Operation Moonglow

by Teasel Muir-Harmony

  In addition to incorporating certain themes and phrases into public diplomacy material, USIA officials also monitored the adoption of these rhetorical devices by the audiences they hoped to influence. When judging the impact of Borman’s tour of Europe, Bourgin noted positively that the “vocab [was] thoroughly absorbed.”111 A foreign leader’s inclusion of the phrase “for all mankind,” or a newspaper article that described a space feat as part of a greater good, proved to many USIA officials the effectiveness of USIA and State Department programming.

  President Nixon began his eight-day European trip on February 23, immediately following Borman’s tour, with an itinerary that loosely mirrored the astronaut’s travels: Brussels, London, Paris, Bonn, Berlin, and Rome. He explained he “wanted to show the world that the new American President was not completely obsessed with Vietnam, and to dramatize for Americans at home that, despite opposition to the war, their President could still be received abroad with respect and even enthusiasm.”112 Reminiscent of Kennedy’s trip to France on the heels of the Freedom 7 exhibit in 1961, Nixon saw a European tour at the beginning of his presidency as a way to present himself as a master statesman on the global stage.

  Ahead of the trip, Nixon expressed worry that protests might erupt in Europe, prompting negative press at home. He wanted Americans to see how respected and experienced their new president was when he traveled abroad. And although he hoped to correct the impression that he was obsessed with Vietnam, it was on the top of mind during the transatlantic flight. Dressed in a maroon smoking jacket, he sat alone for most of the flight, reviewing briefing material. He took one break, calling over National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. The day before, on February 22, North Vietnamese forces had begun an offensive on South Vietnam from sanctuaries in Cambodia. The president instructed Kissinger that it was time to plan a secret bombing campaign, even though Cambodia was a neutral country. Nixon believed that such a campaign would not only send the message to the North Vietnamese that the new American president was a more assertive, bellicose adversary than Johnson; it would also strong-arm them into peace negotiations.113

  When Air Force One touched down in Brussels, King Baudouin greeted Nixon at the airport, reflecting that “during this year, which will perhaps be that of man’s first landing on the moon, we are more than ever conscious of the gulf between the wonderful possibilities open to us and the obligations which burden the world because of war, want, injustice and inequality.” The next day at the North Atlantic Council, the assembly of NATO’s permanent ambassadors, Nixon quoted MacLeish in his remarks. “We are all ‘riders on the earth together’—fellow citizens of the world community,” he recited, while also emphasizing the importance of strong alliances.114 He posed questions about the future direction of NATO, hoping to demonstrate his appreciation of how the organization’s priorities had evolved since World War II and his willingness to engage with European allies: “The ties that bind our continents are the common tradition of freedom, the common desire for progress, and the common passion for peace.”115

  While the public-facing Nixon championed “peace” and Apollo 8’s lessons of unity and connectedness at NATO, his top advisors gathered at Brussels Airport. They met on Air Force One, sitting on the tarmac, because aboard the plane they could form a strategy for bombing Cambodia without the threat of electronic surveillance. The campaign, which would be named Operation Menu, was delayed at first out of concern that the administration would not be able to keep it secret. But by mid-March, after he returned from Europe, Nixon ordered an immediate attack. Over the ensuing fourteen months, B-52s dropped 110,000 tons of bombs, destroying property and food supplies, killing troops and civilians alike, and turning more than 100,000 Cambodians into refugees. The campaign would not have the effect Nixon and Kissinger had intended. It did not speed along peace negotiations, and it would eventually undermine Nixon’s public-facing strategy of “peace with honor.”116

  The rest of Nixon’s European tour was generally considered a public relations success, even if the long-term impact proved intangible. Stops in London, Bonn, Berlin, and Rome received positive coverage in the international and domestic press. Nixon believed that his meetings with de Gaulle were the “high point of the trip.” The two leaders agreed on the need for détente with the USSR and diplomatic relations with China. Nixon asked for de Gaulle’s opinion on the Vietnam War and indicated an interest in initiating direct conversations with Hanoi, a message that he “felt confident… would be passed to the North Vietnamese Embassy.”117 Although Nixon attempted to portray himself as the “peacemaker” in public and augmented this message by referencing the Apollo program, his private actions like Operation Menu would undercut this image. He would ride the political momentum of Apollo’s popularity again in August, when the first lunar landing provided him an even more efficacious opportunity to advance his new foreign policy agenda.

  8

  MAKING APOLLO 11

  FOR ALL HUMANKIND, 1969

  One of the benefits of the space program is that we were getting favorable publicity rather than the negative publicity of Vietnam.

  —APOLLO ASTRONAUT FRANK BORMAN

  “The moon landing will be such a massive achievement, and attract such wide regard and admiration, that to blow a horn about it could hurt the US abroad,” warned John E. Reinhardt, an assistant director of the USIA, to public affairs officers stationed around the world. Drawing on his extensive experience, he cautioned public diplomats about how they should frame the first moon landing. It would be necessary to strike the right balance between nationalism and globalism to advance US foreign relations interests. Described as “cautious, courteous, intelligent, and quietly modest,” Reinhardt labeled himself as a person who “believes in the power of ideas.” In 1956, the year of the Montgomery bus boycott, Reinhardt became one of the few—“a handful… like five”—African American foreign service officers in the USIA. He had spent years on the ground as a foreign affairs officer first in Japan, then the Philippines and Iran, before becoming the ambassador to Nigeria. He knew firsthand why “in today’s increasingly interconnected world, where regional issues quickly transform into global challenges, the value of public diplomacy has never been greater.”1

  It was already well-known that Apollo was an American program, Reinhardt noted. Emphasizing that point would be counterproductive: any “self-congratulatory, bragging…, could only irritate people abroad and detract from their otherwise sure-to-be-favorable impressions of the event.” He clarified that he was not saying that USIS posts should do nothing about Apollo 11, the first moon landing mission, scheduled for July 1969. “The caveat,” he explained, “[was] about tone.” Instead, “Set the entire feat in perspective and interpret its significance to mankind,” he suggested.2

  An episode in Kenya that spring substantiated Reinhardt’s guidance. At screenings of the documentary Apollo 8: Journey Around the Moon, a public affairs officer watched the audience’s reactions closely. “When the narrator intoned words like ‘product of American skill and American sweat’ or the camera panned to a close-up of the flag or the letters ‘USA’ on the space craft an embarrassed laugh would run through the audience,” he reported. This critical commentary captures the growing antipathy toward demonstrations of American power and might among international audiences. And the report evinces how public diplomats fine-tuned their messaging and framing of the space program based on reactions on the ground. The agency’s objective was to draw the audience in, to make them identify and empathize with American spaceflight, and in turn the United States. Any emphasis that Project Apollo was an American accomplishment was coming across as chauvinistic. As NASA edged closer and closer to landing humans on the moon, USIA material left behind images and messages of American dominance in science and technology, and instead focused on the deeper implications of the lunar program on humanity and human experience. If Project Apollo was going to advance US foreign relations interests, it would do so by being more
inclusive, by presenting Apollo as an American-led achievement of all humankind.3

  In January 1969, after the stunning success of Apollo 8 in December 1968, NASA announced the crew selection for Apollo 11. The mission would likely occur in late July or August, just six months away.4 Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman profiled each of the Apollo 11 astronauts for President Nixon, consolidating their biographies and capturing their personalities in a few short phrases. Mission Commander Armstrong hailed from Ohio, flew combat missions in the Korean War, then became a test pilot for NASA before joining the astronaut corps and flying on Gemini 8. Borman described him as “quiet, perceptive, [a] thoroughly decent man, whose interests still turn to flying.” Lunar module pilot Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin was “very athletic, aggressive, hard charging… [, with a] serious personality.” Born and raised in New Jersey, Aldrin also flew in the Korean War before becoming an astronaut and flying on Gemini 12. His PhD research at MIT contributed to NASA’s rendezvous techniques. Command module pilot Michael Collins was the best handball player of the whole astronaut corps, Borman claimed. Born in Rome, Italy, Collins came from a military family, flew on Gemini 10, and was “in some senses skeptical… more inclined toward the arts and literature rather than engineering.”5

  But before Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins traveled to the moon in July, two more Apollo missions had to prove that NASA was ready. First, Apollo 9 in March 1969 tested the lunar module (LM) in Earth orbit. The crew qualified both the LM and CSM for lunar operations by conducting a complete rendezvous and docking sequence, an inter-vehicular crew transfer, a CSM/LM consumable assessment, and a spacewalk. The ten-day flight proved that NASA was ready for Apollo 10, the next step: a “dress rehearsal” of the moon landing that May.6 Meanwhile, the crew of Apollo 11—Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins—spent hundreds of hours in simulators and hundreds more being fitted for space suits and enduring high G forces in centrifuges, while also engaged in public relations, among other preparations. Collins recalled being “busier than I had ever been in my life.”7

  While the astronauts trained and NASA prepared, the USIA, the State Department, and the White House planned the largest public relations campaign in world history. USIA Science Advisor Simon Bourgin praised “Colonel Borman’s good sense and aplomb in public affairs” after his tour of Europe, and he assured his colleagues that Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong “is of a similar stripe.” But they were “uneasy” about not planning formal and extensive programming for what they predicted would be “the sensation of this or any other century.”8 The moon landing “offered the [USIA] its greatest opportunity in its 16-year history to inform the world about America’s scientific genius, industrial and technological skills and the personal courage that made it all possible,” as USIA staff saw it.9 In order to make the flight an effective instrument of US foreign relations, government officials downplayed nationalistic jargon, stressed that the mission was “for all humankind,” and established an infrastructure to encourage global “participation” in the flight, employing messaging that linked unity and progress with American science, technology, and global leadership. This proactive and deliberate global public relations campaign lay at the heart of how and why the lunar landing touched the lives of so many and why it became such a global phenomenon with a lasting legacy.10

  Project Apollo had already offered many public diplomats a unique opportunity to connect with foreign leaders and publics who were otherwise critical of the United States and unreceptive to many other types of diplomatic gestures. When Nixon became president, the situation in the Middle East was volatile. For the USIS post in Iran, “Space on the basis of popularity and broad interest [was] the number one subject that USIS [had] to offer in Iran.”11 A USIS post in Turkey reported that it was having “difficulty communicating persuasively with some of [the] important elite groups in Istanbul including those who control most public media in Turkey and generate much of [the] anti-American poison being spread around this country.” Project Apollo missions were “luckily… one US activity in which these groups have displayed intense interest and this gives us an opening to them.” Posts around the world wrote to the USIA headquarters in Washington, asking for help developing a plan to take advantage of the rare political opportunity that the first lunar landing offered.12

  The USIA, recognizing that the upcoming Apollo 11 mission could be “one of the stories of the century,” responded with a thorough examination of how the agency should cover the mission. In addition to striking the right tone, as Reinhardt instructed, public diplomats created a set of guidelines. Commercial and foreign media would cover the mission in great detail, and they would look to the USIA for press briefings and other material. This is where the agency could play a major role in shaping the narrative. All agency material would (1) treat the mission as an accomplishment of all humankind, (2) emphasize that exploration is an essential component of great nations, (3) explain how Project Apollo was built on the innovations of scientists from around the world, (4) identify the astronauts as “the envoys of mankind in outer space,” (5) describe Apollo’s contribution to progress and solving problems on Earth, and (6) avoid highlighting the fact that the mission was being undertaken by the United States. Like the public diplomacy framing of American space exploration throughout the 1960s, Apollo 11 programming emphasized values of universalism and progress through science.13

  In February 1969, NASA Administrator Thomas Paine established a Symbolic Activities Committee to ensure that the symbolic gestures carried out on the mission reaped the greatest political rewards for the Nixon administration. The committee coordinated and assessed recommendations from the USIA, State, members of Congress, and the White House.14 One idea that did not make the cut was sending an international volume of commemorative poetry to the moon. The United Nations, on behalf of the United States, would invite each country to select a poet to compose a new work specifically for the landing. Each poem would be printed in its original language “to avoid the appearance of disparaging any culture.” The idea behind the volume was that it would “reflect the richness and diversity of world culture as well as its common longing for peace and brotherhood, at the beginning of the extra-terrestrial era of man.” Not only that, but “several obvious benefits would also accrue to United States foreign policy by this generous gesture.” As Armstrong placed the bound volume on the lunar surface, the scene would be broadcast on worldwide television: “The United States will demonstrate dramatically that it wishes to involve all the world in the historical landing.”15 Another idea that was overruled involved depositing a microfiche copy of the basic documents of all major religions, also with the intention of sending an item of “significance for all mankind.”16

  Whether to raise an American flag on the moon was a less clear-cut issue, so much so that a highly contentious debate broke out in Washington throughout the spring. In 1967 the United Nations Outer Space Treaty codified that no nation could claim sovereignty of the moon. The State Department warned the Nixon White House that raising an American flag on the moon might suggest “conquest and territorial acquisition” and could spark international controversy. Instead, State recommended that an American flag adorn a plaque, “providing a visible symbol of U.S. accomplishment while avoiding the possibility of being misconstrued.” This would be the best course for taking “full advantage of this accomplishment both to enhance our posture abroad and to encourage other countries to further identify their interests in the exploration of space with our own.”17

  Numerous politicians echoed the State Department’s sentiments, including Senator Charles Mathias Jr. (R., Maryland). He made the case that Armstrong and Aldrin should carry miniature flags from every nation: “We must signal clearly to the world that Apollo 11 will carry through space not only America’s pride of accomplishment, but also America’s bright offer of hope and progress for all the world.”18

  The USIA weighed in, arguing that the American flag patches sewn on the astronauts’ space su
its and the flag at the base of the lunar module were sufficient national identification. To “neutralize the effect of the American flag,” they recommend leaving a silver globe with the continents in relief or a box filled with soil from every continent on the moon, or even casting the Earth’s soil “symbolically over the lunar surface.” The agency also proposed carrying to the moon and back miniature flags from other nations, which could become presentation items to chiefs of state.19

  Members of Congress vehemently rejected the idea of a UN flag. Indeed, Congress threatened to cut NASA funding if a UN flag became part of the Apollo 11 mission. Because US taxpayers funded Project Apollo, Congress argued, the astronauts should plant an American flag, not a United Nations flag, on the moon.

  On June 10, 1969, roughly a month before launch, NASA announced that Armstrong and Aldrin would raise an American flag, and only an American flag, on the moon. Later that day, the House of Representatives approved the NASA appropriations bill, but only after amending it with the following provision: “The flag of the United States, and no other flag, shall be implanted or otherwise placed on the surface of the moon, or on the surface of any planet, by members of the crew of any spacecraft… as part of any mission… the funds for which are provided entirely by the Government of the United States.”20 Astronaut Michael Collins agreed with the final decision: “Since the landing was being financed by the American taxpayers alone, I felt they were entitled to one show of nationalism amid the international totems.”21 His comment highlights just how international in tone the first lunar landing had otherwise become.

  In late June 1969, NASA invited heads of state to compose messages of goodwill, which would be shrunk down and then etched onto a small silicon disk the size of a fifty-cent piece. Armstrong and Aldrin would deposit the disk on the moon along with other symbolic objects. Many of these messages expressed sentiments that reflected the inscription on the plaque designed for the lunar module along with hope for a new era of peace on Earth. “May the great achievements of space research inaugurate an era of peace and happiness for all mankind,” wrote Kristjan Eldjarn, president of Iceland. “I fervently hope that this event will usher in an era of peaceful endeavor for all mankind,” added the prime minister of India, Indira Gandhi. President Ibrahim Nasir of the Maldives wrote that “this message of peace and goodwill from the people of Maldives came with the first men from planet Earth to set foot on the Moon.”22 NASA Administrator Thomas Paine believed that this effort “greatly enhances the sense of international participation in the Lunar Program.”23