Deke! by Donald K. Slayton and Michael Cassutt

Deke! is the memoir of Donald K. “Deke” Slayton, one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts selected in 1959. Before he could fly in the Mercury program, flight surgeons grounded him due to fibrillations. Space program doctors felt they couldn’t risk these occasional unusual heart rhythms occurring during the stresses of a spaceflight. Slayton remained with NASA, becoming the chief of the astronaut office. He was responsible for crew selections up through the end of the Apollo program. In 1973, a regimen of exercise and vitamins seemed to stop the fibrillations, and doctors cleared him for flight. Slayton finally reached orbit in the July 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. This joint mission, in which an Apollo Command/Service module met up and docked with a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft in orbit, is commonly cited as representing the end of the space race. 

Television writer and sci-fi novelist Michael Cassutt serves as Slayton’s co-writer. In this case, the collaboration involved Cassutt conducting interviews with Slayton, consulting additional primary and secondary sources, and assembling the material into a first-person narrative. This method is understandable for two reasons. First, Slayton is not a professional writer. And second, he was seriously ill at the time of the book’s writing. Slayton was diagnosed with cancer in spring 1991 and died in June 1993. Deke! was released posthumously in 1994.

One major issue that arises with a book written under these circumstances is the question of authenticity. It is easy to wonder how much of the first-person narration is Slayton and how much is Cassutt. As I read the book, though, this worry eased. The book has a consistent tone and point of view, and Cassutt remains a fairly invisible co-author. The blurbs on the book’s cover suggest Slayton’s genuine personality shows through. Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman writes, “This is his story in his own words, and it often seems as if Deke were there in person.” Apollo 11’s Michael Collins agrees, saying, “It reads just like the man: honest, with the ring of truth to it.”

Cassutt makes a particularly smart editorial choice in the book’s structure. Throughout the text, there are occasional one-to-two page “Other Voices” sections that present the perspectives of Slayton’s family members, friends, and colleagues. Often these sections serve to further illuminate Slayton’s character, giving the reader a better sense of the man. The Slayton they describe is recognizable in the book’s narration, making the collaborative authorship feel all the more seamless. The “Other Voices” sections often take on the feeling of rememberances. This makes sense, given that many of them are adapted from speeches given at Slayton’s memorial service. It’s a wonderful idea to array these alternate views alongside Slayton’s own take, and it works great in practice here.

The book begins with an account of Slayton’s early life and the path that eventually led him to NASA. This section is short but fascinating. Slayton was born on a Wisconsin farm at a time when electricity seemed like a recent innovation. After Pearl Harbor, he joined the military. Slayton ended up flying 63 combat bombing missions over both Europe and Japan. Upon his return to the United States, he earned an engineering degree at the University of Minnesota, went to work at Boeing as an aerospace engineer, and then moved into the world of testing aircraft. In 1959, he was chosen as one of America’s first astronauts.

As far as Apollo memoirs go, the book’s content really delivers. We aren’t subjected to yet another rote rundown of mission highlights. Instead, we get many new details and personal insights into Slayton’s life and work. His perspective on Apollo is essentially limited to the planning and crew selection processes. There’s relatively little general discussion here of hardware, scientific work, or large-scale political forces. Intead, we catch glimpses of these things as they intersect with Slayton’s own path. The effect is a memoir that truly feels personal.

Once Slayton becomes the chief of the astronaut office, we get to the meat of the book: the processes he went though in selecting crews and his work with the rest of the astronaut corps. We get Slayton’s very candid assessments of NASA leadership and his fellow astronauts, including some strong critiques. He names some astronauts that didn’t work as hard as their peers, and he’s clear that this cost them future flight assignments. We also see Slayton’s distaste for politics and bureaucracy. He dismisses the notion that his selection process included political factors. For instance, many believed he intentionally chose a civilian, Neil Armstrong, rather than a military astronaut to be the first on the moon. Slayton insists the crew selections depended simply on who was ready for the job and who was up next in the rotation.

One of the book’s many amusing anecdotes deals with this no-nonsense, straight to the point attitude. In an “Other Voices” section, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov—who met with Slayton in orbit during Apollo-Soyuz—explains that he was tasked with selecting cosmonaut crews in the Soviet Union, just as Slayton did at NASA. Leonov delivered lengthy spoken reports to a government bureau regarding a crew’s readiness before a mission. When he mentioned this to Slayton, the American responded that he used only two words for this purpose: “They’re ready.”

My favorite aspect of the book is the degree to which it humanizes the astronauts. As the chief of the astronaut office, Slayton is privy to an array of private struggles, complaints, and relationships within the astronaut corps. We learn how divorces, accidents, and planned retirements changed the dynamics of crew selections. The rippling effects of these changes created the iconic Apollo crews we know today. The man responsible for handling these dynamics was Deke Slayton. Deke! provides terrific insight into how the astronauts of the 1960s and 1970s found their way into the highly coveted seats aboard Apollo spacecraft.