First Man

by James R. Hansen

  Simultaneous with leaving UC, Neil entered into a business partnership with his brother Dean and their second cousin Richard Teichgraber, owner of oil industry supplier International Petroleum Services of El Dorado, Kansas. Dean, formerly the head of a General Motors’ Delco Remy transmission plant in Anderson, Indiana, became the IPS president; Neil became an IPS partner and the chairman of Cardwell International Ltd., a new subsidiary that made portable drilling rigs, half of them for overseas sale. “Neil has inroads with people we’d like to see,” Teichgraber said at the time of Cardwell’s formation. “Neil got us in to see the president of Mexico [Lopez Portillo].” Neil and his brother stayed involved with IPS/Cardwell for two years, at which time they sold their interests in the company. Dean later bought a Kansas bank.

  By 1982, Neil had several different corporate involvements: “I think some people invited me on their boards precisely because I didn’t have a business background, but I did have a technical background. So I accepted quite a few different board jobs. I turned down a lot more than I accepted.”

  The very first board on which Armstrong had agreed to serve, back in 1972, had been with Gates Learjet, then headed by Harry Combs. Chairing its technical committee and type-rated in the Learjet, Neil flew most of the new and experimental developments in the company’s line of business jets. In February 1979, he took off in a new Learjet from First Flight airstrip at nearby Kill Devil (where the Wright brothers made history’s first controlled and powered manned flight in December 1903) and climbed over the Atlantic Ocean to an altitude of 51,000 feet in a little over twelve minutes, setting new altitude and climb records for business jets.

  In the spring of 1973 Neil joined the board of Cincinnati Gas & Electric: “CG&E was very much an engineering company, for power generation. We were getting into the nuclear power age and the company wanted more technical competence generally, so they asked me to join.”

  Armstrong links his connection with Cincinnati-based Taft Broadcasting to Taft’s dynamic CEO and president Charles S. Mechem Jr., who was “one of the seven or eight Cincinnati people I invited as my guest to Gene Cernan’s Apollo 17 flight [the first night Moon shot] in December 1972.”

  Mechem’s recollection remains vivid: “Two-thirds of the way to the Cape, Neil said, ‘Oh, boy! I’ve left my wallet with all my identification back in the motel room.’ I was thinking, We’re going to get to the first checkpoint, and the guard’s going to say, ‘Who are you?’ and he’s going to say, ‘Neil Armstrong,’ and the guard’s going to say, ‘Yeah, and I’m George Washington.’

  “So we got to the first guard gate and the guard said, ‘Oh, you’re Neil Armstrong, aren’t you?’ And we go, ‘Yes! Yes! He is!’”

  Mechem gives a very clear impression of the strengths Armstrong brought to the corporate boardroom: “Typically you ask somebody to go on the board and they say, ‘Terrific, when’s the first meeting?’ Well, it wasn’t that way with Neil. After “probing as to why I wanted him and what he could bring to the board that didn’t have anything to do with his being the first man on the Moon,” Armstrong came on board.

  “Neil fit in perfectly,” Mechem declares, “because there was nobody quite like Neil.”

  Charlie remembers how “wonderfully compatible” Armstrong was “with our people.” “We had this dinner party and afterwards everybody went up into the hospitality suite, and I went to bed, and the next morning, they said, ‘Charlie! We were out on the balcony singing with Neil Armstrong!’”

  Armstrong’s celebrity led to an uproarious moment when, in the midst of photographing the Taft board of directors, the cameraman got behind the camera and said, “Mr. Armstrong, would you take one small step forward?”

  “Once involved in something, Neil never gave up. We were playing golf one time in a corporate outing with Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant, the football coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide, someone who was also very competitive. On the seventeenth hole there was a fairway bunker about a hundred yards long. Neil pulled his drive into it, walked in, and dutifully took a swipe, moving the ball maybe five yards. He didn’t say a word, just walked up, took another swipe, another five yards, maybe. Of course, Neil will never give up, ever. Paul and I were walking along, and Bear turned to me and huskily whispered, ‘Is this the man who went to the Moon?’”

  Then there was the time the Mechem and Armstrong families visited (Taft-owned) Kings Island upon the park’s grand opening: “‘Neil, what rides would you like to go on?’ And he said, ‘Nothing that’s too dangerous.’”

  One connection inevitably led to another. For example, Armstrong joined United Airlines in January 1978. When a Chicago blizzard forced United to accommodate its inbound board members at the UAL flight attendants training school, Neil spent three days with E. Mandell “Dell” De Windt, the chairman and CEO of Cleveland’s Eaton Corporation, who together with Eaton and United board member Nicholas Petrie, “conspired” until 1980 to get Neil to join the Eaton board. James Stover, CEO for Eaton following De Windt, asked Neil to join and chair a newly formed board of directors for their AIL Systems subsidiary located in Deer Park, New York, which made electronic warfare equipment (including defensive avionics systems for the B-1 bomber, tactical jamming systems, battlefield surveillance radar, laser guidance for missiles, and advanced microwave receivers). Neil and Jim Smith, president and CEO of AIL, were successful in taking the company private in 1977 and, in 2000, it merged with the EDO Corporation, which Neil chaired until his retirement from corporate life in2002.

  In March 1989, three years after the explosion of Space Shuttle Challenger, Armstrong joined Thiokol, who had made the Shuttle’s solid-rocket boosters (SRBs). If it had not been for Armstrong’s record of integrity, skeptics may have questioned the propriety of Neil’s joining Thiokol, given that he had served as vice chair of the Rogers Commission that had investigated the Challenger accident. But no one ever suggested any conflict of interest. Remembers James R. Wilson, then Thiokol’s chief financial officer: “We were this fragile entity recovering from the Challenger accident. Just the fact that Neil joined our board and loaned us his good name and reputation did an awful lot of good for our credibility in the marketplace with our customers.”

  Armstrong provided more than credibility for the Utah-based aerospace and defense contractor. With Neil’s help, Thiokol managed not only to survive but also grow, in the expanded form of Cordant Technologies, into a manufacturer of solid-rocket motors, jet aircraft engine components, and high-performance fastening systems worth some $2.5 billion, with manufacturing facilities throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. In 2000 Cordant was acquired in a cash deal by Alcoa, Inc., at which time the Thiokol board on which Neil had been serving for eleven years dissolved.

  Reluctant to assess the value of any of the corporate contributions he has made over the past thirty years, Armstrong only says, “I felt that in most cases I understood the issues and usually then had a view on what was the proper position on that issue…. I felt comfortable in the boardroom.”

  For the first time in his life, Armstrong also made a good deal of money. Besides handsome compensation for his activities as a director, he was also receiving significant stock options and investing his money wisely. By the time he and Janet divorced in 1994, the couple was worth well over $2 million.

  Though he never made a show of his philanthropy, Neil was regularly involved in promoting charitable causes, particularly in and around Ohio. In 1973, he headed the state’s Easter Seal campaign. From 1978 to 1985, Armstrong was on the board of directors for the Countryside YMCA in Lebanon, Ohio. From 1976 to 1985, he served on the board of the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History, for the last five years as its chairman. From 1988 to 1991, he belonged to the President’s Executive Council at the University of Cincinnati. To this day, he actively participates in the Commonwealth Club and Commercial Club of Cincinnati, having presided over both, in 1984–85 and 1996–97, respectively. In 1992–93 he sat on the Ohio Commission on Public S
ervice. In 1982 he narrated the “Lincoln Portrait” with the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra.

  According to Cincinnati Museum of Natural History director Devere Burt: “His game gave us instant credibility. Anywhere you went looking for money, you simply had to present the letterhead, ‘Board Chairman Neil A. Armstrong.’”

  For his college alma mater, Neil was perhaps the most active. He served on the board of governors for the Purdue University Foundation from 1979 to 1982, on the school’s Engineering Visiting Committee from 1990 to 1995, and from 1990 to 1994 he cochaired with Gene Cernan the university’s biggest-ever capital fund-raiser, Vision 21. Its goal set at a whopping $250 million, the campaign raised $85 million more, setting an American public university fund-raising record.

  Dr. Stephen Beering, Purdue’s president from 1983 to 2000, recalled Armstrong’s essential contributions to Vision 21: “Neil was really the PR piece of it. He might say to an alumni group, ‘You know, my landing on the Moon was really facilitated by my Purdue experiences—it goes back to my very first semester when I had a physics professor who had written our textbook and for the first Friday recitation I anticipated that I would need to regurgitate the assigned chapter. Instead, the professor said, ‘I’m curious what you thought about this material.’ At that moment I realized what Purdue was about: it was about teaching problem-solving, critical thinking, analyzing situations, and coming to conclusions that were in detail and original. When I was flying the LM down onto the Moon, that’s exactly what I had to do—take my training but then solve problems, analyze situations, and find a practical solution for myself. Without Purdue, I couldn’t have done it.’

  “And whenever he was on campus, you could see in his eyes how much he enjoyed it. His pure joy showed just standing there with his arm around some band member at a football game. He was thrilled like a kid when he was asked to be the one to bang the big Boilermaker drum. ‘I’ve never done that! I’d like to do it.’ And he marched with the baritones, which he played back when he was in the band. Not for a moment did he act like a celebrity.”

  Armstrong was also involved in a few benevolent causes at the national level. From 1975 to 1977, he cochaired, with Jimmy Doolittle, the Charles A. Lindbergh Memorial Fund, which by the fiftieth anniversary of Lindbergh’s historic flight, in May 1977, raised over $5 million for an endowment fund supporting young scientists, explorers, and conservationists. In 1977–78 Neil accepted an appointment to Jimmy Carter’s President’s Commission on White House Fellowships. In 1979 he served as the on-air host for The Voyage of Charles Darwin, a seven-part documentary broadcast on PBS. The National Honorary Council’s USS Constitution Museum Association counted him as a member from 1996 to 2000.

  Some have said that Neil does not have a political bone in his body: “I don’t think I would agree in the sense that I have beliefs, I participate in the process, and I vote my conscience. But what is true is that I am not in any way drawn to the political world.”

  Both parties, Democratic and Republican, tried to lure him in. In April 1972, major Ohio newspapers headlined, “Armstrong Possible Chief of Nixon’s Ohio Race.” In July 1979, on the eve of Apollo 11’s tenth anniversary, the stories were about the Republican Party trying to get Neil to take on Democratic senator John Glenn. “I’ve often been approached to run for various positions. But I have had no interest in that at all.”

  In terms of the American political tradition, Armstrong has always identified most strongly with the moderate roots of Jeffersonian Republicanism. “I tend to be more in favor of the states retaining their powers unless it’s something only the federal government can do and it’s in everyone’s interest. I’m not persuaded that either of our current political parties is very right on the education issue. But it’s not politic to express those views to anyone today. So I don’t.

  “Both political parties take credit for when the economy is going well and blame the other party for any failures in the economic system. Actually, I don’t think either one has very much to do with the business cycle.”

  In terms of American foreign policy, Armstrong is a realist, not an idealist. “In Jefferson’s time, we were relatively a small nation, certainly in assets, military strength, and financial power—we were still some time and distance away from becoming a power at all. Now for the past fifteen years we have found ourselves as the only so-called superpower, although it’s very likely that China will challenge our position in the not-too-distant future. I don’t believe we should be the world’s policeman even though we are the only superpower. In that sense, I’m not a hawk. On the other hand, I think there is merit to speaking softly and carrying a big stick. How we use the stick, that’s for people more thoughtful and experienced in international relations than I have ever been.”

  CHAPTER 33

  To Engineer Is Human

  “I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector nerdy engineer. And I take substantial pride in the accomplishments of my profession,” so Armstrong declared in his February 2000 address to the National Press Club honoring the Top 20 Engineering Achievements of the Twentieth Century as determined by the National Academy of Engineering, an organization he had been elected to in 1978. Neil went on to say: “Science is about what is; engineering is about what can be.”

  Spaceflight ranked only twelfth on the NAE list. In regard to pure engineering achievement, however, Armstrong regarded human spaceflight as one of the greatest achievements of the century, if not the greatest.

  Armstrong never lost touch with the U.S. space program. Back in April 1970, just as he was transferring from the astronaut corps to the aeronautics office, the Apollo 13 accident occurred. Halfway to the Moon, an oxygen tank exploded in the service module, causing another tank to leak as well. Commander Jim Lovell ordered his crew—Fred Haise and Jack Swigert—into the LM, where the three astronauts rationed the module’s limited supply of oxygen and electricity long enough to slingshot back around the Moon and return home safely. The Apollo program could only continue when and if NASA discovered the cause of the accident, “a harsh reminder of the immense difficulty” in undertaking a manned Moon mission.

  NASA asked Armstrong to serve on its internal investigation board under Dr. Edgar M. Cortright, the director of NASA’s Langley Research Center. Neil aided F. B. Smith, NASA’s assistant administrator for university affairs, with production of a detailed and accurate chronology of pertinent events from a review of telemetry records, air-to-ground communications transcripts, and crew and control center observations, as well as the flight plan and crew checklists. Other members of this panel were Tom B. Ballard from the Flight Instrument Division at Langley Research Center, M. P. Frank from the Flight Control Division in Houston, and John J. Williams, director of Spacecraft Operations at Kennedy Space Center.

  After nearly two months of investigation, Cortright’s Apollo 13 review board released its report on June 15, 1970. Typical of so many technological accidents, what happened to the spacecraft “was not the result of a chance malfunction in a statistical sense but, rather, it was the result of an unusual combination of mistakes coupled with a somewhat deficient and unforgiving system,” a complicated label for what Chris Kraft has called “a stupid and preventable accident.” Tank manufacturer Beech Aircraft Co. was supposed to have replaced a 28-volt thermostat switch that heated up the liquid oxygen with a 65-volt switch, but had failed to do it. The Apollo Program Office was not diligent in cross-checking its own orders, so it overlooked the omission.

  One of the most questionable conclusions of Cortright’s panel was its recommendation that the service module’s entire tank needed to be redesigned—at a cost of $40 million. A number of Apollo managers thought the costly change was unnecessary since Apollo 13’s problem pertained not to the tank but the thermostat. According to Kraft, “If it didn’t look difficult, Cortright didn’t look good. We argued, but Cortright wouldn’t budge.” In the following weeks, Kraft and Cortright fought it out all the way through NASA Headqua
rters. Privately, Armstrong was not on the side of the tank being replaced. Designing a new tank would be—and proved to be—a difficult engineering job, and, as Kraft argued, “ground tests couldn’t possibly provide the kind of testing and flight experience we were throwing away.” “After taking up the new job,” Armstrong recalls, “I was released from active involvement in the Apollo 13 investigation,” or he might have taken some active role in supporting Kraft’s position.

  Naturally, the public valued Armstrong’s thoughts on U.S. space exploration, present and future. Newspapers quoted his commencement address at Ohio State University in June 1971: “My enthusiasm for the future of space travel, I think you’ll grant is understandable. To stand on the surface of the Moon and look at the Earth high overhead leaves an impression not easily forgotten. Although our blue planet is very beautiful, it is very remote and apparently very small. You might suspect in such a situation, the observer might dismiss the Earth as relatively unimportant.

  “However, exactly the opposite conclusion has been reached by each of the individuals who has had the opportunity to share that view. We have all been struck by the similarity to an oasis or island. More importantly, it is the only island that we know is a suitable home for man.”

  In the early 1970s Armstrong continued to consider environmental concerns about the health of the home planet: “The very success of the human species over eons of time now threatens our extinction. It is the drive that made for success that must now be curbed, redirected or released by expansion into a new world ecology…. If we can find people skillful enough to reach the Moon, we sure can find people to solve our environmental problems.” In 1975, Neil accepted a position on the National Center for Resource Recovery board. Promoting recycling, Neil would quip, “You know, the purpose of all those Moon walks was to take the garbage out.”