"Houston, We’ve Had a Problem&quot

The Apollo 13 mission was launched on the afternoon of April 11, 1970. Almost 56 hours later, with the spacecraft 200,000 miles from Earth, Apollo 13 commander James Lovell reported to mission control in Houston that “we’ve had a problem here.” Within a few minutes, NASA notified the White House situation room. National security adviser Henry Kissinger was informed at around 11:00 p. m. Kissinger called Nixon chief of staff Bob Haldeman, suggesting that President Nixon be awakened and informed of the situation, but Haldeman, in what Kissinger later characterized as “one of the mindless edicts by which Haldeman established his authority,” refused to contact the president on the grounds that this was merely a “technical prob­lem.” At 4:00 a. m., Haldeman changed his mind and decided to inform the president; he also called Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler, telling Ziegler to inform the press that the president was “in personal charge of the crisis.” Kissinger describes Ziegler’s interaction with the press as “verbal contortions to imply, without lying outright, that the President had been in command all night.”24

The story of the herculean efforts undertaken by NASA and its industry colleagues to achieve the safe return of the Apollo 13 crew—Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise—is well known and will not be repeated here. Once made aware of the risky situation, Richard Nixon became very emotionally involved in the crew’s fate. There were at the time intense discussions within the White House on whether to send American troops into Cambodia to attack North Vietnamese sanctuaries. Even so, according to Henry Kissinger, “the rescue of the astronauts absorbed a great deal of Nixon’s attention” and “took a heavy toll of Nixon’s nervous energy.”25

On the morning after the accident Ehrlichman suggested to Nixon that he might want to go to Houston to signal his personal concern about the fate of the crew; it took a call from Frank Borman to Haldeman to dissuade the president from making such a trip. Borman, who was in Houston, told the White House that Nixon’s presence would be a distraction as the NASA mis­sion managers struggled to find a way to get the crew safely back to Earth. Likely on the same call, Borman relayed to the White House the news that Vice President Agnew, who was in Iowa on a political trip, was intending to come to Houston “to take charge of the rescue efforts.” The director of the Manned Spacecraft Center, Robert Gilruth, told Borman that “Agnew’s interference was the last thing NASA needed or deserved,” and asked “is there anything you can do to keep the Vice President away from here?”

In his call to the White House, Borman suggested that “Agnew’s presence in Houston would be about as welcome as a Martian invasion.” Haldeman kept an unhappy Agnew waiting for an hour at the end of an airport runway in Des Moines until he could consult with Nixon with respect to Agnew’s plans. When he did reach Nixon, the president “fully agreed” that Agnew should not go to Houston. Haldeman relayed that order to Agnew, who was “mad as hell.”26

The next day there were discussions among the president, Haldeman, and Borman on how to react to various outcomes of the Apollo 13 crisis; the astronauts’ survival was still very much in doubt. The three decided that if the crew returned safely, the president would go to Houston to congratu­late the NASA flight control team, then fly to Hawaii with the astronauts’ families to greet the crew as they returned to U. S. soil. If the crew did not survive, the president would go to Houston to “speak to the men of NASA and reaffirm his support of them and compliment them on their tremendous efforts to bring Apollo 13 home.”27