James A. McDivitt oral history (Doug Ward)

Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt
29 June 1999 12-75
with it. Scientists were up to here with it. Everybody was fighting for it! But it was a—you
know, I always thought that, you know, that was the reason we were doing it.
WARD: Well, you really took some concrete steps, did you not, to improve the relationship
with the scientific community?
MCDIVITT: Yeah. Yeah, I did. You know, they were—they used to get as excited in some
of their things like site selections and other things like that. I mean, those generated as much
heat as the battles that we used to have between the flight controllers and the astronauts, or
the engineering guys and the flight controllers, the engineering guys and the astronauts, or
the program guys and the astronauts.
As a matter of fact, I remember one meeting—as a matter of fact, it was the only time
I did it at NASA—we were involved in a site selection. And some of the scientists would
like to land on this four-inch square on top of a mountain peak. And of course, we weren’t
going to try anything like that. One of the guys, whose name will go unmentioned, got so
obnoxious at the meeting I finally said to him, “Okay,”—his name wasn’t Charlie, but let’s
call him Charlie—I said, “Okay, Charlie, we don’t do that in here. You go outside and sit.
When you feel that you can talk like a normal human being, you can come back in here and
join in with the rest of it.”
And so, he thought I was kidding. And I said, “I’m not joking. Get out of here!”
“You can’t get me out of here. I’m from Headquarters!” And I said, “Get out of here!” So,
he left. And 20 minutes later, he came back in; and we conducted—we continued the
meeting without him. And then when he got back, we continued the meeting with him. And
we finally came to a reasonable compromise on what we’d do. And—