Surprised by Jack

President Kennedy did not really want to address the opening of the U.N. General Assembly's 18th session. The reason for his reluctance: he had nothing that he particularly wanted to say to the U.N., certainly no dramatic proposals to set before it. But advisers, from U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson on down, kept coaxing him with the argument: "Even if you have nothing to say, your appearance would count heavily." At last the President relented.

Basement Brooder. His aides began scrounging for "new ideas" to work into his speech. Stevenson brought down a sheaf of suggestions. The State Department produced a blizzard of memos. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. phoned Pundit Walter Lippmann to ask what the President might discuss. McGeorge Bundy brooded in the White House basement, jotting occasional thoughts on yellow legal paper. The final drafting was left mainly to Speechwriter Ted Sorensen, who was still scribbling away as he flew with Kennedy to Manhattan on the eve of the speech.

The next morning, Kennedy strode past pickets protesting the Birmingham church bombing (one sign read, "Mr. J.F.K., if Caroline and John Jr. had been among the six children murdered, would you still be talking?"), and into the vaulted, blue and gold Assembly chamber to deliver what had finally emerged as a sort of U.S. "State of the World" report.

"My presence here is not a sign of crisis but of confidence," said the President. "I have come to salute the U.N. and to show the support of the American people for your daily deliberations." Referring to the nuclear test ban treaty, he declared: "Today we may have reached a pause in the cold war -- but that is not a lasting peace. A test ban treaty is a milestone -- but it is not the millennium ... If we can stretch this pause into a period of cooperation, then surely this first, small step can be the start of a long and fruitful journey."

Trembling at the Thought. While noting that U.S.-Soviet conflicts "are real," and that "our concepts of the word are different," the President listed six possible areas of "peaceful cooperation." Five were old hat -- prevention of war by mistake, safeguards against surprise attack, further steps to curb the nuclear arms race, a freer flow of information and the prohibition of nuclear weapons in outer space.

But the sixth took just about every body by surprise. Kennedy proposed that U.S. and Russian astronauts go to the moon together. "Why," asked the President, "should man's first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? Surely we should explore whether the scientists and astronauts of our two countries -- indeed of all the world -- cannot work together in the conquest of space, sending some day in this decade to the moon not the representatives of a single nation, but of all our countries."

Kennedy's proposal for a joint moon expedition was known in advance only to a handful of intimates in the White House, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the State Department. Only a few days earlier, discussing joint manned flights, Manned Spacecraft Center Director Dr. Robert Gilruth told the American Rocket Club: "I tremble at the thought of the integration problem. The proposal would be very interesting and significant -- but hard to do in a practical sort of way."

Since nobody expects the Russians to cooperate, the proposal merely confused the real question, which is: Should the U.S. really go to the moon, and if so, how fast and on what kind of budget?

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