The Apollo 7 all developed bad headcolds and became quite grouchy with ground control,
In The Shadow Of The Moon (the book version) disputes this; Eisele caught Schirra's cold, but Cunningham never got sick.
The consensus among those active at the time is that Apollo 7 exposed a latent problem: the relative authority of the spacecraft commander and flight director were never really hammered out in advance. Schirra was Navy, and because ships tend to be isolated and self-contained, captains are traditionally given a lot of autonomy over their internal operations. Even when an Admiral is on board, he can only make suggestions about the operation of the ship because the captain is still responsible for it.
(Ironically, the very same guys on the ground who sparred with Schirra, especially Chris Kraft, insisted on a very similar rule for themselves. After some unpleasant instances during Gemini in which higher management tried to overrule a flight decision in real time, the flight directors insisted on having the last say, and the only way management could overrule one is to fire him on the spot.)
Apollo 7 was an initial shakedown flight that was expected to reveal problems to be fixed before committing to a much more dangerous flight to the moon. It just wasn't expected to reveal
human organizational problems.
In Schirra's defense, the ground threw the first punch. He'd gotten a mission rule that they would not launch if the winds could blow the CM back onto land after an abort. Their CM had the Block I couches that could not withstand a land landing, and one could seriously injure or even kill the crew. The ground broke that agreement, and Schirra was furious. It went downhill from there during the flight.
I've noticed that in later Apollo flights, at least, the Capcoms invariably use language like "We recommend yawing right 10 degrees..." when the message sounds much more like a command than a recommendation. Were the Capcoms always this polite, or was it one of the subtle reactions to Apollo 7?
