Moondust (19 page)

The thing I love about this story, though, is how badly the agitators underestimated Ike. His public image was of a nice guy who was no good at politics, but people close to him say the opposite was true. To him, this military-industrial complex appeared to be less a conspiracy than a condition arising spontaneously from the U.S. economy, rather as class does from the
English education system. So before he left, he acted, making perhaps the most important decision anyone ever made in relation to a space programme that Ike never cared for. He took the insignificant National Advisory Council for Astronautics (NACA) and turned it into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA. Then, while the generals watched in impotent rage, he kicked space into the offices of this new, civilian organization, which would unravel its secrets for the glory of science and the good of humanity. He planned to cede military applications to NASA, too, but was dissuaded. He also wanted to announce that “manned” activity would end with the Mercury programme.

Next up, in November 1960, John F. Kennedy beat Richard M. Nixon to the presidency by the slenderest of margins, polling 34,226,731 votes against 34,108,157. The appointment of Lyndon Johnson as his running mate enraged the new president's brother Bobby, but was convenient politically, despite rather than because Johnson had turned himself into the prime cheerleader of space and technology. It was months before any member of the new administration saw fit to give NASA administrator T. Keith Glennan a call.

Then two things happened: the global celebration of Yuri Gagarin's orbital flight on April 12, 1961, closely followed by the Bay of Pigs debacle just four days later, when a U.S.-sponsored force failed miserably to dislodge President Fidel Castro from Cuba (conspiracy theorists and novelists such as Don DeLillo and James Ellroy had the president's refusal to sanction air cover costing him his life at the hands of an enraged CIA/Mafia). With racial tension striking fear into the hearts of Americans and the accelerating involvement in Laos, which would lead to Vietnam, JFK desperately needed to renew his dynamic image. Particularly irksome to him was the fact that Alan Shepard had been scheduled to preempt Gagarin, but last-minute safety concerns caused his
Freedom 7
flight to be delayed. JFK's close friend Hugh Sidey, a
Life
magazine journalist, described being present at a crucial meeting in the wake of these disastrous first six months in office, where the most romanticized and overrated American president of the twentieth century displayed a charming
ignorance of space matters, before wailing in reference to the Soviets. “Is there any place where we can catch them? What can we do?” Science and exploration don't appear to have been the issue. Pride, vanity, political expediency
do.

Yet there is an alternative version. Three weeks prior to the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy had resisted calls for an acceleration of rocket development. Now he prophesied that the conquest of space would become a symbol of the twentieth century and so he called a meeting with Manned Spacecraft Center director Bob Gilruth and his NASA colleague George Low. Afterwards, Gilruth told Chris Kraft that the president asked about their plans for the future, so they'd told him about Mercury and an ambitious but vague idea of circumnavigating the Moon at some point in the distant future. According to this account, Kennedy interrupted, wanting to know why, if the aim was to defeat the USSR, they weren't considering a landing. As quoted by Kraft, Gilruth said:

“I didn't want to sound negative, so I told him that landing on the Moon was probably an order-of-magnitude bigger challenge than a circumlunar flight. But he didn't let it go.”

The two NASA men had no idea that Kennedy was already asking his vice president to conduct a study into the proposal. But as far as some of JFK's advisers were concerned, there may have been more to this than is commonly acknowledged. In a book published in 1969, the journalists Hugo Young, Peter Dunn and Bryan Silcock spoke to Willis H. Shapley, “a reflective intellectual who sits rather oddly beside the enthusiastic pioneers of space” and happened to be in charge of space and defence affairs at the Bureau of the Budget in 1961. As Shapley told it, “People [within the administration] realized that space was the answer. It was a way of keeping up the aerospace economy and responding to the demand for more missiles without escalating the arms race.” If this is true, the race to Luna really was conceived as the sublimation of a third world war which nobody wanted. All the same, NASA's Gilruth claimed to have woken screaming in his bed on the night after Kennedy announced his grand plan for space. Not only had the president bragged that they were going to sail “this new ocean” all the way to the Moon:
he'd promised to do it by the end of the decade.

There were objections, of course. Dwight Eisenhower came out of retirement specially to proclaim Apollo “just nuts.” Others complained that such a vast government programme would lead to a proto-command economy, in which the state had too much influence, and that it would drain brains from teaching and academia, waste money which could be better spent on social problems and distract attention from security here on Earth. Such concerns were surprisingly muted, though. For one decade, and one decade only, Americans appeared happy, even eager, to place their trust and tax dollar on the collection plate of big government and its scientist priests. In his speech to Congress on May 25, JFK had called for a lively national debate on this bold but reckless proposition. It has been conjectured that he was rather hoping someone would talk him out of it, but no one did. The “debate” in the Senate lasted an hour, with only five of the ninety-six senators even feeling a need to speak.

The next year, in 1962, Kennedy and Khrushchev danced a samba with the security of the planet through the Cuban Missile Crisis; then a year later came Dallas and the grassy knoll and JFK was just one more piece of Sixties lore. Now this tangled mess of dream and expediency was going to the Moon, and I'm dwelling on it at 25,000 feet on a 737 to Reno for a reason – because two other icons of that era did significant things in 1962. First, Marilyn Monroe, actress and assumed lover of JFK, committed maybe-suicide; then the crack test pilot Neil Armstrong, having spurned an invitation to apply for the Mercury project, joined the second group of astronauts and his own idiosyncratic contribution to the mythology of the Sixties was ready to begin. Reno holds the promise of an extremely rare chance to take a look at, and possibly even meet, the astronaut who holds himself most aloof from the public. The space grapevine has been buzzing with it for weeks.

From what I've heard and read, trying to describe Armstrong is like driving through a night mist: there are outlines and hints of something solid behind it, but any light you throw
at him comes straight back at you, until, in the end, you see just what you imagine you see: the reflected glare of your own expectations. And I wonder what I'll see – if anything at all? The hard-bitten Reg Turnill saw something arrogant and “taciturn,” and when he'd finished showing Norman Mailer around the Cape, Mailer wrote a book called
Of a Fire on the Moon
in which he got no nearer to Armstrong than anyone else, but offered some interesting observations of his bearing at press conferences. As per the longings in his soul, the novelist saw something mystical.

“He spoke in long pauses, he searched for words,” Mailer said. “When the words came out, their ordinary content made the wait seem excessive … as a speaker he was all but limp – still it did not leave him unremarkable. Certainly the knowledge that he was an astronaut restored his stature, yet even if he had been a junior executive accepting an award, Armstrong would have presented a quality which was arresting, for he was extraordinarily remote. He was simply not like other men …”

Mailer later acknowledged that Armstrong's parsimony with words, perversely, “became his most impressive quality, as if what was best in the man was most removed from the surface, so valuable that it must be protected by a hundred reservations, a thousand cautions.” Mailer also spoke of the astronaut's down-home public demeanor, “that small-town clearing he had cut into his psyche so that he might offer the world a person.” Wonderful. Yet it seems as likely to me that Armstrong sat at those press conferences knowing that, for the men and women chewing pens in front of him, his wretched smear across on the Sea of Tranquillity would provide just as exciting and profitable a denouement to all this as would the successful conclusion of his beautiful mission, perhaps more … in fact,
unquestionably
more. They asked him what would happen if the ascent-stage engine failed to ignite as he sought to break Selene's ethereal embrace and there is a temptation to laugh at his reply, which was: “At the present time we're left with no recourse should that occur.” But what was he going to say – “Oh, well, then I guess we die”? In fact, the question Mailer asked his reader was much more amusing: “What if Armstrong were to take a step on the
moon and simply disappear?” The entire works of Monty Python would have been rendered obsolete. And it could have happened. One NASA employee, asked about the possibility of the LM slipping on ice, commented, “There might be giraffes up there for all we know, so why not ice?” while members of the public wanted to know whether the Moonwalkers would be armed as they stepped out of the spacecraft. Mailer's pronouncement in the early stages of his book that “the administration had decided to embark upon a surreal adventure” looks about right.

Insiders confirm this impression of Armstrong. From Michael Collins, we learn that “Neil never admits surprise,” while Guenter Wendt muses that he was “clearly not the conventional astronaut … most would agree that he did not make friends easily.”
Apollo 11
flight director Gene Kranz says that the astronaut's silence took time to get used to and complained that at meetings to formalize the mission rules, which governed when to continue with a problematic landing and when to abort, “Neil would generally smile or nod [and] I believed that he had set his own rules for the landing … I just wanted to know what they were.” No one ever did, but Kranz strongly suspected that while there was the remotest chance of setting down, the commander with the Mona Lisa smile would go for it, whatever Mission Control advised.

Reg Turnill suggested that a contract negotiated with
Life
magazine, which gave the journal exclusive rights to the astronauts' personal stories in exchange for an annual cash lump sum, had exacerbated Armstrong's truculence with the media. The payment was regarded by the early astronauts as a substitute for danger money and was split evenly between them, but as the cadre grew from seven to over sixty in the decade between 1959 and 1969, a windfall which started out at $18,000 per annum wound up amounting to little. Worse, the stories that appeared were asinine and there was an air of propagandism about the fairy-tale American families that could be found within the pages of arch-patriot proprietor Henry Luce's organ. Reg and the rest set out to undermine these stories by preempting them, but an unfortunate side effect of this effort was to ruin what trust had existed previously between spacemen and media,
particularly once the postflight divorces started happening. Some of the astronauts, this new breed of real-time celebrities at the centre of the first global media event, understandably began to get sensitive about the attention given to their relations with their families.

“So there was a clampdown,” Turnill explained, “because instead of appearing as gods who were to be worshipped for their perfection, they were being presented as ordinary men and they resented this.”

He then recited a formula which has echoed through the corridors of celebrity for thirty-five years now, but was new then.

“Although they liked being icons in a way,” he said, “it started to ruin the fun of it.”

Some of these men never recovered from their encounter with the new fame that rained down like mortar from satellites in the sky. How unfair it must have seemed, this great quest being assailed by trivia and prurience, infected with other people's fears and fantasies. Armstrong was particularly resentful of this, according to Turnill.

“Of course, Armstrong was a great, great pilot,” he admitted, the sour taste still fresh in his mouth after all these years. “But he must be very vain and insecure inside, because he could never deal with the press. We could never talk to him. You ruffled his feathers as soon as you spoke to him, because he'd resent you asking that question – or almost any question. I've encountered this with many great men.”

The situation didn't improve after the first Moonwalker returned to Earth. Newspaper reports suggest that he was inundated with offers from agents and movie producers and companies eager to sign him up to sponsorship deals, all but a few of which he rejected. A museum in his hometown of Wapakoneta, Ohio, was already being planned and his image was everywhere: he received tens of thousands of letters, including love letters and hate mail, while gossip columnists busily linked him with Hollywood starlets. Instead of cashing in, he took a NASA desk job, then a master of science degree from the University of Southern California, before returning to his home state as Professor
of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Cincinnati, where he stayed until 1979, commuting from a farm he bought in nearby Lebanon. After the teaching, it was business and a list of anonymous corporations which found value in his profile and gift for precision at boardroom level. For a while, he took part in press conferences once a year, but gave no general interviews,
ever,
and his public presence eventually faded away. The former
Life
reporter Dora Jane Hamblin spoke of Armstrong being capable of “cold, tight-lipped rage,” but added that it was mostly reserved for people whom he felt were trying to exploit him. In 1976, a
Cincinnati Post
article headed “Cincinnati's Invisible Hero” reported his anguish over an advertisement for the university's Earth Day celebration, which promised the attendance of “our spaceman.” “How long must it take before I cease to be known as a spaceman?” he is said to have snapped.