Occupation and that does not end and toe hiroshima. A and tell hiroshi meant with the Chinese Foreign minister there was the map at the held the stage and would like to get back to Something Like that. To do with very slowly and steadily without bloodshed if you look at the gambles that mao took we are all long way from that fate god so we are optimistic they are aware of their own problems. Everything is regional. One more question talk about making up a character such as montagu but todays headline on this cnn says Dennis Rodman you could do not make this up as well. [laughter] people have really crazy stories as well. But talk about rodman. A great basketball story about frankenstein. [laughter] i dont know i feel bad for him in the end he says i am practicing basketball diplomacy like pingpong diplomacy. And with the huge framework a very active framework that does not exist the chinese is very busy sending positive signals. In early 1971 as a signal. That would be a very easy low hanging fruit to show political goodwill. More than anything else. [applause] good morning i heard there was a vicious rumors going around i did not make it out of new york city so i am glad the volunteers believe this is with yourn this morning. I love great americani lo stories and i love beehives and a combination of those two things led me to tell this t amazing but looked over american story of ourou b original astronauts wives. I will bring back to 1959 there is the press conference in washington d. C. And the whole country is riveted waiting for the. Announcement of the mercury seven astronauts. War and we are looking to lease seven men, gus grissom, john glenn, allen sheppard, among them, as our cold war warriors, these silver suited spaceman who are going to take us to the stars and beyond. So you have these macho test pilots sitting up on this stage and something peculiar start happening. The reporters are raising their hands and instead of asking tell us about your bravery, about why you wanted to volunteer, the reporters want to hear what does your wife think about this . She is going to let you be catapulted into space, and so there is this immediate attention to the wives of these men. I want to tell you about some of the women. Renee carpenter is sort of the maryland monroe of the space age. She wakes up in garden grove, calif. Early in the morning and sees these headlights hovering in her yard. Is a the ufo . What is that . They are reporters who have come to interview her about what it is going to be like to be one of the wives of these spacemen. It is almost science fiction. Reporters cant believe it. Renee wanted to be an actress in high school, she opens the door, offers the reporters coffee. Some of them of brought doughnuts and they start taking pictures of her and her family as they are crawling all over her and she is a real dish. Jfk would later say he found her the most attractive of all the astronaut wives because of course as they are going to learn, theyre going to quickly go through this cinderella like transformation. In ohio at Wrightpatterson Air Force base, and gus grissoms wife betty received a phone call the night before from her husband, he said you might want to straighten up the house of that. Some reporters might be coming tomorrow. She looks around, the house is a mess, she is just getting over the flu, she feels terrible but somehow pulls it together, goes to the doctor the next morning and as she is stopping at a Grocery Store on her way home two reporters from life magazine encounter her in the vegetable aisle and want to know what she thinks about old gusts going into space. She just wants them to leave her alone. They followed her home. She is the shrinking violets of the group, very downtoearth, folksy, always repeated a quote of gustss which is we dont give a damn about keeping up with the joneses which is more along the lines of we dont give a darn about keeping up with the glenns, annie and john glenn, the superstar couple of the space age. You cant get more apple pie than them. They literally met in a playpen as toddlers in ohio. They are just both sprinkled with freckles, john glenn having that mad magazine kid face, annie to go with it and annie was the ultimate astronaut wife. As the women soon learned, it is not only emission about getting their husbands, these great a military test pilots who not only are picked for their piloting skills but as some of the Scientists Say when they pick the astronauts, there were wild series what were going to happen, where their hearts going to stop in space . Would they stop urinating . Was there Blood Pressure going to fall to zero, they were picked for being literally human cannonballs. Can they withstand it . The why. The couples were announced. Betty remembers investigators coming over to her neighbors home and asking questions about her. Would miss is grissom quote home cooked meal every night . She doesnt drink too much . Doesnt have any communist leanings . All of a sudden not only the astronauts but their wives, a r astrowives wives are tisch step to the entire world as examples of the height of American Family values and these wive these wives you know that probably the most stressful time to be an american housewife the late 50s and early 60s have to hold up this model of perfection so overnight they are transformed. I almost think of them as americas first Reality Stars and really its like that because life magazine bought the rights to their exclusive personal stories for half a Million Dollars in 1959 which was a huge amount of money and in exchange for that they were to allow reporters and photographers into their homes to chronicle their daytoday lives. What was it like to have your husband sitting on top of that rocket about to be blasted into space . So the women are sort of caught in this catch22 which is they are supposed to reveal who they are but yet theres this acute pressure to keep up with the glances, to be that model american housewife so they dont want to let out too much. In fact the book is turned into a Television Show which is going to air this summer on abc and just looking at some of the storylines, i mean its very funny because one of the other wives of this group trudy cooper was the only licensed pilot among the group a very adventurous girl. Of course you had to be an adventurous woman to be married to one of these guys who were ts these highperformance experimental experimental aircraft and then to go where no man of course has ever gone, first into space and then to the moon. Trudy cooper had a little bit too much of it top gun mentality and her husband playing around on her. So before he was picked as an astronaut gordo had to come with his tail between his legs back to his wife and save trudy i have this amazing opportunity. Im going to be picked as a master not. The only problem is they are not going to pick me if i dont have a wife and we were just separated. Basically they get back together for the sake of the space race and they later get divorced almost right after his career is over but those were the kinds of details that the wives were very skittish about letting out as they are having this incredible public eye in the spotlight shined into their lives. So the Program Starts out in langley, virginia. All of the families packed up and moved to virginia and the men start training. They are down in Cape Canaveral, of course florida and one of the most interesting things i learned just starting out on the book was how the cape this incredible mens playground down there where they were working hard but also playing hard was in no wives is all at first. Going to the cape for a wife was totally off limits. They actually werent allowed to go out where the rockets took off from an further early flights all of the wives would watch from the beach. At one point geeks ladens wife marge said this is ridiculous. You are going to be going into space and i cant go to the cape . Whats going on out there anyway . She tells him he had better drivers out there and heights are under some blankets in the back of his car and they go out past the military guards and she gets out there and pops head and of course its sort of a lonely each instance where a brush and what not and she said the whole time she is dying for a cigarette. This was the kind of spunk and a reference that these women brought to this brave new world of being an astronaut wife. You suddenly have these seven women all different walks of life. Alan shepards wife louise was very sort of highbred and i think of her as a Sabrina Audrey hepburn character. She grew up as the the gardeners daughter in these long word Longwood Gardens and in the state on the east coast. When she met Jackie Kennedy she treated jackie like she was an old friend. They were to private school girls getting to know each other. But you had this band forming. These women are in the public eye and they dont know how to deal with it at first until they start giving each other little words of that size like if a Reporter Asks you something you dont know anything about, dont worry. Just say its classified, you know. One of my favorite stories, because a lot of the inspiration for writing the book just came out of these incredible technicolor looking photographs from life magazine. The wives were on the cover of life dozens of times from 1959 to 1972 at the end of the Apollo Program. The wives had their first cover shoot and they are all going to be clustered around this mayor mayor mercury capsule which when you see it today the smithsonian, this thing looks really flimsy and you can understand why its nick name was the canon. You can understand how terrified it would be to have your spouse ride in that thing especially because many of the early test launches have gone absolutely haywire with explosions and things just not going right into the last minute. But the women are told by life in nasa that they are to where these proper pastel shirt waits waits shirtwaist dresses the epitome of the perfect housewife so they start this tradition of the round robin phonecall which would last throughout the space race and calling each other. Are you really going to wear that . What color lipstick are you going to wear and theyll decide they are going to wear pink lipstick and everyone is going to wear a shirtwaist dressed except her Scott Carpenters wife. Reid is a old character intellectual, a really independent woman who will end up hosting her own feminist talk show in the mid70s and looking sort of Gloria Steinem like in many dresses and skirts. She says according to the other wives im not going to let the government tell me what to wear. We are astronaut wives now. Our husbands are civilian. They are no longer military so she is joseph to the military and shes wearing this cocktail dress with big red roses and red high heels and of course the other wives are sort of aghast. But she really i think makes the shot. So you have that kind of melding of personalities coming together. Of course the men meanwhile, they are becoming rock stars and everything that goes along with it. They are getting 1 dollar corvettes which they can. In every year and get a new one. Alan shepard has this really snazzy white corvette. They are getting 1 dollar a night hotel rooms at the holiday inn. This is all down in cocoa beach which is bay city and just lit up with all sorts of neon signs of moons and stars and intergalactic fanfare. The women actually come down to cocoa beach for a sort of ladies weekend and one of the original mercury seven astronauts remembered walking into the lobby of the holiday inn and two women, these astronaut groupies who had come with the adorable name of cape cookies fall to their knees in front of her astronaut, her husband. What is going on . So you have throughout the space race having to maintain this semblance of everything is fine at home. Oh of course, my husband i am sure just goes home to the holiday as soon as he finishes work. Meanwhile course there are all sorts of tabloid headlines coming out and everything. She moves to houston in 1962 and i had a lot of fun learning about this whole area known as together spilled. This is what makes nonfiction writing so tantalizing. This was the space burbs where all of the astronauts and their wives moved. Its almost like Beverly Hills of space men. There were tour buses that would wind their way through the streets of these little subdivisions where john and annie glenn lived next to Scott Carpenter and his wife, whered Eddie Grissom and joe lived a few streets down, where the Media Attention on these families was so a few there green and joe had a doorway else in between their two yards which they called the rabbit hole that they could scurry back and forth between during a fight so the priest press wouldnt see them. Astronaut kids were chased down the halls of the holiday and when they went to visit and they were always told not to open the door to any reporters because they have this exclusive agreement with life magazine. One in anecdote that one of the astronaut kids shared with me that i always have fun remembering is during apollo 11 that flight, the wives first of all janet armstrong, pat collins, a soldier ins wife joan actually had to hide in back seats of neighbors cars to go to the Beauty School beauty parlor because there was a media circus on their suburban lawns. At one point Michael Collins kids opened the door and they were given a present of a panda bear. It was two journalists from i think china bringing them this teddy bear. It turned out there was a microphone hidden inside its stomach. Its this kind of Marx Brothers relationship with cat and mouse game with the press and the wives. Now as one of the wifes put it, she said our wives were composed of highs and lows and in a way what is so remarkable about this group of women is how down to earth they have maintained so their personalities. They were strongly patriotic. They felt that they were given sort of an equal task in supporting their husbands mission into the stars and they were going to do everything they could to support the countrys effort, to support their husbands even when it meant talking things into the backs of drawers, emotional things to deal with later, sweeping things under the rug. As i mentioned they are living in this truman show existence where divorce was allowed within nasa until 1967 when it erupted the first space divorce. So the women had to rely on each other. The men were away at Cape Canaveral and they would fly their hot t38s down to florida on monday warning and wouldnt return until friday night when they would fly their planes over low and rattle the houses and some of the astronauts would wave and say hi honey im home. But the roast in the oven. Your astronaut is home. I went back with some of the women and one in two alan beans first wife. We went into their old house and we were overlooking the pool. Alan bean who of course was the fourth man to walk on the moon on apollo 12 who had done this whole mosaic are with the astronaut insignia. Sue was just sort of very beautiful still today, lawns texan. She is looking out over the pool and she says buzz and joan used to live over there in the facets were over there and this was a really swinging place and it was. The wives in the 60s formed the Astronaut Wives Club which would meet once a month just to sort of support each other and get to know each other. These were monthly tea and coffee events. They would always gather in each others houses for all of the launches and these were just these fabulous scenes. Times have changed but deviled eggs and overflowing ashtrays and martini hours and just sort of being there to support each other and going through something that obviously very few will ever experience. And the way the wives dealt with the pressure was very different. Of course you have the pressure of your husband and you have the pressure of the media and their most dreaded moment even more than the possibility sometimes i think of something going wrong out there on the launch pad was the post Flight Press Conference this was the moment where all of the wives would have to walk out on their suburban lawn, face the cameras and give a statement. And receiving very little formal coaching from nasa besides what they heard back in the air air force and navy days which was feed your husband a Good Breakfast of steak and eggs so he doesnt get light headed up in the air. These women were basically told to act pictureperfect. So they sort of did this send up together. Rene carpenter who i mentioned glamorous outspoken blog came up with this onewoman show when she called it primly stable. That was her sendup name of the astronaut wife. Criminally was married to her perfect astronaut husband and of course they have a perfect astronaut children and they have their dog and she came up and she just said to the women basically, whatever it Reporter Asks you just tell them you are happy, proud and thrilled so throughout the decade basically whenever the wives are asked how they were feeling while their husbands were up there in space are being blasted into space, they often say happy proud and thrilled and of course reporters are tearing their hair out. No, we want to know how you feel but back then they really werent able to put the feeling into words. Of course they were scared of revealing too much in this highly competitive environment. If i show my fears like my husband maybe he will be bumped from the flight. Marilyn lovell married to jim lovell who were just a wonderful couple to this day, of course he is played by tom hanks in Apollo Apollo 13 when jim was going into space one of his gemini flights, maryland found out she was pregnant and she actually hid her pregnancy from jim first for a few months which is pretty remarkable until he finally found out. She said im sorry, i didnt want you to get bumped from the flight. Its a good idea we should