Borman: Felt the scorn of the longhairs.

I never knew until recently that astronaut Frank Borman, after completing his Apollo 8 mission in 1968, became a target of anti-authority campus radicals. A post-mission tour of American universities didn’t go splendidly for Borman, and Carl Sagan apparently didn’t help matters when the spaceman made his way to Cornell. An excerpt from Collect Space about the ill-fated meeting:

“After Borman returned from Apollo 8 NASA sent him on a good will tour of colleges and universities across the country. Borman took his wife Susan along so she could share in the event. At Columbia no sooner than Borman started to talk, the audience started pelting him with marshmallows and two students dressed in gorilla costumes climbed onto stage with him to reenact the opening of the movie 2001.

But as Borman said, ‘Then there was Cornell.’

At Cornell Borman and his wife Susan were guests of Carl Sagan. Sagan invited them to his house for the evening so that they could meet some of the students from Students for a Democratic Society. Sagan explained that he was their faculty advisor.

As Borman explains it, they spent the evening sitting on the floor of Sagan’s living room where Sagan orchestrated an attack, egging the students on when they asked questions such as, ‘Col. Borman, were you aware that on such and such a date American troops massacred hundreds of helpless Vietnamese woman and children? Just what is your opinion of this heinous atrocity? Surely you must have some thoughts on the subject!’

I always wondered why Sagan (a very well-loved man) set Borman and his wife up like that. The best answer I have been able to come up with is Sagan saw Borman as a trespasser. Sagan made no secret of the fact that as a university professor he saw himself as superior to any military officer.”

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Apollo 8 crew reads biblical passages from space on Christmas Day 1968: