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By Root 666 0

the way astronauts had been described. They tended to be pretty open if they agreed to talk at all. A few wouldn’t be interviewed. Alan Shepard told me that he only cooperated in documentary ventures that had a scientific purpose . . . later on he indicated that he had read the Rolling Stone pieces and didn’t particularly like what was there; I don’t know why. Neil Armstrong said he had a policy of not giving interviews and didn’t see any reason why he should change it. I think he had hopes, and perhaps still does, of writing his own book. All the Mercury astronauts who were still alive—[Gus] Grissom was dead—were willing to talk and were cooperative.

Was John Glenn open?

Very open. I spent a day with him when he was campaigning for the Senate in 1974, the year he finally won the primary against Howard Metzenbaum, who had beaten him just a few years before. Then I spent an afternoon with Glenn after he won; he was actually pretty generous with his time, as senators go, and he was very helpful.

I’ve been surprised by the number of reviews that found my picture of John Glenn negative. I wasn’t trying to send him valentines, but in my mind he came off as an exceptional and rather courageous figure. He did a lot of unpopular things. He told off a lot of people, and he almost lost his flight by telling the administrator of NASA and everybody else that Lyndon Johnson couldn’t go into his house, that he and his wife didn’t want him in there. That took a lot of courage.

When did the notion first strike you—of course it should have been obvious to everyone—that the original astronauts were not the Boy Scouts who were presented to America?

I guess from the first conversation that I ever had with any of them. It’s not that they bragged about their exploits or talked about things like driving these wild races on the highway. At the same time I was starting this thing, in late 1972, there had been reports in the press indicating trouble in paradise among the astronauts. Buzz Aldrin’s nervous breakdown had been revealed. That was the same year there was a stamp scandal, which wasn’t really much of a scandal, but nevertheless it made people stop and ask, “What, astronauts took a cut of some stamp sales?” One of the astronauts had just become an evangelist. Two or three had been photographed with long hair, and this was immediately interpreted by newspapers and magazines as a sign that there were astronauts who were turned into hippies, which never happened as far as I can tell.

Perhaps because the general whitewash of the astronauts’ flaws had gone to such an extreme at the beginning, the least little crack was overinterpreted. To this day, so many people think that most of the astronauts who went to the moon have suffered breakdowns or become alcoholics. It just isn’t true.

For a while there was the assumption that this voyage was traumatic because it removed them from all familiar environments, and that this just had devastating effects on these simple men who weren’t prepared for it. The truth was, they had had such sophisticated simulations that there was very little new to see when they reached the moon. By the time Armstrong got there, he had had probably 500 simulated missions in replicas of the Apollo command module, with moving pictures of the moon, based on films that had been brought back by manned and unmanned vehicles. I think it was false for Armstrong to have delivered some apostrophe to the gods or some statement of poetic awe about what he had seen, ’cause he had already seen it all simulated in such high fidelity, how the hell could he pretend there was something startling about it? So he said it’s “a small step for man, a giant leap for mankind.” When I asked him about it, he said, “Sure, I worked on it for a couple of weeks.”

How did you get the notion to cut this book off where you did? The idea of the end of innocence—I believe you make the point that the astronauts’ parade was, in a sense, the peak of American innocence.

I think that was the last great national outpouring of patriotism.