After three hours of checking instruments, the two astronauts asked Houston if they might omit a scheduled four-hour break and disembark now. “We will support it,” Houston answered. They put on their $300,000 space suits and depressurized the LM cabin; then Armstrong, moving backward, began his slow descent of a nine-rung ladder. On the second step he pulled a cord, opening the lens of a TV camera and thus allowing half a billion people to watch him move cautiously down to the stark surface.
His 9 1/2 B boot touched it, and he said: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” It was 10:56.20 P.M. He shuffled around. “The surface is fine and powdery,” he said. “It adheres in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the soles and sides of my boots. I only go in a fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.”
Armstrong put some of the powder in a pocket on the leg of his space suit. Then, nineteen minutes after his debarkation, Aldrin joined him, saying, “Beautiful, beautiful; magnificent desolation.” Armstrong drove a stake in the lunar soil and mounted the TV camera on it. The spidery Eagle was sixty feet away, and in the middle of the television picture; behind it was the eternal night of outer space. Gravity here was one-sixth G, 16.6 percent of that on earth. Viewers saw the two men bounding about like gazelles and heard Aldrin say, “When I’m about to lose my balance in one direction I find recovery is quite natural and very easy.” They planted a three-by-five-foot U.S. flag, the cloth held out from the staff by wires; Aldrin saluted it. They also deposited a container bearing messages from the leaders of seventy-six countries and a stainless-steel plaque reading, “Here men from planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July, 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”
Gathering some fifty pounds of rocks for scientific study, they measured the temperature outside their space suits: 234 degrees Fahrenheit in sunlight and 279 degrees below zero in the shade. A strip of foil was set out to collect solar particles, and two instruments were erected, a seismometer to mark lunar disturbances, and a reflector to send readings to telescopes on earth. At midnight they returned to the Eagle, and after 21 hours and 37 minutes on the moon they fired their engine and departed. (“You’re cleared for takeoff,” Mission Control said. “Roger, we’re No. 1 on the runway,” said Aldrin.) Back in orbit, they rendezvoused with Collins in the Columbia. He rehooked the two vessels together. They crawled back through the tunnel to join him, and the Eagle was cast loose to float through space and, eventually, to crash on the moon.
At 1:56 A.M. Collins pointed the Columbia earthward and fired its engine, freeing the command module from the moon’s gravity. The trip home would take sixty hours. That evening, via television, the astronauts sent the world a picture of itself taken at a distance of 175,000 miles. “It’s nice to sit here and watch the earth getting larger and larger and the moon smaller and smaller,” said Aldrin. Armstrong said, “No matter where you travel, it’s nice to get home.” On Thursday, moving at a speed of 24,602 mph, they reentered the earth’s atmosphere 757 miles over the Pacific. During the crucial part of this phase the spacecraft’s shield was scorched by 4,000-degree heat. Clouds surrounded the command module, and radio contact was lost for three minutes.
Then radar aboard the waiting carrier Hornet picked up the descending Columbia, which was plunging down 13.8 miles away, beneath three 83-foot orange and white parachutes. The module splashed down in six-foot waves, capsized, and was righted when the three men inside inflated bags on the side. Helicopters from the Hornet hovered overhead, guiding the vessel to the spot. President Nixon was waving zoom binoculars on the bridge. The ship’s band crashed into “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” and all over the United States, and in many foreign cities, church bells rang out, whistles blew, and motorists leaned on their horns.
***
Richard Nixon’s greeting to the Apollo 11 astronauts came at the beginning of a nine-day presidential jet trip around the world. During it he visited six Asian nations: the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, South Vietnam, India, and Pakistan. His central purpose there was to drive home his determination to make sure there were no more Vietnams. Stopping overnight in Guam on his way to Manila, he spelled out the Nixon Doctrine for reporters: “Peace in Asia cannot come from the United States. It must come from Asia. The people of Asia, the governments of Asia—they are the ones who must lead the way.” In Bangkok he said he wanted to speak plainly: “If domination by the aggressor can destroy the freedom of a nation, too much dependence on a protector can eventually erode its dignity.”
That sounded unequivocal, but newspapermen were learning that often when the new President promised to make something perfectly clear, it was about to become opaque. So it was on this Asian swing. Even as he deplored America’s overcommitment in Vietnam, he told U.S. troops there that he thought “history will record that this may have been one of America’s finest hours,” and he also pledged to the Thais: “The United States will stand proudly with Thailand against those who might threaten it from abroad or from within.” Telling people what he thought they wanted to hear was an old Nixon weakness; if his hosts weren’t elated by his assurances that he would send them some fragments of moon rock, it seemed, he was ready to hint that he might send a few divisions.
There was another explanation. This was a transitional period in his attitude toward Communism. Part of him was still the cold-warrior, ready to pick up any Red challenge, while another part believed that global stability depended on conciliation between Washington on the one hand and Moscow and Peking on the other. In this sense there was such a thing as a new Nixon. His flexibility emerged dramatically toward the end of this trip. He stopped in Bucharest to spend a day with Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu, and as proof of his friendly feelings he rode through a downpour with the top of his car down. The crowd’s response was amazing; people along the way not only cheered vigorously; they also vied with one another to pick up tiny paper American flags which fell to sidewalks, leaving flags of their own country where they lay.
In England Nixon paused for talks with Prime Minister Harold Wilson. This was his second European visit in five months; he had been in office only seventeen days when he had announced a trip to Belgium, Britain, West Germany, Italy, and France—“the blue-chip countries,” as he called them. He had always believed that he had a special talent for foreign affairs, and he was certainly making friends among other chiefs of state, even though the most important of them, Wilson, Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger, and President Charles de Gaulle, were not to remain in office long. In that first year the new President was going out of his way to be cordial to a great many people at home and abroad, including some toward whom he had once been very chilly. He flew to Independence to give Harry Truman a grand piano which had once been in the White House and played “The Missouri Waltz” on it—Truman was too polite to tell him he had always hated the song—and he extolled retiring Chief Justice Earl Warren, as “a symbol of fairness, integrity, and dignity.”
Even then Nixon kept his distance from the press, but most reporters were generous in their treatment of him. Hugh Sidey of Life wrote that the President had “devised a government in his own image—decent, thoughtful, competent, cautious.” Although newsmen covering the White House felt that his public appearances were forced and contrived, they had a certain admiration for the pains he took for them, knowing how uncomfortable he was in such situations. They appreciated the diet he carefully followed to avoid appearing jowly, how he tried to stay tanned for television, and the time he spent choosing his wardrobe because he wanted his suits to give the public just the right impression of quiet good taste.
As his presidential image formed, he emerged as a thoughtful, rather lonely man who spent hours hunched over yellow legal tablets in various White House sanctuaries, notably a study off the Lincoln bedroom and a hideaway just across the street in the Executive Office Building. He liked paperwork more than Lyn
don Johnson, and people less. The forty-two-button phone was removed from the oval office; Nixon needed only six buttons. He also appeared to be less interested in the news, even news about himself, than Johnson; the teletypes and the television sets of the previous administration were banished to an outer office. His favorite TV programs were Saturday afternoon football games in the autumn and winter, and he nearly always found time to watch them. “I know the job I have is supposed to be the most difficult job in the world,” he said, “but it has not yet become for me that great, awesome burden that some have described it.”
“Middle America” was a current journalistic phrase, and the new chief executive was its apotheosis. He liked the competitive spirit of Vince Lombardi, the music of Guy Lombardo, the novels of Allen Drury, the piety of Billy Graham, the wit of Bob Hope, and the sales techniques of J. Walter Thompson. Though most of his career had been spent in public service, he had the middle-class distrust of the federal bureaucracy; one of his first acts was to abolish the patronage system for selecting postmasters. (The following year Congress, at his request, established an independent U.S. Postal Service.) As a Middle American he believed in expert advice. The voices he listened to most were those of John Mitchell, Henry Kissinger, John D. Ehrlichman, and H. R. Haldeman. Sidey noted that although the President’s programs were a little left of center on paper, “the men he named to high office leaned the other way—and in Washington experience suggested that in the end men would dominate blueprints.” Doctrine seemed to mean little to Nixon himself anyway; he had Middle America’s penchant for trying various approaches, zigging and zagging from the center, in hope of finding workable solutions. At various times in 1969 he proposed tax reform, tinkered with the ideological balance of the Supreme Court, reduced the troop level in Vietnam, returned Okinawa to Japan, tried to alter the welfare system, outlawed germ warfare, and made various attempts to restrain inflation. In that first year he also displayed Middle American modesty. When his advisers crowded around to congratulate him on his return from his first European journey, he called a halt. “Too soon, too soon,” he said. “A year from now we’ll know if it was a success.”
He was not so modest as a spender. Like thousands of other American executives who had made it, the chief executive was overextending himself to support an elaborate new life-style. He was earning $290,000 a year in salary and expenses. He had a home near the office and a retreat at Camp David, but he mortgaged himself to the hilt just the same. First he bought a pair of brick-and-stucco bungalows on Florida’s Biscayne Bay. The cost was put at over $250,000. There the President could spend his leisure hours with an old friend, C. G. “Bebe” Rebozo—a onetime chauffeur and filling station operator who had made a fortune in real estate—aboard Rebozo’s elaborate houseboat, the Cocolobo. Yet even that wasn’t enough for Nixon. While gardeners were still putting in a ten-foot hedge around the Key Biscayne home, the President was in San Clemente, California, buying a $340,000 fourteen-room adobe villa, ordering a $100,000 swimming pool for it, and planning a four-hole golf course on adjacent land, each tee to be marked with a tiny presidential seal.
Although the facts were unknown at the time, Rebozo and another Nixon intimate, aerosol spray valve inventor Robert H. Abplanalp, held mortgages of about $500,000 on the two properties. At the same time, the government was laying out a staggering 10.5 million dollars on the two presidential estates and on houses frequently visited by the Nixons, such as Abplanalp’s island in the Bahamas. Much of the money went for such necessities as helipads and military communications, but sums of money running to six figures were spent on landscaping, furniture, and heating systems.
That wasn’t the end of it. Indeed, in terms of sheer cost it was only a beginning. Four years later Fortune would quote a former official of the Bureau of the Budget as estimating that the expense of President Nixon’s household, as of then, had been approximately 100 million dollars. Lyndon Johnson, who was not thrifty, had maintained three Boeing jetliners; when Lady Bird went shopping in New York, she had taken the Eastern Airlines shuttle. All Nixon’s relatives, including his sons-in-law, traveled on government planes. At the President’s exclusive disposal were five Boeing 707s, eleven Lockheed Jetstars, and sixteen helicopters. He installed an archery range, a swimming pool, and bowling alleys at Camp David; the annual operating costs of the camp went from $147,000 a year under Johnson to $640,000. In addition the chief executive was attended at his various homes by 75 butlers, maids, cooks, and caretakers, 21 gardeners and maintenance workers, 100 Secret Service agents, 300 guards, the crew of the presidential yacht, and the drivers of a fleet of official limousines. Under Richard Nixon the presidential style could only be called lordly.
***
In his first appearance as President he had appeared in the role of healer. “The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker,” he had said in his inaugural, and he had made it clear that he was not merely talking about Vietnam. “We find ourselves rich in goods, but ragged in spirit; reaching with magnificent precision for the moon, but falling into raucous discord on earth…. We are torn by division, wanting unity. We see around us empty lives, wanting fulfillment. We see tasks that need doing, waiting for hands to do them. To a crisis of the spirit, we need an answer of the spirit. And to find that answer, we need only look within ourselves…. We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another—until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices. For its part, government will listen.”
It was a shrewd appraisal of the American dilemma, and during his first eight months in the White House Nixon’s search for solutions was along those lines. He suppressed his own strong combative instincts, keeping his voice down, his profile low, and his ear to the ground. In seeking advice he cultivated an aura of responsible craftsmanship. He had promised a “small” White House staff in his campaign, and after he won had said that he would run an “open” administration with vigorous counsel from “independent thinkers.” As Republicans, he and the members of his administration did not share the Johnsonian conviction that America’s troubles could be traced to underprivilege and poverty, but they had their own guiding light. To them the national anguish arose from a loss of faith in religion, the family, the binding force of friendly neighborhood life, and McGuffey’s Reader patriotism. These were the convictions of small-town America, the great keep of the Republican party. It was hardly their fault that most Americans no longer lived in small towns, or that the attack on the nation’s most sacred institutions, from the flag to motherhood, had acquired an irresistible momentum. The furies of the 1960s were not yet spent. The period was still one of violent contention.
Yet some election results in 1969 suggested that backlash was turning the country rightward. Republicans won the Virginia statehouse for the first time in over eighty years and the New Jersey governorship after sixteen Democratic years. Barry Goldwater Jr. was elected to Congress by California’s 27th District. Liberal Ralph Yarborough was in trouble in Texas; early the following year he would be toppled in the Democratic primary by a conservative challenger. In Minneapolis an astounding 62 percent of the voters swept Charles S. Stenvig, a previously unknown police detective, into the mayoralty on the strength of Stenvig’s advocacy of tough law enforcement in black neighborhoods, and Los Angeles gave Sam Yorty, the closest thing to a racist mayor outside the South, a third term despite an appalling record of absenteeism, drift, strife, and the conviction, on charges of bribery, of three men Yorty had appointed city commissioners.
A trend toward the right did not explain some Nixon difficulties on the Hill. In a truly conservative climate the Pentagon would be sacrosanct, and in 1969 the Defense budget was in peril for the first time in twenty years. Ever since the North Koreans had crossed the 38th Parallel, astronomical annual sums had been appropriated for the military establishment, frequently without even a roll call. The Pentagon outlay had risen from eleven billion dollars to eighty-one billion
, but now the generals were confronted by a balky Congress. Frustration over Vietnam was one reason; others included a scandal featuring senior Army noncoms who had been making fortunes through PX kickbacks, dissatisfaction with the excessive costs of Lockheed C-5A transport production, and the discovery that the Army’s Chemical Warfare Service was transporting 7,000 tons of nerve and poison gas across the country and dumping it in the Atlantic Ocean. The immediate issue raising congressional hackles, however, was a matter of missilery. The Defense Department wanted to start work on an enormous antiballistic missile (ABM) system which could wind up costing the country as much as a hundred billion dollars.
The ABM was necessary, the Pentagon argued, to deprive the USSR of first-strike power—the ability to cripple U.S. ICBM installations with a single blow and therefore prevent American retaliation. Senate critics led by Edward M. Kennedy replied that the ABM would escalate the arms race, that it would waste money better spent on pollution and in slums, and that its radar and computers were too complicated to work. “History,” one technical witness said dryly, “is littered with Maginot Lines.” In the end an ABM appropriation passed the Senate by a single vote, but the victory was Pyrrhic. It laid the groundwork for future struggles over Defense programs and sowed seeds of bitterness between Congress and the new administration. Speaking at the Air Force Academy on June 4, President Nixon attacked the forty-nine anti-ABM senators as “new isolationists.” Senator Fulbright replied: “The greatest threat to peace and domestic tranquillity is not in Hanoi, Moscow, or Peking but in our colleges and in the ghettos of cities throughout the land.”
The split between the President and his adversaries on the Hill widened in two savage battles over Supreme Court nominees. Nixon’s choice of Warren E. Burger to succeed Earl Warren as Chief Justice sailed through the Senate, but when he named federal Judge Clement F. Haynsworth Jr. of South Carolina to replace Abe Fortas he touched off a senatorial revolt. The AFL-CIO and the NAACP denounced Haynsworth as antilabor and racist. He might have survived that, but Birch Bayh of Indiana turned up evidence that the judge had ruled in favor of firms in which he held stock. The nomination was rejected 55 to 45, with seventeen Republicans, including Minority Leader Hugh Scott, in the majority. Nixon called the attacks on Haynsworth “brutal, vicious, and… unfair.” Two months later he announced his second choice, federal Judge G. Harrold Carswell of Florida.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 174