The Unexplained - Howard Hughes - Edition 367 - "First Man" - Neil Armstong

Oct. 23, 2018 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:24:33

Edition 367 - "First Man" - Neil Armstong

A specially extended podcast-only version of Howard's conversation with James R Hansen - whowrote the Neil Armstrong Biography "First Man" that the movie is based on....

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	Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
	And I've got to tell you, it is the end of October now here in London.
	The temperature has dropped like a stone after a great summer that gave every indication that it was going to go on for a very, very long time.
	It is now bright and cold.
	So I think we're headed towards winter here in the northern hemisphere.
	Things may well be better for you if you're listening to this in the southern hemisphere.
	Now, thank you for your emails.
	One thing I am noticing is an awful lot of new listeners to the show.
	A lot of people discovering the back catalogue and then getting up to date with the show.
	So hearing this now, I presume.
	But it's nice to hear from so many new listeners.
	Please spread the word however you can about the unexplained.
	And I do love to hear from you.
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	You can email me through the website, theunexplained.tv, designed by Adam from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
	And you can tell me what you think of the show, how you think it can be improved, and give me guest suggestions, contact details of people that you think should be on the show.
	And I will deal with it from there.
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	You can do it through the same website, theunexplained.tv.
	Guest on this edition, slightly different in that this is an extended edition of an interview that I recorded here, and part of it was first broadcast on the radio show.
	This is the full unexpagated version, as they say.
	This is a long interview with a fascinating man.
	He is the man who created the book First Man, on which the movie First Man about Neil Armstrong, The First Man on the Moon, is based.
	James R. Hansen is his name.
	And the book and research that he did was based on many, many, many hours of speaking with Neil Armstrong himself and everybody who knew him, including his first wife, for one.
	It is a very comprehensive work.
	He is a wonderful man to speak with, and I wanted you to hear the entire interview which I recorded here on this edition of The Unexplained.
	So it runs about an hour and 20 minutes or thereabouts.
	So I think it may well turn out to be the longest edition of The Unexplained that we've ever done.
	But it was such an enthralling conversation that, you know, I didn't want to wrap it up at any point.
	In fact, I would have liked it to go on longer.
	So this is that.
	We have more great guests in the pipeline here, by the way, and your suggestions, always welcome.
	And believe me, if your email requires a personal reply, as many of you will know at the moment, it gets one from me.
	You know, I always do that.
	And, you know, not many people in this world who can actually say that, certainly in this media world.
	So let's get to the guest on this edition.
	This is my conversation with James R. Hansen, the man who wrote the book First Man, on which the movie is based.
	James, thank you very much for doing this.
	Tell me a little bit before we start talking about the man in question.
	Tell me a little bit about yourself.
	Well, I have been an academic historian teaching at a university for over 30 years.
	I have focused on the history of flight, both aeronautics and space.
	My first real job out of graduate school was I did a book for NASA, for the space agency, and that kind of led from one book to another.
	And so by the time I contacted Armstrong about the biography, I had been, I was about 20 years into my career at that point.
	And getting access to Neil Armstrong, did you have to do that through NASA?
	Because of course he wasn't working for them at that point.
	But as I know because I interviewed Edgar Mitchell, and I'm sure is the case with other Apollo astronauts, they still have a big input.
	Yeah, well, in a way, yes, but mostly no.
	It was hard even to find an address to send a letter to Neil.
	And I actually did, yeah, and I actually did have a friend in the NASA history office who had a post office box.
	Neil was living in a suburb of Cincinnati where he was teaching.
	Well, he had been teaching as an aerospace engineering professor.
	He had resigned from that and was just doing, he had different positions on different corporate boards.
	So I needed to have NASA in order to get me an address.
	But after that, it was really up to me to try to convince him to do it.
	NASA, I think the fact that I had done NASA work, but I think even more importantly to Neil was just the fact that I was a university person, that I was an academic, and that he knew that my scholarship was going to be a serious work and not something just sensationalizing his life.
	Was he suspicious then of the media?
	Look, I tried in his lifetime to get interviews with him and I failed.
	Then many people in my position did.
	Yeah, he was very, he did not like to participate in what he would call feature interviews.
	If there was a news item that he thought he could actually contribute to, like after the Columbia accident, I know he talked to some media, but he resisted almost every feature story.
	And, you know, I think there were various reasons for him being on his guard about that.
	I think he did mistrust what the results were going to be.
	He had, I guess, enough early experience that the stories didn't turn out quite as accurate as he wanted them to be.
	He could be pretty literal about things.
	And feature stories, you know, not that they aren't literal in some respects.
	He just didn't want to participate.
	So, yeah, it was hard.
	It was very, very hard for anybody to reach him.
	And that led to a reputation of him being almost a reclusive, which he really wasn't.
	I mean, he was very active and doing lots of things, but he just did not participate in media interviews for sure.
	So, you know, here was a man who was guarded About himself, because he was concerned about the portrayal that would be made of him in perhaps a media piece or whatever.
	And I suppose, from a military background, you can understand that because even around the space program, especially around the space program, secrecy and security was very much keynote.
	Yeah, but most all of the astronauts had military backgrounds.
	There were a few exceptions to that.
	I don't think in Neil's case, it really had to do with that as much as the fact it was just the nature of his personality.
	I mean, what my biography does is go back really to his childhood and looks at personality development.
	And he was really, he was this way, really, from the time he was a boy on.
	I mean, I think obviously once he became a public figure, then that sort of inherent inclination in his personality was exacerbated a lot.
	But I think he was always very reserved and unwilling to share who he was in a lot of ways.
	And I think, you know, as I said, my biography tries to explain that within the context of his family and his siblings and his mother and father.
	But I don't think it was really a result of his— But I think he was really just by nature that sort of person.
	As a boy, he seemed from what I have read to have a sense of duty.
	And if you were looking for pretty much the archetypal all-American boy, then he might well have been it.
	Well, yeah, he certainly was in certain respects.
	I mean, he was an avid Boy Scout member, and he was from Middle America.
	He was from a small town and in many ways reflected small town values.
	His family was a simple family that came out of a farming background.
	Neither one of his parents were college educated, so Neil was the first in his family to go to college.
	So, yeah, I think he did in many ways.
	I think he certainly participated in a lot of things that one would associate with small-town Americana in the 30s and 40s.
	But I always have regarded him as a pretty unique personality.
	And even as a boy, there were things about him.
	He was a little more quiet, a little more, you know, in some ways unaware of social circumstances around him because he was so focused on the things that he wanted to do, whether it was building model airplanes as a small boy or later on flying real planes.
	He had his license at age 16.
	So he was very focused in what he wanted to do, but could be rather oblivious to things going on around him otherwise.
	This may be apocryphal.
	One of the things I read about him was that one of the little jobs that he did when he was younger in his hometown was he was paid a dollar to mow the lawn or to mow the grass at a cemetery.
	That's correct.
	Yeah, he did have that job, and then he had a job at a pharmacy.
	He had a job at a bakery.
	He was kind of a small boy for his age, and he was small enough that he could get inside the, I guess, the big mixers that made the bread, and he could get inside the owner of the bakery would have Neil, as a boy, climb in these mixers and actually clean them out.
	And the money that he earned was almost 100% spent on model airplanes, on flight magazines.
	I mean, it really, and then later for pilots, you know, for lessons out at the grass airfield where he learned to fly.
	And we have to say that I have known people, I know people now who are massively keen and hugely interested in aviation.
	I mean, look, I'm interested in planes too.
	I still am, was when I was a kid and I am now.
	But here we are talking about an individual, first as a boy and then the man, who was absolutely consumed by flight.
	Yes, he was.
	And, you know, growing up in the 1930s, he was born in the year 1930, but there were still lots of aviation firsts that were taking place in the 30s.
	I mean, it's just, it's a little bit past the era of Lindbergh, but many other aviation flights that were setting records.
	And Neil followed those very carefully in the flight magazines, and he built the airplanes.
	And then during the Second World War, as a Boy Scout, he was part of a program that helped identify, you know, airplanes that flew overhead.
	I mean, he would be part of a program to look up in the sky and be able to tell what airplane it was.
	It was part of a Boy Scout program.
	And to his dying day, if an airplane flew overhead, Neil almost invariably looked up and sometimes made comments about it.
	He was much more, I mean, there's been a mistake in sometimes how he's been portrayed because of his later becoming an astronaut.
	Some authors of children's books about Neil in particular have suggested that Neil was, you know, he was a stargazer.
	He looked through telescopes a lot.
	He read a lot of science fiction.
	And that makes perfect sense for someone who becomes an astronaut.
	But it's not true.
	He really wasn't like that.
	He didn't do those things.
	He was really all about airplanes.
	It struck me very much, James, that this man was not about science fiction, not at all.
	He was about science fact.
	Exactly.
	He was an engineer, and the pragmatic...
	I mean, when he talked about that, he talked about it being a simple correlation, you know, a simple correlation that how he came up with that.
	Well, just describing that as a simple correlation tells you exactly how technically minded that he was.
	Right.
	Now, like a lot of, as you say, a lot of the people who became involved in the space program were military pilots and specifically test pilots.
	I interviewed Edgar Mitchell a few years before his death, and that was his background.
	These were people who were trained to push things to the limit.
	They were trained to accept risks.
	They were trained to push their bodies to the ultimate degree.
	Yeah, they were.
	I do, in my book, I make a distinction between the so-called the right stuff, as it was depicted in Tom Wolfe's novel and the movie that was made later.
	I distinguish that from the real right stuff, which I come to define as the type of test piloting that Neil and most engineering research pilots did.
	I mean, I think we have kind of this myth of the test pilot.
	you know, it's kind of been that it is embodied by someone like Chuck Yeager, who's out flying by the seat of his pants, breaking records and daredevil almost to a certain degree.
	Whereas in fact, the real test pilots, the real right stuff, are people.
	They're engineers in the cockpit.
	They're out there to get data from the flight.
	They want to learn about the man-machine relationship, and they're not out there to break records.
	They're out again.
	They're out to learn and discover and improve the aircraft design, improve the aircraft performance.
	And Neil was certainly that sort of engineering research test pilot.
	So I think that's an important distinction that I try to make in the book for people to understand what type of pilot Neil was.
	So when he flew the X-15, we've got to remember and put this into context that the 50s was an era where we were trying to push the boundaries of speed, of design of aircraft, of things that were beautifully aerodynamic and perfectly able to go very, very fast.
	He flew the X-15.
	This did 4,000 miles an hour, a staggering speed.
	That's what, five, six times faster than a commercial jet liner today.
	You're saying that when he went through that, he wouldn't have been necessarily thinking primarily about, wow, isn't this a great experience?
	But he would be thinking about the parameters of the aircraft and what we have learned from doing that kind of speed.
	Absolutely.
	You've described that perfectly.
	When he was flying the X-15, there were certain systems of the aircraft in particular.
	I mean, what the X-15 did was it was to test hypersonic flight, flight at speeds where aerodynamic heating took place and flying it at heights where you're really flying above the negligible atmosphere.
	So what you had is you had a vehicle, an aerospace plane of sorts, where you could get so high that your aerodynamic controls didn't work anymore.
	So what NASA was doing in association with the Air Force was designing what kind of control systems would you need to actually affect and control your vehicle up above the atmosphere.
	I mean, what would you need in a vacuum?
	And so there were systems that you had to fly so high to get yourself out of the negligible atmosphere and then push to see what those systems did.
	So when Neil was flying, you know, the very first scene in the new movie is this X-15 flight and Neil gets into some trouble.
	And of course, the movie can't explain it.
	They don't have the time to do it.
	But the book explains that flight.
	And what Neil was doing was pushing that airplane, not to break any sort of record, but they had a new system that they needed to try to get operative and to see how it worked.
	And so that's really what was going on.
	So yes, it wasn't really about setting records.
	It was to see how is this machine going to fly and what are the conditions aerodynamically and non-aerodynamically at such altitudes.
	But again, and this would be misrepresenting the man from what I've seen and for what you're telling me, it would be very easy to portray him in that situation as somebody who's willing to push the stick a little further forward and push the aircraft for his own experience's sake.
	This guy wanted to help everybody learn in order that they could build better aircraft and ultimately, as became the case for him, go into space.
	Yeah, and again, it's from the engineering background.
	I mean, they understand the systems.
	They're not just flying the airplane.
	They, in some cases, are even, and certainly in Neil's case, they really were part of the design of many of the systems involved with the airplane.
	So they're really, they're engineers at work in flight, basically, is what the research test pilot does.
	And breaking records is, it can be part of the test process, but it's usually quite incidental to the test process for most research test pilots.
	I was going to ask you what kind of a person do you need to be to do that?
	But I think we need to zero in on what kind of person was he to do that, because you're doing this.
	You're gathering data.
	It's groundbreaking, air-breaking stuff.
	But also, you need a certain amount of internal resilience, or you need to be able to shut yourself down on one level, because there's always the possibility that you will die every time you go out, and you will see some of your colleagues die.
	Yes, and in fact, he did.
	It's amazing when you go back and look at the culture of the test pilot at a place like Edwards Air Force Base, which had both civilian and military test pilots in the 1950s.
	The number of pilots that are killed in these test programs is almost unbelievable.
	I mean, it's a very, very high number.
	And so, yes, I mean, you are in a culture where death is happening around you.
	And, you know, it's not my, in my experience, I only know this experience from reading and hearing about it.
	But I think people must, the pilots had to, in a sense, harden themselves a bit because it was happening to them.
	And to some extent, it's a confidence in their own abilities that if they're flying the way they should be and not taking unnecessary dangers, that the odds are with them, that things will be fine, they'll make the flight.
	But, of course, the reality of that flies in the face of that sort of logic.
	And because people that are very good pilots found themselves in circumstances that they could not recover from.
	I mean, Neil had his share of risks.
	I mean, he could have died many times during his flying career, many, many times.
	I guess he could have died in, what was it?
	It was something like four score 78 combat missions.
	That's right.
	He went to college for two years on a naval scholarship, studying aeronautical engineering, and then had to go report for service when the Korean conflict broke out in 1950.
	And so he became part of a fighter squadron.
	He flew a Panther jet, and he flew 78 combat missions.
	And on one of the missions, a good part of his left side wing was shorn off by a cable that the North Koreans had strung across a valley.
	And flying without half of a wing is kind of challenging.
	And Neil Was able to make it back close enough to friendly territory that he was able to eject.
	And fortunately, it was picked up without being hurt very badly.
	But yeah, that was a close call.
	And his fighter squadron had, he had two or three very close friends that were killed in action over North Korea.
	And there was one major problem when a plane was coming into their carrier and crashed during the landing on the carrier and took out numerous airplanes.
	It was just a total devastation on the aircraft carrier.
	And Neil, fortunately, was not flying that day and was actually down in the wardroom.
	But there were lots and lots of casualties.
	He was experienced.
	I mean, death was something that he had experienced from the time he started flying, really.
	And that's where you learned that the show must go on, I imagine.
	You may see these things happen, like the incident on the carrier.
	And we know that those landings, even today, they're precision things and people get them wrong.
	They overshoot, they go into the sea.
	Sometimes, very rarely these days, they hit the deck and cause all kinds of carnage on the deck.
	So it's a very difficult field to be in.
	But the one thing that you learned from that, and I guess the one thing that he picked up from that, is that the show must go on.
	You might have seen this.
	This might have happened on Tuesday, but on Wednesday, you're back in the cockpit and you've got to do it again.
	Yeah, I think that's a very good description of how they have to approach it.
	And one thing that's really interesting about the connection between Neil's naval flying, I mean, the one unique characteristic, there are others, but one tremendously unique characteristic of being a naval aviator is maybe the most dangerous part of your flight is when you land.
	I mean, you've got to come back and land on a carrier.
	And sometimes even at night, you have to do it.
	And that makes it even more difficult.
	But what's interesting is that six of the seven Apollo lunar landing commanders were, in fact, naval aviators.
	And it wasn't as if NASA was specifically requesting that or necessarily seeing the linkage between the carrier landing experience and landing a lunar module.
	But it's, I think, more than coincidence that, in fact, six of the seven commanders did have this naval aviation background.
	Looking at him in those early days, we've heard a lot in the last quarter of an hour or so talking about his complete passion for this, his technical ability, the fact that he can close down parts of himself to do the task in hand and achieve what is required to be achieved.
	But we've heard nothing about what he was like personally and how he got on with people.
	In those early years, he must have been a team player.
	What kind of person was he?
	Yeah, I think he was a quite good team player.
	When he was in the Navy in the fighter squadron, he was the youngest of all of the pilots.
	He was only 20 years old, and he was kind of treated almost as a golden child among those, and he still is in a way.
	I mean, I've stay in touch with some of the squadron mates that are still living, and they still regard Neil kind of as the golden child.
	So I think he was, you know, he was comfortable, when he was comfortable in a setting, and he was certainly comfortable around other pilots, Neil could be very sociable.
	I think he would still not be your most loquacious person of all.
	He would be a good listener.
	He would come in at opportune moments to make the points that he had to make.
	But he did develop very, very close friendships.
	And I think that was something that he continued to do as a test pilot in the test pilot community and with the other astronauts.
	But he was always the type of person that did hold back a little bit of himself.
	I mean, he didn't go out and try extra hard to explain himself to people.
	There was an opaqueness about his character that almost everybody has commented on.
	He eventually gets married in the 50s.
	And the image that America and the world likes to see when we think of people like this is of Larry Hagman, I Dream of Jeannie, you know, living a great— In fact, it was far from that kind of thing for him, wasn't it?
	There were hard realities, and he had to make choices in his personal life.
	Yeah, there was.
	In fact, his first wife, Janet Armstrong, he had met at Purdue.
	And I interviewed Janet at length for the book.
	And one thing that was surprising, I asked Janet to describe how they met and what their dating was like, their courtship.
	And her answer to me was, well, we didn't date.
	And I said, well, if you didn't date, how did you get married?
	And she said, well, he was an older man.
	He was back on campus.
	He had been at the war.
	He was going to get a government job.
	It just seemed like it might be a good idea to be his wife.
	And yeah, which seemed kind of incredible to me and probably maybe to most people.
	But so these two people married in 1956.
	They were nearly strangers at the time.
	And of course, Neil moves out to his job, his test pilot job out in the Mojave Desert of California.
	And then he moves the family, they move into a cabin that doesn't have running water or electricity.
	It's just really bare bones up in the hills above the Mojave Desert.
	And Janet was, you know, was from an affluent suburban family of Chicago.
	Her father was a medical doctor.
	So putting her in those circumstances was a little bit, but they were young and in love, I guess.
	But they had some tragedy in the family that happened early on.
	Well, they did.
	They lost a child, didn't they?
	Which is, you know, even if you are working in a grocery store or working as a car mechanic, it's a real hard thing to build into your life the reality that you've had a bereavement in that way.
	But he was doing that job that consumed so much of him.
	So I presume that tested the relationship.
	Yeah, it tested it very, very harshly.
	In fact, you know, in interviewing with Janet, it was really clear that what Neil did to grieve was it was all private, and he wouldn't even talk about the death of the daughter with his wife.
	She needed him to talk to him, to talk to her, that she needed the support.
	But he just went right back to work.
	And when I asked her, well, did he talk in later years or later on about the death of the child?
	And Janet's Answer was never.
	He never talked about her.
	And so, you know, it was difficult for her to be, really, in a sense, to be married to a man who would not engage her at the level that she really needed it.
	But that was Neil.
	That was Neil.
	I mean, the death of the child was very, it was something that, you know, a lot of marriages don't survive those sorts of losses.
	And this one survived, but in surprising ways and ways that didn't really bring them closer for sure.
	And in that same year that they had the tragedy, the bereavement, the loss of the daughter, that is the year he joins the space program.
	It is.
	And I believe through my conversations with Neil and with his sister and with Janet, his wife, that there was a pretty direct correlation between that.
	It takes about six months from the death to him entering astronaut selection.
	And in those six months, he actually experienced a number of troubled flights, which had not happened at any earlier point in his career.
	And my book looks at these flights one by one to sort of relate what happened.
	And I do think that he had been emotionally upset.
	And clearly, as much as he tried to be handling it on the surface, down deep, he was hurting and it was affecting his flying.
	And he saw, I think, the movement over to the space program and to become a Gemini astronaut was a way of starting fresh, starting fresh, getting out of California, getting away from what had happened and shutting that door, which in some ways, I guess, is, I mean, that's the way he handled it, but it wasn't necessarily the best way for Janet to handle it without his help.
	And so, yeah, I do believe there's a strong correlation between him, the death of the child, the grieving period, and his decision to move on to become an astronaut.
	How does she feel about him?
	Well, you know, they divorce in 1994.
	And so the marriage lasts, you know, despite all of these problems, it lasts a long time.
	Which is astonishing, isn't it?
	All the way through the genesis of his career, all the way through him becoming one of the people picked for Apollo and to go to the moon, then to become the first man on the moon.
	And everything that followed that, the fame and the adulation and all of those things, which we will talk about.
	But it's not until 1994 that they go their separate ways.
	Yeah, they had separated five or six years earlier without the divorce being finalized.
	And when I asked Janet about it, it wasn't that she had gotten beyond the point of dealing with being Mrs. Neil Armstrong, the icon.
	It was just she just got fed up with a man who wasn't going to engage her.
	I mean, she needed him to talk about certain things and to make certain decisions.
	And Neil, it was getting harder and harder for Neil to do that.
	And she just didn't want to put up with it anymore.
	I mean, as harsh as that sounds, when I was writing the biography and studying this, I mean, really, I kept thinking, I kept rooting for them to fix the situation, to find some way of getting closer.
	And I kept, but what amazed me was, I mean, how is this continuing?
	How is this relationship continuing?
	But, you know, I think, and I'm not any expert on marriages.
	I'm not, you know, that's not my field.
	But I think there are a lot of marriages.
	We probably all know people where marriages have continued far beyond, you know, their healthy point.
	And there's, you know, just a lot of forces that are at work that keep people in a married situation when, in fact, they might be better off going separate ways.
	Sometimes it's a centrifugal force that people resist, but ultimately it shakes out.
	And clearly, in what, 1988, when the process began, and then 1994, when they finally went their separate ways, that split did happen.
	The movie, I have a friend who's a professional movie reviewer, and I was very interested in her take on this.
	And I think she lost, and I don't want to speak for her, but I think she lost some sympathy for him because of the movie.
	Well, I think if you read even my book, you lose some sympathy for him, because if you're examining Neil as a father and a husband, you know, there are shortcomings.
	There are things that you wish were not the case.
	And I think, you know, what the movie does is pick up on some of those themes from the book.
	And then you have this fabulous, you know, portrayal of Janet Armstrong by Claire Foy and the scenes where, you know, where Claire, as Janet, shows her unhappiness, her frustrations with Neil not being there for the family as much as they would.
	I mean, those are all based on accurate stories and things that Janet told me in interviews.
	So the movie is not making anything up there.
	It's dramatizing it in a very successful way.
	But all of those things really happened.
	And she seemed to be somebody who had to, whether she wanted to or not, she was put in the position where she had to, to on occasions hold him to account, to make him realize that you need to be addressing this issue.
	You need to be thinking about what you tell the kids about the things that you are going to do and the risks that those things entail.
	Yes, exactly.
	And, you know, one thing about a movie, I mean, we see this a couple of times happening over the course of a two-hour plus movie.
	But in reality, you know, I'm not sure how many more times than that that would have occurred, you know, over the course of the real life.
	I mean, in the movie, it looks like it might happen a lot because you're seeing it happening, you know, having two major sort of blowouts with her husband over the course of a movie.
	But, you know, again, what I'm suggesting is I don't think this was a regular occurrence at all.
	I mean, I think there may have only been two blowouts during that particular point in time.
	The movie then makes it look like it's a more consistent thing on Janet's part where she's calling him to task.
	But I think it was really rare that she did that.
	I mean, it was difficult for her to do.
	And I think she just got to the point where she just couldn't take it anymore.
	And she would insist, especially in terms of when Neil was leaving for the Apollo 11 launch.
	And Neil seemed to be avoiding talking to his sons at all about what the possibilities of the flight were.
	Janet told me when I interviewed her that she went to Neil, got in his face, and told him in no uncertain terms that he needed to sit down and talk to the boys and let them know what could happen.
	In these days, in this era, somebody doing that would probably make a video presentation and hand it to his wife and say, in the event of me not returning, show the kids this.
	It will explain everything.
	He doesn't strike me as being the kind of person who would, even with the technology they had in those days, think along those lines.
	No, I don't think he was either.
	I think he was, you know, Jana once told me that, you know, an argument with Neil was him saying one word.
	No.
	You know, that he just wouldn't, you know, he wouldn't.
	And I think, again, what the biography, what the book can do, the movie can't do, is I do set this up by explaining even as a boy, Neil avoided confrontations.
	His mother, Viola Armstrong, was a very strong evangelical Christian.
	Neil did not embrace that, even as a boy, but he loved his mother dearly.
	And so when his mother discussed religion, Neil would listen politely, not say anything, and walk away.
	And he developed, I think, this sort of conflict avoidance strategy in relationship to his mother and perhaps his father as well.
	And that personality characteristic was true to, he was true to form for that his entire life, even with other astronauts.
	I asked other astronauts and I asked people for mission control, did you ever see Neil in an argument or in an argument?
	And they said never.
	They never saw him in an argument.
	It wasn't Neil's way.
	It didn't mean that Neil agreed with you.
	He probably disagreed with you many times.
	He kept that to himself and then he just dealt with it.
	If he wanted to get his way, he would do it in a different way than arguing about it.
	Now, we've talked a lot about Janet and her experience of this and the dynamic of the relationship as it reflects the man.
	But let's zero down on him and the situation that he was in.
	Let's look at it from his point of view for a few minutes here.
	In that, anybody who's doing something that is responsible, and there is very little that is more responsible than preparing yourself to go into space and to learn about that and ultimately to be picked to go to the moon, anybody who's got that kind of pressure on them, anybody who is constantly being told you're doing important work, the temptation is, of course, to sink yourself into that to the exclusion of all else.
	And partly because that's the kind of person that he was, but also, I suspect, partly because the people driving him, the people to whom he reported every day, expected that.
	Yeah, I think that's certainly true, and I think that was a part of it.
	But in the character of Neil Armstrong, they had somebody who was naturally inclined to do that anyway.
	And again, I hate always to go back to his boyhood, but I strongly believe that the child is the father to the man.
	I'm not sure who first said that.
	But, you know, Neil as a boy was so focused about the things that he was interested in, you know, that he could ignore the people around him.
	And so that focus on mission, whether the mission was just building his airplane when he was 12-year-old or going out to the airfield to learn how to fly when he was 16 years old, he was all about that and could deflect everything else in his life.
	I mean, he was unaware, for example, his grandmother Armstrong came to live with the family when he was a freshman in high school.
	When I interviewed Neil, he told me that Grandmother Armstrong did not come to live with them until he went to college.
	And so we brought his sister by phone into the conversation, and she made it clear to Neil, well, Neil, of course, this didn't affect your life at all, but I had to share my bathroom and my bedroom with Grandmother Armstrong.
	So here's a boy at 14 or 15 and an adult later on who can't remember that his grandmother was in the house for four years.
	So this was a guy that could focus.
	If he had something that he was interested in and he was passionate about and he felt that this was his thing to do, he could push everything else to the side.
	So when you move him into the NASA setting now as an astronaut, and you're asking him to have that sort of focus, well, he's that way anyway.
	So the organization didn't really have to turn him into an organization man.
	I mean, he was the type of person that was perfect for that kind of setting.
	And the one thing that some men get accused of, many men get accused of through their lives, is compartmentalization, putting things into compartments to be able to manage them more easily, just like you're managing shirts in a drawer.
	It seems to me that he was the master of this.
	You had to be.
	He was absolutely the master of compartmentalization, no question about it.
	And his compartments would be locked to everyone.
	I mean, and he only opened them if he absolutely had to.
	If he absolutely had to.
	If it was a compartment he was uncomfortable with, he kept it shut.
	Right.
	In the Apollo program, it was, we read, very competitive.
	The competition to actually get yourself in on a launch, the competition to actually get yourself doing something meaningful.
	Was he competitive?
	Was he ambitious?
	I think he was both, but in kind of a way that wouldn't surface and it would appear to others that he really wasn't competing or wasn't overly ambitious.
	I think he let his actions speak for themselves.
	In his high school yearbook, there was a saying that was attributed, and it wasn't something he said, but what his classmates said about him.
	He thinks, he acts, tis done.
	And I think that's how everybody regarded him, even the other astronauts.
	So he didn't, Neil didn't play games.
	He didn't, you know, I don't think he strategized about, well, in order to become the commander of Apollo 11, I'm going to have to do this or do that or try to undermine this person or, You know, suggest this to the head of the astronaut office.
	I don't think Neil did any of that.
	I think he just was him, and he thought through his own actions that he would, you know, if it was meant to be, then it would work out for him.
	There were people who were involved in the preparatory missions he was.
	How did he get to be selected for the big one?
	Well, as he would say over and over later in his years, it was really just a contingent circumstances because it wasn't like he was preordained to be the commander of the landing mission or to walk out onto the moon first.
	I mean, basically, Deke Slayton, the head of the astronaut office, chose the, what he did was choose the best men to be the commanders and then to line up the crews under the commanders.
	And Deke believed that any of the commanders could do any of the missions if they were trained, if they were put in training for that particular mission.
	So if Apollo 8, 9, and 10 hadn't worked out as well as they did, if they had been some problem and they needed to repeat that mission, then the mission types could have slipped and it could have been Apollo 12 with Pete Conrad as commander that was the commander of the landing.
	So Neil always made clear people understood it, although sometimes I think people who didn't try to understand it would think, well, Neil's just being modest, and of course, he was going to be the commander from the start.
	Well, that's not true.
	It really was a matter of circumstances.
	And, you know, he had been the commander, the backup commander on Apollo 8, which made the circumlunar flight in December 1968 that Frank Borman commanded.
	Then Borman resigned from NASA after that Apollo 8 flight, and that changed some assignments.
	But as the backup crew for Apollo 8, normally the backup crew became the prime crew for three missions later.
	So since Neil was the backup commander on 8, he became the prime commander on 11, and things just worked out that 11 was going to be the first landing attempt.
	And how did he get to discover that he would be the one who would be the first feat on the lunar terrain?
	Well, that was a, I have a whole chapter in my book called First Out, and it's a fascinating story about how NASA does make that decision.
	And when the crew is first named in January of 1969, the press immediately asks, well, who's going to be the first one on the lunar surface?
	And Deke Slayton jumps in, the head of the astronaut office jumps in and answers that question by saying, well, we have to do a lot of simulations inside our mock-up of the lunar module to see which of the two astronauts, Neil or Buzz, in this case, which ones would be best to go out first.
	And in the end, they do announce that the decision that Neil, the conclusion that Neil's going out first is based on the interior layout of the limb, that the way the hatch opens and the way Neil's positioned on the left and Buzz is positioned on the right, that the hatch opens, you know, sort of in a way that would close off Buzz and in their big backpacks.
	It was a very tight quarters and some of the walls of the limb were almost paper thin or something.
	So it was partly down to logistics on board the lunar module.
	Well, that's what everyone was told.
	I mean, the astronauts were told that, the public was told that.
	But in fact, as my book explains, there was a private meeting of the four leading officials in a manned space program, Chris Kraft, Bob Gilruth, George Lowe, and Deke Slayton.
	And they were talking over, they understood that the person who walked out first was going to become this global icon and was going to be a historic character of enormous importance, important to NASA from a public relations, important to America from a public relations, and needed to represent the right kind of person.
	And these four men knew Buzz, and they knew Neil very, very well, personally and professionally.
	And their 100% consensus was it has to be Neil.
	Neil's got no ego.
	He's very much like Charles Lindbergh was like.
	On the other hand, Buzz has ego.
	There were things about Buzz that some of the other commanders, Frank Borman, for example, would not accept Buzz as a crew member, not because Buzz wasn't a proficient astronaut, but that there were just elements of his personality that graded people the wrong way.
	They were very, very different people, Buzz Aldrin and him.
	And we don't talk about Michael Collins, who was the third member of the crew so much, but Buzz Aldrin, from what I read and from what I know, was a very, very different person.
	But I guess that you have to have a mix of personalities, but ultimately somebody has to be Numero Uno.
	Well, you know, Michael Collins is one of my favorite.
	His books about the space program are, I think, the best written by any of the astronauts.
	And Mike talks about the Apollo 11 crew as amiable strangers.
	Wow.
	And that's a wonderful expression.
	But then I asked Mike, and when I interviewed him, I said, well, okay, amiable strangers for the three of you.
	But what about just Neil and Buzz?
	And he thought for a moment and he said, neutral strangers.
	So, you know, they could work.
	Neil and Buzz could work very well together on a professional level.
	And Neil accepted Buzz as such, or he wouldn't have been on Neil's crew.
	But in terms of personal relationships, there was almost nothing between the two of them.
	And in fact, in later years, I know quite well that Buzz tried often to get Neil to come to certain events, you know, reunions or things like that.
	And Neil usually, you know, he didn't go to a lot of them.
	And I don't believe that the two of them actually communicated personally on almost any level in the years following Apollo 11.
	They just, they were neutral strangers.
	Well, isn't that astonishing?
	But I have read and heard that before.
	But having been through such a profound experience, I guess there are many ways to deal with it in subsequent years.
	And that's one of them.
	When it came to actually stepping out, we are led to believe that it was, obviously, it was rehearsed and practiced and planned Meticulously.
	But we are led to understand from the footage that I've seen so many times, and you'll have seen it too a zillion times, it was a difficult landing.
	And I imagine because of the difficulties of finding the lunar landing site and getting down there, perhaps the process of getting off the craft and getting on the surface of the moon was almost not anticlimactic, but perhaps was not quite as big as if they'd smoothly found the site, touched down exactly on plan, and that there were no difficulties.
	In fact, the landing almost didn't happen, didn't it?
	Because of the traumatic experience of finding a site that was clear.
	So that was an enormous hassle getting there.
	So maybe the actual stepping off the craft, you tell me, was not quite the big thing that it might have been.
	Well, you're right.
	They did, in fact, you know, on the ground before they left, they did simulate everything they could in terms of moving down the ladder, getting out of the hatch, all of that.
	But from the point of view, and certainly Neil's point of view, landing the machine was really the key to it all.
	And what happened afterwards was just kind of gravy.
	And so he always told people and certainly told me that in terms of what he was going to say when he stepped out, that he didn't really have it composed until after they landed.
	I mean, why think about it when there's chances, or maybe 50-50, that you're even going to land?
	There's all kinds of scenarios in which you would not land, you would abort, you would not even try to do it.
	And so he thought, well, you know, once I'm down, you know, I think he had a kernel.
	This is my own take on it, that he must have had a kernel of the idea of what he was going to say.
	And then after they landed and it was clear they were going to leave the limb and Neil was going to step out, at that point, he finalized what thought he had.
	But a lot of people tried to give him ideas.
	They asked him, what are you going to say?
	What are you going to say?
	Maybe you should say something like this.
	And Neil always just, again, it goes back to conflict avoidance.
	He would listen politely and then he would walk away.
	He would say nothing and he would walk away, just like he did with his mother.
	So this was whatever he said, and we know what he said now, although there is this question of whether he said amen or not, it was really something that he was going to determine on his own.
	But why bother doing it when you're not even sure you're going to land?
	I mean, the words that we are, we've heard so many times, of course we have, are one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
	But as you say, there is all this controversy about whether he meant to say and whether he actually did say, and it was somehow lost in the ether, that it was one small step for a man, which changes the meaning slightly.
	Yeah, well, there's no question that he meant to say it.
	He certainly was clear about that afterwards and for years later.
	But it certainly did, we didn't hear it.
	And when you listen to it, we've all listened to it a number of times.
	It sure doesn't seem like there's any space in there for him to have said the word A. But there has been a lot of acoustical analysis.
	In fact, I was with Neil at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington when an Australian acoustics specialist gave a demonstration.
	He had what he thought was proof through the electronic, I'm not sure this is the correct technical term, but the electronic register that there was something that indicated an attempt to make a sound, although it was not audible.
	And NASA accepted that conclusion, and of course Neil did, because he thought all along that he had said it.
	And so I think NASA now, in any of their official statements about the quote, uses the A. Neil himself, when I asked him what to do about it, he said, you know, in his typically wry sense of humor, he just said, well, put the A in parentheses, you know.
	So, you know, most of us would probably lose maybe the power of rational thought, but certainly the power of speech doing something like that, because you're stepping out onto another world.
	There is a possibility that it may be the last place you see.
	To be able to say any words, I think, is a remarkable feat.
	Right.
	And there is another possibility, which I sort of prefer myself, because, you know, I'm a Midwesterner, just as Neil was.
	Neil grew up in northwestern Ohio, and I grew up in northeastern Indiana, about 50 miles from where Neil was born.
	And there is a regional accent, and we do tend that regional accent does tend to smash words together.
	So I think there's a chance he said for a man, which, you know, which rolls the R into the A, which rolls it in there to such a degree that you'd really have to have acoustical analysis to be able to tell it apart.
	So that's kind of my own take on it.
	And there actually was just within the past couple of years, it's amazing that this is still being discussed at a serious scholarly level.
	But there was a study at the University of Michigan where another acoustics expert actually concluded exactly what I've just suggested, that it was the word is there, but it's just put together, the R and the A, where it only comes out as one sound.
	And I'm sure they'll be debating it in 50 more years.
	I'm fairly sure about that because people will always do those things.
	But in the meantime, there he is on the surface of the moon.
	I asked Edgar Mitchell when I spoke with him, how did you feel when you looked through the visor at the landscape there?
	And he just said, and I thought it was rather neat what he said.
	He said, Howard, it was a wow moment.
	And that was it.
	It was a wow moment.
	I wonder, and you talked extensively with Neil Armstrong, what went through his head?
	What was he thinking?
	Well, you know, that was, I wish I had gotten more from him on that level because I think, you know, Neil was so mission focused and job focused that what he wanted to talk about was not anything in terms of his own psychological state or emotional state or a sense of aesthetics, but rather, you know, he knew he had experimental setups to, you know, to put in place.
	The very first thing he had to do, NASA wanted to make sure that they got some soil, some dust and rock specimen.
	So there was the first contingency sample that he had to do almost immediately upon hitting the lunar surface.
	And then there were lots of other little tasks that both he and Buzz had to do.
	And so it was almost as if, you know, and it's hard to believe.
	I mean, you're on the moon.
	How can you not have a wow moment?
	But in terms of Neil's own description of things, it's like he was so well trained.
	You know, he wanted to make sure he helped the geologists, you know, because so he wanted his description of what he was seeing, you know, and what he would be picking up.
	So he had to go through the checklist.
	Oh, absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	And so, I mean, unlike, I mean, you're right about Ed Mitchell.
	Of course, Ed has almost a religious experience that's connected to it.
	Neil has nothing of the sort, as far as I can tell.
	He does have this moment, and this is what the, you know, I don't want to do any, this is a spoiler notice in terms of the film, and I won't say too much about it.
	But Neil does make this side trip over to Little West Crater, which was not part of the mission plan.
	It was not scripted for him to go do that.
	And it was at the very end of his EVA.
	And in fact, the mission control people were urging him not to stay over there very long.
	And we know from the telemetry data that his heart rate to get over there when he was, by the time he got to the crater, his heart rate was up to 180.
	Wow.
	And there is a cardiologist in the United States who's still looking at the data from the Apollo astronauts who believes that Neil had some sort of significant cardiac event over at the crater.
	Well, was that an encounter with aliens?
	I mean, I know, you know, this is a question that I have to ask because how many times do you read it?
	The point is often made that maybe there was an encounter with something there that none of these guys, and in particular him, wanted to talk about.
	And that may be partly accounted for the fact that he was so reclusive in later life.
	Something made his heart race.
	Well, I think, I mean, my understanding of the cardiology is that, or the physiology, is that it took quite a bit of exertion to get over there because he had to get over there and get back pretty quickly.
	And so he was loping.
	I mean, there was a type of running to get over there.
	And Neil's heart rate always ran high among all the astronauts and even all the X-15 test pilots.
	Neil's heart rate always ran higher than almost any of them did.
	So, I mean, so that helps to explain what's...
	I think even for a man of steel, which he clearly was in large part, is perfectly understandable.
	How did you ask him?
	And if you did, how did he handle the people who say that maybe you encountered aliens or maybe something else happened there or perhaps he didn't even go to the moon at all?
	How did he deal with that?
	Well, he had to put up in the ensuing years.
	He had to put up with all sorts of nonsense, honestly.
	I mean, I've read through most of the correspondence that he got, and he got tens of thousands of letters from different people.
	And he had one set of folders called Quacks.
	And it was full of the letters from people who either believed that he saw aliens or didn't believe that they went to the moon at all or thought that he had converted to Islam after hearing the Muslim called a prayer on the lunar surface.
	I mean, there were all kinds of stories that he had to deal with later in life.
	And when I talked to him about them, he was kind of humorous to him that these things had come up.
	But it was also clear that he was frustrated to no end, that no matter what anybody said in reaction or in response and trying to explain what really happened and what didn't happen, that it really didn't matter because people were going to believe what they wanted to believe.
	And no matter how hard he tried to maybe correct some of these stories, they just multiplied anyway.
	Okay, Edgar Mitchell believed, and we know this very publicly, that we are quite likely not to be alone in the universe.
	Did Neil Armstrong share any thoughts about that?
	No, that's a timely question for me because just yesterday, I got that question in another interview, and I really didn't have, nothing that I've researched have I found anything that Neil specifically said or wrote about extraterrestrial intelligence or the SETI program.
	And so I emailed his son, Rick, Rick Armstrong, his oldest son, and I asked Rick if he knew of anything.
	And Rick didn't know of anything either.
	So I'm going to have to continue researching it.
	I think the truth must be that Neil didn't really say too much about that.
	I think what I can sort of interpolate from what the kinds of things he did say to questions that were close to that was that I think he felt, you know, it's an awfully large universe.
	There's so much about it that we don't know.
	I think he would certainly keep the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence that he would believe that it could very likely be out there.
	I mean, we've only experienced this tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of what the universe is about.
	What I really enjoyed about Neil is how he talked about the Earth as a spaceship.
	It's a very unusual spaceship because the crew and the inhabitants are all on the outside of the spaceship, but we are in space all the time.
	And so I think he wanted to educate the public to get rid of the old medieval concept of you've got the Earth and then you've got space.
	Well, the Earth is an object in space that's moving and we're not quite sure even where in the universe Earth is in relation to everything else.
	So he was quite comfortable with the idea that we are part of some kind of continuum.
	Absolutely, absolutely.
	And that really reflected his religious, I mean, to the extent he had religious beliefs, he described himself literally.
	I mean, I have this, I have the evidence for it.
	He described himself as a deist, kind of an, you know, an 18th century Enlightenment thinker where you believe that God, you know, created the universe and the natural laws that govern the universe and then sort of just steps away from it.
	And you see God, you experience God through those natural laws.
	You know, it's not a personal doc, you know, and it's not a particular doctrine that Neil believed in.
	He just had this almost Newtonian sense, although there were aspects of Newton that were a little bit more mystical.
	But what people came to interpret is kind of a Newtonian concept of God and the universe, sort of God as the cosmic engineer, which would fit very much with the man.
	I totally get where he would have been coming from.
	How did he deal with the idea and Nixon had prepared a speech or had a speech prepared for him to deliver to the American people that assumed that they'd all been lost, and he would explain that these people had been very brave and all the rest of it.
	So there were contingencies on Earth.
	What contingencies had he made for the worst, if that had happened up there?
	Yeah, very interesting question.
	Yes, William Sapphire, one of Nixon's speechwriters, had prepared these in case of all kinds of scenarios.
	If they landed and got stuck and didn't get off, or if they died crashing, there were two or three different scenarios that had been written up for the president.
	The astronauts themselves were unaware of those speeches, and they came out.
	The fact that they even existed came out later on.
	I don't think, honestly, I don't think Neil did anything in particular to prepare.
	I mean, again, Janet had to get right in his face to try to get him to talk to his sons at all about the possibilities.
	I don't think there was any extra insurance policies or any new will was written or anything like that.
	I think that was kind of the whole idea of that would be back in one of those compartments we talked about earlier.
	In terms of the mission not even succeeding, well, from Neil's point of view, the mission is going to succeed.
	That's the approach that he takes.
	So I don't think he, deep down in his psyche, he's a human being.
	So you got to think that that thought entered his mind.
	But Neil, as much as anybody I've ever met, would be able to sublimate that thought and keep it at bay.
	So I don't think he, I think he was so focused on what he had to do to get there and to fly the lander down to the landing that he just focused as much on that and just tried to turn everything else away.
	And let's be shiningly honest here.
	That's the kind of person you want to go to the moon.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	It is.
	And, you know, I'd said earlier in response to your question that, you know, Neil was not preordained to be the Apollo 11 commander.
	But, you know, in looking back, you can't imagine that, I mean, I can imagine other commanders have done the job as well as Neil, but I can't imagine any of them doing it better than Neil.
	I mean, I think he was a perfectly great choice to do that job, to land that machine.
	He comes back.
	The mission is successful.
	He is lauded around the world.
	They all are.
	But Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon.
	I mean, there's only ever going to be one of those.
	So, of course, he's the center of everybody's attention.
	There's a ticker tape reception.
	You know, they're paraded in limousines.
	The public cheer.
	That would turn a lot of people's heads, but not him.
	No, not him.
	I think there were aspects of it that he really enjoyed.
	For example, when he was in countries where English wasn't spoken, Neil would, on the airplane from one city to another, Neil would almost always prepare a little something where he could speak the native language just if it was a line or two, or he would learn about the history of the place that he was going.
	So he was very, you know, I think, and he always made very appropriate remarks at the places that they visited around the world.
	I mean, they went virtually everywhere to every continent.
	And so I think he enjoyed, he didn't enjoy the celebrity, but I think he enjoyed the experience of meeting new people and visiting other lands and sharing.
	I mean, it was the lunar landing, there was a plaque on the leg that said, we come in peace for all mankind.
	And I think Neil was very much, I think he embodied that.
	He wanted that to be true.
	He wanted it.
	I mean, that was a very turbulent time in world history, you know, I mean, especially in American, I think even in Europe with lots of, I mean, the Vietnam War was at its height.
	We had had the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, you know, student protests in Paris and lots of places in the United States.
	And Apollo was a type of, was at least a sort of a timeout, a respite from that.
	And I think the astronauts could, I mean, they knew what was going on around the world and they knew that Apollo was something that the whole world was embracing.
	You know, it was for all mankind.
	And people were saying, you know, not the Americans did this, but we did this.
	We, the human species, did this.
	And I think Neil really felt good about that and wanted to be part of that.
	But as far as the clamor, the celebrity, that element of it, I mean, if he could have had the part where he was contributing to the for all mankind theme without becoming a celebrity, that's what he would have wanted.
	But he was in an era.
	He was famous in an era where the icons were, well, there was, for us here in Europe, there was Pele, the footballer, of course, who was internationally recognized, John Lennon, Elvis Presley in your country.
	You know, they were the big people, and he was there with them.
	He was on a par with them.
	He was.
	In fact, for many months after Apollo 11, he was getting 10,000 letters, fan mail letters a day, 10,000 a day.
	And he came back from this world tour with many thousands of letters waiting for him to be answered.
	And he got assistance from NASA, from special secretaries that were assigned to him.
	But trying to even keep up with his mail, I mean, it was almost impossible to do.
	But he did his best.
	He did his best to get photographs out, to get his signature out, to answer the mail one way or another.
	But I can't imagine that he, I don't think anyone really could have imagined how big, how big this could be.
	I mean, sure, you know, he understood that it was going to be something that people were going to want to touch him and talk to him and get his autograph.
	But I don't think the iconography that, you know, that's one thing I knew when I was writing the book, that I was not just writing a biography, I was writing an iconography.
	The different meanings that would be projected onto Neil, you know, by culture, by society, I don't think anybody could anticipate exactly where that would go.
	But it's an awful pressure, and it's something that you notice, you know, even if you've only had a little lick of fame in your life, people get an impression of you that isn't often really you.
	You know, I was on a big radio show, and I was always amazed that people would, you know, kind of imbue me with properties that I just don't have.
	Now, if you magnify that a billion, billion times, you've got him.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, that's really a great insight.
	And also the fact that Neil was who he was.
	I mean, Neil was sort of this vessel.
	Neil didn't fill up his own space completely.
	And I think it was also part of the opaqueness that kind of mixes metaphors a bit.
	But I think he was the perfect receptacle of our projections because he didn't really go out of his way to tell you, to tell us who he was or what he was thinking or what he believed in.
	And so since we didn't really have him filling up his space in the way Buzz Aldrin, say, would have filled up Buzz's own space, you know, Neil was like an easy target or the perfect vessel for us to just project our own things into him.
	And then when we did, Neil wasn't the sort to sort of, you know, to deflect them or to tell, bother to tell the world that, well, that's not true or this isn't true or that's not true.
	It just sort of absorbed into him into this iconography.
	So it's fascinating, really, to study all of the different ideas about Armstrong that circulated in the years after he became Apollo, the Apollo 11 first man, because so many of them are totally exaggerated and many of them are just outright fabrications.
	And presumably, he could have, after NASA, gone to work for a big corporation, had a very, very nice life.
	He could have hung out a lot at Palm Springs.
	He could have known Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra and he could have lived the life.
	He chose to go into academia and he chose not obscurity, but he just did not seek the limelight on any level.
	Yeah, he wanted to continue to contribute on a technical level because, you know, again, he had trained hard to become an engineer, you know, to have his college degree in engineering, and he wanted to continue to contribute.
	And I think he left NASA because, you know, they weren't going to let him fly another space mission.
	So what they asked him to do was to move over to the aeronautics side, which was his first love, and to sort of take care of NASA's aeronautics programs.
	And he would have been fine doing, he did that for about a year, but he was put in a Washington office, and then he would get phone calls every day saying, Neil, we'd like you to come over to this embassy or this building because we want to photo shoot with this politician or this ambassador.
	And, you know, they wouldn't let him do his job.
	Right.
	So he became a bit of a mascot, or he would have become a bit of a mascot.
	That's right.
	That's right.
	So he said, I'm not doing that.
	That's not what I, that's not, I'm not doing good work, you know, and he wanted to do good work as he would define it.
	So he took off back to the Midwest, back where he came from, to the University of Cincinnati, where he taught aerospace engineering for about 10 years.
	He would have made, you know, he would have made an average type of university salary.
	So he was not, he didn't make money as a government employee.
	He didn't make money as a college professor to speak of.
	But he did, after 1980, when he resigned from his teaching post, he took a number of positions with different, mostly high-tech, you know, types of corporations.
	And by the time he and Janet divorced, I know from the divorce settlement, he was worth a little over $3 million.
	So that would have been almost all money that he would have accumulated in these corporate board positions.
	But he always, Neil didn't want to just, you know, he could have been attached to any company in the world probably as a, you know, as a mascot or as a spokesperson.
	But he always wanted to choose companies where he actually thought he had something that he could contribute.
	So he went to companies that had, you know, a technical element to them so he could actually, what he had to say, his analysis would actually be coming from the engineering background.
	And of course, his skills were very much in demand.
	When an event that I will never forget, because I was on my first trip to America as a very young person, loving New York, sitting there in a relative's home watching CNN, which we didn't have in the UK, and I saw the launch of Challenger and what subsequently happened, it was an enormous shock.
	I will never, as I'm sure it was part of your life enormously too.
	Of course it was.
	I will never forget what those days were like.
	He, of course, played a crucial role in the investigation.
	Yes, he was made the vice chair of the commission, the presidential commission that former Secretary of State William Rogers chaired.
	And I discussed this at some length in the book because Neil's role was kind of behind the scenes.
	William Rogers took care of the kind of the outward, the public view, you know, and spokesperson for the commission investigating, whereas Neil kind of ran the inside.
	He was kind of Mr. Inside.
	And so his role in the committee was really quite important.
	And of course, as an engineer, engineering is really all about studying failure and knowing how to obviate failure.
	So failure analysis is something that's, you know, that an engineer is very well qualified to do.
	It's really part and parcel of who they are.
	And Neil had also had done some work on the Apollo fire back when the Apollo fire took place.
	66, 67, wasn't it?
	67, yes.
	And the Apollo 13 accident, Neil had some role in looking into that as well.
	But yes, his role in the Challenger investigation was quite important.
	And did he have any kind of role behind the scenes, or even further forward than that, in bringing to account those who needed to be brought to account?
	Well, he was certainly an active member of the investigation and was very active in the interviews of folks.
	I don't think that necessarily there was any specific investigative trail that Neil was following that the committee as a whole was not part of.
	But I think Neil, in the end, is very much a part of the concluding analysis, that the focus was on what Morton Fly called with the solid rocket booster, the cold old rings, and also the role of the teleconference the night before that NASA didn't immediately admit to.
	I mean, without going back through the whole Challenger thing, Neil was certainly there, unlike some committee members who were there sometimes and not other times, Neil was there every day, every minute of every day, and so was very central to that investigation.
	And somebody you want to have on board because of the methodical forensic analysis of the facts of that terrible tragedy for America, for the world.
	And plus, you know, I think, you know, to make Neil Armstrong a member of that commission, I mean, most of them were prominent in one way or another, but when you have Neil Armstrong associated with the presidential investigation, it gave it a level of gravitas and integrity that because Neil had a reputation that was so solid and everybody, if Neil Armstrong's saying that this was the cause of the accident, then most likely that was the cause of the accident.
	A lot of people who have big lives and do important things, life is kind of anticlimactic in the years and decades that follow.
	And for some people, it's retirement or doing jobs that weren't really quite what they were when they were at their peak, and it's hard to come to terms with.
	How did those things affect Neil?
	I guess he was always so busy that they didn't affect Neil, but you tell me.
	Well, yeah, I think he was he never got past being first man.
	I mean, people didn't ever totally forget about him, but he had, he did stay out of the public limelight enough that he would not be recognized.
	You know, I remember doing my interviews with him.
	Neil loved this one ice cream shop that was near his house, and we would go and wait in line to get an ice cream cone sometimes in the afternoon.
	And there could often be a very long line.
	And there I was standing with Neil Armstrong and all these other people, none of them know that it's Neil Armstrong in line waiting for ice cream.
	And so he could go places.
	He could go places and not be bothered.
	But on the other hand, there were people that stalked him.
	There were people who tried to, who followed him from airport to airport.
	There were people that rented driveway space in his neighborhood to try to take videos of him.
	Really?
	So, yeah, so he always had to really be kind of on guard to what was going on around him.
	And that could be very uncomfortable at times.
	So I think the one thing that was great for him late in life was after he and Janet did divorce, you know, he met a woman who had lost her husband in a general aviation accident, Carol.
	Carol held Knight.
	And they married, I think, soon after the divorce was finalized.
	And they were real soulmates.
	I mean, the last 20, well, nearly 20 years of his life in this second marriage, I think he and Carol, they traveled the world.
	They really enjoyed each other's company.
	I think she brought Neil out, you know, had him come out of himself in some respects to do some things that maybe Janet wouldn't have or hadn't successfully gotten him out to do, just because Carol was a much different sort of person.
	And so Neil really, I think he was really in love with this, with Carol.
	And I think the last years of his life were very, very good ones for him personally.
	We would like to think that people go on forever.
	Sadly, not even the first man on the moon goes on forever.
	So we lost him not that many years ago.
	I was part of radio tributes to him, did one online as well.
	It was a shock when such an important person leaves the stage in this way.
	Do you think from your conversations with him, there were any things that he still had to do?
	God, this is a ridiculous question because he walked on the moon, but were there any things that he still had to do when he left us?
	I think he was writing a book.
	It wasn't going to be really autobiographical because Neil just had a hard time talking about himself or writing about himself in a first person kind of way.
	But I do think he wanted to write the book.
	I think there would have been thoughts on, you know, not on his career so much, but on the state of the world of aerospace and the present and the future.
	And so I think that would have been a nice thing to have from him.
	I think he would have continued to lecture, maybe more than, I mean, he had just given talks in Australia and in Arizona within a few months of his death.
	So I think he might have been actually even more active talking and venturing out into the public with Carol at his side.
	So we might have seen more of him.
	He had testified before Congress with Gene Cernan and Jim Lovell in the aftermath of the Obama administration's cancellation of the Constellation program.
	So Neil had some thoughts that he was sharing about what he thought was happening with the space program and what should be happening next.
	So I think we would have gotten more from him maybe in the later years than what we had got from him in some of the preceding years.
	And so we missed out on that.
	Right.
	But a great American and somebody who did something that nobody else will ever get to do.
	And how many people can say that?
	Now, you are enthused by his life.
	You are an encyclopedia of his life.
	Did you like him?
	I did.
	I did.
	I came to like him a great deal.
	And I tried when I was writing the book and researching the book.
	You know, I spent 55 hours just of tape-recorded interview time with him, and we spent other time together.
	We played some rounds of golf.
	And so I got to know him pretty well.
	But I tried not, I mean, my goal was to write an independent scholarly biography that could last and pass the test of time.
	It wasn't to become his friend.
	In fact, I thought it was maybe a little bit, it would be wrong to try to become friends at that point because there might be some tough issues that I had to address in the book.
	And I think there were some.
	But after the book came out, then in the years after, I mean, I did do some events with him and we stayed in contact by email and some phone calls.
	And at that point, I think we did become friends of sorts.
	So you liked him and he liked you.
	That's great.
	Yeah, the one thing that he said to me about the book, and it may not sound like a great compliment, but coming from Neil, it was a tremendous compliment.
	He said to me the day we finished sort of reviewing the manuscript, he said to me, Jim, you wrote exactly the book you told me you were going to write.
	And that meant a great deal to me because I certainly knew from his later life that people, so many people had approached him to try to get him to do things, and they weren't always honest with him, that they would say one thing and then really try to be getting him to do something else.
	So just as you'd picked him as a subject, he'd almost picked you, hadn't he?
	Well, I like to think so.
	I mean, he certainly had lots of options.
	I know from looking at his correspondence, which is now all preserved at Purdue University Archives, where he went to college, that he had any number of authors who had approached him, and that had not happened.
	So I feel incredibly fortunate that it was, you know, that of all the people he could have to agreed to do this life story that he gave me the green light.
	Are you happy with the movie?
	I am.
	I think it's a brilliant, stunning movie.
	It's a very fresh look.
	Now, you know, it's not verbatim the Neil that anybody knew.
	I mean, the actors are going to portray and interpret his character, but I think they do a great job of Ryan Gosling, in particular, playing Neil.
	I think they really bring out some essential truths about Neil's character and about his life.
	And I think, you know, we've had this sort of mythology of the astronauts and kind of this sugar-coated view of the astronauts that has downplayed, I think, to a large degree, the risk, the amount of death that enveloped them and their families.
	And I think this film does a really good job of sort of shattering that meta-narrative that has maybe controlled our understanding of the astronauts in the early space program.
	So, yeah, I think hopefully it's going to, I mean, it already has.
	It's caused a lot more discussion on some issues than it really should be, unfortunately.
	But I think in terms of opening up the whole subject for a fresh look, I think the movie, you know, a movie gets to millions of people.
	A book gets to hopefully hundreds of thousands of people.
	But I think some people will be interested in the story of Armstrong and the moon landings now with the movie that would never open the book.
	And the movie and the book with the same title.
	How often does that happen?
	Yeah, I'm happy that that happened.
	Well, listen, it's been an absolute pleasure to speak with you.
	Last question from me, and you've been very gracious to give me so much of your time.
	And thank you because I've been fascinated by this.
	So I'm very, very grateful.
	Do you regard, walking on the moon was the biggest event of his life.
	Do you regard the work that you've done about him and knowing him as the biggest thing that you've done?
	Yeah, I'd have to say that's definitely so.
	I think, you know, I've done a number of books on different topics, but nothing really as major as the Armstrong story.
	So I suppose no matter what I have done or might still do with my career, I'll always be known first and foremost as the Armstrong biographer, and I'm fine with that.
	I think that's, I mean, it makes the career, you know, I understand the importance of my career in terms of that book quite well.
	Well, I've done a few small things in my life.
	No one's ever going to write my biography, but if anybody ever did, I would hope that it was somebody like you who would do it fairly and would research it intensively.
	Amazing.
	And thank you, James, so much for your time.
	Oh, very welcome.
	I really enjoyed talking to you.
	Well, a remarkable conversation about a truly remarkable human being, Neil Armstrong.
	And my thanks to James R. Hansen for giving me so much time to talk about this.
	A great conversation and somebody I liked enormously.
	I hope you did too.
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	We have more great guests in the pipeline here on The Unexplained as we cruise towards the end of 2018.
	So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
	I am in London.
	This has been The Unexplained.
	And please stay safe, stay calm, and Above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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Edition 367 - &quot;First Man&quot; - Neil Armstong

Edition 367 - "First Man" - Neil Armstong