The full text of President Kennedy’s speech at Rice University was printed in the paper today. I read all of it twice, which is more than I do with most speeches.

He stood at Rice Stadium in Houston, Texas, in the heat of September, and he talked about the pace of human progress and the challenge of space and the nature of the American character. He talked about how in one lifetime — a single human lifetime — we went from Kitty Hawk to orbital flight. He said that no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space.

And then he said the thing that I keep coming back to:

“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”

Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

I stopped when I read that line and just sat with it for a minute. I think that might be the most honest thing a President has said in a long time — not a promise of easy victory, not a claim that we’re already winning, but an acknowledgment that this is hard and we’re doing it anyway because hard things are worth doing.

Harold came over. He’d seen the speech on the news. He said, “He’s spending billions of dollars on a stunt.” I said, “He’s spending billions of dollars on the future.” Harold said, “Same thing.” We had a respectful disagreement and he went home to watch the game.

But I keep thinking about Kennedy’s words. Not just the famous “because it is hard” line, but the part earlier in the speech where he talks about the pace of change. He said: if you compress all of human history into fifty years, then modern man appeared about ten years ago. Agriculture appeared about two years ago. The printing press appeared this year. The steam engine appeared last month. The airplane appeared a week ago. The space age began the day before yesterday. This morning — if you do the math — John Glenn orbited the Earth.

And now we’re going to the Moon.

The thing that stays with me is the scale of the commitment Kennedy is making. The NASA budget will need to be expanded enormously. Facilities will have to be built. A completely new rocket will have to be designed and built from scratch — the Saturn V they’re talking about. A completely new spacecraft. New navigation systems, new communications systems, new everything. The Manned Spacecraft Center they’re building in Houston. The Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral. The tracking stations around the world. All of it building toward one thing.

I’m not a naive person. I understand that part of this is Cold War politics, that we’re doing this because the Soviets have been beating us and the national prestige matters to the people who make these decisions. Kennedy didn’t speak to Congress last year because he was inspired by the romantic notion of exploration. He spoke because Gagarin had just embarrassed us and Kennedy needed to find something America could win.

But I also think — I genuinely think — that in choosing the Moon, something happened. Something crystallized. The Cold War competition picked a target that is also a real thing of wonder. The Moon. It’s not just a political goal. It’s the Moon. It’s something humans have been looking at for as long as there have been humans, something that has pulled at us and mystified us and been present in every night sky anyone has ever seen.

We choose to go. Not because it’s easy. Because it’s hard.

I put the newspaper clipping in my folder. The one with Kennedy’s first speech is in there already. I think I’m going to end up with a lot of clippings before this is all over.