He might have launched into a soliloquy about the terrible decisions he had made, about his being an accomplice to horrors. Then I would have described how my own family had nearly been drawn back into Germany to be eliminated and might very well have wound up in the same concentration camp where he had worked. He might have asked me to forgive him, and of course, I would not have.
When he talked about rocketry, I tried to pay attention, tried to avoid thinking about the Nazis. On his desk were pencils sitting in what resembled a wooden canoe. (Remember, I create mental images of the places and people I encounter.) The desk itself was wood and was polished so sharply that it shone. A white phone. A brown leather calendar and a dark brown desk blotter. Closed manila folders. A white kerchief stuck out of his breast pocket. He spoke with an unmistakable German accent, one I had heard frequently back in Buffalo.
Von Braun would be celebrated as the person primarily responsible for our country’s putting a man on the moon. He also worked at Peenemünde, where more slaves died making the V-2 than were killed by the rocket in England, its target. We concluded the meeting. I stood up, and we shook hands. His hand had shaken that of President Kennedy. His hand had grasped the hand of Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler. His hand had buttoned the tunic of a black SS uniform, had risen to hail Hitler. On his way back to the officers’ quarters after dinner, might he have paused one night to look up at the starry sky he loved so much and seen the souls of Jewish people passing into the heavens?
I left and got on a plane back to Washington.
As my fellowship drew to a close, I had multiple offers to continue in the Johnson administration or elsewhere in government, but I had a desire to start my own technology company and was fortunate enough to attract considerable financial support from Wall Street investors for the enterprise. What’s more, having established many relationships at Harvard with participants in President Kennedy’s New Frontier program and similar connections with figures in Washington, I also had a large pool of extraordinary talent to draw from. Some of those people, including Bill Moyers and various former cabinet officials, would soon join me. Not long afterwards, I also sold (for a handsome sum) the technology behind my compressed-speech machine and thus was blessed with considerable resources of my own that I could direct toward later businesses.
More about those companies in future chapters, but this first one was wonderfully aligned with what had so inspired me back in my college days: President Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s. Even when I was newly blind, I felt the thrill of that challenge. Now, my company would be helping design the computer system for the initial lunar excursion module.
Almost two full years after that triumphal moment—on June 28, 1971—I happened to be back in Buffalo. My little sister Brenda’s high-school graduation ceremony was that weekend. The whole family was going. Then an urgent call was put through to me from Washington to say that someone was trying to reach me. It was my mother, right there in Buffalo. When I spoke with her, she told me to go to the emergency room at Columbus Hospital. My father, Carl, had been in an accident at his shop.
After having lost all his money in the scrap-metal business, Carl had fallen back on selling rags—far less profitable than metal. For months, I had been asking him to retire, and he had finally agreed. I told him that I would take care of him.
It was the day before his retirement. He was driving a forklift around his warehouse, moving bales of rags from one place to another, and he accidentally drove the forklift into a brick wall. The forks pierced the wall, which fell upon Carl and crushed his chest. How long he had lain there, how he had gotten to the hospital, what it had smelled like among the rags and dust and old brick and ammonia and creosote, and how the broken sternum and the punctured lungs must have felt—these were things I would think about later.
The doctor came out and signaled for me to follow. “How is he?” I asked.
Doctors and nurses brushed by, intent on their various duties.
“Your father expired, Mr. Greenberg.”
I thought I hadn’t heard correctly. Of course, I knew this was a possibility, but it took my breath away. I didn’t hear much else of what the doctor said.
Later that day I made the funeral arrangements and contacted family members. The following day, I gave the eulogy at the service. I settled Carl’s debts and other financial liabilities, including a payment of $14,000 that needed to be made to the city because of his responsibility for the collapse of the brick wall—he had been operating in a condemned building. People rested their heads on my shoulders in their grief. I grieved, too, although in a way different from the others, I think. As I have explained, after my biological father, Albert, passed away it was as if I had become the leader of the family. I felt comfortable in the role: I was a son but also a father—to my brother and sisters.
So it was that at night, and for brief moments during the day in Buffalo after Carl’s passing, I thought about our family’s various burdens, but also of our blessings. The hard ride our family had had, but also that we were a family—that my family before, as well as my family now, understood completely what it really meant to be a family. That it meant something to us to have our religion: that, too, we knew very clearly. One
