Oral History: Frank Borman

hi i'm tim naphtali i'm director of the richard nixon presidential library museum in yorba linda california i'm in billings montana it's may 2nd 2009 and have the honor and privilege to be interviewing frank borman for the richard nixon oral history program colonel borman thank you for doing this you're very welcome um let's give a little bit of context to the to the viewer uh tell us uh who the uh who the who the nine were you were one of the nine that came after the seven i was the i was in the second group of astronauts there were nine of us that joined nasa in 1962. uh we participated in both the gemini program and the apollo program and then i left in 1970 to go to a private industry so i was with uh with nasa for eight years one of the second group of astronauts um you were in the in the gemini program and and did fly i believe gemini seven but i flew gemini seven which was a two-week mission the longest mission to the to date and that had been achieved by that by anybody and then i flew apollo 8 which was the first uh manned lunar circumference or lunar circling we didn't have a lunar lander but we circled the moon 10 times in 1968 and then came back i wanted to ask you a little bit about apollo 8 you were supposed to fly something called emission we were originally planned our mission was originally planned to be a uh earth orbital mission exercising the lunar module and the command module the lunar module was delayed a long time and so uh and brilliant in my opinion brilliant move george lowe who was the apollo program manager substituted a circumlunar flight for our mission because we didn't have a lunar lander what role did the did fears that the soviets were about to well the the cia had the word and the soviets had been shooting unmanned and even i think they even put a dog around them i'm not sure but they had uh unmanned lunar orbiting lunar flybys and uh the cia had the information they were going to try to do it before the end of 68 and there's no question that that accelerated the the emphasis on apollo 8 going to the moon because in the final analysis the apollo program was a battle in the cold war it was not a it was an age of exploration had all those good things it challenged technology it satisfied science but it was a battle in the cold war it was a political move as an astronaut how did you see that part of the how hard did you see that dimension my major motive i didn't care about picking up rocks or anything else i wanted to beat the soviets to the moon um tell us please about the you've been asked before but i want our interview to include it what was it like to spend christmas eve circling the moon well you know one of the great things about being in the apollo program in nasa at that time everyone is oriented to do the mission from the from the person who had the most menial job to the people who directed it the mission came first it was wonderful so holidays meant nothing to us i was away from home for eight years my wife raised my raised our children but on christmas eve looking back at the earth our focus went from the moon which had been obviously occupying us because we had a mission to take a lot of pictures of lunar landing sites and so on but back to the earth and that was probably that was the preeminent memory of of my journey wasn't looking at the moon but looking back at the earth and of course being christmasy we were alone we were lonely we were far away from home and it was christmas so it was it had an impact um did you know before you went out there that the tranquility base was one of the areas that was considered for the landing we did we had several faces that were considered and the bill anders took a lot of pictures of all these potential sites um tell us what you recall of meeting lyndon johnson well i met president johnson oh i guess maybe two weeks or ten days before the flight he decided that he wanted to have a dinner at the white house and the crew and all of us went back up to the white house and had a dinner and he'd invited charles lindbergh and jim webb who was the head of nasa and uh it was incidentally the the party took place to the great consternation of the doctors at nasa because they said oh my gosh you know we've had you in isolation now we're going to expose you to all these germs but nobody got sick and it was a obviously for us a big occasion tell us about meeting charles lindbergh well i hadn't met him before but uh he was an interesting very very interesting person uh after the flight uh president nixon appointed both he and i to an environmental committee and so i interfaced with him quite often he was very inquisitive obviously an intellectual i seem to be interested in everything and he wrote me i still have a letter he wrote me from the philippines where he was involved with early tribes and he seemed a restless intellectually restless person to me uh i remember going on one we were on a bus and people were asking for autographs and i was signing him and and he said you know i said he said i just wish i could do that but i i just don't i just can't do that so he was kind of a strange person um which president was it was it uh johnson or nixon who put you on this environmental nixon nixon put you on a bar and and the goal of this committee i'm not sure what the goal of it was really we looked around i remember we went through the bay area rapid transit bart in san francisco when it first started i think back then he was uh it probably may have been the beginning of the green awareness in this country i'm not certain um this wasn't the first time you were put on an important commission please give it tell us a little bit about the commission that investigated apollo 1. well i was apollo 1 was the fire that killed three astronauts in january the 27th of 1967 and i was uh having supper uh in a very remote area with some friends of ours and all of a sudden he got a knock on the door it's a texas highway patrolman saying to call houston i did and i was told about the fire and then i had been selected to be on the committee that investigated the fire and to get to the cape right away so that's that's exactly what i did and then i spent uh i don't know how many months we were there two or three months we issued a report testified before congress and then i was appointed to a group to head a group that went to the north american plant at downey to implement the engineering changes that were going to be made in the in the spacecraft to change it from the one that burned um one of those changes had to do with with the device to open the door that's correct the door the original door the one and the the spacecraft that had the fire was a plug door which was a lot lighter because as the spacecraft pressurized it sealed the door but the problem was when he got over pressurizers nobody in god's green earth could open that door so we changed it to an outward opening door that could that could open rather swiftly probably didn't need to be that was probably an overreaction because uh it added a lot of weight to the spacecraft but nevertheless it worked perfectly so it went fine uh looking back and to what extent do you feel that this fire threatened congressional support for the continuation of the puddle program i don't believe the fire threatens congressional support much at all uh uh the american people were behind us congress was mine and the forcing function were the soviet union's uh interests in space that was uh that was one of the beautiful parts about it was the motivation was there and it was in a time of really distress in the country with all of the the vietnamese problem war problem and the martin luther king's assassination the one thing that seemed to hold together that everybody could identify with except the stream left was uh was the space program i've i've heard it uh i've read that uh apollo 8 was perhaps the only thing people were could cheer in 1968. i think that's right uh i know after the flight i got a telegram we got hundreds of telegrams or a thousand telegram but one of them said thank you apollo 8 you saved 1968 and i think that's about what was so you have to remember also that president johnson appointed a very astute man to head nasa jim webb he'd been a assistant secretary of state under dwight atchison i mean uh dean atchison and uh he was a he knew the government technically he was not that sharp because he uh he was basically a lawyer and a politician but he appointed underneath him really brilliant people there's only one of them still alive chris craft but he let them do it it wasn't a top down that is the important decisions weren't made in washington it was i've often thought that if he'd headed the defense department instead of mcnamara we might have had a lot more success in in vietnam i'm sorry and i'm really glad that mcnamara wasn't running nasa because i don't think that uh we would have got to the moon if it would have been imposed on us but webb would he knew how to keep congress in line and he had tiger teague who was a congressman from texas who ran the space committee and he and and webb orchestrated the hearings and it was all done very very neatly and clint anderson who was a senator from uh new mexico and webb were like that so he was a one he never got as much credit as he deserved when did you first meet richard nixon i first i first met president nixon i believe at the inauguration when he was inaugurated we were invited to uh sit at the place of honor behind him as he as he was sworn in and i think that was the first time i met him you very soon though uh are invited to a number of events well uh we had been sent actually by president johnson arranged or somebody in the state department range for my family and myself to tour europe this was customary after successful flights as the government tried to get the maximum you know favorable publicity out of it and so we went through europe um every every major country in europe and then came back and uh i one of the at one of the events at the white house i think it was uh my wife was talking to ambassador dubrinian who was the soviet ambassador and he said something like you know you've gone through europe but you didn't come to the soviet union and uh i think susan said well we weren't invited or anyway out of that came an invitation for myself and my family to visit the soviet union and for that visit we were briefed by secretary kissinger that we would he would like us to go over there and start to begin a process of of involving the soviet union and the and america in joint space efforts in an effort to try to to smooth relations and so i left there with uh with that mission in mind and that that's we we spent a very interesting 10 days or two weeks in the soviet union so from that came apollo so used that i think that was the the german you know the beginning the seed that was planted and out of that came upon yeah um when you come back from west western europe um you sent you told pete flanagan or at least he heard that you felt there that the europeans were doing some interesting things in their space programs and that europeans should be involved in the u.s space program um i i believe you're one of the first to have argued that this is before the the soviets but the western europeans should be involved do you recall um what you saw on that trip that led you to make this recommendation you know and uh in preparing for this interview i i looked at any letters of the past that i have and i have one copy of a letter that i wrote to dr kissinger that outlined exactly what she said and and as a matter of fact if i i can make a copy of it and send it to you i think it it outlines better than i could just but i outlined basically what's happened and uh the country has followed that procedure that's why i wanted that's why i wanted to raise it because the you know the role that they played on the space shuttle yeah well and the apollo soyuz was i think a very important i think that helped to break i think that helped to end the cold war i really do they you know it was clear as we went over to the soviet union in 69 the intelligentsia there understood that their system was corrupt and flawed and wouldn't work and it was only a matter of time before it finally fell apart what do you recall of the of the tour you took with the cosmonauts when they came to this country well we invited them uh to come back to this country again with the approval of the state department and uh i never will forget we met them at uh kennedy i think it was when they came in from moscow we flew in a in a conveyor prop airplane down to uh washington and uh they had a camera and their son victor started to take a picture out the window and his father oh no no no and you know we assured him you can take any picture you want to no problem no problem i think it was an enormous awakening for the for this these people who had never never been to this country before we had a wide open society that worked um tell us about meeting dwight chapin how did you get to know him well after we came back from the uh soviet tour i was assigned by nasa to be sort of a liaison between nasa and the white house in preparation for the apollo lunar landing apollo 11 lunar landing and so i i was given an office uh and i worked for peter flanagan in the white house and i spent a lot of time up there in preparation for the lunar landing so that's how i met them all at that point before we talk about that part of your career i want to check something i read somewhere that you were offered the command of apollo 11 and you turned it down you know i i've read that too uh i had told d slayton before apollo 8 that uh that was my last flight and i i think that uh deke knew that i had never even been in a lunar module simulator i had focused on re rebuilding the the command module i had all the expertise i believe that anybody could have in that part of this program but i was pretty void in the other one and trying to to uh become really proficient in that time period would have been very difficult so i i don't think i was ever really offered it i don't remember that ever being offered that okay um let's talk about uh your work as a liaison um uh bill william sapphire in his memoirs talked a little bit about the about working with you on the rain plan uh on on what to do if unfortunately apollo 11 went went far wrong what can you recall of of that well you know nasa like any government bureaucracy wanted to use the president's time to get the maximum positive publicity out of it and we they'd send over we did have a contingency plan the what does the president say if there are three dead astronauts up there i i don't recall exactly what it was but basically it was a bunch of bumble jumbo about uh you know uh kind of almost finessing that three people were dead and i think i suggested to uh mr sapphire maybe you ought to just say we've you know we've got three people what are you gonna tell the widows the uh three people are dead and we ought we ought to focus on that rather than on all of the other folds roy um i'm how confident were you that the mission would succeed i was i was quite confident uh i was confident that our mission would succeed and i had enormous enormous trust in the people that ran this program you know the astronauts became the celebrities we got all the credit but the uh george lowes and the uh gilroos and the von brauns these were brilliant people and they were dedicated people and that brilliance and that dedication seeped down and it was shared by everybody that worked on the program and incidentally it was still one of those times where you were judged on your confidence not on your race or your this or that doesn't matter whether you're what you were if you did your job you were there and if you didn't do your job you were gone it was a it was a wonderful time to work for people um what role do you what what what do you remember of shaping the president's schedule around apollo 11 well the main thing i remember about i don't remember i don't think i ever shaved a schedule but i do remember i had an impact with the nasa had sent over a proposed discussion that the what the president should say while he was talking to the astronauts on the moon and it was a long deal and uh i thought it was totally inappropriate and so uh i wrote on the on the letter before it i don't something like i don't recommend this or something and i got a call to go in and see the president and he said well why don't you think i ought to do this i said well mr president first of all you didn't have much to do with this this was a democratic program this was uh you know you just came into office and i don't think you should try to take credit for it you ought to you ought to uh you ought to assume that the american people deserve the credit and also this is way too long you ought to be something be um humble and you ought to just say a a few words and get off the air and uh he agreed because they threw out the other thing and then i don't know who wrote what finally came out but it was a lot a lot different than what went in you also recommended against playing the star-spangled banner and having the astronauts stand at attention exactly i think this is crazy i mean you know you here you have people up there and they should be doing their work in and they're standing attention it went away i you know it wasn't that it wasn't patriotic it just wasn't the time or the place um where uh where were you when when apollo 11 was launched i was at the white house and uh with the president and uh well launched excuse me i i i i'm sorry so he was supposed to go and have dinner with the apollo 11 astronauts the day before the launch he was going to go to florida and the doctors the doctors put a kibosh on that and uh and that irritated me you know we'd gone up with nix with uh johnson and and had also the doctors finally had their say on that one and i got very irritated and public until i i thought dr chuck berry was nuts uh but anyway i can't remember where i was at the launch i i don't believe i was at the cape i i just don't i remember i was at the landing but i don't remember i wasn't let's talk about the landing then well as i said we were at the at the white house then and uh it went perfectly so there was uh it was almost uh what would you say an afterthought everything worked fine well though although there was a little concern because armstrong had a hard time finding a place to land well he did and the computer had a glitch in it but they overcame it quite easily and well where where were you were you in the oval situated as pleased in the white house i can't remember exactly where i believe it was in the oval office i think it was and you're watching it on tv were you getting any other information from nasa or was it just what you saw on tv just what i saw on tv just what we saw on tv do you have any memories that from that of the reaction i mean obviously you were happy but when all of you when when it when it when the when the landing occurred what do you remember seeing what remember remember that you know that that part i don't remember the exact way we were related look here's eight years of work on this thing and and we won i mean it's like winning the super bowl that was fantastic and you know by this time after the inauguration i told you we met the nixons at the inauguration we were invited to have a private dinner with susan and i with them uh as they were moving into the white house and uh so i i think i i like mr nixon i like the president nixon i think we i think we had a pretty good rapport and uh uh susan remembers the dinner very well because about halfway through it or after it was over mrs nixon asked susan do you smoke and susan said oh yeah i do and she she said well come on they went in the ladies room and smoked it was a it was a uh you know it was kind of a personal thing we were and i and i thought uh i thought he handled it you know i liked him not only because personally but but he took my advice so why wouldn't he like on the on the on the what you do when they're on the on the earth on the lunar surface so the landing occurs and then the the the moonwalk is a couple of hours later right yes so um three or four hours i don't know how long yeah so you had a couple hours yeah and then you're watching i can't remember whether i was with the president or not i may have been with peter flanagan then i'm not certain how that went on but were you there when he made the phone call yes i was there when he made the phone call yeah yeah and he did very well that was i to me that was just perfect he didn't take much time he uh he was very humble about it and it worked well tell us about going to the hornet well uh i had to speak to the boy scouts in idaho uh conflicted some way anyway after that or maybe somehow we hooked up with i hooked up with the air force one i can't remember whether it was in idaho or whether it was in san francisco but any event we flew out on the airplane and dr kissinger and the president were there and we landed i think at johnson island and a helicopter then took us out to the uh the hornet and uh and then the president greeted the the apollo 11 astronauts who had to be in this confinement uh thing greeted him through the window of the uh of the confinement thing and that was uh i think everybody was elated then yeah this was a great triumph for america and everybody no matter how sophisticated or how urbane they were i think they were quite quite elated with that fight what do you remember of the the dinner in los angeles for paul levin i believe you were there well that was kind of interesting too because when they were talking about getting this dinner i think it was at the century plaza hotel and they had invited hubert humphrey who had been the head of the space program for johnson you know as the vice president of the spacecraft and so i said you got you got to invite him this is a bipartisan deal and and so they did but it was mostly a a i think it was mostly republican audience that was invited there and and uh afterwards poor old vice president humphrey had a sweet nobody came i know pete conrad and i went by and had a couple of drinks with him and talked to him but there was he was sort of like a fish out of water at that dinner tell us about vice president spiro agnew well vice president spiro agno one of the people that flew with me on apollo 8 was bill anders who became head of the national space council or space i don't know what it was at that's a nice little space committee or council and the head of that politically was always the vice president johnson was and then humphrey and then agnew and the anders would tell me that boy he and his people around him don't really understand or really don't care about anything that he's he is a if there's such a thing as a zero you got one right here a president vice president agnew was the head of the space council he was the political head of the space council the secretary of the space council the civil sermon head of it was bill anders who had flown with me on apollo 8. and bill kept telling me as we talked back and forth that we're not going to get much out of the space council because the vice president doesn't uh doesn't take a great interest in it he said he's been a lot of times playing pinocchio on airplanes and so i was i was shall i say motivated to think that the vice president wasn't worth much because of my discussions with with bill anders um did bill anders tell you about the debate over how many moon missions there will be uh he he alluded to that yes and i think he felt that we were lucky to get him beyond 11 but i i was not involved in that at all he he's he was involved in it and then and he uh didn't have a great deal of uh as i said respect for vice president now you mentioned his uh thinking about vice president agnew in the context of the apollo 13 challenge yes i was again on apollo 13 i was told by the head of the manned spacecraft center bob gilruth that the vice president was i believe was des moines iowa and he was going to come down to uh supervise the uh or at least to be there in nasa houston as they were trying to get apollo 13 back and uh guild wars told me look that's the last thing we need down here is the politician and all the publicity and everything else he doesn't know anything about it can you you he worked at the white house can you get the president to call him off we don't want him here he's not going to help please so i called bob holdeman and haldeman sent him somewhere else that was that was that for for the vice president what role did you play in keeping the white house informed from houston about apollo 13 is that i can't recall what i what i did but i i was i was uh in contact with them a lot i can't remember with with haldeman or or flanagan but uh it was not official it was just um i think it was erlichmann actually or like maybe it was okay you you sent i have the advantage in the united states sure i guess materials i appreciate it you haven't been i'm gonna listen i'm interested to read these are these going to become public i think them i think they all are public okay good um but i mean are your interviews going to be oh the interview is public sure will be public um you actually made a nice point of of getting the white house to recognize ken mattingly's work on apollo 13. the fact that he was doing a lot on the ground to help get these guys back everybody on the ground did a remarkable job of course i know jim lovell had flown with him twice they did a remarkable job both and listen nasa in that era was a unique wonderful organization it really was um there's one other one other interesting thing about about vice president agnew when you know i would guess i was feeling my oats uh when the vice when the president was going to run for the second term i wrote him a letter and uh i said you know obviously i'll be supporting you and i hope but i hope you can find a new vice presidential candidate because i don't think the vice president spiro agnew is up to the chest and he wrote me back a very nice letter and that was the end of it i never heard from him again i never went to the white house again i was i was obviously consigned to the technical individual leave politics to him uh one thing that president one point you you you contact the white house about julian shearer yes the vice president wanted to get rid of him yeah i didn't know i didn't know that but julian shear was a wonderful wonderful pr guy he really was uh yes take this when we on apollo 8 we were circling the moon on christmas eve and we had a large i was told as commander that we had the largest audience that ever listened to a human voice and uh we're gonna have a tv show and i'm busy trying to get all the technical things involved you know what do i and so the uh the only advice that i got from nasa julian chair was to do something appropriate and i thought this was not only remarkable i thought it was wonderful here's a free society not trying to impose a doctrine on the world with some business about the wonders of capitalism or this or that and uh and that's how that bible reading came about so it was it was i i liked julia julian shearer was a sharp dedicated patriot this is the reading from genesis yes yes yeah but after we were told to do something appropriate uh i uh as i said i was so busy with the flight in the flight plan but i called a friend of mine named cyborg i don't know if you know him or not but you ought to interview him he was of course he's very very anti-nixon but nevertheless uh i said psy he'd worked for newsweek and he was a very cultured individual what do you think give me some suggestions he talked to a newspaper friend of his and they set up all night i guess trying to figure out what would be appropriate finally the newspaper man's wife whose name escapes shouldn't escape me but came up with the idea you really ought to read from the first ten verses of jesus that's how that's how it happened that nobody censored it nobody did anything it was it was a remarkable experience from my standpoint um well julian shearer uh got into trouble because some people wanted him out because he was a democrat that's right well so was so was webb they were democrats but you know it doesn't really matter to me if if the person is really competent and he can make things happen and he's uh honest what do you care whether there's a republican or democrat no i i find out that they do care tell us a bit about your work with pows how did you get how did you get involved in that i can't remember who in the white house asked me to get involved with that but i know ross perot did ask me to get involved with it this was after i was had i announced i was going to leave nasa and then it was i don't i think maybe president nixon had left by then but the administration sent me on a round-the-world trip i visited i think 19 or 20 countries basically just to draw attention to the plight of the prisoners we tried to go into north vietnam but they wouldn't do that they wouldn't read china wouldn't accept us it was uh it was 30 days of really we many places we didn't get very favorable uh receptions i remember uh the man that ran swear ahead of sweden there was a man named palmy and i i know i would never buy anything swedish now if you gave it to me he was he was really virulent uh against america so was the uh madame nehru the uh the head of a uh prime minister of uh gandhi gandhi yeah gandhi uh kenneth keating was the ambassador to uh in the our ambassador in india and after we got out of there after she had chewed me out for half an hour i went to the ambassador and i said how do you put up with that he said i don't have to he said you're the only reason i've even been able to see her for several months so it was a it was a an interesting experience you talk about people not liking the us now that we weren't very well liked around the world maybe we probably still aren't but that was a an enlightening experience for me in 1970 the white house gets gets word that uh you're going to be or the group that's the defense group for the pows is going to try to get you a visa to red china oh really i didn't know anything about it um but you did mention to me that you thought you might get into north vietnam that way well that's what that's what the that's what the uh intent was but of course we knew we would never do it and never do it although you know jane fonda and everybody were flying in out of there but they weren't going to let anybody else in um i i guess given what you said about the reaction uh in 72 you were you and you were not invited to the pow dinner that the white house had when they came back no i wasn't no no i mean it was it was like a door came down when that happened and i can't remember whether i made the trip around the world i think it was for president ford i believe it was after after mr nixon had resigned president nixon to resign um tell us a bit about the meeting that you and jim lovell had with dwight eisenhower yes it was in uh i believe it was in in april of 69 he president eisenhower was in the walter reed in a hospital bed obviously in his last hours with all hooked up you could see his ekg and i don't know how he could stand to be like that but he was very very pleasant before he'd requested the level and i combined and he wanted to talk about the space program and so we were told by the doctors you know you can only stand there five minutes he's a very sick man and that's it yes sir we went in and started talking to him and it was wonderful because the doctors came in in five minutes and all of a sudden he resorted to general eisenhower he said get out we're having a good time and we stay we stayed an hour or so with him and talked to him it's kind of interesting because before i went into nasa i had written him a letter you know at the end the waning days of his presidency he had suggested that that the the space race may not be that important it was just public opinion and so i was a major in the air force and i wrote him a letter and i said gee you know mr president uh i'm surprised you say this because i feel i'm a west point graduate and i feel i'm defending my country as much as if i was in vietnam and he wrote me back a really lovely two-page long letter about what he meant what he how he didn't mean to disparage the people that were working in the space program i still have that one so he's uh he's one of my heroes what do you remember of that meeting i mean you must be my last group to see him he must have been a little money he died shortly after that yeah again he was just a wonderful human person obviously knew he was close to death but uh was sharp as attack sharpest attack um did you meet john f kennedy by any chance i never met president kennedy matter of fact i was at north american uh beginning to work on this apollo program when he was i remember i was flying in a north american helicopter when we landed they announced that the president ben had been assassinated so i never met him at all um there is a you you sent a note to the to the white house uh contributing money to a uh dwight shape and defense fund uh it was and it's actually a sort of ironic letter um but did you uh uh do you remember where you were when when you heard that president nixon was resigning i can't remember but it was a real blow to me personally because uh you know i i my interaction with him i i thought he was in the best interest of the country and then when i found out he lied that that really was a it was a to me a very hurtful thing i i had i had hoped he was trustworthy you know that did you ever stay in touch with dwight chapin afterwards i didn't stay in touch with any of them even anybody in nasa really it and i always believe you got one photo on the beach and one foot on the on the boat you better decide whether you want to be on the boat or in the beach when that was over i left when the nasa program was over i left i wasn't i was asked to work in the administration of nixon administration uh haldeman asked me to uh if i'd be interested but i and i saw yeah what job do you have in mind and i i never could get a firm answer well it'll be a very important job uh can well but what doing what uh well you'd be at the policy level i never really was told what it would be so same way with carter carter offered you a job yeah i never will forget we were it was a at the you know the alfalfa dinner in washington i'd gone to that and i got a call that the president wanted to see me so i went over the white house and here's uh president carter with his uh what was the name of the of his uh assistant that had cancer hamilton jordan album jordan they were there and i thought i never will forget carter had brogans and levi's and a leather jacket on and uh this was a little different than the nixon white house you know with suits and they said they wanted me to come to work in their administration and they they have a little office behind the and he took me in there and talked well what do you want me to do mr president well we we we're you you tell us yes you'll come and then we'll tell you well under those circumstances no that was it was uh and frankly i'm glad i didn't work there but it's interesting you were considered a bipartisan kind of guy i think so yeah yeah um well uh looking back at at apollo uh for kids that uh are are way too young to remember it at what couldn't possibly have been alive at the time put apollo into perspective what do we you know um what did it show about us what did it show about our capabilities the apollo program was uh i think a brilliant stroke by president kennedy actually president johnson had a great to do with it too because uh president johnson suggested it uh president kennedy gave the you know the political and the motivational reason for it and the american people responded enormously it was the closest thing i believe to the all-art effort we had in world war ii that this country has achieved since world war ii it was about 400 000 americans getting gump every day trying to understand how they could do their job well so that we could beat the russians to the moon and uh i was very fortunate to be a part of it i was i felt very fortunate to be a part of it the astronauts like everything else and every other form of endeavor became the celebrities but the people that did the work and uh and led it jim webb uh on down i i just have the highest regard for them there's only one of them left chris craft all the rest have died about the astronauts i remember uh just thinking that when when when the white house was being encouraged to get rid of julian shearer um vice president talked to some uh astronauts and europe he wrote to them to say well one of the reasons why the astronauts doesn't like to don't like julian shearer is that uh the life contract has ended uh and he didn't want to well nobody in nasa wanted that life contract that was imposed by president kennedy what for the first seven and when we got there we participated in it but i think it was something like 16 000 a year or something like that and of course i like i like that frankly because it was sixteen thousand dollars i didn't have we couldn't buy insurance and uh it was a i thought a worthwhile thing also they portrayed nasa and the you know that was one of the results of that contract was nasa could do no wrong everybody did everything right so that was uh i don't know i i did not remember saying julian sure didn't like it i hope in that letter said i like julian cheer because i did like jesus you did you said he should stay and he said it didn't matter if he was a democrat or not that's what you said that's right because he do exactly what you said here he does the job okay um but but i just wanted because it uh it uh he's dead too yeah but i i i noticed from your interaction with the white house that you the nixon white house you didn't mind saying what you believed and what was on your mind i hope that's i always when i ran eastern i always want people to tell you what they feel and what they believe and then you get all their make the decision then everybody's got to salute and say yes sir and go do it but until that time what good is a staff a person if he doesn't give the the way he feels um are there any other recollections of the nixon period nixon white house that you'd like to share with us that i haven't illicit elicited no it was uh it was a wonderful experience for us because we were invited to many social functions there and uh i know for and uh and not just with the nexus we were invited to the white house in 68 to light the christmas tree and for president johnson and it was uh you'd have to be awful crash not to think it was a great honor to be associated with people that run this country you must have been in a ticker tape parade we were in a lot of tigger tape parades after the but one in new york probably new york what was that like chicago and well that was one of the they had a big a big dinner at the waldorf and the governor rockefeller he gave us each some uh some steuben mountains of the moon you know well that was heady stuff i was a colonel in the air force but my main education and i'll tell you when i was a cadet at west point in 1948 they took 12 or 14 of us over to europe the war ended in 45 as you remember and we toured europe all through europe uh uh on a mission to see what the mil where the battlefields were and so and we we visited the dachau and some of the concentration camps and then we went to to spain i'm out to spain to greece where there was still a war going on that's the only time i've ever been shot at but that really focused my attention on the difference between this country and what freedom is worth and what the horrors that uh that i saw people were still living dps displaced people were still living in dhaka you know and uh you know that's just sort of sent me on well you know this is this country's worth fighting for and all i want to do is uh it will be an air force i taught people how to drop a bombs and you know wouldn't bother me a bit they tell me to drop an a bomb on the defense of this country all i want to know is where do you want to drop that i really feel that what we have here is unique and special and i hope it's preserved for my great grandkids

Channel: Space Oral History

Views: 8,658

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Id: Ty0ZbPfgXc4

Length: 46min 39sec (2799 seconds)

Published: Sun May 09 2021