It was spring 1961 and the Soviet Union continued to trounce the United States in what was called the “space race.” Since 1957 and the shocking appearance of Sputnik I overhead, the Russians had scored one space first after another. The last straw came on April 12 of President John F. Kennedy’s first year in office when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited the planet for one full revolution. America was again humiliated—and threatened—by the Soviets’ obvious lead in rocket boosting power.
Former naval officer JFK, smarting also from the recent Bay of Pigs fiasco of the U.S.-backed invasion by Cuban exiles, would soon speak of space as “a new ocean” that America “must sail on . . . in a position second to none.” For now, he knew that the United States must seize the initiative with a dramatic new space goal that could be achieved before the Russians. Among a handful of top American aerospace leaders privately surveyed for their best ideas was the chief rocket man of the young NASA, who laid out a cogent case for the objective that was chosen.
And so, on May 25, 1961, just three weeks after U.S. Navy Cdr. Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr.’s successful non-orbital arc beyond the atmosphere had given America all of fifteen minutes of manned space flight, Kennedy stood before a joint session of Congress. The thirty-fifth president challenged the nation to “commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to earth.”
Little more than eight years later, on July 16, 1969, Apollo 11’s three astronauts—Neil A. Armstrong, a former navy combat aviator-turned-civilian, and two West Pointers-turned-U.S. Air Force pilots, Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. and Michael Collins—were powered toward an imminent lunar landing by the Saturn V launcher. NASA’s chief rocket man and his team had created the largest, most potent rocket ever built. The man behind this achievement was an improbable figure, a former enemy scientist and Nazi Party member who had developed missiles for Hitler’s Germany and then for the U.S. Army. He was Wernher von Braun, and reaching the Moon—and beyond—had been his dream since boyhood.
In his day, von Braun enjoyed popularity equal to that of a movie star. Yet despite all the publicity and the flood of fan mail he received, he seemed, at times, to scarcely realize the extent of his fame, preferring to focus on the reason for it. For example, during his NASA days in the 1960s his friend Edward G. “Ed” Uhl, the head of the aerospace company Fairchild Industries, invited him to a jaguar hunt in the Yucatán region of Mexico. Sportsman von Braun, who had been raised on the blood sports of wildlife hunting and bird shooting in Germany, eagerly accepted. For what Uhl called “a poor-man’s hunt,” it would be just the two of them. Uhl’s friends were cutting mahogany on some land they leased there and had offered their lumber camp as a base for a hunt in the surrounding jungle.
Uhl recalled that they flew into Merida, where a World War II jeep with a Mayan driver met them.
Off we went to camp. It was way back in the Yucatán, right where Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico all come together. After several dusty hours of driving we came to a little village with grass huts. One, we could tell, was a store, because they had wild turkeys hanging by their necks out front. But they had Cokes, so we stopped. They didn’t have any ice, but the Cokes had cooled in the spring.
While we were chatting and drinking the Cokes, one by one these young people came out of their huts and would say, “Dr. von Braun, would you sign this, please?” I couldn’t believe it! I said to myself, “The U.S. government has an advance team out here!” But it couldn’t be. But there they were, deep in the jungle, these Indian kids. Some had his picture! Others had notebooks or just a piece of paper—and they all wanted his signature and they all knew of him.
Later, as they drove on, von Braun remarked, “Isn’t it wonderful how young people are turned on by space?”1
Von Braun’s favorite autograph story concerned a talk he gave to a school in the United States in the late 1950s. Afterward, he was surrounded by a group of teenage girls. One girl pressed forward and excitedly asked, “Dr. von Braun, could I have two autographs?” “Well, yes,” he replied, signing the first of the two blank cards she offered. “But why do you want two?” The girl answered sweetly, “Because for two of yours I can . . . [get] one of Elvis Presley’s.”2
During his more than three decades in the United States, from 1945 until his death in 1977, von Braun achieved fame and widespread recognition, in contrast to his largely secret adult existence in Germany. Hollywood made a film about his life when he was still in his forties. His face graced magazine covers and newspaper front pages. Network television programs featured him in prime time. Books about him spread his renown. And all this was before he spearheaded the triumphant first manned voyages to the Moon. From the 1950s on, von Braun, “Dr. Space,” was the preeminent figure in U.S. rocketry and the exploration of space.
He was a hero to millions—rare for a man of science and technology, and rarer still for a former wartime enemy of the United States.
Von Braun saw his fame as both a blessing and a curse. His celebrity gained him a platform from which to call for the exploration and exploitation of space—and aroused resentment among some colleagues. It opened doors and brought a parade of the similarly renowned to his door, along with unceasing demands on his time from a mostly admiring public. Although he called autographs “this plague,” he apparently complied with practically all such requests; it was, in part, good public relations for the space program. When the demand got too heavy in the early 1970s, photographs for fans were signed by auto-pens, and recipients never knew the difference.
Paradoxically, this extreme celebrity came to a man who spent his career emphasizing the “we” over the “I” in the engineering and scientific teams, large and small, that he led—while making sure he was the undisputed leader of those teams. The military and civilian programs he helped advance were unfailingly successful in a time of enormous national and global tension. At the same time, he was a gregarious, charismatic pied piper of space.
There was hardly anywhere on earth he could go without being recognized. For example, in the winter of 1961-62, von Braun once found himself dodging recognition in exotic Kathmandu during a nearly three-week, around-the-world trip for business and sightseeing with his friend Carsbie C. Adams. Adams, a health-care facilities entrepreneur, had coauthored a book with von Braun,3 and the von Braun family often visited Adams at his plantation in Georgia. Now, on the morning of their departure from Nepal, the two men were eating breakfast in their hotel when they met a woman from New York. Adams recalled: “Von Braun introduced himself with a rather quick mumble as ‘Don Brown.’ I spoke up immediately and quite distinctly introduced myself. I knew that von Braun desired to remain anonymous—due to the CIA’s serious concern about his being so close to Red China [twenty-five miles away]. They had not wanted him to go to Nepal in the first place, since they thought he might be kidnapped.”
The woman persisted, asking von Braun again for his name. “This time,” Adams recalled, “he pronounced his name correctly and distinctly, and she said, ‘Oh, von Braun, like the von Braun in rocketry.’ And von Braun said quietly, ‘Yes, like the von Braun in rocketry.’” Adams almost broke up laughing but somehow kept a straight face. Von Braun did the same, continuing to look down at his plate. He soon finished his breakfast, excused himself, and went up to his room to pack. With von Braun gone, the woman said to Adams, “You know, he does favor the von Braun, but he’s much too young.”4
In 1966, en route to the South Pole, von Braun and his chief scientist, Ernst Stuhlinger, checked in without fanfare at the White Heron Lodge in Christchurch, New Zealand, the staging area for U.S.-sponsored scientific activities in Antarctica. After a full day of briefings and trying on polar gear, the two men finally sat down for a quiet dinner at the lodge. A band played onstage in the dining room. Von Braun whispered to his companion how relaxing it was to be somewhere he wasn’t recognized and where no one asked for an autograph. He thought nothing of it when the female vocalist began singing about going “to the moon with you,” as Stuhlinger remembered it. But when she finished she headed straight for their table. “Dr. von Braun,” she gushed, “I sang this one just for you, and I mean it! Would you have a seat for me on your moon ship?!” For the rest of the evening a trapped von Braun signed autograph after autograph.5
Von Braun had a knack for attracting attention in public and social settings wherever he went, at home as well as abroad. Space historian Frederick Ordway remembered his first exposure to von Braun’s “star quality” even before his fame had soared to its highest. The two men had met in the mid-1950s through the New York City–based American Rocket Society. Ordway and his wife, Maruja, hosted a reception and dinner party at their home in Syosset, Long Island. Guests of honor were von Braun and his young wife and cousin, Maria. Ordway was then working for Republic Aviation and had invited people from the company, other technology firms, banks, and brokerages—a mix of business and social friends.
“We were having this cocktail party before dinner, with everybody crowded around him,” recalled Ordway. “He could talk about any and every subject. There he was, this very handsome guy . . . and all these sophisticated Long Island north shore people . . . were just drooling over him.”6
A similar stir occurred among the country music crowd in Nashville. In the late 1960s, von Braun, Ordway, and writer David Christensen were working on a series of educational filmstrips on rocketry and space exploration. Von Braun was scheduled to record the narration—in German and English—for the series at RCA studios in Tennessee’s “Music City,” long a country-and-western performing and recording center and home of the renowned Grand Ole Opry live radio show. Nashville lay a hundred miles north of Huntsville, the self-proclaimed “Rocket City, USA” ever since the U.S. Army in 1949 made the nearby idled Redstone Arsenal its new center of missile R & D (research and development) and moved in the von Braun team of rocketeers the next year. When von Braun and Ordway arrived at the studios they found a bevy of country music performers and crew on hand to tape their own television show.
“They treated him like a hero,” Ordway recalled. “All the country singers were gaping at him and making over him, including some rather scantily clad young things in long black stockings.” Von Braun was all smiles then, and later, after he had finished the taping, when the same thing happened—black net stockings and all—as he left the studio. Their day’s work done, von Braun and Ordway had dinner at their hotel and then repaired to the lounge for a nightcap. Von Braun loosened up, looked across the table, and said with a grin: “Well, Fred, it was a great day, wasn’t it? But I think you and I entered the wrong business.”7
The scientist’s superstar fame brought many such lighter moments. In 1958, shortly after he had been on the covers of both Time and Life, von Braun was on a business visit to San Francisco. His then-assistant Francis “Frank” Williams recalled that they had some free time before catching the 1 AM red-eye flight back to Huntsville. They decided to have a quiet drink at the famous Top of the Mark lounge crowning San Francisco’s Mark Hopkins Hotel.
Two men immediately recognized the scientist, and von Braun invited them to drag up some chairs. Others entered the bar, spotted von Braun, came over, and also were invited to join the group. Before long eight or ten men were sitting at the table, with von Braun the center of attention. The drinks kept coming until von Braun flashed a look at Williams. The young assistant excused himself, found the maître d’ and asked him to page von Braun. A telephone was brought to the table and Williams took the fake call. He announced that there was an immediate meeting they had to attend elsewhere, and the two escaped.
Later that evening, von Braun admitted he was sometimes pleased at being recognized, but that fame certainly had its downside. If he were ever tempted to go somewhere where he wouldn’t want to be seen he would have to resist, he said, because “some sonuvabitch would recognize me!”8
The November 1957 Life cover story on von Braun that had recently appeared quoted him as saying: “I get about ten letters a day. About half come from youngsters who want advice on how to become rocketeers. We tell them to hit math and physics heavily. One lady wrote that God doesn’t want man to leave the Earth and was willing to bet me $10 he wouldn’t make it. I answered that as far as I knew, the Bible said nothing about space flight but it was clearly against gambling.”9
Von Braun’s avalanche of fan mail ran the full spectrum. One woman wrote, “I only have one question before I sign off: Is it possible for one to attain sexual pleasure from sending up rockets?”10 No record exists of any von Braun reply, and most such correspondence was relegated to a file labeled “Strange.”
Many letter writers offered technical advice, much of it also strange. A New Jersey man wrote that he had the plans for “a vibrationless gas engine” which “should solve your problem of building a rocket ship with 36-cylinder or 72-cylinder engines.” From a man in Massachusetts came a letter stating: “I know how to make an artificial conscious brain. . . . I could make one in less than three years. You must believe me.” This would allow a person to be “on Earth and on the Moon at the same time, for example.” If only von Braun could help him obtain the “several portable digital computers” necessary for the task.
One of the strangest letters, an ominous one, came from a correspondent in Germany claiming to represent a “world-famous rock ‘n’ roll group.” All that the band wanted was for von Braun to secretly bring to America a pretty, fourteen-year-old German girl who they had marked for stardom as a singer. They would pay him well for his trouble, but if he didn’t cooperate, it would be “death for you and your wife.”
Beginning in January 31, 1958, with the launching of Explorer 1—which Von Braun’s U.S. Army team had developed and launched—the heavy attention paid the German-born rocket scientist, now a naturalized U.S. citizen, became less uniformly favorable. The bulging mailbag now contained a smattering of hate mail addressed to the father of the V-2 missile in World War II. Since the late 1940s, it had been no secret that von Braun was the technical director of the German army’s rocket development base at Peenemünde (a village on an island in the Baltic Sea at the mouth of the Penne Estuary). But his newfound fame—and near adulation—suddenly drew more attention to his past. It was a past that included acceptance, under pressure, of Nazi Party membership and an SS officer’s commission. Some writers accused him of involvement in the Holocaust. Others criticized the seeming ease with which he had shifted his allegiance at war’s end from Germany to the United States. Would he not go elsewhere if the right opportunity presented itself? In the mid-1960s, when von Braun was absent from one of the unmanned Saturn rocket test flights at Cape Canaveral, a Washington, D.C., space reporter who was well known as a von Braun critic accosted me, a young missile-and-space writer for the Huntsville Times, with: “Von Braun couldn’t make it down, huh? What’s the matter—he couldn’t miss his Chinese lessons?”11
At his speaking appearances around the country, von Braun occasionally attracted protest groups and hecklers. Some shouted “Nazi!” and “Sieg heil!” The title of his 1960 movie biography—I Aim at the Stars—drew comedian Mort Sahl’s addendum, “but sometimes I miss and hit London!” Tom Lehrer summed up much of this attitude in a satirical ditty that included the lines:
Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience . . .
“Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun.12
Despite such criticism, von Braun’s celebrity and popularity remained high. Other government officials and colleagues in the private sector were sometimes rankled by his style because he thought big and was aggressive in pushing forward his ideas and his own group. “That did not endear him to other NASA center directors,” Thomas Shaner, von Braun’s assistant at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville in 1969–70, remembered. “There was a lot of animosity toward Dr. von Braun from some at NASA headquarters and some at the other field centers. They were extremely jealous of him.”13
On January 31, 1959, the first anniversary of the launching of the Explorer 1 satellite into orbit, a satellite mockup was presented to what is now the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Maj. Gen. John Bruce Medaris, von Braun’s boss at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Redstone, spoke briefly, followed by Secretary of the Army Wilber M. Brucker and then von Braun.
“When von Braun stopped speaking,” remembered Ordway, “there was pandemonium. People all rushed down to get his autograph. Secretary Brucker, who had also been governor of Michigan, looked at me and said, with all seriousness, ‘Nobody gives a goddamn about the Secretary of the Army!’”14
Despite hecklers and envious colleagues, von Braun remained in the spotlight. He often had trouble going about his business, or pleasure, unmolested by an admiring, or at least curious, public. Covert operations were the rule, including intricate planning, anonymous reservations, rear entrances, and hidden tables in dark corners.15
On at least one occasion, the covert operation came from the other side. In 1959 von Braun was invited to Los Angeles to appear on a television program with “a panel of missile experts.” When he reached the studio, however, out walked show host Ralph Edwards. Von Braun was the surprised subject of the top-rated prime-time network show This Is Your Life!
The Hollywood-produced film about his life that comedians poked fun at had its world premiere in Bavaria, where von Braun’s parents were living, shortly before it opened in the United States in September 1960. I Aim at the Stars, directed by Lee Thompson, raised anew the question of von Braun’s role in the development of the V-2 missile. He had interceded with the film’s British director for script changes to make it clear he knew full well, once war began, that the rocket would be used against London. For example, von Braun protested a script line in which his character says he “supposes” the missiles will be fired at London. He had the line replaced with “of course” they will be fired at London. In the finished film, actor Curt Jurgens, playing von Braun, intones: “When there’s a war, every man wants his country to win. I was no exception. . . . If I had refused to do this work, I would have been labeled ‘enemy of the state.’ If you’ll forgive me, I chose to stay alive and continue with my job.” The movie was not much liked by critics, filmgoers, or von Braun.16
The excitement surrounding America’s early space efforts brought a steady stream of celebrities to visit the scientist in Huntsville. Walt and Roy Disney were good friends. Singer and space fan John Denver, and actors Robert Young, Bette Davis, and Gloria Swanson, as well as Boston Pops conductor Arthur Fiedler, came to see him. He had private get-togethers with Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr. The pioneering heart-transplant surgeon from South Africa, Dr. Christiaan Barnard, visited him. Media superstars Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite dropped in to do stories on him, and popular TV host Hugh Downs became a friend in the 1970s. Von Braun was a friend of captains of industry Donald Douglas of McDonnell-Douglas, William Allen of Boeing, and William Reynolds of Reynolds Aluminum, among many others. He corresponded in the early 1960s with Dr. Albert Schweitzer. Jacques Cousteau was a pal.
The rocket scientist was honored at White House dinners and knew Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter. He was on a first-name basis with the astronauts and close to many of the leaders of Congress. Renowned Washington hostess Perle Mesta threw a dinner party in his honor.
Leading scientists also visited von Braun, including Edward Teller, the developer of the hydrogen bomb, and the science fact and fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Most came for private sessions with von Braun and to get glimpses of the future, often via personally guided tours of his team’s facilities. In the late 1960s, when Gen. Mark Clark, U.S. Army (Ret.), visited the Marshall Center, von Braun invited the World War II field commander and Korean War general to have lunch with him and several senior staff people, recalled scientist-manager William R. Lucas. After lunch, Clark stood and said, “Dr. von Braun, I enjoyed being with you today, and I appreciate what you are doing for my country, sir.”
Quick as a finger snap, von Braun, a naturalized U.S. citizen, replied, “Sir, it is my country, too.”17
Von Braun was periodically invited to join other VIPs at the Bohemian Club, a private California retreat for the rich and/or famous. There, he strengthened relationships with two U.S. Army heroes of World War II, Gen. James H. “Jimmy” Doolittle and Gen. James Gavin. Although they had been his enemies in the war, they both became admirers and friends of the German rocket man.
In 1962, von Braun presented the Henry Grier Bryant Gold Medal of the Geographical Society of Philadelphia to his astronomer friend I. M. Levitt, the director of The Franklin Institute’s Fels Planetarium in Philadelphia. The medal was given in recognition of Levitt’s studies of the Moon’s geography.
Later, in 1970, when the German Society of Pennsylvania awarded its gold medal to von Braun, Levitt returned the favor. Much of his introduction was an erudite tracing of the twin developmental paths of astronomy and space exploration through key historical figures of various nationalities whom, he said, “Nature had given to mankind.” And then, observed Levitt, there “arose the need for a man who could synthesize all the elements to produce a space transportation system to fashion the staircase to the stars. Again, Nature was called upon to produce this synthesizing genius, and Nature responded with a remarkably able and astute figure in contemporary science. His name is Wernher von Braun.”
Recalling that occasion some thirty years later at age ninety, Levitt noted that he and von Braun had been friends since their first meeting in 1952. He recalled von Braun’s rare brand of magnetism. “Wernher was a commanding figure. He was the type that, when he walked in the room, the conversation would stop and eyes would turn toward his entrance. He had a commanding presence, and he was so very, very bright.” An early advocate of space exploration, Levitt began in 1952 to write an internationally syndicated newspaper column on astronomy and future space exploration. Levitt, who was Jewish, said he was convinced von Braun had not been a Nazi adherent at heart. He said he had reason to believe—from independent sources in Europe—that the rocket leader had accepted Nazi Party membership and an SS officer’s commission as mere expediencies. For one thing, he said, they gave von Braun a measure of authority when dealing with the unwelcome SS troops stationed at the Peenemünde V-2 center.18
Von Braun received countless medals, keys to cities, more than twenty honorary university degrees, and other domestic and international honors. Included were the highest awards given U.S. civilians in defense and space fields. In the 1950s and ’60s, the Associated Press named him “Newsmaker of the Year in Science” more frequently than anyone else. In January 1977, near the end of von Braun’s life, President Gerald Ford awarded him the National Medal of Science.
Earlier, in 1959, Notre Dame University gave von Braun its Patriot of the Year award, little more than a decade after World War II and just four years after he had gained U.S. citizenship. (It was also before the public learned of his connection with the notorious underground Mittelwerk V-2 factory near Nordhausen.) “It is not ordinary for a man who once worked for the enemies of the United States to receive an award which is established to honor the outstanding American patriot of the year,” the award presenter said. “But then, Dr. von Braun is no ordinary man.”
Forty years later, and in a new century, how would Wernher von Braun be viewed? Would his popularity persist, or would his lingering baggage as a “former Nazi scientist” affect his standing a quarter century after his death? For the 2003 centennial celebration of the Wright brothers’ first powered airplane flight, Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine coordinated a worldwide survey by several professional groups to choose the “Top 100 Stars of Aerospace.” More than a million ballots came in from industry professionals in 180 countries, selecting “the most important, influential, and intriguing personalities in the history of flight.” The results were revealed in June 2003 at the Paris Air Show and in the magazine.19
Where did Wernher von Braun come in? Surprising to many, he ranked first among space figures, ahead of such trailblazers as Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Yuri Gagarin, John Glenn, Robert Goddard, Alan Shepard, and Jules Verne. And in the overall category he ranked second, behind only the Wright brothers themselves.