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THE RACE TO THE MOON: STILL A COMPELLING STORY

THE RACE
By James Schefter
Doubleday, 320 pp $24.95

Some reporters get to cover the story of a generation. Count Jim Schefter among this lucky bunch.

He was a staff writer for Life magazine in 1963, and he got assigned to a breaking story that would keep readers entranced for the better part of a decade: America’s race against Russia to get to the moon. It was a race that was started so quietly that the U.S. didn’t even know it was already losing the competition at first; it was a race that became a national commitment after President John F. Kennedy announced that his goal was to put a man - and American on the moon before the decade was over.

And of course, three decades later, we all know who crossed the finish line of this race.

Schefter, the lucky young journalist, had access to the astronaut heroes who kept up the pace and passed the baton from one to the other from year to year, and to their families. Life magazine had struck an exclusive deal with NASA to tell their stories, and ran a series of somewhat sanitized and boosterish articles and pictorials in the pre-CNN, pre-24x7 news media era.

Now, Schefter looks over a career’s worth of notes and memories, interviews some of the principals with the perspective of history, and re-tells that story as one narrative.

The tale is still thrilling.

Despite the media saturation for the space race over the years, from the mythmaking novelization of Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff” to the historical perspective of Andrew Chaikin’s “A Man on the Moon : The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts,” there’s plenty of room for more. There’ve also been other insiders’ tales, such as Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton’s “Moonshot,” and, of course, hours and hours of Hollywood movies and documentaries that all lead up to that “one small step for man.”

You can add “The Race” to the space bibliography, but it doesn’t quite belong on top of the stack.

Partly, that’s because Schefter (or his editor) couldn’t quite decide what angle to take with the book. In journalistic lingo, that would be “the hook.” The main hook is the one that’s bluntly stated in the title -- and for part of the book, Schefter does a great job of maintaining his parallel coverage of the Soviet Union’s running of the race.

The book starts with the USSR’s stunning early achievements at a time when the U.S. - and President Eisenhower in particular - didn’t even realize the starter’s gun had already gone off and our runners hadn’t lined up at the gate. And Schefter deftly paints a portrait of the Russian scientist in charge of the Soviet space program - the mysterious “Chief Designer,” Sergei Korolev.

Unfortunately, halfway into the book, it’s clear the Soviets had already lost the race (never mind the fact that everyone reading knows the ending). The drama gets sapped out of the competition even as the U.S. stumbles with the death of three astronauts in the disastrous fire of Apollo 1 in 1967. By then, the tragedy wasn’t enough to slow the inevitable victory.

Even though Schefter bravely mentions the Russians at the very end, it reads like an attempt to justify the title; at that point, the Chief Designer was already dead.

Meanwhile, “The Race” gets caught up in trying to be the “true” insider’s look at the space program.

There are plenty of wonderful insights, including the original astronauts’ love for the comedic character “Jose Jimenez.” But Schefter never gets too personal. He coyly writes about the astronauts’ randy escapades and wild lifestyles - and especially those first seven, the ones with the “right stuff,” all except for the straight-shooting John Glenn, of course. He never digs too deep, though, and in fact rarely writes about how both the fame and shame affected the very wives and children he got to know.

It leaves the reader wondering if the same rules of journalistic “propriety” that kept these stories out of the public eye baack then are still exerting their pull on Schefter today. Sometimes, you get the feeling he knows a lot more but still can’t let us in on the details.

Schefter also never quite develops what could be a fascinating story: the one about how the media covered the space program. He often inserts information about how much access the press had to the program, and the ground rules established by NASA for the reporting of the program. But the writing here seems detached, as if he didn’t experience it first-hand. So it’s all the more vivid when Schefter slips into a rare first-person passage, describing the heartbreak of being the first one to showed up at an astronaut’s home after he died in a training flight accident, and having the wife answer the door.

As a writer, Schefter seems to have been torn between relying on the reporting style of his Life magazine days or toying with more poetic prose.

For much of the book, he writes in simple declarative sentences, like these after Alan Shepard learns he’ll be the first American to fly in a Gemini capsule:

“It wasn’t silent for long. Bob Gilruth held out his hand and Shepard shook it. The others woke up and joined in. These seven were hard men and dedicated. They’d experienced terror, known disappointment, visited with death. A little thing like this wasn’t the end of the world.”

Sometimes, the brevity works dramatically:

“Wernher von Braun was a star. Robert R. Gilruth was a shadow. Sergei Korlev was a secret person.

“And they needed each other desperately.”

But every once in a while, Schefter’s fingers fly a little more deftly over his keyboards, as in this vivid passage about a test launch of the rocket that would take men to the moon:

“It was unique and overpowering. At first, for a half second, it was the crackle of an immense fire. The crackle was overlaid with a thunder that didn’t stop. The thunder was overlaid with the roar of a dozen hurricanes. The crackle came back in orchestral counterpoint, arguing with the hurricanes for dominance. Air pushed against faces and ears with a pressure that wasn’t wind, just a steady shove. Reporters leaned into the shove and craned to watch that omigod rocket pitch over on cue to a straight east heading.”

Unfortunately, Schefter doesn’t show a flourish often enough for my taste, but this race can still take a new telling and keep us enthralled.

It’s not a great book, but it still tells a good story.

This book review ran in the Denver Rocky Mountain News.