For several years under Borman, Eastern enjoyed record-setting profits. But labor difficulties, and the deregulation of the airline industry, caused a downturn in the company’s business. Borman fought to right the ship, even making concessions that went against his instincts. For a time, the moves worked. But after a downturn in the economy, and new labor conflicts, Eastern was sold to new owners. After more than a decade at the helm, Borman resigned as the company’s chairman in 1986.
No longer bound to Miami, the Bormans moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where their son Fred owned a car dealership. While there, Frank and Susan enjoyed one of the easiest and happiest stretches of their marriage. Frank served on corporate boards, invested in the car dealership with Fred, and stayed close to their other son, Ed, who’d become a helicopter test pilot. Frank did a lot of flying of small aircraft, still a foundational pleasure. Susan designed and rebuilt a home in the desert.
After more than a decade in New Mexico, Frank and Susan moved to Montana, following their son Fred, who’d purchased a cattle ranch. Frank continued to fly in Montana’s big skies and attended air shows across the country with Susan. People still recognize him in Montana sometimes. Some ask if he still looks up into the sky at the Moon and thinks about having gone there. He smiles, but tells the truth: “I suppose I do, but not often.”
* * *
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Shortly after Apollo 13’s safe return in 1970, political heavyweights in Wisconsin approached Jim Lovell about running as a Republican for United States Senate in his home state. He demurred, but that didn’t stop Vice President Spiro Agnew, then President Nixon himself, from stepping in to press the recruiting effort. The election was just six months away; even with a war chest from the party, Lovell still had no structure, no party history. He passed. The decision pleased Marilyn. She knew Jim would make a fine senator but also knew that politics could tear a person’s life and family apart. To her, going to the Moon had been a safer bet than going to Washington.
Lovell stayed at NASA for the next three years, working on early plans for the Space Shuttle and studying science applications for future space missions. The agency even sent him to a management program at Harvard, where he got his first taste of business.
All the while, the Navy had been calling, urging him to come back to the fleet, but promotion in that service didn’t feel right to Lovell. He’d been a captain; the next step up was admiral. After more than a decade at NASA, he’d be competing against men who’d studied war and seen serious combat in Vietnam. To Lovell, they would always deserve promotion more than he. Given his management experience at Harvard, it seemed time to make the move into the private sector. When he retired from NASA and the Navy in 1973, no man had spent more time in space than Lovell, a total of 715 hours and five minutes, or just five hours short of a month.
As a private citizen, Lovell went to work for a tugboat company in Houston, where he became president and chief executive officer. The business proved lucrative, but after four years, Lovell found an even better opportunity, as president of a telecommunications company. It grew exponentially with deregulation in the industry, then was sold to Centel, a larger telecom corporation, where Lovell remained as an executive and board member until his retirement in 1991.
Four years later, Hollywood released a film version of Apollo 13, a book Lovell had coauthored about the rescue of that ill-fated mission. Tom Hanks played the lead role and the film became a hit. Suddenly, everyone wanted a piece of Lovell, and he did his best to oblige, touring the country and giving talks with his usual warmth and good humor. The new notoriety also helped him launch Lovell’s of Lake Forest, a restaurant on Chicago’s tony North Shore. Lovell packed the place with mementos from his NASA career, along with a giant mural behind the bar, titled Steeds of Apollo, that showed four horses galloping into the heavens. But the restaurant’s real secret weapon was Lovell’s son, Jay, its executive chef, who made Lovell’s of Lake Forest a success.
On most evenings, the restaurant was packed with patrons. On the night of September 11, 2001, it was virtually deserted but for Jim Lovell himself. Dressed in his usual suit and tie, he stood alone in the corner of the basement bar, staring at the television, watching endless replays of terrorists bring down the towers at the World Trade Center in New York, an American hero not quite believing what had just happened to America.
In 2003, Jim and Marilyn Lovell celebrated the thirty-fifth anniversary of Apollo 8 with Frank and Susan Borman and Bill and Valerie Anders. The reunion was warm and friendly, but it seemed to Lovell that Frank was doing everything, even making lunch, while Susan seemed not to contribute much at all. But the whole event was so nice that Lovell didn’t think much more about it.
Five years later, the couples met for the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 8. This time, it was even more evident to Lovell that something was amiss with Susan; she acted strangely and hardly talked, and Frank constantly helped her, even with small things.
Like his crewmates from Apollo 8, Lovell had flown private planes since retiring from NASA. Lately, he’d been piloting a twin-engine Cessna 421, able to make it from his home near Chicago to his other home in Texas—along with Marilyn, their dog, and luggage—in a slick five hours. But Marilyn had been growing increasingly concerned about her husband’s flying alone. In the gentlest terms, she urged him to find a copilot or sell the airplane. In 2013, at age eighty-five, he sold. Not a day passes when he doesn’t miss it.
In 2015, after a sixteen-year run, Lovell’s of Lake Forest closed its doors, a victim of the economic downturn that began in 2008. Jay Lovell and his wife, Darice, opened a smaller, more casual place in nearby Highwood, Illinois. Jim and Marilyn eat there often.
At their home near Chicago, Jim and Marilyn lead a quieter life than they did during the NASA years, when they could hardly leave the house without attention. Now they enjoy their children and grandchildren, and a golden retriever they found at a rescue shelter—one that watches the Apollo 13 movie whenever it plays on TV. For many years, Jim and Marilyn’s daughter, Susan, wore the mink jacket that Jim had sent to Marilyn on Christmas Day 1968, while he was orbiting the Moon. But late in 2015, Marilyn asked for it back, if only for a Chicago winter shaping up to be colder than most.
Even now, Marilyn and Jim go for nightly walks near Lake Michigan. The shoreline makes for a perfect place to gaze up at the Moon, especially when it’s full and just rising over the trees. In summer 2017, the International Astronomical Union formally recognized the name “Mount Marilyn” for the lunar mountain Lovell picked out for his wife during Apollo 8. Every once in a while during their walks, Jim shows Marilyn where it is on the Moon. Every once in a while, he thinks, I’ve been there.
* * *
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By the time the last Apollo mission flew in late 1972, Bill Anders had been at the National Aeronautics and Space Council for almost four years. In that time, he’d worked on projects like Skylab (America’s first space station), Viking (to put an unmanned spacecraft on Mars), and the Space Shuttle. He’d also lobbied successfully to include astronaut-geologist Harrison Schmitt on Apollo 17. To Anders, it made little sense for the agency to send only test pilots to land on the Moon; NASA needed someone who could expertly interact with and appreciate its geological wonders.
Before going to Washington, Anders had made a deal with NASA that permitted him to keep using the agency’s T-38 airplanes for as long as he worked in government. The move allowed him to stay connected with high-performance jets and kept him sharp, just in case NASA extended Apollo into the future and changed its mind about keeping Anders in the command module pilot’s seat.
Anders was still at the Space Council when he and Valerie welcomed their sixth child, daughter Diana. Soon after, he was appointed by President Nixon to the five-person Atomic Energy Commission (a move that made sense, given that Anders was a nuclear engineer), and two years later, in 1975, he was
named the first chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In six years of service in Washington, Anders had proved himself serious and nonpartisan. In 1976, a White House staffer reached out to Anders to see if he’d be interested in becoming an ambassador. Anders talked it over with Valerie, who expressed an interest in a country she’d found especially beautiful during a family visit. President Gerald Ford approved, and in 1976, Bill Anders became the United States ambassador to Norway.
While working in Oslo, Anders received a package from the International Astronomical Union, the organization in charge of naming surface features of planets. The IAU was pleased to announce it had named six lunar craters for Americans—the crews of Apollo 8 and Apollo 11—and six for Soviet cosmonauts. Included was a photograph of the craters. Anders was displeased: For starters, his crater wasn’t the one that he’d named for his family during the Apollo 8 flight. Second, the astronauts’ craters were in an area past the horizon that couldn’t be seen. Third, the cosmonauts hadn’t even been to the Moon (Anders joked that as atheists, they wouldn’t even pass the Moon on their way to Heaven). He called the organization and argued the astronauts’ case, to no avail. The explorer’s prerogative—to name the places one discovered—didn’t seem to apply. Anders, however, wouldn’t forget it. Years later, he would still be pushing the IAU to make things right.
Anders finally left government service in 1977, joining General Electric as vice president of its Nuclear Products Division. Two years later, the company sent him to the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School; when he returned, he became the general manager of GE’s Aircraft Equipment Division, a multi-billion-dollar business. Over the next several years, Anders improved the division, all while absorbing the management style of GE’s young new CEO, Jack Welch, who pushed to consolidate, simplify, move fast, and stay only in businesses in which his company could rank first or second in the industry.
After seven years at GE, Anders left to become chief operating officer of the aerospace and defense firm Textron. In 1989, he left that company to become vice chairman of General Dynamics, a major supplier of aircraft, tanks, and other weapons to the United States Department of Defense. By agreement, he would become the company’s CEO a year later.
On paper, the move might have seemed crazy. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the coming end of the Cold War, defense contractors began to suffer, their wares no longer in name-your-price demand. General Dynamics seemed even worse off than its competitors; having amassed huge debt, it looked headed for bankruptcy. But Anders saw possibility in darkened clouds.
On becoming CEO, he instituted many of the principles he’d seen Welch use at GE. Among other moves, he sold off any part of the business in which General Dynamics couldn’t be a market leader. He worked hard to change the corporate culture and become efficient, replacing most executives and many personnel, getting rid of waste endemic to the industry, and focusing on shareholder return. He even pitched in as a test pilot, flying the firm’s F-16 fighter jets—until he sold off that part of the business, too.
The company’s fortunes turned around fast. Billions of dollars flowed in, enough so that Warren Buffett purchased 16 percent of the company’s stock—then gave Anders proxy to vote his shares. By the end of Anders’s three-year term as CEO, he was a darling of Wall Street and, by many accounts, had saved General Dynamics. “After orbiting the Moon,” one industry analyst said, “mundane business problems did not faze him.”
Anders stayed on at General Dynamics for another year as chairman of the board, then retired from the company a wealthy man in May 1994. Soon after, he and Valerie fell in love with the natural beauty of Washington State, where they bought a house on the water and established the Anders Foundation, a philanthropic organization devoted to supporting education and the environment.
All the while, Anders kept flying. He’d already purchased a De Havilland Beaver airplane restored by his friend and former commander, Frank Borman, but what he truly envied was Borman’s P-51 Mustang single-seat fighter-bomber, a workhorse from World War II and the Korean War. “If you ever find another, let me know,” he told Borman.
Not long after, Anders found himself flying over Borman’s home in New Mexico. He flipped open his cellphone and called to say hello.
“Hey, Anders,” Borman said, “I found a Mustang for you—get your ass down here!”
The two men drove to inspect the plane.
“I’ll buy it if you test it,” Anders told Borman.
Borman, the old test pilot, put the plane through its paces. Anders wrote a check—and then had an idea.
He would start a museum dedicated to preserving—and flying—historic military aircraft. The Mustang would be one of the first pieces in the family’s Heritage Flight Museum, opened in 1996 in Burlington, Washington. It would also be the plane Anders flew in the 1997 Reno Air Races. At age sixty-four, he finished third in the silver race.
Along with Valerie and their children, Anders has helped run the foundation and the museum ever since. He still feels young; even in his mideighties, he’s surprised to look in the mirror and find an elderly man looking back. He takes daily walks with Valerie. And he still flies, but not the warbirds anymore. Mostly, he takes a light two-seater, much like a Super Cub, over Washington skies. It’s not a Mustang, or the F-89 he used to challenge Soviet bombers during the Cold War, but it’s a hell of a lot better than not flying at all.
And he still cares about the environment. He knows that most people understand that Copernicus and Galileo were right, that the heavens do not revolve around Earth, but he wonders whether, down deep, any of us really believes it. By his estimation, human beings must think, in their reptilian brains, that Earth is flat and infinite; otherwise, they wouldn’t treat it as badly as they do. To that end, the Anders Foundation continues to fight to protect the environment on the only planet any of us has.
Nearing the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 8, Anders thinks often of the view he got of his home planet from a distance of a quarter million miles. To him, Earth seemed staggeringly small, little more than a pinpoint in an infinite universe. That feeling has never left him. When he was young, Anders sometimes wondered about his place in the universe, and whether he was special. After the Moon, he didn’t wonder about that anymore. After the Moon, he knew he wasn’t special, and it brought him a kind of peace.
* * *
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As of this printing all three of Apollo 8’s astronauts were still married to their wives. They are the only crew that flew in either the Gemini or Apollo programs whose marriages all survived.
A few years ago, doctors diagnosed Susan Borman with Alzheimer’s disease, for which there is presently no cure. (It was symptoms of this illness that Lovell had noticed in recent get-togethers with the Bormans.) Gradually, she lost her cognitive abilities; by 2015, she sometimes didn’t recognize Frank or her sons, and needed a full-time care facility. From the moment she showed symptoms, Frank refused to leave her side, and has remained committed to her care ever since. Even at age ninety, he awakens at 5:30 A.M. to exercise, not for his own benefit, but to make sure he stays alive long enough to take care of Susan until the end of her days.
Every day, he visits her at the facility, where her room is decorated with photos of her family, and of the days when she and Frank had their adventures. In one, she is on the cover of a national magazine, looking more radiant than a Hollywood actress. “She was really beautiful,” a nurse tells Frank. “Still is,” Frank says.
It doesn’t matter to Frank that Susan sometimes doesn’t respond, or that she might not even know who he is. He still climbs into bed with her every day and lies next to her, still takes her to get her nails done at the beauty shop, still talks to her and tells her he loves her. He turns down invitations to travel or receive awards. He always eats nearby. Susan needs him.
He struggles to say it
without tears but he must say it. “Susan is the best wife and best mother a person could ever hope to have. I was selfish. I was lucky.”
And now he must return to her; it’s visiting hours at the facility. As he walks from his truck toward the front door, it is clear he is on a mission, a new mission, the only mission more important than the Moon.
Frank Borman, age 27, already an instructor at the fighter weapons school, Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, 1955. It was here that Borman taught elite young Air Force pilots to fly for America and defend her greatness. Courtesy of Frank Borman
Susan Borman, age 20, just before her marriage to Frank in 1950. This girl, Frank thought, can handle anything. Courtesy of Frank Borman
Marilyn and Jim Lovell, aboard the U.S. Naval Academy schooner Freedom, just after their wedding in 1951. “I don’t know how to dance,” Marilyn told Jim when he first asked her out. “I don’t either,” he replied. “We’ll learn together.” Courtesy of Jim and Marilyn Lovell
Bill and Valerie Anders on a ranch in Colorado, around the time of Apollo 8. Bill’s mother had wanted him to date an admiral’s daughter, but Bill just wanted to be with Valerie.
Courtesy of Bill and Valerie Anders
Rocket Men Page 33