The story of Wernher von Braun “reminds me of a Greek drama that deals with the fights between the gods,” mused Peter Petroff in June 1999. The Bulgarian-born master engineer and multimillionaire entrepreneur, then in his eighties, added: “Zeus, the big-shot god, gives selected people just enormous capabilities. Then the lesser gods are jealous and throw up all these hindrances.” Petroff, whom von Braun recruited to work at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in the mid-1960s, continued with his analogy: “Zeus created a guy, von Braun, who was way, way above everybody else. The gods gave him too much talent. He was not only a top-notch engineer and physicist, but he was a visionary. On top of that, he could convince anybody of anything.”1
Then, on March 1, 1970, von Braun, at the apogee of the Apollo 11 and 12 Moon-landing triumphs, left his impregnable home base of twenty years and moved north to take on a challenging position at NASA headquarters in Washington.
“This was a tragedy,” Petroff observed years afterward. “Little guys, from jealousies or for fun, messed up what [von Braun] was doing, a typical Greek drama. This was tragic.”2
The downfall was yet to come. Full of hope and purpose, von Braun moved into his new offices—two doors from Administrator Tom Paine’s—at the space agency’s central command at 400 Maryland Avenue. As deputy associate administrator for planning, he nominally ranked fourth in the agency’s hierarchy, yet he was outside the chain of command. His task was to develop the grand plan for U.S. space activities for the next twenty years or more, map a master campaign for selling it to the White House, the Congress, the scientific community, and the American people—and then go out and sell it.
His first step in gathering a planning staff of twenty to thirty was to line up two trusted lieutenants in Huntsville. Frank Williams, NASA engineer-manager and former air force officer, had been assistant to the director at the Marshall Center in the early 1960s; Jay Foster was a technical management specialist at MSFC. Another valuable ally assigned to him was James L. “Jim” Daniels Jr., a former MSFC management associate who had been with the NASA headquarters Executive Secretariat for two years when von Braun arrived.
Also helping with the transition were young engineer Tom Shaner, his last assistant at the Marshall Center, who drove von Braun’s cherished, late-model, deluxe Mercedes sedan to Washington,3 and Bonnie Holmes, von Braun’s secretary of nearly two decades at Huntsville. Holmes temporarily moved to the capital to help her departing boss get settled in his new job, screen secretarial candidates, and select the best. That proved to be Julia E. “Julie” Kertes, a professional career woman experienced in working with high-level aerospace and defense executives in Washington and elsewhere.
Certain workaday realities at NASA headquarters paralleled those at the Marshall Center. That meant tons of fan mail, piles of requests for speeches, much work over long hours—and much laughter, at least for a time. Nina Scrivener, secretary to George Low, the deputy administrator, had an office next to von Braun’s in the top-floor executive suite. “She could hear the loud laughter next door,” recalled Kertes. “She often remarked how wonderful it must be to work for someone with Dr. von Braun’s sense of humor. We were the envy of the suite.”4
For his first few months in Washington, the flood of mail was so heavy and the telephone calls so incessant that Kertes could hardly get any work done, she remembered. “Our mailroom said he received more mail than the other four [top NASA] executives combined!”5 Well after the first few Apollo lunar landings, von Braun continued to be “inundated with requests for his autograph,” Kertes recalled. “If he had signed everything sent to him, he would never have accomplished anything else.” So she had to sign his name with a stylus on half or more of the stuff flooding in.6 All of this attention on von Braun did not delight everyone at headquarters.
Before being offered the post at NASA’s headquarters in Washington, von Braun had not inspired affection among some working there—and certainly not from his NASA colleagues in Texas—with one of his stronger displays of chutzpah. He had lobbied the agency for practically an exclusive role for the Marshall Center in managing the development of the proposed Space Shuttle. Each center director was to present a proposal to headquarters on how the shuttle program ought to be run and which responsibilities should go where. The main office had given guidelines and directions to each of the field centers.
“They were telling Marshall, ‘Now, you ought to propose this, this, and that,’” recalled Shaner. “Of course, von Braun listened to all that and took it all in and had his meetings with his top guys at Marshall, and they discussed it all. He was going to be the man to pitch it . . . and everybody thought they knew what he was going to do.” Shaner continued:
He went up to headquarters, and I mean he proposed that Marshall . . . manage the total program—everything, lock, stock, and barrel, even the [program] management, [rather than] headquarters. [Marshall was] going to develop the orbiter. Marshall was going to train the astronauts . . . going to do it all. And politically, that didn’t go over well at all. But he would always go for the whole enchilada on everything.
That didn’t endear him with Chris Kraft out at Houston, and . . . others. There was a lot of animosity toward Dr. von Braun—from headquarters, from other field centers. They were extremely jealous of him because of, number one, his tremendous intellect, and, number two, because the guy was famous, and most people in the country thought that he was the head of NASA.7
But things might be all right now. After all, von Braun was in Washington at the invitation of the real administrator, his friend. “Tom Paine and Wernher von Braun,” emphasized Shaner, “had a close personal relationship and tremendous respect for each other.”8 No one doubted that.
Getting resettled in Washington also meant finding a new home. The von Brauns had sold their late-1950s, tri-level ranch house on a Huntsville hillside to the State of Alabama, which envisioned it as a kind of annex to the new Alabama Space and Rocket Center a few miles across town. When those plans fell through, the house was sold at public auction to a married couple, George and Pam Philyaw, coincidentally both aerospace professionals and licensed pilots. Moving in, they found a note from Maria von Braun on an interior wall of the garage. The note was tacked beside a couple of sizable holes punched in the sheet rock at front-bumper level. It read: “This is where the family practiced takeoffs and landings.”9
In Virginia, the von Brauns had found a spacious, comfortable home in a neighborhood of good-size wooded lots in Alexandria. Only Peter Constantine—“Pete” to his sisters—was now living year-round with his parents. The Alabama-born boy was well aware of his background. One day at work, Wernher recounted to his staff: “Well, Peter’s in trouble. They got into the Civil War in his studies at school, and Peter said he’s a Confederate! And so he held forth for the Confederate cause!” Von Braun laughed as he told the story, adding that, after all, Peter was an Alabamian.10
Iris Careen was away at Oberlin College in Ohio, and Margrit Cecile was at a girls’ school in Atlanta. As their daughters grew to adolescence and young adulthood, Wernher and Maria shared the usual parental worries over peer pressure and drug use in the turbulent ’60s and ’70s. At times their concerns rose above the norm: Iris was present at Kent State University in Ohio when the pivotal 1970 student protests over the Vietnam War’s widening erupted on campus and ended with deadly bloodshed. She escaped injury.11
The von Brauns’ Alexandria property had room to add a heated pool and small domed observatory to accommodate the scientist’s prized new eight-inch Celestron reflector telescope. It was a farewell gift from Huntsville friends and colleagues so that he could indulge his passion for stargazing on clear nights.12 The couple liked their new home’s secluded location on a dead-end street.
The von Brauns soon began enjoying an active social life in Washington. One evening they attended an elegant dinner party at which the space scientist was seated next to popular Washington newspaper columnist Betty Beale. He apparently turned on the charm. She soon informed her readers:
One of the most fascinating men in the world has just moved to town. From now on, Wernher von Braun will be so sought-after as a dinner partner that he may wish he had stayed in Huntsville, Alabama. The rocket genius is a brilliant conversationalist, extremely handsome and socially charming. His lucid conversation covers everything from the atom to God, in whom he believes deeply, and he can make cosmic science seem perfectly clear even to a society columnist.13
The smitten society writer added that while von Braun said he would delight in traveling to the Moon, he admitted, “It’s better to have a live astronaut than a dead scientist.”
After settling into their new home in Alexandria, Maria von Braun got to know the neighbors, including the children. “She loved kids,” recalled Frank Williams. “She loved her kids, and she loved kids in general. In fact, she used to baby-sit quite a few of the neighbors’ kids there, and she loved doing that.” Maria had toys for them, was “a good storyteller,” and even came up with an invention to rig her kitchen “in Rube Goldberg fashion so the kids could not get into any of the kitchen cabinets,” Williams remembered. “She looked forward to keeping those kids [free of charge, of course]. It was just having them and helping.”14
Several early events did not augur well for the success of von Braun’s mission in Washington, however. George Mueller, the NASA associate administrator for Manned Space Flight, was an admirer who had encouraged him to make the move. Mueller left the space agency in December 1969. That was after the rocket scientist had committed to the job, but before he had made the transfer. At the same time, Low, the Apollo spacecraft program manager at the Manned Spacecraft Center (later named the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center) in Texas and no fan of von Braun’s Huntsville operations, was promoted to NASA deputy administrator and shifted to the capital.
Also in late 1969, after the positive space report by the Agnew Commission had been circulated, Paine had talked with President Nixon about publicly calling for a manned Mars mission—von Braun’s ultimate personal dream—as a future national goal. Nixon responded by announcing that landing men on Mars by 1982 would be a worthwhile objective for America. It was hardly a stirring, Kennedyesque challenge. Then, in early 1970, Paine briefed the news media on the severe impact of the “drastic reductions” newly made by the Nixon administration in NASA’s proposed budget and programs for the next fiscal year. Nixon appeared to have forgotten all about Mars.
And so, by the time von Braun headed for Washington to draft plans for an aggressive, long-term space program, support had been undercut at the White House and on Capitol Hill. With the continuing Vietnam War, growing budget deficits, urban unrest, campus protests, and other migraines, bringing about any turnaround in space efforts would be a steep uphill struggle. Even supreme optimist von Braun knew it. But he had given his word, and maybe there was a chance he and his friend Tom Paine could somehow pull it off. He honored his decision to enter what he would soon call “the Washington jungle.”15
Paine was indeed a bright spot as von Braun began his Washington sojourn. A close, friendly rapport between the two quickly deepened, Kertes remembered. They had almost daily, one-on-one discussions in the administrator’s nearby office. Their collaboration fortified von Braun in his planning task.16
Among von Braun’s early steps as he set out to chart America’s future in space was to ask Ernst Stuhlinger, his chief scientist back at the Marshall Center, to give him a list of the top ten U.S. scientists with interests in space experimentation. Because of his reputation as someone much more attuned to engineering than science, von Braun sought through these contacts to get input from, and stir up further interest within, the scientific community in what he saw as enormous future opportunities in space science.17
He also took a coast-to-coast, fact-finding tour of NASA centers with the added purpose of building support for his mission. Flying into Los Angeles one afternoon for several days of visits to area space facilities, von Braun had dinner at a restaurant with assistant Jim Daniels and two other NASA men. He then suggested the foursome go out on the town for some entertainment. One of the fellows mentioned a nightspot that might do. Arriving there, the group entered a club featuring nude dancers. The men tried to make their way inconspicuously to a dark, secluded booth as the famous rocketeer softly cautioned, “Now, let’s not make too big a deal of this.”
About that time a loud voice rang out: “Hey, Wernher! Wernher von Braun!” “My God,” murmured the object of the attention. The big mouth turned out to be a colleague from headquarters. He stood up and led his party over to join von Braun and friends. The men had a few drinks, watched the sexy performers, joked, and chatted.
As the hour grew late, they began leaving. Night owl von Braun said he wasn’t quite ready to go and asked Daniels to stay with him. The two found stools near the stage where the dancers undulated to the music. The appreciative men carried on light talk, and some of the dancers flirted with von Braun. “Jim, you need to watch their eyes,” he advised his younger friend. “It’s in their eyes you can see their true dedication to their art.”18
At one point Daniels excused himself for a visit to the men’s restroom. He returned to find von Braun had taken a new seat—at a piano next to the stage. “He was playing some jazzy stuff for the girls to dance to!” remembered Daniels. “There were even some bar hangers-on gathered around him. Probably none of them knew who he was. He certainly wasn’t drunk. He was just enjoying himself playing that piano while those gals danced.” At closing time, around 2:30 in the morning, the two men left and returned to their hotel. “Nothing else happened,” recalled the associate. “He just wanted an entertaining night out with the boys, to let his hair down. That was ‘Wernher von Braun the human being,’ I guess you could say.”19
Life back in his Washington office, too, had its lighter moments. For one thing, his secretary remembered, “he kept falling out of his chair!” Von Braun’s new, executive-style chair was top-heavy and sat on a thick plastic mat on top of the carpet. He would lean back in the chair and put his feet up on his desk. Before he could catch himself, the chair would roll, topple, and send him crashing to the floor.
“The first time it happened,” recalled Kertes, “there was a loud crash in his office and I ran in. He was on the floor, thankfully unhurt, ensconced between his desk and credenza. The third or fourth time I heard this crash, I thought, ‘Oh, no! Not again!’ It struck my funny bone and I started to laugh, but not out loud.” She could not go into his office right away for fear she would burst out laughing. Soon she heard a loud “Julie!” She rushed in, trying not to look. All she could say was, “I’m going to do something about that chair—today!” A new, more stable, chair arrived before the day ended.20
When the boss had meetings in his office with his male associates he would close the door to her office, Kertes recalled, “because they would sometimes get carried away with their language.” One day a male staff member brought her a “cuss box” for the top of her desk. Thereafter, when a spirited meeting in von Braun’s office would break up, the men would file out and usually drop coins in Miss Julie’s box. One day, even with the door closed, “they were unusually loud and I could hear almost every word they said. So I went into his office and placed the cuss box in the middle of the table.” Von Braun protested that the cussing didn’t count if the door was closed. “If I can hear it,” Kertes replied, “it counts.”21
A different side of von Braun showed in the case of Kevin Steen, a boy from Carefree, Arizona, who had written in the late 1960s to von Braun in Huntsville about his enthusiasm for space flight. Kevin developed cancer at an early age. Von Braun responded with a letter of encouragement, and soon the two became pen pals. Not long after the scientist had transferred to Washington his secretary received a call from Kevin’s father. He wanted her to tell von Braun that the boy had undergone surgery at the Mayo Clinic but that “his body was filled with cancer and the surgeons could do nothing,” Kertes recalled.
“Dr. von Braun said [to his staff], ‘We must all pray for Kevin,’ and we did,” the secretary said. “To everyone’s amazement, a miracle happened and Kevin began to recuperate. A few months later we learned that Kevin had been back to Mayo and there was no sign of cancer in his body!” The secretary remembered well her boss’s comment to the staff: “Now we can see what the power of prayer can do.”22
A steady stream of interesting and famous visitors flowed through von Braun’s Washington office. Two in particular caused considerable stirs. One afternoon Jacques Cousteau, the undersea explorer, paid a lengthy visit, and the fellow skin and scuba divers strengthened their friendship. The meeting ran so long that Kertes had to run downstairs and hold a taxicab so Cousteau could get to the airport during rush hour. Departing employees of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which occupied the lower four floors of the NASA building, were astounded to see Cousteau there and asked why. They seemed equally surprised to learn that Wernher von Braun worked in the building.23
Another day, actor Hugh O’Brien came calling. The space enthusiast was there with Mike Ross of Kennedy Space Center to work with von Braun on a documentary for television. At the time, the handsome, square-jawed star played the title role in the hit TV Western series Wyatt Earp. Word spread that he was waiting in the reception area, and soon NASA employees swarmed in to ogle and meet him, take his picture, and get his autograph. Julie Kertes entered her boss’s office and cheerily announced, “‘Dr. von Braun, Wyatt Earp is here to see you.’ He said, ‘Who?’ He had no idea who Wyatt Earp was.”24
Not every visitor to von Braun’s office was welcome. He received a stream of calls from a former U.S. Army associate who had succumbed to the bottle and was trading on his acquaintance with the space leader for business purposes. “Dr. von Braun finally told Julie not to put the man’s calls through to him anymore,” recalled Daniels. “He told her not to lie, but just don’t put him through.” Eventually, when the man simply showed up at the office one day, “Dr. von Braun went out to lunch with him—strictly out of compassion for an old associate who had become a sot.”25
Equally memorable was the visiting sculptress from Finland who had admired von Braun from afar. She had gone through NASA Public Affairs chief Julian Scheer and arrived at von Braun’s office lugging one of her large abstract stone sculptures as a gift. “It was this convoluted, unrecognizable piece that was too big for his desk,” Daniels recalled. “The lady personally presented this modern masterpiece to Dr. von Braun with praises for his accomplishments.” After graciously accepting the purported work of art, thanking its creator, chatting briefly, and walking her to the door, he asked Daniels, “What the hell should I do with it?” Daniels suggested it would scare away the crows from his garden at home. Von Braun decided the piece should grace the NASA building’s garden, for whatever use the birds there chose to make of it.26
Kertes soon discovered that one of the “finest qualities” of her dynamic boss was “his treatment of other people. He treated everyone the same, whether it was the garage attendants or a high government official. In other words, he treated everybody like human beings.” Such qualities led her to develop a “great admiration” for him—although admiration and respect were not always his preferred sentiments. “I recall a letter from a young woman to him in which she said ‘I respect you very much.’ He wrote a note to me on her letter saying, ‘The fact that she says “respect” instead of “love” makes me feel old.’”27
An easy rapport blossomed between secretary and boss. She also became close to his family, as had Bonnie Holmes in Huntsville. “I love Mrs. von Braun; what a lady,” Kertes said many years later.28 Unmarried, she occasionally stayed with Peter von Braun when his parents went out. When the couple was about to leave on a trip to Africa, the secretary asked her boss to bring her back an elephant. “Okay,” he had agreed, “but you’ll have to pay the shipping!” He later mailed her a postcard from Kenya with news of having sighted more than a hundred elephants that day. It bore a postage stamp depicting one elephant with huge tusks. With von Braun’s interest in elephants, and his upper-class background, “I was convinced . . . he must be a wealthy Republican,” Kertes said, “but he informed me he was not!”29
Frequent little notes moved between von Braun and his secretary. One day she passed along a commemorative foreign stamp picturing von Braun, President Kennedy, and the Saturn V super-rocket, with a request for an autograph on its face. He complied, and then returned her memo with the notation: “Could you get me such a stamp for myself? Be glad to pay up to $1 for it.” Kertes checked around and later sent her boss a note stating that the stamp was sold only as part of a souvenir sheet—priced at $6. “Forget it,” von Braun wrote back. His secretary consoled him: “It’s not a very good likeness, anyway.”30
Another time, she sent him a clipping from a news brief that was available during an international space conference in Bremen, Germany. In it, von Braun was quoted as saying he anticipated walking on the Moon within ten years. It further reported that he envisioned a stay of “at least eight or ten days” at a fifty-person U.S. lunar research station. Von Braun returned the clipping with the notation, “Baloney.”31
In addition to the heavy flow of mail and phone calls to von Braun’s office, his secretary recalled that he received a preposterous number of invitations to speak—from members of Congress, trade associations, colleges, elementary school classes, and so on. Even so, he never saw some of the speaking invitations addressed to him. Washington staffer Jay Foster said Julian Scheer, who “actively disliked” von Braun because of his past in Nazi Germany, intercepted these and quietly substituted himself without von Braun’s knowledge.
It reached the point, Foster recalled, that Paine stepped in and issued an edict: The only people henceforth allowed to sub for von Braun at speaking engagements were (1) any astronaut and (2) Robert Jastrow, director of the Institute for Space Studies at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, in whom Paine and von Braun had implicit confidence.32
Von Braun eventually balked at the flood of routine speech requests from Capitol Hill. “His treatment of members of Congress was unheard of,” Kertes remembered. “In Washington, congressmen cater to their public, but they expect government employees to cater to them. But Dr. von Braun wouldn’t even return their telephone calls! . . . His problem was that he couldn’t say no!” The lawmakers always wanted him to appear at functions they—or their big contributors or important constituents—were hosting, because “he was a very big draw,” said the secretary. Still, they couldn’t be ignored. And yet Kertes couldn’t force her boss to return the calls. The solution was to steer the more important ones to Arnold Frutkin, the space agency’s congressional liaison officer. “He would talk to Dr. von Braun,” the secretary remembered, “and the matter was taken care of.”33
Von Braun also received more than a few German and other foreign visitors to his Washington office—too many to suit Frutkin, who handled international, along with congressional, affairs for NASA. He confronted von Braun one day and insisted that all these foreign visitors first come through his office as a matter of protocol. “I had never seen Dr. von Braun lose his temper,” Kertes said, “but he lost it with Dr. Frutkin. He said, ‘Arnold, the last thing I want is your job. These people were not here on NASA business. If and when they come to talk about the space program, then I’ll send them to you! Look, these are friends of mine, and they will remain my friends.’” Kertes added, “That cleared the air.”34
Von Braun assistant Daniels helped with management of the planning operation during the space scientist’s first months at headquarters. Like other staff-level members of the Executive Secretariat at NASA headquarters, Daniels had dual assignments—a primary job with the Secretariat and a secondary role serving an individual executive there. The two traveled together, worked together, and became close.
During World War II Daniels had been a teenage aviator on B-24 bombing raids in Europe, and sometimes the two discussed the war. After von Braun had been in Washington six months, the day came for Daniels to leave Washington for a yearlong stint at Syracuse University to advance the teaching of management within government. Before a going-away party, von Braun asked Daniels to step into his office.
“We sat down—and he brought me to tears,” Daniels remembered. For twenty or thirty minutes von Braun talked about his gratitude for the departing associate’s help, about the Syracuse assignment, about his own plans and hopes, “and about things like friendship and loyalty.” He then gave Daniels something he would always treasure—a signed photograph inscribed “To Jim Daniels, with regards—who helped me find my way through the Washington jungle.”35
As part of a new offensive to win White House support for a reinvigorated space effort, and to gain more input, Paine, von Braun, and Jastrow organized a major brainstorming conference, Space Programs in the Year 2000. It covered five days, including a weekend in June 1970 at the NASA facility on Wallops Island, Virginia. It was attended by two dozen of the leading thinkers inside NASA and the aerospace community at large, among them astronaut-hero Neil Armstrong. Von Braun and Jastrow presented their new papers on advanced propulsion concepts. The keynote speaker was von Braun’s longtime friend Arthur C. Clarke.36
Material presented and discussed at the conference incorporated much of the new input von Braun had considered as he worked on his comprehensive space plan for the nation. The resultant twenty-year plan included several main elements. There were to be a series of three separate Skylab space stations in Earth orbit; a smaller, simpler Space Shuttle than the mainstream concept then being pushed; and continued production and use of Saturns and other launch vehicles for scientific, unmanned missions to Mars, the Sun, and on multiplanet tours. Later would come a larger shuttle, a larger, permanent space station, a permanent lunar base, and ultimately a manned mission to Mars.
“Tom Paine was excited about it,” Shaner recalled von Braun’s saying. The administrator thought it was “the greatest integrated space plan he’d ever seen.” It called for a gradual increase in the space budget to a peak of $12 to $14 billion, and then a slow decrease over a period of years thereafter.37
After months of preparation of their draft proposal of the aggressive, long-term national space plan, von Braun and Paine were ready to test Richard Nixon’s level of excitement over it.38 Paine took it to the White House in the summer of 1970. The response was negative: The timing for another grand space initiative was all wrong. The word was that Congress would not buy it, the taxpayers would not buy it, and the Nixon administration did not buy it. The White House said, do only what you can within a total budget of $5.5 billion a year and maintain the program on an even keel.39
Paine and von Braun were crushed. The NASA administrator soon told von Braun of his decision to leave the agency and rejoin his old company, General Electric. Paine said he had no interest in “carrying this agency,” if that was all they were going to do. He suggested that von Braun also leave, the latter confided to Tom Shaner.40
Von Braun’s friend and sponsor had been heading the space agency on borrowed time. Paine was a Democrat appointed by President Johnson in early 1968 to be NASA’s number two leader under Administrator Jim Webb, a Kennedy appointee. When Webb resigned in the fall of 1968 after Nixon’s election, Paine became acting administrator. And then when Nixon took office in early 1969 he had tried to replace him with a good Republican but failed to get the person he wanted. And so he had made Paine permanent administrator.
With the Nixon administration’s rejection of a bigger and brighter space future, Paine was now ready to leave. He submitted his resignation on July 28, 1970, and declared his intention to return to GE, effective September 15. The announcement came just five months after he had uprooted von Braun and brought him to Washington. Paine told reporters that recent cutbacks in the space budget had nothing to do with his departure. “When he left, Dr. von Braun was just devastated,” recalled secretary Kertes.41 The rocket scientist and master planner could not imagine the changes of fortune the next two years would hold.