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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.
“Mission Control”9 pages
Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt 29 June 1999 12-94 you’ve got to come over here. We’ve got to put something together for the President, and I don’t have the time to do all of this stuff.” So, she grumbled and moaned and quit complaining and came over. And I told her generally what the outline was. And she put together a letter, and then I went ahead and corrected it. And in between other things we were doing, we got this letter out to the President. And I don’t know what the President was going to do with it, because he sure wasn’t going to second-guess me! You know, speaking of this second-guessing. I don’t know if you’ve talked to Rocco Petrone yet or not, or whether you will. But, you know, Rocco was the toughest—he was the toughest gorilla in the valley! And he just scared the living daylights out of everybody in NASA. And I think that we would’ve never had an Apollo Program if Rocco hadn’t been down at the Cape, got that thing built the way he did, and then—and he had this reputation as being so hard-nosed! And then he became the Program Director when I became the Apollo Spacecraft Program Manager. And in the three or four years we worked together, he never raised his voice to me one single time. We got along just like this. He used to still terrorize the guys down at the Cape and the guys at Marshall. But he and I got along so wonderfully. And I had so many tough decisions to make, and Rocco never second-guessed me. You know, “What’s your decision in this, Jim?” And, “Should we go or should we not go?” And if we were going to go, he endorsed it. And, well, it was a real pleasure working with him. He was a topnotch guy. He was a real bulldog. When we had an engineering problem, he’d get on the teleconference sometimes, we didn’t have videoconferences in those days, and we’d discuss a scratch in the tank for maybe eight hours. And we would go over every aspect that any human being could think of, and then we would do it ten more times. Because he was a great guy to work for. I just wanted
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