When you work in the White House, people are likely to listen to you and want to talk with you, because, again, it is all about access. This was a real life, not a scholarly life, not a theoretical life. I was done with that. If you did not perform in the White House, then all that had come before in your life was worth nothing. You would go home having lost all you might have built yourself up to be.
But you also lose a certain innocence in the White House. You see things you do not want to see. You see people behaving in an untoward manner, such as a staffer rifling through another staffer’s desk. If the president says, “Let us sit down and reason together,” it means you’ve already lost.
I had come into the White House believing everything. I left believing half, or three-fourths, which means that I had lost the comfort of uncritical belief. One needs to believe in one’s country and in one’s president. For most young men my age, even back then, loss of belief did not mean so much. But it meant a lot to me. I lost, well, a certain softness. I had knowledge about the war in Vietnam that was not much discussed then, but we Fellows knew that America was into some very bad things. One thing we knew a year before the New York Times and others blew it open was that the war was a disaster for the United States. It was hard to accept.
We Fellows also lost interest in life beyond the White House. Nothing seemed so good or important out there. We lost sleep. We lost time to jog or swim or pay bills or pick up our dry cleaning or see the dentist. We lost visits home to our families. We lost the money we might have been making had we not taken the fellowship in the first place—for our salaries were unremarkable. We all wondered whether our posts were leading us to the very subtle shift from faith to cynicism. We knew only that we would not be the same people as when we started. We did not move from the outer prefectures into the heart of the kingdom only to discover that the emperor resembled our old neighbors. But we saw that he was, in fact, just a man.
On December 15, 1966, an unexpected political shock occurred. Bill Moyers, White House press secretary and special assistant to the president, abruptly resigned. At the age of thirty-two, he was widely considered the most powerful figure in the administration after the president, and he was a man I greatly respected and admired. No one except Bill, who was exceptionally close to President Johnson, knows definitely whether the resignation was forced or not. Bill, to his great credit, has so far as I know steadfastly refused to talk or write about the event or about any of his private conversations with the president. But what was known was that Bill opposed escalation of the war, while President Johnson was torn about it. A defensive president was not a pretty sight to those of us inside his house.
One incident during my White House days stands out in vivid relief. I arranged to meet with Wernher von Braun during the summer of 1967. He was fifty-five years old. Everybody knew about him, but Jewish people knew about him in a special way. Von Braun had worked with the Nazis at the infamous rocketry base at Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea in northern Germany. He was working there when my Aunt Bertha and her family were hiding under a windmill in Holland.
There is debate about whether he, the architect of the Nazi V-2 rocket program, believed in Hitler’s cause. He was an officer of the Schutzstaffel, the SS. He worked alongside slaves, though he later said that the whole slave-labor thing repulsed him. The only thing certain is that his true passion in life was space and space travel.
No one told me I had to go see von Braun to report to my boss about the status of NASA and our space efforts. I wanted to meet von Braun for a personal reason. He was then the director of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Having become a naturalized citizen of the United States after the war, he had restarted his life in Alabama. I met him at his office there.
It was a bright and humid summer day. Sweat spread like an oil stain around the trench of my back. His handshake was strong, and I could not help thinking übermensch. If Hitler had wanted to design an Aryan, it would surely have been in the image of this rocketeer.
Behind his desk were plastic models of different kinds of rockets. Our conversation was terribly banal. He answered all the questions I put to him—about vertical takeoff and landing designs, the moon program, the space program—in a concise engineer’s way. Indeed, he had done great things for the advancement of our space program.
Our meeting lasted about an hour. It still seems implausible: a Jewish man meeting on a friendly basis in the American South with a former officer of the SS. Toward the end of the meeting, I asked him about the evolution of rocketry,
