Books in Brief
First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong by James R. Hansen (Simon and Schuster, 784 pp., $30). Regarding the space race, conservatives should be as angry as the left about American involvement in Vietnam. Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon signalled that the United States, reeling from Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin, and chimps in space suits bearing the American flag, had won the space race. But the controversy over Vietnam and the far left dissent it had unleashed in the United States was taking shark bites out of this glorious, Cold War victory.
In the beginnings of the space race, the Kennedy administration was countering Soviet achievements with talk of launching the "first free man" into space. Government officials and citizens were denouncing Yuri Gagarin's statement from the capsule, "I see no God from here." But by the time of Armstrong's walk, the sixties couldn't be kept out.
A debate raged over whether the American or U.N. flag should be planted. NASA feared lawsuits from atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair if God were mentioned from the moon. From Tom Wolfe's fearless single combat warriors beating the Soviets without risking nuclear war, astronauts were now forced into an apolitical mold of internationalism and secularism.
James R. Hansen's authorized biography adheres to this mold. Although the Cold War is mentioned, there is no political celebration of America being first. The Soviets are merely competing technocrats, as if the worst they could do to the United States were develop a better slide rule. The competing pilot camps portrayed by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff, astronaut/civilian/scientist types versus the military, seat-of-the-pants barnstormers, is the only hint of conflict allowed in this book, and it is not hard to see where Hansen plops down. Chuck Yeager is portrayed as suffering from selective memory loss regarding his relationship with the more engineering-minded Armstrong.
Everything in First Man boils down to a technical problem to be solved--no symbolism, and certainly no flag-waving, even in zero gravity areas, is allowed. Ronald Reagan features in the index but only in the context of the technical glitch that was the Challenger episode. Khrushchev, on the other hand, the Soviet dictator who promised to bury us in space as well as on earth, is not even listed.
The Korean conflict is portrayed with no mention of the geopolitics involved (odd, since that too was a technical problem of a potentially lethal kind); instead, the only criticism or opinion ventured is the lack of information given to the pilots for the mission.
The more earthbound have always critiqued the astronauts' comments from space as having no literary or-academic quality, betraying their scientific, empirical background. But that is to be forgiven when the job at hand is to get back home without burning up in re-entry. Hansen, on the other hand, has no excuse.
Those wishing for a purely scientific book will not be disappointed by Hansen's book. He is able to take the reader into the labs and various tests. But for all his attempts to keep context out, it nevertheless plays a behind-the-scenes role. Instead of a natio-nal celebration of capitalist brawn, First Man takes cautious steps not to offend, in the best politically correct manner. And in this, Hansen does not do justice to his subject, whose step on the moon was anything but cautious.
--Ron Capshaw