He didnt 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 werent even here when he walked on the moon. The other asked it not said jay if you dont do it who else is going to do a quicks jim calls it a great book and adds to neils legacy. We did our level best to try to get this done for the history. We have had a heavy Library Event sale so thats great. We were trying to get neils 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 thats Jim Thompsons the first manned. Guest thats the official, thats his official biography. You know, be assigned to do that and this is not a biography. Its a recreation of his story on direct observation and research generally referred to as a repertoire. That is what it is. I hate biographies. I dont want to do biographies. Host you have party done to already done to better sort of, quasisomewhere 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 didnt talk much. Most people didnt 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. Its 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 neils best friend. No, i was not neils best friend. I dont know who the heck neils 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 didnt 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 didnt 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 didnt 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 hed say oh yeah go ahead. We never had a situation where that didnt take place and he fully trusted me. He told me things that if i say i cant 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 vicechairman 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. Hes 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 couldnt 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 didnt give you an answer that wasnt 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 thats 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 wellestablished 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 Staffords 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 threestar general he retired as a threestar 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. Thats 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 queks. Guest you have a certain answer you had to give and if you didnt didnt 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, its 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 years 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 rightwing 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 dont want to be doing 350 knots 20 feet off the ground. Thats no place to go but he managed to nurse it back. He couldnt land on the carrier because he couldnt slow it down enough without rolling it. He figured he couldnt 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 didnt work too hard at it because he didnt 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 didnt 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 arent 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 emailed it to neil. He checked it and he liked it. I said thats her opening chapter but i could never quite bring into the computer. The man just couldnt brag on himself. He couldnt 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 youre a pilot. I couldnt 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 Martins press and they write the most grandiose things you can think of. I think they wrote i was neils best friend and it was an autobiography. I dont 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 neils attorney and the attorney for the trust. She is also carol his widows 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 dont 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 dont do it. Dont get me wrong, nobody in neils 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 dont know if they really thought how good of a chance i had being the substantial publisher that i have. But it doesnt matter because i have been sending them anything and any question they have asked. I think mark called up and said, set an email 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 didnt 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 email and i still have our conversation between neoand die so theres no question about it. I said mark its 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 dont think of dont 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 wasnt 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 recreation, a written recreation 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 lees to kill a mockingbird. That is based basically on her life and in fact Truman Capote is the mayor. Hes 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 its what you do. You are just recreating 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 recreation. Host i am recreating 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