First Man

by James R. Hansen

  Turning out as well as it did, the broader political repercussions of the Gemini VIII flight were minor. “In the flight, both of them came across as being pretty much what we thought of them before,” Mike Collins has explained. “There was certainly nothing in the aftermath that affected their crew assignments, absolutely not. And there would have been if they’d screwed up big-time.” Astronaut Bill Anders, whose first mission was to be Apollo 8’s historic circumlunar flight in December 1968, agreed: “Not only was Neil quick-thinking, he certainly wasn’t shy about doing things that well could have worked against him.” According to Chris Kraft, the way Armstrong handled himself during the emergency gave NASA “even greater confidence in Neil’s abilities.”

  Two weeks after the flight, the Gemini VIII Mission Evaluation Team “positively ruled out” pilot error as a factor in the emergency. In revealing the team’s findings, Bob Gilruth commented, “In fact, the crew demonstrated remarkable piloting skill in overcoming this very serious problem and bringing the spacecraft to a safe landing.” There was no question that Armstrong would be given another assignment as a mission commander.

  Most NASA people felt that Armstrong and Scott deserved the approbation, though Walt Cunningham would later issue a disgruntled statement: “Of course, Neil and Dave received the usual medals…Scott’s career as the fair-haired boy of the third group of astronauts was unaffected. Both performed well over the remainder of their careers, but at the same time their very progress ignored the fact that their peers—and many others at the space center—felt they had botched their first mission.” Most unfairly, Cunningham complained that Neil “parlayed a busted Gemini VIII flight into the Buck Rogers grand prize mission, the first lunar landing.”

  As for the medals the two men received, NASA did, indeed, present both with its Distinguished Service Medal. From the air force Dave also received a Distinguished Flying Cross, a lesser honor than the service’s Distinguished Service Medal, which could have been presented to him. Major Scott also received a promotion to lieutenant colonel, whereas Neil received a $678 raise that brought his salary to $21,653, making him, thanks to his twelve years in the civil service system, the highest paid astronaut. Still, there was no ticker-tape parade or dinner with the wives at the White House, as there had been for some of the Mercury Seven or for Gemini IV’s Jim McDivitt and Ed White.

  As depressed as he was about his mission being cut short, Armstrong himself could not be so sure about his prospects: “I think if it had turned out that we, in fact, had made a mistake—a little one or a big one—that would have been a serious issue. Dave and I couldn’t identify serious mistakes that we made, but we recognized that maybe we did make some. So I’m sure there was a concern that it might affect us someway in the future.”

  Like any pilot who loved to fly, Neil would have liked to have jumped in a spacecraft and gone back up again as soon as possible. All he could do was, as he put it, “get right back into the cycle.” On March 21, 1966, just two days after he arrived back from Gemini VIII, NASA named him the backup commander and William Anders the backup pilot for Gemini XI, a rendezvous and docking flight made by Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon six months later.

  It would be his last crew assignment prior to Apollo.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Astronaut’s Wife

  To the 7,000 folks back in Wapakoneta, their native son was a “space hero” whether the Gemini VIII spacecraft made its scheduled fifty-five orbits or only managed the seven that it flew. On Wednesday April 13, 1966, three weeks after his townsfolk had nervously sat around their TV sets and radios well past their regular bedtimes awaiting news of their boy’s splashdown in the Pacific, the little Ohio burg played host to 15,000 attendees of the “Blastoff!” a gala homecoming in Neil’s honor.

  Armstrong was in no mood to celebrate, but, “Wapakoneta made the request, NASA put its seal of approval on it, and the event was on.” For his old friends and neighbors, the astronaut put on his best face. So did wife Janet: “I didn’t know these people,” but “it was a happy event for the town. It was just one of the things we had to do.”

  Though it was a raw early-spring day, the smiling couple rode with their two boys in an open convertible from the small Lima, Ohio, airport to the Auglaize County Fairgrounds. Following a brief press conference, the parade then drove into Wapakoneta proper, through its flag-bedecked downtown business district to Blume High School, where Neil had graduated in 1947. In the high school gymnasium, to a luncheon crowd of 1,500 lucky invitees and ticket holders, Neil thrilled everyone by saying, “You are my people, and I am proud of you.” Among the gifts he received during the ceremonies was a small statue of a lion, a leather attaché case, a silver tray, and life memberships in the Elks Lodge and local senior citizens club. A local columnist wrote that Neil accepted the gifts with “boyish modesty and blushes,” reciprocating with small, framed American flags (as well as an Ohio flag) that had circled the globe with him aboard Gemini VIII. The prodigal son termed the homecoming “magnificent” and repeatedly told the crowds that the reception was “more than I deserve.” Asked whether he was afraid for his life during Gemini VIII, he admitted that the stuck thruster had scared him, “but no more than on some previous occasions when I was pilot of an X-15 test flight.”

  Janet relates, “He was surprised at how much attention and admiration there was, and the number of people that were out there. I was, too. He probably wished that it could have gone away. He had to make the best of it.”

  Neil’s parents beamed with pride from ear to ear. For Steve, a thirty-seven-year veteran employee of the State of Ohio, it was a tremendous honor to show off his family to government officials, including his boss in the Department of Mental Hygiene and Correction, Martin Janis, and Governor James Rhodes, like Steve a lifelong Republican. During his speech at the high school, the governor announced that the state would be joining Auglaize County in building a $200,000 airport to be named for Neil.

  But Steve’s elation could not match the radiant glow of Viola Armstrong. “Those dear people,” Viola later wrote, “they did everything they could possibly think of to make it a lovely day. They were so good. Neil thanked everybody for everything that they had done. They [NASA] had a nice little movie for him to show, which is always a saving grace for the boys, so they can tell a little bit about their flight—you know, in color.”

  For Viola, the happy outcome of her son’s Gemini VIII flight was, as always, a vindication of her Christian faith. Not that her own experience of the emergency had not terrified her. After watching the launch in person at the Cape, she and Steve had returned in the company of Janet’s mother and that of Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Child, some friends of Neil’s from Tacoma, Washington, to watch the television coverage in their Cocoa Beach motel room. When the networks reported that the docking had been made successfully, the group relaxed and went to dinner in the motel restaurant. While they were eating, the motel manager came and tapped Steve on the shoulder. Taking him to the side, he whispered to Neil’s father that trouble had developed with the flight. The boys were all right, but it looked like their mission would need to be aborted. The manager advised the Armstrong party to leave quietly by way of the back door so as to escape the gaggle of reporters already positioned out front. According to Viola, “We did this immediately, only to find two or three newsmen at our door. They were poking their microphones in our faces and asking, ‘What do you have to say, Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong?’” By then, the NASA protocol officer who had been assigned to them for the day had come to the rescue. He told them to say only, “Indeed, we know nothing yet, thank you.”

  Back home in her church in Wapakoneta that evening, a Lenten service was under way when a gentleman who had been listening to a radio out in the parking lot rushed down the aisle to tell the pastor about Neil’s trouble. After asking the congregation “to pray unceasingly,” the pastor then put through a call to the Florida motel where the Armstrongs were known to be staying. After much persua
sion with the long-distance operator, he talked with Steve and Viola and led them individually in prayer. According to Viola, “It was a very touching situation. Fortunately for me, I had had myself very close to God as long as I can remember and in these hours of real trouble, He was very near to me. It made it much easier, for I was not talking to a stranger…Our prayers were answered, and about one-thirty the next morning our boys were safely recovered.”

  If not for NASA’s unwritten rule that wives best not be at the Cape for launches, Janet Armstrong could have been in Florida that awful night. Instead, she and her sister Carolyn Trude were at home in El Lago, caring for Janet’s young boys while playing host to a handful of houseguests.

  In its bureaucratic paternalism, NASA equated keeping the wives away from the launch with “protecting” them. God forbid, if a disaster occurred at the launchpad, no one at NASA wanted a wife to experience personal tragedy in the VIP stands in view of a television audience of millions.

  For the astronauts themselves, the rationale for keeping the wives at home was different. Bluntly put, Deke Slayton did not want the wives at the Cape. In the nervous days leading up to launch, a wife’s presence could only divert her husband’s attention. No astronaut wanted to risk Deke’s ire and the chance of it carrying over into future crew assignments. “Florida was an off-limits playground,” astronaut Gene Cernan has explained. “If you wanted to bring your wife and kids to Florida, you had to get advance approval from Deke and let the other astronauts know. There were plenty of pretty women imagining love with a space hero,” Cernan has candidly admitted, “and some of them would give anything to sleep with an astronaut, a temptation that some astronauts found too great to ignore.”

  Some wives suspected their husbands were having extramarital affairs; a few wives might have known it with certainty. Members of the press who covered the NASA beat knew about a few of the indiscretions, but such things just were not reported in 1960s America. Still, circumstances must have been difficult for Life magazine’s Dodie Hamblin. “I think Life treated the men and their families with kid gloves,” Hamblin later observed. “So did most of the press. These guys were heroes…. I knew, of course, about some very shaky marriages, some womanizing, some drinking, and never reported it. The guys wouldn’t have let me, and neither would NASA,” not to mention the editors of her own magazine.

  Infidelity was not something that Janet spent much time or energy worrying about. Staying at home alone was also nothing new to her. “When the men are preparing for a flight,” Janet explained in an interview with Hamblin in March 1969, “they are really home hardly at all. They come on weekends and even then they have work to do. We’re lucky if they have a chance to come in and sit down and say hello before they go off again a day later. Having them for eight hours is a privilege during times like this.”

  As for the dangers in Neil’s line of work: “Certainly I realize that there are risks involved in his profession. I suppose we spend years trying to prepare ourselves for a possible tragedy, because the presence of danger is there. But I have a tremendous amount of confidence in the space program. I know that Neil has confidence, and so have I.”

  Yet the pressures of Neil’s first space shot in March 1966 had been different, more extreme. For Gemini VIII, television cameras had not been allowed inside her home, but they were strategically positioned to start filming whenever she went outside. Right in her living room sat a ubiquitous Life magazine photographer. Janet realized that she was constantly on display, as were all of the wives of astronauts during a space mission.

  “When Neil and Dave got in trouble,” Janet recalled in 1969, “the first thing I thought was, ‘I want to go see Lurton.’ I didn’t call. I didn’t say anything to the children except that I would be back later. When I got over there and things settled down, I wanted to come home, but I didn’t want to have to face all the press, so I waited a little longer until everything was really in satisfactory shape as far as the men were concerned. When we knew that they were down and that they were safe, then I felt that I could at least go by the reporters. It was dark and there were so many floodlights on. I was so petrified that I just walked right on through them.”

  But in 1969 Janet purposefully left out the most troubling part of her sojourn that evening. Initially she had set out, not for the Scott home, but for Mission Control. As soon as the trouble with Gemini VIII was known, NASA had turned off the squawk boxes the agency supplied to astronaut families, leaving her and Lurton Scott in the dark as to what was happening. The NASA public affairs officer assigned to the Armstrong home drove an insistent Janet to the Manned Spacecraft Center. There she was stopped at the front door of the control center. “I was denied entrance, and I was furious,” Janet recalls. Only then did she drive to the Scotts’.

  “Don’t you ever do that to me again!” Janet later told Deke Slayton, on the eve of Apollo 11. “If there is a problem, I want to be in Mission Control, and if you don’t let me in, I will blast this to the world!” As for turning off the squawk boxes, Janet understood: “NASA did not know who was in our homes listening to the squawk boxes. There might have been information that would be leaked to the public that NASA did not want leaked in a critical situation, which is why they had a policy for terminating communications in our homes during a crisis. This was totally understandable for security reasons.” What was not understandable was why an astronaut’s wife would not be allowed into a secure place to follow what was going on inside Mission Control. “Okay, the men there would have felt bad if something awful happened to our husbands and it might have been difficult for them to see us there, but my comment to Deke was, ‘Well, what about the wives?’”

  Life’s version of Janet’s experience that night was even more fictional than Janet’s sanitized tale. In its initial story about the Gemini VIII flight, Life ran a dramatic picture of Janet down on her knees, “listening but not watching” as she leaned over a living room TV set. According to the caption, the picture was taken just as “the word came that the astronauts had been picked up and were back in good shape.” The caption quoted Janet accurately as saying, “I simply knew they were going to make it. But also I am a fatalist.” The truth ended there.

  “The picture published in Life magazine with me kneeling at the TV was because the squawk box was there.” (The shot was taken in her home before the squawk box was turned off, not at the Scotts’, where she was when the word came that the astronauts were okay.) “I was on my knees there with my eyes closed trying to concentrate on what was being said, but it came out that I was in a praying position and blah, blah, blah. Well, that’s not true.”

  Given the tragic deaths of Elliot See and Charlie Bassett just days before Gemini VIII, NASA should have been prepared to show far greater consideration for the astronauts’ wives. See and Armstrong, the two civilians chosen by NASA for the New Nine back in 1962, had become quite close working together as the backup crew for Gemini V. In that role, they had spent a lot of time together, as had Janet with Elliot’s wife Marilyn. Not since Chet Cheshire back in Korea had Neil grown so close personally to another man. “Elliot was a hard worker, diligent. He really worked hard on Gemini V. He had good ideas and would express them. He may not have had the same personality as most of the astronauts, but being of a little bit different personality is not necessarily bad. I heard from others that they thought his piloting—particularly his instrument skills—were not as good as they should have been. I flew with him a good bit, and I don’t recall anything that was of substantial concern to me.”

  The deaths of Elliot and fellow Gemini XI crew member Charlie Bassett had occurred as they were coming in for a landing at St. Louis’s Lambert Field in a T-38 airplane. The two men had flown up from Houston, accompanied by Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan, their backup crew, in another T-38, in order for the four of them to get in some practice time on McDonnell’s rendezvous simulator. Approaching the field in bad weather and low cloud cover, both planes overshot the runway. St
afford climbed straight out of the fog, circled, and landed safely. Hoping to keep the field in sight, See banked to the left to stay below the clouds. His T-38 slipped too low. The aircraft smashed into Building 101, the same building in which McDonnell technicians were working on the Gemini IX spacecraft. Elliot and Charlie died instantly; no one else was killed.

  For certain astronauts, the circumstances of Elliot’s death only confirmed their dubious opinion of his astronaut status. Neil never saw it that way: “It’s difficult to try and blame him for his own death, and I certainly wouldn’t do that. When you’re doing a low go-around underneath low clouds it’s hard to be sure…It’s easy to say, well, what he should have done was gone back up through the clouds and made another approach. There might have been other considerations that we’re not even aware of. I would not begin to say that his death proves the first thing about his qualifications as an astronaut.”

  Armstrong also knew Bassett, and Janet knew his wife Jeannie, but not nearly as well as they knew the Sees. “Charlie was a very affable fellow,” Neil relates. “He had a good reputation and was in my branch in the Astronaut Office. I had worked with him some. It’s always hard to lose friends, but it was a common occurrence in the world I lived in.”

  On March 2, 1966, two weeks to the day before the launch of Gemini VIII, Neil and Janet joined a large group of mourners, most of them NASA employees, at two separate memorial services held for their deceased comrades. Elliot’s funeral took place at Seabrook Methodist Church at ten in the morning, Charlie’s at Webster Presbyterian Church at one-thirty in the afternoon. The following day, with every one of the astronauts present, the two astronauts were buried in Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington, DC. NASA’s attention to the emotional state of their astronaut corps seemed virtually nonexistent. “I don’t have any knowledge of them having such concerns,” Armstrong recalls of the days between the death of his close friend and his own command of the most complicated space mission ever tried.