In response to the reporter’s question about choosing his first words from on the lunar surface, Armstrong simply answered, “No, I haven’t.” As hard as it may be to believe, that was the plain truth. “The most important part of the flight in my mind was the landing,” Armstrong explains today. “I thought that if there was any statement to have any importance, it would be whatever occurred right after landing, when the engine stopped. I had given some thought to what we would call the landing site. I had also thought about what I would say right at the landing; I thought it was the one that history might note. But not even that was something that I had given a great deal of thought to, because, statistics aside, my gut feeling was that, whereas we had a ninety percent chance of returning safely to Earth, our chances were only even money of actually making the landing.”
In fact, Neil had already chosen Tranquility Base as the name of the spot on the Sea of Tranquility where he and Aldrin would land; privately, he had told Charlie Duke about the name, since Duke would serve as CapCom during the landing and Neil did not want Charlie to be caught unawares when Neil used the phrase immediately upon touchdown. “In the absence of official names for the various locations and landmarks on the lunar surface,” he told the press, “we have chosen to use some unofficial names for our recognition purposes and for our training purposes, and we’ll continue to do that.” No one else in NASA besides Charlie Duke knew about Tranquility Base until Eagle landed.
A special high-level government committee had decided that Armstrong and Aldrin should leave three items on the surface as symbolic of humankind’s arrival. The first was a plaque mounted on the leg of the LM that held the ladder down which the astronauts would climb. This plaque depicted the Earth’s two hemispheres; on it was inscribed the statement, HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH SET FOOT UPON THE MOON, JULY 1969 A.D. WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND. The second item was a small disk, less than one and a half inches in diameter, upon which had been electronically recorded a microminiaturized photo-print of goodwill letters from various heads of states around the world. The third item was the American flag.
“I would like to ask Neil Armstrong if he agrees with the congressional mandate which specifies that the U.S. flag and only the U.S. flag will be implanted on the Moon on Apollo 11,” a foreign reporter asked at the prelaunch press conference on July 5.
“Well, I suspect that if we asked all the people in the audience and all of us up here,” answered Neil, “all of us would give different ideas on what they would like to take to the Moon and think should be taken, everyone within his own experience. I don’t think that there is any question what our job is. Our job is to fly the spacecraft as best as we can. We never would suggest that it is our responsibility to suggest what the U.S. posture on the Moon should be. That decision has been made where it should be made, namely in the Congress of this country. I wouldn’t presume to question it.
“Some people thought a United Nations flag should be there,” Armstrong explains today, “and some people thought there should be flags of a lot of nations. In the end, it was decided by Congress that this was a United States project. We were not going to make any territorial claim, but we ought to let people know that we were here and put up a U.S. flag. My job was to get the flag there. I was less concerned about whether that was the right artifact to place. I let other, wiser minds than mine make those kinds of decisions.”
Later at the press conference, Armstrong responded to another question from a foreign correspondent as to whether there was not some legal importance to the United States’ landing first on the Moon. As so often was the case, there was a simple eloquence in the offhanded directness of Neil’s answer: “I think we might refer to this plaque again, in the last line. It says we came in peace for all mankind. I think that is precisely what we mean.”
Reporters tried hard—and mostly in vain—to get Armstrong to philosophize about the historical significance of the Moon landing. “What particular gain do you see in going to the Moon for yourselves as human beings, for your country, and for mankind as a whole?” “Do you think that eventually the Moon will become part of the civilized world just as the Antarctic is now, which was also once a removed and unacceptable place?”
“First, let me repeat something that you have all heard before, but probably addresses itself to your question,” Armstrong answered. “That is, the objective of this flight is precisely to take man to the Moon, make a landing there, and return. That is the objective. There are a number of peripheral secondary objectives including some of those you mentioned early in the question that we hope very highly to achieve in great depth. But the primary objective is the ability to demonstrate that man, in fact, can do this kind of job. How we’ll use that information in the centuries to come, only history can tell. I hope that we’re wise enough to use the information that we get on these early flights to the maximum advantage possible, and I would think that in the light of our experience over the past decade that we can indeed hope for that kind of result.”
Nor did the journalists have much luck in provoking Armstrong into giving anything other than unemotional, engineering answers about the grave risks inherent to the flight.
“What would, according to you, be the most dangerous phase of the flight of Apollo 11?”
“Well, as in any flight, the things that give one most concern are those which have not been done previously, things that are new. I would hope that in our initial statement that we gave to you an idea, at least, of what the new things on this flight are. Now, there are other things that we always concern ourselves about greatly, and those are the situations where we have no alternative method to do the job, where we have only one. You, when you ride in an airliner across the Atlantic, depend on the wing of the airplane to stay on the fuselage; without it, you could not have made the trip, see? We have on recent flights had some of those kinds of situations. In our earlier lunar flights, the rocket engine for the service module must operate for us to return from the Moon. There are no alternatives. Similarly, in this flight, we have several situations like that. The LM engine must operate to accelerate us from the Moon’s surface into lunar orbit, and the service module engine, of course, must operate again to return us to Earth. As we go farther and farther into spaceflight, there will be more and more of the single-point systems that must operate. We have a very high confidence level in those systems, incidentally.”
“What will your plans be in the extremely unlikely event that the lunar module does not come up off the lunar surface?”
“Well, that’s an unpleasant thing to think about and we’ve chosen not to think about that up to the present time. We don’t think that’s at all a likely situation. It’s simply a possible one, but at the present time we’re left without recourse should that occur.”
“What is the longest time, if the ascent stage doesn’t fire…I think Mike Collins said in an earlier interview that he would then have to just leave and go back to the Earth. What is the longest time you can wait between the not-firing and the time when Mike Collins would have to go back, the time you would have to work on the LM or fix whatever was wrong or try to fix it?”
“I don’t have the numbers. Probably it would be a matter of a couple of days.”
It was such seemingly passionless answers to questions about the human dimensions of spaceflight and about the historical and existential meanings of going to the Moon that piqued Norman Mailer’s razor-sharp acumen for disdainful insight. Like other reporters, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Naked and the Dead and Armies of the Night wanted more from Armstrong, a lot more. Mailer wrote that Armstrong “surrendered words about as happily as a hound allowed meat to be pulled out of his teeth”; that Armstrong “answered with his characteristic mixture of modesty and technical arrogance, of apology and tight-lipped superiority”; that Armstrong had “the sly privacy of a man whose thoughts may never be read”; that Armstrong, like a trapped animal, seemed to be looking for “a way to drift c
lear of any room like this where he was trapped with psyche-eaters, psyche-gorgers, and the duty of responding to questions heard some hundred of times.” At the same time, Armstrong was “a professional” who had “learned how to contend in a practical way with the necessary language,” always choosing words and phrases that “protected him.”
It intrigued Mailer (in narrating his book, Of a Fire on the Moon, Mailer called himself Aquarius, in reference to the hopeful spirit of a future Age of Aquarius) that Armstrong exuded such an “extraordinarily remote,” almost mystical quality that made him appear different from other men. “He was a presence in the room,” Mailer noted, “as much a spirit as a man. One hardly knew if he were the spirit of the high thermal currents or that spirit of neutrality which rises to the top in bureaucratic situations, or both…. Indeed, contradictions lay subtly upon him—it was not unlike looking at a bewildering nest of leaves: some are autumn fallings, some the green of early spring.” Of all the astronauts, Armstrong seemed “the man nearest to being saintly.” As a speaker, Neil was “all but limp.” Still, the overall impression Armstrong made on Mailer was not unremarkable. “Certainly the knowledge he was an astronaut restored his stature,” Mailer realized, “yet even if he had been a junior executive accepting an award, Armstrong would have presented a quality which was arresting…. He would have been more extraordinary in fact if he had been just a salesman making a modest inept dull little speech, for then one would have been forced to wonder how he had ever gotten his job, how he could sell even one item, how in fact he got out of the bed in the morning. Something particularly innocent or subtly sinister was in the gentle remote air. If he had been a young boy selling subscriptions at the door, one grandmother might have warned her granddaughter never to let him in the house; another would have commented, ‘That boy will go very far.’”
Mailer continued his dogged pursuit of the puzzle-that-was-Armstrong into the press conference organized exclusively for the magazine writers and beyond that into the studio where NBC filmed its interview of the astronauts. As the journalists kept pushing hard for the crew of Apollo 11 to disclose personal feelings and emotions, Mailer watched and listened as Armstrong entrenched himself ever deeper in his engineer’s protective cloak, the armor of “a shining knight of technology.” Armstrong replied in “a mild and honest voice” to a question about the role of intuition in his flying by remarking that intuition had “never been my strong suit” and by asserting, like a logical positivist, Mailer noted, that the best approach to any problem was to “interpret it properly, then attack it.”
Armstrong had mastered “computerese.” Instead of saying “we,” Neil convoluted the English language and said, “A joint exercise has demonstrated.” Instead of saying “other choices,” he referred to “peripheral secondary objectives.” Rather than “doing our best,” it was “obtaining maximum advantage possible.” To “turn on” and “turn off” became “enable” and “disable.” Mailer, who had rejected in disgust his own college education as an engineer, saw in Neil’s vernacular proof not only that “the more natural forms of English had not been built for the computer” but that Armstrong represented “either the end of the old or the first of the new men.”
“If not me, another,” Neil stated, to Mailer’s mind disclaiming “large reactions, large ideas” behind media comparisons of his own journey as commander of Apollo 11 to Christopher Columbus’s adventure in 1492. Armstrong’s concern was “directed mainly to doing the job,” one that could be done by no fewer than ten other astronauts. And hundreds of people were backing up his crew in Houston, at the Cape, at the other NASA centers, and tens of thousands had been working in industrial firms all around the country to enable Apollo to blaze its course. “It’s their success more than ours,” Neil humbly told the media.
Armstrong was no common hero, Mailer realized. “If they would insist on making him a hero,” the author noted, “he would be a hero on terms he alone would make clear.”
From Collins and Aldrin, the reporters were able to get a few remarks about family and personal background (Buzz mentioned the family jewelry he was taking with him to the Moon). Nothing of the sort came from Armstrong. “Will you take personal mementos to the Moon, Neil?”
“If I had a choice, I would take more fuel.”
“Will you keep a piece of the Moon for yourself?”
“At this time, no plans have been made” came the stiff response.
“Will you lose your private life after this achievement?”
“I think a private life is possible within the context of such an achievement.”
Neil left them with very few opportunities for discursive follow-ups. When the rare chance came, a member of the media rushed through the hole like a fullback plunging off-tackle to the goal line. Following a comment from Neil about the economic benefits to the nation of the space program, a writer jumped in to ask, “So, are we going to the Moon only for economic reasons, only to get out of an expensive hole of a sluggish economy? Don’t you see any philosophical reason why we might be going?”
It was exactly the sort of open-ended question that Armstrong had tried hard all day—in fact, all his life—not to answer. Yet it was a question that Neil could not avoid without looking like a “spiritual neuter,” to use Mailer’s phrase. “I think we’re going to the Moon,” Armstrong offered tentatively, “because it’s in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It’s by the nature of his deep inner soul. We’re required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.”
What precisely was in Armstrong’s own deep inner soul about the Moon landing, or about anything else that happened in his life—his true feelings about his father, his religious beliefs, the effects of little Karen’s death—was hardly laid bare by the remark, or by any other verbal statement he ever made. It was just not his way. Perhaps, his extraordinarily judicious restraint of expression was a deeply inculcated outcome of the avoidance strategy he had developed in childhood. Or perhaps it derived, as his first wife Janet today hesitantly suggests, from a feeling of social inferiority based on his humble family background in rural Ohio.
What Armstrong on the eve of becoming the First Man did not and would not define or explain about himself, others now sought, almost desperately in the days before the launch, to explain and define for him. All the humanistic and cosmic meanings that he would not fill in, others felt compelled to fill in for him. On the eve of humankind’s great adventure to set foot on another heavenly body, Armstrong had become like an oracle of ancient times, a medium, wise, prophetic, mysterious, by which fortunes and misfortunes were told, deities consulted, prayers answered.
Not until he constructed his own myth out of Armstrong could the creative mind of Norman Mailer be satisfied. It did not matter that Mailer would never meet Neil face to face, never once talk to him directly, never ask him a single question of his own. Mailer, too, had sat the before the oracle, “the most saintly of the astronauts,” someone who was “simply not like other men,” who was “apparently in communion with some string in the universe others did not think to play.” It was up to Mailer, up to Aquarius, to decode Armstrong.
Like Mailer, we were to be the author of our own Moon landing.
Mailer conjured the makings of his own Armstrong while sitting in on NBC correspondent Frank McGee’s interview with Neil near the end of the day on July 5. In the interview McGee referred to a story in Life by Dodie Hamblin in which Armstrong told of the recurring boyhood dream in which he hovered over the ground. Mailer had read Hamblin’s story when it appeared but dismissed its importance until he heard Armstrong, after a day filled with Neil’s engineer-speak, corroborate that, indeed, as a boy, he had such dreams. Mailer was taken with the beauty of the dream: “It was beautiful because it might soon prove to be prophetic, beautiful because it was profound and it was mysterious, beautiful because it was appropriate to a man who would land on the moon.” For Mailer, it was a type of epiphany, one by which he could constr
uct “The Psychology of Astronauts” and interpret the entire Space Age: “It was therefore a dream on which one might found a new theory of the dream, for any theory incapable of explaining this visitor of the night would have to be inadequate, unless it were ready to declare that levitation, breath, and the moon were not proper provinces of the dream.”
The idea that such a nonwhimsical man as Armstrong, as a young boy, dreamed of flight “intoxicated” Mailer, “for it dramatized how much at odds might be the extremes of Armstrong’s personality.” On the one hand, consciously, Armstrong, the archetypal astronaut-engineer, was grounded in the “conventional,” the “practical,” the “technical,” and the “hardworking.” He resided at the very “center of the suburban middle class.” On the other hand, what Armstrong and the other astronauts were doing in space was “enterprising beyond the limits of the imagination.” Their drive and ambition simply had to have a subconscious element.
It was in this union of opposites, the impenetrable fusion of the conscious and the unconscious, that one found in the modern technological age “a new psychological constitution to man.” More than any of the other astronauts, Neil’s personality stemmed from the core of that “magnetic human force called Americanism, Protestantism, or Waspitude.” He was the Lancelot of the silent majority, “the Wasp emerging from human history in order to take us to the stars.” Never mind that Mailer knew almost nothing about Armstrong’s family background, personal history, married life, religious beliefs, friends, or genuine psychological state. Aquarius’s object was not to understand Armstrong; it was to understand the comings and wrong-goings of humankind in the twentieth century:
On the one hand to dwell in the very center of technological reality…yet to inhabit—if only in one’s dreams—that other world where death, metaphysics and the unanswerable questions of eternity must reside, was to suggest natures so divided that they could have been the most miserable and unbalanced of men if they did not contain in their huge contradictions some of the profound and accelerating opposites of the country itself. The century would seek to dominate nature as it had never been dominated, would attack the idea of war, poverty and natural catastrophe as never before. The century would create death, devastation and pollution as never before. Yet the century was now attached to the idea that man must take his conception of life out to the stars.
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