First Man

by James R. Hansen

  As a futurologist, Armstrong’s vision was sometimes blurry. To a gathering of hardware dealers at the Mid America Show in Columbus, Ohio, in February 1972, he predicted, for example, that by using space technology “within our lifetime we will have eliminated the calamity of severe storms.” More accurate was his notion of the day “when satellites will provide complete libraries of films and books to monitors in homes.” To his credit, he often humorously related, “the future is not something I know a great deal about. But I did live in Washington for a time and learned that lack of knowledge about a subject is no impediment to talking about it.”

  When thinking historically, as he did in 1974 at the two hundredth anniversary of Harrodsburg, Kentucky, the early settlers’ westward drive rated comparison with trips that took men to the Moon. “They were dissatisfied with taxation without representation, and we today cry a little bit about both of them…. Your town founder, Colonel James Harrod, took much longer to make the trip from Pennsylvania to Kentucky than we did going to the Moon, but I think he spent less money.” Turning more serious, Armstrong told the crowd, “The need to build a new world is what lifts man’s horizons in search of the future. Without these horizons, a man turns inward and is concerned only with himself. With them, he thinks more about tomorrow than today, more about society than himself.” Addressing a Chicago meeting of the American Bar Association in 1977, Armstrong expressed his concern that a nation of laws had to be made to work: “Ancient Athens died, but her principles survive. And we ask, ‘Is this the destiny of our nation, or might it just be possible that our nation can survive along with preservation of its principles?’”

  Armstrong’s far more typical reserve earned him the moniker “The Lunar Lindbergh” from some disgruntled members of the press. “Armstrong Has No Comment for Last Shot” one frustrated reporter complained in the buildup to Apollo 17 in December 1972, the last flight in the manned lunar program. The story became Neil’s silence, and it quoted one unidentified NASA public relations man at the Cape for the launch saying, “He’s a closed-mouth son of a bitch. If he’s here [which he was], we’re probably the last people in the world he would tell where he is and what his plans are.” The story also included a critical quote from University of Cincinnati press officer Al Kuttner: “Since he’s been here, he’s only had one session with the press and there was a lot of arm twisting done to get that. He’s not very easy to find. In fact, I don’t even have his home phone number, and I don’t know where he lives.” There was also a statement from Armstrong’s special secretary at the university, Ruta Bankovikis, identified only as “Miss Bankovikis,” coolly saying in very formal English: “Mr. Armstrong does not wish to speak to reporters. He does not give exclusives. He does not give out interviews. It would be indiscreet of me to tell you where he is staying at Cape Kennedy while he watches the Moonshot.”

  “Invisiblest” headlined a Cincinnati paper’s 1974 short feature story on Neil. An accompanying editorial cartoon showed a Mt. Rushmore–sized Armstrong in his NASA space suit with three gentlemen (one of them clearly a reporter) climbing up a ladder to talk to him. Reaching the top of the ladder, what the men saw inside his helmet was literally a brick wall. Any sort of public appearance generated headlines like “Armstrong Out of Seclusion,” “Armstrong Stays Alone in His Private Orbit,” “Neil Armstrong, Where Are You?,” “Cincinnati’s Invisible Hero,” “The Hermit of Cincinnati,” and “In Search of Neil Armstrong.” Readers’ posts to gossip columns such as “Will Neil Armstrong ever return to public life?” were answered “Not if he can help it.”

  Armstrong’s resolute unwillingness to play any direct public role other than that of his own choosing proved especially frustrating to proponents of the U.S. space program, including some of his fellow astronauts. Gordon Cooper, for example, later criticized, “After his walk on the Moon…Neil came home, sat for a news conference or two, then quit NASA and became a recluse rather than take part in NASA’s grand plan to milk the event for all the public goodwill possible. I think the next time Neil took a question at a press conference about his historic mission was at the thirtieth reunion of the flight, in July 1999. In this regard, Armstrong was the opposite of John Glenn, who, come to think of it, would have been a great first man on the Moon.” Even the fairer minded and more historically accurate Jim Lovell has expressed a similar sentiment: “Sometimes I chastise Neil for being too Lindbergh-like. I tell him, ‘Neil, Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic on private funds and had a private group build his airplane and everything else, so he had all the right to be as reclusive as he wanted. But you went to the Moon on public funds. The public taxpayers paid for your trip and gave you all that opportunity and fame, and there is a certain amount of return that is due them.’ And Neil’s answer to that is, ‘I’d be harassed all the time if I weren’t reclusive.’ And he’s probably right.”

  Yet, Armstrong did regularly speak out. “I’ve given a large number of press conferences. When I’ve visited other countries, I’ve usually given them. Every Apollo anniversary we hold press conferences. I feel no obligation to have a press conference just for the purpose of creating feature material which is not newsworthy; it’s just human interest. I don’t feel that that’s required and, consequently, I try to avoid those kinds of situations.

  “I’ve had some bad experiences with individual interviews where the journalist wasn’t honest about what he was after. Once they report something erroneously, there is not much you can do that’s effective in correcting it. So, a long time ago, I concluded that I just would not do individual interviews with journalists. They would be restricted to press conferences, because when there is a number of journalists present who are all hearing the same thing, they are much less inclined to tell it differently than they heard it.”

  “Man’s Mars Landing Possible: Armstrong,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, December 7, 1971: “I am a pilot not a prophet…. It is only a matter of will, resources, and justification.”

  “Armstrong Envisions Great Space Benefits for Earth,” Cincinnati Enquirer, February 9, 1972: “I’m here today because the people here wanted to stay away from politics and controversy, and I’m the only guy they could find who is not a presidential candidate.”

  “Moon Walker Hopes for Return of Surface Transportation,” Cincinnati Enquirer, April 5, 1974: “The airplane is about sixty times better than the automobile as far as pollution is concerned, and we’re still working to make it better. The balance is to find an acceptable level of transportation without deterring the quality of life.”

  “First Man on Moon Says Space Ventures Paying Off,” The Spokesman Review (Spokane, Washington), September 17, 1976: “There has been a synergistic growth from original advancements of the space program—such as miniaturization—which has spread into a number of different fields.”

  “Neil Armstrong Takes ‘Citizen’s Look at National Defense,’” Western Star (Lebanon, Ohio), May 3, 1978: “We have the advantage over the Soviet system…It is my hope that such a cumbersome system, plus the maturity of the Soviet leadership, can work to reduce any catastrophic initiative on their part…. If we are to have a government by the people, the people must be informed and responsible. I am optimistic that this can be achieved.”

  “Armstrong Says We Need Space,” Cincinnati Post, May 14, 1978: “As we look ahead ten years, I would hope that we maintain the momentum of the past two decades, that we enjoy significant success with the Space Shuttle, that we initiate a new permanent space station, and that we provide the vista from a spacecraft to many, many new travelers.”

  “Disappointed Astronaut: Armstrong Urges More U.S. Space Efforts,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 12, 1979: “The problem is that we may have suffered from too much success. The most disappointing thing is that we had a lot of ideas, but we were only able to get a few started.”

  “Space Shuttle May Snap Nation Out of Dumps: Armstrong,” Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, February 14, 1981: “The Shuttle is, in fact, the fir
st spacecraft of commerce…. Our education system must encourage looking outward to the universe that is our home.”

  “Armstrong Wants Cutbacks Halted,” Associated Press, December 9, 1981: “Government research has made America the world leader in aviation and we should not undermine that advantage by canceling aeronautical research.” (House Subcommittee on Transportation, Aviation, and Materials.)

  “Former Astronaut Supports ‘Star Wars,’” Florida Today, October 19, 1985: “I find no difficulties, personally, with the ethics of providing a shield when the other fellow has a sword. The technology required to do that seems very challenging to me.”

  “Character: Our Next Frontier,” Cincinnati Post, February 20, 1976: “Human character. This is the area where we’ve made the least progress—learning about the brain, about our behavior and the ways we relate to one another. I think that’s the most important direction we can take in the next twenty years, basically to begin to understand ourselves.”

  “Seek Truth, Armstrong Urges,” Toledo Blade, June 14, 1982: “Mark Twain said, ‘Truth is mighty and will prevail.’ There’s nothing the matter with that except it ain’t so. We hold that the pursuit of truth is meritorious for its own sake. Truth is seldom absolute. It’s more often dependent on the perspective of the observer.” (Commencement address, University of Cincinnati.)

  Snapshots of Armstrong frequently appeared in the social section of Cincinnati newspapers on those occasions that he attended charity balls and other civic functions. Appearing semiregularly were feature stories and personality profiles written specifically about him or about him as part of the select group of men who had walked on the Moon, though he only rarely agreed to be interviewed for the piece.

  When he severed the ring finger of his left hand in a freak accident at his Lebanon farm in November 1978, the injury and successful emergency microsurgery (by a special team at the Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky) inspired a fresh spate of headlines: “First Moon Man Hurt on Barn Door,” “Louisville Surgery Team Rejoins Armstrong’s Finger,” “From Moon Walk to Microsurgery: Astronaut Praises Technique That Saved Finger,” “Armstrong Blasts Off After Touchy Operation,” and “One Small Tip: Moon Walker Leaves City with a Restored Finger.” To the inevitable questions he received upon release from the hospital,* Neil declared with his dry wit, “I didn’t think it was news for a man to travel about half a million miles through space unharmed and then rip his finger off when his wedding ring caught on a door as he jumped off the back of a truck. Like all of us, I suppose, I incur routine injuries along the way.”

  As the tenth anniversary of the first Moon landing approached, the press was reduced to begging: “Speak to Us, Neil,” ran one editorial in a local paper. “You’re a hero whether you like it or not,” the plea concluded. Armstrong opted to hold a press conference—immediately dubbed “A giant leap for the press” when word surfaced that the “First Person on Moon Will Step Out of Anonymity.” Yet the local Cincinnati Enquirer could do no better than “Armstrong Reticent Talking of Moon Walk 10 Years Later” and “The Search Goes On.” In the following years, the legend of the lunar Lindbergh only grew, despite all he was actually doing and saying publicly, further fueled in January 1983 by nationally syndicated radio commentator Paul Harvey’s labeling of Neil as a “recluse.”

  One notable activity that Neil successfully kept out of the press was his trip to the North Pole, which he made in April 1985 under the direction of the professional expedition leader and adventurer, California’s Michael Chalmer Dunn, and in the company of the world-famous climber of Mt. Everest, Sir Edmund Hilary, Hilary’s son Peter, and Pat Morrow, the first Canadian to reach Everest’s summit. “I found the trip to the North Pole tremendously interesting,” Armstrong recalled, “predominately because it was so different from everything we normally see in our usual life. It’s so very different up there. It was well worth the troubles of the trip.”

  A month before he journeyed to the North Pole with the Hilary expedition, Neil had become a member of a fourteen-member commission named by President Ronald Reagan to “devise an aggressive civilian space agenda to carry America into the twenty-first century.” Other members of the commission included U.N. ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, astronaut Dr. Kathryn D. Sullivan, space futurist Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill, Nobel laureate physicist Dr. Luis W. Alvarez, air force general Bernard A. Schriever, and Brigadier General Charles E. Yeager. Chairing the commission was Dr. Thomas O. Paine, the former NASA administrator.

  “We worked off and on for several months, collected a lot of information from all kinds of different sources, had meetings and presentations, and then tried to develop a long-range plan for the nation’s future in space.” Early on, Chairman Paine (whom Armstrong knew well from the Apollo program and had always found very easy to work with) told the group to set their sights on fifty years out, to the year 2035, “though the fewer number of recommendations a commission makes, the more effective those recommendations will be and the more likely they will be implemented.”

  In May 1986, Bantam Books published a glossy 209-page book entitled Pioneering the Space Frontier: The Report of the National Commission on Space, illustrated by imaginative renderings of space artists Robert McCall, Ron Miller, and William K. Hartmann. Supplementing the splashy written report was a fifty-minute videotaped program anchored by Armstrong’s opening remarks. Among the panel’s bold recommendations were calls for a permanent base on the Moon by 2006 and a human outpost on Mars by 2015.

  “The recommendations of the Paine Commission are not today sitting on everyone’s desk as something we remember and emulate. It’s not referred to or even thought about very much,” largely due to the tragic events of January 28, 1986, when STS 51-L, the Space Shuttle known as Challenger, disintegrated, killing commander Dick Scobee and pilot Mike Smith along with three mission specialists: flight test engineer Ellison Onizuka, the first American of Asian descent to fly in space; physicist Ron McNair, the second black American in space; and electrical engineer Judy Resnik, the second American woman in space. Dying with them were two payload specialists, Gregory Jarvis, a designer of satellites, and Christa McAuliffe, a high school social studies teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, who had been selected from a list of over eleven thousand applicants to be the first teacher in space. With the deaths of the Challenger 7, as they came to be known, representing as they did a microcosm of American society, the U.S. space program entered a deep and prolonged period of crisis and depression, obfuscating the dreams of the Paine Commission.

  At Reagan’s request, Armstrong joined the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident. Reagan and former secretary of state William P. Rogers, who had agreed to chair the commission, both wanted Neil to serve as its vice chair. “The morning after the accident, I received information that the White House was trying to get in touch with me. I called the switchboard and after talking to one of the president’s staff, I was put on the line with Mr. Reagan. It is very difficult to turn down a president.

  “Our job was to get the report to the president in four months—a hundred and twenty days—from the time he gave us the job.

  “Secretary Rogers seemed to be very interested in doing this job and doing it very diligently.” Neil did not meet with him face to face, however, until the first time the commission met, on February 3, six days after the accident, in the New York City law offices of Rogers & Wells. Other members of the prestigious group were David Acheson, a former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and senior vice president for Communications Satellite Corp.; Eugene E. Covert, head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT; Richard P. Feynman, a Nobel Prize winner in physics who taught at Caltech; Robert B. Hotz, former editor of Aviation Week and Space Technology; Major General Donald J. Kutyna, who formerly managed the DoD side of the Space Shuttle program and was then serving as the director of the air force’s Space Systems and Command, Control and Communications; Sally K. Ride, the first U.
S. woman astronaut in space; Robert W. Rummell, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and former vice president of TWA; Joseph F. Sutter, a Boeing executive vice president; Arthur B. C. Walker Jr., a professor of applied physics at Stanford University; and Albert D. Wheelon, an executive vice president at Hughes Aircraft. Completing the baker’s dozen was General Chuck Yeager. Their swearing in (Covert and Yeager were the only absentees) took place in Washington on February 6.

  In choosing Rogers as the chair and Armstrong as vice chair, Reagan girded the panel. “Bill Rogers was Mr. Outside, and he did that job very well,” Neil commented. “He knew what the commission needed to have, and he knew the best ways to accommodate all the different constituents in this matter without jeopardizing the commission’s work.

  “Bill gave me the job of running the operational side of the committee, and then we formed some committees and put chairmen in the committees. I suggested that Donald Kutyna [active-duty military] be the head of the Accident Investigating Committee, because Don had been on accident boards before and he knew how they worked.” “Neil was Mr. Inside,” Kutyna remarks. “He really ran the commission.”

  Going in, Armstrong was privately concerned that the Challenger investigation would be conducted by an outside body and not by NASA, as with the Apollo 1 fire or the Apollo 13 accident. “As it happened, the hardcore investigators were out there doing their work anyway, and they weren’t so much encumbered with having to deal with public hearings and other affairs that the commissioners were stuck with. So perhaps in the long run, being public didn’t affect the investigation’s timetable very much, but I had apprehensions about it in the first place.”