With NASA Administrator Tom Paine’s mid-1970 resignation, speculation immediately focused on von Braun and George Low, the deputy administrator, as possible successors. Von Braun didn’t have a chance. Charles Sheldon was the White House senior staff member of the National Aeronautics and Space Council from 1961 to 1966 and later chief of Science Policy Research for the Library of Congress. He observed:
There was always a lingering resentment at the Washington end toward von Braun and his team. There were always rumors that von Braun would someday be the next head of NASA. But there is a great sensitivity in Washington about racial and ethnic interests in government. People said, “Don’t pay any attention to the rumors. Von Braun would never be given any political position. No one who had worked with Hitler and the Nazi government could be trusted.”1
Low, a superb engineer, experienced technocrat, and Austrian-born Jew, soon was appointed acting administrator by Nixon until a permanent choice could be made. That would take more than six months. With Paine gone, von Braun was now on his own at NASA headquarters, caught in the Washington morass. The climate there soon turned arctic.
Low had been the number two leader at NASA-Houston, archrival of the Huntsville operations headed by the hard-driving von Braun. More than a few of those in charge at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Texas viewed the German-born Marshall Center director as a grasping, scheming glory hound. Low’s personal background also stood in contrast to that of von Braun, the aristocratic former Nazi Party member.
“The first time I met von Braun I was prepared not to like him, but we became the best of friends,” Low told Lee B. James, who was then the manager of the Saturn V Program Office at the Marshall Center.2 Also, as NASA deputy administrator, Low had assured MSFC’s Frank Williams in early 1970 that he was “pleased” von Braun was coming to Washington to take charge of space planning. He encouraged Williams to accept von Braun’s invitation to join his team there.3
Whatever friendly feelings and healthy working relationship had existed between the two, a drastic change occurred nevertheless in the treatment accorded von Braun at headquarters—for whatever reasons—after Paine left and Low took over. When the agency’s top officials testified on Capitol Hill, NASA’s erstwhile perennial star witness was not among them. He was required to submit all his other speeches for review and approval, and advised to stick to the script and forgo his trademark ad-libs. Few headquarters officials ever asked his advice or input on decisions. There were no more chatty sessions in the administrator’s office, von Braun’s secretary recalled; he had difficulty even getting an appointment to see Low, whose office was two doors away.4 Clearly, he had become persona non grata.
“Wernher and Low had problems,” recalled Jay Foster of von Braun’s planning team. “I don’t know that it was necessarily personal, but I don’t think Low ever forgave Wernher for the Nazi connection.”5 Others, however, doubted that this was the major cause of the friction between the two.
Now essentially out of the loop, von Braun was not invited to most meetings of the NASA hierarchy. He may have been nominally the fourth-highest official in the agency, but he was not considered part of the command chain. One example was a high-level meeting von Braun learned of informally. As Lee James recounted, based on a private conversation he had afterward with a pained von Braun: “He walked in a little late, as he always did, and the room got kind of quiet. So, Wernher said, ‘I looked around at so-and-so [James could not remember who von Braun said was presiding] and said, “I am welcome here, aren’t I?” And they said, “No, you’re not.”’ Can you imagine that? It was just that they had decided they didn’t want von Braun up there.”6
“From that meeting on,” said James, “von Braun was rather crushed. He said, ‘Lee, how do I handle something like this?’ . . . Obviously . . . he had gotten into something where he was not going to be happy.”
Insiders attributed the antagonism shown von Braun to a range of political and personal circumstances. Among the more benign political factors cited was that Low considered himself a caretaker interim administrator in a time of deflated White House and congressional support and tight space budgets. He was not about to buck the tide and allow von Braun and his “tiger team” of long-range planners to run loose with their grand schemes. Von Braun staffers also suspected that darker internal NASA politics included payback pressure on Low from Houston partisans to give a now-vulnerable von Braun his comeuppance for past intra-agency sins.
Several personal factors were also at play. Homer E. Newell, NASA associate administrator, chief scientist, and then the official directly above von Braun in the pecking order, had been in charge of planning. A cautious, deliberate man, Newell was not pleased with surrendering that role to the full-throttle von Braun, and he let it show, several von Braun staffers said. Another headquarters official who tended to be “anti-von Braun,” remembered Jay Foster, was William E. Lilly, chief of plans and analysis in NASA’s Office of Launch Vehicles, and later the agency’s first comptroller general. In government service since 1950, “Bill Lilly thought Wernher was not enough of a bureaucrat,” said Foster. “He felt that Wernher spoke too candidly in public and rocked the boat by saying what he thought.”7 Some von Braun staffers believed that the so-called Jewish Mafia within NASA and the larger space community had applied pressure on Low to drive von Braun out while he had the opportunity. Tom Shaner thought such talk was “overdrawn and overly dramatic.”8
More often than not, simple human animosities flared over von Braun’s having been a wartime enemy, along with pure jealousy over his celebrity status, high accomplishments, and charisma. One senior German-born member of the old rocket team, who kept a close eye on the Washington machinations from Huntsville, said he believed Low’s ill will toward von Braun sprang much more from “outright jealousy” than from any “ethnic factors.” “For instance, von Braun in the past would always testify at a congressional committee hearing in a full chamber, with only standing room,” the retired rocket expert continued, on condition of anonymity. “When George Low testified, there would be only a few people in the audience, and some of them would fall asleep. It was just jealousy.”
The Peenemünde veteran took pains to note that Low “had acquired worldwide admiration for his work and his influence at the future Johnson Space Center.” And yet, he added, Low “became a different person when he transferred to NASA headquarters. He allowed his actions and his decisions to be controlled much more by personal feelings—and by pressures from others—than by a desire to provide strong leadership to the national space program.”
No one believed that von Braun had entered the high-powered world of Washington bureaucratic politics as an innocent, however. Before leaving for his new post, he had told his closest associates at Marshall Center that he was headed for a place where a great deal of horse manure is shoveled. The trick, he had said, is making sure you stayed at the right end of the shovel and did not live “the life of a mushroom.” “What’s that?” someone asked. The departing director had explained: “You are kept totally in the dark; every now and then someone opens the door a bit and throws in a shovelful of horse manure on you. And if you dare try to poke your head above the surface, it’s in danger of being chopped off!”9
Hermann Weidner, von Braun’s chief of R & D operations at the Marshall Center, may or may not have been aware of the irony in what he wrote two years later to his ex-boss. “Dear Wernher: . . . You also may be able to tell by now which end of the shovel you finally ended up with in this deal: Whether you have become mushroom-number-four in NASA or rather the handler of the stuff at the other end, as you predicted you would.”10
There had been notions before 1969–70 of persuading von Braun to leave Huntsville and move up to headquarters. However, he “had been advised by Mr. [James] Webb that it would be very unwise for him to go to Washington,” said Edward D. Mohlere, a Marshall Center manager under Eberhard Rees. “[Webb] had said, ‘They will eat you alive.’”11 Webb, a bulldog-tough Marine Corps veteran of World War II, had specific notions about who “they” were. An in-depth 1987 NASA history of the Marshall Center expanded on the subject. “Von Braun’s relationship with Webb had always been proper but distant, and was tinged with the Nazi question. Paine claimed that Webb wanted to keep von Braun out of Washington: ‘I think Jim had the feeling that, well, the Jewish lobby would shoot him down or something.’”12
Paine believed that Webb’s fears were baseless regarding the fate awaiting von Braun. Perhaps Webb had not wanted to compete with von Braun operating from the bully pulpit of the nation’s capital. Paine elaborated in a 1986 interview with author Joseph Trento:
I think most people felt that he had a damned unfortunate past and nobody liked a Nazi . . . but he had kind of paid his dues and that he really helped us get to the Moon in developing the Saturn V and showed himself to be a worthy citizen of the country; and while we won’t exactly forgive and forget, politeness dictates, at least, we won’t get into a disgraceful knock-down and drag-out. So it was sort of a neutral thing. He was neither the terribly charismatic or popular figure Jim feared, nor was he the great target of the anti-Nazis who very properly would object to having a prominent member of the Hitler regime ensconced in Washington in a policy area.13
But von Braun had moved to Washington, and it had not taken long for things to start coming apart for him. John Goodrum Sr., a veteran engineer-manager at the Marshall Center, was in the capital on business in the Nixon–Henry Kissinger era of the early 1970s and spied his ex-boss one evening in a bar on K Street. Goodrum joined him for a drink. Von Braun looked unhappy. Goodrum asked how his work was going. “Well, John,” replied the space leader, “I’ve found out up here I’m just another guy with a funny accent.”14
In von Braun’s beleaguered tenure at headquarters, his wife’s sympathetic ear apparently was his salvation. Maria related those grim times years afterward to family friend Ernst Stuhlinger. “On many evenings we walked around the block for hours and hours while he talked and poured out his soul . . . all I could do was just listen . . . he was so deeply depressed; for him, a world was falling apart. . . . I felt that the only relief I could give him was just encourage him to talk.”15
Despite the frustrating downturn of events for the space program and for him personally in the capital, von Braun tended to keep up a positive front with his former compatriots during visits to the Marshall Center, according to Stuhlinger and others. He was able at last to do some serious, big-picture thinking, he said. And he was busy with the proposed Space Shuttle and other challenging projects, he emphasized, reassuring his old team members that better times for space activity would come again.16
Still, he felt bitter disappointment over decisions by the national leadership to abandon the Saturn-Apollo capabilities created at dear cost and to sound a retreat in the space arena. Those feelings burst through in a never-published, August 1970 interview in his offices with then-NASA contract writer Robert Sherrod.
We are saying, “Well, okay, we now have landed on the Moon, so let’s do something else. Let’s clean up the rivers, let’s do something with the air, do something with the polluted cities . . . do something for the poor,” and so forth. But instead of now cleverly utilizing that new capability, we just kill [it]. We can’t replace it overnight for something on the other side.
So, this is again a case where we don’t rule by rational thinking but by emotion. People say somehow instinctively, “These goddamn Apollo guys had their day in court, they had all the fun. But now that we have landed on the Moon, let’s quit—you know, walk away from it and do something entirely different.” By quitting in this area prematurely you don’t get one alternate problem solved overnight. . . .
We surely learned one thing in Apollo as we were looking back at this spaceship Earth . . . coasting in the universe with limited resources . . . What can we do with that new space capability to help solve the problems of that planet Earth? Let’s turn that capability gently around and use it in these new areas.17
It made no sense, he lamented in the interview, to “get the fire axe out” and whack a successful space program to pieces. Good sense or not, however, it happened.
Life in Washington went on for a demoralized von Braun, with occasional sparkling social and cultural events to brighten his otherwise largely unhappy existence. He and Maria were among the guests of President and Mrs. Nixon at a White House dinner early in 1971 honoring Apollo 14 astronauts Alan Shepard (promoted to admiral that year), Edgar D. Mitchell, also a navy flier, and Stuart A. Roosa, of the air force, plus other key people behind the successful mission. Included were several of von Braun’s old colleagues invited up from Huntsville and Cape Canaveral.18
In April 1971, von Braun traveled to northern Alabama to take part in the dedication of the collected papers of his U.S. writing collaborator, friend, and colleague from 1930s Germany, the late Willy Ley. With encouragement and support from von Braun and others, the library at the University of Alabama in Huntsville had purchased the Ley collection from his widow after the death in 1969 of the early rocket enthusiast and space author.
The working climate for von Braun at headquarters took a turn for the better in April 1971. James C. “Jim” Fletcher became President Nixon’s appointee to head the space agency. Low resumed the post of deputy administrator. Fletcher, an air force missile scientist in the 1950s, had been favorably impressed with von Braun’s participation in the eye-opening series of space articles in Collier’s magazine and had later met him during a visit to Redstone Arsenal. “They had a cordial relationship” at headquarters, remembered Frank Williams of the planning team. “They joked a lot.”19
One day Fletcher, von Braun, Williams, and Daniels, among others, were flying aboard a NASA plane. The steward announced that the bar was open and called for drink orders. Von Braun and Daniels ordered cocktails. Fletcher, a Mormon who had come straight from the University of Utah presidency, said, “I will have milk.” When the drinks arrived, Daniels recalled, von Braun called Fletcher’s attention to “these fine mixed drinks” he and others held while the boss had a glass of plain milk. “Jim,” von Braun teased, “it’s too bad your religion doesn’t allow you to have more than a milk drink. Cheers!” With hardly a pause Fletcher responded, “Wernher, it’s too bad your religion doesn’t allow you to have more than one wife. Cheers!”20
Under Jim Fletcher, von Braun’s sense of usefulness was less than satisfying, although not nearly so gloomy as in the months during Low’s interim reign. Fletcher and von Braun were “never impolite” to each other, Williams remembered, but von Braun was left somewhat adrift; “Fletcher asked him to do very little.” Added Williams:
Von Braun was much better known [than Fletcher], much better liked, and had a much broader clientele of contacts and friends, and so I think there was a lot of jealousy. He [Fletcher] didn’t know what to tell von Braun to do. We were just about to lose our thrust [in the space program]. There was a window of opportunity, and if Jim had let von Braun go do his thing, I think we could have aroused enough interest and enthusiasm on [Capitol Hill] to put pressure on the White House to let us do more.21
But Fletcher did not seize the moment, if indeed there was one. Von Braun did put considerable thought and effort into the proposed Space Shuttle. The operative design concept called for a large, two-stage, all-reusable system. Von Braun argued for a transitional smaller, simpler, cheaper vehicle that was not fully reusable, saying the upscale model could come later. Development of the lower-cost version gained Nixon’s eventual approval.
Otherwise, recalled Williams, the von Braun planning team “wrote reports, made surveys, did all kinds of tasks.” Von Braun’s own discomfort intensified. Of what use was he now in Washington? “He was being wasted, and it was eating him alive,” Williams said. “He shared [that frustration] with quite a few people. He talked with Eberhard [Rees, his successor at the Marshall Center] about it. He didn’t run to a bar and talk, or go to any therapist, but he did discuss it with some of us. He said, ‘I’m just wasting my time.’”22
Wernher von Braun the natural optimist was treading water in a sea of pessimism. He was a strong leader with hardly anyone to lead anymore and no goal to lead them toward. To some he seemed like a great conductor without an orchestra to conduct. Word of his predicament evidently reached Walter Dornberger, his old military boss, patron, and friend all through the V-2 era at Peenemünde. The former German general, who had retired to Mexico from Bell Aerospace early in 1972, urged von Braun: “Always remember our old battle cry: ‘Never give up!’ And let nobody ever break your spirit. Much to do is left.”23
Also early that year a plan emerged for what proved to be “Wernher’s Excellent Sailing Adventure.” He loved sailing, and although he never owned a sailboat, he nevertheless enjoyed sailing borrowed boats and occasionally helping to crew aboard friends’ fine vessels in America.
The idea for a getaway sail in the Caribbean to mark his sixtieth birthday was his wife’s. Maria von Braun knew that her husband would take little pleasure in the big Washington birthday bash that inevitably awaited him unless he escaped town. She knew his growing disaffection with his work would have only added to his dread of such a party. So she broached the idea, and her husband jumped at it. Maria excluded herself from the event; this was to be Wernher’s birthday escape. Besides, she wasn’t much of a sailor, and hardly relished the idea of being part of the boat’s working crew.
An enthusiastic von Braun recruited staffer Frank Williams, who was an experienced small-boat sailor and fellow pilot adept at navigation—in the air, anyway. The two hatched a plan for a ten-day, island-hopping cruise aboard a chartered, forty-one-foot sloop von Braun already had identified in the British West Indies. The plan came together when von Braun signed up expert big-boat sailor, NASA colleague, and good friend Hans Mark and his wife to round out the crew.
Then seas got choppy: yachtsman Mark had to cancel shortly before the departure date. Williams hastily recruited a willing couple as substitutes: James Ian Dodds, a young contractor employee in von Braun’s office with rowing crew, but no sailing, experience, and his wife, Ruth, a nurse and good cook. They had a crew again—but one inexperienced at sailing in open seas. That meant the venture would be a “bare-boat” sail, or one without a single professional-level sailor aboard. But the four had a boat, charts, and a general course mapped by von Braun in the West Indies from Grenada north as far as St. Vincent and back again. They also had a book on sailing.
At St. Georges, Grenada, after stocking Josephine III, their graceful vessel, with a full case of Caribbean rum and other basic provisions, skipper Wernher and crew were surprised by word of a required test of their knowledge of ocean sailing. The novices crammed for the exam and the next day managed to convince the local authorities that they were seasoned sailors. They set rules for the cruise, prepared a logbook to be kept, and established a required daily radio code-phrase that involved reporting the number of bottles of rum “in bond” remaining on board. This was to show all were safe and not taken captive by pirates, drug smugglers, Communist agents, or aliens.
The four set sail aboard Josephine III on March 23, von Braun’s sixtieth birthday. It was to be a voyage of exotic islands and idyllic harbors, of snorkel dives among tropical fish above coral reefs, champagne birthday toasts, skies sunny and stormy, seas calm and rough, happy encounters with the locals, and succulent seafood feasts. There would also be ample refreshments of beer, rum, gin, fine wine, and brandy, as warranted. It all came about, island after island, somehow with boat and suntanned crew relatively intact at the end.24
Toward the finish of the adventure, over drinks ashore with his crew and a few hearty islander acquaintances, von Braun conspired to have some fun with his secretary back in Washington. He would send her a note in a bottle. With the heading “Josephine III, March 30, 1972, AD,” in his bold script he wrote:
Dear Julie:
Had a rough trip. Down to one torn sail and two bottles of rum in bond. Whales to port, sharks to starboard and reefs ahead. Sun merciless. Twenty minute turns on the pumps. One crew member dying of tetanus. Scurvy rampant. Skipper delirious. Finishing our last days with the two remaining bottles of rum—and drifting into the sunset.
Ruthie Wernher
Frank Ian
P.S. Please answer by return bottle: Is Nixon still running?25
He wrote a second note addressed “To Finder,” advising that both it and the letter to his secretary should be dispatched to “Miss Julie Kertes” at the NASA headquarters address. At the bottom of that second note he stated, “Finder will be rewarded with 10 bottles of Tang” (the astronauts’ official space drink). The bottle was then capped and supposedly tossed overboard into the sea. Von Braun arranged for the bottle to be “found” by an equally fun-loving island acquaintance. Two weeks later the acquaintance wrote Miss Kertes:
Bottle enclosed was found on deserted island while I was in search of turtles. Found no turtles, but am big on Tang, as you Americans call it. No sign of boat or crew but local legend has it rum-soaked scurvy crew still haunting Caribbean. Send Tang in bond to H. Richardson, Petit St. Vincent, Petit Martinique, Grenada, West Indies.
P.S. Who is Nixon and where is he running?26
After his return to the office von Braun asked his secretary every day for several days if a package had come for her from the islands. When at last it did, she recalled, “He was so excited! He was like a kid!” Kertes then shipped finder H. Richardson one bottle of Tang—ten would have been too expensive. She kept the note and bottle. And she always suspected that Dr. von Braun had been drinking a bit, perhaps, when he wrote that letter in a bottle.27
After his homecoming from sailing the seas, von Braun was also surprised with a slightly delayed sixtieth-birthday gift from friends, colleagues, and associates all over the country, and the world. In a variation on an Old Country tradition, it was a bound album of hundreds of one-page personal letters recounting shared memories with von Braun over the decades.28
Later that spring, von Braun decided to end his free fall at NASA. As Frank Williams later put it, Wernher decided to “bail out, cash in, and just say sayonara” to the agency.29 The frustrated space planner had done all he could at headquarters. “Wernher . . . came to the conclusion that the long-range plan was . . . in being,” recalled NASA veteran Jay Foster, “and the government and the country and the world could attack that [space challenge] at whatever pace the politicians decided they wanted.”30 Time would tell when his twenty-year plan might be activated—perhaps forty or fifty years hence.
Von Braun quietly advised his staff to seek other positions and acknowledged their frustrations along with his own. Daniels had left in late August 1970. Foster returned to the Marshall Center for fresh assignments, and Williams soon departed to build a new career elsewhere within NASA and later with Martin Marietta.
At NASA headquarters on the morning of Friday, May 26, 1972, von Braun announced his retirement from the agency, effective June 30. He had worked the last twenty-seven years for the U.S. government. He would now join Fairchild Industries in nearby Germantown, Maryland, as vice-president for engineering and development and would pursue “some space projects I feel are of particular importance.” Administrator Fletcher said everyone at NASA “will miss the daily stimulation of his presence.” He praised the departing rocket pioneer as the individual most responsible for leading America into the space age.31 Von Braun’s staff later agreed that neither Fletcher nor anyone in power at NASA had lifted a finger to try to keep him there.
Von Braun expressed deep gratitude for his twelve years with NASA, but he was less than effusive about the last two and a half years at headquarters. Daniels, back in Washington for the occasion, put the brightest possible face on the situation: “Wernher is quite happy with his accomplishments up here. But in the current climate, he felt his job was done. And, as he told me, he wanted to try a new approach to making a contribution, or, as he put it, ‘I’d like to try it on the other side of the fence now.’”32
The immediate reaction of one of his former rocket team members in Huntsville was to remark, “What really surprises us most is that he stuck it out up there that long.”33 But the announcement of his retirement “broke my heart,” said Kertes. “With Dr. von Braun, there was never a dull moment. They were the busiest two and a half years of my life.” He was “probably the best boss I ever had, and I had many fine ones.”34
One afternoon at the end of June there was a farewell gathering for von Braun at NASA headquarters that included a contingent of his longtime associates from Huntsville and the Marshall Center, a few close friends in Congress, and his Washington staff members. Administrator Fletcher spoke. So did George Low, whom, perhaps surprisingly, Maria von Braun was said to have liked especially well. Her husband responded briefly to the two men’s remarks.
“It was a sad occasion,” Kertes remembered.35 For von Braun, though, his “happiest moment” in Washington occurred during that unfestive party. Low had pulled him aside at the going-away affair and thanked him for lobbying for the smaller and simpler Space Shuttle over the “grandiose concept” then favored by most within NASA. Low, one of the pillars of Project Apollo, quietly told von Braun he had done a great service to the agency and the nation by saving the shuttle with his input and advocacy.36
Thereafter, with von Braun gone, Fletcher and Low abolished his planning position, office, and staff. Fletcher invited a member of the von Braun group to join his staff. “Before I took [the new job] I called Dr. von Braun and asked him what he thought about it—and whether Dr. Fletcher had been responsible for his leaving,” the staff member recalled in an interview many years later. The former staffer said von Braun replied he had no problem with the employee joining Fletcher and that no, another official, whom he named, had been responsible. After a while the new member of Fletcher’s staff grew confident enough to ask Fletcher why he had not tried to keep von Braun on board. Fletcher said he realized he was blamed, but that he had not insisted that the rocket pioneer should go. The administrator named the official responsible, although granting he could have “overruled” that individual, as Fletcher put it.
“It was George Low” whom Fletcher identified, the retired Washington staff member revealed a quarter century later, on condition of anonymity. “He was very jealous of Dr. von Braun.” It was also Low whom von Braun had privately identified to his former staffer.37
Peenemünde veteran Adolf K. Thiel ran into von Braun after his departure from NASA, when both were visiting the space agency’s Ames Research Center in California. They had dinner together in what turned out to be their last meeting. “It was clear he was very disappointed over the way things had gone in Washington,” Thiel recalled. “George Low . . . resented von Braun.”38
But von Braun’s undoing at NASA headquarters resulted from far more than just one man’s resentment or jealousy or other form of ill will. A fateful confluence of individuals and circumstances cut short his hoped-for seven or eight “good years” of government service in Washington. He managed to put in barely two, and they were hardly good.