NASA Merrifield, Robert - May 25, 2000
Interview with Robert Merrifield
Interviewer: Clarissa Hinojosa
Date of Interview: May 25, 2000
Location: Merrifield home, Austin, Texas
HINOJOSA: It is May 25, 2000. This is Clarissa Hinojosa, recording an interview with Mr. Robert Merrifield, at his home in Austin, Texas. I wanted to ask you for, Mr. Merrifield, how you happened to come to become associated with NASA, and what you did with them?
MERRIFIELD: I was working for the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington, D.C., in 1961, and a good friend who worked for the Atomic Energy Commission had a friend by the name of Phil Whitbeck – that’s exaggerating the circumstances – an acquaintance, Phil Whitbeck. And Phil had asked my friend to come to work at the new Johnson – well, it was called the Manned Spacecraft Center. And my friend, who had just gotten an extremely good assignment to the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, which was a rare and wonderful feather in anyone’s cap, to get such an assignment, had to turn it down. And he told me about it, and he said, “I think this is an excellent opportunity.” Well, I had been in intelligence for about ten years, and I had done a number of studies of the Soviet Union. One of the problems in intelligence is that oftentimes people who are getting ready to go on a trip to the Soviet Union, back in those days, had to have the latest information. And so, even though the study may have been six months old, they would say, “Well do you have anything later?” Well, it would take me a year, a year and a half, to prepare one of these things, which was like writing a book. And it got to be real discouraging and it was almost like time being thrown away. So when this suggestion was made, I thought, “Well, that sounds interesting, and I think I might enjoy going into it.” So I made application, and went down, was interviewed, and was accepted and went to work for Chuck Bingman in the, I don’t know, in the Administration Directorate. I was to work for him for about five years.
HINOJOSA: Before I started the tape, you told me about the week of the Moon landing. Would you mind repeating that for me?
MERRIFIELD: Oh, sure. And if you would like me to anything in my career in a chronological fashion or whatever, I’d be glad to do that. We lived on the same cul-de-sac that Buzz Aldrin lived on in Nassau Bay. As the date for the Moon landing approached, my wife and Buzz Aldrin’s wife were having a cup of coffee together one day, and Joan Aldrin said to my wife, “You know, I’ve a got real problem and I don’t know what to do it about it.” My wife said, “What’s that?” And she said, “Buzz’s uncle and aunt are coming for the launch, and they’re going to stay here, but the problem is that the hotel reservation that we had for them somehow got lost, and now because everything is booked, there’s no way that we can get them a hotel room.” And my wife said, “That’s no problem. They can stay here.” Well, they lived about four houses away, and she said, “We could give them a key, and they could come and go as they see fit.” And that’s what we did, and they were lovely folks. Their name was Moon, which is an unusual coincidence, but interesting nevertheless. And they stayed with us the entire time of the period of the launch. And when it was over with, they left.
HINOJOSA: Thank you, I appreciate you telling me that for the tape. But I also want to take you up on your other offer, and go back and review your career with NASA chronologically.
MERRIFIELD: My first assignment was a rather unusual one, and this lasted for two, three years. And that was, in the early days of the first Mercury missions, there were a lot of delays in the process of getting the people who were assigned to remote sites for tracking and keeping in communication with the astronauts. And in the course of leaving when they were supposed to leave, they were expected to be gone maybe ten days at most, while the mission was in progress, getting over there and getting back. Well, weather delays, mechanical problems, one thing or another tended to increase these delays, and sometimes these people ran out of money and had a real problem with what to do next. And so NASA asked me to find a solution for that, and in the course of time I did. But, as often does happen in life, conditions improved and as a result much of the need went away. But they found someone else, hired, to do that job, sort of in an administrative role, in the Flight Operations division. That was my first assignment.
Another assignment that came along later was, there was a problem when the Center started doing work on the Apollo program in New Mexico at the White Sands Proving Ground. We had a number of teams up there. They worked together, but they had no common coordinator, and as a result, there was overlapping, there were problems of control – who reported to whom at the Center, all that sort thing. And so they asked me to go up there and see what I could do to find a solution, which I did. And that problem eventually went away. So, this was the type of assignment that I had, and they were interesting and enjoyable. Although they didn’t have any continuity or anything, other than just resolving common problems that the Center had, it nevertheless was the type of assignment that was enjoyable to have.
Then I saw what I thought was a need for the Center, and I approached Chuck Bingman and mentioned it to him, and he encouraged me to follow through on it, and this I did. And what it was, was to create a long-range planning entity at the Center. By this time, of course, we were in Houston, at the site that is now the Johnson Space Center. The long-range planning effort was one that seemed logical, because they worked in fits and starts, and it was good to think in terms of what would be needed in ten, fifteen years, against what would be needed to tomorrow. And as a result, it seemed, often, that the Center was just having to scratch to get things done tomorrow, that they hadn’t had any idea would be required, and as a result, people were overworked, they had to put aside assignments they felt they needed to do, and on and on and on. So, this met with good reception, and so I started working on that, and after a bit, had a small team of people attached to me, who were working on it. We got the thing in order and presented it first to the Director of Administration.
At this particular briefing on the plan, Wes Hjornevik was there, and so was Phil Whitbeck, his deputy. It didn’t seem to be going well, as sometimes happens, because it seemed like every five or ten minutes, Phil Whitbeck would say, “I don’t think this will go. That’s a type of activity that nobody will want. This is bureaucratic type of increase at the Center and on and on and on.” So I thought, “we have been shot down at the get-go on this thing and it’s a shame.” But, surprisingly, Wes Hjornevik, who hadn’t said anything while the presentation was in progress, and when I concluded, he thought for a minute, and said, “I think it’s a great idea. Let’s go with it.”
So we did, and we took it all the way up to Dr. [Bob] Gilruth, and he was cool on the idea. He was cool because, he said, “I am afraid what’s going to happen is that people are going to hold our feet to the fire on this. If we say, you know, we think in terms of this program or that going up in five, ten, fifteen years, people are going to say, ‘OK, where it is now?’ And it may be that we will have found something else.” And we tried to reassure him by saying, “You know, we’ve got to be flexible, and if the plan isn’t flexible it’s not going to be worth anything. We will be flexible and it will reflect what appears to be the best needs of not only Johnson Space Center but NASA as a whole.” Well, he reluctantly gave his approval to the project, and as a result, I think it suffered. I was attached to it initially, and eventually it passed into other hands, and the people who had that, some of them, were highly competent people who had and excellent record at the Center, and they met with a great deal of frustration. It was one of those things that was a great idea, but without the strong support from Dr. Gilruth, it did not mature as it should have.
While that was coming along, or was reaching the part where I was ready to do something else, I had a call from Paul Purser, who was assistant to the Director of the Center, Dr. Gilruth, to come see him. So when I did, he said, “You know, Bob, I think we could use a history of the Center, and you’re a historian, a trained historian, would you be willing to do it?” And I said, “Mr. Purser, I think this is a good idea, but I was involved in a government history when I first went to work. This was in Washington, working for the Marine Corps, as a historian. But the historians were not given primary responsibility, they were just like gofers. The Marine Corps officers did the actual writing and putting together of the manuscript. And after six months of that, I was so soured on government history that I don’t think I’d ever want to be involved in another one.” And he tried to reassure me, telling me that I would have a free hand in putting together the material, interviewing who I wanted to interview and so forth. So I told him I’d think about it. Well, in about a week, I got a call from Paul Haney, who was the Director of Public Affairs at the Center, and Paul asked me to come see him. And he said, and again, I told him what my reservations were, and again he assured me I would have a free hand in the history. But he said, “Let me ask you something.” He said, “I’d like to know how you’d handle a problem that exists at the Center.” And I said, “What is it?” And he said, “Dr. Gilruth has as his assistant for Operations Walt Williams, and he dislikes Walt Williams personally and professionally. How would you handle that?” And I said, “Well, if it isn’t a major issue, I would see no point in making an issue out of it. However, if contention did develop, or cause a falling out between them, you couldn’t ignore it.” Well, he liked that answer, and so again, he said, “Well, I would certainly like to have you take on this project, and would give you full support and assure you that you would have a free hand with what you’re doing.”
So after thinking it over, I decided that with those two people backing me – and they were two very important people at the Center – that it would be a different situation. So I started work on this project. It took almost five years. I think I started in ’65 and finally ended in 1970. In the process, I interviewed something like 125 people for the history, and these people ranged from people who were in everyday assignments all the way up to people who had been in the top assignments at NASA, both past and present, at NASA headquarters, and people who worked for the supporting contractors, like IBM. I made a number of trips to Washington, and other places, where I interviewed some of these people who were out of town, and had no problems getting approval for any of that or anything else I wanted to do. In fact, I had several secretaries who worked elsewhere in the Johnson Space Center, who would transcribe all of these interviews, and so as a result, I had support from people who didn’t report to me or otherwise I had no control over. And so it was a very pleasant assignment, and I really did enjoy it, as a historian.
We went through the first draft, we got very favorable responses for it, this comment version that had circulated. I incorporated those I felt were important and contributed something to the draft, and put out a second draft. And this was the one that was the final draft, that was, after I got comments back from that, then it was to go to the Government Printing Office to be printed. Just about the time I was getting comment back from those who received it, all of a sudden, I began to get vibes from NASA headquarters, from the History Office, that weren’t very good. Some of the comments were very critical and I couldn’t figure out why, suddenly, they had turned sour, and I soon found out.
Apparently, word had come down from the Deputy Director of NASA that this project would not be good because what I had written would be available also to Congress, and it was quite apparent that oftentimes, NASA and the Johnson Space Center had gone off on its own or had done things that didn’t really have government approval. And as a result, they thought it best to maintain a good relationship with Congress, and as such, they felt it was best just to shelve this project.
Well, this was a bitter disappointment to me, as you might imagine. And I tried to reason with the people from NASA headquarters, without success. And let me just give you an example of the type of problem that they saw and felt was going to create some kind of situation that would be unfavorable with Congress.
Early in the Mercury mission, it was decided that a Center was going to be needed for the Manned Spacecraft Center, a separate facility, because at that time they were co-housed at Langley, with the Langley people, at Langley Field [Virginia]. It was felt it was important that we be given a separate entity and mission. So, apparently, a team composed of a person who was a NASA headquarters and a person who was at Goddard Space Center [Maryland] were sent down to Houston to scout the area, and determine whether they thought it would be a suitable place to be locating the new Space Center. The only problem was that the man who was the Congressman, who had chairmanship of the committee that passed on the NASA budget and appropriations every year, was representative from Houston by the name of [Senator Albert] Thomas. [The representative from the Houston district was Olin (Tiger) Teague. Merrifield refers to Senator Albert Thomas from the Houston district, who was the chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee which determined the funding for NASA.] And Thomas had made it plain to the NASA officials that he expected the next space Center to be created to go into the Houston area. And they had not given much attention to this, and had gone ahead and created the Goddard Space Center, which, of course, was not located in Houston. And apparently he went through the ceiling.
So apparently, Thomas went to the Director of NASA and he said, “By God, I told you that the next Center was going to go into my district, and now you’ve put it at Goddard.” And his fist hit the table, and he said, “You better not make that mistake again.” Well, this was a serious problem. You know, they, the Center, NASA as a whole had all this funding channeled through this man, and if he got a bad attitude toward NASA, it couldn’t be anything but problems. So this is the reason for that early visit onto the Center. And shortly after that, they created, NASA created, a group of five to travel to all potential sites for the Center. Now, of course, they were just going through the motions of making it look like they were looking for the best possible site for the Center. But nobody knew that, except a couple people right on the top. So, over the next two, three months, the people who were assigned on that just worked like the devil, because they visited something like 55 sites, and they had two days at each one, two or three days, and the travel time in there, and as a result it was almost a burn-out situation. Well, the finally got finished, and went back to Washington, where they began to write up what they had done.
And one of the members of the team made a suggestion, that the others thought was a very good one, and that was “Why don’t we go ahead and rate and rank these?” So they did, but unfortunately, in the rating and ranking, Houston came in about fourth or fifth place. And that wasn’t what NASA wanted to hear. And [Hugh] Dryden, who was the Deputy Director and the coordinator of the team, when it was handed to him, frostily handed it back and said, “No one asked you to do this and nobody wants this. Tear it up.” Well, the reason, of course, was obvious. So, the team was very much taken aback. They did as they were told, of course, went ahead and submitted that and over the course of the next few months, the Johnson Space Center was selected to go into the Clear Lake area of Houston, and that’s where it went.
I had the team report that was given to me by the fellow at the Goddard Space Center, who had been with, on that first trip down to Houston, and they were ferried around by George Brown with Brown & Root, who was one of the people who was highly placed in industry, and was considered an important member of the Houston community, and as a result would be sure to make sure they would see everything they wanted to see. And they visited a number of sites, six or eight, in the Houston area. It was one of those things that I couldn’t avoid, and yet, how was I to treat it? Well, I wrote it up just as it was, I didn’t pull any punches. And this was what concerned them, and as a result, it was the reason, I guess, that it was put on the shelf.
But as I said, this was a real blow to me, and professionally, especially after I’d put in almost five years of hard work on the thing, well, I was to be reassigned to the Shuttle Program Office, and as a result, would have nothing to do with history after that. So, I tried my best to talk to various people in higher levels in NASA, both at the Johnson Space Center and at NASA headquarters, and I had no luck whatsoever. Phil Whitbeck was absolutely no help at all. So I went to see Chris Kraft, who was then Center Director. And Chris I’d known for a long time, I’d worked very closely with him on the first assignment I had, and always had an excellent working relationship with him. And when I went into his office, he said, “Bob,” and he was very frosty, he said, “I fired my best friend, and you can well believe that I’ll fire you, too, if I have any problems over this history.” I said, “Wait a minute, Chris. When I interviewed you for this history, you remember, you said that there was information you had given me that, if handled wrong, it would be the end of your career. Do you remember that?” “Yeah, I remember it.” I said, “You notice, it didn’t give you any problems when the history came out, did it?” Well, then he began to backtrack, and he was far more reasonable to talk to, and he said, “It’s out of my hands. I can’t to anything about it. NASA headquarters has made the decision that this should be put on the shelf because this could be proving embarrassing to NASA as far as Congress is concerned. I can’t do anything about it.” So that was really the end of it. I tried appealing it to NASA headquarters, but the person there I knew, and is now dead [so] I don’t want to mention his name, he would not return my phone calls. It was extremely frustrating. It was a low point in my career. But, life has to go on, and my family, I had three children, we lived in the Clear Lake area. There was no point in fighting this, because all it would do would be to hurt me professionally and hurt my family in the process. So, I just finally through up my hands, and said, “Move on to other things.” But it was very difficult to do.
Okay. Move on to other things. Then I went to work for the Shuttle Program Office, and there I had responsibility for the oversight of the McDonnell Douglas contract operations. It was a project where we reviewed the quality of the progress of their work on various tasks that had to do with the Space Shuttle. This was to go on for quite a little while, and as a result, I guess I did that type of particular work for about five or six years. It was varied. I had a lot of different people to, or projects to look at and determine what quality they were. But the people that had been assigned to this by McDonnell Douglas were very efficient, very capable people, and it was most enjoyable. I’m sure it would have been far less enjoyable had they been a bunch of incompetents or had done a job that was going to rank pretty badly.
Interestingly enough, I came into contact with Kraft again as a result of being on this assignment. And Kraft was very cool to the idea that was being proposed, that we do this, because he said, “I can well imagine myself having to watch in the evening when somebody might be lurking in my back yard, ready to shoot me because I gave a low rating or allowed a low rating through and as a result lost his job or lost something in the process.” But after considerable talking and discussion, he finally went along with the project. And this was one of the first uses of this form of incentive – where the company and the individual who was in charge of that particular portion of the work got financial benefit as a result of doing good work. And it was, I thought, to be very successful.
HINOJOSA: Will you please continue, sir?
MERRIFIELD: Yes. We were talking about the assignment I had in the Shuttle Program Office, and in effect supervising the quality of work that McDonnell Douglas did in its assignment at the Center. And as I said, they did good work and it was an enjoyable assignment. And I spent most of my time during the remaining years I was with NASA on that particular project. Although I had other assignments that came and went over time and numerous supervisors came and went, this was the most important I had during that period. And in the fall of 1979, I retired from NASA, as I was eligible for retirement at that point.
HINOJOSA: I wanted to ask you a question about the site selection process. You talked about how Representative [Senator Albert] Thomas was adamant that the next NASA site be moved into Texas. Do you think that Vice-President [Lyndon B.] Johnson’s being a Texan had an influence on that decision as well?
MERRIFIELD: That question’s been asked of me many times. And it’s possible that indirectly he had some influence on it because he was chairman of the committee that reported to the President, because of course at this time, he was Vice-President to President [John F.] Kennedy on NASA and the space program. And of course, being an ardent Texas booster, Johnson would have wanted the Center to go somewhere in Texas, if not particularly in Houston. But I never saw any proof of his involvement. In any of the research I did, nor did anyone I talked to say that Johnson had put pressure on them or so forth.
Now, Johnson wasn’t above taking it upon himself to get involved, and you remember during the first flight. This was during John Glenn’s flight. Just before the flight was to take place, just a few hours before he was supposed to board the spacecraft, John Glenn was informed that the Vice-President wanted to go over and spend the time of the launch with John’s wife Annie. And John was very opposed to this because Annie was a person who stuttered and was very ashamed of the fact that she stuttered and did not like to be put into a position where she was, in effect, getting pressure that would lead to more problems for her. And she begged him not to do it. And John, who was a very loyal husband, told the NASA people who had called him, “No, she does not want that, and I’m not going to give my approval to it.”
Well, a lot of pressure was brought to bear on him. The people at NASA said, “You could be pulled off the flight if this makes people up on top real unhappy with you.” And John apparently stuck to his guns and said, “Well, I’m sorry, this is not right, and I can’t do it.” [NASA replied] “Well, he’s on his way over there now.” [Glenn responded] “Well, you’ll have to tell him he cannot go, because she does not want to have him come.”
So Johnson had to turn around and go back to his office as a result of that. So, there were occasions when Johnson did, apparently, put his nose into business, but I have never seen or heard anything to indicate that he had a voice in the eventual selection of the Center, as far as the Houston area was concerned. And I’m confident that he was pleased with the location, because it added to the luster of the state, and that’s what he wanted. [He] was a very important person at that time, of course, became more important in the fall of ’63 when Kennedy was assassinated. But by that time, of course, the Center was already been picked and was under construction and so forth. So at that point, it would have made absolutely no difference at all.
HINOJOSA: Something I wanted to ask about the Kennedy years, and the Johnson years. I’ve read or heard other people express that they felt that the space race was an expression of Cold War politics. Did you get this feeling of “We’re doing this to beat the Russians.”
MERRIFIELD: Yes, yes, that was undoubtedly an aspect of the undertaking putting a man on the Moon, or going into space. And the Russians had an important start and had done several things that made us look rather foolish initially. For example, they had the first dog in space.
HINOJOSA: Laika. Was it Sputnik 2?
MERRIFIELD: Yeah. And they had the first man in space and on and on. And at this time the Center, the Center hadn’t been created yet, they were still at Langley. They had a test flight go all awry and it looked like we were a bunch of stumble-bums when we really weren’t. And I’m sure there was a lot of anxiety on the part of people who were in politics, especially at the national level and in the Presidential office, as to where we were going. And you remember, it was in the course of one of these trips to Houston, during the period of early Apollo or it may have been just before the first initial flights [Apollo] were taken.
HINOJOSA: Please continue.
MERRIFIELD: During the early Gemini flights, these had been successful and NASA was now beginning to perform in a fashion that gained the confidence of national leaders as far as the space program was concerned, the Manned Spacecraft Program. And as a result, this is when President Kennedy came to Houston and was to make that monumental statement that this was a national goal, to have a man put on the Moon and returned safely to Earth by the end of the decade. So this was a national commitment that was made at that point. Well, although we didn’t really understand what was going on. It was only in aftermath that we could see that we had gradually passed the Russians, the Soviets, in terms of the space accomplishments that we had gained the upper hand. The momentum was there and so forth that was necessary to carry through. And from this point on, of course, we dominated the manned spacecraft program, man-in-space in particular.
And I guess what was said about it was that while we were feeling the pressure of the competition, once the competition was largely gone, then the pressure to go on to the next stage and do something like a landing on Mars or some further accomplishment such as, perhaps, a settlement on the Moon, a colony on the Moon, all these things were kind of put on hold. And had we had the competition, I’m sure that the space program would have gone ahead and had something monumental that was to be accomplished. And although I don’t want to leave the impression that the Space Shuttle was a ‘nothing’ program, it certainly had far less in the way of technical and historical importance than say, had, the Apollo program. And it was a disappointment to many of us who were at NASA that much of the work that had already been done to plan a Mars mission was simply shelved, and nothing more was done on it. And as a result, several decades have gone by and we have in large measure, technically just, you know, seemed to be in a standstill position.
To be sure, some work has been done of importance, such as the Space Shuttle and helping the Hubble program and others like that, couldn’t have been done had we not had the capability of making trips into space and back again. But in terms of interplanetary missions or anything that of exciting nature of that type simply went by the boards. And you could see that in the reaction of the public because public confidence began to die down; public interest in the Johnson Space Center began to wane. And the number of visitors, I guess at one time was between one and two million a year, dropped so sharply that the body that was created to publicize the Center and what it was doing suddenly found itself short of funds and concerned about its future. This was largely because the public was no longer excited about the space program. It had lost its edge. And although technically we were doing things that were important, such as the Space Shuttle, nevertheless, it wasn’t exciting. It didn’t have the same type of public appeal that the Apollo program did.
HINOJOSA: Thank you very much. May I ask you a silly question?
MERRIFIELD: Sure.
HINOJOSA: I hear a lot of NASA people pronounce a word I’ve heard as Gemini [long I at the end] as Gemini [long E at the end]. How did that pronunciation come around?
MERRIFIELD: I think it’s one of those words that has a dual pronunciation as far as people are concerned, some say Gemini [long I] and some say Gemini [long E].
HINOJOSA: Oh, okay. So it wasn’t a distinct “We’re going to pronounce it this way.”
MERRIFIELD: No, no, I don’t think anyone who was in any particular post of importance ever said, “This is what it’s going to be called” or “This is the pronunciation” or whatever.
HINOJOSA: Oh, okay. Thank you. Like I said, it was a silly question. I was just curious.
MERRIFIELD: No problem.
HINOJOSA: Are there any closing thoughts, or anything else you’d like to discuss or talk about?
MERRIFIELD: Well, to follow on what I was just talking about, you wonder what the century is going to bring. We’re now in a period of intense technical change. For someone who is in his seventies and has a hard time trying to make the cell telephone work properly or use it properly, let’s put it that way, the opportunity for space seems to be just unlimited. And yet, the things that are being done or the planning that is going into it seems so insignificant in comparison to what it was back in the late ‘50s and the ‘60s. So, it’s one of those things that one day, I guess, we will be on Mars or we will go to other planets. But even though technologically we’re moving at an extremely fast rate, no one is putting any pressure on NASA to update or bring closer a Mars mission or as far as I’ve been able to see, to do anything that would increase man’s role in space. I think that’s sad.
HINOJOSA: Thank you very much.
MERRIFIELD: You’re welcome.