It would seem that a distinguished liberal historian, a jumbo-jet captain and retired Swiss Air Force officer, and a brilliant rocket engineer and satirical novelist would have little in common. But as their most recent books make clear, Douglas Brinkley, Lukas Viglietti, and Robert Zubrin share an optimistic, ‘Whiggish’ outlook on human progress and the possibilities of space exploration.
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Brinkley, an old-guard figure of the liberal establishment, has just published American Moonshot — John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race, which tells the story of how JFK came to send America on its first voyages to the Moon. Smartly written and edited, it intertwines the biographies of our 35th president and the brilliant German-born aerospace engineer Wernher Von Braun, drawing heavily on Michael Neufeld’s outstanding 2007 book Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War.
American Moonshot occasionally shows a lack of understanding of a few critical parts of the story it tells. Brinkley garbles the naval background behind the PT Boat program and ignores Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s critical role in forcing the U.S. Navy to pay attention to these small craft. He is equally confused about the origins and impact of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative.
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