Chasing the Moon

by Robert Stone

  * * *

  —

  AFTER A SILENCE of a few months, Edward R. Murrow decided to revive his suggestion that NASA integrate the astronaut corps. He had been repeatedly told that all astronaut candidates must be experienced test pilots, prompting Murrow to write President Kennedy a memo asking whether the United States shouldn’t begin training black test pilots now. He added, “The first colored man to enter outer space will, in the eyes of the world, be the first to have done so. I see no reason why our efforts in outer space should reflect with such fidelity the discrimination that exists on this minor planet.”

  At about the same time that Murrow wrote the president, an advisory committee investigating equal opportunity in the military focused its gaze on the nation’s most celebrated pilot training school, at California’s Edwards Air Force Base. Colonel Chuck Yeager, the man who in 1947 first flew a plane faster than the sound barrier and served as the idol of every jet-fighter pilot in the United States, had just been named commandant of the Air Force’s Aerospace Research Pilot School, a new addition at Edwards. When a White House aide inquired whether there were any African American pilots enrolled in the ARPS, the answer was a curt “no.”

  At the request of the White House, the Pentagon began a search to find a qualified minority candidate for ARPS, ideally a black Air Force pilot with extensive flight experience and a technical degree. The name that quickly rose to the top of the relatively short list was a twenty-eight-year-old Air Force captain named Edward Dwight, who had a combined total of 2,200 hours of jet-flying time, an outstanding service record, and a degree in aeronautical engineering.

  Opening his office mail on a routine afternoon, Dwight encountered a letter that was unlike anything he had seen. It proposed he enroll in the test-pilot school at Edwards as part of a program to be the first African American astronaut. Well aware of the Kennedy administration’s commitment to enforcing desegregation and equal opportunity, Dwight realized this could be his chance to play an important part in moving the country forward. But he was mindful that a tremendous risk accompanied the proposal: If he was successful, he would make history and a promotion was assured; if he failed, there was likely no coming back.

  Ed Dwight had been fascinated with aircraft since watching P-39 Airacobra fighters fly out of an Army Air Force field in Kansas City during World War II. As early as junior high school, he was borrowing books from the local library to learn the math and physics required to pass pilot training exams, study that proved invaluable when he took an Air Force pilot’s exam. After graduating from college he joined the Air Force, where he learned to fly jets, became a flight instructor, and earned his degree in aeronautical engineering at Arizona State University.

  He was a married father of two children, stationed at Travis Air Force Base in California, when he followed up on the letter and submitted his Edwards application. Typically after submitting such paperwork months of silence would elapse, but Dwight received an immediate response, ordering him to Edwards a few days later. He had expected to be among other African American candidates but discovered he was the only one. Initially, he and the other members of the new class bonded, unified by their fledging test-pilot status. However, it wasn’t long before alpha-male behavior prevailed, with every candidate engaged in a competition of survival of the fittest. Dwight got along well with the other pilots but was also viewed with suspicion. There were rumors that due to his friends in the White House, Dwight had an unfair advantage, and that his success would only come at the expense of his fellow classmates.

  Chuck Yeager, Edwards’s feisty and notoriously stubborn commandant, did nothing to make Dwight’s situation any easier. Yeager had been pressured by Air Force chief of staff General Curtis LeMay to admit Dwight, a request that LeMay told Yeager came directly from Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Believing his school was being used to further the administration’s political agenda, Yeager did nothing to hide his resentment. By the early 1960s, Yeager’s own fame was being eclipsed by the attention accorded the Mercury astronauts, an elite club Yeager couldn’t have joined even if he had wanted to. He lacked both a college education and an engineering degree.

  Prior to coming to Edwards, Dwight had idolized Yeager. Once there, however, he encountered a man who exerted strict control over his school and who didn’t appreciate outside interference—especially when it originated in the White House. A confidant at the school told Dwight that Yeager had assembled his entire staff of instructors to inform them that the White House had forced him to enroll Ed Dwight in ARPS in an attempt to promote racial equality. Dwight was told Yeager then suggested that if they all failed to speak, drink, or fraternize with him, Dwight would be gone in six months.

  Dwight was mindful of the legacy of Major General Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., who endured four years of near-complete social isolation as a member of the West Point class of 1936. Davis, the first African American to graduate from the U.S. Military Academy in the twentieth century, was also legendary as the first commander of the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II. Like Davis, Dwight refused to drop out.

  Yeager felt as if his elite school was under siege, especially when lawyers from Robert Kennedy’s Department of Justice arrived to investigate claims of racism and discrimination in the Air Force’s treatment of Dwight, making an uncomfortable situation even worse. In his autobiography written more than two decades later, Yeager likened the experience to being “caught in a buzz saw of controversy…[as] the White House, Congress, and civil rights groups came at me with meat cleavers.” He explained that if any discrimination was involved, it was based on his conviction that Dwight was not qualified to be in the school.

  After Captain Edward Dwight was named a candidate at Edwards Air Force Base’s elite aerospace pilot school in 1963, many in the press thought it inevitable he would be named America’s first black astronaut later that year. However, despite some progress in civil rights made during the 1960s, NASA did not select the first African American astronaut until 1978.

  Despite the adversarial situation at Edwards, Dwight’s hard work and determination to persevere paid off, and he graduated sixteenth in his class. But Yeager would only advance his top ten students to the ARPS postgraduate school for astronaut training. When it became apparent that Dwight’s name would not be on the list of astronaut trainees, General Curtis LeMay interceded at the behest of the White House. He made a deal with Yeager to enroll Dwight in the ARPS astronaut school by expanding the number of students from ten to sixteen, a move intended to appease the White House without giving the appearance that Dwight had received any preferential treatment.

  Viewers watching a March 1963 NBC Sunday evening newscast heard reporter Robert Goralski announce to the nation that “A twenty-nine-year-old Negro says he is anxious to go into space. He is Edward Dwight of the Air Force, selected to be an astronaut, the first of his race to be so designated. Captain Dwight and his family got the news at his home at Edwards Air Force Base in California.”

  The press assumed that anyone who finished the ARPS was likely to go into space either as a NASA or Air Force astronaut; however, the manner in which astronauts were chosen remained opaque, rules were often bent and requirements adjusted. Being chosen to attend ARPS did not guarantee future selection on a space mission, but at the time this detail was lost on most journalists not covering the space program.

  The national struggle for civil rights was entering a new phase. Alabama’s new governor, George Wallace, had been sworn into office with a defiant address proclaiming, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Reverend Ralph Abernathy of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) were jailed on Good Friday during a campaign in Birmingham to apply pressure on local merchants who practiced segregation. Subsequently, the city’s police commissioner approved the arrest of nearly one thousand children during a demonstration and moved against
protesters with dogs and fire hoses, producing disturbing images that were printed on newspaper front pages and seen on the national news broadcasts.

  In response, entertainers in Hollywood threw their support behind a “Freedom Rally,” where Paul Newman and Sammy Davis, Jr., joined Dr. King and a crowd of more than forty thousand at the largest civil rights gathering ever held on the West Coast. Comedian Dick Gregory, who appeared on the stage next to Dr. King, referenced the news about Ed Dwight’s selection in his comedy monologue: “I read in the paper not too long ago, they picked the first Negro astronaut. That shows you so much pressure is being put on Washington. These cats just reach back and they trying to pacify us real quickly. A lot of people was happy that they had the first Negro astronaut. Well, I’ll be honest with you, not myself. I was kind of hoping we’d get a Negro airline pilot first. They didn’t give us a Negro airline pilot. They gave us a Negro astronaut. You realize that we can jump from back of the bus to the Moon?” Gregory also did a riff about landing on Mars and meeting an alien with “twenty-seven heads, fifty-nine jaws, nineteen lips, and forty-seven legs,” whose first words to him were “I don’t want you marrying my daughter neither.”

  King laughed along with the crowd at Wrigley Field, but unlike the African American press, which was publishing features about Dwight and his family, King, like Gregory, was no fan of the push for a black astronaut. He saw it as the equivalent of promoting the achievement of an exceptional black athlete on a box of Wheaties. Both did little to further African Americans struggling for advancement. In fact, he thought it could be detrimental, leading those in power to assuage their larger responsibility. “Well, you got an astronaut. What more do you want?”

  Shortly before Dwight was to begin the ARPS graduate course, another jet pilot, then an engineer and instructor at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was driving his Volkswagen bus through the New Mexico desert while listening to the car radio. Bill Anders, a twenty-nine-year-old Air Force captain with more than 1,500 hours flying time, had been twice thwarted when trying to gain admission to the Edwards Aerospace Research Pilot School, yet he remained determined to get in.

  At the top of the hour, the radio station presented five minutes of news headlines, which included this item: “The National Aeronautics and Space Administration will recruit fifteen new astronaut trainees this summer. The program is opened to both civilian and military volunteers. Cutoff date for applications is July 1, 1963.

  “To qualify, a candidate must be a United States citizen born after June 30, 1929, and be six feet or less in height. They must have earned a degree in engineering or physical sciences. Must have acquired one thousand hours of jet-pilot time or have attained experimental flight test status through the Armed Forces, NASA, or the aircraft industry. And be recommended by his present organization.”

  Anders had all those requirements. But he knew that the mandatory test-pilot experience was coming next, and it would eliminate him immediately.

  He listened as the newsreader continued, “Compared to 1962 selection criteria, the maximum age requirement has been reduced to thirty-five, and certification as a test pilot, while still preferred, is no longer mandatory.”

  Anders was astounded. NASA had dropped the test-pilot requirement. He hadn’t given a lot of thought to becoming an astronaut; he just assumed the next logical career move for a hot jet pilot was Edwards’s test-pilot school. As he continued listening to the car radio, Anders figured that becoming a NASA astronaut was certainly as interesting an option as becoming a test pilot. He had only three weeks to mail his application.

  * * *

  —

  DURING THOSE THREE weeks, the Soviet Union sent cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky into space in Vostok 5, setting a new endurance record of five days. Attention to Bykovsky was eclipsed two days later when he was joined in orbit by Vostok 6, piloted by a woman. The charismatic Valentina Tereshkova was a twenty-six-year-old former textile-factory worker and amateur skydiver, who was personally selected by Khrushchev to be the first woman in space, a decision conceived entirely as propaganda. Predictably, members of the American press once again asked whether women astronauts might be allowed in the American space program, most notably writer and politician Clare Boothe Luce, wife of conservative Time Life publisher Henry Luce. Surprising many of her anti-communist friends, she criticized NASA’s lack of will and apparent sexism while noting that Tereshkova’s flight was symbolic of the emancipation of women in Russia, where 31 percent of engineers and 74 percent of doctors and surgeons were female. A year earlier, Congress had held hearings about the astronaut selection process and whether women might be qualified, but nothing had changed. After Tereshkova’s flight, NASA did nothing and again waited for the public discussion to subside.

  While Tereshkova got world attention, educators in predominantly African American schools pointed to Ed Dwight’s selection as an astronaut candidate as a way to motivate students in mathematics and science courses. Dr. Charles Lang, a science teacher for the Los Angeles Unified School District, sought out Dwight to appear in his educational filmstrip, “Equal Opportunity in Space Science,” which was revolutionary for its time. In it Dwight appears with two black schoolchildren, telling them, “Our country is going to need boys and girls with knowledge, imagination, and courage to make it even greater than it is today,” and the filmstrip’s narrator suggests that the coming space age promises not only “better spaceships” but also opportunities for “creating better cities.” Lang gave copies of his filmstrip to NASA’s “Spacemobile” educational outreach program, which included it in school science demonstrations across the country. At a time when there were, as Dick Gregory pointed out, practically no black commercial airline pilots employed in America, Dwight’s fame prompted requests from public schools, asking him to deliver motivational speeches. “There are no racial barriers for anyone who wants to be a man in space,” he told his audiences. “All that counts is whether you can do your job.”

  Dwight’s face appeared on the covers of magazines, not only African American periodicals like Sepia (“America Trains First Negro Spaceman”) and Jet but religious journals such as The Sign National Catholic Magazine and Catholic Digest. He and his wife were even pictured on the cover of the salacious gossip magazine Top Secret (“Integration in Space”).

  But perhaps the most curious part of Dwight’s sudden fame was his part in a moment of international diplomacy, much as Edward R. Murrow had originally envisioned. For the Mercury orbital missions, NASA had established two small African tracking stations, located in Kano, Nigeria, and on the island of Zanzibar. But due to the political volatility of the post-colonial era, NASA had concerns about how long the stations could operate safely. In fact, during the summer of 1963, the State Department warned the technicians in Zanzibar to be on the alert for political rioting and to prepare a personal emergency escape plan. In an attempt to mollify local antagonism about the presence of the American stations, Murrow’s U.S. Information Agency had photos of Ed Dwight printed and distributed in Kano and Zanzibar. The hope was that after seeing Dwight’s photo, the potential rioters would racially identify with America’s first black astronaut and forgo any damage to the American stations.

  But the increased media attention only made Dwight’s situation at Edwards more difficult. Yeager and Dwight were asked to pose for a series of press photographs in which Yeager assumed the role of the experienced teacher, using a scale model of an F-104 to instruct Dwight about aeronautics. In interviews Dwight gave no hint of the tension he was experiencing. “I’m a pilot. Nobody cares what color a man is here.” However, the accounts never mentioned that Dwight was only the third African American test pilot in the history of the Air Force.

  NASA received 721 applications for the third group of astronauts. Overseeing the selection board was Mercury astronaut Donald K. Slayton, who had lost his chance to be the second American to orbit the Earth
the previous year when he was grounded due to an erratic heart rate. In compensation, he had been named the unofficial “chief astronaut.”

  In early August, while the selection process was under way, “Deke” Slayton accompanied the second group of astronauts on a five-day desert-survival course in the Nevada wilderness. As part of their training they learned how to fashion desert-suitable clothing from parachute fabric and build a makeshift shelter, which proved exceedingly practical during an hour-long downpour. While in the desert, Slayton was unexpectedly summoned to take an important phone call from Washington. When he returned he told the new Gemini astronauts that the call was from Robert Kennedy, who had requested that NASA accept Ed Dwight as part of the third group of astronauts. “I just spoke for all you guys,” Slayton told them as a group under the Nevada sky. “I said if we had to take him and he wasn’t qualified, then they’d have to find sixteen other people, because all of us would leave.”

  Robert Kennedy’s call to Slayton came shortly after an extremely contentious meeting between the attorney general, Lyndon Johnson, and James Webb, concerning NASA’s poor record of placing African Americans in managerial positions. Believing that Johnson and Webb had talked about equal opportunity but done nothing to effect change, Kennedy decided to call Slayton personally. However, by the time Kennedy placed his call, Slayton and NASA’s selection committee had already winnowed down the list of 721 candidates to thirty-four finalists deserving further detailed evaluation.