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This is a NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project transcript of astronaut James A. McDivitt, interviewed by Doug Ward at Elk Lake, Michigan, on 29 June 1999. McDivitt talks about flying F-86s in Korea, test pilot work at Edwards, and his first class at the Aerospace Research Pilot School. He also covers turning down Dyna-soar, joining NASA in 1962 and learning to be an Apollo Program Manager. He describes the Change Board and says decisions were not second-guessed.
Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt 29 June 1999 12-58 And a lot of things will burn very quickly like that. WARD: Joe Shea, you alluded to, is the Apollo Spacecraft Program Manager at the time. And Joe ended up, along with his counterpart at North American, receiving a lot of the criticism for the accident and ultimately being replaced. Do you think that was really justified? MCDIVITT: No, not at all. Not at all. No, I think the criticism of both the North American Program Manager and the NASA Program Manager was totally unjustified. If other people were so smart, why didn’t they say something? I mean, we had the best engineers that we could find. We had good crewmembers. We had everybody who knew anything about space working on this thing. And nobody said anything about it. So, for them to then focus on just a couple of people and say that they were at fault was, I think, really idiotic and, well, possibly looking for scapegoats. But it wasn’t warranted. WARD: There was another countercurrent going amidst all of this. And it was the same kind of a current that was flowing at the time of the Challenger accident, and that was in the press corps, where the attitude that prevailed was that: if the press had been a little more vigilant, since it was so clear to everybody following the accident what the cause was, the press should have been able to figure this out and alert the world—and NASA—to the fact that they had a problem. MCDIVITT: Well, I think that there’s a—I think that the press does some good things. I think they do a lot of bad things, too. And I tend to deal with the press on an individual basis. There are some good guys, and there are some bad guys. And that was the way I dealt with
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