For Robert Seamans, memories of the White House meeting he attended on November 21, 1962 were vivid even before he heard them on tape last week. "I could give you chapter and verse on that meeting much better than I could something that happened two years ago," Seamans says. "Because it was very, very intense." The meeting came 18 months after President John Kennedy's call to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade.

The Kennedy Tapes

Contrary to the popular view of John Kennedy as a space visionary, the president had little interest in space and strove to put humans on the moon only for its political importance. "I'm not that interested in space," he told NASA chief James Webb late in 1962. [READ MORE]

Listen to an excerpt of the White House tapes: [ACTIVATE PLAYER]

"We Choose to go to the moon ..." President Kennedy's speech at Rice University rallying the people to forge ahead in the Apollo program. [ACTIVATE PLAYER]

At the meeting, documented on a tape released last week by the JFK Library in Boston, Seamans witnessed a clash between his boss, NASA Administrator James Webb, and President John F. Kennedy over the nation's objectives in space. While Kennedy insisted that the Apollo moon landing program should be NASA's top priority, Webb argued that the lunar mission was only part of a broader quest to make the U.S. the world's preeminent spacefaring nation.

Webb, who died in 1992, was passionate in his view, Seamans says. "I think he truly believed that we would not only make the trip to the moon, but that we were building a structure, both organizational and equipment-wise, that was going to permit extensive activities of man in space, not just for landing on the moon, but for going well beyond that."

Seamans recalls that Webb wanted to avoid the kind of single-minded approach that had characterized some military space efforts, such as the development of the Atlas and Polaris missiles. "There wasn't any question in Jim's mind that the program was going to be about more than Apollo," Seamans recalls. "We're not stamping people's foreheads with 'Apollo' at NASA."

At NASA Headquarters, Webb faced opposition from his deputy for manned spaceflight, Brainard Holmes, who wanted the agency focused solely on getting to the moon. "We'd have meetings where Webb would talk about the totality of the program, and preeminence in space, and so forth," recalls Seamans. "And afterwards Brainard would come up [to me] and say, 'I don't know what he's talking about. It seems to me our objective is just to get to the moon, and I can't put up with all this other crap."

In November 1962, after Holmes' dispute with Webb made it into the pages of Time magazine (where Holmes had a reporter friend), Seamans says, the White House asked for the meeting with NASA officials. The intensity of the more than 70-minute encounter was palpable, Seamans says. "I think anybody who was there would say it was one of the most intense meetings they'd ever been to."

For Seamans, "the intensity came from knowing that Brainard Holmes reported to me and I was going to have to deal with him on these issues. It came from being in there with the President of the United States debating the very program that we'd already invested almost a year and a half in, where there seemed to be a pretty major difference between my boss and what the President wanted. It was just to see two men battling it out."