he didn't want a biography. he wanted a story of his life of flight. he failed anything that he did any of the astronauts could have done so he wanted them to get equal credit. he was that type of a guy. he never thought of himself as being anything special but he wanted the story of flight told him we were going to do it and when he passed away we had already worked one chapter out and i decided to go ahead because and do the flight because people suddenly they made sense. i looked around mike and all the people from a poll of practically all of them are gone. we have to realize that over half the people on the planet weren't even here when he walked on the moon. the other asked it not said jay if you don't do it who else is going to do a quick's jim calls it a great book and adds to neil's legacy. we did our level best to try to get this done for the history. we have had a heavy library event sale so that's great. we were trying to get neil's story in a library for history and hopefully we have taken a shot at it and hopefully we have done good. >> host: there was one earlier biography and that's jim thompson's the first manned. >> guest: that's the official, that's his official biography. you know, be assigned to do that and this is not a biography. it's a re-creation of his story on direct observation and research generally referred to as a repertoire. that is what it is. i hate biographies. i don't want to do biographies. >> host: you have party done to already done to better sort of, quasi-somewhere between autobiography and biography. in terms of how you started this book was it because you have a friendship with neil armstrong going back a long time and when did you meet him? >> guest: well i met him in 1962 when he came in with the second group of astronauts but there was a couple of personal things in 1964. he lost a young girl, karen and she died of a brain tumor at the age of two. it was really difficult for neil. i lost a young son and one morning he came into howard johnson from cocoa beach. this was 1964 and i was than talking with wallace. my wife was too on the hospital and he looked at me me and he says who shot your dog? i told them i said well the whole tragedy and told him about it and we got to talking about it. he didn't talk much. most people didn't know he even had a daughter let alone that he had lost her. that was when he was flying out at edwards which is now named after him. it's the neil armstrong research center. so anyway, we got to a point that we were trusted friends is what i like to say. some people want to say you were neil's best friend. no, i was not neil's best friend. i don't know who the heck neil's best friend was but we were friends. we were trusted friends. when the challenger blew example he was called to be the vice chairman and to the investigation. i am working on a story two days later on the tom brokaw show and a first person to call me when i got off of the air with neil. he said what do you know that you didn't tell brokaw and i said i told brokaw everything. anyway we work together on that in a couple of times we were going to get started on this book and never did even though he did other stories together and there were a couple of other offers by publishers which neil thought about and turn down. as i say we talked about doing this off and on but as i said somebody had to do it. you know, i wanted to take a whack at it so hopefully it turned out okay. >> host: tell me a little bit about the background of you meeting him. obviously you are a correspondent at the cape, for nbc for a lot of years. when did you start their? >> guest: when i met him he was one of the gemini nine. you know the press, he was sort of like a wet blanket. he stayed back there and didn't say much and was now going. i just knew him. like i meet you and we talked. there was nothing special about it until that morning and howard johnsons where we talked about losing two children and then it grew. >> host: i would like to get the viewers just a little background. you started at the cape went? >> guest: i started for nbc news on july 21, 1958. i have been covering the lunches since april of 58. i was a veteran when alan shepherd flew on may 5, 1961. i didn't set out to do it but i wanted to cover every flight by american astronauts. there has been 166 of them and i was fortunate enough that they looked on the inside of the cover of the book they would see a picture of me on the air when neil made a stop on the man. you can see neil across mission control on the television screen stepping off onto the surface of the men. by then i knew it pretty well and i knew some things. you know he told me some things and comments that are not in that book even though he has passed on. i will not break that confidence because we had a working agreement. being a reporter generally if i say to you and you and i sit down and talk and the discussion is not off the record then everything is open. with neil, you have that friendship they are to protect and we worked so many things together. before i would use anything i would say to neil hey i want to use this is it okay and it okay if he'd say oh yeah go ahead. we never had a situation where that didn't take place and he fully trusted me. he told me things that if i say i can't talk about today but i was lucky that i got a lot of reports behind the scenes. when he was investigating the challenger accident as a vice-chairman he and i talked a couple of times a week. i kept him up to date on what i had. nobody knew that and you know we work together. he came came, for example nbc decided to give me a -- after being with him for 50 years. he's that you can invite anybody because the wheels are coming down from nbc in new york and finally they called and said you can invite three or astronauts. i invited neil and i invited john glenn. john glenn and neil were in the book, pictures of them. they went through jungle training together and that is where their friendship started even though they were from the same state. so alan shepherd was there. i couldn't invite alan shepherd so i invited edgar to wakulla men with moon with alan shepherd at all. then came. he and john had earlier that year asked me to come to cleveland to the 500 club in space space. their 50th and they had 19 astronauts from all higher. we did television and i did a keynote. we just had a great time. they came down and we had a great time. there was a picture in the beginning of the introduction of the book. my wife and myself in neil sitting at the table laughing. john glenn was up doing standup comedy. [laughter] anyway that was the way things went. but i never did anything on the air without saying hey mala want to do this and he said the i. >> host: that was the relationship you established early on or at least after the 1964, but before that time he was kind of anonymous. of course he was terribly, cheyenne may be too strong but certainly very reserved and private. >> host: >> guest: he was a very private person and he would think everything out. if you asked him a question he would think it through before he would answer to make sure he didn't give you an answer that wasn't true that he would have to change later. he was called the quickest pilot that ever lived when he was flying and the slowest person ever to answer. >> host: so you probably knew the mercury astronauts very well at the time of the gemini nine came on board. guess that the guys in those days in the press corps if you said astronauts that's what you meant, the mercury seven. >> host: was there a bump in the road in the transition of integrating nine new guys into the already well-established group? >> guest: there were several of them. i have a great chapter in there that i think involves neil and stafford with the innkeeper down there henry landward. these guys were the seven that were standoffish to the nine like you have to earn your way into the club. henry said you know what you guys need to do. you need to throw a dinner to make a black tie and show them respect and all this. he said i will put it together. the first words that came out of tom stafford's mouth was who was going to pay for this? the hotel will pay for it because tom went to the naval academy on scholarship and even though he went into the air force and became a three-star general he retired as a three-star general afterwards but you know his mother -- his mother was dead and his father had to borrow the money to buy a bus ticket to send him to fulfill his scholarship to annapolis and all. he was very tight with money. as one of the jokes neil said was the last time stafford picked up a check he said she was hitchhiking. [laughter] that was another one. they got together on this dinner and cut to the chase on that they brought in guys in the black tie and had the best of winds brought in. when they sat down for dinner, they started out and it was supposed to be rightfield with au gratin potatoes but it was like fried cardboard. [laughter] the potatoes were you no stinking and the salads have been sitting in the sun all day. it was a real god gender had a big laugh. after that they were together. that's the pollock culture. the pilots eyes did that. >> host: practical jokes. >> guest: are you old enough to remember the turtle club collects. >> host: i was reading about that the other day. are you a turtle quek's. >> guest: you have a certain answer you had to give and if you didn't didn't you have to buy everybody a drink no matter for the priest was standing there or not you have to buy everybody a drink. >> host: so, why was he chosen as one of the nine? forward the qualities he had in him what was his background? >> guest: neil was a fighter pilot in the korean war and became back. he had gone in on this program they had a training program, i forget the name of the admiral and all that it was named after that he had gotten a scholarship and what they were to do was this part of the rotc, naval rotc program that was a special program, it's in the book but anyway he had gotten in and he was supposed to spend two years at purdue and then he was to go for a year's training and of this and then come back and spend the second two years and get his wings and bars. after he had been there for two years the navy pilots pulled some of the guys out and sent them to flight training in pensacola and kept them out for the navy. so he actually went over as a fighter pilot on on the essex stille midshipman. he had not gotten his bars yet that he had his wings. he was one of the few that flew actually in combat as the midshipmen. it was in combat two or three months before he got his bars. so on september 3, 1961 he was born august 5, 1930 and so he was whatever their field team was from 21 he was so much over his 21st birthday. they went on a run to knock out bridges and all of that in korea and when they went down for the second pass on this bridge he released his last bomb. everything looked good. he was flying with major john carpenter who is on loan from the air force to the navy and he was the division lead. as neil came up, about 500 feet off the ground here was this antiaircraft cable stretched him out and about in. it took off half of his right-wing and he had to fight the thing to keep it going. he was 350 knots and he went to 20 feet off the ground and came back up. he told me, he says you don't want to be doing 350 knots 20 feet off the ground. that's no place to go but he managed to nurse it back. he couldn't land on the carrier because he couldn't slow it down enough without rolling it. he figured he couldn't get it under 170 knots so john carpenter stayed with him and nursed it back to what they called d3 which is a marine base in korea. he ejected just as he went out and came down and landed there. he was picked up by one of his flight buddies and everything and they got him back. but when the navy put out the story, the navy public affairs put out that he had a cable, a guide wire is what they put out to a power pole. it took about 3 feet of this wingtip. he kept trying to get that changed but neil didn't work too hard at it because he didn't talk that much to begin with. and then the stars and stripes did a story on it. so he just said to me that night at dinner i brought this up. i use the navy version and be sitting at the table and he says six to 8 feet. six to 8 feet? i was an antiaircraft cable. that night you were talking about than a few other things that happened on the landing that we didn't know about. he told me i would like to have that -- i would like to have a fax tone on that. that would obviously be the opening chapter. we are talking about your life a flight. we aren't talking about your whole life. we are talking about your life a flight so i thought that would be the perfect opening chapter. i sat down and wrote it and e-mailed it to neil. he checked it and he liked it. i said that's her opening chapter but i could never quite bring into the computer. the man just couldn't brag on himself. he couldn't bring himself to that point. finally he looked at me and he said jay you are one of us. he says you will go ahead and do it. you do it on your own. he says you're a pilot. i couldn't even carry your lunchbox. anyway, then he passed on unexpectedly. >> you talk to him for a while. i have to bring this up. i hear the family was upset with the initial advertising of the book that it was the author of the biography. >> guest: no, no, no. what happened was you are familiar with -- are. for people who are not familiar with galleys this is the roughed out edition of the book where you pick out, you can pick out all the mistakes. i wrote nothing for the jacket of the book. you have people in publishers like saint martin's press and they write the most grandiose things you can think of. i think they wrote i was neil's best friend and it was an autobiography. i don't remember exactly but it was all wrong and i jumped on it immediately. immediately i wrote susan wheeling who is with the task law firm. she is neil's attorney and the attorney for the trust. she is also carol his widow's attorney. i explain all of that. they were wonderful family. they are like neil. they are very bright people. one of the reasons why i don't do autobiographies are want to do a biography is because any person who has any experience like truman capote and these people were my heroes from what little i knew or i know. they said never do a biography of the family. it will drive you absolutely. they will take it over the line so don't do it. don't get me wrong, nobody in neil's family, what i did as a courtesy. i simply sounds carol the first three chapters and all that they could look at. it was never a biography from the beginning. it was their reportage. anyway i offered her, carol you may have any part of that book you would like. if you would like to join anything like that and i said the same thing to mark and of course they said no. of course i don't know if they really thought how good of a chance i had being the substantial publisher that i have. but it doesn't matter because i have been sending them anything and any question they have asked. i think mark called up and said, set an e-mail saying he resented the line. i said we talked about this for 28 years and i said we can change that. i go back and i would say look, 1992 year father wrote for moonshot the introduction and was paid by michael reagan of turner publishing. he was going to be on the whole book but at the time he was going through the divorce with janet. i think he didn't want to do it at that time. i looked at him and i said i will do the introduction. we all met with michael reagan in atlanta. so he did that and we talked about this other book. we offer to other things. if you look at everything that we did plus the stories we did together and everything over the course of 20 years there is a 20 year run of events there where we were physically talking about it. still there are people living better witness to the -- witnesses to this. i have stacks of e-mail and i still have our conversation between neo-and die so there's no question about it. i said mark it's not necessary. >> host: certainly that is not the jacket copy now. >> guest: i may have the bottom of 120 years or something. we are going to take that off. >> host: interesting you don't think of don't think of it as a a biography because it looks biographical to me that i noticed the choice that you made to only do story and pretty much move on to the new boyhood and support. >> guest: i wasn't interested whether it had two words are one word on his nose. but we wanted to do was we wanted to do an advance. he was so extraordinary and they should be done and i hope this is what we have done. a repercussion as you know is a re-creation, a written re-creation of an event based on direct observation which i was there for all of it and talk to neil through through all of it along with thorough research and documentation. that is a repercussion. another example was truman capote these first blood. >> host: in cold blood. >> guest: in cold blood. he was not there to witness it but he went out there and he interviewed all the people. he got to know the two killers and he was with them throughout the whole process before they were hanged. so that was his repertoires on that and of course i just love harper lee's "to kill a mockingbird." that is based basically on her life and in fact truman capote is the mayor. he's a smart young guy. >> host: they were childhood friends. >> guest: right, they were childhood friends. another example is tennessee williams streetcar named desire and that took place in new orleans. this is a technique and it's what you do. you are just re-creating something that you are part of the witness to. >> host: you are comfortable writing dialogue and conversations. i was cautious about writing a conversation that you are seeing it more as a re-creation. >> host: i am re-creating it plus the fact i was there and most of the dialogue, for example what i did an dialogue with neil i try to get everything absolutely correct. what i did was there is as you know a transcript of every word spoken on the apollo level mission. now let me put a caveat on it here. there are also back channels where they talk to flight directors and whatnot. now he also told me this directly, the stuff that i have been there and i have got it quoted as closely as i can get it right quote cam and i have guys. neil told me this or that where they talked about him being the commander of apollo 11. so i have those. i have transcripts where he and i talked about it and as i say he told me for example, they s saw, they were going out on apollo 11. they looked back at all three members of the crew and saw a flashing light. it appeared like it was following them. it was a flashing light. the flash would go away and come back, go away and come back. so neil thought it was something man-made. he didn't think it was aliens or anything as silly as that. buzz and mike got little carried away with it and when i got back into the quarantine in houston, neil called me and he says have you got anything because we have got stuff on one another. do you have anything and i said yes. that was a very sensitive spy satellite of our national assets and it had rolled over and died but it was still in orbit. every time it would go over if the sun was exactly right you would get that flash. i know exactly what it was and i told him. he told them. let's get off of it. sounding like some hollywood guy. >> certainly fueled the ufo conspiracy theories by astronauts of which there are way too many already. but to get back to the flight story after korea the next big thing is the x15 so maybe you could tell him about that experience. >> guest: neil came back and finished his engineering degree and everything at purdue. when he got out he wanted to go to the naca which was the predecessor to nasa. that was the civilians agencies that was doing exploration in flight and he wanted to be a research test pilot. that is what he wanted and he wanted to be at edwards. so he applied that they liked his record and they liked his drive but they didn't happen opening at edwards. they have an opening at the lewis research center in cleveland. so they got nailed to apply them to go up there. so he went up there and all they had was an old pad to which is a dual p. 51 and a c-47 which i forget what the navy called it. >> host: to dc-3 in any case. >> guest: that's right, that's what it was. as soon as that happened, he goes out to edwards and he gets an a for civilian and he flew everything out there and did everything they told them to do. his copilot the whole nine yards. he did everything he was supposed to andy came outstanding in his ex-15 flights. for people who don't know that was a rocket craft. it would take you to the edge of space. he went the highest i think was 37 article milestone that was what we called the pasadena flyover because he skipped off the top of the atmosphere and he came back and when he came back over base he was supposed to be in position and come down and land at 100,000 -- 150000 feet. he turned around and came back and landed. they were taking bets on whether or not he was going to make it back in and that was right after this little girl's death. i think that might have affected him a little bit. then because chris craft for example who was the chief flight director of the mercury program with gemini and all he was with neil at the research group before nasa. all those guys so they knew him. they all felt that neil was a step above the air force and the navy guys and i think he was to match. he would never tell you he thought he was. i think he was too so they really wanted him at mercury. they were disappointed that he didn't apply for mercury but he's thinking, his next promotion he had every reason to believe he would be chief test pilot of ex-15 but then when he saw shepherd go up and of course wenger gary and went before that he realized that if i'm going to go higher in space on a flight is going to be on top of a rocket. so when it came to around two billing out for gemini nine he did. he was glad to see it and they brought them in. >> host: i think eisenhower specified there would be military test pilots. i'm not sure if he was given an opportunity to fly. >> guest: he could have. i don't know what they were saying he couldn't but they did so much stuff behind the scenes. he had so much speculation and it was so hard to cut through that. for example people came up and said the reason alan shepherd was selected to be the first in space was because he was navy and john f. kennedy was navy. this is the type of stuff and neil you know he was against that totally. it's one of the reasons why he steered away from the press in general. he didn't hate the press. he just preferred not to talk to them. so anyway there was so much of that stuff going on and he was building quite a reputation for himself situations and i forget the other guy he was flying with the b-29 out there on a test flight. they wanted him. they really wanted him and they were so glad to see that he applied and left the x-15 program and went to nasa and he was too in houston. next our neighbor with ed white he was the first to walk in space and who died in apollo fire. >> host: that was a stronger. i've i have heard others say that mine was the strongest group of test pilots. even stronger than the mercury. >> guest: of oh yeah they were better qualified. you are absolutely right. they were better qualified plus the fact that they were in a position to do apollo. like lovell and john young so anyway neil was considered like the top of the cream of the guys who were in charge. when he flew his turn came to fly he lost in gemini eight and not only flew the first docking in space, but then he flew the first emergency return from space. and the way he had to handle that because he was on the other side of the earth out of contact with mission control. that is one of the reasons why he and i talk so often and sell what we should be doing today in space is that we should be flying out in increments. we haven't been out of earth's orbit for 42 year so we have a lot of stuff going on today, commercial space and all of that which is great in itself but this is like twa and the airlines. they're not doing anything different than we have been doing but you've got to get out and explore and do it in increments. the biggest problem we have got to go beyond the earth is to deal with radiation. once we are out of the protection of the atmosphere from that radiation we have to deal with it. people say what people say why do i go to mars? we don't know how to go to mars. it's just that simple and if we did go to mars and sent a crew out there with a radiation they would be exposed to baby babbling idiots when they got there. you simply can't do it. you have got to come up with something. you have to do it in great increments. neil feldt lets do it in threes, what he called threes. first don't give any further way than three seconds from communication with mission control in which you can get help and three days that you can get back to earth. now when you learn how to live in space and that's on the other way past the moon and you get out to point but when you can live out there and you know what you're doing and you can fly safely and go to the next step, this is what we pointed out in the book and this is what we felt we should be doing and be wrote enough about it and did enough about it with the programs. should be it. meanwhile everybody is talking about google getting in and branson getting in and everything like this. that's fine, but what they are doing has been done for 40 years. and so they are doing commercials and if they can put up satellites cheaper that's fine but if we want to build on the stockpile of knowledge, if we want to build on that we have got to go out and explore. we have to go beyond what we are enough. we have to go beyond the space station. that is what neil wanted was a program that we could do it. >> host: i wanted to return to that at the end but i did want you to perhaps tell the viewers about gemini. people that they know anything they no apollo 11 and we have to get to that but tell them about the gemini 8 story. >> guest: germany was the bridge between mercury and apollo and the first spacecraft to be in orbit. with the mercury out they did was put in orbit and once it was an arpad it had attitude control jets. they could adjust their altitude but they couldn't do anything else. with gemini they could fire larger thruster rockets and change the orbital path and therefore they could go dock with one another. they tried a couple of things that didn't work and lost a couple of the target rockets so it came to neil when he flew with dave scott. he flew gemini 8 and they got up. he had a work ethic that you wouldn't believe. he worked every way to be able to catch this target and dock with it. nobody had done this. this was a big thing. they have problems doing it so it came off like clockwork for neil and dave. we all go to bed, goodnight and they are going to go to their sleep to their sleepy sleep here never buddies feeling wonderful. they go out of contact with mission control and they are over china on the other side of earth and the spacecraft starts spinning. he brings it to neil's attention and dave thinks it's his side so he checked his. his gyro is showing him in a bank. so they started immediately suspecting it was the a g at fault. anyway the speed got greater and greater and it got to the point where they were almost 400 revolutions a minute and they were about ready to pass out. neil had to make the decision to get off of that or they were going to pass out. so he made it in order to get enough rocket power to get off of that spinning at jena he had to fire the eighth section of his return rocket. he had to return rockets for re-entry. the a and a a b bank so he fired the a bank got it under control and on top from it but as soon as they handoff to and everything they thought that's it. it starts spinning again. then he realized it was gemini 8 and they kept turning off and putting on and they got down and found the culprit. something sticks in my mind. >> host: thruster number eight. guess who it was thruster number eight so anyway they have to believe that and get it under control and let it bleed itself to get it under control. they had to then land on the next opportunity. the next opportunity is way out in the middle of the pacific 400 miles off of okinawa. they had to comment over china by themselves which they did because they got a tracking station and called mission control a couple of times. as i said they set up and they said everything is ready and in austin didn't hear from them until the recovery plane was over the gemini in the water. >> host: when you were sitting in mission control as a reporter you didn't know what happened. >> guest: nobody knew. >> host: after retro fire they flew off the raiders green. >> guest: one of the tracking things got close enough to the gemini 8 and picked up a signal from neil and he said everything was well. >> host: they had to float out in the ocean for a little while. >> guest: excuse me. my sinuses are getting a little trouble here. >> host: is the first american space managed to be -- mission to be cut short because of an emergency in flight. >> guest: the decision was made starkly by the astronauts on board because they didn't have that much contact with mission control and they were immediately criticized by second-guessers. when chris kraft and bob dover is, they thought that neil was having trouble with a comptroller but as soon as they found out that they had an actual stuck open thruster they said we would have done the same thing he did. he did exactly what we would have done. we wouldn't have done done anything any different. again they were very impressed with it. when he got in line and started training in his lunar lander training vehicle to land on the moon, a lot of guys didn't want to fly because it was so tough. neil said i don't want to learn to land government 200 feet above surface. i want to learn somewhere i can get help. >> host: described as if you will. >> guest: they called it the flying bits because it looked like a landing patch and they have these thrusters. first of all they try to simulate gravity to what it is honored. they had a big turbo fan rocket engine in the center and this would fly them and take them off the earth and when they got ready to simulate the landing they would use just enough of a turbo fan rocket engine that would, so they could control and it would take care of 56th of the gravity and leave them won six of which is what they would have on the moon and then they would fly but they still have the wind factor. they couldn't get away from the wind factor. they would fly down on one sixth of the gravity using the same thrusters and everything you see and neil was the first in line to fly. he was doing most of the flying. one day he was out there and i forget which number was that it's in the book. he was out there and he's flying up in the wind was too tough that day. they went ahead and did it anyway. he lost all control of everything. he was three seconds like 100 feet three seconds off the ground that we nailed that down. that had never been nailed down. i went back and i got the guys that were actually there i actually got the transcript of what was said between him and the control trailer, everything. it's in the book. never before had that been found. i talked to the guy that was actually in charge of it and everything. some people have speculated that he was a split-second off the ground he would have been killed. it was the split-second off the ground. he was 2.84 seconds, almost three seconds off before he crashed. that's real close but when it rolled over and he had no control he knew he had to eject. so he ejected and came down and saved everything. saved his life in the whole nine yards but his ability to react under circumstances was another feather in his cap to be the first to land on the moon. in fact chris kraft and robert didn't want him to practice anymore. neil insisted that they should. when he landed evil on the moon he had 61 flights in that trainer. he told me, he said it was easier landing eagle on the moon that was flying this trainer. so anyway all of that practice and research that he put in it really paid off for him because when they were coming down it turned out the original target was a crater the size of a football field. so he had to actually fly over the surface of the men's 100 feet or so off. he's running out of gas trying to find a smooth place to sit down and so when i spotted this he got down below 50 feet and in his own mind he had calculated that as long as he had equal below 50 feet if he ran out of gas that was all right because under one sixth gravity it would settle down and not destroy itself hopefully in the right position that he could take off again. he wasn't really that concerned about it. when he did finally touched do down, the miscalculations they came up with he had 16 seconds of fuel left. >> host: wow, it was a close landing. so, why was he chosen as the commander and one of the things about him is his first assignment was a backup commander on gemini and the commander said he never had to be the second pilot. he was always commander. why was he chosen as commander for apollo? >> guest: teac slayton who was the chief astronaut and chris kraft the chief test pilot who worked with him earlier in california. they had more confidence in him and as you say there was a lot of speculation going around that one was a civilian and one was in the military. it had nothing to do with it because if neil had not have made it, pete would have been the next with apollo 12 and pete could've handled it. one thing about it nixon called neil up, president nixon called him up and he said neil i want you to know that if you have to abort you will get another chance to land on the moon. i don't want you taking chances to land because you think it's in your only chance. neil told me that he made the same promise to the other guys later on down but neil was smart enough to know that after he landed on the man moon that was it. he wasn't going to get another shot as a national hero. that is what kennedy did to john glenn. after the first orbital flight of mercury would never got another chance to fly because kennedy said he said national hero and you don't risk his life and besides kennedy became pretty good friends. >> host: obviously there was great skill in being picked to be the commander of a landing mission. it lined up in the order that he would be in command. >> guest: that's right but you see when deagan them minded up levin was to make the first landing. neil got that one as commander. they talked about it in apollo 8 while they were circling the moon. they talked about with it with mission control because neil was back up not jim lovell but frank boorman backup commander. they talked about it and he asked about the crew. i called the crew in the book, called them the misfits because they were not beer drinking buddies. they were from different backgrounds but as neil said i wasn't looking for buddies to drink beer with. i was looking for the best guys out there and i thought there's nobody better to have in the command module then jim lovell and mike collins. and he said buzz a ph.d. and everything. he made the scientist boys happy and another thing there was a lot of speculation about buzz aldrin was so mad because he wasn't the first guy on the moon. he didn't take one picture of neil armstrong on the moon. when that started speculating i asked neil about it and he said what the hill are they talking about? i had the camera. he said buzz had to put up these external. he said i gave buzz the camera for a few minutes before we had to get back on board and he did take pictures and in fact he took one of me loading the rocks. that's on the cover of the book him loading rocks and that was taken by buzz aldrin. it never occurred to them that the press didn't know any bett better. that's just the way it was. >> host: i thought buzz had a chest mounted camera. >> guest: know he did not have that. neil had it but neil passed it to him. he was setting it up. he had to take it off and give it to neil or to give it to buzz and then buzz gave it back to him. >> host: i know there has been a lot of discussion about whether buzz resented being displaced and neil going out first but neil you say didn't think there was much to this. >> guest: well, know what happened was buzz wanted them to talk to the flight crew group and a flight group was flight group is determined who should go out first. it would have been almost physically impossible for a bus to go out first because he would have had to come over neil to go out. it made sense for neil to go out first and for him to be the last backend. but deke slayton's reasoning i was very simple. buzz was the lunar module pilot. it was the lunar module that set him on the moon so buzz had to monitor all of the systems. now of course the commander could fly both but like the command ship collins and the lunar module buzz aldrin they were first in line on the system and everything was working fine. he didn't know in a one sixth environment because they were used to working with the systems and much heavier gravity how these fluids would settle down and if they would stay settled in all of this. this was a lot of their concerns so buzz is playing it like a piano to get everything settled. while it worked out better than anticipated because they told us a bit y. they said when they first planned we are going to get them a four hour rest to sleep. i said you go out that way and a touchdown on the first place other than her you want to get on that moon as best as you can at least grab a handful of dirt and show us that you were there. when i told neil that, neil laughed and he said you are absolutely right. we want to get out as quickly as wicked we could. >> host: this week period was planning. >> guest: it was to keep the press thinking that was what they were doing instead of the press speculating on while they had problems here and do some bad and playing up these stories. that is why they use their crews. in fact i did a story with neil on that when he told me what you didn't know about the moonwalk and that was in 200942008, one of the two. we put it on "msnbc".com. 2 million hits. still a record. of course today there are so many web sites out there. you would never do that again but it's still a record. they came back and read the story that we did. we had other things too. >> host: we are down to four minutes and i have to ask this question which is of course how did he deal with his fame? obviously some people thought it was better that armstrong went out first because he might have dealt with it better but in any case it was a hard thing for him at this personality to be at least for while the most famous person on earth. >> guest: that's true. he thought of things. his personality was that he was totally dedicated. his family knew what he did and they supported him. the family was very important to him. he was trusted all the way down the line being the father that he was but he went out and flew the x. 15 mission shortly after they buried karen ann and janet, i don't know this for a fact that janet you know she resented it. but i'm the same type of person. i don't know about you but if i have a job to do and i lose a family member and this is happened, i don't need to sit around in grief for two or three weeks. i need to get to work and that is the way he was getting back on the job and taking care of things. he wanted to make sure he got everything right and as he used to say don't brag about what you can do, show them what you can do. he was doing this. it was this type of work ethic that they were so familiar with that they felt like he was the guy for the job. let's say that he had to abort his landing. they had a great guy pete conrad right behind him who could handle it because they would have learned that much more. in fact the only real problem they had was the 1201 in the 1203. when m.i.t. designed the computers going down they designed them that they had two systems, flight control systems. they have the primary and they have emergency. so anyway they said you can only run one. buzz look at the thing and he said this is stupid. if i have to switch to a primary to emergency he says they need to know where we are so i have got to run both the maoist executive overload. it turned out they read what it was and they went ahead and landed three at. >> host: me wasn't comfortable with being famous afterwards. he tried various things. he was a professor and as you mentioned earlier he had been on the challenger investigation. >> host: >> guest: he was the most happy on his dairy farm. that is one of the reasons why i became friends with him. i'm a small-town boy and john glenn was the same way. we were all friends close together doing things. we weren't pure drinking buddies but a lot of times neil and i would wind up come he would call me up and we would wind up going to cocoa beach when he was in town. we would go in and have a couple of drinks and just sit there and talk about the things generally small-town people. mike collins was a metropolitan and all and he couldn't believe people could live on a farm with cows or people could live in a city like new york where they are rubbing elbows out of time. >> host: is very nice talking to you. i enjoyed hearing the stories. thank you very much. >> guest: thank you and people should know who you are at the smithsonian. it's been a real privilege and thank you for the interview. >> host: okay, thank you for the interview. >> that was "after words" booktv signature program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists public policymakers, legislators and others familiar with their material. "after words" airs every weekend on booktv at 10:00 p.m. on saturday, 12:09 p.m. on sunday and 12:00 a.m. on monday. you can also watch "after words" on line. go to booktv.org and click on on "after words" in the booktv series and topics list on the upper right side of the page. >> we are at the henry a. wallace country life center reaches 50 miles south and west of des moines. this is the birthplace home of henry a. wallace. the wallaces of iowa consists of three generations of offices. the patriarch was known as fondly as uncle henry and he was the founder of wallace's farmer magazine. his son henry c. wallace was u.s. secretary of agriculture under woodrow wilson and henry c.'s son was born on this farm in 1888 to one on to become editor of wallace's farmer magazine. he was announced by franklin roosevelt to serve as u.s. secretary of agriculture which he did for eight years from 1933 to 1941 and 1941 to 1945 he was roosevelt's vice president and u.s. secretary of agriculture. he was known for the agricultural adjustment act which was the first time that farmers were asked not to produce. at first people couldn't believe the things that he was proposing regarding that but then as prices went up they started to listen to him. people still refer to him today as the genius secretary of agriculture. >> booktv covers hundreds of author programs that the country a year long. here's a look at some of the events we will be attending this week. ..

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