For most people around the world, receiving an email from Neil Armstrong was like getting a message from the Archangel Gabriel. The first time I received such a message from Neil was back in 2001, and I remember the tremendous excitement I felt when I saw his message pop up in my inbox. More than six hundred emails from Armstrong later, sent to me over the course of our ten-year association since I began work on his authorized biography, First Man, I still regard every message that he sent to me as extraordinarily special.
Of all the emails, letters, and communiqués I received from Neil, the one that I will always remember the most is the last one he ever sent me. It came to me at 3:53 P.M. on August 11, 2012, six days after his 82nd birthday and five days following a quadruple cardiopulmonary bypass surgery that had been performed on Neil’s heart at a hospital in suburban Cincinnati, where Neil lived with his wife, Carol. Earlier that day I had sent Neil a “get well” message via email, wishing him a speedy recovery and hoping to meet him for a round of golf. I wasn’t sure what condition he was in at the time and thought that it could take many days before he got around to reading, let alone answering, any of his email. But I got an answer from him that afternoon. It read:
Hi Jim,
Many thanks for the note.
I had checked into my gastro doc to check out an apparent reflux problem. It seemed an unlikely connection (for several reasons) but it turned out to be the right thing to do. We did a nuclear stress test leading to an angiogram, leading to a quad bypass.
Recovery is going well but golf will be on the back burner for a while. Hope to be kicked out of the hospital in a day or so.
My best,
Neil
As anyone who was close to Neil could attest, his email message to me that afternoon, two weeks exactly to the hour that he would die on Saturday, August 25, was classic Neil Armstrong: succinct, right to the point, yet thoughtful and kind, and with a dollop of wry good humor.
What exactly happened in the hospital with Neil’s condition over the course of the next two weeks leading to his death may never be known outside a small circle of family and friends and the medical staff that attended to him. Heart surgery of any kind is truly major surgery; so much can go wrong, especially when the patient is 82 years old. Neil’s wife, Carol, and the rest of Neil’s family chose to keep the circumstances to themselves, just as Neil would have wanted it.
Shortly after his death, the family released the following statement:
We are heartbroken to share the news that Neil Armstrong has passed away following complications resulting from cardiovascular procedures.
Neil was our loving husband, father, grandfather, brother and friend.
Neil Armstrong was also a reluctant American hero who always believed he was just doing his job. He served his Nation proudly, as a navy fighter pilot, test pilot, and astronaut. He also found success back home in his native Ohio in business and academia, and became a community leader in Cincinnati.
He remained an advocate of aviation and exploration throughout his life and never lost his boyhood wonder of these pursuits.
As much as Neil cherished his privacy, he always appreciated the expressions of good will from people around the world and from all walks of life.
While we mourn the loss of a very good man, we also celebrate his remarkable life and hope that it serves as an example to young people around the world to work hard to make their dreams come true, to be willing to explore and push the limits, and to selflessly serve a cause greater than themselves.
“For those who may ask what they can do to honor Neil,” the family had a simple request: “Honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty, and the next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink.”
The news of his death stunned the entire world, made headlines on the front page of virtually every newspaper on the planet, and brought outpourings of deeply felt sentiments about the greatness of Neil Armstrong, not just as an astronaut, test pilot, naval aviator, and engineer, but as a highly honorable man. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden commented, “As long as there are history books, Neil Armstrong will be included in them.” President Barack Obama said, “Neil Armstrong was a hero not just of his time, but of all time.” The British astronomer Sir Patrick Moore said: “As the first man on the Moon, he broke all records. He was a man who had all the courage in the world.” Harvard University astrophysicist Dr. Neil De Grasse Tyson commented, “No other act of human exploration ever laid a plaque saying, ‘We came in peace for all mankind.’” As his authorized biographer, I received no less than five dozen requests for my own comments about Neil from media outlets all over the globe. They came to me from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, France, India, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Qatar, Russia, South Korea, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. As heartbreaking as Neil’s death was to me personally, I did my best to offer my thoughts on what made Neil such a great man and what his legacy was, and will continue to be, “for all mankind.”
In all of my comments about Neil after his passing, I tried to emphasize a few main points. The first was how tremendously active he had been in the last years of his life. Hardly a recluse, Neil in the years since the publication of First Man in 2005 had continued to travel all around the world, sometimes just as a tourist, regularly going on golf trips to Scotland and Ireland with his two sons, but also often giving talks to various groups and audiences. For example, in 2010, Armstrong in the company of fellow Apollo astronauts Gene Cernan and Jim Lovell, spent two weeks with American troops overseas as part of an Armed Forces Entertainment/Morale Entertainment tour. Sponsored by American Airlines, Armstrong and entourage stopped at fifteen U.S. and NATO military installations in eight countries, including Afghanistan, logging over 15,000 miles. Then in the fall of 2011, Neil made a trip to Australia, during which he not only took a ride around Sydney Harbor in the grand old Aussie steam yacht Lady Hopetoun but also met Captain Richard de Crespigny, the pilot of the Qantas flight of the Airbus A380, the world’s largest passenger aircraft that in early November 2010 suffered an uncontained engine failure and was forced to make an emergency landing at Singapore Changi Airport. Becoming friends, Crespigny even arranged for Neil to fly Qantas’s A380 simulator. While in Australia, Neil also granted a rare filmed interview with—of all organizations—the Certified Practicing Accountants of Australia. As Neil explained, his father, Stephen Armstrong, had been an accountant, and he was giving the interview in memory of his father, who had died in 1990.
The second point about Neil that I always tried to make was how passionate he remained about flying. Whenever I (or anyone else) was with him out-of-doors and an airplane flew overhead, Neil would always look up. He could tell you exactly what sort of airplane it was. If he was at the summer air show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where hundreds of different aircraft types would be on exhibition, Neil could identify each airplane, its wing type, its power plant, its maximum speed. In First Man, I had emphasized how Neil as a boy had been all about airplanes, not about fanciful tales about rockets and space voyages from science-fiction literature. He moved from air to space because the technology of flight was making that transition in the 1950s just as he was coming out of engineering school and becoming a test pilot. But his first love, and his last love, was airplanes. In his mind, first and foremost, he was an aviator, one who happened to pilot the first craft onto the Moon, but who had flown all kinds of vehicles that set record firsts. For the segment on CBS’s 60 Minutes that aired in the week that First Man came out in the autumn of 2005 (the only publicity he agreed to do directly for the book), Neil had flown a sailplane. For the next seven years until he died, he took every opportunity that came his way to sit at the controls of a flying machine, as he did when Captain de Crespigny offered him a chance to fly the A380 simulator at Qantas Airlines. The Armstrong family upon his death invites all of us to “give him a wink” when we gaze up at the Moon; I will also give a little salute when I hear an airplane overhead and imagine that Neil is at its controls—or is at least looking down upon its flight from the loftiest vantage point that he had ever enjoyed while with us, even higher than the Moon itself.
The third point I always tried to offer focused on Neil’s brilliance—yes, his intellectual brilliance. Almost everyone who ever met him will tell you that Neil was one of the smartest men they had ever met—and one of the best read and most informed. There was hardly anything that did not interest him or arouse his curiosity. Everything he encountered raised questions for him to chew on, and he doggedly sought out the answers to all the questions, whether they be in books (he was a voracious reader) or in a study of the operations of nature. Though he was a trained engineer, his mind was highly scientific, very precise, and thoroughly systematic in its pursuit of both practical solutions and broader fundamental understanding. And he loved history, infusing historical examples in many of the speeches he gave throughout his career, especially as he grew older. He was at work on a book manuscript at the time of his death; rather than an autobiography, it offered his studied reflections on many subjects, not all of them pertaining to flight. One can only hope that there will be a way to bring his book to fruition and to the worldwide audience that surely will be interested in reading it.
A fourth point that I thought was important to make concerned Neil’s highly publicized criticism of the direction that the United States space program was taking. When Neil spoke out before committees of Congress in 2010 against the cancellation of the “Constellation” program, against the reversal of what had been NASA’s plans to pursue a return to Moon landings, and against an immediate reliance upon private spacecraft as the major near-term focus of the American endeavor in human spaceflight, Neil was speaking out from his nearly sixty years of experience in the aerospace field, not from anything related to partisan politics. Though Neil, as is the right of every American citizen, held political beliefs and voted his conscience in elections, never in his career was Armstrong truly political in his concerns about America’s policies regarding aeronautics and space exploration. If his fellow Apollo astronauts Gene Cernan and Jim Lovell, along with former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, had not so strongly urged Neil to speak out publicly against the direction the U.S. space program was taking, Neil likely would not have done it. But once he made up his mind to do it, he gave it everything he had and made it the best, clearest statement of national concern that he could compose. “I believe that, so far,” he told the U.S. House Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in May 2010, “our national investment in space exploration, and our sharing of the knowledge gained with the rest of the world, has been made wisely and has served us very well. America is respected for the contributions it has made in learning to sail upon this new ocean. If the leadership we have acquired through our investment is allowed simply to fade away, other nations will surely step in where we have faltered. I do not believe this would be in our best interest.”
Underneath Neil’s senior picture in his high school yearbook were the words “He thinks, he acts, ’tis done.” How clairvoyant were these words from the yearbook editor! They were as true of Neil Armstrong in almost everything he achieved in his remarkable life. Once he had thought something out—which could take awhile, as those who knew Neil the best would attest—he moved forward with confidence toward the goal until it had been made real.
Finally, I thought it was important to explain that Neil Armstrong possessed “The Real Right Stuff,” and not just in the sense of being a great pilot—far from it. All his life, in whatever he did, Neil personified the essential qualities and core values of a superlative human being: commitment, dedication, dependability, a thirst for knowledge, self-confidence, toughness, decisiveness, honesty, innovation, loyalty, positive attitude, self-respect, respect for others, integrity, self-reliance, prudence, judiciousness, and much more. No member of the human race stepping out onto another heavenly body could possibly have represented the best of humanity more than Neil Armstrong did. And no human being could have handled the bright glare of international fame or the instant transformation into a historic and cultural icon better than Neil. Sure, it was in Neil’s mild and modest personality to avoid publicity and keep to the real business of the engineering profession he had chosen; he was simply not the sort of man to seek what he felt was undeserved profit from his name or reputation. But in my studied analysis of the quiet and unassuming way Neil lived his life after Apollo 11, the way he avoided public attention and the media for all the subsequent years, I came to perceive that Neil possessed a special sensitivity that was part and parcel of his elemental character: it was as if he knew that what he had helped his country achieve in the summer of 1969—the epic landing of the first men on the Moon and their safe return to Earth—would inexorably be diminished by the blatant commercialism of our modern world, its redundant questions, all of its empty talk. At some deeply personal level, Neil understood and appreciated not just the glorious thing that had happened to him when he landed on the Moon with Buzz Aldrin while Mike Collins orbited overhead, but the glorious thing that had happened to the entire world, to all of us.
Neil had been a foremost member of the team that achieved humankind’s first forays into deep space—and he has always emphasized the teamwork of the 400,000 Americans instrumental to Apollo’s success. He had been at the top of that pyramid, yes, but there had been nothing preordained in his becoming the commander of the first Moon landing or becoming the first man out onto the lunar surface. As he always explained, that was mostly the luck of the draw, contingent circumstances. Still, he had done what he had done, and he understood what great sacrifice, what awesome commitment, and what extraordinary human creativity it had taken to get it done. He was immensely proud of the role he had played in the first Moon landing, but it didn’t turn into a circus performance for him or a money-making machine. In major respects, Neil chose to leave that particular stage of his life to the history books. It was like golfer Bobby Jones never playing competitive golf after winning the Grand Slam or Johnny Carson never again appearing on TV after leaving The Tonight Show. Not that Neil lived the life of a recluse after Apollo 11—that is a myth created by journalists frustrated with not getting interviews with him. After the Moon, he lived a very active life with many more accomplishments to his credit—in teaching, in research, in business and industry, in exploration. And he lived it all with honor and integrity.
For the opening epigraph to First Man, I selected what I felt was a profound sentence from the book, Reflections on the Art of Living, written by American mythologist Joseph Campbell. The sentence read: “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” Neil Armstrong enjoyed the privilege, and all of us should be delighted that it happened just that way for him—and for us.
James R. Hansen
September 3, 2012