Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (39 page)

When I came back from the flight, he was very curious about not only my personal experiences but also how this was affecting the rest of the world. Other nations were very interested in this. We talked about that some. This was something that was very important for the country, and he was much more confident then that we could actually accomplish the goal of landing on the Moon.

After Al Shepherd’s successful suborbital flight, there was a parade in Washington, DC. There were hundreds of thousands of people out that day,
and we began to get an idea that this was really important to the people of this country and that they were really excited. I expected some attention, but I didn’t expect all the super attention to it. It’s hard to believe that I was in the middle of that. I sometimes looked at myself almost in the third person, as though I was looking at someone else out here.
Was that really me?

It wasn’t just in this country. The decision, made early on by Eisenhower and continued by Kennedy, of making our [space] program public and open to everybody was a very wise decision. I have a stack of newspapers that someone collected and sent to me from different capitals all around the world. All the headlines are on
our
flight of the
Friendship 7.
That there would be that kind of worldwide interest was almost unbelievable to me. They didn’t do it with the Soviet flights, but they reported our flights in a “We did this” type presentation. The free world had done this together. That was good.

The Soviets had kept their program secret. We said we’d share the results of [our program] with everybody, and we did. We’ve continued that with the International Space Station now. Fifteen other nations besides us are involved in the space station. Ironically the Soviets—the Russians now—participate in our space flights. It’s amazing how things change over a period of time.

Gherman Titov, who was their second orbital astronaut, came to this country in the summer of 1962, right after my flight. We had a reception at the Russian Embassy and were told, “They finally have accepted your dinner
invitation for this evening,” even though it had been turned down a couple of days before.” So, I thought,
We’ll put on a dinner.

I told their [the Soviets’] driver to drive halfway to Baltimore and get them lost a little bit on the way out to the house. I sent a couple of policemen off to get frozen peas at 7-Eleven, and Annie and I went racing home and canvassed the neighbors for steaks. They were supposed to arrive any minute, so I had two of these little round barbecue things with charcoal in them, with fans on them, getting very hot. We were going to put on a dinner one way or another. Just about that time, the cars pulled up out front and Titov and the Soviets who were with him—the ambassador and everybody else—started walking up the driveway.

One of the little posts on this barbecue thing burned off and dumped the steaks in there. I tossed water on it, and smoke and steam were coming out the carport. As Titov came up, I told him through the interpreter, “I don’t know how things work in the Soviet Union, but over here sometimes you have to work for your dinner. Take off your coat and help.” He did, and we had a great time. The next time I saw his wife at that time, Tamar, she had her shoes off and was with Annie and Louise Shepherd grinding Planters peanuts to put on the salad. He told me later that was the best time he had while he was in the States on that trip.

Bob Kennedy came to me about six months after my space flight and said he and the president talked and wondered if I would be interested in running for the Senate. He and Ethel, we had dinner out at Hickory Hill and talked about this. I thought about it, but I turned it down. I thought my flight wasn’t far enough in the past, and I owed it to the program and everybody to plow all my experience back into the program that would help train new people.

I turned down that opportunity, but Bob and Ethel, we became very good friends. They invited us up to Hyannis Port a number of times. On some of those weekends, the president was up there. That’s where we really
got to know him. We went sailing on their yacht, the president instructing my teenage son on sailing and things like that. He was a warm, friendly person. If there was a definition of charisma, he’d be that definition. He just exuded personality. We got to be good friends.

I water-skied, and of course the president, with his back, didn’t. Jackie was a good water-skier. She and I skied together sometimes, and the press made a big deal out of that with pictures of us out there, the two being towed at the same time. One time I fell—I had a longer tow line than she did. You’d cross back and forth and toss the line over the person ahead of you. I hit her wake, which dumped me, and I went into the water. She kidded me about that for a long time.

I was driving from Ellington Air Force Base in Houston back out to the Johnson Space Center and heard [about President Kennedy’s assassination] on the car radio. That was a real blow. Along with the rest of the country, I reassessed my responsibilities to the country. It was hard to believe, like it must be some mistake—the same way it was hard to believe when Bob Kennedy was killed. We had been campaigning with him. I often wonder what would have happened had he been president, but we’ll never know that of course. Shortly after President Kennedy’s death is when I decided to run for the office that he and Bobby had talked about.

It was devastating. The goals he had set, things he was doing, what he was standing for, and where he wanted the country to go—that was hard for the country to accept. There was a lot of excitement about the Kennedys, Camelot, and the future of the country. People couldn’t believe we had changed direction, and then all at once it was cut short by this assassination. It was a tremendous blow for the whole country.

The Soyuz is over our heads right here, as we speak. Tom Stafford and Deke Slayton, who were directly involved with the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, were good friends, still are—or Tom is; Deke’s gone now. That was a good thing, a first effort to get our programs together and cooperate. Early on, Kennedy had suggested that we work together. The response from the Soviets wasn’t all that
favorable; it wasn’t completely negative, either. I always did think there were hopes that we could get together with the Soviets and do some of the things we’re doing now, combine programs as we’re doing on the International Space Station. The more we keep the space program and other technical programs on an international basis, the better off we are in the long term. The advantages may vary from one country to another temporarily, but the more you share information and the more you work together with other people, the better off you are yourself.

Ending the shuttle program was a very poor decision. It was the most complicated but the most capable vehicle ever built. As John F. Kennedy said, “We are the leading space-faring nation.” For us to have to pay the Russians to launch our people up to our space station, one we built and put up there—with some help, of course—I don’t like that at all. The biggest opportunity that followed the Lunar Landing was the International Space Station. When I was in the Senate, I supported that fully and debated that every year on the Senate floor for appropriations. Wherever we travel in space, we’re well advised to do research that benefits people right here on Earth—wherever we go. The International Space Station is the most unique laboratory ever put together.

On the shuttle in 1998, we had eighty-three research projects on that one flight—on medicines, growth, aging, all sorts of things. Before it burned up,
Columbia
had ninety research projects. To cut off our only means of getting to that [space] station and to take heavy equipment back and forth was wrong.

We have three different groups working on building craft that will take people back and forth. We will resume that. But right now, if something happens to Russia’s launch system, our human space program ends. That’s it—until we build a new way of getting back and forth. We could have maintained that. When President Bush made the decision to discontinue the program, he wanted to set another goal of having a permanent presence on the Moon. But it’s expensive to do that. He didn’t want to increase the budget, so in order to pay for it, he said, “We’ll cut out the shuttle program.” Each shuttle launched, it was estimated, costs somewhere around four hundred million dollars. That’s a lot of money.

But [cutting the shuttle program] cut out our only way of getting back and forth to this station, which I see as so valuable for the future and for research in the future. To come down to paying sixty million, seventy million dollars for each astronaut launched up to the station and back by the Russians, that’s wrong. If we’re going to be the space-faring nation that John F. Kennedy envisioned, I would like to have seen the shuttle replaced only after we had its replacement in hand and ready to go.

I went to see President Obama after he took office and tried to get him to reverse that decision. He said, “We’re in the midst of the recession”—the beginning of the recession at that time. He said he couldn’t put the money back in the budget. I’m sorry we couldn’t do that. But the original decision to do away with the shuttle was announced at NASA in 2004 with a cutoff date of the shuttles by 2010 and ending the space station by 2015. The [Obama] administration has extended the life of the space station out to at least 2020, with some possibility that we’re going to extend beyond that time period. I hope we get our own means of transportation back and forth to the space station—and get it soon. It’s important for the future.

I also hope we can instill in our young people an appreciation of what this country is, what it stands for, and what it does. Over the past fifty or sixty years, there’s too often a forgetting of these things that led up to why we even have the country we have today. That has to be appreciated—it’s not something that is written forever and will be there forever unless we nurture it and stick with it.