This New Ocean, page 46
Semantics, which most engineers abhorred, were becoming the litmus of what they did. They had to figure out what a “system” was and define what constituted its “failure.” Many engineers, including those in the STG and at McDonnell, tended to equate reliability prediction with astrology and failure-rate tables with the zodiac. They maintained, with some justification, that a technology as complex and dynamic as theirs contained too many imponderables to permit foolproof predictions. It was a point that would be born out repeatedly as the space age progressed, and most notably in the Challenger disaster, which had been calculated as a hundred-thousand-to-one possibility.
If Glennan had problems with the news media’s own semantics, which in his opinion were often wantonly mean-spirited, he was delighted to cooperate with both NBC and CBS for documentaries on Mercury and to put the astronauts’ “stories” on the auction block for the print media. The highest bidder was archenemy Time’s stablemate: Life.
Time-Life publisher Henry Luce understood that sending Americans into orbit and then to the Moon figured to be the greatest adventure of the century. So he not only agreed to pay the seven astronauts half a million dollars, but also to have their stories ghostwritten under their bylines and submitted to NASA for approval in advance of publication. Hugh Sidey, one of Life’s prominent columnists, took a cavalier approach to the generally frowned upon practice of paying for stories. “Checkbook journalism has been with us for as long as we’ve had journalism and still is,” he said. “I mean, the big and the powerful get the breaks, that’s all.”
Yeager, who was testing jets at Edwards at the time, took a dim view of the astronauts’ supplemental salaries, and his colleagues undoubtedly agreed.60 “They were military test pilots. You do something because it’s your job,” he said later, adding that NASA’s contract with Life “exposed the guys to a mercenary environment of taking a lot of pay for doing your job. That, to me, was wrong.” The first man to fly faster than the speed of sound remained as good as his word until he left the Air Force. Then he cashed in on his own reputation by selling his name and face to a watch manufacturer, other advertisers, and a video game maker.
The popular weekly picture magazine and the space agency upon which it depended for material carefully created a succession of impossible men, or rather of boy test pilots who could have walked out of the pages of a comic book. As portrayed in Life and, for example, in a book called We Seven that was derived from the magazine articles, the new heroes were living embodiments of the Boy Scout ideal: physically fit, morally straight, and mentally awake youngsters-grown-to-men believing in God, country, and their merit badges. Their devoted wives were as proud as heck and suffered their husbands’ danger by biting white knuckles in dutiful silence. Their children were happy to jog with them (Lyn and David Glenn); practice archery with them (Scotty and Jay Carpenter); ride with them in shiny sports cars (Suzanne and Marty Schirra), duck hunt with them (Scott and Mark Grissom), or just sit with them at poolside (Kent Slayton). Their dogs did not make mistakes.
NASA and the armed services that fed it hero-candidates fretted so much about their image that some were actually sent to what astronaut Michael Collins would call “charm school.”62 Besides being astronauts, he explained, the Air Force thought they should have “certain social skills as well, so they ran a short course. I think we came back to Washington for a couple of days and they told us that you’re supposed to wear socks like this,” he said, showing one that covered most of his calf, “that go on forever and no one wants to see hairy legs.… And you had to hold your hands on your hips this way [palms down] and not that way [palms up] because people you don’t want to talk about hold them the other way.”
The Dark Side
As the space program geared up, Cocoa Beach turned from a sleepy hamlet straddling Route 1 along the Indian River to a boomtown crammed with motels, liquor and package stores, fireworks stands, barbecue and hamburger joints, gas stations, real estate offices, car dealerships, and bars (“lounges,” in the region’s genteel argot). The minions of the law were still so green, according to one journalist from up north, that they charged a homicide suspect with “premedicated murder.”63 The space program turned Cocoa Beach and the towns nearest to it into “Spaceport U.S.A.,” a tacky carnival and theme park for adults.
The arrival of the astronauts and their handmaidens, the engineers, technicians, company reps, military types, and assorted bureaucrats, also drew large numbers of young women who were attracted to the Mercury Seven and their successors the way their sisters in other places followed and embraced matadors, movie stars, and champion athletes.
In the astronauts, the ladies very often found willing partners. The vast majority of the men they pursued had two different personas. The public saw the carefully cultivated Boy Scouts, while the astronauts’ intimates often saw a far more earthy side. Flying fighters was a highly individualistic and dangerous job that carried a cachet like that of the Arthurian knights. But if fighter pilots considered themselves members of an elite fraternity, those who occupied an even higher perch—the test pilots—were even more full of themselves. Many believed implicitly that the choicest bourbon, steak, women, cars, and cigars were their due; were their just reward not for being heroes, but for excelling at a game in which losing often meant violent death. For many of them—the self-coronated royalty of the military caste—a kind of divine right made every attractive woman a dish fit for a deserving king. For most of the early astronauts, handpicked heroes whose macho surpassed even that of test pilots, the heady privileges of stardom easily overwhelmed caution and restraint (Glenn was a notable exception). Furthermore, flying and testing fighters are highly individualistic occupations in which there is an unambiguous distinction between winning and losing. That made the original seven and many of their successors far more competitive with one another than the public ever knew.
The women came in considerable numbers, bringing their bikinis and tight dresses to the pools and lounges of the Starlite and Vanguard Motels and other playpens where access to the rooms did not require a walk through the lobby. According to a number of accounts, one called “Wickie” made her way to the beds of six of the original seven, keeping score the way old-time gunslingers notched the handles of their .44s.64
“Basically, they were all hotshot pilots and had egos accordingly,” recalled John W. King, who covered the beginning of the Mercury program for the Associated Press and who then became chief of public information for NASA at Cape Canaveral.65 “They acted like they did while on leave from aircraft carriers,” he added, mentioning the infamous Tailhook sex scandal that gave the Navy a black eye more than thirty years later.
“There were ladies in Cocoa Beach, Florida, and probably other places around the country who liked to brag about how many or which different astronaut they had managed to slip into their bed,” one astronaut recounted years later in reference to “Wickie” and her colleagues.66 “If they only knew that it wasn’t all that difficult, then they probably wouldn’t have bragged that much.… It was unbelievable,” he added, “and no one ever said a word. It never got into the press.”
CBS’s Walter Cronkite, a correspondent and commentator so avuncular that he was sometimes likened to Eisenhower himself, ignored the heroes’ warts and instead helped to project what Apollo astronaut Russell L. “Rusty” Schweickart would call their “Boy Scout monotone image.” Years later, Cronkite admitted that “we were quite aware that the image that NASA was trying to project was not quite honest. But at the same time, there was a recognition that the nation needed new heroes.”
It was taboo for any astronaut to publicly describe another’s sins and for almost two decades the Fourth Estate kept the secrets as well (as it did with Kennedy’s womanizing). Tom Wolfe broke out of the unspoken pact in The Right Stuff, however, when he described some of the astronauts’ passions for hot cars and the “young juicy girls” who infested Cocoa Beach and who were “always there and ready.”
In The Right Stuff, Wolfe described a heated exchange between Glenn and some of the others during a tour of the Convair plant in San Diego. “The next day the seven of them were in the living room of a suite that had been set aside for their use, when Glenn launched into a lecture, along the following lines: the playing around with the girls, the cookies, had gotten out of hand. He knew, and they knew, that it could blow up into something very unfortunate. They were all squarely in the public eye. They had the opportunity of a lifetime, and he was sorry but he just wasn’t going to stand by and let other people compromise the whole thing because they couldn’t keep their pants zipped.”
But Shepard, an otherwise correct naval officer who liked to cut loose when he could, would have none of the rebuke, according to Wolfe. “Commander Al, the colonel’s son, knew how to put on all the armor of military correctness, in the stern old-fashioned way. He informed Glenn that he was way out of line. He told him not to try to foist his view of morality on anybody else in the group,” Wolfe reported. Shepard, he added, believed implicitly that there was nothing wrong with extramarital female company so long as it affected neither individual performance nor the program as a whole.
The heated exchange and the reason for it were kept out of the public eye by both the space agency and reporters who still drew lines between individual privacy and the public’s right to be informed. But the moral conflict, in which all seven took sides with varying degrees of intensity, further divided individuals who were already locked in a professional competition that was the inevitable result of being famous. It was only natural. But it was also the stuff of nightmares for those who shaped NASA’s image and who therefore labored to keep the big picture from cracking wide open.
If the astronauts and cosmonauts shared common selection and training processes, so too did they share primal urges. Sometime after he achieved celebrity status, the baby-faced Yuri Gagarin appeared with a nasty gash over his left eye that he kept for the rest of his short life. Officially, the U.S.S.R.’s preeminent hero had gotten the wound when he fell while playing with his infant daughter. In fact, the world’s premier spacefarer got the scar on October 3, 1961, while vacationing with his family and some space officials at a sanatorium near the Black Sea. According to a diary entry made by Nikolai Kamanin, the cosmonauts’ chief (and repeated by a Russian surgeon in a book), Gagarin seems to have forced his way into the room of one of the nurses. Suspecting that something was going on, his wife, Valentina, rapped on the door. The fighter pilot got out of the room the way he would have left a burning jet: he vaulted over the balcony, which was only about six feet above the ground. But as he jumped, his feet became tangled in grapevines, so he landed face first on a cement walk, fracturing a bone and landing him in the hospital for three weeks. He later told Kamanin that he didn’t know there was a woman in the room and that he was playing hide-and-seek with his wife.
And like his American rivals, Titov and his comrades had a rambunctious streak that was common to fighter pilots. Kamanin related that Titov was supposed to leave an open car and get into a closed one as his motorcade left town during an official visit to Romania in 1961, for example. But instead, the exuberant cosmonaut decided to jump onto one of the motorcycles escorting the cars and take it for a hair-raising spin through the countryside. There were a number of other instances of “misbehavior” by Titov, Kamanin noted, most involving traffic violations and heavy consumption of vodka. And in the spring of 1963, he expelled three cosmonauts after a drunken brawl with a military patrol. A fourth had been thrown out the previous year because of blatant marital problems and being absent without official leave from the garrison.
Khrushchev Versus Khrushchev
In his campaign for the presidency, Kennedy accused the Eisenhower administration of committing a spate of dangerous mistakes, chief among them the ceding of military superiority to the Soviet Union and all but abandoning the high ground. He hammered Eisenhower throughout the summer of 1960 and into that turbulent autumn for what he insisted was a dangerous gap between America’s space program and that of its Communist rival. It was a gap, JFK charged, that was the equivalent of the one he said existed between their respective bomber and missile forces.
Kennedy, whose known passions did not include rockets, had no more inherent interest in space than did Khrushchev. Yet like Lyndon Baines Johnson, his running mate, he brooded about his country’s appearing to be second best to the U.S.S.R. and worried about the military balance. And like LBJ, he came to see that there were profoundly romantic qualities about intrepid men venturing into the forbidden void in the service of their country. The conquest of the new frontier was compelling precisely because it embodied the classic elements of the timeless Homeric adventures: men willfully testing their own mettle on a perilous journey and mustering the courage that was necessary to prevail. There were some, such as Tsiolkovsky and von Braun, who felt this in their souls. Others, such as Frank Malina and Lyndon Johnson, felt it in their guts. And still others made it their intellectual property without feeling anything. Khrushchev was one of them, and Kennedy was another. The intensely competitive young Irish-American politician would soon understand, albeit intellectually, that the classic quality inherent in the adventure of launching Americans into the new ocean would unite the nation under his leadership. The key element in the equation, Kennedy would come to realize, was not having the technology; it was having an adversary.
Khrushchev himself played a role worthy of Sophocles. He presided over a country that was surrounded by an immensely powerful and dangerous enemy. He knew that there were generals—Curtis LeMay and Thomas Power, for instance—who wanted to obliterate his country with nuclear weapons and had the bombers to do it. Whatever feats Korolyov and the others accomplished in space, they in no way made up for the fact that the Soviet Union was still recovering from the effects of a devastating war and needed time to build its own nuclear arsenal and a powerful enough military to deter yet another invasion from the West. That being so, Khrushchev decided, it was better to bluff than to negotiate from weakness. By the time Kennedy was elected president, Khrushchev had become convinced that excelling in space (or seeming to) not only had immense propaganda value at home and abroad, but was relatively cheap for what it bought. And what it bought was the appearance of strength: a defensive mirage. Technology was the embodiment of socialism’s triumph over nature and had long been the state religion. But its most important icon was no longer the tractor, the hydroelectric plant, or even the hydrogen bomb. It was the rocket.
Yet it was a tremendously expensive mirage. The pride the average Russian felt because of the feats in space was more than offset by the knowledge that they did nothing to alleviate the “disastrous situation they were in with regard to housing, clothes, food, wages, and so forth,” as one Russian writer observed.72 The dichotomy between the thundering rockets at Tyuratam and the pitted streets, seemingly endless lines for bread and sausage, cracker-box housing, drab, swamp-colored clothes, and flimsy shoes created a quiet but pervasive cynicism about the system.
More important, the propaganda generated by the space program should have been judged not by its appearance, but by its effect, which was virtually nil. The strategy of courting Third World countries with Sputniks and other spacecraft and of sending space exhibits to Asia, Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere to gain influence accomplished nothing practical. No proletarian uprising, no socialist revolution was ignited by the Russian space program. The thought of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, or Ho Chi Minh urging their followers on and spreading the revolution by invoking the image of Soviet technological achievement, let alone triumphs in space, was ludicrous. The downtrodden were galvanized by events that took place where they lived, not in the sky.
Finally, and most significantly, Khrushchev’s taunting insistence that his country’s string of triumphs in orbit and beyond were a barometer of its strength and heralded a socialist age managed to arouse both Kennedy’s ire and that of an exuberant space establishment eager to sprout real wings and grow into a large and powerful institution. Kennedy never believed that Soviet space spectaculars fundamentally endangered the United States. But they were immensely useful to him politically because they gave him an issue. Khrushchev’s trying to stave off the United States by baiting it had exactly the opposite effect: it provided Kennedy with the ammunition he needed to show that the United States had become dangerously weak on Eisenhower’s watch.
“The first man-made satellite to orbit the earth was named Sputnik,” the senator from Massachusetts said during his campaign for the presidency. “The first living creature in space was Laika. The first rocket to the moon carried a red flag. The first photograph of the far side of the moon was made with a Soviet camera. If a man orbits the earth this year his name will be Ivan.”*
And, JFK warned on another occasion, “If the Soviet Union was first in outer space, that is the most serious defeat the United States has suffered in many, many years.… Because we failed to recognize the impact that being first in outer space would have, the impression began to move around the world that the Soviet Union was on the march, that it had definite goals, that it knew how to accomplish them, that it was moving and we were standing still. That is what we have to overcome, that psychological feeling in the world that the United States has reached maturity, that maybe our high noon has passed … and that now we are going into the long, slow afternoon.”74 The oblique reference to Will Kane, the courageous but outgunned marshal played by Gary Cooper in the film High Noon, was inspired.
Accelerating the nation’s space program was crucial, the senator added, dusting off the old imperative to seize the high ground: Soviet control of space would invariably lead to its control of Earth. “[A]s in past centuries the nation that controlled the seas dominated the continents,” he continued, choosing to ignore the fact that neither the Royal Navy nor the Spanish Armada had figured decisively in the control of Europe and that the Western Hemisphere had been lost to the imperialists despite the frigates and men-o’-war in the British and Spanish navies. “This does not mean that the United States desires more rights in space than any other nation. But we cannot run second in this vital race. To insure peace and freedom, we must be first.” It was implicit, of course, that being first would indeed bring more “rights” (whatever that meant). But the race metaphor was beginning to stick and, contrary to Glennan’s assertion, it was by no means the exclusive property of the news media.
