The Race: The Uncensored Story of How America Beat Russia to the Moon [Hardcover]

The Race is a deeply-flawed, error-filled book that adds nothing to our understanding of the space race. Schefter was a journalist with both Time and Life magazines during the 1960s. As such, he got to hang around with some of the astronauts and other NASA officials. He bills this book as the "uncensored" account of that epic undertaking. But by this mostly what he means is that it includes some stories of astronauts getting drunk and cheating on their wives. Many of these more ribald tales are not totally believable. Some of them don't seem physically possible. One story is that sometimes 3 or 4 women would line up in the hallway outside an astronaut's hotel room, waiting for their "turn" with him. This stud service tale and many others have the air of stories told around a poker table over too many beers--about as believable as the story about the fish that got away. While the astronauts were not saints, as Tom Wolfe proved two decades ago (in what remains the best astronaut book ever written), Schefter's stories don't ring true.

Schefter exhibits many of the flaws of a journalist trying to write history. In short, he does not let facts get in the way of a good story. The book is riddled with numerous errors, many of which are relatively minor, but all of which indicate that Schefter is a sloppy and lazy writer.

For instance, the Vanguard satellite did not have "primitive photo-cells" that took an image of the earth. The Saturn I did not have a single F-1 engine and the F-1 engine produced 1.5, not 1.3 million pounds of thrust. "Escape velocity" is not 17,500 miles per hour. And the X-15 rocket plane was not dropped from the belly of a B-29; it was dropped from the wing of a B-52. He was obviously thinking of the movie The Right Stuff and its depiction of the X-1. You have to wonder about an author who seems to take his cues from movie versions of events.

One of his bigger errors concerns his account of the July 1969 explosion of the Soviet N-1 moon rocket. Schefter says that American spy satellites photographed the rocket on the pad just before the launch. Not true. More importantly, he says that when it exploded, it killed 100 people. Also not true. Nobody died. He is obviously confusing the explosion with the 1960 explosion of a Soviet ballistic missile that killed well over 100 people.

All of these things are totally checkable. The fact that Schefter did not bother to check them indicates an extreme laziness and journalistic arrogance on his part. The lack of footnotes, bibliography, or other sources indicates that we simply have to take Schefter's word for all this stuff. That is hard to do considering all the obvious mistakes.

If we cannot trust him on the things that we can check, how are we to trust him about the things that we cannot check? He has all kinds of rude astronaut stories which apparently came from the Houston NASA public affairs officer, Paul Haney (although Schefter does not make clear what are first-hand accounts and what are hearsay). As I already noted, many of these do not seem believable. Others are deeply problematic.

A good example is Schefter's account of an incident following the death of astronaut Ted Freeman in 1964. Schefter was a young reporter who heard about the crash of Freeman's plane and was told by his editor to meet chief astronaut Deke Slayton at the home of Freeman's wife. He went over there and saw what he thought was Slayton's Corvette parked in the driveway. He went to the door and knocked. Freeman's wife answered and Schefter stammered out that he had heard about the accident. An angry neighbor then told Schefter to get lost.

Schefter claims that it turns out that the Corvette actually belonged to the astronauts' doctor and that Deke Slayton was not there because he had stopped at a local bar first before facing the widow. The whole story smells. For one thing, the astronauts' doctor did not own a Corvette. And Schefter's claim that Slayton went to have a beer before meeting the widow of one of his men, whether true or not (and how are we to know?), seems like a slap at Slayton.

In Schefter's favor, it seems likely that Freeman's widow already knew that something was wrong when the doctor and neighbor showed up at her door. It is unlikely that Schefter is the one who blurted out the fact that her husband was dead. But the very fact that a reporter showed up to see the widow only an hour after the death of her husband is disgusting. Why should we have any sympathy for this vulture?

The subtitle of this book also says that it is the "complete" account of the race to the moon. It isn't by a long shot. There is very little information on the Soviet side of that race. The Russians barely exist in his narrative. Is the subtitle merely another factual error or an "embellishment?"

This is a pathetic attempt at a gossipy memoir by a guy who has trouble getting his facts right. Avoid it.

Finding a way to make "The Race" stand out from the competition in an increasingly crowded publishing niche must have been tough. As a journalist in the thick of it as it happened, Schefter chose the "uncensored" route. "Uncensored", of course, is a meaningless adjective in this respect. As far as I know, there is no Censor of Books About Space. In its tabloid sense, however, a tag of uncensored makes us expect scandal and revelation. Sure enough, Schefter offers a little of both. But it's largely irrelevant. We knew 6/7ths of the Mercury astronauts were less than faithful - that is, we did if we read Wolfe's "Right Stuff" or ever personally knew a military pilot. And to read about some astronaut or other leaving his (to be famous) footprints on the roof lining of someone's car really adds very little to the narrative.

If Schefter was looking for an angle, why not his own? I would love to know what it was really like to be involved in reporting the space programme in the 1960s. Did he get caught up in the excitement of it all? Did he cry when Apollo 1 burned? The book sledom ventures into first person, which is a shame, because when it does it becomes novel and interesting. A little more humanity, a little more involvement, and this could have gone from being an OK book to one worth keeping.