“Buzz went to the Moon in peace for all mankind, but it looks like he had to change his motto.”
Her eyes flash and she almost collapses with laughter.
“Is that good?” she entreats.
But before I can answer, she’s flying back down the corridor and as I reach for the elevator call button outside, I can still hear her voice, retreating into the distance, still demanding of no one in particular, “Is that good? Is it?” And I guess it is.
4
The Life of Neil
My World is shapes and patterns.
I like the airplane wallpaper by my bed; the black-and-white dogtooth check of the sofa which Mum and Dad fold out to sleep on at night; the candy halo sun which hovers above a bull on a Picasso print in the hall, which I can stare at for hours and have a terrible desire to eat. At night, they play bagpipe records to send me to sleep and seem to think this is normal.
I’m forever told not to touch the pigeons in Washington Square Park, where the old men play chess all day. Germs: strange, squiggly things that you can’t see but which sneak up when you’re not looking and make you have a bath. Mum is unclear about whether the squiggly things I see if I half close my eyes and look into the light are germs. My hope is that they’re not. What with bombs, and beatniks out on West Fourth Street, and the people who put razor blades in apples at Halloween, and a second brother who they told me was going to be Mark, then turned out to be David – and the nightmarish Red Skull, who causes Captain America such trouble in my comic books – there’s enough to worry about already.
They think I like nursery school, but I hate it. One day, I hit my friend Bobby in the stomach to demonstrate the principle that when someone does that to you, you can’t breathe and fall over. His dad died of cancer. His mom thinks the Beatles are cute, but I prefer the Monkees. His sister Elizabeth taught us to spell “f-u-c-k” and when I asked my dad what it meant, his face went stormy and he said, “It’s a bad word and you’re not to use it,” so now I write it on the floor with chalk during story time, then move to one side and point it out to Mrs. Montgomery. She says, “Yes, I know.” (One day in the far future, a colleague will tease, “Amazing: then you became a journalist!”) All the same, I have noticed that words have power, even though, or maybe because, quite a few people around the Village don’t have them. Richard Raffeto’s mother, who has the voice of a traffic jam and hips like the Hoover Dam and always a huge vat of spaghetti boiling in the kitchen, doesn’t; neither does the little Puerto Rican boy I’ve met, though his beautiful sister does and appears before me like the Madonna, inviting me to his birthday party, or walking me home when I fall off my bike and crack my white skull on the pavement, and there’s a tiny corner of me that will stay in love with her for the rest of my life.
Not that I could do anything about it. The Puerto Ricans live across a big road, which Bobby and I are specifically forbidden to cross. We stand and gaze over there sometimes, can see that the streets are narrower and darker and more cluttered than ours. Sometimes I feel as though there’s a little grey cloud following along a few steps behind me, or a dog with a big, drippy yellow tongue. The world is confusing, or maybe just confused. On the evidence so far, I’m not sure that I like it all that much, though the coconut ice cream in the park is nice.
I was born into 184 West Fourth Street in the week that an unknown Bob Dylan moved in at 161. My English parents had arrived there in 1957 and my mother still describes her trance-like first stroll down Fifth Avenue, stroking the buildings and breathing, “I can’t believe I’m in America.” It was the New York street-life yarns of Damon Runyon that drew my father to the city, and my mother, a plasterer’s daughter from Acton Town, London, with him. Dylan later described the place in his Chronicles as “like some uncarved block without any name or shape and it showed no favouritism … everything was always new, always changing.” To my working-class father, New York felt like a frontier, a place in which the past had no purchase and there was nothing outside of himself to constrain him. No wonder he loved it so much.
Home was so grey by comparison and you could feel it in the culture’s every pore. While angry young playwrights and authors and British New Wave film directors like Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson raged against their decaying, class-bound nation, caught between a putrefying old order and a new one it didn’t have the guts or imagination to join, the Hollywood dream factory of Monroe, Dean and Brando was at its peak and the New York art scene was a rebuke to Paris; Kerouac had put the Beats on the map with On the Road, and West Side Story was about to revolutionize the performing arts. Europe was wardrawn, stately at best, clutching at a veneer of sophistication, while America, so young and brash and out, drank cocktails and danced the night away. From any angle this looked like a rollercoaster ride to the future and it was no coincidence that the only thing really beloved of Jimmy Porter, the protagonist in John Osborne’s landmark play, Look Back in Anger, was jazz.
Better yet, the year before Sputnik, in 1956, Elvis Presley released “Heartbreak Hotel” and “rock and roll” launched itself at an enervated white world. Always Elvis-sceptic, I once asked the photographer Alfred Wertheimer, one of the last to be allowed real access to the singer, why the girls in the crowd were crying – whether the tears were part of an act. He told me:
“Well, I think it was the fact that we’d been through this rigid Eisenhower era. Everything was cutsie-pie crinoline skirts and ‘How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?’; the girls knew their place and they weren’t women’s libbers yet; everything was very tightly organized. Then along comes a guy like Elvis … he’d go onstage into a darkened auditorium, where there would be maybe 4,000 people – mostly young ladies, a few boys and then a few police, who were there just to make sure nothing ‘dirty’ was happening. From the very start, Elvis is focussed on the girls and they’re in love with his hair and the way he curls his lip. And he talks to them and then he begins to sing and he lets it all hang out. His hair, which was immaculate, starts coming down and the sweat comes down – and do you think he stops to mop his brow or sweep his hair back up? No. He gets down on his knees, then gets back up: he is so revealing, so unconscious of his own body movements that all of a sudden the girls look at each other, after all the years of holding everything in, and they cry.
“They’re not putting it on the way you’d see girls doing in later years: they’re not screaming or jumping up and down, just holding each other and crying. The boys would be wondering what the hell’s going on and the cops couldn’t figure it at all. They’re going, ‘Is this something dirty? Why are the girls crying?’ ”
After that, I felt that I understood both the 1950s and the 1960s a little better. I felt a mix of awe and envy for the Baby Boomers who defined the Space Age: for the Brits who had escaped the drabness of their parents’ world through fanatic devotion to that visceral black American music, the voice of a southern underclass who – like them – hadn’t yet tasted the lily-white prosperity of the Eisenhower years, who, as members of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Who, Yardbirds, Animals, Kinks, Cream, Fleetwood Mac, Derek and the Dominoes, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Velvet Underground, Faces, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, Free, laid down so much of the sound track to the Space Age; and also for the American engineers, because, while the lunar astronauts were older than commonly imagined, the average age of Gene Kranz’s Mission Control team at the time of Apollo 11 was twenty-six. So I’m beginning to see why space and the counterculture have always seemed connected to me, why von Braun’s Saturn V and the white Fender Stratocaster guitar with which Hendrix skewered the national anthem at Woodstock less than a month after the first Moon landing sit in my mind as the two most potent icons of the second half of the twentieth century. They were America’s yin and yang, symbolic of the ways in which it chose to spend its incredible wealth and vitality. Someone said that Apollo represented “the triumph of the squares,” but the great good fortune of squares and freaks alike was to be involved i
n something that they could – had to – make up as they went along. Gene Kranz told me: “Everything we needed to go to the Moon with, we had to create – and this joy of creation was a marvel to behold …” When we draw on the Sixties for music, movies, fashion, fiction, this is what we’re after – which is ironic, because innocence is the one thing you can’t re-create, can only parody.
I’m also starting to feel an affinity with the astronauts, whose birth dates mostly fall between 1930 and 1935, because we both trailed in the wake of era-defining generations (they the World War II defenders, me the Baby Boomers), looking up to and taking our values from them, and ultimately paying for some of their delusions. And I suspect that this is why the astronauts are shaping up to be more complex than expected: by the time I’d reached junior high, flying in the military meant dropping napalm on little girls – only an amoral fool would choose to do it – but to them, flying was about the daring pilots who saved the world from fascism. Charles Lindbergh was their Hendrix, Amelia Earhart their Grace Slick. Of course they wanted to fly. Of course they wanted to climb onto rockets and fling themselves at the heavens. Yet, as we’ve already heard, the astronaut thing was an accident.
Here’s how Apollo happened.
John F. Kennedy was a perfect expression of his time. One of his more august biographers, Richard Reeves, suggests that the most significant thing about him was not anything he did or said, but his ambition. With little experience and no principles to speak of, “he believed (and proved) that the only qualification for the most powerful job in the world was wanting it.” He didn’t wait his turn and, after him, no one else wanted to wait theirs, either. He was the Pop Idol president.
The thing is this: prior to taking office, Kennedy had no more interest in space than did the man he wanted to replace, the D-Day choreographer General Dwight Eisenhower. In fact, “Ike” resented the very thought, because the launch of Sputnik in 1957 ruined the final years of his second term. He knew the satellite represented no serious military threat and had been comfortable with what one historian characterized as the superpowers’ “tacit agreement to treat the Cold War as a Cold Peace.” What he hadn’t seen was the way his enemies and vested interests within the aerospace industry and military would be able to use Sputnik as a stick to beat him with. Throughout the Cold War, fear of communism had been exploited less by governments than by self-serving minor politicians and bureaucrats like Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Machiavellian FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, but suddenly the venerable president found congressional big hitters wading in. And some of this stuff was colourful. The bluff Texan Lyndon Johnson, Democratic leader in the Senate and soon to be vice president, for instance, chimed:
“The Roman Empire controlled the world because it could build roads. Later – when it moved to the sea – the British Empire was dominant because it had ships. In the air age, we were powerful because we had airplanes. Now the communists have established a foothold in outer space …”
And what had the House Speaker John McCormack had for breakfast the morning he declared that the U.S. was facing “national extinction”? Or General Curtis LeMay, when telling Johnson’s subcommittee on U.S. preparedness in technology, space and security – hastily convened after Sputnik 2 hurled Laika the unlucky dog into orbit – that “it is doubtful in my mind whether we could catch up before we have a general war.” A what? And if that wasn’t enough, Wernher von Strangelove weighed in with the appalling possibility that Sputnik could lead directly to an orbiting bomb, even though he must have known that such a thing would be of no tactical advantage.
On and on, the subcommittee heard endless hand-wringing testimony to American technological torpor, while a symphony of detonating U.S. rockets played in the background. Tom Wolfe describes the humiliating televised “lunch” of the first U.S. satellite on a Vanguard rocket, which rose six inches, caught fire, then sank to the ground like a fat old man – Ike might have favoured Lyndon Johnson – exploding. The tiny satellite was afterwards found bleeping under a bush and the Kremlin actually sent condolences. Then another exquisitely embarrassing Redstone groaned four inches up, sank back, popped its parachute and sat on the pad like a Victorian lady with her skirts blown round her ears, and the media and public wanted to know why this was happening, because they’d believed the story that American science was to be the bringer of a promised new world where there would be plenty and better of everything, and no poverty, no hunger, no germs … GE über alles! When Lyndon Johnson eventually acceded to the presidency he’d always coveted, his vision of the “Great Society” would be founded precisely upon this notion – equality and harmony through technological advancement. But American science wasn’t working. In this context, space acquired a symbolic urgency.
So Eisenhower, Ike, was shocked. He woke up one morning feeling like a reluctant dad at school sports day: it seemed that someone had put his name down for the Space Race – but what the blazes was it? He hadn’t even known there was such a thing until everybody started telling him that he’d already lost. In his memoirs, Eisenhower confided that during this period his main concern “was to find ways of affording perspective to our people and so relieve the current wave of near-hysteria.” A noble sentiment, but he couldn’t do it, and when the time came to leave office, he delivered a farewell address which stands as one of the most bizarre in his country’s history. In it, he warned of the creeping influence of a “military-industrial complex” – a phrase that would have sounded easier on the lips of Noam Chomsky or Marshall McLuhan, or for that matter Chairman Mao, than coming from this Republican ex-military man with little apparent taste for drama.
The thing I love about this story, though, is how badly the agitators underestimated Ike. His public image was of a nice guy who was no good at politics, but people close to him say the opposite was true. To him, this military-industrial complex appeared to be less a conspiracy than a condition arising spontaneously from the U.S. economy, rather as class does from the English education system. So before he left, he acted, making perhaps the most important decision anyone ever made in relation to a space programme that Ike never cared for. He took the insignificant National Advisory Council for Astronautics (NACA) and turned it into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA. Then, while the generals watched in impotent rage, he kicked space into the offices of this new, civilian organization, which would unravel its secrets for the glory of science and the good of humanity. He planned to cede military applications to NASA, too, but was dissuaded. He also wanted to announce that “manned” activity would end with the Mercury programme.
Next up, in November 1960, John F. Kennedy beat Richard M. Nixon to the presidency by the slenderest of margins, polling 34,226,731 votes against 34,108,157. The appointment of Lyndon Johnson as his running mate enraged the new president’s brother Bobby, but was convenient politically, despite rather than because Johnson had turned himself into the prime cheerleader of space and technology. It was months before any member of the new administration saw fit to give NASA administrator T. Keith Glennan a call.
Then two things happened: the global celebration of Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight on April 12, 1961, closely followed by the Bay of Pigs debacle just four days later, when a U.S.-sponsored force failed miserably to dislodge President Fidel Castro from Cuba (conspiracy theorists and novelists such as Don DeLillo and James Ellroy had the president’s refusal to sanction air cover costing him his life at the hands of an enraged CIA/Mafia). With racial tension striking fear into the hearts of Americans and the accelerating involvement in Laos, which would lead to Vietnam, JFK desperately needed to renew his dynamic image. Particularly irksome to him was the fact that Alan Shepard had been scheduled to preempt Gagarin, but last-minute safety concerns caused his Freedom 7 flight to be delayed. JFK’s close friend Hugh Sidey, a Life magazine journalist, described being present at a crucial meeting in the wake of these disastrous first six months in office, where the most romanticized and overrated Amer
ican president of the twentieth century displayed a charming ignorance of space matters, before wailing in reference to the Soviets. “Is there any place where we can catch them? What can we do?” Science and exploration don’t appear to have been the issue. Pride, vanity, political expediency do.
Yet there is an alternative version. Three weeks prior to the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy had resisted calls for an acceleration of rocket development. Now he prophesied that the conquest of space would become a symbol of the twentieth century and so he called a meeting with Manned Spacecraft Center director Bob Gilruth and his NASA colleague George Low. Afterwards, Gilruth told Chris Kraft that the president asked about their plans for the future, so they’d told him about Mercury and an ambitious but vague idea of circumnavigating the Moon at some point in the distant future. According to this account, Kennedy interrupted, wanting to know why, if the aim was to defeat the USSR, they weren’t considering a landing. As quoted by Kraft, Gilruth said:
“I didn’t want to sound negative, so I told him that landing on the Moon was probably an order-of-magnitude bigger challenge than a circumlunar flight. But he didn’t let it go.”
The two NASA men had no idea that Kennedy was already asking his vice president to conduct a study into the proposal. But as far as some of JFK’s advisers were concerned, there may have been more to this than is commonly acknowledged. In a book published in 1969, the journalists Hugo Young, Peter Dunn and Bryan Silcock spoke to Willis H. Shapley, “a reflective intellectual who sits rather oddly beside the enthusiastic pioneers of space” and happened to be in charge of space and defence affairs at the Bureau of the Budget in 1961. As Shapley told it, “People [within the administration] realized that space was the answer. It was a way of keeping up the aerospace economy and responding to the demand for more missiles without escalating the arms race.” If this is true, the race to Luna really was conceived as the sublimation of a third world war which nobody wanted. All the same, NASA’s Gilruth claimed to have woken screaming in his bed on the night after Kennedy announced his grand plan for space. Not only had the president bragged that they were going to sail “this new ocean” all the way to the Moon: he’d promised to do it by the end of the decade.