Rocket Men Read online

  “That’s part of the job,” Kraft answered.

  Borman saw no yielding in Kraft’s eyes. The cameras would stay.

  Borman still objected that the work plan was too crowded, and Kraft didn’t deny it. There was a lot to do, maybe too much, but six days on a moonshot was an eyeblink, given the risks and expenditures required to get there, so they damn well had to get the most out of it. Anything less and none of them would be doing his job.

  That made sense to Borman.

  And with that, the plan was complete.

  The men checked their watches. It was five P.M. In just four hours, they’d designed a mission that would send the first human beings away from their home planet, have them orbit the Moon, then return home. In a year that was shaping up to be among the most fractious in the nation’s history, in which its citizens were rippling with anger and its institutions were no longer trusted, something sublime had occurred in this office. Shaking hands, Kraft and Borman had the same thought: This was a great afternoon. This was America at her best.

  The two men left the building together. As Borman walked past the other astronauts’ Corvettes and climbed into his 1955 Ford pickup, Kraft could only admire him. Even during this technical meeting, Borman had been true to form: direct, principled, and bullshit-free, unwilling to look past minor details or compromise around edges. To many, including Kraft, he seemed the ideal astronaut to command the riskiest flight NASA might ever undertake. To those who knew him best, it seemed Borman had arrived at a crossroads, not just in his career but in his life.

  FRANK FREDERICK BORMAN FIRST LEFT EARTH at age five, in 1933, when his father took him on a trip from their home in Gary, Indiana, to an airfield in Ohio. There, a barnstorming pilot wedged father and son into the front seat of a Waco biplane and flew them over the countryside. Five-year-old Frank could hardly process the freedom of it all—the open cockpit, the wind in his face, nothing between him and the rest of the world as the machine growled and swooped through an endless sky. The pilot asked for five dollars when the airplane finally settled back on Earth, a fortune during the Great Depression, and the greatest bargain Frank could imagine.

  Not long after, Frank’s family moved to Tucson, Arizona. His father, Edwin Borman, leased a Mobil service station and tried to make a go of it. The Bormans didn’t have much—just a modest two-bedroom home and a 1929 Dodge with creaky wooden spokes. As the Depression moved into the 1930s, Edwin’s business suffered and he lost his gas station lease. It was then that Frank saw his dad live by the mantra he’d been preaching forever: Do not quit, stay in there and pitch. Edwin took a job changing tires at another garage, then found work driving a laundry truck. Frank’s mother opened their house to boarders to make extra money.

  At school, Frank’s teachers observed him to be bossy and headstrong, a report that didn’t surprise his parents. Since the day Frank could walk, he had moved in straight lines and with shoulders pinned forward, a kid compelled to arrive. Not everyone knew where Frank was going, not even his mom and dad sometimes, but it seemed to them a mistake to label the boy rude or abrupt just for pushing past people and things that slowed him down. They’d always told Frank he could be the best at whatever he chose if he did things the right way, with excellence and integrity, no shortcuts.

  Edwin and Frank often sat together at their living room card table building model airplanes, some powered by rubber bands, others by tiny temperamental gas engines that screamed like banshees. Frank learned to take responsibility for his creations. Edwin never stepped in and finished the job for Frank, no matter how many times the engines wouldn’t fire—even during model airplane competitions, even while judges were waiting. He just let Frank keep working, keep adjusting, until the Borman plane flew better and farther than all the rest.

  By the late 1930s, many kids across America had become fascinated by the idea of space travel. Scientists were developing rocket technologies, and the future that these machines promised exploded in color in popular science and adventure magazines, comic strips, and films. Frank couldn’t have cared less. Science fiction bored him. If his friends went to see movies about spaceships, he stayed home and built airplanes, the kind of machines that flew for real.

  Frank entered high school in 1942, in the midst of World War II. Schoolwork came easily to him, which left him time for deeper pleasures. One day, he wandered over to nearby Gilpin Airport and told the manager he wanted to fly. The man had no problem with Frank’s age—fifteen—but warned that lessons cost nine dollars an hour. Frank knew his parents couldn’t afford that, but he did some quick mental math. By combining the salaries from his three current jobs—bag boy at Safeway, gas station jockey, and sweeper at Steinfeld’s Department Store—he could put himself into the air.

  He signed up and was taken to a hangar where he met his instructor, who was about thirty years old, had trained very few students, and was dressed not like a pilot but in Levi’s and a white T-shirt, which was unusual at the time for a woman.

  In the 1940s, only about a hundred women worked as flight instructors in the United States. Bobbie Kroll was one of them. Frank hardly noticed her gender, she hardly noticed his age, and at once they were together in the cockpit. Miss Bobbie was an ideal teacher. She would not yell or panic, and she remained calm when Frank banked too hard or struggled to come out of a stall. After just eight hours of dual instruction, she turned Frank loose to solo.

  For the next three years, Frank continued taking flying lessons, making good grades, and playing quarterback on his high school football team. But his best night of high school came during senior year at a local dance in Tucson, when he spent the evening moonstruck by a golden-haired sophomore named Susan Bugbee. She’d been voted the most beautiful girl in her class, and Frank, a longtime believer in democracy, thought the voters had gotten it right. He was aching to ask her out, but this young man who stared down thunderstorms in small airplanes couldn’t stomach the idea of rejection. Instead, he came up with a plan. A friend of Frank’s would call Susan on the phone. Pretending to be Frank, he would ask her for a date. That way, if she said no, Frank wouldn’t hear it.

  Susan said yes. Frank wished he’d heard it.

  The two began dating, and right away Frank sensed he’d met his soul mate. Susan was bright and quick-witted, warm and fun, and loyal to her friends. Sometimes she wrote “Susan Bugaboo” instead of “Bugbee” in her notebooks. She had a mischievous gleam in her eye, the same as when she’d been in elementary school and pulled the fire alarm during a rainstorm as a prank (the nuns were not happy; Susan’s father loved it and smoothed things over with the sisters).

  Susan’s parents were both college graduates, rare in those days. Her mother was Tucson’s first female dental hygienist, her father a surgeon who’d moved to Arizona after losing a lung to tuberculosis. Susan had been very close to her father, who took her on house calls and had her join him on his volunteer work to help the underprivileged. They often went on adventures together: on his days off, he would drive her outside the Tucson city limits to the ends of dusty roads, where they would capture tortoises together (she’d keep them as pets for a while, then release them), and Dr. Bugbee would buy his daughter turquoise jewelry from Native Americans who sold their wares from the backs of old pickup trucks. Susan was never as close to her mother, who seemed to resent her for all the attention people paid to her.

  One day, when Susan was thirteen, her father had an asthma attack. His oxygen bottle was empty, so Susan’s mother told her to run to Johnson’s Drugstore and get a new one. Susan got the pharmacist to drive her home, to save time and in case he could help. But by the time she returned, her father lay dead on the floor.

  “You’re late,” Susan’s mother said. “You killed your father.”

  The words devastated Susan. On the spot, she knew she’d never forget them. But something about that incident steeled Susan’s spine. From the day Frank
began dating her, he sensed an undergirding of strength in Susan. This girl, he thought, can handle anything.

  As high school drew to a close, Frank needed to decide on a future. He wanted to be a fighter pilot—a perfect way to combine flying and defense of his country. World War II had ended nearly a year earlier, but already tensions were building with the Soviet Union. No less an expert in looming tyranny than Winston Churchill now warned that “an iron curtain” had descended across Europe. Frank believed him.

  After scoring high on admissions exams, Frank enrolled at the United States Military Academy at West Point in the fall of 1946. Cadet Borman was all baby face and golden hair compared to his classmates. Many had already attended college, and at least half were veterans of World War II. In early fall, Borman tried out for the plebe (first year) football team. He’d been a star high school quarterback, but at this level he didn’t have the necessary arm strength. He joined anyway, as the varsity team’s assistant manager, in charge of gathering dirty socks and sweaty jockstraps. It was thrilling for Borman, who got to observe head coach Earl Blaik’s legendary intensity and to watch one of the young assistant coaches, Vince Lombardi, develop his own military coaching style.

  Borman fell in love with West Point. The rules, the order, the discipline—it all seemed designed to tune out distraction and allow a man to get on with what really mattered. As a kid, he’d already been different from his peers—he went after the things that were important to him, as if he were on a mission. At West Point, nothing mattered but the mission. He pledged himself to the academy’s motto—Duty, Honor, Country. It seemed to Borman that a person who believed in anything less wouldn’t get where he needed to go.

  All the while, Borman and Susan continued dating, if only by U.S. mail. She was still in Tucson, and they were separated by more than two thousand miles. West Point did not allow furloughs for plebes, even for holidays. Fearing he’d receive a breakup letter from Susan, Borman struck first, sending a letter to Susan saying they needed to cool their relationship. It only made sense, in light of their distance, his commitment to West Point, and the focus he’d need to make his new dream, of becoming an Air Force general, come true. Susan knew: She was no longer his mission. The letter broke her heart.

  By the end of his third year, Borman ranked near the top of his class. For her part, Susan had enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania’s dental hygiene school, following in her mother’s footsteps. While there, she was offered a contract with the Ford Modeling Agency in New York, which she declined. During quiet moments, Borman wondered if he’d made the mistake of a lifetime by letting her go.

  In the summer of 1949, Borman was one of a select few cadets chosen to tour postwar Germany. For him, the biggest impression came at the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. There, he saw the firing range and gallows used to execute Jewish prisoners, and the ovens used to cremate them. And he saw families, East German refugees, living in tiny stalls in the barracks, separated from other families only by hanging blankets; these were people who’d chosen to give up everything and flee to the West rather than live under Communist rule. The trip sickened and saddened him, and it reinforced his certainty that America was a force for good in the world, a country that stepped up to help suffering people and defend freedom.

  When Borman returned from Germany, he only missed Susan more. She had returned to Tucson after earning her degree, and was chosen over seventy-one other contestants as the city’s representative at a Mardi Gras festival in Mexico. The local newspaper showed her draped in a silver-blue mink cape and wearing over a thousand dollars’ worth of silver and turquoise. In case Borman had forgotten what he’d lost, the newspaper noted that the selection was based on “beauty, poise, personality, charm, and intellect.”

  Borman graduated eighth in a class of six hundred seventy at West Point. It was a beautiful ceremony, but all he could see were the swarms of girlfriends and fiancées who’d come to shower love on his classmates. His only comfort came from knowing he’d been among those selected for a coveted spot in Air Force flight training, and from driving his parents back to Arizona in the new car he’d purchased, a blue Oldsmobile Rocket 88 stretch coupe with a V-8 engine and a bench seat in back.

  Borman had sixty days’ leave before reporting for flight training at Perrin Air Force Base in Sherman, Texas. On the first of those days back in Tucson, he called Susan and asked her to dinner. They hadn’t had a date in ages, and she still had hurt feelings from their breakup of three years ago, but she agreed. He took her to a small Italian restaurant on the outskirts of town. They laughed and talked and connected as if they were still in high school; even the owner could see their chemistry because he kept feeding the jukebox and pressing the love song buttons. Borman didn’t waver this time, he did what he’d been wanting to do for years—he asked Susan to be his wife. There was no talk of the challenges of a military life or the risks he’d be taking as a fighter pilot. There was just the question—“Will you marry me?”—and her answer—“I will.”

  * * *

  —

  A month later, Frank and Susan were married in a Tucson Episcopal church. After honeymooning at the Grand Canyon and in Las Vegas, the Bormans reported to Perrin Air Force Base, then to Williams Air Force Base in Chandler, Arizona. These were fun and adventurous times for the new couple, even if training was risky. Men died from losing control while pushing the limits in these high-performance jets, but it never occurred to Borman that he’d be hurt. Others had survived the training, and he knew he was better than any of them.

  Susan never complained about the dangers of Frank’s job, the hours it required, or even their tiny home, a trailer with no air-conditioning. Once, after Frank’s model airplane flew away from him, Susan spent the next day searching the area for miles, knowing how disappointed he was to have lost it. She didn’t find it, but Borman was touched that she didn’t want him to worry, even about little things.

  Soon Susan was pregnant. A month before the baby was due, in September 1951, Borman was transferred for the second time in eight weeks, this time to Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas. He protested, arguing that the move was too much for his eight-months-pregnant wife. A captain reminded him, in various shades of blue, that there was a war going on in Korea. Borman gathered blankets and a pillow and turned the bench seat in the back of the Oldsmobile into a bed, tucked in his pregnant wife, and drove to Las Vegas.

  On October 4, 1951, Susan gave birth to a baby boy, Frederick. On the same day, Borman flew two missions—no time off for a brand-new father, such was the urgency of wartime training. The work of a fighter pilot was exceedingly dangerous; six men died over one weekend, all at Borman’s base. At home, Susan never allowed her husband to see how these accidents made her shake.

  New orders sent Borman to the Philippines, closer to the war in Korea, which was just what a fighting man wanted. Still just twenty-one years old, Susan sold the Oldsmobile for the price of a one-way plane ticket and, with baby on lap, made her way to Manila. Another son, Edwin, was born in a Quonset hut at Clark Field in July 1953. A few months later, Borman’s tour in the Philippines ended, and so had the Korean War. The battle he’d signed up to fight had faded away.

  Borman spent the next several years logging hours in fighter jets, learning to drop atomic bombs, waiting for his chance to defend America. Always he posted the highest marks, blending rare piloting skills with a fighting instinct and a mission-first tunnel vision. Wherever he went, he considered Susan his secret weapon, a partner, mother, and best friend who arranged their lives so that his only worries were in cockpits.

  Not all of it came naturally to Susan. Every boom in the sky, every siren on the base, had to be answered by reminding herself, It’s not going to happen to Frank. He’s different. Frank’s a better pilot than they are. Frank will always be okay. After leaving the commissary one day at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, Susan witnessed a midair col
lision between two jets. She knew Frank was flying at that time. Both airplanes were two-seaters, but only three parachutes opened in the sky. Frantic, she ran toward the billowing black smoke and tried to climb a fence to reach the field, but she was intercepted by a GI, who ordered her to go home. Susan raced back to her neighborhood and banged on the door of Frank’s boss. The man’s wife let her in.

  “What do I do?” Susan asked.

  “What you do is wait,” the woman said.

  And Susan did, for two and a half hours, until Frank landed and called her. He reacted to news of the fatality as he always did, by thinking That dumb sonofabitch killed himself; it’ll never happen to me because I’m better. It was a defense mechanism shared by many fighter pilots, and Susan bought into it, too. At least for now.

  In 1956, Borman was ordered to earn a graduate degree in aeronautical engineering in order to become an instructor at West Point. He enrolled at Caltech in Pasadena, where he kept up with some of the best students in the world. By 1957, he had his master’s degree and was teaching thermodynamics and fluid mechanics at West Point.

  He loved being back at the place that had shaped him. If anything, Susan loved it more. Her boys were playing little league baseball and learning to swim, she’d decorated the family’s apartment, and Frank was home most nights. For the first time since they’d married, it seemed a stable existence, and one that might last.

  A few months later, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. Borman couldn’t imagine a bigger blow to national pride, or a clearer indication that America was losing the Cold War. Already a staunch anticommunist, Borman now believed the United States to be facing an existential threat. From that point forward, his thinking changed. If he could do anything to be part of the fight America needed to bring against the Soviet Union, he would do it. Even if the United States needed him to drop an atomic bomb, he wouldn’t have hesitated for a second. He didn’t want to kill anyone, let alone innocent civilians, but his faith that his country would always act as a force for good in the world trumped all.