Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox Page B
Authors: Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox
Tags: Science & Math, Technology, Aeronautics & Astronautics, Engineering, Aeronautical Engineering, Astronomy & Space Science
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the Vice President’s office, Hugh Dryden was already there,” remembered Webb. “He’d been invited by the Vice President to meet me there. So I talked this over with Hugh. We got away from all the secretaries, and I said, ‘Hugh, I don’t really think this is the thing for me to do.’ He said, ‘I don’t either. I don’t really believe you’re the right one, or that you’d want to do this.’” Then another acquaintance, Frank Pace, came into the anteroom for a meeting with Johnson. “Frank,” Webb said, “Hugh and I don’t think I’m the right one to do this. You’ve been in the missile business. Do you agree with that?” Pace vigorously agreed. “All right,” Webb said to Pace, “you’re the messenger. When the Vice President comes in, instead of my keeping my appointment, we’ll be outside. You tell him I’m not the right one.”
Webb and Dryden retreated into the echoing corridor outside Johnson’s office and waited. After a few minutes, Pace abruptly emerged. “He came out like he was being ejected from the office,” Webb remembered. “The Vice President just threw him out.”
Webb was marched into Johnson’s office and given the full Johnson treatment. As soon as he got out of there, he called his friend Clark Clifford, an influential Kennedy adviser, and said, “Clark, you’ve got to try to get me out of this.” Clifford laughed and replied, “I’m the one who recommended you. I’m not going to try to get you out of it.” Finally, when Webb said that he would not accept the job “except by direct invitation of the President,” an appointment with Kennedy was arranged for that afternoon. Webb got no promises from the President that the United States was going to make a major effort in space. But in the end, Webb found he could not “honorably and properly” refuse.
Though the manner in which Webb came to NASA was not auspicious, a case can be made that James E. Webb was the Kennedy Administration’s most effective appointment. He would have his share of problems and make his share of mistakes, but in Jim Webb NASA got that strange Washington hybrid, the politician-manager—a man who could run a large organization and know where all the bodies were buried. He was also a man who could play congressional appropriations committees with the finesse, the hard-eyed calculation, and, when circumstances required, the deviousness of a Lyndon Johnson himself. The role he played at NASA until his resignation in the fall of 1968 was indispensable. Many of the engineers of Apollo, often men with little use for politicians, will tell anyone who asks that of all the people who got the United States to the moon by the end of the decade, Jim Webb was among the most important.
People could get badly burned if they paid too much attention to the North Carolina accent and the country-boy pose. “You must remember,” a close colleague once said, “that Jim is a very complex fellow, and he has many hats. He jams on his lawyer hat, then he pulls his Marine flyer hat down over his ears. Then his businessman hat. What he said with one hat on doesn’t always agree with what he said with another.” Jim Webb was one of those men who could keep two contradictory ideas in his mind at the same time with no trouble at all.
Webb never tried to make technical decisions himself, but he would sometimes override a technical decision for nontechnical reasons. Despite this, and even because of it, he eventually won the respect of most of his engineers. To Ken Kleinknecht, an engineer’s engineer, this politician (“a talker” is Kleinknecht’s label for such persons) always remained a little exotic and incomprehensible. “I could listen to him talk for forty-five minutes, and when he got finished, you know, I really didn’t know what he’d said. But you listened every minute!”* And Kleinknecht thought Webb made good decisions. Kleinknecht remembered when Webb canceled a seventh Mercury flight, a
Webb and Dryden retreated into the echoing corridor outside Johnson’s office and waited. After a few minutes, Pace abruptly emerged. “He came out like he was being ejected from the office,” Webb remembered. “The Vice President just threw him out.”
Webb was marched into Johnson’s office and given the full Johnson treatment. As soon as he got out of there, he called his friend Clark Clifford, an influential Kennedy adviser, and said, “Clark, you’ve got to try to get me out of this.” Clifford laughed and replied, “I’m the one who recommended you. I’m not going to try to get you out of it.” Finally, when Webb said that he would not accept the job “except by direct invitation of the President,” an appointment with Kennedy was arranged for that afternoon. Webb got no promises from the President that the United States was going to make a major effort in space. But in the end, Webb found he could not “honorably and properly” refuse.
Though the manner in which Webb came to NASA was not auspicious, a case can be made that James E. Webb was the Kennedy Administration’s most effective appointment. He would have his share of problems and make his share of mistakes, but in Jim Webb NASA got that strange Washington hybrid, the politician-manager—a man who could run a large organization and know where all the bodies were buried. He was also a man who could play congressional appropriations committees with the finesse, the hard-eyed calculation, and, when circumstances required, the deviousness of a Lyndon Johnson himself. The role he played at NASA until his resignation in the fall of 1968 was indispensable. Many of the engineers of Apollo, often men with little use for politicians, will tell anyone who asks that of all the people who got the United States to the moon by the end of the decade, Jim Webb was among the most important.
People could get badly burned if they paid too much attention to the North Carolina accent and the country-boy pose. “You must remember,” a close colleague once said, “that Jim is a very complex fellow, and he has many hats. He jams on his lawyer hat, then he pulls his Marine flyer hat down over his ears. Then his businessman hat. What he said with one hat on doesn’t always agree with what he said with another.” Jim Webb was one of those men who could keep two contradictory ideas in his mind at the same time with no trouble at all.
Webb never tried to make technical decisions himself, but he would sometimes override a technical decision for nontechnical reasons. Despite this, and even because of it, he eventually won the respect of most of his engineers. To Ken Kleinknecht, an engineer’s engineer, this politician (“a talker” is Kleinknecht’s label for such persons) always remained a little exotic and incomprehensible. “I could listen to him talk for forty-five minutes, and when he got finished, you know, I really didn’t know what he’d said. But you listened every minute!”* And Kleinknecht thought Webb made good decisions. Kleinknecht remembered when Webb canceled a seventh Mercury flight, a
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