Raymond de Souza: Nixon and Apollo, linked tales or ambition and tragedy

Five years before the Apollo landing, Nixon was a young man whose best days were behind him. By the time Nixon resigned in 1974, the Apollo program was finished, the moon program over

U,S, President Richard Nixon applauds the Apollo 11 astronauts, l-r, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin who are confined in the quarantine trailer on July 25, 1969Popperfoto / Getty Images

Yorba Linda, California — There is something of an echo of the Apollo space program in the long life of Richard Nixon — ambition, success, tragedy and remembrance.

By happenstance I was preaching at a parish a short drive away from the Nixon presidential library this week and so headed over there for their special exhibition on the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing. It was a complete madhouse inside, as it was a free admission day, sponsored by AT&T in honour of their arranging the phone call from Nixon to the Apollo astronauts on July 20, 1969. There was giant inflatable space shuttle in the courtyard which children could climb up and slide down.

Like most people, I associate the lunar landing with John F. Kennedy, and his pledge to land a man on the moon “and return him safely” by the end of the 1960s. JFK was assassinated more than five years before the critical Apollo missions in 1969; it was Lyndon Johnson who largely provided the presidential backing for the moon shot. But it was Nixon, inaugurated in January 1969, who was in office when it was accomplished.

Now that manned space flight has become routine — so routine that the principal interest in it today appears to be for tourism, rather than science or exploration — it is hard to imagine how big the lunar landing was. The exhibit has a disc on which messages from some five dozen world leaders are recorded. Nixon himself flew out to the USS Hornet, an aircraft carrier some thousand miles from Hawaii in the south Pacific, in order to personally welcome the astronauts back after the splashdown of their capsule in the ocean.

The exhibition includes fascinating artifacts, including the computers which ran the Apollo missions, all of them less powerful than the smartphones of the visitors taking pictures of them.

Objects from the presidency of Richard Nixon and related to the US Space program are displayed as part of a new exhibit at the National Archives in Washington on January 7, 2013. Saul Loebsaul / AFP/Getty Images

Perhaps the most remarkable artifact is a memorandum from William Safire, Nixon’s speechwriter, to H.R. Haldeman, the chief of staff. Subject line: “IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER.” Not discovered until some 30 years after the events of July 1969, it is the draft of the speech Nixon would have given if the astronauts on the moon could not return to the orbiting spacecraft. They would have been left on the moon to die. The notes on the memorandum indicates that the president should address the nation only after speaking to the “widows-to-be.” That would have been another first for a president — condolence calls made in advance of death.

Yet the speech was never given, and instead Nixon basked in the glow of the Apollo 11 success. What is striking about seeing the Apollo exhibition at the Nixon library is that the rest of the building tells a similar story of ambition, setback and success.

Five years before the Apollo landing, Nixon was a young man whose best days were behind him. As Eisenhower’s vice president, he had lost to JFK in 1960. (The library magnanimously does not assert that JFK likely stole the election, now widely conceded.) In 1962, Nixon, having returned to California, lost decisively in the gubernatorial race. He was finished.

Five years after his triumphant return to power in 1969, Nixon resigned in disgrace. (The library’s documentary film actually opens with his resignation speech, a rather commendable and candid approach.)

Journalists look at television in White House press room while President Richard Nixon announces his resignation, 08 August 1974. Becky Guthrie / AFP/Getty Images

By the time Nixon resigned in 1974, the Apollo program was finished, the moon program over. The space shuttle program would continue manned space flight, but only in Earth’s orbit. Going to the moon or beyond had been abandoned. In due course, Ronald Reagan would have to give his version of the speech that Nixon never had to give, noting upon the Challenger explosion that “we have grown used to wonders in this century; it is hard to dazzle us … but the space program has been doing just that.”

Reagan reached his most eloquent in a moment of disaster and distress, not dazzlement. It would have been the same for Nixon had the Safire speech been necessary.

When Nixon returned to California in 1974 — the library has the helicopter that took him from the White House that final time as president — he was finished, again. Yet by sheer dogged perseverance in the final 20 years of his life he returned to honourable service, now as an elder statesman. He died 25 years ago and is buried at the library, just a few steps from the home in which he was born, built by his own father. At his funeral, Bill Clinton noted that the entirety of Nixon life — not just the resignation — needed to be remembered. Not unlike the Apollo program, with its deaths and near-disasters, and that glorious moment 50 years ago when mankind made its giant leap.

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