[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 7]
[Senate]
[Page 10124]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON

  Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, when Lyndon Johnson was Senator 
and majority leader, he had observed that during the Korean war, often 
the Soviet Union held the high ground because their MiGs could fly 
higher than our planes. Certainly as majority leader he went through 
the shocks that the entire Nation experienced when the Soviets 
surprised us by the launch of the first satellite, Sputnik. We knew 
then that the Soviet Union had the high ground. At that point the 
Nation came together, realizing we had a serious problem because we had 
an adversary that was dedicated to the elimination of the United States 
of America and that for our defense interests we clearly had to start 
doing something about it.
  There is the whole story of that extraordinary time of the late 1950s 
when America came together, when we finally had to reach out to a group 
of German scientists. We were fortunate, at the end of World War II, to 
get to Peenumunde, Germany, before the Soviets did, in order to get 
most of those German rocket scientists, led by Werner von Braun. 
Ultimately that was the team to which we turned to produce the rocket 
that could get our first satellite--Explorer was its name--in orbit. 
But that was after we were shocked.
  This Senate, this Congress, under the leadership of Lyndon Johnson, 
said we have to organize ourselves in a way that we can take this on. 
That was the birth of NASA, 50 years ago this year. NASA was the 
National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Now that acronym has 
become the noun; everybody knows it as NASA. It was the organization 
that was given the task after that majority leader put that through 
this Chamber and through the Congress, to have it signed into law by 
President Eisenhower, with all the ingredients in the law that would 
give us this Federal agency that could take on this daunting task.
  Along comes the election of 1960 and Lyndon Johnson doesn't get the 
nomination but, because the nominee is smart enough to realize he has 
to bring together the party in a tough election, Lyndon Johnson is his 
Vice President. So they get into their first year in office and the 
Soviets surprise us again and they take the high ground when they 
launch Yuri Gagarin into one orbit.
  Mind you, we didn't even have a rocket at that point that we could 
put a human on the top of that could get us to orbit. We were still 
operating off of that Army Redstone rocket that von Braun had 
successfully put up to put the first satellite in orbit, but it only 
had enough throw-weight, or power, to take that Mercury capsule with 
one human in it and put it into suborbit.
  I remember when I was a young Congressman back in the 1980s, one day 
Tip O'Neill, the Speaker, saw me on the floor and he said: Bill, come 
here. He knew I had just flown in space. He wanted to tell me a story. 
As a young Boston Congressman, Tip O'Neill was down at the White 
House--the John Kennedy-Lyndon Johnson White House--and he said: I had 
never seen the President so nervous that day. He was pacing back and 
forth. He was just like a cat on a hot tin roof.
  He asked one of the aides what is going on, and he realized that 
Kennedy knew that we were just about to launch Alan Shepherd, only in 
suborbit--and this is a few weeks after Gagarin has already taken the 
high ground. Of course it was then a second suborbit with Grissom, and 
it was 10 months later that America had John Glenn climbing into that 
Mercury capsule on top of an Atlas rocket that had a 20 percent chance 
of failure. Of course we know the rest of the story.
  Interestingly, what happened in between that time when the Soviets 
had taken the high ground with Gagarin up, before we could get Glenn up 
for three orbits, the President made the decision--and it was a bold, 
new vision--and said we are going to the Moon and back within 9 years. 
But then he turned to his Vice President to implement it. Therein lay 
the idea and the secret to one of the most successful governmental and 
technological achievements in the history of humankind with the White 
House, specifically the Vice President, directing the way, giving 
complete carte blanche to their newly selected Director of NASA, Jim 
Webb, to go forth and do this magnificent technological achievement.
  Of course we had to scramble. Even after we had John Glenn up, the 
Soviets still held the high ground. They did the first rendezvous in 
space. But then we started to catch up and of course America knows this 
wonderful success story in which we were able to go to the Moon and 
return safely, a feat that has not been accomplished by any others.
  I come back to why I am standing on this floor today. America has had 
that success because of the then Vice President of the United States, 
Lyndon Johnson, who then became President and pushed that program on 
through to extraordinary success.
  It is fitting that the space center that trains those astronauts is 
named the Lyndon Baines Johnson Space Center.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.

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