Gus Grissom Quotes
In the Air Force, you get some weird orders, but you obey them no matter what.
Carpenter, M. Scott, et al. We Seven: By the Astronauts Themselves. Simon and Schuster, 1962, p. 69.
Kleinst, one of the guilty war criminals, is here quoted with the defense that most Nazi war criminals uses—namely that they were obeying orders. But international law makes no distinction between military and political orders, and it is the obligation of a soldier to refuse to obey an illegal military order and the orders he obeyed were illegal and contrary to International law—an order to kill babies and young children can never be legal for example.
Miles, a hero of the Indian Campaigns (although he led the atrocities at the massacre at Wounded Knee) and then the leading military figure in America was an opponent of the policies of the new young President and had political aspirations of his own for the Presidency. Miles’ opinions were printed in the press. He maintained that he was not speaking as the Commanding General of the Army but personally as a citizen. The President surprised almost all by publicly scolding and reprimanding Miles when he next came to the White House. Five days later Roosevelt made the reprimand official, effectively ending Miles career. The issue of when senior military officers can criticize the administration has been debated ever since. Roosevelt was also a war hero himself, and although the military was shocked by such “savage” treatment of a senior officer, the President had public opinion on his side. Every decade or so there is a military official who does not care for the administration’s policies and expresses himself publicly. President Truman’s firing to General Douglas Macarthur was the most dramatic case, but Truman was well aware of the Miles and TR precedent.
Lawrence of Arabia
He was a Republican who served a Democratic President to the distress of some of the extreme right wingers of the Republican Party.
Virgil Ivan "Gus" Grissom was a United States Air Force (USAF) pilot and a member of the Mercury Seven selected by National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) as Project Mercury astronauts to be the first Americans in outer space. He was a Project Gemini and an Apollo program astronaut. As a member of the NASA Astronaut Corps, Grissom was the second American to fly in space. He was also the second American to fly in space twice, beaten only by Joe Walker with his sub-orbital X-15 flights.
