John F. Kennedy visited Vandenberg to watch a missile launch — and get a badge
Vandenberg Space Force Base near Lompoc has been a hub of activity over the past few weeks.
SpaceX celebrated the successful launch of a Falcon 9 rocket carrying 51 Starlink satellites on Sept. 13, while Firefly Aerospace’s first rocket launch ended in a fiery explosion on Sept. 2.
Vandenberg has been the site of high-risk ventures for decades.
President John F. Kennedy came to Vandenberg in March 1962 as the race to the moon was underway. Less than a year earlier, during a joint session of Congress, the president announced the audacious goal of “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth” within the decade.
Up until then, the United States had played second banana to the Soviet Union, which had launched the first satellite, the first dog and the first man into space.
While Kennedy, a Democrat, was in California, he paid a courtesy visit to former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican. The leaders were seen together as a sign of bipartisan solidarity against the Soviets.
Although JFK looked youthful and healthy in photos of his visit, we now know he suffered from Addison’s disease and chronic back pain.
Kennedy came to Vandenberg a few months before the Cuban Missile Crisis, possibly the closest the Soviet Union and United States came to nuclear war.
America was more than a year away from the first in a series of high-profile assassinations that would cause people to question institutions and leaders. Kennedy was killed in November 1963 and his brother, U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy, was fatally wounded in June 1968.
The man seen standing next to Kennedy in photos of the president’s Vandenberg visit, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, became one of the chief architects of a disastrous American escalation in the Vietnam War serving under President Lyndon Johnson.
Telegram-Tribune city editor John Sarber took a columnist’s approach to writing about the day’s events on March 24, 1962:
JFK Looks Role Of U.S. Leader
What did the president talk about during his hurried three-hour visit at Vandenberg Air Force Base yesterday?
We stood within a few feet of him most of the time and we didn’t hear a word! He was conferring with only the highest brass, military and civilian.
He uttered not a public statement of any sort.
But by his stance and by his bearing, it is our personal opinion that Mr. Kennedy is the prototype of what a president should look like, even his habit of carrying his hat in his hand.
He looks younger than you’d imagine, and he is not as tall as we had thought. He looked trim and healthy, but he seemed tired toward the end of the tour. Facing 88,000 people at Berkeley earlier in the day took a delayed toll on his visage.
Not once as we trailed him did the president of the United States cover the entrancing shock of hair that so identifies him. It was part of his dignified dress, but was never out of place.
Just in his hand (was his hat) so you knew his dress was complete.
On the wind-swept airfield at Vandenberg we stood for a full 20 minutes awaiting the presidential party.
We only then fully appreciated the rope installed to keep an abbreviated welcoming group of 120 newsmen at their proper distance.
We simply grabbed onto the rope and hung on; otherwise we’d have gone aloft. And it was cold, very cold from a wind sweeping in from the ocean just a mile away.
The president’s plane touched down at an impressively slow speed for a big jet, an Air Force counterpart for the Boeing 707.
It taxied slowly up to an awaiting motorized ramp, but then halted for nearly 10 minutes to await the arrival of a trailing aircraft bearing the press.
When the other plane landed, the president’s pilot then quickly rolled over to the alighting platform.
Maybe the plane was the “Caroline” but we couldn’t tell.
The only distinguishing markings proclaimed it as “United States of America” in big letters.
Things moved mighty fast and punctually for the next three hours, from the moment the president entered the awaiting black limousine airlifted from Washington for the purpose.
The entire rear seat dome was encompassed in glass, permitting Mr. Kennedy full vision from any angle of the vast 64,000 acres forming the Vandenberg complex and a view of the massive array of gantries, towers and instrumentation emplacements over the hills of the pretty Lompoc valley.
The touchdown of the presidential plane was a signal to start stoking up the big Atlas-E missile, and the president only had to wait two minutes to watch it soar aloft with massive fire in its tail.
Even a president would have been impressed, a member of the press who had suffered many unsuccessful “holds” and spent many chilly days on the frigid dunes on unrewarding missions remarked.
The presidential cavalcade was condensed to a minimum, only about 10 cars and three chartered buses bearing the members of the press.
The tremendous aerospace center of Vandenberg had been declared closed to the public, and only closely scanned official visitors were permitted aboard.
But at designated points along the tour the official family gathered to greet Mr. Kennedy: forming in groups at three points.
Mostly they were children of the officers and men stationed on the base. The caravan was so short they even cheered joyously when the bus carrying newsmen from southern California passed by.
As a sideline to advise of the tightness of security at Vandenberg yesterday, a telephone call to the base switchboard brought a plea — “If this is not an official call, please place it again tomorrow.”
We watched as Mr. Kennedy was handed an honorary badge by the missile crew that made the successful launch.
“Do you mean I get it just for watching?” the president remarked upon accepting it.
When they start giving out badges for just watching, we think every member of the press who withstood the winds and the temperature at Vandenberg should have one. Possibly two.
And we are still wondering why we were not permitted in the little room the president entered in the big hangar that was so closely guarded?
An atomic something we presumed!
They let us see everything else, but the little room with the grey door was top secret.
It couldn’t have been the men’s lounge, because that was on the other side of the hangar. Or was it?
