I finally got around to reading JFK’s “We choose to go to the moon” speech delivered in the Rice U. football stadium in 1962.
But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
The speech was written by the main presidential speechwriter Ted Sorensen, although it is said that JFK penciled in the joke, “Why does Rice play Texas?” The next month, underdog Rice, the smallest college to play big time football, managed to tie the U. of Texas 14-14. But since then Rice is 2-43 vs. Texas.
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon… (interrupted by applause) we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
I’m not an expert on the subject, but this rhetoric sounds highly reflective of Sartre’s postwar existentialism with its emphasis on choosing, of being condemned to freedom. When Sartre unveiled it at a packed lecture in Paris in the fall of 1945, existentialism played a useful role in offering the bright young people of Europe a fashionable philosophy that was definitely not Communist.
Whatever happened to existentialism anyway? Sartre himself got bored with it, perversely becoming a Stalinist in the early 1950s when even far leftists were growing sick of Stalinism. But it’s interesting how a climate of opinion that can spread from a lecture hall in Paris to a football stadium in Houston can more or less be forgotten about as rapidly.
