The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 26 February 2016
by Lily Koppel
Our grand mission to send men to the Moon, back in the 1960s and 70s, looks now like an idyllic time of adventure, political unity, engineering knowhow, and a willingness to fund great dreamy projects. Some of these aspects were real, others, particularly political unity, were only illusions. The sixties, of course, were ten of the most tumultuous years in American history. And yet, despite war and assassinations, protests and reaction, we somehow managed to send men to the Moon, where they walked and collected unprecedented scientific data. It was a remarkable journey, tinged by Cold War politics, and real-world pressures. The story has been told from many points of view, in books and movies, over the intervening decades. One day, probably not so far off, people will wonder that anyone ever really journeyed to the Moon.
We've read about the men, exclusively men, who were selected to fly into space. Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff is the iconic book for that story. There are others. Here, though, Lily Koppel turns to the stories of the wives of these pilots, women who filled a role specific to a time and a place, and colored with the moral expectations of the times. These women were to support their men, stay at home and worry about whether their husbands would come home alive from journeys atop rockets, or merely from tooling around on their motorcycles. These were macho men, womanizers, adventurers, test-pilots, the Alpha Males of the entire nation. The women were expected to fit a photogenic role as supportive wives raising the perfect children in what became a posh suburban neighborhood near the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Of course, we've long known about the cracks in that perfect facade of womanly devotion that was the ideal of the era. These women were persons, each with her own desires, plans, dreams, and sense of self and independence. They realized this to varying degrees, and those who found the most freedom, early on, were those, ironically, whose husbands were killed at their work, in plane crashes and one tragic spacecraft fire. In the meantime, NASA expected them to serve a propaganda purpose, to be available and photogenic, and then to quietly vanish if their men should die or otherwise fail in the endeavor. There were perks to the job, though. Life magazine had an exclusive contract with the wives that helped them to fund the houses they built for their families. There were numberless gifts and rewards, along with visits with dignitaries, presidents and first ladies.
The author of this book takes on a daunting task. In the first decade of crewed spaceflight, there were almost fifty astronauts, and almost all of them were married. Koppel's research was extensive, and she deftly conveys the lives of these women by highlighting the events that characterized their collective experience. The women survived to varying degrees. After the last trip to the Moon, Apollo 17, there was a cascade of divorces and the suicide of Pat White, widow of Ed White, who died in the Apollo 1 fire. But the women moved on, still reflecting on this period of their lives as the most adventurous and maybe even glamorous. Their stories could easily fill a book four times the size of this one. But Koppel weaves a fascinating tale of women's independence, identity and domestic politics inside the fishbowl that was NASA's manned flight program. Since then, there have been hundreds of men and women who have flown in space. None have traveled anywhere near even half way to the Moon, and few have had the glamor and fame that the original seven Mercury astronauts and the Apollo astronauts enjoyed way back then. Indeed, we've come a long way, culturally, since then, if not much farther along in the exploration of the Moon.
See also: [The Wives of Los Alamos by TaraShea Nesbit] [A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin] [Astro Turf by M. G. Lord]