Buzz’s relationship with his sisters, living on the floor down below, was not very close. Older sister Madeline left her active little brother to his own playful occupations, while Fay Ann and Buzz mostly quarreled and picked at each other. Both girls teased him for not doing as well in school as they. One gets the definite impression that Buzz spent a lot of time alone. He worshiped the Lone Ranger for his independence and great sense of justice. Buzz liked sports but preferred those that were solitary, notably pole vaulting and scuba diving. For seven straight summers, from ages nine to fifteen, he went off to boys’ camp at Trout Lake in southern Maine. Sometimes his parents would make a visit, but mostly they spent their summers at the New Jersey shore. “The eight weeks raced by each summer and I was never once homesick. I look back on my experience at camp as being quite instrumental in leading me toward what I call competitive appreciation for associating with other people: having standards set for you, set by other people, or standards you would set for yourself.”
His ambition to excel grew by leaps and bounds. Small for his age, he picked a number of fights, hoping to prove something by getting a black eye. In pickup football games around his neighborhood, he played with older boys, impressing them with his energy and aggressiveness. At camp, he did his utmost to win individual awards, and he won many, including a trophy when he was eleven for the best all-around camper. Once he became serious about academic matters during the ninth grade, he was “crushed” whenever he received a grade as low as a B. At his father’s insistence, he sat out of football during his junior year so as to continue producing the even higher grades he would need to be accepted into a military academy. When he returned to the football team as a senior, they won the New Jersey state championship. Although still small for his age, Aldrin played center, opposing the much bigger defensive linemen.
Buzz’s father, however distant, loomed larger over him than any football opponent. “My father never gave direct instructions nor stated goals, but what was expected was somehow made clear. I also knew he was more important than most of my friends’ fathers.”
When the United States entered World War II, Buzz was eleven. Aldrin Sr. returned to duty as a full colonel. In the South Pacific, he worked as inspector general of the Thirteenth Air Force. Activated at New Caledonia in the Coral Sea in early 1943, the Thirteenth staged out of tropical jungles on more than forty remote islands, thus earning the nickname the “Jungle Air Force.” Later, in Europe, Gene Aldrin studied antisubmarine warfare. Buzz remembers that visits home “were always short and, it seemed to me, rather remote.” When the war ended, his father was serving as chief of the All Weather Flying Center at Wright Field in Ohio.
Immediately following Buzz’s graduation from Montclair High School in 1947, his dad enrolled him in a military preparatory “poop school,” Severn School in Maryland, not far from Annapolis, home of the U.S. Naval Academy. Without Buzz’s knowledge, his father was laying the groundwork for his son’s admission to Annapolis. Even when Buzz told him that he much preferred the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, his father persisted. “I advocated the Naval Academy,” Gene Aldrin remarked later, “because they had more technical studies, engineering studies, and also because in my experience the navy took care of its people better.” His father even told Buzz’s mother, “As a matter of fact, I think Buzz prefers Annapolis.” That Aldrin Sr. preferred Annapolis was really all that mattered. Gene Aldrin secured a principal appointment to the naval academy for his son from New Jersey’s Republican senator Albert W. Hawkes.
But Buzz would not take his sights off West Point. “Whether the fact that my sister was dating a guy from West Point had anything to do with my preference, or that I got seasick, or that I felt that ships were a diversion from airplanes, I’m not sure. Somehow I just felt more aligned towards the army air corps and West Point. When news of the principal appointment to Annapolis came through, my father and I had a brief confrontation during which I stubbornly insisted that he go back to Senator Hawkes and say that my choice was West Point.” Very reluctantly, his father gave in, but only after the idea of Buzz’s going to West Point got assimilated into Gene Aldrin’s adjusted mental scheme for his son’s future.
At West Point, Buzz’s quest for excellence continued. At the end of his plebe year, as he notes proudly in his autobiography, he ranked first in his class. That summer, at Camp Buckner, a military reserve some ten miles from West Point, Aldrin received the assignment to be a company commander. As for the standardization and regimentation in West Point’s system of education, Aldrin liked its clarity: “To me, the beauty of the system was that you knew exactly where you were at all times. You could measure your progress. You also knew what was expected of you from day to day. You did your lessons, went to class, and performed.” Such clarity existed in the Aldrin home only when Buzz found ways to satisfy his father, which was extremely rare. When Buzz graduated from West Point third in his class, his father wanted to know who finished first and second.
During the summer preceding Buzz’s senior year at West Point, Gene Aldrin had “recommended” that his son apply for one of the prestigious Rhodes scholarships. Only those candidates with demonstrated excellence of mind and in qualities of person were seriously considered for the honor, which took them to Oxford University for two years of advanced studies. In the United States, a lengthy screening process annually sorted through hundreds of nominees until the field was reduced to thirty-two winners. In a building on the campus of Princeton University, Buzz interviewed for the Rhodes scholarship. He was not accepted.
“I fully expected my father to be disappointed and was not at all prepared for his immediate rationalization. ‘I didn’t really want it anyway,’ he said, ‘because it would do virtually nothing for [your] military career.’” Then, “Dad and I agreed that following West Point I would enter the air force.” Father and son disagreed, however, over what type of flying Buzz should do.
Once again, Buzz’s determination won out. His parents were in the viewing stands the autumn day in 1951 that Buzz earned his wings after completing fighter training in Bryan, Texas. After the ceremony, as a surprise for his father, Buzz arranged for one of his instructors to take his dad up in a T-33. “He was still lobbying for me to change to multiengine aircraft and I wanted him to sense some of the independence of the fighters,” Buzz relates. “He was pleased with the flight but somewhat unimpressed.” No matter what Buzz did, it never seemed to be quite good enough.
Aldrin fought in Korea with the 51st Fighter Wing; his outfit, flying the F-86 interceptor, arrived in Seoul the day after Christmas 1951. That same day, as cold winds hit nearly 100 miles per hour in the Sea of Japan, Neil Armstrong on the carrier Essex left Yokosuka for his third round of combat flying over North Korea. By the time the final cease-fire was negotiated in July 1952, Aldrin had flown a total of sixty-six missions. He had three encounters in his Sabre jet with Soviet MiGs. In the first, on May 14, in his own words, he “simply flew up behind the enemy and shot him down.” It might have been “a singularly undramatic experience: no dogfight, no maneuvers, no excitement,” but it was one that Aldrin’s gun camera caught on film, the first such pictures of the Korean War showing an enemy pilot bailing out. Life magazine ran the pictures the following week.
Buzz’s second encounter with a MiG, on June 7, was more daring, even reckless, though for that Aldrin was not responsible. With two of the planes in his formation of four having aborted their flight due to engine trouble, Aldrin tried to catch up in his F-86E with a preceding formation of faster F-86Fs. The planes led him into what turned out to be an unauthorized mission against an enemy airfield some fifty miles north of the Yalu River inside Manchuria. Near the forbidden target Buzz engaged and shot down his second MiG. Now over two hundred miles from base, he barely made it back. Debriefing with the renegade squadron of F-86Fs, something that was customary for a pilot to do after joining up with another formation, Buzz never told anyone else about the foray into Manchuria.
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Aldrin’s third and final encounter with MiG aircraft came shortly before the armistice. Observing several of the Russian jets heading north, he ineffectively fired several bursts at them from long distance. Buzz did not leave Korea until December 1952. For the last six months of his combat tour, he flew escort missions up and down the coast, being careful never to infringe on the twelve-mile limit that by treaty was now ensuring the legitimacy of North Korea’s boundary.
Back in the States, Aldrin reported to Nevada’s Nellis Air Force Base as a gunnery instructor. The following year, 1955, he applied and received a three-month assignment to Squadron Officer School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. In between, on December 29, 1954, Buzz married a bright and articulate young woman with a master’s degree from Columbia University named Joan Archer, the daughter of one of his parents’ friends. Joan came to think of her husband as “a curious mixture of magnificent confidence bordering on conceit, and humility.” One of his classmates at Maxwell, a captain that Buzz respected a great deal, felt similarly, and one day took Buzz aside to tell him so. “He said, in effect, that I was too competitive, too insensitive to others, too determined to be the best, and that if I didn’t watch it I’d end up with a reputation as a hotshot egotist.” With “tears streaming down my cheeks,” Buzz thanked the captain.
When a baby boy, James Michael Aldrin, was born to the newlyweds nine months later, Buzz’s father displayed a rare moment of delight while having a celebratory drink of bourbon with his son. “It was one of the few times I can remember,” Buzz remarks, “when my normally stern and disciplined father was literally fidgety with happiness.” The only comparable father-son experience occurred when Buzz was nine years old. He was heading out the front door for his first trip to summer camp when his father stopped him, took him into one of the ground-floor bedrooms, sat him on the bed, and explained to him “the engineering wonders of pipes.” According to Buzz, “the subject of the birds and the bees was woefully imprecise to my father compared with the exactness of fitting pipes together.”
Finishing the officers’ school at Maxwell, the Aldrins went to Colorado Springs, where Buzz served as aide to General Don Z. Zimmerman, dean of faculty at the new U.S. Air Force Academy. They stayed there, and loved the place, until General Zimmerman moved on to a job in the Pentagon. Then, in August 1956, Buzz joined the 36th Fighter-Day Wing, stationed in Bitburg, Germany. For the next three years, the Aldrins lived in Germany. While Buzz was busy flying the F-100, the most sophisticated fighter in the air force, and practicing nuclear strikes against targets behind what was then called the Iron Curtain, Joan gave birth to two more children, Janice Rose on August 16, 1957, and Andrew John on June 17, 1958.
One of the friends Buzz made at Bitburg was Ed White. In 1958, when White completed his time at Bitburg, Ed enrolled at the University of Michigan for graduate work in aeronautics. By now Aldrin had set his sights on the air force’s experimental test pilot school at Edwards, but he believed that getting more education before going there, like Ed White was doing, would be the “perfect combination” to achieve whatever his future career goals might be. “I knew I needed more formal education,” Buzz stated. “Not because I wanted to know more for the sake of knowing; I needed knowledge that I could put to useful work.”
He asked the air force to send him to MIT, the school from which his father had earned a doctor of science degree some thirty years earlier. His first term in the fall of 1959 Buzz took from a bed in the Chelsea Naval Hospital, the military hospital closest to MIT. While touring southern Italy before returning from Bitburg, he and Joan had drunk some house wine that gave them both bad cases of infectious hepatitis. “I had nothing to do but study,” Aldrin recalls. “It paid off because when the first-semester grades were posted in December, I was first in our class of air force officers.”
In three years’ time, Buzz finished a doctor of science degree (not a PhD, as has often been indicated). The title of his 259-page thesis was “Line of Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous.” “I wanted to choose a subject which would have practical application to the air force, but which might also apply to astronautics.” Wanting to contribute to the problem from the pilot’s viewpoint, Aldrin zeroed in on the idea of what he called “man-controlling” rendezvous. “I knew there were computers and other sophisticated means of rendezvous being planned, but what if they failed at the last minute? Success would depend on the amount of knowledge the astronaut had about man-controlled rendezvous.”
Buzz had a difficult time getting his thesis committee to approve his work. The members of the committee were Walter Wrigley, the thesis adviser and professor of instrumentation and aeronautics; Robert L. Halfman, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics; Myron A. Hoffman, assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics; and Norman E. Sears, group leader, Apollo Space Guidance Analysis Division, MIT Instrumentation Laboratory. Wrigley, a protégé of Dr. Charles Stark Draper and, like Draper, a specialist on inertial navigation, had serious questions about Buzz’s emphasis on the need for piloting abilities to control spacecraft in precise maneuvers. So, too, did the thesis’s outside reader, astronautics professor Dr. Richard Batten, who felt that Aldrin was not paying enough attention to the advantages of automated and computerized control systems.
For Buzz, passing the doctoral examination was a “very humbling” experience. “I did not know how to please academia. I took the written examination twice before doing it well enough to suit my advisers, and the oral exam was nearly my Waterloo. Deliberative, precise, and theoretical, Aldrin was not exactly quick on the verbal uptake,” Buzz has explained. “But one day I emerged drenched with sweat—and victorious.” Securing committee approval was even more difficult than Buzz knew at the time. Professor Batten, for one, refused to sign the approval form until the thesis underwent significant revision. “They wanted me to revise,” Buzz admits, “and I agreed to do it, but my time had run out and I had an air force assignment [at its Space Systems Division in Los Angeles]. Then the air force assignment got me into the astronaut business and the folks at MIT kind of gave up expecting revisions of my thesis.”
Buzz dedicated his thesis to “the crew of this country’s present and future manned space programs. If only I could join them in their exciting endeavors!” In fact, he had already tried to become one of them. In the spring of 1962, as he was starting work on his doctorate, Aldrin had applied for the second class of astronauts, the one to which his friend Ed White and his future Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong was selected. At that point, flight test experience was still required, so Buzz tried for a waiver. “I knew darned well I wouldn’t get it, but I wanted the application in the record.”
By the time NASA announced that it would be selecting a third class of astronauts, Buzz had orders to work on Defense Department experiments that would be flying aboard the Gemini spacecraft, but he got to Houston another way. Passing the battery of psychological and the physical tests (there was some concern about his liver function due to the hepatitis), Major Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. became one of the fourteen astronauts announced to the public on October 17, 1963, the same class as Mike Collins.
Assigned early in his training to mission planning, Aldrin became a member of the MSC panel on rendezvous and reentry. Strangely, in his view, all of the important work on rendezvous, Buzz’s specialty at MIT, was in the hands of another panel, one focused on trajectories and orbits. Buzz made the “tactical error” of pointing out “the absurdity of this arrangement.” Several of his peers started referring to him as “Dr. Rendezvous.” Apt though it was due to his MIT degree, the sobriquet was not meant to be flattering. Asked whether any of his fellow astronauts felt disdainful of his advanced degree, Aldrin today answers, “I think, yes.” Buzz understood fully well that the term “Dr. Rendezvous” was used behind his back to make fun of him: “They were doing that, there’s no doubt about it.”
It is doubtful that Armstrong ever used the term,
though he was certainly aware of it. “Buzz was very able in rendezvous matters. He knew more about that than anybody else in the Astronaut Office. He didn’t hide that fact, but he didn’t take advantage of it either, from my observations.”
As an astronaut, Aldrin exhibited the same curious combination of ambitiousness and naïveté, of maneuvering and total directness, that characterized his earlier life. Unsure how Deke Slayton selected crews, Buzz asked a number of other astronauts how it all worked. When he did not get satisfactory answers from the fellows, largely because none of them really knew either, Buzz decided to go right to Slayton and ask. As crew after crew for the Gemini flights were announced in 1965 and 1966 without his name being included, Aldrin grew too frustrated to hold back. Dave Scott, like Aldrin, a Class of 1963 astronaut, got put on the crew with Armstrong for Gemini VIII. Gene Cernan, another member of his class, got the prime assignment for Gemini IX. Mike Collins, another classmate, teamed up with John Young for Gemini X. Aldrin lamented to Deke, “I understand the rendezvous business as well if not better than any of the others…I also told him that I had no idea at all how the selections were made, but that I felt it was honest to at least state that I had some pretty good qualifications. When I finished, there was a moment of awkward silence before Deke politely said he’d take the matter under consideration. What I had done, in my characteristic directness, was break an unstated ethic. I had been brash. I didn’t think of it as a brash thing to do, but apparently that is how it was greeted by the NASA hierarchy.”
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