Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman

by Neal Thompson

  “He was mad at the world and he let everybody know it,” astronaut Gene Cernan recalled.

  One day Slayton had asked Shepard to stay behind after a meeting. “Don’t you think you’re being a little tough on the guys?” he asked. “I suppose I’ve been taking it out on them,” Shepard admitted. At the end of a long talk, Slayton asked that he at least consider easing up a bit.

  Meanwhile, the public affairs office was trying to find a way to restore the public confidence and its own morale—or at least offer a brief diversion. The solution was a party held May 6, 1967, at the Escape Velocity Press Club. The dual purpose was to celebrate the sixth anniversary of Shepard’s Freedom 7 launch and, to a lesser extent, to memorialize Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. Proceeds from the banquet would go to the Ed White Memorial Scholarship Fund.

  It was an emotional night for Shepard—and a turning point.

  The lights dimmed and the flicker of a movie projector lit up the screen. More than five hundred pairs of eyes—aerospace executives, NASA officials, politicians, editors, photographers, and reporters—watched as a Redstone rocket lurched into space.

  Shepard and his Freedom 7 capsule then filled the screen. In his silver space suit, aboard the USS Lake Champlain, just moments after his fifteen-minute flight, Shepard looked like the perfect astro-stud as the James Bond theme pumped through the speaker system and the film’s title flashed onto the screen, one word at a time.

  Astronaut Hero . . . or . . . How to Succeed in Business Without Really Flying—Much.

  Laughter filled the hotel banquet room as Wally Schirra’s voice narrated the pseudo biographical documentary. After several scenes of spectacular airplane and jet crashes, intended to imply that Shepard had been at the controls, Schirra’s voice explained that, “in the interest of national security, the Navy requested that Shepard be assigned to NASA.” Then Shepard’s despised chimpanzees, Enos and Ham, filled the screen, and Schirra’s narration explained how Shepard “had studied their methods.” Shots of Shepard were then interspersed with shots of Einstein, Washington, and Lincoln.

  The narration ended with Schirra thanking “the fabulous Wally Schirra” for the five-minute film. It appeared the film was over, but then a shot of Shepard at his desk flickered onscreen. Unbeknownst to Schirra, the filmmakers had given Shepard the last word. Shepard, looking stern in a self-deprecating rendition of his own Icy Commander, said, “Wally, I expect to see you in my office at oh-eight-hundred Monday morning.”

  After the film, the roasting continued with a few gag songs, most of them written by Shepard’s record producer friend Mickey Kapp. Schirra and a few other astronauts joined Kapp to sing of Shepard’s smile—“like the hiss of a cobra before lunch”— and how Shepard had sold them on some business scheme and “we lost our shirts.” “It’s okay, we’ll borrow money to pay the rent,” they sang. In a knockoff of “King of the Road,” they sang, “I always win and my partners lose.” Then Shepard joined the group and sang a rendition of “I Believe in You,” from the Broadway show How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. But that night’s version of the song was “I Believe in Me.”

  After dinner they invited Shepard to come to the podium and say a few words. The gags continued as two huge bodyguards kept shoving Shepard back into his seat. When they finally allowed him to reach the dais, a tableful of NASA officials stood and made for the door. They returned laughing, but then when Shepard tried to speak, he found that Schirra (the mastermind behind the evening’s gotchas) had turned off his microphone.

  The laughter finally settled down, and it was Shepard’s turn to speak. As he stood there that night, a decade after Sputnik had started it all, he looked out into a crowd full of peers, bosses, politicians, journalists—a cross-section of everyone who’d played a role in the first ten years of the space race. He’d spent eight years as an astronaut but only fifteen minutes in space. At that moment it seemed unlikely that he’d ever fly again. In fact, he was considering a possible return to the Navy if his ear continued to sideline him. So he decided to use his evening in the spotlight to clear his plate, to say things he’d stored up, but carefully, with a smile and a bit of classy, soft-edged sarcasm. One by one he addressed his adversaries, critics, and colleagues.

  To the press: “I know we’ve tried your patience, and certainly you’ve tried ours on a number of occasions.”

  To Shorty (who’d been invited back for the occasion) regarding his infamous 3 A.M. “We’re all asleep” quote on the morning of Gagarin’s flight: “The truth of the matter is, that’s the earliest he’d gone to bed in weeks.”

  To Bill Hines, the dogged reporter who broke the Cape Colony story: “The truth of the matter was, we refused to serve him a corned beef sandwich.”

  To the men who’d given him the opportunity to make history six years earlier, he elaborated. When the Russians reached space in April of 1961, “it was discouraging to us all.” The United States could have beaten them if they’d flown a few weeks earlier, “and the temporary flush of victory would have been ours,” he said. He admitted that he had been “heartsick” over getting “so close to an event that the country needed.” But, he continued— and at this point he looked out toward Wernher von Braun, whose caution had led to the delays that allowed the Russians to beat America into space—a rash decision could have easily resulted in failure. Waiting until everything was ready, he now realized, had been the right decision, the “mature” judgment call. “It exonerates the careful judgment of you men who placed success over temporary propaganda advantage,” he said.

  For someone as proud as Shepard, it was an extraordinary concession. He’d been so angry back then. But losing Grissom to shoddy workmanship had taught him something. He still wanted “every chance for this country to be first in everything it does,” but not at the expense of lives. He wanted von Braun and the others to know that he now realized “that we will be remembered in fact for how we did it, and not when we did it.” The applause was loud and sustained, and a few of the men in the room bowed their heads to hide their tears. Shepard held up his hands and asked for quiet. He wasn’t finished. He wanted to “close with a few words about the recent accident.”

  The room felt silent.

  “All of us here tonight jointly share the responsibilities for the human frailties which are now so apparent and for the insidious combination of materials and equipment which was so devastating in their behavior. [And] we jointly share the responsibility for future prevention of similar circumstances.”

  But, having said that, it was also time to put Apollo 1 in the past, to stop pointing fingers and casting blame and asking “what if” and hanging heads. “The time for recrimination is over,” he said, taking a cue from his wife’s life view. “There is much to be done. Morale is high. Vision is still clear. Let’s get on with the job.”

  Amid the thunderous ovation that followed, one might have detected in Shepard’s words a clue that he wasn’t talking just about NASA. Indeed, a cure for the Icy Commander was nigh.

  18

  “Captain Shepard? I’m Charles Lindbergh”

  On wintry East Derry evenings, he’d sit at the big wooden table in Nanzie’s kitchen while she cooked dinner at the wood-fired stove and told him this family story:

  It’s 1750 and twenty-one-year-old Josiah Bartlett has just finished his schooling and moved to Kingston, New Hampshire, to practice medicine. He has seen only a few patients when he himself becomes a patient. One day he feels a damp chill crawl across his body, up his spine. The next day he is sweating, dizzy, nauseated. As his fever continues to rise, another doctor friend tells him, “Shut tight all the windows in your room, and refrain from drinking liquids.” But the fever rises higher still. The young man grows weak and delirious. After many such days, his doctor declares that all has been done that can be done. Bartlett’s condition is hopeless. He is dying. Bartlett lies in his bed, waiting for darkness to claim him. But one night the young man rebounds slightl
y, breaking briefly through the haze of his delirium, and opens his eyes. He is parched from the doctor’s orders to avoid liquids. His lips, dry and cracked, ache for something cool and wet. To a friend attending his bedside, he says: “Bring me a jug of cider.” With his friend’s help, he sips cider through the night. The cool, rich apple nectar moistens his sear, sapless body, infuses it, and by morning he is finally able to break a sweat. The perspiration cools him, the fever subsides, and in only a few days more he is back on his feet. And Josiah Bartlett vows never again to trust another person’s judgment above his own.

  When Bartlett returns to his medical practice, he begins experimenting with nontraditional treatments. Patients are drawn to him, his friendliness, and his intelligence. Success with such treatments—like using tree bark to relieve sore throats—earns him a large and faithful clientele. The popular doctor, tall and handsome with curly red hair, is elected justice of the peace, then appointed by the king of England to command the local militia. In 1765 he becomes a representative in the New Hampshire state legislature. Nine years later he and other representatives begin complaining about Britain’s restrictive rules for the colonies. Bartlett is fired from his job as justice of the peace and commander of the militia, and the legislature is ordered to disband, which it does—only to meet elsewhere in secret. As colonial resistance and aggression grows, Bartlett travels to Philadelphia to help the colonies’ other activists create a Continental Congress. On the evening of July 4, 1776, Josiah Bartlett is the first delegate of the new Congress to stand and vote “yea” in favor of a document declaring freedom from Great Britain and the creation of “free and independent states.” An old bellman in the tower of Independence Hall clangs the Liberty Bell, signifying the birth of a nation.

  In the months following Shepard’s sixth-anniversary dinner and into 1968, the effects of the Ménière’s disease, after occasionally subsiding over the previous few years, suddenly became worse than ever. His balance was shaky, and he lost most of the hearing in his left ear. His fate seemed confirmed: He’d never fly again.

  One day in the summer of 1968, Tom Stafford—Shepard’s partner during his short-lived courtship with the first Gemini flight—stopped by the office. Stafford knew how hard the illness had been on Shepard and often kept his eyes open for possible solutions. That morning he had some news. He’d heard through friends about an ear, nose, and throat specialist in Los Angeles who had been experimenting with surgery to cure Ménière’s. Shepard flew to L.A. and met with the doctor, William House, who made no promises. The surgery had been performed only a handful of times, and it carried no guarantee of success. There was even a slim chance the symptoms could worsen as a result of the surgery and that Shepard might lose all hearing in that ear.

  But Shepard felt this was his last chance. If it didn’t work, he would leave NASA.

  As a Christian Scientist, Shepard had been raised to believe that God would make things right if he was right with God. He respected his mother’s devotion, which was also Louise’s, but he never fully accepted the idea that a deity controlled life’s ups and downs. He was more inclined toward self-reliance, believing in his own abilities—and that, like Josiah Bartlett, he could cure himself. But with Ménière’s disease, he had met his match. He had tried exercise, medication, optimism, and even patience. “I convinced myself it would eventually work itself out,” he said years later. “But it didn’t.”

  Now, despite Louise’s lifelong aversion to medical treatment and her deep-seated belief in healing oneself through positive thinking and prayer, a doctor’s knife was the only possible answer, and she had no choice but to support him. Do it, she said. Go for it. Shepard called Dr. House and scheduled the operation.

  Shepard consulted briefly with NASA doctors, but he didn’t want the entire NASA machine involved in the decision, so he told very few people about the upcoming surgery and asked NASA to keep it quiet. He checked into St. Vincent’s Hospital in L.A. under an assumed name suggested by House’s Greek nurse: Victor Poulos. “If this thing doesn’t work, I don’t want a lot of people feeling sorry for me,” he said.

  The procedure was to cut through the mastoid bone, behind the ear, and into the part of the inner ear called the sacculus, which is where endolymph fluid resides. In Shepard’s case, excessive pressure in the sacculus was causing the endolymph fluid to inflame the sacculus, disrupting the inner ear’s delicate balance of bone, fluid, and tissue. With tiny instruments and a delicate touch, House cut a small hole in the sacculus, releasing a spurt of blood-and-pus-filled fluid.

  House then inserted an inch-long rubber tube, as thin as pencil lead, into the sacculus. He connected the other end of the tube to a space behind the sacculus that is filled with cerebrospinal fluid, the fluid that surrounds the brain. If it worked, the tube would drain excessive endolymph fluid from the sacculus into the spinal column.

  But it would take months to see results. Shepard returned home wearing a big bandage behind his ear, which he then had to explain to his fellow astronauts. While recovering from his surgery, Shepard returned to his job as head of the astronaut office. But first he stopped in Deke Slayton’s office one day to tell him about the surgery—and to begin lobbying for one of the upcoming Apollo flights. The Icy Commander was so confident that the operation would be a success, his mood turned noticeably upbeat in the following weeks.

  Walter Cronkite had seen Shepard occasionally in the years since he had first met him in 1961. He considered Shepard “aloof” but respected him for sticking with NASA and heading up the astronaut office while his teammates flew. One day shortly after the operation Cronkite saw Shepard sitting by the pool of the Cocoa Beach Holiday Inn, where Shepard often stayed while visiting the Cape. As they shared a drink and reminisced about the early days of the maturing space program, Cronkite tried to get Shepard to confess to feeling at least a twinge of fear while sitting inside his capsule six years earlier. Shepard insisted, as he had in previous conversations, that riding the Redstone rocket was “duck soup” compared to his previous test piloting and nighttime landings on storm-tossed aircraft carriers. But Cronkite wouldn’t let up.

  “C’mon, Al,” he said. “There you were, lying flat on your back at the top of that rocket, and you’re about to be blasted off. What were your thoughts? C’mon, I won’t print it. I promise. I won’t even tell anyone. But I want to know.” Shepard thought about it a minute, then looked at Cronkite. “Well, you know,” he said, “I looked at those toggle switches I had to turn on cue, I looked at the dials I had to turn on cue, and I thought to myself: My God, just think, this thing was built by the lowest bidder.” The two men cracked up, and Cronkite realized he hadn’t seen that toothy, big-lipped smile in ages.

  About six months after Victor Poulos emerged from surgery, the symptoms that had dogged Shepard for more than five years disappeared. House’s surgery was a great success, and Shepard returned to Slayton’s office and told him that he was ready to fly again. “Get me a flight to the moon,” he said.

  The soul-searching, investigations, shake-ups, and restructuring that had occurred throughout NASA after the Apollo 1 disaster resulted in a completely redesigned Apollo capsule—and a ridiculously huge new rocket. Except for the Apollo 7, the new flights scheduled to begin in October of 1968 would be boosted from earth atop a Saturn 5 rocket, which Wernher von Braun had spent nearly a decade creating. The 363-foot rocket (actually three separate rockets, or “stages,” containing a total of eleven booster engines) would pack 7.5 million pounds of thrust—a hundred times more powerful than the Redstone rocket that had propelled Shepard’s Freedom 7 capsule.

  Unlike the bell-shaped Mercury and Gemini capsules, the Apollo spacecraft consisted of a bell-shaped command module and a cylindrical service module beneath that. Beneath the service module was the Saturn rocket’s “third stage”—an engine that would boost the spaceship away from the earth’s gravity on its 250,000-mile journey to the moon. Tucked in a compartment beneath the service module r
ode another capsule of sorts—the bug-shaped lunar module, the vehicle that would take the astronauts to the moon’s surface.

  The new system was finally tested in October when Wally Schirra, with crewmates Donn Eisele and Walt Cunningham, spent eleven days orbiting the earth and testing all of Apollo’s systems on Apollo 7. Two months later NASA made one of the boldest decisions of its history. Instead of a repeat of Schirra’s test, NASA decided to send Apollo 8 all the way to the moon. NASA administrators asked Shepard to discuss the idea with the astronauts in his charge, and Shepard reported back that he felt it was “a stroke of genius.” He then pushed the three-man crew of Apollo 8—Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders—into a relentless training schedule. He didn’t want any astronaut errors to taint the flight.

  Three days after liftoff Apollo 8 reached the moon, and while orbiting it on Christmas eve the astronauts sent home vivid, moving reports on the gray, dead beauty of the land just sixty miles outside their windows. “A vast, lonely, and forbidding place, an expanse of nothing,” they called it, “a grand oasis.” The three astronauts took turns reading from the Bible—“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth”—before wishing the world a merry Christmas. Then Frank Borman looked out the window in time to see the blue and white earth “rise” like the sun above the flat gray of the moon. “This is the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life,” he whispered.

  The public fell in love again with the space program. The glorious photographs taken by Apollo 8 all but erased the terrible memories of Apollo 1.