supporters in middle america. i think that's a sincere set 1968, nasaber launched men into the moon's orbit for the first time. delivered a live telecast, showing images as seen from space. next on history bookshelf, where height," chronicles the mission in its entirety. this is about 40 minutes.

>> good afternoon. he is the editor at large for time magazine and grew up in baltimore. he is the author on multiple books from narcissism to polio today, he isbut the author of a few books we will bring out. apollo 13.story of today, he will not only talk

about the new book, but signing the book afterwards. the book is "apollo 8." joining me in welcoming jeffrey to th kluger. [applause] >> you wrote it in 1994. what brought you back to that storyline. ? 8?apollo 13 or apollo apollo 8. were daughter and i speaking about great yarns, and the story of apollo 8 came up. tale of american

space history it will be eight, of 11, and 13 that are the true benchmarks. 11, first footprints. 13, a great tale of survival, was the first time human beings left the gravity field of earth. we managed to haul ourselves out , get aircraft in the atmosphere, spacecraft around the earth, but orbiting the earth is sort of dog paddling. 8 the first time that we sailed across, the true deep waters of deep space. they were creatures of another no longer earthlings, moon men for 24 hours. it was the mission that made all

of the landings possible. >> what makes apollo 8 special? apollo 11 was special because of the first steps on the moon, but apollo 8 was a germanic shift in the plan. talk about -- age rheumatic shift in the plan. talk about what made it so special. was easily the most bloodsoaked year in modern history. bobby kennedy assassination, martin luther king assassination , the tet offensive in vietnam, soviet invasion of prague, more bleedinge world was from wounds. in summer 1968, a handful of people at nasa realize there was a way to right the ship of the dividend redeem

the year and the country. this was one year after the apollo 1 fire. the dream of getting to the moon by 1970 seemed completely beyond reach. the spacecraft had to be built from the bottom up. the saturn five rocket was not working. the lunar module was hopeless. here we were in the summer of 1968, 16 month before president kennedy's deadline and that guys at nasa, and they were all men at the time come and not including the women from "hidden figures" who did extraordinary work, said we can fix his command module and saturn five, and if we do this work and do it fast and get our guys trained and catch a couple of breaks, we

can be in lunar orbit in 16 weeks and kickstart this program, and they did it. >> you mentioned the people who made this happen. it's about the people who put this effort into it. do they draw you as a journalist to the stories and the dramatic events. tell us about the particular people. jeffrey these three guys are , jim lovell and frank bormann. i never lose sight of the fact to call jim a friend. i've known the family for 25 years. all three of these guys in some ways represented something special and particular about why human beings travel in space, and that is frank bormann, why we travel in space and do these ambitious things.

they all went into it in into it with different motivations. anders adores machines, adores the counterintuitive way a machine like the lunar module work. he made himself an expert of every rivet, wire, and ball. this mission he did not get the fly, so he learned the systems of the command module. is and was a patriot. he trained to be a fighter pilot. he went to west point. he joined the air force. he wanted to fight in korea. his country needed him and he was ready to fight. he was grounded for about a year

. his window of opportunity passed to fight in korea, and when this opportunity to be an astronaut and fly this improbable mission was presented to him, he knew this was his chance to fight the very important battle in the cold war, go out, win, and come home. for him it was a mission. all three guys knew about the epic nature of the mission, that this was a mesh and mission for the species at large. they all came to it with different personal agendas. robert: that -- >> that is brought out nicely by their patch, drawing things out, having people go there.

lovell and bormann had an interesting connection. it is a unique crew, but in part because they had flown together before. jeffrey: that's right. ivok at the gemini spacecraft. seats.asically two coach you are wearing inflatable suits , so your shoulders are touching. the overhead is three inches from your head. they lived in that spacecraft without ever opening the doors for two solid weeks. bormann described it as a fortnight in a men's room. they joked when they came home. they said maybe we will get married. robert: they spent some that >> they spent so much time together. jeffrey: it was a mission nobody wanted. they did it. they performed it brilliantly.

work sow cohesion made well. they brought in bill anders, a smart, energetic hotshot in all the right ways. he rounded out that group. >> he didn't get to drive the lunar module like he hoped, but ended up playing a substantial role in where the stories have come today, through his photography. immersed himself in studying the lunar surface. it is probably one of the most famous photos taken in human history, earth rise. these kinds of things, these stories are covered through ,cademic histories, biographies and earth rise here. what is your take on this flight that is really new to add

another voice to that story? what did you learn you can convey in a book that is new for readers? jeffrey: i want to say this is not by accident this picture is sideways. insist on rotating it 90 degrees. the moon rises in the lateral way. the lunar surface was below them , so they saw it right side up, but this is the way it looks in space. what made this a new experience for me, i knew it was going to be thrilling to write everything that happened when they got to the spacecraft. , whoitor, john sterling was my editor when i wrote apollo 13, he said i want those spacecraft 40% of the way through your book. he is a smart man. he knows how to pace a book.

i work hard to make that happen. what struck me also was that 60-week window they had to get this mission out of the planning stage and on to the launchpad. it was that monomaniacal focus they showed at nasa, particularly in houston, to get the systems ready, to sell the on the ideasa brand brass of doing this. "e original subtitle was the ingenious, outrageous, insane nation saving mission of apollo 8." they said enjoy that, because it will never see print. theid capture the nature of , every singleet person who was brought into the room for these quiet

conversations, every higher level of nasa brass who was told we have a way to get to the moon in 16 weeks, they all said you are out of your mind and it can't be done them and then they listened, and they said, well, i think we can get it done. i think we do have the hardware. we just have to fix it. we do have the human power to spread to this mission. we certainly have the astronaut personnel. they were great people for this mission, but as chris craft, the director of flight operations, once told me, i asked him what is the best pilot and crew you ever flew, and he said people always ask me that and i always say you think i will make it up but my answer was always it is what ever crew i am flying right now because every crew benefits from what the previous crew did. even if they had not been able , they had these trios of

extraordinarily gifted men. they just had to pick the one right for this mission. >> that is what is audacious about what they did. they put people on top of the all the way to the moon. there had been previous launches. jeffrey: the first one was perfect. the second one almost shook itself apart getting to orbit. hisperson went out to give post-launch press conference and nasa expected him to be politic about it. he said, this was a disaster. write that down, disaster. there is no way to fix that. and he walked out of the room. weht months later they said

will put three guys on top, but it was because they had faith in their ability to sort out the problem, and they did. >> we are talking about technology. the museum is home to a lot of that technology. apollo 8 is house in chicago. we have an interesting picture of its arrival there, which everyone will find interesting. when you see these objects, how'd does that connect your research and what happened? you talk to the people, now you are seeing the technology. talk about your reactions coming to a place where we have that stuff. jeffrey: i was never quite so happy about my schedule this morning. i said, get the security team and drag me away from the is.lay or what ever else it i believe these machines in powerfully,s are

evocative of for a lot of reasons. nobody fully realizes the scale of them and tell you are standing next to them. is so ugly itle is beautiful. it is the perfect machine. i can look at pictures of that all day, and to stand in the vicinity of it and see the scale, the tactile nature of it, this is what it would have looked like to be a person engaged with that machine. soyuz is another example of that. you have the sleek apollo spacecraft. you have two different machines built like two empires on two empires thatworld, were at nuclear dagger points

with each other, yet connecting to them there is this chunk of seven-ton black hardware. it had a port for the american ship, a port for the russian .hip it was the greatest engineering metaphor for global geopolitics, for how you could bring to spacecraft together and bring to nations together to see the hardware, to make it tactile, to make it real. it is the reason i never tire of these stories. a modern manifestation of what you're talking about is the international space station. it is the size of a football field, and yet many nations came together to build this thing. time magazine chronicled some of documentary ofa the last few years, especially

going to the space station. thinking about those stories , theher, apollosoyuz international space station, these partnerships, what you have been doing lately, how do you see in this political climate and technology sharing or not sharing, and the general public support, can we expect to see this continue, can something like a partnership from the international space station will go forward and take us to the next place? >> this is one of those questions that i actually feel i can answer optimistically. i think the collaboration can and should continue. we are invested in it. 17 nations who have collaborated took 17 this, if you

families and they built an apartment building and live together, they are stuck together, so you better make this work. i also think that will serve as futureate for international collaboration. getting spacecraft to mars, human beings to mars will be in order of magnitude more difficult than it was to get human beings to the moon, but if you can bring 17 countries together to do it, you cut costs, time, build collaboration , bring special expertise from different people, and i was torched by how readily and how poignantly that u.s.-russian collaboration in space transcends petty politics. baikonurere over in and watched the launch of a rocket at 1:30 on the bitter -- there was kozak stan

such a granular level of collaboration. one asked her not an two cosmonauts climbing into that -- one astronaut and two cosmonauts climbing into that ship. everything about it is a symbol. are collaboration, cooperation. scott kelly has a twin brother, mark kelly, nothing more defining than his relationship with his twin, he calls me my brother from another mother because they have that year in space together. i wanted to bring this back to the apollo 8's story as folks

may have seen a photo that popped up there, the moon as crew.y the apollo 8 that, something like earth from that perspective, is really something that was brand-new at the time. this was huge. they broadcast this from the moon on christmas eve. live onr t able to see this their television from 250,000 miles away. is that something that is helpful for us to think about and the far as space media and how they interact? there is this partnership between the two. nasa's job can't be done without public support.

the media brings that support to the public. tell me about your role as a writer in the space community, the excitement that you are helping that story. jeffrey: that is something i like to think about. i would love to be an astronaut. i wanted to be a nasty not when i was a little boy. realized as a little before eight that i was so ill equipped to be an astronaut. it is not something i have the brass to do. but to be in the vicinity of that. to orbit around that, to be in mission control, to be sitting miss lovell said to me on the set of the movie, and i was already feeling close to marilyn, and the family at large , she said something to me that i took exactly the way she meant it.

she said i have come to believe was born to fly the mission of apollo 13 and you were born to tell that story. i know she wasn't disparaging my other things that i had written, but that is ok to think that i was a little boy in maryland and my favorite astronaut was jim ofell and the rammed in this human beings are like subatomic particles. involved myision running into jim lovell and being able to make people understand why that story was , that is with apollo 8 a good day's work. i feel both humbled and privileged to be able to do that. if you have a question, sit in the back row where you can stand. questions, theof

crew successfully returned. what happened next? they parted ways, of course. ,n the immediate aftermath where did their lives take them as far as the crew? jeffrey: their lives went to very different places. frank bormann was done. it wasn't like he didn't have a good time. he did. it wasn't like he didn't realize the epic nature of the mission. he did. book, he giveshe walksacecraft a pat, off, and doesn't look back. he was a man with a patriotic job to do and he did it. bill anders wanted to go back into space but he knew the byzantine nasa flight rules mean that if he got assigned to another mission, the odds are

good he would have been in the heter seat, which means would have gone to the moon again and still not have gotten a land, so he was offered i position in government to president nixon, then went into private industry and was very happy doing that. the moonl was halfway and he said, baby, i am coming back here. the new that he it traveled a quarter of a million miles to get to the moon and got within five dozen miles of the surface and was determined to close that last five dozen miles. as history proved, he flew on happens and learns what when the spacecraft is everything right learned later what happens when the spacecraft is everything wrong. >> i was born after apollo. we have those who don't remember

these missions. i grew up watching the space shuttle, the international space station. my children won't remember space doesles flying, so what apollo 8 and the experiences of those particular asked her not, how is that instructive or helpful for thinking about spaceflight or inspiring new generations to think about where they can go? jeffrey: there are a couple of things about that. i will briefly include an anecdote in the summer of 2012, my family went out to visit the family for the weekend, and jim was taking us to a museum to see the apollo 8 spacecraft.

i pulled my girls aside and said, ladies, you may be too young to appreciate this right now, that this is columbus showing you the santa maria. keep that in mind for later. they did keep that in mind and they got back to the house and they saw the big shaggy dog toby and then everything was about toby again, but for a minute they had that appreciation. if you looking is at the three qualities i was talking about with the three astronaut, anders is a man of engineering, lovell a man of exploration, borman amanda patriotic duty. good are three dawn qualities to take into any career if you are a 20 your old student looking at your future, so you could do worse than followed the example of these three guys in planning your own future.

>> i think we have a question from the audience. >> good afternoon. i was a college student home for christmas during the apollo 8 mission and i would love to hear your experience of that christmas eve broadcast. i know i wept. it was so beautiful. how did you experience it? how did the crew experience it? jeffrey: i could lie and say i was too young to remember it, but that was a complete untruth. i was old enough to remember it. i was a very young adolescent, ofe,, and i had learned one the rules, show no a motion. you certainly don't cry over things. i could not abide by that rule, even as a kid. i felt that excitement. eyest tears coming into my , because i knew this was something wholly different, and

when they read on christmas eve the verses of genesis, i did not grow up in a terribly religiously observant family, i knew what genesis was, you could've been a person of faith, an atheist, it didn't matter. the first of genesis is a beautiful verse. what was it speaking of? or in speaking of birth, the case of 1968, rebirth. it was speaking about a way to redeem this. that was not lost on me. i was devastated watching bobby kennedy's death, martin luther king's death. i lived in baltimore. baltimore burned in the riots. i knew how dreadful and mortal that year had been. it was the ability to redeem a year, and i believe the astronauts themselves appreciated that, but not until they came back. of all of the telegrams,

letters, awards they got from leaders around the world, all three of them say that what impressed them and touch them for was a simple card someone whose identity still remains unknown, a woman who wrote them a card and simply said to the crew of apollo 8, thank you for saving 1968. i think they felt that that is what they did, so they went back to the rest of their work, to the work that consumed them afterwards, but they knew what they had done for the world. i think that it's a darn good legacy. >> i think there was an element of surprise to hear religious mission,ing from a because already we were thinking of nasa and spaceflight as being all about science and technology , and the fact they literally

were in another world and out in the cosmos, i don't think anyone expected them to convey that particular message. jeffrey: there was a suit or a threat to file a suit because this was mixing church and state and they had read scripture and the her world basically said, fight a different fight. , theyrank borman spoke all address congress, and when he addressed congress, the supreme court was sitting right in front. he said, i was very happy to be able to read the verses of now seeing the nine gentlemen in the front row, i'm wondering if maybe we should not have done that, and everybody laughed.

abiding strictly by separation of church and state, that technically broke the rules, but it broke the rules for such a grander good, so i don't think reasonable people objected. >> thank you for your comments. jeffrey: thank you. >> i want to thank all of you for joining us today and join me in thanking jeffrey kluger for joining us. [applause] history bookshelf features the country's best-known american history writers of the past decade talking about their books. you can watch our weekly series every saturday at 4:00 p.m. eastern here on american history tv on c-span3. this weekend on american history tv, tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern on lectures in history, catholic university professor and former cia national on

intelligence operations during president kennedy's administration. >> i want to focus on the two biggest intelligence subjects of the kennedy administration, which often are the two major historical episodes that people thember from this period, bay of pigs and the cuban missile crisis. we have a fiasco and crisis, and they are both big problems. what they have in common is cuba. announcer: sunday at 6:00 p.m. on american artifacts, a look inside the national portrait gallery on its anniversary. >> the charter was to collect the men and women who made a national impact on america's history and culture, and i use advisedly,mpact because we had john wilkes booth who assassinated president lincoln, and the notorious gangster al capone. moral tested to be

in the portrait gallery. we are a place to reflect on those people who have change the national conversation and got us to where we are today. announcer: watch american history tv this weekend on c-span3. on the campus of lawrence, campus, learning about the cities history. we take you inside the wilcox collection of political movements, the largest collection of right-wing political literature in the country. >> the wilcox collection is really a celebration of free speech. it is one of the largest collections of its kind in the world. it represents both left and right wing collections on the political spectrum.