American Pioneer: Buzz Aldrin on the Moon (and on Earth) / Buzz Aldrin & Ken Abraham

American Pioneer: Buzz Aldrin on the Moon (and on Earth)
BY OWEN LIPSTEIN

Forty years ago Apollo 11 pilot Buzz Aldrin became the second human to set foot on the moon when he followed Neil Armstrong down the ladder of the lunar module. As a result, he also became one of the most famous people in the world. An American hero and household name at the age of 39, he had suddenly achieved his greatest dreams by overcoming our nation’s greatest challenge. But his personal challenge was yet to come. Back home, very much on Planet Earth, the wild publicity exacted its personal cost. While the mission to the moon took eight days, Buzz Aldrin’s battle with depression—openly, at the expense of his Air Force career—and then his alcoholism, took a full decade.
In Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home From the Moon (Harmony, 2009) Aldrin, with Ken Abraham, recounts the breath-taking details of that mission, along with the harrowing one back on earth.
We were honored to speak with this genuine hero about his journey there and back.

Owen Lipstein: What kind of reaction has your book received?

Buzz Aldrin: There is an unmentionable astronaut that didn’t care for certain parts of it, but that’s OK. I understand. [Laughter] The Boston Cambridge Hospital for Mental Depression was thrilled with what I had to say. I’ve had a speaking engagement to the US Army War College at Carlisle Barracks because when they read the book they wanted me to discuss, in particular, the increased suicide rate and depression among combat soldiers returning from the Middle East.

OL: Are there things, years later as you think about your moon landing, that could have gone wrong but didn’t?

BA: Well, I don’t dwell on all the things that could have gone wrong that didn’t. That’s the job of the simulator people, to come up with and train people on all the things that could go wrong. Our point of view was to be as knowledgeable as possible and have an open mind and think positively, and not dwell on the negative.

OL: Your book describes in fascinating detail what was happening as the lunar module was descending, and it sounds like you were mostly involved in what you had to do next and not thinking about much more than that.

Aldrin: When people suggested—or asked—that we send poets or philosophers or journalists or writers or musicians, President Eisenhower said, “No. I want to have success. I want to have test pilots carry out this mission because they are expert operators.”
Well, I was not a test pilot but I was a pretty good operator—at least a couple of [Russian Mikoyan-Gurevich] Mig pilots thought so when they descended in their parachutes. I was of a different breed, somebody who looked at mission planning—what we should do with what we have and how we can do it better. That’s how I got into the astronaut program, by feeling that we didn’t really fully understand how an operator should accomplish the intercept of a spacecraft in space. That’s what I wrote my thesis on and pretty much what I emphasized early in my activities. Then I kept looking for how to do things better, like the difficulties we had in space walking and how to come up with better foot restraints and eventually to train with underwater neutral buoyancy, which I knew being a scuba diver, would be very, very effective in controlling the energy expenditure of maintaining positions in space.

OL: It seems to me that one of the themes in your book is that you and the men you went with were trained to do a very specific set of tasks. What you weren’t trained to do was come back and be celebrities.

BA: Tom Wolfe wrote about it in The Right Stuff; there is no such thing in my mind as “the right stuff.” There is tremendous variety in the personalities and character of the Americans who reached the moon. They have traits that they’ve inherited but perhaps have trained over, so maybe those traits aren’t particularly evident. They are extroverts or introverts. They are people who are very private and people who just seem to want to project themselves into the forefront of every situation they’re in and be macho—all sorts of things like that.

OL: What about you? Suddenly at the age of 39 everybody in the whole world can call you by your first name as if they know you.

BA: Some people immediately wrote books about it. We were the fortunate ones who on the first landing were obligated by contract to work with authors from World Book and Life magazine to talk for publication about our lives before, during and after. The proceeds were then to be split 72 ways. Well, in our hustle and bustle post-flight, and the fact that there were two of us and we were not receiving a whole lot of compensation, there wasn’t a whole lot of motivation to delve into the innermost personal aspects of our lives for the book First on the Moon: A Voyage with Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr. (Little Brown & Co. 1970). We came up with something as best we could and then went about our lives. I guess at that time we probably got maybe $8,000 for participating in it.
Different people were exposed to different situations. We did have a little bit of help from speech writers, but they were not too pertinent—they were pretty liberal in their analogies.

OL: At the time it was so radical that you came out about your troubles with alcohol and depression, and it seemed like your board appointment to the insurance giant Mutual of Omaha was questioned when you discussed your problems. They wanted you to be a certain person and you announced that you weren’t that person.

BA: Well, that’s right. I discussed a domestic marriage situation that somehow didn’t fit with their image of a member of the Board of Directors. In addition I thought insurance companies certainly ought to cover not only physical disabilities, but mental disability as well.

OL: At the time that was a really big idea. No one was talking that way, least of all people in a position like your own.

BA: Yes, that’s true—but they weren’t talking about going to the moon in 1955 either. So we develop as a society. We pioneer new areas. I just happened to choose not only to be a space man, but also a social pioneer by discussing things that I thought shouldn’t be swept under the rug.

OL: Truly, you were a pioneer in both those areas and most people don’t get to forge ahead in even one.

BA: Well, I know my first book Return to Earth [by Aldrin and Wayne Warga, Random House 1973] certainly didn’t discuss alcoholism, but I think people who read the book could come to their own conclusions. That’s why in the intervening years between that book and [this one], I felt it was really essential for me to bring people up to date at the time of the 40th anniversary. However, I believe that perhaps some very particular people from a recovery organization might be a little concerned that maybe I overstepped the bounds of traditions in acknowledging my membership in that group.

OL: You have had the opportunity to meet just about all the recent Presidents. Has any one particularly impressed you?

BA: [Laughter] Each president, of course, has their own associated, anticipated outcomes of the space program. I hate to make comparison or judgment. I think each one values the sections of the space program in light of what resources are available to apply to the space program.

OL: You seem like you are in a great place in your own life. You’re 79, full of optimism, energy, possibility and resolve.

BA: I think I’m far better right now than I was when we finished writing the book. I’m not immune from the return of tendencies that are not all that healthy, which is why I try to stay close to a fellowship of recovering people and am alert to other behavioral patterns that maybe promote vulnerabilities. I certainly feel that I am sensitive to the way things are going. If they are going fine, I feel very good about it. If they are not going so well, I’m kind of discouraged. I try to be optimistic all the time, but there are times when the bastards just get you down. [Laughter]
I’ve certainly learned a lot about humanity. The pros, cons, and the weaknesses that groups of people have, and that individuals have. For the most part we are trying to do the best we can, but there are some human tendencies that are pretty detrimental to the success of peace and happiness ever-after. There is a greediness, a short-term focus on ‘what is there for me right now,’ which has brought about some rather undesirable situations for lots of people. It wasn’t their fault, it was other peoples’. We just have to learn—and maybe never overcome these tendencies completely—as a human species.