Jill Lepore, "Fifty Years Ago We Landed on the Moon. Why Should We Care Now?" The New York Times , June 23, 2019 Excerpt: The seemingly unintended consequences of developing technologies that would take men to the moon were not top of mind in the Kennedy administration, mainly because a lot of those consequences were intended: Rockets can carry weapons, too, and everything learned on the moon mission had military applications, even if NASA was a civilian agency. If not worried about the legacy of conquest and the future of war, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were concerned, very concerned, with the civil rights movement. Edward R. Murrow, who had left CBS to take a post [as head of a " public diplomacy " [JB emphasis] agency, the United States Information Agency , image from known overseas as the United States Information Service)] with the Kennedy administration, urged the president to include a black astronaut on the moon mission: “I see no r...
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