, united states would go to the moon by the end of the decade and a great bipartisan effort. the word moonshot enters our culture in earnest. it costs about $25 billion to go to the moon. that would be $185 billion today. we did it to beat the russians. jack kennedy always said americans had to be first. that the new frontier was one of outer space. he would call it the new ocean. he became an incredible salesman as president. i trace early jack kennedy s evolution on aviation, and as it matures into the space age, and also the birth of rockets and our cold war rivalry with the soviet union. it is a global story about american supremacy in the aerospace field. brian: i want you to look at a still photograph. if you walk into the aerospace museum, you will see this display. you have same as on top below oboee spirit of st. louis nash above the lunar module. when you look at that, what do you think? doug: i think, give the curator of the museum a big raise, because that is a sm
meant saving for retirement. , livewashington journal at 7:00 a.m. join the discussion. brian: doug brinkley, your new book american moonshot, what is it about? doug: it is really about how john f. kennedy put all of his political chips on this idea of going to the moon. in 1961, john kennedy gave an afternoon joint speech to the joint session of congress, and pledged that the united states would go to the moon by the end of the decade, and it became a great bipartisan effort. enters ourmoonshot vocabulary. but we did it to beat the russians, and jack kennedy always said american had to be first, that the new frontier was one of outerspace. he would call it the new ocean. and that we had to win. he became an incredible salesman as president. so i traced early jack kennedy s evolution on aviation as it matures into the space-age, but also on the birth of it is a global story about american supremacy in the aerospace field. brian: i want you to look at a still photograph
of the picture stuff, if you go to classical there s little dots, sometimes most interesting histories are written by people who look a little tinny and somehow able to imagine something and i think there s something about imagination, something about also doing the work of archival work, doing the you have to actually do all of the work and sometimes in the midst of it you discover something, it s not just about what story it is but kind of why that s important and what s at stake. well, on that important note [applause] but wait, there s a book signing. buy books and read books and these are wonderful ones, so signing area, they ll answer your questions. thank you very much. thank you for coming. thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] you re watching book tv on c-span2, live coverage of 24th annual los angeles times festival of books held on the campus of the university of southern california. one of the panelists you just saw james donovan will be jo
speaker: elements of the central intelligence agency killed j john kennededy. speaker: the story has been suppressed. witnesses have been killed. we have a right to know who killed our president and d why he dieied. [music playing] speaker: in dallas, preparations were already underway for extraordinary police protection when the president should arrive. interviewer: do you anticipate any trouble on the president s arrival? jesse curry: because of what has happened here previously, we would be foolish, i think, not to anticipate some trouble. i don t really, i don t anticipate any violence. speaker:r: here comemes air foe numbmber one, ththe presidenes plane now totouching dowown. here s s mrs. kennnnedy, anand the crowowd yells. and the president of the united states, and i can see his sun tan all the way from here. dan rather: looking at how things actually went, it wasn t just a trip to dallas. it was a political trip, preparing for the 1964 elections. speaker: shaking ha
came across all these different gems of information that could have been the highlight of my career now. co-author richard paul and stephen moss took about ten african-americans that broke the color barrier at nasa and the use of the space program by kennedy and johnson to advance the social change. when it s up for the presentation we are here to talk about the book we couldn t fail the space station program it looks at the role in the civil rights in the years before the rights act happened. discrimination was not against the law. it was easy. when we talk about the achievements of the people in the book and when we talk about the rules put in place by the kennedy administration to try to address the workplace discrimination at how they were implemented. so we will be talking about the people whose lives were touched. our book tells the stories of ten men who came to work in the space program during the years that we call the civil rights era and some of them were nasa