"Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country," John Kennedy had said in his first inaugural address. According to this ideal, each citizen was individually responsible for doing what he or she could to make society better, not the government. Consider how the 1960's American space program operated: NASA was run so much from the bottom that the presence and influence of Washington is practically invisible. The hard scheduling and engineering decisions were instead worked out by the ordinary lower-echelon workers thinking independently in the field. Not surprising then that the last person to find out about the prospect of sending Apollo 8 to the moon was NASA's administrator, the man who was supposedly in charge at the top. James Webb might have been responsible for making the final and essentially political decision, but unlike his Soviet counterpart he interfered little with design and engineering problems.
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NASA, however, was a government program , and its success helped prove not only to the demonstrators that Borman faced, but to an entire generation how it was possible to use government to solve society's ills. "As revolutionary visions faded, many became crisp professional lobbyists: environmentalist, feminist, antiwar," wrote Gitlin of the aftermath of the 1960's. "Most were willing to think of themselves as unabashed reformers, availing themselves of whatever room they found for lobbying, running for office, creating local, statewide and regional organizations." 26
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While Americans had often used local government to achieve their ends, and while the first half of the twentieth century had seen continuous growth in the use of the federal government to wield change, the 1960's saw a burst of federal activism that was possibly the largest in the country's history. 27 The success of the space program, though certainly not the sole cause, surely helped weaken resistance to centralizing American political power around the national government.
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Nowhere was this process more obvious than in the environmental movement. As nature photographer Galen Rowell said in 1995, Bill Anders' photograph of an earthrise over a barren lunar surface was "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken." 28 Every edition of The Whole Earth Catalog displayed this picture on its inside cover, describing it as
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