Nixon and the Apollo Astronauts

According to his senior advisor John Ehrlichman, the Apollo astronauts were to Nixon “very wonderful people. There was just not enough the coun­try can do for these guys, and they are doing an enormous amount for the country. . . He would always be enormously stimulated by contact with these folks. And there was an element of hero worship on his part.” Nixon “liked heroes. He thought it was good for this country to have heroes.”5 Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman suggested that the president believed that the Apollo astronauts were “something special—not as individuals so much as for what we represented.” According to veteran Time/Life correspondent Hugh Sidey, whenever Nixon met with one or more of the Apollo astronauts, “the color comes to his face and the bounce to his step.” Sidey suggested that Nixon saw the astronauts as “the sons he never had. . . They are the distill­ers of what Nixon considers to be the best in this country.”6 Nixon saw the Apollo astronauts as exemplars of the best characteristics of Americans and was eager to use them both overseas and in the United States as role models for what humans could achieve with positive intent and sufficient determina­tion. Nixon’s attitude toward the Apollo astronauts led to a judgment on the part of those planning post-Apollo space efforts that he would never accept a proposal to end U. S. human space flights; any future NASA program would have to keep Americans flying in space.

While Nixon may have had positive feelings toward all of the Apollo astro­nauts, he developed a continuing relationship with only one of the group— Frank Borman. The Apollo 8 commander was invited to Nixon’s inaugural; to Borman, the invitation suggested that “Nixon was not only genuinely interested in space, but seemed to have embraced me personally as the space program’s symbolic representative.”7 By the time of the inauguration Borman was already scheduled to go on a three-week European “goodwill” tour. One of the first decisions of the incoming Nixon administration was to give its approval to the trip; Nixon’s secretary of state, William Rogers, later told Borman “we clearly made a wise decision.”

The Apollo 8 crew was invited to the White House on January 30, as the president announced that “it is very appropriate for Colonel Borman to go to Western Europe and to bring. . . not only the greetings of the people of the United States, but to point out what is the fact: that we in America do not consider that this is a monopoly, these great new discoveries that we are making; that we recognize the great contributions that others have made and will make in the future; and that we do want to work together with all peoples on this earth in the high adventure of exploring the new areas of space.” Upon his return to Washington, Borman reported that “space technology in Europe lags behind American achievement by a considerable amount” and suggested that the United States “immediately request an international agency to select a certain number of qualified scientists from different nations of the earth to join our program to participate as scientists/ astronauts in future earth-orbital space stations.” This suggestion interested Richard Nixon; in the months to come he would press his associates to find ways to fly non-U. S. individuals on future U. S. space flights.8

Borman was surprised by “the extent to which Richard Nixon accepted me.” Indeed, until he left NASA and government service in mid-1970, Borman served as Nixon’s “in-house astronaut,” frequently consulted on space policy and personnel issues as well as serving as liaison between the White House and NASA during the Apollo 11 and Apollo 13 missions. Borman in early 1969 and again in fall 1970 might even have become head of NASA if he had been so inclined. With respect to his relationship with President Nixon, Borman recalls that “I liked him, I really did. . . I know he was terribly shy, even ill at ease with people he didn’t know, and when it came to making small talk he was a disaster.” However, “we never had to engage in small talk; at every meeting I had with him, we always discussed important matters on a one-on-one basis. He took advice—and sometimes it was advice that he either didn’t want to hear or that was contrary to what his advisers had told him.” Borman was “sure that he trusted me personally and he trusted my judgment in areas in which he knew I had some knowl – edge.”9