NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project
Edited Oral History Transcript

Paul P. Haney
Interviewed by Sandra Johnson
High Rolls, New Mexico – 20 January 2003

Johnson: Today is January 20th, 2003. This oral history with Paul Haney is being conducted in High Rolls, New Mexico, for the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. The interviewer is Sandra Johnson, assisted by Rebecca Wright and Jennifer Ross-Nazzal.

I want to thank you again for agreeing to talk with us today, and I’d like to ask you first about when you first started working for NASA in 1958, how that came about.

Haney: I worked for the Washington Evening Star [Washington, DC]. I’d been there about four or five years, and for some reason had gotten into a couple of space kinds of story odysseys. In 1957, the Russians put up a satellite that absolutely startled the world, and it was one of the few times that I can recall in the five years I was at the Star that they went out and did a man-on-the-street kind of thing. The Star, they used to call it “the gray old lady of 11th Street,” 11th and Pennsylvania. We were the only paper in the world that didn’t have to leave the office to cover a motorcade, a presidential motorcade, because it came by us.

One of the major reporters there was a guy named Bill Heinz [phonetic], who covered the White House a little bit, and he covered lots of things. He wrote very well. And the people running NASA had approached Bill, and said they were about to start this here now space agency, and could he suggest somebody that might come over and help them out in the public information arena. He said he wasn’t interested; all these little federal bureaus came and went. But he said he knew a guy named Haney who seemed to—I’d picked up on a couple of space things and put that one edition out, the man-on-the-street thing.

The Star had the first newspaper strike in 150 years in Washington on that Thanksgiving weekend, and when I had gone over even before Thanksgiving, I began to wonder how long the strike might last. It only lasted one weekend. But I was afraid that I wouldn’t find anybody to resign to at the Star.

I was definitely interested. I thought it was going to be a huge endeavor, and I got over there another couple of days in roughly that period, around Thanksgiving, because [Dr. T.] Keith Glennan, who was the first Administrator, made a speech on Wright [Brothers] Day [December 17], which used to be December 3, and it was in that speech that he, for the first time, pronounced the word astronaut and identified it, invented it. And I went over the speech a little bit. He’d already figured out the word astronaut. I wouldn’t take any credit there, but put together a little background, little context that seemed to work out.

There again, he was following—the Russians had been saying that they’re cosmonauts. They were the first to come along with that. So NASA had to decide whether it was going to follow or come up with something different, and they decided to come up with something different. And I went to work during Christmas week of 1958. Somehow managed to slide over there.

Johnson: What were your duties there when you first started?

Haney: Try to figure out what a public information officer should do. They had three or four people in the Information Office, and in situations like that, there wasn’t a hell of a lot going on. So I sat around and tried to think of what a—really, Mercury was the only project we had. We had been assigned a couple of things. NASA, I like to point out to people, was sort of put together at a federal yard sale on a Saturday, much like Homeland Security. I just really can feel for those people, because they don’t know what the hell they’ve got or how to account for it, where it is or how it functions, and that’s exactly where NASA was.

The [President Dwight D.] Eisenhower administration knew they had to do something, but they weren’t terribly sure of what, and General Eisenhower, the President, he was not a hands-on kind of guy. He was a wonderful old man who won World War II for us, and even Democrats like me voted for him, the only time I ever did, in 1952.

But you could tell they were going to have one hell of a rough road, and they did, because they’d been assigned pieces of the Army, pieces of the Air Force, and all the individual services, particularly the Air Force and the Army, and to a lesser degree the Navy, which is very heavily involved there in Washington. It’s a naval laboratory. They couldn’t quite figure from just these jottings that took place at meetings when all this was supposed to happen.

And then there were some very sparkling personalities, like a kid from Germany named Wernher von Braun, who had a tremendous gift for self-expression, and he managed to thumb his nose at Adolph Hitler successfully for a few years, and he constantly had Hitler hoping that next month he’d be a good boy and end the war in Europe. He didn’t. But he certainly impressed a lot of the U.S. Army that brought Wernher and 200 of his helpers over here to White Sands, and cornered them there, and they’d go back and forth along the same route that you came up today from El Paso [Texas]. They had sort of a private gate. They’d go in and get to spend their weekends in El Paso and live down there, then go over to Juarez and play and eat burritos.

But I remember the situations like Huntsville [Alabama], which was a major Army—it had been a Redstone Arsenal, what it was called, and it was set up in World War I: The Army wasn’t eager to get rid of landscape like this, but all Keith Glennan knew was that that was on his assigned list, that that piece of property and three or four thousand people assigned there were supposed to go to work for NASA at some unspecified date. And he called up the guy running Redstone Arsenal one day and asked him when they were going to commit, and he said when the machine finally stopped going back and forth through the grinder, he was going through the grinder. He said he resolved never to ask again when those people were going to come aboard. They were going to have to come on bended knee to him, and they did. It took a year and a half.

But this was supposedly a marriage arranged in downtown Washington, but, boy, those are tough marriages. There have been others. I don’t think there’ll ever be one as difficult as the one ongoing, because that thing, hell, that’s bigger than the whole government has ever been. And I pity poor Tom [Thomas J.] Ridge[Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security], who used to be the Mayor of Erie, Pennsylvania. He gets to put this thing together.

Johnson: If you would, describe the PAO [Public Affairs Office]office and how it was organized when you first started there.

Haney: There was a fellow named Walt Bonny [phonetic], who was a very dedicated aviation kind of historian. Walt came from a little town in Massachusetts where he’d worked on a daily newspaper. I can’t remember which. There aren’t many towns in Massachusetts, and this was sort of halfway between Boston and the middle of Massachusetts. But he had that nice, quiet Massachusetts air. He’d gone to work for NACA [National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics], the predecessor, and I don’t know how much you’ve gotten into that, but that’s another kind of little story.

NACA was an offshoot of the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903, so NACA happened in 1915, which is really going. And it didn’t have any employees then for four years. The first employee was a guy named John [F.] Victory [NACA executive secretary]. He or his daughter were loosely attached to this first Public Information Office. I’ll never forget, because one of my first chores was trying to find John Victory three or four places to speak in order to get him to Florida for his annual Florida visit. He likes to spend four or five months. I don’t know what the flying involvement was. But the first notation on NACA said that in 1919 when they finally got around—they bought a hangar at Langley Field, Virginia, one about 160 miles south of Langley Air Force Base, and it said the agency will be funded to $5,000 and return to the [U.S.] Treasury any monies not spent. I always liked that. I remember looking that up one day.

Walt Bonny, who had come from this daily in Massachusetts, he loved flying and stories about it and the Wright brothers from Dayton, Ohio, who finally—there was a lot of competition to put that first flight together, and some of it right there in Washington, although the people in Washington kept crashing, which was a terrible place to crash, right there in the river. They’d get up to about seventy-five feet and go into the brink.

But Walt was all for that, and there was lots of pushing and shoving in the aviation in the twenties, trying to get people to fly off—to invent the aircraft carrier, and the Navy wasn’t buying it. They were sure that that the big battleships is what would be needed for the next century or two. Then Pearl Harbor changed everybody’s mind about that.

But Walt Bonny ran the place, and he’d been at NACA for about fourteen years, and he was a dedicated Republican, as was Keith Glennan, the first Administrator, who had served on the AEC [Atomic Energy Commission], which was a hot commission in those days in Washington. Before that, Glennan ran Western Reserve University near my home in Cleveland [Ohio]. I didn’t go to Western Reserve. I went to the other school that nobody ever heard of called Kent State [University] [Kent, Ohio], which is just a little southeast of Western Reserve.

In addition to Bonny, there was a photographer named Joe Stein [phonetic], who had worked for the Portland, Oregon daily, mainly as a photographer. I don’t know where he and Bonny had met. And it seemed to me there was another guy who was kind of on loan to them from the Wall Street Journal, sort of one of those—“Gee, this space thing could be interesting for the Wall Street Journal.” What isn’t? And I don’t know whether they were paying—I can’t remember his name—a salary or what, but he was there.

And then the day I went to work, there were two other guys came to work—Harry Holcomb [phonetic], who worked for a little paper down near Langley in southern Virginia, and he later became the editor of the Av Week [Aviation Week]. I think it’s still kind of the weekly which is recognized throughout the industry. But he wandered off into that there in Washington. This is three or four years later.

There was one other guy named Dick Mittauer [phonetic], who had been working for the senator from Omaha. Nebraska always elects one senator from the rest of the state and one senator from Omaha, and he worked for the senator from Omaha, who had a long Polish name. And the three of us all reported for work—I think it’s a matter of record—about the 3rd of January, but I was there a little bit earlier.

You asked about what we were doing. I don’t know. I kept looking around and looking at what was going to happen. That’s all a newsperson does, anticipate. So naturally, they were supposed to start testifying, and the budget cycle normally starts about February or March, and nobody really seemed to give a damn much about NASA. They didn’t have any flights planned. I don’t know, we just kind of sat back, and then along in, I think it was, the first week in April, we introduced seven astronauts, the first seven, in a little theater.

Our offices were in the Dolly Madison House [served as NASA Headquarters from 1958 until October 1961], which is the oldest building on Lafayette Square. I don’t know how much you know about Washington, but the White House was started in 1800, and it sits over here, and the Dolly Madison House started in 1750 or ’60, and it sits here, and there’s an old church that is about the same, and then my favorite hotel sits over here, and a private club. But that is a very historic piece of Washington. There’s a park, and I always liked it.

And I was particularly in love with Dolly Madison’s—[Mrs. Dolly Payne Madison, wife of President James Madison] her downstairs front parlor was my first office, and it got my attention one day. I was sitting there, and a piece of plaster about eighteen inches square let go from eighteen feet above and hit me right on the head. I was talking on the phone to somebody. [Laughter] And had to clear my throat. But the Dolly Madison House went on back about half a block, and there was a theater sort of in the back.

And we couldn’t think of anywhere else better to introduce these new pilots than that. And that worked out pretty well. Got a lot of news and a lot of coverage. I guess probably the best question was the last, which was asked by Mae Craig [phonetic] of the Portland, Maine Press Herald, who has now gone on to greater things, to death, but she said, “What was the roughest part of the physical?”

And John [H.] Glenn [Jr.] started very seriously to answer. He said, “Think of how many orifices there are in the human body and up which one might probe,” and he got about that far into the explanation of the worse part of the physical, and everybody in the audience broke up, and that was the end. And Mae was a little embarrassed, but I don’t even think she mentioned her question in her story. I remember looking it up.

Johnson: These astronauts were introduced to the public at that time. Did the PAO help them to deal with this fame that was thrust upon them all of a sudden?

Haney: A lot of those guys, particularly Glenn, he’d been a hotshot Navy Marine Corps pilot all through World War II, and then after the war, every time the Navy needed a new aviation appropriation, they would go strap John in whatever the newest fighter was, and he’d run across the country in record time and land somewhere around Washington or one of those air stations near Washington.

Wally [Walter M.] Schirra [Jr.] was Navy, and he married the daughter of everybody who had been the last people that had run the Navy for about the last hundred years. He married very well for a New Jersey kid. And he went to Annapolis, which helps.

Alan [B.] Shepard [Jr.] was a direct descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence from New Hampshire, and he lived three miles outside of Boston. He sure as hell knew what was going on historically. One of the hottest pilots in the Navy. They all loved to fly.

The day before they were introduced, I was told to go in and to meet them and try to make them feel at ease. They helped make me feel a lot easier, I know. And I told them the kind of questions they’d probably get. They said, “Yeah, we figured that. [unclear] do you really think?”

I said, “They’re going to ask you about your religion. They’ll go right down the line. And you can say ‘none’ or ‘the Great Jehovah,’ or whatever, but make sure you got it cold.” And there was a little fretting about that.

But they got through the press conference very well. The funniest part of it was that very quickly at the press conference, which lasted about two hours, John and Alan Shepard sort of became—a question, if asked of one, wasn’t totally answered until the other had thrown in his seventy-five cents’ worth, and that, at least to me, sitting in the front row, I certainly hoped it wouldn’t get out of hand. It didn’t. But that volleyball game went on quite a while. One of them would kind of finish up, and the other one would say, “And then there’s the fact that—.” So some of the answers got tremendously long, just like this answer has.

But that was the day I met all those guys, and it turned out John went to a little college about fifty, sixty miles from where I did. He played football at Muskingum College, played center next to a guy named Louie Jooleraw [phonetic], who was my high school coach at Talmadge High School, and he just thought that was wonderful. He didn’t know that Louie had ever gotten a job. And then he wound up teaching and coaching at one of the Cleveland colleges.

But we still—oh, we go back a bunch of deeds in Washington, and I saw John and Annie just a couple of weeks ago. They were the only ones of the old group, and, of course, they still live in Washington. John was an astronaut. He did finally move to Houston [Texas], but he didn’t live there very long. He never moved to Houston when he was in the first round. He just commuted from Washington, which got to be an excellent little story.

And they asked the—[Harrison Hagan “Jack”] Joe Schmitt and Neil [A.] Armstrong and, I guess, [Eugene Andrew] Cernan was involved in this thing a couple of weeks ago, and they asked me to remember something funny, just historical, so I got up and told them about the time German [S.] Titov was the first Soviet cosmonaut who came to Washington, shortly after John’s Mercury flight, in the spring of ’62, and so it was a pretty big deal. We’d been trying to get involved with them in several technical meetings in Europe, and they either wouldn’t send anybody, so we didn’t send if they weren’t represented.

But that meeting, whatever it was, they did send this kind of number-two guy of theirs, who was a very tiny little guy about five-three, and for some reason John and I were assigned to show him around Washington. We just decided that he should get a feel for it, and he was quite a little politician. He said the first day that he thought he’d go into politics, make a run for the Soviet Senate or something, which I thought was kind of interesting. I didn’t know they had a Senate.

But we took off in the car, and everything we showed him, he would use a word that I was to hear often in East Texas, and the word is, “Shee-ut,” [Laughter] And it’s a negative word. It’s kind of like, “Eh!” And everything we’d show him—the Washington Monument, 555 feet and 5 inches tall, he’d say, “Shee-ut! We got obelisk in South Moscow 1,500 meters.”

I don’t give a damn what we showed him. The biggest rolling steel mill in the United States over near Baltimore. “Shee-ut! We got one in Novorossiysk that makes three times that much.” No matter what we showed him.

And I couldn’t resist. The second day we were going down Pennsylvania Avenue, and we had a little time before going up to Capitol Hill, and we stopped at the Archives, 7th and Pennsylvania. I took him in and showed him one of the original copies of the Declaration of Independence, and he didn’t say a word. He just looked at it, and he seemed to appreciate it. And we got back in the car, and went on on our thing.

But all through the two days, he kept quizzing either one of us about “barbecue.” It was like a word he’d just discovered in a magazine coming over; “Bar-bee-cue. Is that the way you say it? Bar-bee-cue.” He’d stand there and look out the window. “Bar-bee-cue. Bar-bee-cue.”

About the second night, John explained it to him, a barbecue, you burn steaks on a grill and usually have somebody over. Barbecue.

So the second night we went over to the Soviet Embassy, and according to political diplomatic protocol, they were entertaining us, and Shepard was in town for some reason. And we were going down the line, and I was about two people behind John, and Titov puts out his hand and introduces John to the ambassador, and he says to John, “I come your house tonight six o’clock for barbecue.” [Laughter] He knew John lived over in Arlington across the river.

And John said, “Tonight?” It was then five o’clock.

Johnson: Oh, no.

Haney: So we had a quick little meeting, and Shepard said he had another engagement and couldn’t stay around. I was the only one who knew where John lived, so I was detailed to stall and keep drinking as long as I could, which was a real challenge. And then we had about four or five Packards full of Russians lined up to go do this barbecue.

Poor John took off immediately and got all of his Marine Corps neighbors to donate, raid their freezers and get steaks out and get braziers, and charcoal things. That’s what they used in the sixties. And borrowed a little gas here and there, and just fretting like crazy. We didn’t have any cell phones, but I knew that I just had to delay as long as I could. So I took these guys out for a huge ride around the Pentagon. I thought they’d appreciate that. Took them around the second time, and they began to wonder, “What the heck’s going on?” I took them the back way into John’s house, which was out in the boondocks, and not too far from where I lived at the time.

We pulled up there, and as we pulled up in front of his house, one of the braziers, he’d put too much gas or something in it, and it had sparked off the paint on his carport under the garage where he had them all, and the house had just seized fire, and the paint was on fire out there. You didn’t need any guides or any help in knowing what was going on. And these Russians piled out, and everybody was looking for garden hoses and buckets and things like that, and the fire was out in about three minutes and really didn’t burn much of anything except the steaks. But everybody was, “Wow!” There was even some photographers there from the Evening Star. They got a great bunch of pictures.

But the best line of all, Titov walk up to John, and he says “Tell me. Every time you have barbecue, you burn down house?” [Laughter] One of the great lines I think I’ve ever heard. So that’s what I told them at the Smithsonian. They appreciated that.

Where the hell were we? In Washington in 1962.

Johnson: Yes. You were there. You became a news director of PAO in ’60?

Haney: In ’60, a year later. There wasn’t anybody else around. I got a promotion. I was the first Director of the News Division, and then anybody we hired was automatically in the News Division. By then, we were starting to get at least some developmental things on various rockets and launching systems. So I just assigned somebody to do the XY rocket, and I was kind of keeping track of Mercury because of the first involvement, and Mercury got a little complicated because the Atlas was going to be the boosting machine for the manned flights, but then they were going to have some more manned flights using a Mercury Redstone for shorter missions.

And then there was a lot of other test work that went on down at Wallups Island, which was about sixty miles south of Washington. There was a tremendously difficult relationship to work out. How are we going to dance with all these people at Langley? And it wasn’t just Langley. NACA had about a dozen centers around the country, and I don’t know who taught them about security and the importance of security, but they sure had a good teacher, because they didn’t—well, as a practical fact of life, the NACA, as an agency, every other year would have an opening, a public opening for one of these centers, so that if you were head on to take care of the public one year, you might have to do one more before you retired. At Langley, that’s where literally it all started, and that was a lot of military involvement at first, but that’s where the first hangar was for NACA, and where John Victory, who was the first employee, used to go. He started hiring a few people in the twenties.

But essentially, NACA’s job was to help the various services, and particularly the Army, and look at the twenties and thirties. [Charles] Lindbergh became a very prominent member of NACA. It was a bunch of good old boys. It was almost like the SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission], I would say, who had really made it in aviation somewhere, and a couple of times a year, they’d go back to Washington and have a big dinner somewhere and give each other a few awards and a lot of applause.

That was at a political and a Washington level, but there was really hard stuff going on with the development of the airplane, which did a lot of developing in the twenties and thirties, and a lot more developing in the forties during World War II. And they got into rockets, assisting JATO, jet-assisted take-off something, which were rockets they put under the wings of all kinds of bombers.

But they developed a tremendous two-tiered system where the people, as they called themselves in the field, liked to decide—they decided pretty much what to do in a technical way at the various centers. And once in a while, they would go back to Washington and maybe tell them what they were doing, and maybe not. But somehow the political force of the group in Washington was respected, and nobody in the field tried to overturn that.

But there were some strange combinations. There was a test pilot, and I cannot remember his name, who ran Ames, out near San Francisco [California], near the bay, and he was testing a plane somewhere over the Midwest once, and the plane started to break up on him, and he told God, if God would let him land that damn thing or put him down, he would never fly in an airplane again. And God granted him his wish, and he landed in some farmer’s field, and he never flew in an airplane again. Here’s the director of one of these large centers on the West Coast. They’d have a meeting of all the directors in Washington, and it took him three days to ride the train to get to the meeting, which might last one day. I always found that incredible that he wouldn’t assign somebody else. But I just love little stories like that.

In Cleveland there, which was the nearest thing to home that I knew about, into the early sixties, on the roof of the hangars, it still said “NACA,” and NASA had been there two to three years. I don’t know when they changed that roof. But it was called the Lewis Research Center for many years. Mr. Lewis was some engineer who had done great things, I don’t remember what, and he got the center named for him, just like the guy Ames on the West Coast. That center, by the way is now named the Glenn Research Center, and I haven’t had a chance to twit John about that. He’s making out. He also has a huge undertaking down at Ohio State, which he didn’t go to either. But it’s the Glenn Research Foundation or some such, where he gets a lot of his calls answered, and they do some of his travel.

Johnson: While you were at Headquarters, you had something to do with the formation of the Washington news pool? Is that correct?

Haney: Yes. I thought that particularly in Mercury that some of that stuff, if not in the Mercury flights, later flights, would need a pool, which under Washington terms is a very well-defined thing, and I knew about that. And I wanted to make sure that it was very—and all the proper hands were laid on it and anointed. I went up and started, I guess, on the Senate side of the press gallery, because they had—I think they’d started a news pool for George Washington or somebody a couple of hundred years earlier, and I knew from history that that’s better, that’s the place to start. And ran around and got a lot of—and everybody kept saying, “Why do we need a news pool? There are only six or eight hundred still photographers in the world. We could all fit on the deck of a carrier.” But they began to see it might have an advantage, and we could identify that this will be a pool operation where the numbers would be.

It went through, and it was easier getting it through all of the official Washington press stuff than it was through NASA, which as quickly as it started flying stuff, started developing a lot of other things that we’ll probably get into if we talk fast.

Where have you got [Frank] Borman hung out?

Wright: I’m sorry?

Haney: You’re going to Las Cruces?

Johnson: Yes.

Haney: You’re not going to talk to Frank Borman? He’ll be very upset.

Wright: Well, we came to talk to you.

Haney: That’s the way it goes, though. People come here and then they go—I always hear things about Borman. We don’t talk much to each other.

Johnson: You just hear it from other people.

Haney: But I hear it from other people or his wife. Did he leave something on—anyhoo.

Johnson: In 1963, you had the chance to come to Houston. How did that come about, and what was your position?

Haney: There was a wonderful old guy named [John A.] “Shorty” Powers who was hired. He was an Air Force guy in the Ballistic Missile Division, BMD, in Los Angeles, and they’d had several launches out there, I think, and maybe at the Cape, particularly distant things, and this is part of that competition that was going on, And the Air Force had gotten into this very early, because nobody told them not to. So they just decided to launch three or four Pioneer shots, and aiming at the Moon. They never managed to hit it, but they went ahead and launched it.

Shorty wound up as one of these typical service assignments. He was a pilot who loved to fly. And he just had a wonderful, deep baritone voice. He was only about five-three. Another good Ohio boy from Toledo. He understood about countdowns and things like that. He’d flown in the Berlin Airlift during World War II, had just gotten into it after the war was over, I guess; had about twenty years in, and the Air Force had sort of wished him on NASA, particularly Walt Bonny, because he’d done something that General “hoopty-do” that ran BMD didn’t like, and he saw an opening where the Air Force could get some identification in this new thing called NASA. And that general, who I’ll think of his name after a while, could get rid of him.

So Shorty came in briefly in the summer of—shortly after we identified the astronauts and they were moving to Langley. They lived down there except for John, who always lived in Washington. It was nice having a Washington astronaut. Anyhoo, Shorty, he had very much of a military kind of approach. He’d never worked any news—he had no feeling for news whatsoever, but he was certainly a talented voice and a talented promoter of aviation. He loved to fly, and he liked people that flew, and that’s really where he wanted to be. I couldn’t have cared less. I liked airplanes because they got he from here to there in a hurry, but, god, don’t ask me to try to land or take one of the things off. That’s not for me.

And in that respect, Shorty and I got along fine. I was working for a newspaper in Charleston, South Carolina, when Shorty died, and I did this on the editorial page of the Charleston Evening Post, which turned 200 years old about two weeks ago. There’s only one daily in the United States older than the Charleston Post, and that’s the New York Post. It’s a year and a half older than the Charleston Post. Maybe you knew that. I didn’t know that.

But there is Shorty, and that’s me at Shorty’s going-away party in Houston out on Spanish Drive. What was the name of that street? I’m feeding him a piece of cake.

We reached a point where he had—Shorty had some real problems with alcohol later in his thing. As a matter of fact, he died in a motel in Phoenix with a bottle of scotch in each arm, and somebody—I called out there, and they said he was watching television, and I asked, “What was he watching?” And they didn’t know. [Laughs]

But quite a guy and wonderful performer, and you hear his voice on a lot of those Mercury things. In fact, I think that’s him doing the countdown on that launch—who was the senator from Arizona? Lyndon [B.] Johnson did a little girl throwing weeds away, and you hear this countdown in the 1964 election, and it’s Shorty’s voice doing the countdown, and this little girl is taking her flower and throwing it away one petal at a time. That was the commercial that cost Longfellow or whatever his name was, the senator from Wisconsin, the election. He was running pretty good there for a while, but Lyndon just—shoom!—because he said that this guy was going to go to war with half the world. And as soon as they elected Johnson, what the hell did he do but went to war with the other half of the world and kept going to war with them. We were just managing little tiny wars under the Eisenhowers and the [President John F.] Kennedys and so forth.

The head of NASA, the second head of NASA, was James E. Webb, who was the youngest director of the Bureau of the Budget still in the history of the United States when he worked for [President Harry S.] Truman just after the war. He was from Tallyho, North Carolina. By god, you hadn’t lived and felt the enthusiasm and the hot breath of somebody from North Carolina till you met Mr. Webb. He could talk. He’d burn the wall. He could talk so fast and so furious, and brighter than hell, and he was awfully proud of that fact. He was thirty-six or thirty-five. He was Director of the Office of the Budget. And then he’d gone to work for one of the major oil companies, and that’s how he got the NASA job.

Lyndon just started polling the oil troops, much like [Vice President Richard] Chaney got his job in Houston, and they said, “Oh, yeah, this fellow Webb, he’s from Washington, got a law degree at George Washington University, and he’d be the one.”

So he became the second NASA Administrator. It was well into February before he got the job, which it sounds like he wasn’t there after the election. A lot of those jobs are at least identified in November, or in typical early December. And he didn’t get appointed—I think it was middle of February. But he sure as hell understood how Washington worked and where the money came from and how it got spent. And he really moved out and anybody could—I certainly appreciated his abilities, and he must have appreciated mine a little bit, because when I—I don’t know, after Mercury, I began to wonder about this damn space stuff.

Kennedy had decided we were going to go to the Moon and everything, and that was a one-person kind of an announcement. Hell, he just seemed to get that idea, and nobody else had thought of it, and he goes up to a joint session, “I think this country should go to the Moon, and not because it’s easy, because it’s hard.” Christ, people would say, “Wow! “I mean Democrats, Republicans, everybody. There was only one vote against that offering, and I think it was [Charles] Grassley from Iowa, who was in the House then: They asked him why he voted against it, and he said, well, he didn’t think any vote ought to go through unanimously, and it didn’t.

Now, in ’62, after Mercury was all said and done for, I guess it ended in June of ’63, I got, among other things, got one hell of a nice offer from IBM [International Business Machines] to go to work in Washington as the Vice President for Public Relations, and IBM was—boy, they were at the top of their game, and they still are doing pretty well. But they decided to reorganize. They were going to have a Washington kind of division or an electronics aviation, space. Jesus, this thing was made in heaven, and somebody put my name on it.

I was courted, and I went up to New York, and had a dinner with the people and passed the first test. I was all set to go. I didn’t have much sympathy or there weren’t any tears. We could do without this space stuff. But then it got down to the crunch, and I was supposed—I guess it was sometime in July, and I was to go back to New York that evening and give IBM my final answer. And I was just walking out of the office about five o’clock in Washington to go catch the shuttle to go to a restaurant on the east side of New York, and the phone rang, and it was Webb’s secretary. She said, “Paul, Mr. Webb would like to see you the first thing in the morning.”

I said, “About what?”

She said, “I’m not sure, but I think it’s about that job in Houston.” She thought it was, you know. Well, here I am put in the box of do I go ahead and cash in or what.

I decided not to, or I decided to delay it, and I called New York, said I couldn’t make it. The next morning, he called me over, and in the typical James E. Webb style, he launched a 182-word sentence that got into the possibility that we might go to war with Vietnam. Hell, no, they hadn’t any ideas. This was two years before Lyndon and Vietnam. But he said, “There may be some widespread wars involving the U.S. and Southeast Asia,” and in light of that, and in light of—I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but he was into one of these marathon Webb sentences that ran from here to the South Pole, and sort of at the end of all that, he said, “So for those and other reasons, would you mind going to Houston, take over as Public Affairs?”

And I said, “I thought you’d never ask.” So I went to Houston.

Johnson: Did you reorganize the office when you got there?

Haney: Yes, but it was a hell of a lot of fun then, particularly at the end of that period: I had to on a very special occasion. I was working for a wonderful guy named [Dyer] Brainerd Holmes, who was brought in and sort of organized the Gemini and the Apollo. He introduced everybody to computers and showed them how this could—everybody could look at the computer every night and know where everything else was. Among other happenings, I was—he literally, Holmes, stuck his head in my office one day at noon and said, “Could you go to Paris tonight? We’ve got a big thing on in the morning there, and it would require someone of your stature.”

I said, “Shit, I try to make it to Paris at least once a week.” [Laughter] I was kidding, you know

He said, “No, I’m serious.”

I said, “Hell, I don’t even have a passport.”

He says, “We’ll get you a passport.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

Caught a plane out of New York about seven o’clock, and literally, the first person that I shook hands with on French soil was [President] Charles de Gaulle, which wasn’t bad for openers, you know. He wasn’t from Ohio, but he didn’t talk about that.

On the plane going over there, I’d been working all night on this French. I’d taken two years in high school and two years in college, and I’d ripped up more paper trying to think of something cavalier to say in French because I was sure he didn’t speak any English. And this was the first introduction of the Apollo Program in Europe, and particularly in France, and the guy who was supposed to do it had one of these huge medical breakdowns or something, had to go into the hospital, appendicitis, I don’t know what. So I don’t know why in the hell they asked me to do it.

But I get over there, and I got into this little run in French as I got out of the car, and literally De Gaulle walked up and stuck his hand out. He was about six-five, and I’m only six feet. He just towered over. And I started rambling on in this high school French. He put his arm around me, and he said, “Would you be more comfortable in English?” [Laughter] I couldn’t do anything but laugh, and I said, “Thank you, sir. Thank you.” And we got along famously then for the rest of the day. But that was a nice greeting.

Johnson: I imagine so.

Haney: And we were able to run around, and I came back through Ireland, where my father had grown up, western Ireland, and the White House said, “Be sure and mention that the President will be along there soon.” So I told everybody I was advancing Kennedy’s first visit to Ireland. I wasn’t, but it was a nice excuse to go to Ireland.

And I did get to see the house my dad had grown up in, who was still alive back in Ohio. And I looked at his grades in the first and second grade, and they still had the original paperwork in the bottom drawer of this teacher’s—the National Irish School, and I just couldn’t believe that. I got home, and I called my dad, and I said, “How come you missed two weeks in February of 1896?”

And he said, “How did you know that?”

I said, “I went down to the school and asked.”

He says, “My god.” He hadn’t been back there in forty or fifty years.

Anyhoo, it was some of the splash that was coming up. There was this huge parade in New York after John’s flight, and that was in ’62, but that was for everybody. All the seven kind of celebrated that as one. And no other group did that quite like they did. They just had a pact that certain things were group undertakings, and that was one. John got the flight, but to them, it could have been anybody else. And that was one hell of a parade. They threw more paper on John Glenn than they did on Lindbergh. And the actual tonnage—and I don’t think that’s been equaled since. Maybe it has with the Yankees. They’ve won so many times. So then we got down in Houston.

Johnson: I was going to ask you about your open-door policy and how you approached your job in Houston. Did you have to fight for that right to get the information out to the public, or was that something that was accepted?

Haney: Oh, “fight” might be a hard—I might use that, but it was difficult because it was an engineering world, and I was not an engineer, and I kept trying to suggest to them, you know, if you wanted a pilot, hire a pilot. But I was in the information business, and here are some of the things we should do. And I did get in touch with the senior people in Houston.

Mrs. [Oveta Culp] Hobby was still alive. She had been President Eisenhower’s—she was the first Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. In fact, I went to that press conference when I worked at the Star, and she didn’t remember me. But one of the first places I went was the Post in Houston, and, god, she looked like one of the senior ladies out in the desert. I remember she turned around in this cane chair, which was kind of a dramatic movement, one of these South Seas movies, and I said, “Gee, you didn’t look that good at your press conference.” She’d run the WAC, too, during World War II: She said, “Oh, were you there, too?” Then she kind of warmed up a little.

But she was one of about a half a dozen people that really made that center happen in Houston. That was one of the most incredible things in the country. That was the last big national construction deal where a town went out seeking it, and they got it, and they made damn sure they got it. They had Exxon signed up for 2,000 acres out there in the Bay Area, and there were no accidents. And they had the law firms. They had all the title grants. I’ve never seen anything so—I may still have a copy of the original legal document that conveyed that to the government. But they gave it to the government. They didn’t sell it like so many other places in California in selling shipyards and space deals. They wanted that, and they were damn happy to get it and didn’t attempt to run it in any way, but they were sure happy when Webb, who was running Kerr-McGee [phonetic] in Oklahoma, but they all had a Houston kind of directory or that’s where home was, even though something like Kerr-McGee in Oklahoma.

And there was that effort on the local level, and I can’t give you a better for-instance than after Gemini IV, which was a big, big Gemini flight, EVA [Extravehicular Activity] and Ed [Edward H.] White [II] and the walk in space, and certainly the biggest—it was bigger than any of the Mercury flights as far as crowds and interest, and it was something that we were trying like hell to beat the Russians in, but we didn’t succeed again. They beat us by a few months. They just seemed to keep doing that.

After that flight—it was a four-day flight in early June of ’65, and after the flight, we were having a little post-flight party, as we so often did, at the home of one of the pilots. The pilots got home a few days after the flight from the Cape, and invariably about twenty or twenty-five people would be called and show up and hoist a few rounds around dinnertime in honor of the occasion. I remember you could hardly hear it, but somebody was knocking at Ed’s back door, and I went over and answered it, and it was James [A.] Baker [Secretary of State] and [President] George Bush the First, and they had come to the servants’ entrance. And I’ve kidded Bush about that since. And Baker just introduced himself, and he said, “Ed sort of suggested we might want to come around. There was going to be a party tonight.”

“Come right on in.”

And Ed was one super Republican. In fact, I remember in his Life piece, just before that flight, he said something about the blood in his veins felt red, white, and blue. I mean, it was just so patriotic and so Republican. I didn’t try to talk those guys out of much of that stuff. I said, “Come on, Ed. This sounds like you’re the opening statement at a Republican National Convention.”

He said, “No, that’s the way I felt.” I couldn’t talk him out of it.

But that’s the way James Baker and George Bush—and hell, Baker’s still at Rice [University] [Houston, Texas], they’re still running that institute, which is getting larger and larger. It’s like one of those outfits. The Cato Institute in Washington is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Post and the Hobby family, has been for years. I don’t know where this other thing is going at Rice [University], but they have a large oil interest in that school, and it’s getting larger. I see people on CNN explaining what the President of Venezuela is going to do next week in oil. And more and more I’ve gotten a lot of questions and circulars from them.

Anyway, Houston was all for that there space center, and there was never any question about that.

Johnson: You were talking about Gemini IV. That was the first one, of course, from Houston where the mission control and also long duration of the type.

Haney: Four days, yes.

Johnson: Did you do the commentary on that?

Haney: Oh yes. We did three out of the Cape, and it was kind of like another Mercury flight, because it only lasted three revs [revolutions]. It was typical of Mercury. It was just kind of get it up and get it down, and let’s declare a big victory, first down or something.

Johnson: How did you learn the commentary?

Haney: We’d been doing a lot of that in Mercury.

Johnson: Had you done any commentary in Mercury?

Haney: Yes. All the Mercury flights, for the most part, were fairly short. The Mercury flight before the last, Wally Schirra’s flight, was nine hours, but, hell, that was like one good shift in a simulation. But then Gordo’s [L. Gordon Cooper, Jr.] flight, the last Mercury flight, was thirty-five hours. So we had to have an overnight shift, and I was the overnight shiftee, and I’d worked all the simulations, kept track of them.

That’s what was really interesting, when [Christopher C.] Kraft [Jr.] just took a lot of those people down to the Cape, and they literally lost their names. They became FIDO, and whatever their function was in the control center. And for months at a time down there, and they’d go to dinner and say, “Hey, FIDO, pass the salt,” or, “Give me that ketchup.” And they lost their name tag, birthday tag identities of their own making.

John [S.] Llewellyn, [Jr.] was one of the ones that made it to the thing in Washington the other night. It was supposed to be an Apollo 17 deal, because it was all vectored to when Apollo 17 geared up and left the Moon on December 14th, 1972 or ’73, and that was the last of the great Apollo: Hell, I was working for two outfits in Europe. I don’t know why I got invited. But some of those old people, going back to Mercury, decided, I guess, that I should be there. Plus, Jack Schmitt was a local boy up in Albuquerque [New Mexico].

That’s an interesting story. Jack and the present Democratic senator—what the hell is his name—not the Republican, but the Democrat—both graduated in the same high school class from little Silver City, New Mexico. Maybe there were twenty-five kids in that class. Both of them became U.S. senators, Schmitt because the Mexican who was in office and had been—I can’t remember his name. Somebody in his office got his hand in the cookie jar or something, and they had to throw him out of office, and Schmitt put his hand up, and it’s about 1976 or ’74, just after 17. Hell, he’s about the hottest thing in New Mexico, the hottest. He already had a Ph.D. in hard-rock geology. He wrote his thesis on some rill in northern Norway. His dad taught hard-rock geology at Harvard [University], and he had one hell of a time making—he came in as a science kind of pilot, and they sent him over to Phoenix to learn to fly, and, god, that was a terrible undertaking, where it seemed like he would—he didn’t mind getting up and taking on all these dirty redneck pilots, and they hated the scientists, particularly the ones like Schmitt and like the other guy who wound up landing on the Moon early, but had a Ph.D., [Eugene E.] Aldrin.

But there was a tremendous clash there, but I’ve always been amazed that a little country school system like Silver City could produce two U.S. senators who graduated in the same high school class. I mean, you take all these other huge schools in New York and Harvard and Yale [University], and they produce lots of Presidents and other things, but not two from the same class. End of case.

Johnson: Let’s talk about some of the press briefings that began in ’64.

Haney: The general topic. I felt like we owed—that we just shouldn’t go down and fly missions every—and Gemini was easier. We flew ten missions, ten manned missions in nineteen months, and we’ve never come close since, even the Shuttle thirty years later. And we flew every six or seven weeks. There was a certain sense that, “Well, we ought to be doing this, because that’s what we’ll be doing thirty years from now after Apollo. But whatever it is, we should show people that we can do it.”

Then it seemed like you’d get locked into a mission, and every mission had different little simulation effects. But we were very well schooled. Hell, I had fifteen commentators, and every one of them knew the whole damn mission. Some of those things were going ten and twelve days. Gemini ’76, I think, went fourteen days, part of it. They’d get up there, and Borman—that was the weekend of the Army-Navy game, so they had a sign, “Beat Army,” or Schirra had it. That was their greeting.

I just felt like we should be—because of this, I was trying to build the relationship with Houston, and I managed to eventually, even though I was accused of other things. But I didn’t think we should make all of our news out of the control center, that it should happen on a regular weekly basis, because that, in fact, is how it happened that things would happen industrially on the West Coast or wherever, or out here at White Sands where they are constantly testing the little shape-up kind of systems. God, they fired those things for ten years. I’ve never figured out what they did, but they sure as hell spent a lot of time on the thrusters, and they needed them on one of the flights, Gemini VIII.

But I felt like we should be just handling whatever was the top of the news every week, Tuesday or Friday, I think it was Friday, and it seemed to go over it. The only people that got unhappy with it were various sections in Washington. I don’t know whether they were unhappy because we weren’t making the information co-equal, a joint release or whatever, but I never liked that, and we had gotten into that in the very early days.

We did some Moon flights out of JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California] in the very early days. In fact, one of the first things I worked on was a Moon flight in January of ’59 or thereabouts. I talked to some guy in Los Angeles for thirty-six hours on the progress of Pioneer 3, and it was a long telephone conversation, but it kind of introduced me—we were so happy, we only missed the Moon by 20,000 miles. Everybody was cheering. “Wow! Twenty thousand! Damn!.” You’d think we’d done a long pass.

But I felt like that there should be a news space. And another, along about that same time, I really started bucking the trend, because, as I told you earlier, NACA had had this history of opening a center, one center every three years to the public, and usually it was just to the employee families. They never made much noise about it, and they’d bring the wife and the kids down and show them where they worked. But I thought that we ought to just have an open house on Sunday and let the people come out and see what the hell—we just put exhibits in Building 1, which was my building, and then the buildings got renumbered. You can tell there was a little politics going on. Somehow [Center Director Robert R.] Gilruth’s building became Building 1. That was Building 2 under the original drawings for the center.

But we had some exhibits there anyway, and we added a few more. And one Sunday in June of probably ’64, that center opened in April of ’64, and I think it was June or July, sometime that summer, I thought I’d just see what it would bring, and my god, there was an amazing traffic tie-up on the Gulf Freeway. The Gulf Freeway has forever been under construction since day one.

In fact, I’ve got to tell you, the first time I saw the property, the site of the Manned Spacecraft Center, was from an airplane two days after [Hurricane] Carla in 1961, September of ’61. Carla was one of the worst hurricanes that visited that particular area, just kicked the dogshit out of the bay. It came up in the bay like no other hurricane has, and they’ve gone other places. But it went up in the bay, and that property at ground zero, where the site is, was only sixteen feet above sea level.

After that storm, there was a—I’ll never forget it. NASA ran a DC-3 kind of transport service three days a week and would start at the Cape and go up to Langley and drop people off. Or if you worked in Washington, you stayed on another 150 miles. And they did that three times a week. This particular day, we took the shuttle back from the Cape, and we went to Houston, just to say we’d been there. We were about to announce the fact that it was going to be the site, only the damn hurricane came along. That’s how Dan Rather got a job in New York. He was working in Galveston, and he almost got pulled off the 45th Street exit. There are still a lot of film of that.

As we came in over the bay, I said, “Where the hell—where’s the center? Where’s the center going to be?”

And the guy says, “Well, that shrimp boat where you see, that’s going to be kind of the middle.” He had a big blueprint.

I said, “You’re kidding me.” The first thing I thought, it was going to be like an offshore oil platform. I thought, goddamn, how novel to put a space center out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. Because that’s what it looked like. It was still under water, and this shrimp boat had stuck right where Building 1 became. I wish I had a snapshot of that.

Then we went on back to Washington. That little shuttle thing was a lot of fun. I rode the hell out of it.

Walt [Walter C.] Williams, who was one of the major—he taught Chris Kraft how to be an operations person, and he was born in New Orleans and went to LSU [Louisiana State University], and he loved to drink. I tried to hold him back. But I can remember one time at Langley going into the Officers’ Club, and we decided to stock up—we each bought a gallon of martinis, and we sold them on the shuttle between Langley and touchdown, only 150 miles away. It was a forty-five-minute flight. But we got our money back from the other passengers, and nobody had figured that out.

But that was quite a—to see that thing for the first time. We delayed the announcement of the Manned Spacecraft Center because of the damn hurricane. It began to put in question whether we had the damn thing on a platform, but then it went away, and we went ahead and said, “Ah, they don’t have these things very often,” which is why I finally moved from that area.

In ’83, we had three hurricanes in about eight weeks. I was driving out to the coast, and I stopped in East El Paso and bought the house, and didn’t even go see it until I came back and became kind of intrigued with desert life, although there were a hell of a lot of sandstorms down there that April and October. We’ve never had a standstorm up here. But we know—we can see the clouds when they’re having them down below.

Johnson: In Chris Kraft’s book, he made the statement in the book, “Haney understood the need to feed the press,” and he talked about the news center and how you got the information to the press.

Haney: Yes. Chris became a great help, but at first he had some very strange ideas, and he kept deferring to Williams during the Mercury Program. He’d say, “That’s all Walt’s area. Talk to him.” And we wound up with a pretty good arrangement.

Shorty sat next to Walt in the control center, and I sat right behind the glass and had access to everything else, and I was usually talking to a few people in Washington that had needed to know.

The best thing that happened about the Mercury Program was going into Al Shepard’s first flight. We still didn’t have a very disciplined—I’d asked for an information program where we’d reach a point where everything would become available at—I guess the first time around was about T minus seventy-two hours, three days before the flight, where everything became real time. And during the mission everything would be reportable on a real-time basis. That was not the case under the various Air Force or Army launches. They held the provision was fire in the tail, and nothing was to be released until that thing lifted off, and then only prescribed statements that had been approved beforehand. And if something did something before—if it turned over and started heading for one of the larger cities in Florida, you’d say it an event of an unexpected nature happened, and it was all prescribed, no matter what it did, and you just looked like a goddamned idiot, particularly with television that would set up outside the Cape and were taking a feed, and nobody could stop them from taking that picture, although the Air Force tried a few times. We just looked ridiculous.

And I had pitched Glennan, and he had passed it around through the senior council, and during the first two years when we got down, we launched some Vanguards and some other things where we looked like idiots, and I’d written this thing up to go to a real-time use of all the circuits. I remember I’d lose every time, and Glennan would come back and pat me on the head and say, “They still don’t like it much.”

And I’d say, “How bad was it?”

He’d said, “Thirteen to one,” or twelve to one as senior council.

But when Webb came aboard, we were a hell of a lot closer to—well, it was right on the Shepard flight, I decided to pitch it again in particularly, and Webb said, “I don’t want it. I’m not interested. See what they say about it at the White House.” And that had never happened before.

We took it over and gave it to [Press Secretary Pierre] Salinger, and I was down in Florida at the news center, and I got a call from the President’s office, Mrs. Lincoln. I remember she never called me again. That was Kennedy’s main secretary. And she said, “The President would like a word with you.”

I said, “Well, he’s allowed.”

There I am sitting in the middle of this motel, and then he sort of got on. Salinger got on the line and said, “Paul, the President’s wondering about that escape rocket on the Mercury. He wondered what the history of it is.” You could tell what kind of a gambler he was. And I’d just read something a night or two before, that it had worked fifty-six or fifty-seven out of fifty-eight tests, and the little solid rocket that was to pull everything off and get your laundry out of the way free. I had the answer right there, and I could hear Salinger. There was something else going on in the background, and then a little laughter. And then he said, “The President says go ahead. Give it a go. See if it works.”

I remember throwing that goddamn telephone up as high as I could, and it hit the ceiling and double-dribbled off. And that was the phone call that put the Public Information Program in business. I never did get anything signed. All the engineers wanted something signed in triplicate and notarized, and I asked Salinger about it later, and he said, “Oh, shit, we don’t sign this stuff. You did the right thing.” And he said, “He liked the outcome.” And I certainly liked the outcome, because that changed forever the Information Program, and it just got better and better as we improved on it. It went through some more bumps.

I don’t know what the hell they’re doing today, but you can’t do any better than real time. Particularly I remember in Gemini VIII, we had one of the first real incidents aboard when we had a problem when the spacecraft started rolling up, because some thrusters got stuck. At first, they thought we’d just docked with another vehicle, and they figured it was the other vehicle, because it hadn’t flown before. It was independently launched. And they backed off from the other vehicle, and the damn rotation got worse. It was Neil Armstrong and Dave [R.] Scott. And they had to use most of the juice you’d normally reserve for coming in to get the damn rotation stopped. And it was a real melodrama because we were in the Pacific [Ocean] and you were going forty minutes without any contact. We noticed it over Africa, and then it was forty minutes to Australia from South Africa. And we got into Australia, and Neil was breathing again. He said, “We finally got it stopped, but we need to come down soon.”

And they came down one rev [revolution] after that, and I remember Kraft looking over his shoulder, and he said, “We’re going to China.” To me.

And I said, “We are?”

They came down about a mile and a half off Kemoi [phonetic] Island. Kemoi and Matsu are Chinese islands. And, boy, the Chinese were just raising hell. And the thought was, “Boy, we’d better land that thing in the right bay or we’re in deep trouble,” because the Chinese weren’t going to be any help at all. They were going to do to those people what the Hawaiians did to Captain Cook. They threw him in the stewpot, if you remember.

Anyway, we didn’t go to China, but that was about as close as I’ve ever been to going to China. We started taking suitcases, clothes, to launches, and had a special DOD [Department of Defense] flight laid on. A team would go to wherever the spacecraft was, and we didn’t have to, because it came down, it was a lot easier for the Navy to pick it up, and then they took it to Hong Kong or somewhere, big airport, and sent them home. But it was pretty exciting.

One of the biggest television shows at that time was an ABC show called Lost in Space, half an hour, and we were competing with Lost in Space during that evening, 8:00 to 8:30 or something like that. And when the Lost in Space people put up a bulletin or something, or broke into the program, there were a hell of a lot of calls, particularly in New York, who said they didn’t give a damn about this NASA stuff. They wanted the program, and they wanted to know what happened. They got delayed somehow. That showed you how quickly they’d gotten over all the mystery of these launches. And that was damn close.

Johnson: I think we’re going to stop for just a minute.

[Tape recorder turned off.]

Johnson: I was going to ask you about the change-of-shift briefings and how that came about and if you had to coach the flight directors and the center directors and whoever was involved in those, or if that was something that came easy to them, or is that something that you had to—

Haney: That was a relatively easy thing. At first, I think there was a lot of fear. That’s a good question, because usually there was—if there was a problem in the flight, it was fairly specific to, well, the electric circuits, say, or in liftoff, if the engine hadn’t performed just like it should have, then the liftoff guy would, other than the Air Force, and they were all down at the Cape.

We had a couple of interesting little run-ins on that, but to get to your question about on a change-of-shift basis, it was something that I worried the hell out of, that the engineers would get up on the briefing stage and say, “Well, we just don’t know yet. We haven’t analyzed the data,” which would be a typical engineering cover-your-ass kind of position.

But as we got more and more into it, people like Chris Kraft or the lead flight director, I just got a whole new appreciation for Chris. I began to try to think of happenings that would stymie him, and I usually couldn’t. And even when, a couple of times, when I knew he was running on really thin oxygen trying to explain something, he was so damn convincing, god, he’d win me over with the first fifty words, and what an asset. And he defended the—he had that integrity.

When we first got into—and it was more so—in Mercury, we didn’t need change of shifts, because one shift was it, except for Gordo’s flight. And we did have a little change-of-shift briefing, had an overnight thing. We said, “Gordo went to sleep.” I was trying to work out something with Gordo, something else that was going on with Gordo, that he was having a strange dream, and that would have been a first in space, but I couldn’t justify it.

So it was in Mercury then when we got into these much long, much longer missions, twelve, ten, fourteen days, and they really got kind of hairy when Dick [Richard Francis] Gordon [Jr.] would run out of oxygen, and they’d get into medical kinds of things, but it wasn’t terribly easy. But from the mechanical standpoint, Kraft really earned his money. He had one hell of an ability as a person, I think.

I remember I was helping the guy who wrote his book for him, who used to work for the [Houston] Chronicle and died suddenly here about a year ago. I called up Chris and asked him if he knew his co-writer had bit the dust, and he says, yeah, he’d just gotten the call about it.

Johnson: Kraft had the ability to—and I saw it in many ways—to bring out the very, very best in people, including me. He would literally just—I’ve never about a very good golfer, for instance. Kraft has been a superior golfer all his life. And for some damn fool reason, he used to ask me, if he needed a fourth, to play when we were in Florida or at home or wherever. And invariably, I would start trying hard. I shot the best game of golf in my life playing with Chris, and I gave him all the credit for it. He just has an absolute genius for that. And he did it in so many ways. He’d extract that little mechanical way from all those people sitting on consoles and all down through the—and what a nice gift. And how we’d get into the—after a while, get into Apollo was a little hairier because it was farther from home, and it would take you two or three days to get home no matter what. But even then, you felt like that somehow that the whole engineering community would have anticipated whatever the problem was. And Kraft could explain it. Extraordinary.

He was a little bit narrow going into it, which was my unhappiness with so many of the engineers. He was very worried about the frequencies that were used during Project Mercury, and under no circumstances did he want PAO putting those in the press kit and broadcasting them to the world. He was sure the Russians were going to come out there and sit in trawlers offshore, and somehow jam the frequencies and make it so they couldn’t communicate.

I suppose if the Russians really were serious about launching the things during the early Kennedy administration from as close as Cuba, that it was a possibility, because they did show up with a trawler every once in a while out there, but they never tried to do—and I’m not sure what the hell he had in mind, but it was something terrible. And he always, when it got really down to it, he always reserved the right to—he would say that, depending on his judgment—he only told me this two or three times, and I got so tired of hearing it that I never went back, but he reserved the right to cut Public Affairs off, to shut down our microphone.

And I’d say, “That’s not within your right. I mean, you’re running this thing technically, but you’re not running it from a—.”

And he’d say, “Yeah? Well, let’s just see about that.”

And so there was that unhappiness, but it all kind of came together nicely, like a Wagnerian opera, and they play the [demonstrates] the last chorus, and it never got pushed.

And we had tremendous good things. We were talking earlier about trying to get the community involved, and we went to this—god, what a hell of a sales job that was to the senior staff, of a two-hour Sunday one shot “Let’s see how it works, see if anybody gives a damn.”

And we created the biggest traffic jam in the history of the Gulf Freeway, and that same weekend down in Galveston, they were showing off the USS Texas for the first time, they had almost nobody show up for the Texas. Boy, I really took flight at the—I felt a little bad for the Navy, which I had been an unhappy member of during the Korean War.

But, my god, and that was it. From then on, I think we started opening very shortly every two hours every Sunday afternoon. And then it got to be Saturday and Sunday afternoon, and that was when we had all the press stuff was across the street, which was something arranged pretty much by somebody in Washington. I didn’t know about it until they’d signed a lease on the GE Building, which was Building 6. It really wasn’t all that bad, frankly. We didn’t have that good of an accommodation on our side, but we should have been doing it on our side of the building, but what the hell. It was easier to check the press in and do the change-of-shift briefings and everything else, which is what we did during Mercury, during Gemini. And then somewhere along toward the end of Gemini—we were still over there in Apollo.

Johnson: When it moved on site in ’65?

Haney: Yes, because I remember coming up on the January 27th and the fire. That press conference was held over at Building 6, what we used to call the GE Building. But then we went about eighteen months there without flying anything and Apollo just doing all the tests, and at that time somebody else decided, “Gee, why don’t we do it on our own front lawn? Why do we go across the street?” And it was a discussion I decided not to get into, and I let the other people bang heads. I knew which way I was going by that time.

Johnson: Did everything come through PAO, or did any of the other directorates have the ability to release anything to the press?

Haney: No, there was never an interest. They all said that was—and they just hoped that we’d get it right, and we didn’t always do that. There was a lot of pulling and tugging between [Donald K.] Deke Slayton’s [Director of Flight Crew Operations] office and mine, because particularly as we got into Apollo, we developed a plan for each flight where we’d take the crew and we were trying to expose the contractors. And we did some of this in Gemini, too. I remember the first Gemini flight we did a thing up in Baltimore. The Martin Company was a major contractor on the Gemini. And we did something out in the Maryland countryside with the crew, [Virgil I.] Gus [Grissom] and John [W.] Young. That sort of set the stage.

We did a thing in San Diego [California] for one of the boosters, where one of the boosters was made. I’ve forgotten whether it was—hell, that might have been Mercury. It was fairly early. And they had several astronauts out there, and, god, they had twenty or thirty thousand workmen out in the yard at noon, and hardhats and everything. Gus was supposed to make a speech, and he got this long, twenty-minute introduction from a Vice President of the company and Gus finally stood up and said, “Do good work,” and sat back down. [Laughter] The shortest speech in the history of speechifying. But the crew, they just loved it. “Oh! More!” Whistle. Beat on their hardhats. The shortest speech in the history of the space program.

Johnson: You had some interest in putting television cameras as early as the Gemini flights.

Haney: Yes.

Johnson: Of course, that didn’t happen.

Haney: Not much luck. I’ve forgotten which Gemini it was, but we were kidding afterwards, it looked like we took a picture of a black cat in a coal mine, because you couldn’t see a damn thing except the little squiggles in the light, and for some reason it wasn’t tried again. There was some effort to put a camera on the last Mercury flight, but it didn’t happen, so it wound up on one of the early Geminis. And, frankly, we were doing so many other things.

But there was one hell of a struggle. You could see it coming years away, and for some reason the dammed—the crew as much as anything, and they were sort of bargaining for other things with the powers-that-be, and they knew what our position was, and I just held from day one. I said, “You can’t tell me you don’t want a stationary camera on the Moon that shows that LM [lunar module] lifting off,” because there was no backup in the LM system. It just had one fundamental way of igniting and going up. The only system in all of space that had no backup. And if that damn thing didn’t ignite or the sparkplug didn’t work, you didn’t get off the Moon, and there was no other way to get you.

So just on the basis of that, I said, “You can’t tell me you don’t want a camera that’s stationary and sitting there, just to take that picture and forward up the signal up to the other spacecraft going around or back to Goldstone” or wherever.

And people would say yes. God, this went on for years. It started about ’64 or ’65, during the Gemini Program. And I can remember we had a big “This is where we are” kind of a deal one day in late ’65 in the auditorium, and we had at least a thousand people had come in from all over the world to get the status on Apollo, which was flying little flights here and there we’d sprinkle in between Geminis. Flew the first mile over here at White Sands, literally the first mile. It was an abort test, and it went up one mile, and it worked, but we had a whole crew that came out. I remember Sigurd [A.] Sjoberg, who has since died, who was very close to Kraft, ran that thing out here, and he did a wonderful job. And I did a kind of a half-ass report. We had pretty good press pull out on that.

But I got to learn a little about New Mexico. First time I came out to New Mexico, I remember renting a car, and Salinger had said that President Kennedy was coming out to New Mexico, and he wanted to do a little space thing. Where should he stop? Las Cruces, El Paso, or Holloman? Holloman is just west of Alamogordo here.

He heard that I was coming out here for something. It was my first trip out there. I got off the airplane in El Paso, and started out 10, which wasn’t completed. It was just the side road. The middle of it wasn’t done yet. I got into the damnedest dust storm I’ve ever seen halfway to Las Cruces, and I finally found a field to pull off in, and I just sat there. After about an hour, hour and a half, I was able to go outside, get outside of the car. The car did not have any paint on it. I don’t know whether you remember, there was some guy in Boston was making cars in Ireland. They were called D’Orleans [phonetic], and they were gray metal, and that’s exactly what that little Ford rental car looked like. It didn’t have a spec of paint from here to there. I was pretty proud of it. And they didn’t charge me extra to paint it, because, apparently, that had happened to some other cars. But what a sterling—anyway, where the hell are we? Oh. Kennedy finally stopped at Holloman and stayed about two hours, didn’t go anywhere, made all the mayors come over to him. but that was the first space stop in this area, in ’62, I guess.

Speaking of which, there’s a fairly small little group who attended “the last supper,” as we call it, with him, which was held down at the Rice, the night before he went to Dallas, and he got into a speech, me and about 400 other people, about the space center, and he was talking about an upcoming Apollo flight that was going to put up the largest weight. Every time Apollo flew, it put up more weight than the last one, and that was in November. And the line in his speech was something like, “And, God willing, if everything works out in January, this nation will place in space the largest payload in the history of the world.” Well, instead of payload, he said, “The largest payroll in the history of the world.” [Laughter] And everybody in the audience did what you did; they sort of tittered. Kennedy was such an incredible speaker. I never have heard of him making even that much of a mistake in any speech he ever gave.

We used to run around Washington when I was still at the Star, and if he was speaking somewhere in town, people would go to hear him, just like you might hear a jazz saxophonist in New York who was going to play between seven and eight at a certain bar in the Village. And when he said payroll, he stopped, and he said, “Well, as a matter of fact, it will be the largest payroll, and you people in Houston should appreciate it.” And that really destroyed the audience. And he even laughed a little bit at that. But that’s the only mistake I think he ever made in a speech. If he’d waited a day, he’d gone through all his life without making a mistake. Anyhoo—

Johnson: I was going to ask you about during the mid-sixties, and you mentioned the Apollo 1 fire earlier. During that time period, there were some astronauts that, unfortunately, were killed in various accidents. How did PAO deal with that?

Haney: Pretty easily. I can remember one. I can’t remember his name now, but he was from Quanah [phonetic], Texas, the only time I’ve ever heard of Quanah, Texas. I’m not sure where it is today. But I know I was up at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs [Colorado] making a talk about Apollo. God, we really wore them airlines out, and it just seemed like everybody was running around the world making talks about Apollo, and you couldn’t get enough of it.

But I can remember I got a call from somebody who said they were going out from Houston to Quanah, wherever in the hell it is. I think it’s somewhere between here and Dallas. And that this guy had run his car into something, and was no more, or a few little things like that. But first the fire was so bizarre and so incredible, and for me it was even more remarkable. I got divorced that morning at nine o’clock, and I tell people the day started on a positive note and went to hell. At nine o’clock in the morning, the decree became final. This lady, we’d been shadowboxing for a few years. As a result of the divorce, I needed a car, because she had decided to take the only able-bodied car we had, so I was out testing a 1961 Nash Rambler, and my administrative assistant, Roy Alford, knew approximately where I was, and called, and I’d given him the name that I was going to this guy’s house to drive this car, and he called me, and he said, “Kraft was just in here, and he said to get your ass over to the control center now.”

Aye, aye, sir. And went over there, and it was then about a half an hour, twenty minutes after the fire, I guess. It was around six o’clock, five-fifty, something. I never forgot I’d forget the time either. And we right away started listening to these tapes. Boy, it was just bizarre as hell. You could tell that—I particularly recognized Ed White’s voice, and he said things like, “Fire in the spacecraft,” which was what he’s supposed to do. That was his job in the middle seat. And he said, “And it’s a bad fire.” And then I heard the guy on the right. Gus never said a word. He was just—he was Gus, and he was bound and determined to get that damn door open, which he never could have, but there was a lot of scrambling on that tape, and they were very dead by then, a couple of minutes.

That took another five minutes, I think, to get the damn door—the door was like a time lock on a bank where you’ve got to turn certain wheels inside, and that’s what Gus was trying to do. And then as soon as you turned them inside, somebody else had to turn them outside. Well, it was so hot outside, nobody could hold on, even with gloves. And somebody tried. They tried and couldn’t, and finally, it took at least five minutes to get that damn thing open, in the middle of which it ruptured and released, which was probably good.

One of the hoses—I’m sure you can get all this independently—oxygen hoses had broken loose, and when oxygen is ignited, that’s called acetylene, and it was like a welder’s torch. It was going around there, and it took one guy’s head off, almost. Burned right through the neck. And burned the hell out of White, and Gus was jumping around. The fire started at Gus’ left knee, in a little box with too many wires in it, and that radio circuit hadn’t worked all day. They’d been through the simulation. It kept shutting down, and they’d retry, and they’d bring North American out to put a new box in and on and on and on. It wasn’t worth a damn. They finally got it to where it just literally fried itself.

It was interesting, we’d had some other possibilities of particularly killing a crew in flight, which was about the worst thing we could imagine, and we had developed scenarios on how you report this, and there were several lines of reporting within the government and outside the government, and that you heard certain timelines to get this done. I can remember the first pilot we lost—I can’t remember his name. He was from Dover, Delaware. And he landed a little short at Ellington [Field], and almost made it over the fence, but he’d hit a bird in flight, running around Arlington. This was about ’64 on a Saturday morning.

I immediately—I got a call from Deke Slayton that this had happened, and the first thing I did was call somebody in Washington who was on the duty desk there, and I said that Lyndon Johnson had been at the center that week and expressed some interest in it. So I suggested we try to get ahold of the White House, because of Johnson’s close—he was campaigning for the job, and he was in a motorcade in New Jersey, and I knew the press guy. He was a big fat guy from Milwaukee [Wisconsin], and I once set a record drinking martinis with him. I drank nineteen, and he only drank eighteen.

But I called them in the motorcade and told them what had happened, and he said, “That’s interesting, Paul. The President will want to know that at the next stop,” which was Jersey City or Philadelphia or something. And then we went ahead and released the information; just like you would any other accident or something.

But we had developed—“we” in NASA Headquarters, [Julian] Scheer and I had developed a time line where if you couldn’t find somebody at the level above you or below, you just went ahead with it within, I think it was, thirty minutes, so it was time-critical that you just go ahead and release it. And the onus was on the local—wherever it happened, the Information Officer closest to it was the senior person that took it. And this was not just talked about; it was written down, “This is the way we’re going to proceed,” because this discussion had been going on for three or four years.

It’s now 1967 in the case of the fire, and we’d developed—we had that thing, the worst one was the Gemini accident. The Gemini VIII crew flew their plane into the building in St. Louis where the spacecraft had been put together. I was at a public affairs meeting in Washington and went out to Andrews [Air Force Base] and got on a plane and went to St. Louis, and we were the last plane cleared to land. It was really a shitty day, the weather, and all I felt was the ground bumping. Never saw anything. Before I knew, we were on the ground.

But that, we invoked the local manager, kind of get it out there and get it out in a hurry, and it worked pretty well. I just hung around there a couple of days and then went back to Washington for the funeral. Took the bodies over to Scott Air Force Base across the river. I’d lived in St. Louis for a couple of years, so that helped a little. I knew which bars were open.

Anyhoo, going back to the fire, though, for some reason, and particularly Julian Scheer sort of acted strangely in our opening conversations. The other part of the plan was wherever it happened, that station took upon itself to develop the story as needed and put it out as quickly as possible in greater detail, other than just the bulletin. And for some reason, Scheer didn’t want much to do the bulletin. He thought maybe it should be released from the Cape because that’s where it happened and that’s where the people were. And I said, “Well, that’s fine, but since the people lived in Houston, maybe it ought to be kind of an either/or, or a joint effort.”

Jack King and I—King used to work for the AP [Associated Press], and we had very good relationships, particularly writing bulletins, and we had this thing written in about twenty minutes, twenty-five minutes after the fire, and we didn’t get around to releasing it until an hour, hour and fifteen minutes. The first words—and it was pretty much cast in a Cape attitude, because that’s where it had happened. The plan was that the local—wherever the people were from, would develop the next phase, and Scheer just said, “I’m not sure we need any more ‘next phase.’”

And I told him how full of shit I thought he was, which I’d done before, but then I also needed some more leverage, and I got George [M.] Low into the discussion, and George was aware of all the planning that had gone into this thing, and here was a classic example. So, God love George, he hung around. He had several long discussions with Scheer, as I had on the phone, and then he turned to me, and he said that “If Scheer doesn’t call you back and tell you that it’s all right, go ahead and release it at such-and-such a time on my authority.” I could have kissed him. And Scheer never called back, and we went ahead and did a full-blown press conference over in Building 6 with people who knew about what had gone on. It was really a pretty constructive effort, and all the Houston television showed, and they became the—feeding the information back, because the Cape did nothing nearly as coherent as that.

It was that same—I guess it was that same night, four or five of us got on the plane, [Joseph F.] Shea and some of the Apollo managers and one or two of the engineers, and went to the Cape, and started putting things together almost like detectives working a murder, and I can remember we met a saloon there in downtown Cocoa Beach. It’s the only time in my life I ever saw Frank Borman drink too much. We were sitting around in a little place, still there, at the intersection where the road comes over from Cocoa, and then A1A runs up and down. It’s the coast road. We’d all had a little bit too much to drink, but I think Frank must have started much earlier, and we were having this discussion about what circuits were involved and here and there, and everybody had little plates of hors d’oeuvres, and shrimp tails were left, and Frank was making the point, and all of a sudden, he just put his head down on this plate of shrimp and went to sleep. We talked over him for a while, and somebody took him wherever he was staying. But he worked very hard as a member of that crew inspection board, as a matter of fact, and it gained a lot of respect for him.

Johnson: Of course, the program came back, and they did fly.

Haney: Yes, they came back, and everybody worked like hell and tested things out. And I’m not sure how they ever resolved the oxygen mix, but one of the ridiculous things, that we were taking off in pressurized oxygen, which was just a dedicated way to—we’d done it all through Mercury and Gemini, and we were going right ahead, and the Russians kept saying, “Gee, why would you do that?” And they had this Earth atmosphere at liftoff.

Johnson: Was there anything specific about any of the Apollo flights that come to mind for you as far as what PAO was responsible for?

Haney: Well, we had a tremendous struggle, and it started, as I said, a couple of years earlier, about the camera. Somehow, I guess, we got yukered into—that was our main ploy, that we somehow absolutely had to have that camera. And nobody else—as I say, I think other offices were using it as a bargaining chip for getting other things, and they’d change their vote. I can remember not too long before the flight, I got into the most involved leak of my career where we leaked certain information to, we’ll say Time magazine, and they leaked it to NBC, and it was about a three-cushion pool shot kind of leak, where it minimized where it was going to come back to, but it had to come back to NASA for resolution. I also felt like it had to get resolved, because we were getting down close to what was going to go aboard [Apollo] 11, and we had kind of a camera or two on 8.

[Tape recorder turned off.]

Johnson: You were talking about some of the Apollo flights and coming up to Apollo 11.

Haney: Yes. As I said, we were doing more and more expanded things with the crews, and we had multiple flights involved. I can remember we did a thing with the—and you had to appreciate the backing-up that was going on. The [Apollo] 8 crew was pretty much backed up by the 11 crew. I can’t remember what the hell we were doing in El Paso, but we were down along the river doing some kind of a geology thing, or maybe it was with the 11 crew, and the 8s were backing up. It kind of swam together.

But those sort of things, particularly in the field, it was identified that we’d be in the area to do a walk along the south rim of the Grand Canyon to see certain kinds of rocks, or that must have been the case down here along the Rio Grande. But you had to get all those crews in El Paso or wherever, and keep it to the time and make sure the local people knew that it was happening and that they didn’t come down with enough military action to suspend it but just stay the hell off on one side and watch it. And it, for the most part, worked, as did particularly a lot of the geology stuff, and there was lots and lots of it. It seemed kind of spontaneous, but that was the nicest part of it, that it did seem, over at Kitt Peak in the south of Tucson [Arizona], the huge operation with the telescope where they were dedicated—the scientists there didn’t want to look at the Moon, because the Moon is so close, only 240,000 miles. Hell, they’d much rather look at something that’s out there fifty light-years out. But the University of Arizona system leaned on them hard enough.

I can remember one night going in there with a crew at nearly midnight, which is one of the best viewing [unclear], and they put in a record on their PA system, “Fly Me to the Moon,” and it was not the sort of thing you’d expect from a bunch of hard-nosed people like that.

But that camera thing, it had been a long-running argument with a long fuse on it, and it just sort of developed a life of its own, and damned if we didn’t fly a—I can’t remember what kind of a camera flew on 8, but some kind of a television camera did fly, and we got into a big argument on the crew on who took which still pictures, which Borman swears he took the first Earthrise picture, and [William A.] Anders or somebody else really took it. I didn’t know how to break the news to him

Bob Hope showed up down there after the Apollo 7 flight and did a show from the auditorium, his regular weekly show, which was pretty well watched. I never could figure out where the hell he got my console phone number. He called me during the mission, though, just out of the blue. He said, “Hi. This is Bob Hope.”

I said, “Yeah, and this is—.” Somebody.

He said, “No, this really is Bob Hope.”

“What are you talking about? You’re not Bob Hope.”

He says, “Yeah, I am.”

I said, “Where did you grow up?”

He says, “Well, I was born in England, and then I moved to Cleveland.”

I said, “What part of Cleveland?”

He says, “Oh. You must know Cleveland.”

I said, “Yeah, I know Cleveland. Where did you grow up in Cleveland?”

He named the corner, and I said, “Hi, Bob. What can I do for you?” He couldn’t have faked that.

That was an interesting deal where he didn’t want to deal with anybody else in Washington in that show. It was just faster and quicker and better to do it at the Houston level. And he just about got me fired on that, particularly because one of the local congressmen wanted a little piece of that, I think, and never got around to getting it. But it was a good show.

It was during that mission that this whole thing about the drinking club that had started at Edwards came out. Are you a—what the hell? We’ve got a picture of it in there. The original pictures are in the Smithsonian, and they’re still there. We did fly a television camera on 7, and Schirra called them the cue cards. One of them they held up said, “Paul Haney, are you a Turtle?” Another card said, “Deke Slayton, are you a Turtle?”

Turtles, this was a drinking club formed on the first bar, a place called Pancho’s at Edwards during World War II, and they’d sit around thinking up any excuse to get drunk, and sometimes meet their wives or girlfriends there. I don’t know whether you know the background on Turtledom or not, the club. It presumed that everybody had a beast of burden, a donkey or a—and there were four or five questions, all very suggestive that had a very straight answer, and let the person trying to answer the question be bemused by the other answer.

But as a Turtle, if you are ever out in public and you are asked if you are a Turtle, you were to answer, “You bet your sweet ass I am,” invoking the donkey or the—and I remember that during the 7 mission Schirra kept saying, “Has he answered yet?” meaning me, because if you didn’t, the penalty under the bylaws of Turtledom is if you didn’t answer, you had to buy a drink for everybody within earshot who were real Turtles. And we were going live that afternoon to about 300 million people, including a hell of a lot of Turtles in Chile and Japan and all over the world, and we were getting telegrams from them.

That’s the only time Gilruth ever called me into his office and said, “What is all this ‘Turtle’ shit? Why did you answer that question? Why did you say, ‘You bet your sweet ass I am?’” and I had to explain it all.

And he said, “Gee, that’s kind of dumb, isn’t it?”

I said, “Well, those crazy pilots. They get out there at Edwards. That’s what they came up with.”

Schirra had carried it to he was taking cards that supposedly made you a member of the outer shell of Turtledom because of that flight. Anyway, but that was the—and it was Wally’s, that crew’s way of saying, “That television shit, who needs it?” And they could use it on jokes like that, which the joke was almost too successful. But it wasn’t in Gilruth’s eyes. It was strange. The only time he ever called me up there after a flight or a mission and said, “Why did we do this?”

Johnson: You ended up leaving NASA in 1969. Was that before Apollo 11?

Haney: Just before, yes. I had gotten into—it was kind of a running thing with Julian Scheer, who came aboard at the end of the Mercury Program, the first flight he sat in on. He was a consultant for about a year, and we had a similar background. We both worked for the Knight organization, John S. Knight, me in Akron, which was Knight’s hometown, and Julian in Charlotte, North Carolina, at the Observer.

Anyway, Scheer and I more than once got into little hissing matches. But I remember he came down to the Cape for that last Mercury flight, and I introduced him to Gilruth. They’d never met. We were at this big dining hall at downtown Cocoa Beach, and Gilruth was a little bit loose that night. He’d had his three martinis, which was about all he needed. And for some damn reason, he did not take a very warm liking—Gilruth had just enough booze that he was a little combative, and I remember Gilruth, Julian, and I were standing here, and I said, “This is our new Administrator of Public Affairs in Washington,” and Gilruth got up and drew back to hit him. I’d never seen Bob in such a combative mode, but I guess he had just enough booze, and I interceded and told him not to hit him. I don’t know why I did that.

But we had a kind of a competitive relationship, let’s say, because he felt like I should justify everything I wanted to do, and he was the new kid on the block, and we’d had an awful lot of new kids along the block in that position. I think he was the seventh or eighth person to fill that in the last five or six years, and I have never been so worn out from breaking in new bosses in my life.

One of them was a sociology prof [professor] from the University of Georgia. I think he lasted six months. Another one sold soap with a big company in Cincinnati. He lasted three days. I mean, it was a goddamn joke. And these people were political kinds of payoffs, where they, “How’d you like to work for NASA?” And they’d contribute a lot of money to the campaign or something.

And the Vice President in charge of whatever would show up, and after a few weeks or a few months, they’d say, “Gee, I don’t—.” Most of them surrendered and said, “The hell with that. I don’t understand it.” And none of them but Julian had come out of a news background, and he certainly had—and we kind of struggled back and forth. It seemed like when there was really a tense situation or development, we got along best like that St. Louis flight.

We were sitting there, we were having a meeting in his house, and we got the word this crash had gone. He said, “Paul, get your ass over to the airport. There’ll be an Air Force plane waiting for you.” And he made all this while I drove over there. So there was just tremendous rapport in some respects, but it sure as hell was bad when it was bad. And I developed a series of things.

He was also taking advantage of—we’d just elected a new President named [Richard M.] Nixon, and he decided to move during that December-to-April period as if I were a political appointee, and I wasn’t, of course. But somewhere in my files there, I’ve got a file of “Scheergrams,” as I called them. And they would be three and four pages of, “I just don’t understand how you can demonstrate such wisdom on Monday and then do things like not calling me to do this or that on Tuesday,” and most of them I didn’t respond to.

Then as we were getting down on the short strokes, we did Apollo 9, and I’d laid on [Apollo] 10 the press kit for [Apollo] 11, and most of the conferences were out of the way, but I guess 9 or the early part of 10 was the last mission I worked. I’d gotten this thing, a three- or four-page Scheergram about something was terribly wrong, but he was sure that I could do better. And then I got a Scheergram which said, “We’ve decided that you’re just under too big a load somehow down there. You’ve been carrying this for about eight years, and somehow I would like for you to decide, do you want to do the mission, just be the mission commentator and work the missions, or do you want to back off and designate somebody to do that and you stay over and work the books and do the day-to-day stuff and keep the charts on who attended what?”

And I went back and said, “Yeah, that’s an interesting idea, going into quite a hurly-burly period. I’d never thought of subdividing the job just like that, but if subdivide we must, yeah, I think I’d just as soon do the missions. I feel more in touch with it, after all.”

About the next week, ten days later, a letter came down telling me to report to Washington—there was no other interim discussion—as a new Special Assistant to the Administrator for Public Affairs. I happened to be in Washington just before the letter arrived, and we discussed a little bit, although he’d never told me what he really had in mind, and I just went back and told him, I said, “Thank you very much. I guess I have some options here, and I choose to exercise one. I quit.” And I quit. The next day I went to London and got two jobs, and that was that.

I never was quite sure, and the day that that letter arrived in Houston, somebody else showed up from Houston, went in Gilruth’s office, and this guy I’d known from Headquarters for a long time, can’t remember his name now, who died about a year later. I hope he didn’t die of the workload. But he was walking in Gilruth’s office as I was walking out, and Scheer had sent the letter to Gilruth, who had called me up to read it to me, and was addressed to the Center Director. And I told Bob what I was going to do, and then walked over to the door, and this other guy showed up, and I said, “Hey, you’re a little wandering off your territory, aren’t you?” Or, “Aren’t you still working in Washington?” He didn’t say anything. And it dawned on me that he was going to be the new interim Public Affairs Officer. I don’t think he’d ever been to the Cape to a launch, but he had worked for a newspaper somewhere in Southwest Michigan, but mostly [unclear].

Johnson: Before we wrap up the day, I was just going to see if Rebecca or Jennifer had anything real quick to ask before we close.

Haney: Sure.

Wright: I just have one quick question for you. What kind of impact was on your office after Frank Borman and his crew’s Christmas greeting from Apollo 8?

Haney: That was an interesting thing. Frank, as you may know, is kind of a bishop in the—let me get it right, whatever the English version of a pretty high-level church, and he was very active around Houston in that sort of thing. I had no idea that it was coming. He had told Kraft that he was going to do it. Didn’t ask permission or didn’t need to, and I thought it was very effective coming as it did, when it did, and I think a lot of other people thought so.

There was that lady who was churchless over in Austin, who went the full—rolled over from being godless to being Mother Theresa. God, she had some kind of a mission over there. Had managed to get killed here about five years ago, probably by somebody on the staff. I think they finally put them away. I’m not sure. But that event, she was very critical of the reading of the Bible, and that event triggered the heaviest single mail issue in the history of the Manned Spacecraft Center. Got 600,000 pieces of mail in about six weeks, and 95, 96 percent of them were pro Borman or pro “read the Bible,” and the other were kind of in favor of the other lady, not saying anything. But it was one hell of a little deal.

And there was some Fundamentalist group in Missouri that really started riding the charger awfully hard. It was strange in that I remember my name wound up going out on all the return mail, because it was handled as a volume, and our office did that sort of thing, and that’s why I was made aware of the count. My god, 600,000 pieces in six or eight weeks. Nothing has ever come near it, even the landing.

Johnson: I appreciate you letting us come to your home and listen to your story today.

[End of interview]