Kennedy's mandate

For millennia, humans could only gaze upon the moon from afar. For all the stories told about it, the moon seemed forever out of reach. Then, in May 1961, in the heat of the geopolitical rivalry between U.S. and the Soviet Union, President John Kennedy declared that we would be going there after all: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth."

This photo, from earlier that May, shows Kennedy (center, foreground) watching a television broadcast of a space flight by astronaut Alan Shepard, accompanied by others including Vice President Lyndon Johnson (left, foreground) and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy (right).