Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon(21)

Like most astronauts, Borman was conservative politically. Yet he voted for Democrat Lyndon Johnson for president in 1964 because Borman believed strongly in racial justice and civil rights. He was affected by Johnson’s famous “Daisy” television commercial, aired during the campaign against Barry Goldwater, that juxtaposed a little girl against the mushroom cloud made by a nuclear bomb. The image disturbed Borman, yet he was ready, at a moment’s notice, to drop the same kind of bomb on the Soviet Union if that’s what America deemed necessary.

In 1964, Deke Slayton, the man in charge of crew assignments, teamed Borman with Jim Lovell to be primary crew for Gemini 7. The mission was planned as a fourteen-day Earth-orbital flight, the longest space mission ever attempted, intended primarily to test human endurance in space and to conduct a cascade of medical experiments.

During training, Borman and Lovell averaged more than twenty days a month away from home. When Borman got time off, he spent it with his family at home in Houston, taking Susan and his sons hunting and fishing. (Susan doubted she could bring herself to shoot a deer, but after Frank and the boys bought her a rifle, she had no trouble taking the shot. Frank never figured out whether she missed on purpose; to him, it meant everything that she tried.) To learn to water-ski, he and Susan checked out a book from the library, then took turns driving the boat, pages flapping in the wind. He loved how fast Susan took to it, even as he struggled. His boys delighted in how their father, a master of the skies, could barely swim. To make it to his sons’ junior high football games, Borman pushed NASA’s T-38 jets to their operational limits on Fridays after work, then ran to the hamburger stand Susan operated at the games, ready with his order in hand.

On Saturday, December 4, 1965, Susan and her two sons arrived at the VIP area at Cape Kennedy for the launch of Gemini 7. At 2:30 P.M., the Titan II rocket fired. As it rose in a column of white smoke and orange flame, Susan held on to her boys but looked away. Photographers captured the image—a good mother, a woman overwhelmed. Six minutes later, Gemini 7 was in orbit around Earth. Susan and her sons boarded a bus to the airport to go home. Out the window, Frederick and Edwin searched the sky for a glimpse of their dad’s rocket ship.

Despite being confined to a cabin no larger than the front half of a Volkswagen Beetle, the longer Borman and Lovell flew, the more they liked each other. Every day, over and over, they sang “He’ll Have to Go,” a 1959 country ballad by Jim Reeves. “Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone,” they crooned; “Let’s pretend that we’re together all alone.”

After eleven days in space, Borman and Lovell received visitors. Approaching like a white star, Gemini 6, which had just launched from Cape Kennedy, closed to within one foot of Gemini 7, proving that two ships could rendezvous in space (a necessary maneuver for flying a lunar landing mission, in which astronauts would use a lunar module to shuttle between an orbiting spacecraft and the Moon). Lovell burst out laughing when the Gemini 6 crew, Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford, flashed a sign to Borman: BEAT ARMY. Schirra, Stafford, and Lovell were Navy, and as a West Point man Borman had no choice but to take it.

By the time Borman and Lovell splashed down in the western Atlantic, they had set records for duration of flight (more than 330 hours, or 13.75 days), distance traveled (more than 5 million miles), and number of orbits (206). More important, they’d helped America take a major step toward the Moon by proving man could endure long stretches in space. The two weeks they’d spent was the maximum duration it was believed a lunar mission would require.

Borman was immediately made a full colonel, the youngest in the Air Force at age thirty-seven. A few weeks after splashdown, Susan wrote an article that was published in newspapers around the country. People had noticed how frightened she’d been during launch and the flight, and not everyone appreciated it—including some at NASA.

“These past weeks I had worn my feelings on my sleeve,” she wrote. “Some said they were pleased to see an astronaut’s wife willing to admit she was scared. Others, including some people in the space program, were critical because I failed to maintain the traditional stiff upper lip. ‘For heaven’s sake, wipe your tears. You’re ruining my morning coffee,’ one woman wrote. At one time, such criticism would have cut me deeply. But…I have come to realize you can’t be all things to all people. So I decided not to pretend and not to try to hide my feelings—I decided to be myself.”

Soon after Gemini 7’s return, Borman received a telegram from West Point offering him a permanent professorship of mechanics. Susan loved the idea of returning to an idyllic life at West Point. But Borman said he couldn’t do it—his heart was in flying, and he had a Cold War to help win. He would stay with NASA.

A year later, the tragic Apollo 1 fire occurred. Susan made it her mission to comfort and support her friend Pat White, the wife of one of the fallen astronauts. She visited the new widow every day, listening to her, holding her, and crying with her, trying to be strong as Pat kept repeating, “Who am I, Susan? Who am I? I’ve lost everything. It’s all gone.” At night, when Susan got home, she began to drink a bit, if only to quiet her nerves.

In the past, Susan had dealt with fatalities among Frank’s colleagues the same way he did—by assuming it would never happen to him. But Ed White was different. He was a near-perfect physical specimen, even stronger than Frank, yet even he had been unable to get the spacecraft’s hatch open during the fire. Frank told her that Charles Atlas himself couldn’t have moved the hatch, but it was more than that to Susan. Ed White had been a West Point graduate, a devoted husband and father, and a committed patriot. He didn’t screw around with muscle cars or other women. Which was to say he was just like Frank.