space under the Kennedy Administration. “By the time Monday morning came I had a pretty good picture of what was going on”—namely, that Wiesner and the men around him were dead set against the manned space program. Webb had decided that he “would not take the job if I could honorably and properly not take it.”
    But he had an appointment to talk to Lyndon Johnson that Monday morning at the office Johnson still kept in the Senate Office Building. “When I arrived at