michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” There are two stories from the 1960s that America likes to tell about itself, the civil rights movement and the race to reach outer space. Today: The brief moment when those stories collided. It’s Sunday, July 21. Emily Ludolph, how did you come upon this story?

emily ludolph

So last fall I’m down in the morgue, which is this massive room three stories underground stacked with filing cabinets full of the photo archives of The New York Times. And it’s not just me down there. It is a scanning team that is digitizing all these photos. The Obituaries team is pulling files on whoever they’re writing about that day. And I was over in the Science section going through these manila envelopes, and I pull one out, and it’s stuffed full of images. And the people who have folders down in the morgue are incredibly well-known people. They are Eleanor Roosevelt and Diego Rivera and Donna Karan, and the name on this folder is Ed Dwight, and I’ve never heard of that name before. So I open it up, and it’s full of these beautiful, black-and-white, glossy photographs of this handsome African-American man. He’s in a flight suit. He’s being photographed next to these big 1960s jet fighter planes. And I’m thinking to myself, who is this guy and why does he have this huge file? So I go back upstairs, and I start going through the digitized archives of The Times, and one of the first headlines that comes up about him is “Negro Astronaut Aiming for Moon.”

archived recording The president of the United States. [APPLAUSE]

[music]

archived recording (john f. kennedy) I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth. archived recording 1 Astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Edwin E. Aldrin and Michael Collins, the three men who will make the next and most historic round trip to the moon. archived recording 2 T minus 10, 9, 8. We have a go for main engine start. We have main engine start. 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, liftoff. archived recording 3 Apollo 11, Apollo 11, this is Houston, over. archived recording 4 O.K. Neil, we see you coming down the ladder now. archived recording 5 Roger, we copy. archived recording (neil armstrong) It takes a pretty good little jump. That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

emily ludolph

And I’m wondering, what is this guy’s story, and how does it fit into the story of the journey to the moon that we all know?

michael barbaro

And how did you go about answering that question?

emily ludolph

Well, I started by just punching Ed Dwight’s name into Google, and a website comes up, and that website had an email address. And I was like, oh, my God, this guy is alive, because all of these articles are from 1963. So I emailed that email address, having no idea what would come back, and he wrote back to me the same day. So I gave him a call.

[phone ringing] ed dwight Ed Dwight. emily ludolph Hi, Ed. It’s Emily. ed dwight Yeah, uh huh.

emily ludolph

And I thought, oh, my God, he doesn’t want to talk to me at all.

emily ludolph I’m so excited to talk to you. I’ve been reading a lot of old newspaper articles about you. ed dwight Oh, boy. You got to watch that.

emily ludolph

The conversation starts off sort of very reticent.

ed dwight Well, the story and everything else in my life’s being is rather complex.

emily ludolph

But he eventually opened up, and we ended up spending over an hour on that first phone call with him telling me his entire life story.

ed dwight I’m originally from Kansas City, Kansas.

emily ludolph

So Ed tells me this story of growing up.

ed dwight I started school at two.

emily ludolph

And he is clearly incredibly ambitious, incredibly precocious.

[music]

ed dwight My mom got me a library card at the age of four, and I lived in the library.

emily ludolph

He’s an altar boy at the local Catholic church.

ed dwight My mom started me working at nine.

emily ludolph

He’s delivering food for his parents’ restaurant. He has —

ed dwight Two paper routes —

emily ludolph

— two paper routes.

ed dwight — not one.

emily ludolph

And close to where his family lives is the local airport.

ed dwight I was just a black kid that was just hanging around. And so when I was about maybe 5 or 6, they started paying me money to clean out your airplanes.

emily ludolph

In addition to his other jobs, Ed will go off to this airport and clean the pilots’ planes.

ed dwight And they’d give me a nickel or a dime. And when I got to be about 10 or 11, I said, I want to fly. I mean, I don’t want the money. I want to know where you guys go when you leave and where the hell have you been when you come back.

emily ludolph

He loves being at the airport. He loves the airplanes. He loves dreaming about where they’re going when they fly off on these trips.

ed dwight But this was a white man’s world. Kansas was segregated at the time. And I never for a minute thought that I would ever really fly an airplane. I mean, that just was crazy.

emily ludolph

And then —

ed dwight But this was my private fantasy.

emily ludolph

— one day he’s on his paper route, and he looks down at his newspaper.

ed dwight On the front page of one of my newspapers was an African-American pilot.

emily ludolph

And he sees a photograph of an African-American Air Force pilot who’s been shot down in Korea.

ed dwight And he was on the front page standing on the wing of a jet. He was a prisoner of war.

emily ludolph

And sort of paradoxically, given the subject matter, Ed goes, this is great news.

ed dwight And I says, oh my, God. They’re letting black folks fly jets.

emily ludolph

They’re letting black guys fly jets.

michael barbaro

And so this is a revelation to him?

emily ludolph

That’s right.

ed dwight I immediately applied for pilot training.

emily ludolph

So he sets about building a course load for himself toward pilot training. And he goes to the local library, and he gets all of these flight manuals out.

ed dwight They say manuals they use in training pilots.

emily ludolph

And he’s poring over them. He’s basically memorizing them.

ed dwight I would take them home and take all the exams at the end of the chapters. I would study the chapters. emily ludolph Wow. ed dwight So anyway, I went on to join the Air Force.

emily ludolph

He joins the Air Force, and it turns out when it comes time to take his flight certification test, it is the same tests that have been in the back of these library books the whole time.

ed dwight So sure enough, I miss two questions on the two-hour exam.

emily ludolph

He aces them.

ed dwight And they immediately call a college, called my mom. You’ve got a kid that’s a genius! [LAUGHS]

emily ludolph

And he very quickly from there starts to rise through the ranks. He goes from second lieutenant to first lieutenant.

ed dwight Sent my flying time up faster than other guys.

emily ludolph

All of his reviews and ratings are outstanding. He’s getting comments from his superiors that say things like Ed shows leadership tendencies. He’s doing advanced certifications in engineering and mechanics and mathematics. He gets an engineering degree, and he ends up at Travis Air Force Base near San Francisco. So meanwhile —

archived recording Another spectacular year in the space race.

emily ludolph

— the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union is heating up.

archived recording The Soviets on October 12, Columbus Day, launched an innovation in space travel, the three-manned space bus.

emily ludolph

In April of 1961, the Russians get the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin.

archived recording — a 27-year-old Soviet Air Force officer whose name will live in history.

emily ludolph

And when he comes back, he goes on this world tour.

archived recording Major Gagarin looked as pleased to arrive in Britain as Britain was to greet him.

emily ludolph

Visiting Asia and Africa and everywhere he goes, he’s greeted by these screaming, enthusiastic crowds, ticker-tape parades. He is enormously popular. And back in the U.S., Edward R. Murrow —

michael barbaro

The television anchor.

emily ludolph

— yes, who is, at this point, head of the U.S. Information Agency, which is in charge of sort of the hearts-and-minds story of America abroad, looks at this man being adored by all of these crowds. And he writes to the head of NASA — and we have that letter. He says, “Why don’t we put the first nonwhite man in space? If your boys were to enroll and train a qualified Negro and then fly him in whatever vehicle is available, we could retell our whole space effort to the whole nonwhite world, which is most of it.” This request makes its way over to President Kennedy’s desk, who passes it on to the vice president, Lyndon Johnson, who kind of gathers together all of the heads of the different military agencies. And they say, can you help us find this man? And the search is on.

[music]

michael barbaro

And how do they go about finding this man? What qualifications are they looking for?

emily ludolph

Well, that’s an interesting question, because all the way back at the end of the 1950s, when they are first trying to figure out, O.K., who should be an astronaut? They’re asking themselves, should it be a scuba diver? Should it be a racecar driver? Should we have arctic explorers? Should we host a nationwide competition so anyone can apply? But President Eisenhower, who was a career military man, vetoes this idea. He says they have to be military men. They have to be test pilots. A part of the reason for that is security clearances. It’s test pilots are used to flying things that no one has ever flown before in hostile environments, and they are the best at staying levelheaded and cool when problems arise that no one has ever seen before. So in making that requirement that they be test pilots — I mean, the military had only desegregated a decade before. Women had never flown combat missions. So it is effectively ensuring that those first classes of astronauts are going to be male and white.

ed dwight He put together a set of credentials that would eliminate every black pilot in the universe.

emily ludolph

So this request from President Kennedy is essentially impossible to fulfill because the pool of pilots is so small. The qualifications are so stringent.

ed dwight You had to be under 30. Had to have an engineering degree. Had to have at least 1,500 hours of jet time.

emily ludolph

And NASA writes back. All these different agencies write back. And they say, we don’t have people in the pipeline for this. This is not a problem for the military or NASA, it is a problem for the entire United States — except for the Air Force secretary, Eugene Zuckert, who writes back and says, actually, we do have someone. His name’s Ed Dwight, and he is ready to start training.

ed dwight I was a star in my unit. I was placed on a fast track for promotion. I had been promoted to captain early, and then I was immediately put in for major.

emily ludolph

Ed has a decision to make, basically, because in the Air Force, he has this incredibly promising career.

ed dwight I was guaranteed that I was going to be a general had I stayed in the unit that I was in, and there were big plans for me.

emily ludolph

And his superiors at Travis Air Force Base say the space program is brand new. You have this incredibly bright future ahead of you in the Air Force.

ed dwight What is this?

emily ludolph

And this really could be a career killer for you. But in the end, he decides to go for it.

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back.

[music]

michael barbaro

So once Ed decides to take President Kennedy up on this invitation to be the first African-American astronaut, what happens?

emily ludolph

He is transferred to the Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, which is the top place for training jet pilots in the United States. And the Air Force has put together this kind of graduate school for test pilots that is trying to anticipate what these future astronauts are going to need to know. And that school is helmed by Chuck Yeager —

archived recording October 14, 1947, Edwards Air Force Base, California. Captain Charles E. Yeager flew the experimental X-1 faster than the speed of sound in level flight.

emily ludolph

— who, apart from Charles Lindbergh, is the most famous person in American flying at this point.

archived recording Another historic highlight in the aerospace age.

emily ludolph

So when he starts this program —

ed dwight I made 2,500 speeches.

emily ludolph

— on top of all of the training that he’s doing to prepare him to become an astronaut —

ed dwight I mean, I was on the road from Thursday till Monday. All the time I was in training — emily ludolph But you gave these speeches. ed dwight Yes. I was all over — emily ludolph Wow. ed dwight — the country.

emily ludolph

Ed’s experience is unique because he is programmed into this nationwide speaking tour.

ed dwight Starting out at, yeah, 6 o’clock in the morning with a quarter-to-12 breakfast all the way to preschool, high school, then ended that particular day in Washington, D.C., going on stage and —

emily ludolph

And he’s talking to universities. He’s talking to elementary school students. His face is on the cover of magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times. So he becomes this massive celebrity, but also it’s a really difficult experience for him.

michael barbaro

How so?

emily ludolph

First of all, there’s purely logistics. He’s off doing all of these tours all weekend, but he’s still got to come back and do his flight exams on Monday just like all of his peers who have been studying all weekend for them do. On top of that, Ed is also dealing with the reality of racism in America in the 1960s. And so when he’s traveling, hotel rooms aren’t booked for him. Cars leave without him. Waiters in restaurants won’t serve him. Meanwhile, back at the base he has this incredibly tense relationship with Chuck Yeager, who is this celebrated figure in American flying, and who Ed says was calling him into his office almost on a weekly basis, encouraging him to drop out of the program because he couldn’t handle it, which Chuck Yeager denies.

michael barbaro

So what happens next?

archived recording O.K., I guess you all know why you’re here today and why we’re here. I’d like to introduce the new group of 14 astronauts we’ve been in the process of selecting for about the last four months.

emily ludolph

Yeager ultimately graduates him, and in October of 1963, NASA announces the next class of astronauts. It includes Buzz Aldrin and four astronauts in total who go on to walk on the moon.

archived recording (speaker 1) Was there a Negro boy in the last 30 or so that you brought here for consideration? archived recording (speaker 2) No, there was not.

emily ludolph

And Ed’s name is not among them.

michael barbaro

Does that mean that this is over for Ed?

emily ludolph

No. Ed still has hope that he’ll be selected for a future astronaut class. So he continues his training.

ed dwight And everything was working for me. Washington was able to solve all these problems that kept popping up until November the 22nd, 1963. archived recording Here is a bulletin from CBS News. In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.

emily ludolph

Anyone who is alive in America on that day remembers where they were.

archived recording From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official. President Kennedy died at 1:00 p.m. Central Standard Time, 2:00 Eastern Standard Time.

emily ludolph

And just like everyone else, Ed remembers exactly where he was.

archived recording This nation is wounded. It will have a century, I think, to absorb the historic impact of this terrible event.

emily ludolph

He was in Seattle. They were doing a flight simulator training at a Boeing plant. Someone came in. Ed remembers what step of the staircase he was standing on when he announced that the president had been shot and they were canceling the training for the day. So Ed is going through the same sort of emotional loss that everyone in the country is going through. And at the same time, over the course of this entire experience, Ed has really felt like there’s been a hand on his shoulder as he’s doing all of these public appearances and speaking tours. That is President Kennedy’s hand. The thing about this public speaking tour that’s been going on this entire time is it very much does fall outside of the chain of military command. He is talking with senators. He’s talking with the White House, but that is because that’s what he’s being asked to do. And after the assassination, he fears that all of that protection has fallen away from him, and he might not be wrong about that.

michael barbaro

What do you mean?

emily ludolph

Well, within a month and a half, Ed has been transferred to a base in Ohio, where he is flying transport planes and doing experiments that are less and less and less related to the space program. The next astronaut selection comes up. Ed is again not picked. And he eventually resigns his commission and leaves the Air Force.

michael barbaro

So what becomes of Ed Dwight?

emily ludolph

Well, he starts this whole new life that includes developing a career at IBM, opening an executive flight company, starting a restaurant called The Rib Cage. And eventually, he goes back to school and gets his M.F.A., and he becomes an artist. He sculpts large-scale public monuments. There are more than a hundred. They’re all over the country, and his specialty is iconic African-American figures.

michael barbaro

Emily, it sounds like after Ed left the space program, he went on to have this very distinguished career, but leaving the program in that moment, right before it achieved some of its grandest ambitions, including putting men on the moon — I have to imagine that that was difficult for him. Is that something that you two talked about?

emily ludolph

Yes. And I think the important thing to remember is that this was just a few years of Ed’s life, and he has gone on and done so many things since then. He’s now 85. And when I asked Ed where he was at that time, he says he doesn’t remember.

michael barbaro

He doesn’t remember at all?

emily ludolph

Yeah. It’s kind of surprising. So I spoke to Ed many times and kept asking him that question over the course of multiple interviews, and each time he says he doesn’t remember. And I keep thinking about this story that Ed told me about being a little boy and seeing a picture of an African-American pilot on the front page of his newspaper and how that sort of spurred him on to his entire career. And I wondered just what would it have meant if Ed Dwight had gone on to join the space program and walk on the moon? I brought that question to Charles Bolden, who was the first black administrator of NASA. And what he said to me was to see an Ed Dwight walking across the platform, getting into an Apollo capsule would have been mind-boggling in those days. It would have had an incredible impact.

michael barbaro

Emily, thank you.

emily ludolph

Thanks so much.

michael barbaro