Genesis

by Robert Zimmerman

  Through this all, the Vietnam war raged on. By election day, almost 30,000 Americans had been killed in the southeast Asian jungles.213 And no one could see an end to it all.

  Overall, 1968 had not been a good year.

  APOLLO 8

  To the contestants in the space race, however, all of these issues were distant tragedies. They had volunteered to do something noble, courageous, and bold, the last lap of the race had finally arrived, and neither side had time to think of anything else.

  On September 15th the Soviets struck, proving that the C.I.A. reports had been correct. Zond 5 became the first vehicle to fly past the moon and then return to earth, landing on September 21st in the Indian Ocean. A failure in the spacecraft’s reentry guidance system caused it to miss Soviet territory. Despite being called “Zond,” this was a Soyuz test spacecraft capable of carrying a human crew. This time, however, it merely carried a crew of turtles, flies, worms, and plants.

  Three weeks after this Soviet triumph, NASA followed with Apollo 7, the first American manned mission in almost two years. Commanded by Wally Schirra, this eleven day orbital mission was the Apollo program’s first shakedown flight.

  Schirra, one of the original seven Mercury astronauts and the fifth American to fly in space, had not trusted the redesign work done by the investigation committee and Borman. Though scheduled as the commander of the first manned Apollo mission after the fire, he was blocked by Borman when he tried to take an active part in the command module’s redesign. While Borman had sympathized with Schirra’s concerns, he was also determined to keep the redesign focused. “They meant well,” Borman wrote later of the numerous astronauts who wanted to take part in the redesign, “but their wish list was longer than a rich kid’s letter to Santa Claus. If we had redesigned the spacecraft in accordance with everything they wanted, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin might not have landed on the moon for another five years.”214

  While most of the changes Schirra and the other astronauts desired were incorporated into the refitted spacecraft, he still chafed at not being able to supervise the changes personally. “We all spent a year wearing black arm bands for three very good men,” he grumbled. “I’ll be damned if anybody’s going to spend the next year wearing one for me.”215

  Much like Gemini 7, Apollo 7 circled the earth again and again as the three astronauts tested the operation of the Apollo command module. Unfortunately, on the first day Schirra came down with a head cold, which he immediately passed to his fellow crew members, Walt Cunningham and Donn Eisele. Over the next week and a half, clogged sinuses combined with zero gravity and a pure oxygen atmosphere conspired to make this crew the grumpiest in history. At one point Schirra suddenly canceled a scheduled television broadcast by declaring, “The show is off! The television show is delayed without further discussion. We’ve not eaten. I’ve got a cold, and I refuse to foul up my time.”216

  Other than the colds and the ill-tempers that went with them, however, this flight had few technical problems. One of its most successful achievements was the use of the world’s first handheld black-and-white video camera, built by RCA. Three times over the ten day mission the crew held live press conferences, joking and doing somersaults in zero gravity. It was here that the lighthearted Schirra of Gemini 6’s harmonica and bells reappeared. He began the first telecast by holding up a card that read “Hello from the lovely Apollo room high atop everything.” The third started with Schirra welcoming his audience to “The one and only original Apollo road show starring the greatest acrobats of outer space!”217 Behind him Cunningham and Eisele did somersaults and pinwheels. The televised broadcasts were immensely popular, watched by millions, allowing the world to see what it was like for a person to float in space.

  The investigation committee and all of NASA had been vindicated. Everything had worked so well that soon after landing NASA labeled this a “101 percent successful” mission.218

  Four days later, on October 22nd, the Soviets joined the party. Georgiy Beregovoi took off on Soyuz 2, the first manned Soviet mission since the tragic death of Komarov in April 1967. During Beregovoi’s four day mission, ground control made extensive tests of their automatic earth-controlled docking system, maneuvering close to a Soyuz target vehicle but never successfully docking with it.

  Then, on November 10th, five days after Richard Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey for the presidency, the Soviets launched Zond 6. Similar to Zond 5, this craft was sent on a course that would take it around the moon and then back to earth. Unlike Zond 5 and any previous Soviet mission, the Soviet press publicly announced Zond’s mission before the flight was completed. Zond 6 was “to perfect the automatic functioning of a manned spacecraft that will be sent to the moon.”219

  With this announcement, NASA’s decision became unavoidable. Everything had gone as planned on Apollo 7, and as Chris Kraft noted, everyone wanted to “beat the Russians’ ass.”220

  On November 12th, even as Zond 6 was flying to the moon, Thomas Paine, the new NASA administrator, announced to the world that Apollo 8 would do the same. “After a careful and thorough examination of all the systems and risks involved, we have concluded that we are now ready to fly the most advanced mission for our Apollo 8 launch in December -- the orbit around the moon.”

  As the news conference unfolded, the reporters couldn’t help noting repeatedly the risks involved. One remarked how previous NASA planning had always included a lunar module for any flight to the moon, just in case the main engines failed. This one did not. Another wondered what the odds were for the mission to be successful. Several worried about the dangers of radiation and solar flares.

  Sam Phillips squelched these doubts. “I’m not going to try and calculate a set of probability numbers or odds for you. I feel that we’re ready for lunar orbit and that we have every reason to expect that we will be able to carry out the full mission and to succeed with it. If I wasn’t convinced of that, I wouldn’t have recommended such a mission in the first place.”

  Four days later, the three astronauts gathered at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas for a press conference of their own. Once again, many of the questions centered on the dangers and uniqueness of their particular mission: “Is this flight too risky after only one manned Apollo flight?” “What will be the most critical moment in the flight?” “How concerned are you about not being able to get out of lunar orbit?” “Have you considered the dangers of radiation and solar flares on your journey to the moon?”

  At one point a reporter bluntly asked, “If you lose the main propulsion system, can you get out of lunar orbit and get back?”

  “No,” Bill Anders answered just as bluntly. “Once we are in lunar orbit, the main propulsion system has to operate.”

  Borman’s response to all this was very matter-of-fact. “I was involved in some of the decisions that were made in re-engineering the Apollo [capsule], and I wouldn’t get in the thing if I didn’t think it was a safe vehicle.” He also pointed out how absurd it was for some people to get “a little queasy” now about going when this had been the point of the whole program to begin with.

  A number of reporters took a more philosophical approach to the mission, noting that the Apollo 8 craft would actually enter lunar orbit on Christmas Eve. One asked the three astronauts if they planned on “making a Christmas-type gesture from space.”

  Frank Borman tried to answer, but for once in his life he seemed to be at a loss for words. “Well, that’s a secret, I think. We’ll have to think . . .”

  He paused. “We’ve already considered that and we’ll have to . . .” He paused again. “I think it would be inappropriate and . . .”

  He paused a third time and then finally admitted, “Quite frankly, right now we don’t have any idea what it might be.”

  In fact, only days before, Julian Scheer, NASA’s deputy administrator for public affairs, had called Borman and told him that NASA was worried about what the astronauts would say when they gave their second pres
s conference from lunar orbit. “We figure more people will be listening to your voice than that of any other man in history,” he told Borman.221

  It had suddenly dawned on everyone in NASA how important those words would be. For both the designers that created NASA and built the Saturn 5 as well as the military-trained test pilots that would fly her, this problem was far more challenging than building a rocket bigger than the Statue of Liberty.

  On Christmas Eve 1968, three American astronauts were going to be orbiting the moon. What in God’s name were they going to say?

  WORDS

  On December 8th, the Apollo 8 astronauts moved into their crew housing at Cape Kennedy. These special isolated quarters, located on the third floor of an engineering and office building on the Cape, were provided by NASA in an attempt to reduce the chances that any astronaut would catch an ailment prior to launch.222

  Each man had a small, private bedroom furnished much like a college dormitory, and all shared a single living room, a conference room, and a dining room. To compensate for the isolation, NASA provided the astronauts with a full-time chef. The man, who had been a tugboat cook, was considered “excellent” by Borman and “terrible” by Anders. Lovell merely grinned and ate the food.

  As intended, they spent their days going over the flight plan, practicing maneuvers on the command module simulator, or reviewing the design of the rocket and spacecraft. For the first week they performed a dress rehearsal of the countdown, as well as practicing emergency procedures should the rocket fail during launch.

  For exercise the astronauts mostly jogged across the building grounds. At night Borman would go outside and stare at the moon, wondering if they could actually hit their target from so far away.

  Unexpectedly, however, the reporter’s question on whether they were going to make “a Christmas-type gesture from space” had begun preying on Borman’s mind. When Julian Scheer first enunciated the problem, Borman asked him if he had any recommendations about what the astronauts should say. Scheer’s response was to the point. “I think it would be inappropriate for NASA and particularly for a public affairs person to be putting words in your mouth. NASA will not tell you what to say.”

  As commander, Borman found this problem much more complicated than flying a jet fighter or piloting a space capsule. Though it was his responsibility to find the appropriate Christmas Eve statement, he was not a poetic man, and didn’t know where he could go to find the right words.

  He considered using the prayer that Rod Rose had worked out for him, and rejected the idea. This was his own private message, for his own local church. It didn’t speak for Lovell or Anders, or for the rest of the world. He needed something broader.

  With only two weeks left before launch, Borman found himself thinking about the problem more than he would have liked.223 Other, more important worries, such as making sure his crew and his spacecraft were ready, were beginning to take a back seat to this seemingly minor challenge in public relations.

  Borman thought that a message for world peace would be appropriate, but every idea he came up with seemed hollow. How could he, a military man, call for world peace when his nation was at that moment participating in a bloody war in Vietnam?

  He asked the other two astronauts for suggestions. Anders, a practicing Catholic, proposed they make a Christian statement, possibly reading something about the meaning of Christmas. He suggested telling the traditional Christmas story.

  Borman wasn’t satisfied. More than a billion people would be watching their telecast, many of them not Christians. He needed a statement able to include them all.

  Lovell was also at a loss. They talked about rewriting the words of “’Twas the Night before Christmas” or “Jingle Bells,” but dismissed these ideas instantly. “It was too flippant,” Lovell remembers. “It did not match the event.”

  Borman called Susan and asked her if she had any suggestions. She also was baffled. “To please everybody, to send a message to the entire world at just that moment?” she said. “Wow, I can’t imagine what that would be.”

  Getting desperate, Borman telephoned Simon Bourgin, whom he had met on his Asian tour after the Gemini 7 mission. Bourgin, a former newspaperman, worked for the United States Information Agency as science policy adviser. He helped plan and then participated in the tours, escorting the astronauts in their travels. Since 1966 the Bormans and Bourgins had become close personal friends. Frank found Si’s gentle intelligence and refined artistic sense a refreshing and civilizing contrast from the world of military test pilots.

  Bourgin agreed to think about the problem. To his mind, Apollo 8’s trip “around the moon was not that big a thing. Other events would soon transcend it.” Nonetheless, he knew that the flight, circling the moon on Christmas, would have an “overwhelming importance because it would give us a kind of rebirth and spiritual renewal.” He played around with these thoughts for a couple of days, but nothing he wrote seemed right. “[My words] didn’t have the ring of epic truth -- what [the astronauts] said was going to be as important as what they did.”

  Though he had been sworn to secrecy, Bourgin decided he needed help. One of his Washington friends, at the moment spokesman for the Bureau of the Budget, had once been a magazine and television writer. “I could talk about it with Joe because we had had a long friendship, and I trusted him totally.”

  Joe Laitin had been a war correspondent in Germany and the Pacific, and after the war had covered the Nuremburg trials for Reuters. Later he spent ten years in Hollywood as a freelance writer, doing articles for popular magazines like Ladies Home Journal, Colliers Magazine, and the Saturday Evening Post. Since 1963 he had been working the public relations beat in Washington.

  Laitin’s first reaction to the question was “Oh, this is a piece of cake, no problem.”

  In order to get some idea about how the astronauts would feel orbiting the moon, he asked Bourgin if NASA had any descriptions or pictures that could help him visualize what the astronauts would see. Since no one had yet gone to the moon, all Bourgin had was an artist’s conception, which he immediately messengered to Laitin.

  That night, after his wife and kids had gone to bed, Laitin sat down in his kitchen with his manual typewriter and propped the artist’s conception up in front of him. The picture made the moon look like a gray cinder, and the earth was no larger than a tennis ball. Laitin imagined himself in lunar orbit, and suddenly felt a deep pang of loneliness for that tiny tennis ball. There lived “everything that was dear to me and that I loved.” He started to type.

  The first idea wasn’t right, so he pulled the sheet from the typewriter and tried again. The second idea also wasn’t right, so it too ended up as a crumpled sheet on the floor.

  A few hours later hundreds of balls of paper littered the room. To his chagrin, Laitin was having the same problem as Borman: everything he wrote sounded hollow in comparison with the war in Vietnam and the turmoil of the last year. Worse, Laitin recognized that because the astronauts were military men working for a government project, any platitudes uttered by them would seem like propaganda.

  Joe Laitin, teaching a world affairs course in Los Angeles, 1962. Credit: Laitin

  Like Bourgin, Borman, and everyone else, Laitin realized that the words somehow had to include the feelings and beliefs of as many people as possible. They also had to have a special ring, a majestic, almost biblical quality to them.

  Why not go to the Bible?, he thought.

  He went and got a Gideon Bible that he had once swiped from a hotel. Because the astronauts would be speaking on Christmas, Christ’s birthday, he thought, Laitin immediately turned to the New Testament and began leafing through St. Mark’s.

  Still, nothing seemed right.

  It was now four in the morning, and Laitin was getting desperate. At that moment his wife Christine came downstairs to see what was going on. Seeing her husband, a normally unreligious man, reading the Bible and surrounded by piles of crumbled paper, she immediately bec
ame fearful. “Joe, what have you done?”

  He explained his problem. Christine Laitin had had as interesting a life as Joe Laitin. Born in Paris, she had been educated by the nuns at the Convent of the Sacred Heart off the Normandy coast. Rather than become a Roman Catholic nun, however, she joined the A.B.C. Ballet of Paris as a ballerina. During World War II she fought the Germans in the French Resistance. In 1947 she came to America as a war bride, and after two unsuccessful marriages, married Laitin in 1961. Their marriage would last until her death in 1995.

  “If you want poetry you’re looking in the wrong part of the Bible,” she said. “You should look in the Old Testament for that.”

  “But it’s going to be Christ’s birthday,” Laitin said, actually irritated.

  “I don’t care whose birthday it is, if you want that kind of language you have to look in the Old Testament.”

  Laitin was now really annoyed. He looked at the thick Bible in his hand. “It’s four o’clock in the morning,” he said almost angrily. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  His wife answered, “Why don’t you begin at the beginning?” She remembered how the opening words of the Bible possessed that stark simplicity reminiscent of the wild Normandy coast where she had spent her childhood summers.