| POWERING APOLLO: James E. Webb of NASA W. Henry Lambright Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-8018-6205-21 | ||||
| ISBN 0-8018-6205-11 | 271pp. | HC/BWI | $? | |
| Page 46: | "As a tragic aftermath, Forrestal's emotional health, already poor, deteriorated rapidly. In May 1949, late at night, in the midst of severe depression, the nation's first secretary of defense leapt to his death from a sixteenth-floor window of the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland." |
| This word, uh, leaped out at me. I thought it must be a spelling error: S/B either "lept" or "leaped". But I checked, and Lambright's usage is correct. |
| Page 52: | In a quote: "Can you imagine the Under Secretary bounding about the building..." |
| This is just one example of Lambright's inconsistent capitalization of titles. Generally, he doesn't capitalize them, viz. "under secretary of state". That would be OK — if he stuck to it. |
| Page 110: | "He said, 'That's my job to worry about that. I'll see to it that our charter let's us do what we need to do.' " |
| Remove apostrophe: S/B "lets". |
| Page 152: | "NASA had been having considerable trouble with North American, the contractor with the largest role in Apollo, responsible for both the Apollo spacecraft and Saturn rocket second stage (S-2). Schedule slippages and other problems brought tensions to a point where Phillips in December 1965 had assembled a 'tiger team'—a group of top NASA specialists—to go to North American and find out what was going wrong and why. After talking with both North American management and working engineers, Phillips had written Mueller an angry memo on December 18, 1965, filled with specific complaints and naming people he regarded as at fault. While he did not name North American's president, Lee Atwood, he left no doubt that Atwood's 'passive role' was responsible for the situation. Such passivity was unacceptable to Phillips, in view of the inept performance of the head of Space and Information Division (S&ID), the key North American man running NASA's work, Harrison Storms." |
| See next entry. |
| Page 170: | "Within NASA, Storms was controversial. Aptly nicknamed 'Stormy', he was exceedingly strong-willed, a trait that helped and hurt him. Many of Webb's top associates regarded him as stubborn, and Phillips and Mueller questioned his competence. Mueller felt that the Apollo spacecraft was too complex a machine for Storms, whose approach to management he described as 'basically to yell at people to go fix things.' After the fire, Webb became convinced that Storms had to be replaced, not least because Storms, like Shea, resisted making major changes in the spacecraft." |
| In my review of Mike Gray's book1, I stated that Harrison Storms was made the "sacrificial lamb" after the 1967 Apollo fire. Perhaps he was not so blameless. What is certain is that this book agrees that, from the viewpoint of his company, Storms was at least competent enough to retain in his position as S&ID head. |
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