First Man

by James R. Hansen

  Neil’s main frustration was not with his aeronautics job per se but with the ongoing “requests” from NASA, Congress, and the White House for “appearances on demand,” which Neil came to find “a real burden.” “I would say to NASA, ‘Here’s the proposal so tell me what you want me to do.’ In general that was true for all public appearances while I was in government service. I didn’t have a choice.”

  Many an evening was spent on the Washington dinner-party circuit. Recollects Janet, “We were able to meet a lot of Washington people. They enjoyed meeting Neil personally and congratulating him for what Apollo 11 accomplished for our country and the world. Since we were still on the government pay scale [Neil’s annual salary was $36,000], there was not much money available. Dottie Blackman, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, was a fine seamstress and operated a dress store in Minnesota before their move to DC. She was a dear friend and helped with [evening] clothes.”

  Armstrong took every opportunity to fly airplanes, including NASA transports en route to the Ames, Lewis, Langley, or Dryden laboratories. “I was able to maintain my flight currency—not as current as I would have liked, but better than not at all. And being around the research programs involving the field centers gave me the opportunity to accept some invitations to fly other aircraft”—including England’s Handley-Page 115, a small aircraft to test the Concorde supersonic transport’s highly swept wing shape; Germany’s large Akaflieg Braunschweig SB-8 sailplane, innovative for its use of structural composite materials; and England’s Short SC-1, an experimental VTOL machine, only two of which were built. When he got to the RAF airfield, however, the SC-1 was temporarily out of commission.

  NASA’s foremost aeronautical endeavor of the 1960s fell victim to politics when, on March 24, 1971, in one of the most dramatic roll calls in modern U.S. Senate history, fifty-one senators voted to deny further funding for the American supersonic transport program. “In our office, we didn’t have any responsibility for the SST, but we followed it closely. I thought the prototype aircraft that Boeing was building would be a good research machine that we at NASA would want access to. Consequently I stayed relatively close to what was going on. I knew Bill [William M.] Magruder, [the national director of the SST program, first for the FAA and then for the Department of Transportation] very well and I had a lot of responsibilities in that area. Scott Crossfield was the SST guy for Eastern Airlines at the time, and I knew him, too. Different congressmen and senators [asked] for my opinion on SST matters. Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson, who had introduced legislation to prohibit the operation of any civil supersonic aircraft within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States until—and unless—sonic boom and stratospheric pollution from such aircraft could be reduced to zero, asked me a specific question about the subject [Armstrong was in favor of continuing the SST program] and my answer wasn’t to his liking. Nonetheless, Nelson went right over to the floor of the Senate and immediately quoted me as saying just the opposite of what I had said. I was learning the ways of Washington.”

  The demise of the American SST had no bearing on Neil’s decision, in August 1971, to resign from NASA for a teaching post at the University of Cincinnati. “I had always told people it was my intention to go back to the university. That was not a new thought for me. I didn’t want to leave NASA precipitously, though it was never my intention to be in that bureaucracy job that long. I had met the president of the University of Cincinnati on several occasions. His name was Walter C. Langsam, a historian of early-twentieth-century Europe. Walter had talked to me and written me a couple of nice little notes saying how much he would like me to come to his university. Walter said, ‘If you come, we will make you a full professor and you can do whatever you want.’ I decided to accept the invitation. I had had a lot of university invitations by this point but most of them—far and away the majority of them—were invitations to be considered for university presidencies. I just wanted to be a professor.”

  Curiously, NASA offered little resistance to Armstrong’s departure. The new Nixon-appointed NASA administrator, Dr. James C. Fletcher, issued the following statement: “It is with special regret that I accept Neil Armstrong’s resignation, and I wish him well in his new duties at the University of Cincinnati. His contribution to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration went far beyond his role as an astronaut and as a commander of the first Moon landing. He joined the Agency as a research test pilot, and he leaves it as Deputy Administrator for Aeronautics. In all his duties he has served with distinction and dedication.” Neil’s time in civilian government service totaled sixteen and a half years. Fletcher indicated that Armstrong would serve as a part-time NASA consultant, something that Neil personally did not plan on doing or, in the end, actually did.

  Some people in and around NASA thought that Neil must be “batty” for landing in a place like Cincinnati. An editorial in the Cincinnati Enquirer stated, “One would have to imagine the appointment of Christopher Columbus as a professor of navigation at, say, the University of Barcelona, or the appointment of Thomas Edison as a professor of electrical engineering at Rutgers, or the appointment of Napoleon as a professor of military science at the Sorbonne to grasp the significance of the University of Cincinnati’s success in engaging the talents of Neil Armstrong as a professor of aerospace engineering.” A cartoon in the same newspaper showed him standing behind a classroom lectern with a space helmet on his head and one student sitting at a desk whispering to another, “They say his lectures are out of this world.” The unkindest comment from a local writer was that university officials “hoped” Neil “will pimp for UC,” a comment for which the writer’s newspaper later apologized in print.

  Friends and associates recall Neil’s interest over the years in writing an engineering textbook. Most suspected a geographic pull, which Neil flatly denies: “Returning to Ohio wasn’t a consideration.”

  Even a professorship at one of the elite engineering schools—Caltech, MIT, Stanford, Georgia Tech, even Neil’s alma mater, Purdue—would not have been as appealing. “I thought Cincinnati’s was a pretty good department and it was small, about a dozen people,” and unlikely to protest Neil’s immediate full-tenure status without the customary year of probation. Department head Dr. Tom Davis was a fairly well known specialist in the burgeoning field of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The program offered a PhD degree, though Neil’s highest academic achievement was a master’s, recently awarded at the University of Southern California after more than a ten-year stretch of off-and-on graduate work.* Asked by a reporter whether Armstrong wouldn’t be the university’s only full professor minus a doctorate, a UC spokesman responded, “We don’t have any others that have been on the Moon, either.”

  Armstrong’s title was university professor of aerospace engineering. Students called him “Professor Armstrong” or “Dr. Armstrong,” even though the only doctorates that he had at this point were honorary (from Wittenberg University and Miami University in Ohio and his alma mater, Purdue).† The faculty naturally called him Neil. “I seemed to get along well with all the other members of the department. I don’t know what their thoughts were about me, but I felt comfortable with all of them, and some I became quite good friends with.”

  Neil could have gotten away with a light teaching load, but that wasn’t what he wanted. “I didn’t want to get out of any of the teaching. I didn’t even mind teaching core courses, though I didn’t teach a lot of them. It was always a scramble to find enough guys to cover all the courses, so I did. I taught three quarters a year and took the summer off. I was usually there every day. I did travel some, but tried to make sure it didn’t interfere with my normal full schedule of responsibilities.”

  Getting started in the classroom did not prove easy for such a famous person. Dave Burrus, a student in Armstrong’s very first class, remembers the scene: “The first day of class started out normal like any other. At the end of class when we opened the door to leave we found the h
all packed with reporters. Chaos broke out almost immediately. I was the last student out the door. Professor Armstrong grabbed the door handle and slammed the door shut and would not come out.

  “The reporters had no one to interview except the students,” so Burrus obliged: “I guess he’ll never be just another professor. I’m just afraid he’ll get bugged and leave. He’s the best thing that ever happened to this program.” Other students were more antagonistic: “Why don’t you guys leave him alone. He’s just another person now, just another professor. Give him a break.”

  Neil remembers that first day. “It was very chaotic. I was just trying to get these guys started in a worthwhile class, and it was hard on them and hard on me. Just another example of how journalists aren’t always very thoughtful.”

  Neither, apparently, were actresses. In 1974 Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida appeared unannounced at the door to his Baldwin Hall classroom, much to the delight of the students, but not to their teacher. “She came to town ostensibly to take pictures for a book she was doing, but it turned out that it wasn’t for a book at all but rather for a magazine article [Ladies’ Home Journal, August 1974]. I really liked Gina from my visits with her in Mexico and Italy [during the 1969 Giant Leap world tour], but I was really disappointed in her not being truthful about her objective.”

  Armstrong personally invented two courses for the department. The first was aircraft design. “I didn’t come with a background in design, but no one was teaching that course and, since I had never been successful at being a designer, I thought I at least could teach it.” The second was experimental flight mechanics, which basically concerned how professional flight-testing got done. Most students took both courses in the series. “They were the courses most important to me personally, and I thought they were interesting offerings that a lot of students might enjoy. Both of them were graduate courses, though they were available to upper-level undergraduates, generally seniors.”

  Students were surprised to find their celebrity professor such an excellent teacher. Though a serious lecturer and a demanding grader, near the end of an academic quarter he was known to relate some of his favorite flying stories.

  “When we got to the first quiz, reality set in!” Neil remembers. “In the core courses I tried to be reasonable, but maybe I was a little tough there, too. But certainly in the upper-level courses I tried to make the tests challenging. I thought that graduate-level courses—even for undergraduates stepping up to the graduate level—shouldn’t ever be considered as pushovers…I was not a believer in the big final test—a one-shotter. I wasn’t taught that way at Purdue. In the real world, though, you do have to face big final tests from time to time, and there’s always a chance that if you have an off day at the wrong time it can really penalize you badly.”

  Armstrong ultimately failed to navigate the Byzantine labyrinth of university politics. “I really couldn’t work the system. I had determined not to take any work from NASA; I wouldn’t make proposals to them because I thought it might be viewed as taking advantage of my past association, which I wouldn’t do. In retrospect, I was probably wrong about that. I probably should have been active, because I would have known exactly where to go to get some satisfying research projects done. It would have been easier in terms of funding sources had I taken that route.”

  Two major changes at the University of Cincinnati ultimately led, in 1980, to Armstrong’s leaving the school. “It was burdened with lots of new rules,” relates Armstrong of UC’s shift from independent municipal university to state-school status. “In order to escape being bound to the rules of the faculty collective bargaining group, it was required that I be less than full-time. So a strategy some of us tried was going to half-time teaching and half-time in a research institute.” In July 1975, the university approved George Rieveschl, a UC chemist famous for his invention of Benadryl, the first antihistamine; Edward A. Patrick, an electrical engineering professor; Dr. Henry Heimlich, Cincinnati’s famous inventor of the Heimlich maneuver, who practiced medicine at the local Jewish hospital; and Armstrong coming together as the Institute of Engineering and Medicine.

  Like others over the years who have been philosophically opposed to collective bargaining agreements, Armstrong “wanted to be valued on my own merits, not on some group’s merits. Because I was involved by this time in professional societies, projects of various kinds, sometimes speaking engagements, I was looking for a way to legally circumvent this envelope of instructions that had been thrown over the top of us.

  “Establishing the institute was not something that had been high on my priority list. It was just kind of a necessary evil. Once getting into the work, though, I did find some of it very interesting and tried to actively participate in it.” What got the most publicity in the newspapers were reputed attempts to design a palm-sized artificial heart on the basis of the coolant pump that had been used in the Apollo space suit, and to develop a portable artificial lung from a modified version of the PLSS (Portable Life Support System). According to Armstrong, however, “the project was only intended to investigate methods of reducing damage to blood cells while being pumped. The press extrapolated and created some confusion in this matter.

  “Yet the university’s rules were still so cumbersome that I just went completely to half-time. Really it was half-time in name only—what it really amounted to was half pay,”* and ultimately “a conflict of the instructions between my basic job as it had been offered to me by President Langsam and the new rules.” Beyond that, “I could not expect the volume of requests coming my way to subside—some of which were good opportunities with good people and quality institutions. I realized that, in my situation, I couldn’t remain in that kind of job. On the other hand, taking board of directors’ positions provided a livelihood without obliging myself to spend all of my time with any one of them.”

  For Armstrong, his last years at the university were not especially stressful, “just irritating.” In the autumn of 1979 he wrote a short note of resignation, effective the first of the year, to President Henry R. Winkler, Warren Bennis’s successor after Langsam as UC president. Winkler reported to his board of trustees about the resignation: “Now, Neil’s own personal career pursuits lead him into other activities…. I hope that he will always continue to look upon the University of Cincinnati as his academic home.” To some colleagues, including Dr. Ron Houston, the head of the newly organized Institute of Applied Interdisciplinary Research, which subsumed the Institute of Engineering and Medicine in 1978 with Neil as its associate director, Armstrong’s leaving was a mystery: “He didn’t even say why he was leaving.”

  To the press Winkler intimated that Neil’s financial situation might have played a role. “The resignation was necessary in light of his own personal plans and ‘personal reasons.’ I assume ‘personal reasons’ might include the economic status of his family.” UC director of information services, Ken Service, surmised: “When you’re the first man on the Moon and everyone’s hanging on you, I guess you just get tired of it after a while.”

  In January 1979 Neil, after turning down any number of lucrative promotional offers, agreed to become a national spokesperson for the Chrysler Corporation.

  His first TV commercial for the American car manufacturer came during the telecast of that month’s Super Bowl XIII, which Neil attended in Miami in the company of Chrysler execs. More TV spots aired the next day as did splashy print ads in fifty U.S. newspaper markets, showing Neil endorsing Chrysler’s new five-year, 50,000-mile protection plan. At the 185-acre Warren County farm northwest of Lebanon, Ohio, that the Armstrongs had purchased after moving from Bethesda, a small fleet of Chrysler automobiles—a New Yorker, Fifth Edition, Cordoba, W200 four-wheel-drive pickup truck, two different front-wheel-drive Omnis, and a Plymouth Horizon—had been seen parked for days at a time. According to Janet, Neil had told Chrysler, “‘I need to try your product first.’”

  The press asked questions: Why is Armstrong starting to do a
dvertising now, after all this time? And why Chrysler, of all companies? Neil explains today: “In the Chrysler case, they were under severe attack and in financial difficulty, but they had been perhaps the preeminent engineering leader in automotive products in the United States, just very impressive. I was concerned about them and when their head of marketing approached me to take a role that was not just as a public spokesman but also as someone to be involved in their technical decision-making process, I became attracted to that. I visited Detroit, where I talked to Chrysler head Lee Iacocca and other leading company executives [one of them ironically named “Moon Mullins”]. I had a look at the projects they were working on. I got to know some of their people and concluded that it was something I should try.

  “It wasn’t an easy decision, because I hadn’t done anything like it before. Yet I decided to try, on the basis of a three-year agreement. I loved the engineering aspects of the job, but I didn’t think I was very competent in the role as a spokesman. I tried my best, but it wasn’t something I was good at. I was always struggling to do it properly.”

  In the coming months Armstrong forged professional relationships with General Time Corp. (a subsidiary of Tally Industries) and the Bankers Association of America. He made promotional commitments on a case-by-case basis, in General Time’s case by conceiving his involvement not as a commercial endorsement of the company’s “Quartzmatic wristwatch” but rather a technological breakthrough. “The Quartz watch company had built the timer in the lunar module, so that was the connection there—the technology was good. As it turned out, the product quality was not as good as I thought it should be. As for the American Bankers Association, it was not a commercial organization, but rather did an institutional kind of advertising. We made a couple of ads, but it just didn’t come together.”

  Armstrong’s trial run as a public spokesman for select American—always American—products proved to be temporary, but corporate concerns became his primary focus for the rest of his professional life.