Chasing the Moon by Robert Stone & Alan Andres

Author:Robert Stone & Alan Andres
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2019-06-04T04:00:00+00:00

Far more than Hollywood’s portrayal of von Braun in I Aim at the Stars, Lehrer’s brief musical takedown became the lasting artistic interpretation of his life and legacy. What irked Lehrer wasn’t von Braun’s employment by NASA but his status as a national hero in the media, which he considered grotesque. Arthur C. Clarke provides one of the rare accounts of von Braun’s reaction to Lehrer’s song, recalling a party where Lehrer’s LP was played and Clarke witnessed von Braun’s usual good sense of humor “tested to the breaking point.”

With his subversive song, Tom Lehrer focused attention on the wartime past of von Braun and the Peenemünde Germans working on Apollo—something few American journalists covering the space program in the 1960s had revisited. For them, the story of the V-2’s development was old news and irrelevant to the bigger ongoing story. Von Braun’s colleague from Peenemünde Kurt Debus was now Cape Kennedy’s director of the Launch Operations Center. An imposing figure, with a face scarred from deep wounds sustained during his university fencing days in Darmstadt, Debus had been an active member in Heinrich Himmler’s SS during the Third Reich. Journalists weren’t comfortable detailing biographies such as his when writing pieces about Gemini and Apollo, even though in private they joked about the irony that a lot of former Nazis were going to put America on the Moon.

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