Apollo: The Race To The Moon

by Catherine Bly Cox

Jim Elms called Webb a “politician in the best sense of the word.” He told a story in later years that encapsulated what he meant. It happened after the lunar program had been approved and Elms was down in Houston as Gilruth’s deputy. They were trying to get the Control Center built. Fresh out of industry and not understanding how government funding worked, Elms and Earl Hilburn had laid out the Control Center on the assumption that I.B.M. computers were going to be installed—at that time, only I.B.M. was making the kind of equipment they needed. But when the Control Center was half built, one of the other computer companies got wind of this and started to raise a fuss. This was all the more inconvenient because the General Accounting Office had just issued a directive saying that no one was to buy I.B.M. equipment except via a competitive bidding process. But if NASA went through the competitive procurement process, the entire Apollo program schedule would slip disastrously. A non-politician would have bought the I.B.M. computers and embroiled NASA in a scandal, said Elms. A careful, cover-your-ass politician would have followed the rules, let the program slip a year, and blamed his subordinates. What Jim Webb did was to call in the chief executive of every major computer company in the United States, including the one who was complaining. As each came to his office, Webb told him (as Elms reconstructed it, in a convincing drawl), “I want to thank you very much for comin’...