I'm John Batchel with Bob Zimmerman. His book is Genesis, The Story of Apollo 8, the First Man Flight to Another World.

We've been hurrying with NASA to lunar orbit.

We pause now because this is taking place inside the Cold War, which, for those of us who lived through it, was massive.

Every moment there was the possibility of nuclear weapons exchanges.

In fact, there were many instances during the Cold War

where accidents could have led to catastrophe that we can only speculate about now.

At the same time, Bob, throughout his story, relates ongoing crises that very much are backdrops to NASA's striving to reach the moon.

Remember, it was a mission set by Jack Kennedy, who dies tragically, involved in the fantasies of a young man who had defected to the Soviet Union

and then pretended to be either anti-Cuban or pro-Cuban.

And Kennedy's mission was passed off to Lyndon Johnson.

Linan Johnson applies himself, builds the Houston Man Space Program,

and continues at the same time to involve the U.S.

in the Vietnam War, their civil rights at home, and the Berlin crisis, which he inherited from

Jack Kennedy. At the same time, there was a Cuban Missile Crisis. I could go on with crises,

invasions, Prague Spring of 68. This chaos, I was a young person at the time in

university. This chaos was all presented to us as the way of the world. You just get used to this

chaos, but it always was backed up by nuclear weapons. NASA was seen as outside of the military contest,

but as I read Bob's recitation and remind myself, this was a race to be the superior culture

over the Soviet Union, which had been bragging and boasting of its Roscosmos.

Bob, I want to go back even further.

Khrushchev, who was replaced in 64 by Brezhnev, was a man who drove the Roskosmos program.

And the United States didn't know that.

...