JFK to Webb - Lacking Justification for Continuing to Fund Apollo

Back in 2011, the JFK Library declassified and released parts of a private conversation that JFK had with James Webb on September 18, 1963. Here are some quotes...


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JFK to Webb: "Do you think the lunar, the manned landing on the moon is a good idea?"

"...this looks like a hell of a lot of dough to go to the moon when you can go - you can learn most of that you want scientifically through instruments and putting a man on the moon really is a stunt and it isn’t worth that many billions."

"Why should we spend that kind of dough to put a man on the moon?"
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The transcript is available he
http://www.jfklibrary.org/About-Us/N...-the-Moon.aspx

And the audio is available he
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_tVusN1--Y


What amazes me about that JFK Library press release is that they make no mention of the fact that this conversation happened two days prior to JFK's speech to the UN General Assembly (September 20, 1963) where he announces his proposal to pull a 180 on Project Apollo.

It is clear to me that it is this very conversation where we get a look at JFK's reasoning that he can no longer justify funding Apollo for the purpose of beating the Russians. He tells Webb about the National Security purpose, and that if funding is to be continued then they could justify it as a military program.

But JFK's decision to go ahead two days later and make the grand announcement to the UN that he wanted to pull the rug out from under NASA makes it perfectly clear that he had decided that Apollo was no longer worth the cost.

The biggest thing that changed was that JFK had succeeded in establishing the Space Treaty as his means for curbing the Nuclear Arms Race. Any historian who writes about the Space Race without showing how it was integrally a part of the Cold War Arms Race is simply turning a blind eye. The facts are overwhelming. I'm glad to know that people like Neil deGrasse Tyson have an accurate understanding of why NASA was created.


That JFK Library press release states:
"The recorded meeting is open in full without any redactions."

I find this to be extremely curious because they released about 8 minutes of audio, and this meeting was said to have lasted 46 minutes long. I'd like to know what they did with the other half hour+ of audio!

The man's been dead for half a century, and the Library says that:
"Approximately 30 hours of un-reviewed meeting tapes remain."

Apparently no one has told them that we live in the Information Age. Either that, or they've been working extremely hard to preserve the Camelot myth.. I wish someone with the courage of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange would just post every single minute of those recordings.

I fully understand the need to protect privacy, but after 50 years? Not so much. Especially when these recording have such value to the accurate understanding of vital history where the entire human species was hanging in the balance.

~ CT