table tennis players. someone on that team is carrying a large stash of drugs is about to declare his deep love of communism agent mao and the entire world is watching. nixon and kissinger are having a connection they have been practicing this secret lead now here they are and they don't know what is happening. luckily joe knows what he is doing. it is so skillful the story preens -- runs four weeks with the enormous feelings for the country's. the myth of trying because everyone has the same end

came which is to upset the russians. the more they can do the more likely it is russia comes to the bargaining table. the russia of love spee and now they thought that could go on forever. it was brilliant. that gives the enormous amount of leeway to mao for public support and nixon says he could not have done this and he says they always tell you what they are thinking. that is extraordinary. but of all the people with meticulous manipulation the tiniest of details and everyone was bamboozled.

that really means the whole world has changed in the greatest irony is it all started with montagu only to real gloves in his life. ping-pong and the soviet union will of the chinese and americans had gone their own way in an end to where are they today? thank you. [applause] >> this microphone does not project but it is important for the internet. please raise your hand to

come up to you. >> what inspired your research to even look get this story? >> yet was a mixture. going to beijing to wonder why on earth this happened? also writing about sports and politics white different nations chose different sports i have pictures and this took me four years and thank god i did not pick the one with six ports. [laughter] but the most remarkable thing is when i found the name montagu we have montagu

in england. how am i? actually it is made best friends hong called he had not been allowed in to now they know why. to launch the book next week [laughter] >> i was reading your review in "the new york times" in 1972 when the table tennis team was in the united states how was the political climate after that happened? >> it looked like the return

trip it was very important for the americans. there was still low but fed tightening was right at the end of day number two. so it is terribly embarrassing situation for the chinese. there one of the allies but no one knows the created outrage they had a total poker face they should not let anything disturb but who really gets upset is some who have gone on to be established with human rights in china.

there's so outraged when it comes time to visit the rose garden but for added six don't show up. nobody could talk. so it was extremely awkward. >> tell us about the research process. how it did you gain access? >>. [laughter] i don't know if i would have written if i knew what did would entail. i thought it i was very very

asking for interviews in china like other countries. but to it was not. i forgot just because you retire as an athlete 30 years ago does not mean you are still not managed and living in government quarters so every single person who's played in those 61 squads are taking care of by the state so i have to go through the sports ministry and it took a very long time and i had to submit a lot of papers in a in the end they gave permission i did not lie about it. i was more honest and i was with my publisher. [laughter] what was fascinating was the different reactions some

that had drifted away from the state but were open with me to tell me extraordinary stories but those that got to a high level they were very glad to see the back of me but generally i was kind and open. >>. >> it is interesting there were on this team and obviously as a way to reach out. that was the last resource civic there were many ways

it could have gone horribly wrong for the most obvious is the american team is to say are we allowed into china? the chinese just changed the tactics but they were really lucky when they rang the embassy in tokyo, the man who picked up the phone was extremely bright. and he remembered in a foreign policy reported that was several hundred pages long one line that said the athletic exchanges could begin the last thing he wanted to do was to get state department approval so he could not say yes but you are individuals, americans the state department has

nothing to do with it but you can go. they think it is a huge process of day but it is just the guy with a sharply but it was that fragile. credited require a little bit of blood from the american side. there would have been but it may will never know. probably in an archive not released yet. >>. >> through their research process where you where the soviets tried to wipe out i

did the new the nuclear standoff with its all the way into washington in the defense minister wanted to push of but in rethink the cuban missile crisis was the closest but this was close to the point there was us a digging campaign when they were convinced by the end the entire population of the cities were underground. one hell of a campaign. is remarkable zero lot of fun and is our breeding.

you never have seen so many hysterical embassadors all taking countries anywhere in the world and you cannot trust the chinese whatever you do. don't trust the chinese. kissinger reads the reports and is loving it and thinks it is billion to. he was right to. the russians were so intransigent than to they had no interest in and day vietnam. it was a game changer. >> talk about the highs and so lowe's when you are writing. when do you have something good or you throw it in the garbage chute and walk away.

>> when teeeighteen saw her looking creaked the web and the editor hands back the first copy. [laughter] and in this case i can dig indy 500 page book eighth came out that to a vendor to 85 pages. that is a lot of chopping. that just means you have wasted a lot of weeks and months in your life. there is a lot that naturally falls by the wayside but you just don't know what is what and editors of a company like simon & schuster is good at what they do you can be petulant for a while but we

are grateful it is trevor. [laughter] >> why did you choose the unhappy choice? >> for me had i initialized this side could not sell its it is too preposterous. [laughter] really. come on. with my first meeting with major endeavor is trying to find a new agent and i have this idea about international relations and espionage and a table tennis [laughter] use a the word a and the eyebrows go up. the story is so bizarre and montagu is such a strange

character i don't have the imagination to make up montagu. >> along those lines do you think nobody talks about it because the results were achieved or was purposely concealed once the story was out there? >> the remarkable thing is the way he compartmentalized information even when that incident happened the rest of the team did not know what was going on in. so people were killed four of lot less than signaling to the americans. but the blind guy who you

knew when he was doing was the team captain. he made a career out of that moment actually mao loved him so much he is also a very good diplomat and follows through on that said ultimately this is from central command minister of sports and physical culture. and was referred to be and when mao falls. the it spend 10 years in exile as a street sweeper. with the false dennis mann -- the most famous man occasionally he lets it slip

-- slipped but forget about all the changes. quincy was diagnosed with cancer there are many things he could have done it was with that compartmentalization of information was the opposite. >> how do you see the relationship going forward? said there other people who could answer better than me but my impression but i

could sit down in to the things that has always amazed me but my sense of history compared to theirs since. there is a lot of things with the chinese culture the last 180 years has been a blip of success stories. but they mark deeply and then the russians come in the germans come even americans. it is a hard thing to forgive and to with the

japanese invading of the thirties it is a very brutal 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 today's 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 don't know i feel bad for him in the end he says i am practicing basketball diplomacy like ping-pong 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. rescue. please welcome lily koppel. [applause] >> good morning. so nice to be here. i heard there was a vicious rumor going around and i didn't make it out of new york city because of the weather's so i am so glad volunteers believe this is actually me and i'm here sharing the story with you this morning.

i love great american stories and i love beehives. and a combination of those two sayings as you will learn lead me to tell this amazing but looked over american story of our original astronauts wives. i want to bring you back to 1959. april 9th there is a press conference in washington d.c. and the whole country is riveted and waiting for the announcement of the mercury 7 astronauts. is the height of the cold 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 can't 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, they're going to quickly go through this cinderella like transformation. in ohio at wright-patterson air force base, and gus grissom's 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 down-to-earth, folksy, always repeated a quote of gusts's which is we don't give a damn about keeping up with the joneses which is more along the lines of we don't give a darn about keeping up with the glenns, annie and john glenn, the superstar couple of the space age. you can't 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 we're 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 is too were actually investigated by the fbi before the couples were announced. betty remembers investigators

coming over to her neighbor's home and asking questions about her. would miss is grissom quote home cooked meal every night? she doesn't drink too much? doesn't 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 wives, the most stressful time to be an american housewife, the late 15s and early 60s, has to hold up the model of perfection. so overnight they are transformed. i think of them as america's first reality stars. life magazine bought the rights.

they bought their personal stories, like magazine in 1959, a huge amount of money. in exchange for that, to reporters and photographers into their homes to chronicle their day to day lives. what was it like to have your husband sitting on top of that rocket, about to be blasted into space. the women were caught in this catch-22 which is they are supposed to reveal who they are, there is acute pressure to keep up the glens to be the modern american housewife, and the book is being turned into television show which is going to air this summer on abc and just looking at some of the story lines it is very funny because one of the

other wives of this group, trudy cooper was the only licensed pilot among the group, very adventurous girl, you had to be an adventuress woman to be married to one of these guys who were testing in their early careers these high-performance experimental aircraft, to go where no man has gone, first into space, then to the moon. trudy cooper had had a little too much of this top gun mentality and her husband bordeaux --gordo playing around on her. before he was picked as an astronaut, he came with his tail between his legs back is like saying trudy, i have this amazing opportunity, i will be picked as an astronaut. the only problem is they are not going to pick me if i don't have a white and we were just separated. they get back together for the sake of the space race. they would later get divorced

after gordo's career is over. those of the kind of detail the wives were very skittish about letting out as they are having this incredible public eye and spotlight shined into their lives. the program starts out in langley, va.. all of the families pack up and moved to virginia and the men start training and they are down in cape canaveral, florida and one of the most interesting things i learned just starting out in the book was how the cape, this sort of incredible men's playgrounds down there where there are working hard but also playing hard, was a no wives zone at first. going to the cape for a wife was totally off-limits. they weren't allowed to go out where the rockets took off from, all the wives would watch the early flights from the beach. at one point deke slayton's wife

marge said this is ridiculous. you are going into space. i can't go to the cape. what is going on out there? she tells him that he'd better drive her out there and he hides her under some blankets in the back of his car and they go past military guards and she gets out there and pops up her hat and it is sort of a lonely beach jetties and scrub brush and what not. the whole country is dying for a cigarette. this is the kind of spunk and irreverence that these women brought to this brave new world of being an astronaut wife. you have seven women, all different walks of life, allen sheppard's wife louise was very highbred. i think of her as the sabrina and audrey have removed character. she drew up as the gardener's daughter at longwould gardens

and stayed on the east coast so when she met jackie kennedy she almost treated jackie like she was an old friend, they were two private school girls almost, getting to know each other. you have this band forming, these women are in the public eye and they don't know how to deal with it at first so they start giving each other words of advice. if a reporter asks you, something you don't know anything about, don't worry, just say it is classified. one of my favorite stories, because a lot of the inspiration for writing the book came out of these technicolor looking photographs from life magazine because the wives were on the cover of life dozens of times from 1959-1972 at the end of the apollo program. the wives have their first cover shoot and they will be clustered

around this mercury capsule, which when you see it today at the smithsonian, this thing looks really flimsy, you can understand why its nickname was the can and you can understand how terrifying it would be to have your spouse ride in that thing especially since many of the early test launches had gone absolutely haywire with explosions and things just not going right until the last minute but the women are told by life and nasa that they are to where these proper pastel, the epitome of the perfect american housewife, so they set this tradition of the round robin phone call which will last throughout the space race and calling each other, i you going to wear that? what color lipstick you going to where? and they decide to wear pink lipstick and everyone will wear

a shirt waist dress except for run a carpenter, scott carpenter's life. usable character, intellectual, a really independent woman who will end up hosting her own feminist talk show in the mid 70s and looking sort of gloria steinem like in the dresses and skirts but she says according to the other wives i am not going to let the government tell me what to wear. we are astronaut wives now. our husbands are civilians, they are no longer military, so she shows up to the photo shoot and she is wearing this cocktail dress, big red roses and red high heels and of course other wives are sort of aghast. she makes the shot so you have that melding of personalities coming together. stuff of course the men, meanwhile, they are becoming rock stars. everything that goes along with

it. they are getting $1 corvettes which they can trade in every year and get a new one. alan shepard get the snazzy white corvette. they're getting $1 a night hotel rooms at the holiday inn. this is down in cocoa beach which is space city, lit up with all sorts of neon signs, moons and stars and intergalactic fanfare. the women actually come down to cocoa beach for a lady's weekend and jo schirra remembered walking into the lobby of the holiday inn and two women, the astronaut crew piece who come with the adorable name of cape cookies, fall to their knees in front of her astro not, her husband. what is going on here?

so you have throughout the space race, having to maintain this semblance of everything is fine at home, of course my husband, i am sure this goes home for the holiday, as soon as he finishes work. meanwhile of course there are all sorts of tabloid headlines coming out and everything. the space program moved to houston in 1962. i had a lot of fun learning about this whole area known as togethersville. this makes nonfiction writing so tantalizing. this was the space verbs' where all the astronauts and wives moved. it is almost like beverly hills of spacemen. 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 renee, where betty grissom and jo schirra lived a few streets down, where the media attention on these families was so acute that renee and jo had doorway built in between there two yards which they called the rabbit hole and that they could scurry back and forth between during a flight so the press wouldn't see them. astronaut kids were chased down the halls of the holiday inn when they went to visit and were always told not to open the door to many reporters because they had this exclusive agreement with life magazine. one anecdote one of the astronaut kids shared with me that i always have fun remembering is daring apollo levon, that flight, the wives first of all, janet armstrong, pat collins, buzz aldrin's wife

joan, had to hide in back seats of neighbors cars, go to the beauty parlor, the grocery store, there was a media circus on their suburban lawns. at one point of michael collins's kid opened the door and they were given a present of a panda bear, two journalists from china handing them this caddy bear, oh wow, this is great. turned out there was a microphone hidden inside its stomach. this kind of marx brothers relationship with cat and mouse game with the press and the wives. as one of the wives put it, she said our lives were composed of highs and lows, and what is so remarkable about this group of women is how down-to-earth they maintained sort of their

personalities. they were strongly patriotic. they felt they were given sort of an equal task in supporting their husband's mission into the stars. they were going to do everything they could to support the country's effort to support their husbands even when it meant tucking things in the backs of the worse, emotional things to deal with for later, sweeping things under the rug. as i mentioned they were living in an almost truman show existence, no divorce was actually allowed within nasa until 1967 when it erupted in the first space divorce. the women had to rely on each other. the men were away at cape canaveral, flying their teeth 38s to florida monday morning, they would not return until friday night when they would fly their planes down low over

togethersville and rattle the houses. that was some of the astronauts's way of saying hi, honey, i am home. put the rose in the oven. your astronaut is home. i recently went back to togethersville with some of the women and went into sue bean, alan bean's first wife, looking at the pool and alan bean who was the fourth man to walk in the route moon with pete conrad on apollo 12 did this mosaic bar with the ignacio zamora insignia and sue was very beautiful, blond, texan, looking out over the pool and said buzz and joan used to live over there and the bass ats were over there. thists were over there. thisets were over there. this was a really swinging place. the wives and 60s for the astronauts' wives club which

would meet once a month to support each other and get to know each other. these were monthly tea and coffee events. fabulous scenes that are not reproduced in women's gathering today because times have changed, doubled as and over crowing -- overflowing ashtrays and martini hours and just sort of being there to support each other and going through something very few will ever experience. the way the wives don't with the pressure was very different. you have the pressure of your husband and the pressure of the media. and the most dreaded moment, even more than the possibility of something going wrong on the launch pad, was opposed flight press conference. this was the moment when all 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 their air force and navy days which was feed your husband a good breakfast of steak and eggs so he doesn't get white headed up in the air. these women were basically just told to act picture-perfect and so they did this send up together and ran a carpenter who i mentioned, glamorous and outspoken, blond, came up with this 1-woman show and called it released a land that was her send the name of the esteban wives and she was married to squarely stable, her perfect astronaut husband. they had their perfect astronaut

children and their dog smiley and she said whenever reporter asks you tell them you are happy, fraud and thrilled, throughout the decade whenever the wives are asked how they are feeling, when their husbands were up there, in space, being blasted into space, they often say, happy, proud and frills. and of course reporters are tearing their hair out. we want to deal -- to hear how you feel but back then it wasn't -- they really weren't able to put the feeling into words. they were scared of revealing too much in this highly competitive environment. if i show my fear is like my husband maybe he will be bumped from the flight. marilyn lovell, married to jim lovell, a wonderful couple to this day, he was played by tom hanks and apollo 13.

when he was going into space on one of his gemini flights, marilyn found out she was pregnant and she hid her pregnancy from jim for a few months which is pretty remarkable until he finally found out and she said i am sorry, i didn't want you to get bumped from the flight. cheese said good idea, we should keep it secret for a longer. this is just a taste of the astrowives lives. i would like to open up the discussion to questions now because it is such a rich topic and i could talk a little more about what it was like going into these historic figures's living rooms and what it was like getting to know them as well. if anyone has questions, please do line up.

>> in your book, you talk about one of the episodes on one of the lunar landings where the camera didn't work and there was virtually sort of a cover-up because they didn't want to show that. i wonder if you could go into that. >> one of the most exciting things, of course, about walking on the moon, being on the moon for the guys and everybody watching back at home, that was what was so incredible about the apollo program. even for someone like me who is one of the wives once asked me when i went to interview her, where were you when we landed on the moon? how old were you? i said jo, i think i was moon dust. i wasn't born yet. whenever you become fascinated with this subject, you can go there with the guys. all you have to do is look at

the youtube footage, television footage they filmed. the incident you were just talking about was apollo 12, the second mission to the moon. alan bean had this television cameras a burgling to use to chronicle their journey and he by accident turned it into the sun, so it was burned out. the only transmission they were able to share with the public in real-time was the voices of the astronauts which are going into the wives's homes versus on the squawk boxes which are these baby intercom like space-age device is all the wives had at home but the networks are flipping out. we are not going to get our moon footage and we had big swaths of time allowed for it. what they did was nasa had some mockups of the moon where the

guys would practice going through their routines for when they were up there so they outfitted some actors in space suits and had them sort of manic what pete conrad and alan bean or beeano as his friends call him or doing on the moon and it has only fuel the conspiracy theories that anyone who has anything to do with nasa including the wives think are absolutely ludicrous. i would like to tell you all how i came to write this book and a little bit about getting to know these women today. of course i am a writer, i live in new york with my husband who is also a writer, in the front row. our lives are composed on a daily level of thinking about stories, thinking about ideas for great stories. this isn't something you can

manufacture. inspiration has to hit. i have to admit at that time i was quite into the show madmen, we were having a carrot -- a tv marathon watching it and i love the 60s time period, my grandmother used to wear pulitzer dresses, we just bought this big soda book of the moon landings with the norman mailer text of a fire on the moon. and i was looking through these pictures of neil armstrong on the lunar surface, buzz aldrin and his sort of marshmallow space suit and just having sort of a tomboy moment because these are pretty male heroic images, until i turn a page and i am hit with this burst of color. ..

and a sort of continue to support each other through triumph and tragedy. one of the sweetest things about the connection of the wives is many of them when i met them they wore a little gold bracelets with a tiny golden whistle on it and that's one of their symbols we will be there

for you and it was a matter of winning over these women's trust. they were always very protective of nasa, of their husbands even if they were later after their husbands back from the moon divorced because astronauts and their wives did divorce after the apollo program and i see it as a casualty of the incredible amount of pressure that was on these families to come for them and tform andto just work aroune rigorous hours. out of 30 couples only seven marriages survived. so in many ways as they pointed out, there relationships have endured longer than the marriages. it outlasted them as well. there were people that were more

difficult to get to know their mothers. at the beginning everyone was sort of whistling is betty going to talk to you? i don't think that he is going to talk to you. she doesn't come to our meetings and so i was nervous because she was someone important to talk to and sure enough i got a lovely letter from her. she doesn't talk on the phone much because of her hearing that she said when you come to houston please come to my home and it was one of these interviews that i expected it to be about two hours and when we went back to her house about 10:00 at night i told her i think i should go to the hotel and get some sleep and come back tomorrow morning. and she was just fun loving andd honest and had the kind of memory she would've plucked out

conversations that she had back in the day. they were high school sweethearts like many of the astronauts and their wives. her story is a tragic one. of course during the mercury program, his capsule thinks so he is given a bad rap for that position of his and from the early days of course way men always had to deal with the pressure of what if he doesn't come back. which is you don't talk about the danger especially with your husband coming to don't talk about the danger with your friends because it was seen as a james many of them have superstitions and my favorite woman i got to know during the project had a superstition i think we can all probably relates to which is pete's

pillow had to be perfectly smooth on his site of the bed in his closet door had to be closed because if she did it, she felt like something wrong could happen and this is just a reflection of the fear these women had to digest and live with. goss always told betty that he didn't like her wearing black and she felt the only time you should ever wear black was to a funeral and purposefully she didn't end up wearing black to his funeral people to listen to something happens to me i want you to have a party. so early on she promised him, she said okay i will have a party. he is one of the men that died during the apollo fire, and this was the first large-scale tragedy when the men perish in a

capsule it catches fire on the ground and this is a very revealing part of what these men went through because it was excruciating. the way that they reported was relatively new lows in the official man always had to tell the wife her closest friends are always called before tuesday something bad has happened out there. i want you to go to her house right now that the women knew they were not allowed to use say anything they just had his agent told the official word could arrive, so very difficult. in the case of petty end o betto other wives in the fire, debbie ended up saving nasa's -- sueing nasa's and as a result she was

basically ostracized from together as bill by the other astronauts and the astronauts lives for not touting the party line for going against the company organization. pat weitz was a tragic story. she never really got over her husband after apollo one and when they were planning a reunion years later she actually committed suicide and they saw her as a final tragedy of the apollo one fire. so a lot of heartache in this story. but just incredible american moments that were not seen as

necessarily input to report back then because we were not as focused on the fact as behind every great man is a great form in or behind every moonwalk or there is a strong woman waiting on earth and it is just a whole another sort of constellation perspective on what it took to get to the moon. do we have any of your questions? >> it could be your next book three of how do the children fare in that kind of upbringing? >> as i talked to many of the kids it was sort of growing up in the cradle of the american dream, green lawns, a pool that was shaped like the space capsules like the -- the kids

almost remember fondly those were the days our mother would lock us out of the house and they don't come home until dinner. you are giving me a headache and it was great because we would ride our bikes and go to the pool and that is sort of the memory. but i think it's difficult having a father who is a hero but often and absentee father because they wer were a way trag so often. one of the kids remembered it was sort of strange. it was like a dad wouldn't be home a lot suddenly he would be very end of the magazine would be there and we would be doing a photo shoot out on the swing. we never did this in real life. it's probably at a lot of kids

in hollywood at the old place now. their lives were made almost reality shows so there was dealing with that and i will share one more funny anecdote which is the wives were always sort of kidding and complaining they had to drag their kids into watch the space launches, johnny would rather be watching star trek. but within your dad is doing some important stuff. well my best friends dad is an astronauastronaut and lives acre street, those are engineers over there, and this was the world that was normal to them and the wives tried very hard to keep normal and grounded. >> you kind of you who do to help their lives changed after the program and i was wondering if you could share their thoughts on what was it like when that ended?

do they feel like it should continue and like there was a sense among these families at that point? everyone was sad when mixing ended the program and these wives who i see today and i think in history they will continue to be seen and i've told this to them as a sort of pioneer space women. they were the pioneers. their husbands were doing something we had never done before. just the moments of going out in your backyard as jane conrad remembered when her house .-full-stop there walking around on the moon and she -- the house just cleared out and she had all of the wives over for a party about 5:30 in the morning she wandered out by the pool and just look a looked at the moon t of stared at it and i think we can all think this when we look at the mood like we went up

there as a country and as human beings. but she said she remembered when she was a little girl how she used to look forward to man in the moon and she said this is trippy. my husband is the man in the moon and for this one moment she had this mystical feeling of clarity. this is the late 60s. people are into that. she said it basically vanished in a moment and then she was going back inside to do the dishes. but to get back to justify fallout after the apollo program, i think the most prominent example is looking at buzz aldrin and his wife. like many they had a hard time coming back from the moon after the families and the crew members into their lives would

go on these fabulous tours especially after apollo 11 they went all over the world presenting moon rocks and little cases to the clean of thing cleg going, etc., the heads of state and while they were on this tour she shared her diary with me that she kept and she starts seeing buzz spiraling out of control. he's been outspoken about his own alcoholism and depression he built with after coming back from the moon and that is something that changed her life. they ended up getting a divorce and they have three kids. she has an entry in her diary i think our lives will return to normal and he looked at her and said i've been to the moon. nothing is ever going to be the

same. and i think that is true for a lot of the families. >> you mentioned how you flipped a page in a magazine and a story came to life. if you have a moment at the end of the red leather and i hear -- diary what caused you to flip their? cynic i will save that for the moment and please -- >> i haven't read the book yet but i look forward to reading it. i don't know the ages of the women that you are referring to but in your research, did the idea come up with a conversation about the commercialization of space travel and would any of them ever consider the galactic would they do that themselves?

to ask about going into space back in the six he sispa and lots of time with life magazine of course, if you have these articles about we are going to be putting up a couple of the astronaut had this sort of crackpot scheme and root beer stands when we colonized, so yes someone like a former tough marine said i would have gone up there in a heartbeat and the early pilot who ended up flying in the powder puff derby she would have been there in a moment but some of them are like are you kidding i want to stay down here with my feet on the ground and of course they all hope we will continue to explore and push the envelope as their husband used to say. i will just mention very deeply

the red leather diary, my first book because i think it reflects on how i wanted to talk this kind of story. i grew up in chicago. and it was a new york guy in a city girl. i was in new york with that density of people walking around looking at these old buildings into these windows lit up and i just sort of naïve, just to be an incredible amount of untold stories but there are and how everybody has a story and somehow i just wanted to be able to reveal some of those distant stars. so very serendipitously i have

to say i feel quite lucky. but strange things happen to me or maybe i see the world in a different way. i notice things that seem almost fear a tale -- fairy tale. i came out after i graduated and i was working as a news clerk at "the new york times" which is like the devil wears prada that without the prada with lots of bow ties and the businessmen who would give me bits of advice. i wanted to be a novelist to which i going to return to for my next project, which is going to be fiction. i came out of the building and there was something too good to resist pus push with the dumpstr and not an ordinary because it was filled with about 50 old trunks into these were the old kinds that were brought on the

titanic from paris and the french line. i am not a dumpster diver by trade but i love vintage clothing and a good story so it's eight in the morning and i literally climb on top of that is to and i start -- you are all looking at the very odd. i started going through these dresses in the collections of handbags and among the urban treasure with a red leather diary kept from a woman from 1921 to 1934 at the height of the depression and a long fairy tale short i ended up tracking down the owner is 90 with the help of a private investigator and befriending her. she wanted to be a writer and she hosted a literary salon, she was a renaissance woman who had

love affairs in her story spoke to me so much i ended up telling this story of how this comical made the way back to her and it was sort of given as a gift to the rest of the world. telling the forgotten story was very interesting to me. little things i remember from professors the good stories are often little margins were footnotes. it's not the typical heroic model but it's the other side of the coin and it was that desire and hunger to tell the story that is an untold stor story but there's also this sort of emotional catharsis for the

subject that has been under the radar revealed to the world and i know from speaking to the boys not only does this book take them back in time but they feel very gratified that people care about their story. i don't think many of them call themselves heroes because they were so in support of their husbands and would have seen that as arrogant and inappropriate, but i certainly see them as heroines myself, and i think they have the right stuff. [laughter] [applause]

in other words, there has to be some suspicion -- >> evidence which -- >> i wouldn't call it evidence. there was certainly circumstances. no question. there was circumstantial. it also included brokerage houses, bank accounts, checking accounts. however, they could say no, and

in rick's case they did. but what -- they said no. but the big thing was, i would say part of it wasn't just his bank account or credit card accounts, and they were little things that would come up. i can't believe he was so sloppy. well, i guess i can. heeds charge an airline ticket -- he would charge an airline ticket, new york to vienna, austria, and we were under the rules and regulations as a cia employee can you travel anywhere out of the country, whether it was for pleasure, you know, vacation, he had to get approval from the office. of course, rick hadn't done that in of all places, the in the austrie