I was 18 years old on the summer Sunday night 50 years ago when man landed on the moon. I was in my father’s office at ABC News where he worked as the Assignment Manager. I was working down the street as a summer Desk Assistant at WABC Eyewitness News. He was behind his desk as Neil Armstrong descended the steps of the lunar module. He instinctively reached for a pen, and began to write on a small pad, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”, as the words came out of Armstrong’s mouth. I guess it was his newsman’s instinct. It was something that the millions of people around the world watching would remember. While it was one of great accomplishments in history, it was also the last great, good thing we did together.
The country was greatly divided in the middle of a cultural and societal upheaval. We were just over a year from the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. There were riots burning in our cities over racial inequality and the war in Vietnam. Nixon had just been elected in one of the closest elections in our history. Less than a month after the moon landing, the nation would be shocked by the Manson murders. Many of the Silent Majority would be shocked by the hundreds of thousands of young people who sang through rain and mud at Woodstock. But for those four days in July, as three Americans blasted into space and made footprints on the moon, the world seemed as one, and it was because of American vision and determination.
It started like a heavyweight championship fight with the Soviet Union. Who would get into space and to the moon first? We were staggered when the Soviets launched Sputnik in the 1957, and then put a dog in space. They then put Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into a single orbit on April 12, 1961. We were knocked down. But we got up. Three weeks later, American Astronaut Alan Shepard went up for a 20 minute sub-orbital flight on May 5th. Three weeks after Shepard’s flight, President Kennedy went before Congress and the nation and laid down a challenge. “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”
Can you imagine any president or leader issuing that kind of leadership challenge today? And it getting accomplished? There’s a lot packed into those few sentences. Kennedy uses words like “believe”, “commit”, “achieving the goal”. He sets a deadline, and says nothing will be more “difficult”, “expensive”, “impressive”, or “important”. He was giving marching orders to the country and notice to the world. Getting to the moon was a goal only we could accomplish because of who we were. He rallied the country. People would be glued their televisions or transistors radios for every launch through the sixties leading up the moon landing. The nuns in my Catholic school would even let us listen to a radio in class. One even brought a TV into the classroom so we could watch. That was almost as big an event as landing on the moon.
A year and a half later, after several more successful flights, Kennedy put his foot on the gas with what became known as “the moon speech” on September 12, 1962 at Rice University in Houston. Kennedy told the crowd gathered in Rice’s football stadium, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept…and one we intend to win…”
The world has changed, and we are as divided today as we were in that long ago summer. We showed we could come together for the good of all mankind, by putting aside our many differences to achieve that “giant leap”. When we look up at the moon this week we should all remember what’s possible.
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