The day hope landed
When I remember the moon landing, I think about my father. Fifty years ago, on the evening of Sunday, July 20, 1969, we sat together in Dad’s capacious study in our house in Ithaca, N.Y., holding our breaths, hardly uttering a word as the Eagle touched down.
My father, raised in Barbados, was a stern and distant man of donnish bent. He was rarely impressed and almost never smiled. But when Neil Armstrong, the Apollo 11 mission commander, stepped onto the lunar surface, Dad grinned from ear to ear. The nation joined in. The world joined in. The jubilation of the moment cannot be explained. There is no analogy.
If you’re not old enough to remember, the chances are you don’t appreciate how desperately the nation and the world needed Apollo 11. The Vietnam War seemed eternal. Tricky Dick was in the White House. Heroes were falling everywhere. Just 13 months earlier, Robert Kennedy had been assassinated in Los Angeles. Two months before that, Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered. During the spring and summer of 1968, the nation’s cities had burned.
That weekend, the nation’s left was in a particularly bad way. On Saturday morning—literally the day before the Eagle touched down—I had witnessed my father’s agony after learning that the previous night, Sen. Edward Kennedy had driven his car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, resulting in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne.
My father was bereft. He had worked in John
Kennedy’s administration and been part of Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign. He was among those who had seen Teddy as the best hope to defeat President Richard Nixon in 1972. Now that hope was gone.
Yet one of his hero John Kennedy’s greatest dreams was about to be realized, and Dad was smiling. JFK’s promise to put a man on the moon within the decade has given us the phrase “moon shot,” used routinely nowadays to describe the commitment of vast resources to solving a specified problem.
The clear-cut finish line was part of what made the Apollo missions so exciting. It’s easy to forget how in the 1950s and early 1960s, the U.S. lagged behind the Soviet Union in the space race. The Soviets launched the first true satellite, put the first man in space, put the first woman in space, and accomplished the first spacewalk. The U.S. was terrified of falling further behind. Winning the race to the moon became among the highest of national priorities.
Any criticism misses the mark. The moon landing, like the space program itself, served a different set of needs. All through history, the stars have been shining down on what we are pleased to call civilization. Reaching those distant glimmers has been a human dream for as long as there have been human beings to look upward in wonder.
The desire has quickened in billions of hearts. And for a jubilant moment on the evening of July 20, 1969, we really thought the world had taken one giant leap along the way.