On July 20, 1969, American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed a rocket module on the surface of the moon and, taking what Armstrong famously called “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” became the first humans to walk on Earth’s satellite.

It was a moment that John F. Kennedy had promised at the beginning of the decade, when, having used Republican reluctance to spend money on space exploration as a talking point in his 1960 presidential campaign, he promised that American astronauts would reach the moon by the end of the 1960s, when, he hoped, he would just be wrapping up his second term in the White House. Things didn’t work that way, and three presidents—Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon—were involved in the effort to make sure that America, and not Russia, was the first to take that giant step. Still, it was largely JFK’s vision that “leapfrogged” the nation to the moon, a task done when he said it would be done.

Douglas Brinkley, professional historian and prolific writer, chronicles the presidential politics behind the lunar landing in his new book American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race. Its publication may coincide with the countdown to the 50th anniversary of the landing, but the book has been on his mind for many years. “When you grow up in Ohio in the ’60s, as I did,” he tells Kirkus, “then it was an especially big deal. I was 9 years old when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. He was from an Ohio town not far from where I lived, and he became one of my all-seasons heroes. John Glenn had a big impact. He was also from Ohio, and he later became one of our senators. My formative years were heavily influenced by NASA.”

Those formative years were also spent in the shadow of the Cold War, when the United States and the USSR were competing in every theater. One thing that occupied Brinkley’s attention was the big question of how Kennedy was able to make space a central concern of his administration at a time when the Cold War was becoming hot in places like Vietnam and Cuba. Even at the height of the Bay of Pigs debacle and the Diem assassination, Brinkley documents that JFK was keeping his eyes fixed on what NASA was doing.

There was good reason for that. As Brinkley notes, Franklin Roosevelt had revitalized the country with New Deal projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Works Progress Administration. Dwight Eisenhower had the Saint Lawrence Seaway and the interstate highway system as legacies. Kennedy wanted something big to put his name on, but he was also a politically astute man who had a big problem: He needed to keep the South from slipping over to the Republican side during the height of the civil rights era. That didn’t work out quite as planned, either, but the South got the bulk of NASA money all the same: a space center in Texas, a flight center in Florida, test and research facilities in Alabama, and so on. Granted, the rest of the country benefited from the space race, too. As Brinkley points out, “We got GPS, MRIs, all kinds of technology from it. We spent about $185 billion in today’s dollars, and we got back our investment many times over.”

Brinkley is a busy man these days. When we caught up with him during a brief stopover to his Texas home, he was just returning from New York after preparing historical notes for CNN on the political background of the Mueller report, breaking news at the moment. He is traveling extensively to support the new book, with speeches planned at the NASA facility in Huntsville, Alabama, at the Kennedy Library in Boston, and at the Library of Congress, where he’ll talk to members of Congress about the historical accomplishments of a bygone cooperative era even as each of them gets a copy of his book.

Moonshot is a term that comes from sportswriting, Brinkley notes; NASA borrowed it. “Joe Biden calls his campaign to cure cancer the next moonshot,” he says. “The left wants a Green New Deal as its moonshot. Astronauts are pushing for a trip to Mars as the next moonshot for NASA. Whatever we decide on, people in these hyperpartisan times are hungering for a project that’s bipartisan in nature that will prove that we can accomplish anything we set our minds to as a nation if we’re willing to put all our muscle into one large endeavor.” As American Moonshot ably demonstrates, we’ve done it before.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.