The American Experiment

by David M. Rubenstein

  DM: They both hated business. They hated money talk. Money was not ever the center of their focus. And they hated lawsuits. They did set up a Wright airplane manufacturing company, which was instantly successful, and the legal issues began to really play on Wilbur. You could see it in his face. He lost weight, he got very pale, and his strength was obviously in decline. He contracted typhoid fever and died in his mid-forties, much too soon.

  It’s a little like a Greek tragedy, because their father had warned them, since they were little children, “Don’t drink dirty water.” And of course that’s where typhoid fever comes from—bad water. It was a real loss.

  Orville lived on until 1948. If I had grown up in Dayton, Ohio, in the same neighborhood, I could have known Orville Wright. Think of that. I was fifteen in 1948. He might have been that nice old gentleman around the corner.

  DR: Did the family ever get wealthy from their enormous invention?

  DM: They got wealthy, but they did not get wealthy the way so many people are wealthy at that time. The robber barons, the ultrarich, were far wealthier than they were.

  DR: Where is the original plane now?

  DM: The original plane is in the Smithsonian. It was smashed up so it had to be completely reconstructed, but it’s there.

  The first human being to take off in an airplane, Orville Wright, and the first human being ever to set foot on the moon, Neil Armstrong, both came from the same section of southwestern Ohio. Think of that. Another wonderful point is that when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon he was carrying a little swatch of the canvas from the original plane that flew at Kitty Hawk.

  DR: What would you say is the most remarkable thing that you learned about these individuals? What would you say is the most remarkable thing that you uncovered in writing the book?

  DM: They wouldn’t give up, no matter how many setbacks. We don’t talk much about failure with our young people today.

  There’s all kinds of ways to go through failure. One is you get knocked down, you lie there, you cry and you whimper and you lapse into self-pity or you blame other people. The other is you get up on your feet again and you learn from your failure. What went wrong? How can we fix that? Let’s do it again, only this time let’s do it right.

  I found some very marked similarities, though they were very different human beings in different ways, between the Wright brothers and Harry Truman. They remained modest all their lives, they had excellent manners, they never got full of themselves, they were loyal to their hometown, loyal to their families. They came from very modest beginnings and they were knocked down many times and they always got back up.

  There are very similar parallels between Truman’s famous ’48 whistle-stop campaign and the Wright brothers’ determination to fly. There was something in that age, that time, the way people were raised at home, not just at school, that mattered powerfully.

  And, of course, it was a time excitingly full of innovation—the automobile, the lightbulb, the telephone, the bicycle, the escalator, the elevator, the skyscraper, all coming of age. Dayton, Ohio, had more patents issued to it on a per capita basis than any other city in the country. It was kind of the Silicon Valley of our country at that time in mechanical/technical innovation. It’s where the cash register was invented and made by the National Cash Register Company.

  All kinds of things were being made on almost every street downtown. It was kind of a renaissance of its kind. We had Theodore Roosevelt in the White House, we had no debt—none. We had a surplus. We were setting out to build the Panama Canal with perfect confidence we could do it, and we did—the greatest achievement this country had ever undertaken in terms of cost and risk and difficulty.

  The attitude was one that the future was exciting and the possibilities were infinite. The spirit of the country was high. That’s what we need to recover. We need leadership that will lift the spirits of this country, lift the spirits patriotically.

  DOUGLAS BRINKLEY on the Race to the Moon

  Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University; author of American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race and other books

  “How do we all work together for a grand objective?”

  In 1957, the United States was shocked when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first satellite to orbit Earth. Was the U.S. too far behind in the race to control space to even catch the Soviets, let alone ever beat them? Many in the U.S., and in the world, thought so.

  President Dwight Eisenhower quickly approved the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and authorized the recruitment and training of astronauts, and the American government began to play catch-up. But before the world could see the American progress, the Soviets succeeded in launching, in 1961, a manned satellite—putting the first man, Yuri Gagarin, into space and into Earth orbit. The U.S. seemed to be falling further behind.

  The following month the United States did manage to put a man, Alan Shepard, into space, but it was only a fifteen-minute suborbital flight. However, America did finally get an astronaut, John Glenn, to orbit Earth in February of 1962, and that event—followed by a ticker tape parade in New York and enormous public adulation for Glenn—probably gave President John Kennedy the confidence to visibly push an idea he had originally spoken about in 1961 to Congress: send a man to the moon before the end of the decade.

  When this ambitious idea was first presented to Congress on May 25, 1961, it was given only modest public attention and was not really very high on Kennedy’s New Frontier agenda. But in September of 1962, Kennedy made his famous “Moonshot” speech at Rice University, where he firmly committed the U.S. to land a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade. As he famously said, he wanted to, among other reasons, pursue these tasks “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

  At the time, the American public’s general sense was that President Kennedy and his team had the drive and focus to make this awe-inspiring task possible. Within his administration, however, this time frame was seen by virtually all of Kennedy’s advisors as technically unrealistic and prohibitively expensive.

  These concerns were buttressed by another not insignificant problem: there was no real scientific rationale for men, as opposed to robots, to get to the moon by the end of any decade. All of that was beside the point to President Kennedy. He felt a political need, as the records now show, to beat the Soviets in the space race, and this seemed the best prospect, in part because the Soviets seemed then unfocused on this particular space achievement.

  As we now know, Kennedy’s goal was achieved, but the president tragically did not live to see it. Since that time, long-range goals that seem to be out of reach have come to be labeled “moonshots.”

  As the fiftieth anniversary of the original moonshot approached in 2019, countless books were published on the details of the actual Apollo 11 mission and its heroes. But there was one extraordinary book published then, American Moonshot by Doug Brinkley, that focused on man’s centuries-old quest for flight and space travel, and the various decisions made by President Kennedy that led to this historic flight.

  Doug Brinkley is one of the country’s leading historians, having written more than twenty-five well-received history books on a wide array of subjects. I have interviewed and talked to him many times about our shared interest in American history; this interview took place on April 30, 2019, at the Library of Congress as part of the Congressional Dialogues series. The knowledge he brings to any discussion of his book subject is awe-inspiring.

  I should add that the fact that politics drove the moonshot goal does not, in my mind, diminish the boldness of the goal or the enormity of the achievement. It was one of the epic scientific and technical achievements of mankind’s long history on Earth, and a testament to American boldness, skill, leadership, and innovation.

  * * *

  DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): How long did it take you to write this boo
k?

  DOUGLAS BRINKLEY (DB): I started my journey to writing American Moonshot as a kid who grew up in a town on the Maumee River called Perrysburg, Ohio, which is near Toledo. I was eight and a half years old when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon.

  Armstrong was from Wapakoneta, Ohio, which wasn’t too far away from where I grew up. He became my boyhood hero. I started collecting anything and everything I could about NASA. My family would go to Cape Canaveral, and finally, in 2001, I was able to do, for NASA, the official oral history of Neil Armstrong.

  It was right after 9/11. I thought the interview would be canceled in Houston at the Johnson Space Center, but George Abbey, who was running it for NASA, chipped in and said, “Mr. Armstrong doesn’t cancel anything.” Armstrong flew his airplane from Cincinnati and landed there at Houston. I got to spend eight hours with him, including six hours on tape.

  DR: Was he as good as his image?

  DB: The big thing about many of the astronauts, but particularly Neil Armstrong, was that he was an engineer first and foremost. Obviously, he was one of the greatest pilots who ever lived. He was a true Korean War aviation hero, shot down under enemy fire, a great survivor and all of that. But he used to say that we underappreciate engineers in the United States, that we don’t celebrate engineers in history enough.

  I struggled with interviewing Armstrong because I’m a historian, a humanities person. I was trying to get him to open up. He was famously skittish of the news media, to put it mildly. Charles Lindbergh’s baby had been kidnapped, so he was worried that something would happen to his family.

  But at one point, I said, “Mr. Armstrong, in the days leading up to Apollo 11, did you ever just go out and look at the moon, and think, ‘My God, I’m going to be standing there looking down at blue-green marble Earth?’ ” And he said, “No.”

  That was the extent of it. He wasn’t being difficult, he just didn’t think like that. It was a mission, something to be accomplished, and he accomplished it.

  DR: Who actually selected him to be the first man on the moon? Why was it him and not one of the two others?

  DB: Armstrong was picked—it’s ironic, because he did have a great career as a military pilot—because he was a civilian. In 1969, with the Vietnam War going on, it was preeminent that the first person on the moon was a civilian, that it didn’t look like the United States was militarizing the moon.

  Also, everybody liked Neil Armstrong. Among the astronaut corps he had no enemies. He could be very quiet and self-effacing, and NASA publicity people recognized, with a name like Neil Armstrong and the background that he had, he would be the perfect kind of quintessential American. I think NASA and the Nixon administration were correct to pick Armstrong as the first.

  DR: Buzz Aldrin was going to be the second man on the moon. Did he lobby to be the first?

  DB: Buzz Aldrin really wanted to be first. He didn’t get that slot. People think Buzz is a pugilist, that he fights and is a rough-and-tumble kind of character. He’s actually utterly brilliant. He did his doctorate in engineering at MIT. He’s not just a rough-and-ready guy.

  That said, if you get to know Buzz Aldrin, the big thing about him is that his moonshot is the Mars shot of the future. Anytime you talk to him, it’s about going to Mars and how there’s no coordinated leadership to go to Mars by 2040. He’s still banging the drum of being a space explorer, and wants to be remembered in history as promoting going to Mars.

  DR: Was there any infighting as he was trying to lobby to be the first man on the moon?

  DB: Just massive disappointment, wanting to be first. But Armstrong did something special, which was that the photographs we see of astronauts on the moon are Neil Armstrong taking photographs of Buzz Aldrin.

  Incidentally, one of the greatest things our country did, fifty years ago this summer, is right when they’re running out of fuel and time and they’re getting ready to leave the lunar surface and get on to the Eagle, you can hear, if you listen to the [recordings], Armstrong say to Aldrin, “Did you leave the packet?”

  He put something down on the moon, and what was in that packet were medals honoring the three astronauts who died at Cape Canaveral in the Apollo 1 disaster of 1967—Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. And medals to honor the Soviet cosmonauts who died in their race to get to the moon, as a way for the United States to honor Russia because without somebody to compete against, without the Russian technology to spur the United States forward, we never would have gone to the moon.

  DR: Did NASA tell Neil Armstrong what the first words on the moon were supposed to be? If not, where did those words come from?

  DB: Neil Armstrong wrote those words and invented the words himself—the famous “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” He test-marketed the phrase at a kitchen table with his brother. And his brother said, “Wow, pretty hard to beat that.”

  If any of you want to play a futile game, try to come up with your own best line. It’s kind of hard to beat the line that Armstrong came up with. Nobody knew officially what he was going to say—at least we don’t think anybody knew.

  DR: There was some confusion about what he actually said. Did he say, “This is a small step for man” or “for a man”?

  DB: It should be “a man,” and that’s what Armstrong meant. But if you listen to it, you won’t hear the “a.” A lot of times people will put brackets around it to insert the “a.” But others say that he said it, but it’s just that the telecommunications didn’t come across clearly.

  DR: When they came back, they landed in the ocean and were quarantined. How long and why were they quarantined?

  DB: They were quarantined immediately for fear that they might have been contaminated or contracted some unusual virus or bacteria on the moon. Nobody believed that to be the case, but we were erring on the side of precaution. They were held in quarantine twenty-one days.

  But what was very interesting to me writing my book was that right when we rescued the Apollo astronauts from the ocean and they went on the USS Hornet, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins spoke to then-President Nixon. It was a moment filled with American pride. That summer, there were some talks led by Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and Bill Moyers, LBJ’s speechwriter, of PBS fame later. They were lobbying the Nixon administration to name the rocket the John F. Kennedy, to go to the moon.

  Nobody in the White House cottoned to the idea of giving JFK credit for the moonshot. Bryce Harlow, Eisenhower’s former White House assistant, fumed about the federal government having “gone far enough” in “Kennnedyizing” NASA space ventures. White House advisor John Ehrlichman warned that if Nixon “fell prey” to naming the rocket after JFK “the next step will be renaming the moon” after Kennedy “because NBC thinks it would be a good idea.”

  So Nixon never invoked John F. Kennedy’s name. But at NASA Mission Control in Houston, Texas, the second the astronauts were rescued to be put in quarantine, on the big screen at NASA was John F. Kennedy’s May 25, 1961, afternoon pledge to Congress, when he famously first put out they were going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. And on the screen, after the Kennedy quote, they put in big letters: “Task Accomplished July 1969.” And that day at Arlington National Cemetery, a citizen put a card on JFK’s grave that said, “Mr. President, the Eagle has landed.”

  DR: Most of your book is not actually about the flight to the moon, the Apollo 11 mission. It’s about the effort to get there, the pledge by President Kennedy to get there, and the whole history of the search for what was on the moon. Where did the moon originally come from?

  DB: Most people believe that it’s actually a part of Earth, and it came out of a collision with another planet. It’s eerily similar—the dust, the rocks that we brought back—to compositions found here.

  DR: As long as men and women have been on Earth, they were looking to the moon and saying, “How can we get there?”

  DB: It was an age-old desire
to get to the moon. The tides are dictated by the moon, our calendar by the moon.

  I found out in my research that the great French novelist Jules Verne, right after the American Civil War, in a novel, From the Earth to the Moon, predicted the first humans on the moon would be Americans and they would leave from Florida. It took eight days for Apollo 11, and Verne has that in his book too. He was eerily prescient.

  And by the twentieth century, particularly by 1903, once Orville and Wilbur Wright leave Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and we’re in the aviation age, people were looking more and more to the skies, and more and more literature started being written about going to the moon.

  DR: Who was Robert Goddard?

  DB: Dr. Goddard taught at Clark University, and was America’s only really top-tier rocket scientist of the 1920s. He would go into a cabbage field in Auburn, Massachusetts, and launch liquid-fuel rockets, very primitive deals. He’d get written up for noisemaking, and he got hassled by the authorities quite a bit.

  They tried to then control him by putting him on an army base in Massachusetts. That didn’t work. So Dr. Goddard moved to Roswell, New Mexico. They weren’t crazy in New Mexico, the ranch hands, about all those weird objects in the sky they thought were aliens. It was Goddard doing rocket experiments in Eden Valley, as they called it. We tested most of our rockets after World War II at the White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico, due to the proximity of Goddard and also the excellent weather conditions there for conducting sky experiments.

  DR: During World War I, was there any effort to have rockets that could launch against an enemy?

  DB: We were so far behind on rockets, nobody in the Wilson administration took it really seriously in World War I. In the 1920s and ’30s, while we’re doing a lot of great things with military aviation, we’re neglecting the idea of rockets and missiles.

  The country that wasn’t neglecting it was Germany, first in the Weimar Republic and then when Adolf Hitler came into control. Rocketry in Germany was a big, big deal.