Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/moyfiles/1968moy.001

Text File | 1993-07-21 | 13KB | 250 lines

                                                                              ╚January 3, 1969

Men of the Year:The Apollo Astronauts



I undertook a new voyage to a new Heaven and World . . .

     So it seemed to Christopher Columbus in 1500. In the
closing days of 1968, all mankind could exult in the vision of
a new universe. For all its upheavals and frustrations, the year
would  be remembered to the end of time for the dazzling skills
and Promethean daring that sent mortals around the moon. It
would be celebrated as the year in which men saw at first hand
their little earth entire, a remote, blue-brown sphere hovering
like a migrant bird in the hostile night of space.

     The year's transcendent legacy may well be that in
Christmas week 1968, the human race glimpsed not a new continent
or a new colony, but a new age, one that will inevitably reshape
man's view of himself and his destiny. For what must be surely
rank as one of the greatest physical adventures in history was,
unlike the immortal explorations of the past, infinitely more
than a reconnaissance of geography or unknown elements. It was
a journey into man's future, a hopeful but urgent summons, in
Poet Archibald MacLeish's words, "to see ourselves as riders on
the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the
eternal cold -- brothers who know now that they are truly
brothers."

     The realization may take a long time coming. Its harbinger,
the odyssey of Apollo 8, was the product of centuries of
scientific conjecture and experimentation. The mission's
fantastic precision could never have been achieved without the
creativity and dedication of the greatest task force ever
assembled for a peaceful purpose: 300,000 engineers, technicians
and workers, 20,000 contractors, backed by $33 billion spent on
the nation's space effort in the past decade. Nor could Apollo's
galactic galleon have ventured forth without the knowledge
amassed by the earlier astronauts, from Alan Shepard and John
Glenn on, who dared brutal hazards aboard relatively primitive
craft in the laggard race to launch Americans into space. In
large measure, too, the superb functioning of Apollo 8 was a
result of heartbreak.

New Names for History
     After the deaths of Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger
Chaffee, when Apollo 204 burned on its pad in January 1967, the
translunar vehicle was extensively redesigned. Man's first
voyage to the moon also bore the imprint of two farsighted
Presidents: John F. Kennedy, who exhorted the nation to "set
sail on this new sea," and Lyndon Johnson, who in more prosaic
language insisted to Americans that "space is not a gambit, not
a gimmick," but a realistic challenge that could not be evaded.

     In the end, though, it was three lonely men who risked
their lives and made the voyage. And in the course of that first
soaring escape from the planet that is no longer the world, it
was the courage, grace and cool proficiency of Colonel Frank
Borman, Captain James Lovell and Major William Anders that
transfixed their fellow men and inscribed on the history books
names to be remembered along with those of Marco Polo and
Amundsen, Captain Cook and Colonel Lindbergh. In 147 hours that
stretched like a lifetime, America's moon pioneers became the
indisputable Men of the Year.

     For the American people, the astronaut's triumph came as
a particularly welcome gift after a year of disruption and
despond. Seldom had the nation been confronted with such a
congeries of doubts and discontents. On their TV screens,
Americans had watched in horror as Martin Luther King lay dead
on a Memphis balcony and as an assassin's bullet pierced Robert
Kennedy's brain in Los Angeles. While U.S. prestige declined
abroad, the nation's own self-confidence sank to a nadir at
which it became a familiar litany that American society was
afflicted with some profound malaise of spirit and will.

The Paradoxical Planet
     The principal focus, if not the prime cause of American
frustrations, was the cruel, inconclusive war in Viet Nam. It
had divided and demoralized the American people as had no other
issue in this century. And it continued to divert a
disproportionate amount of the national treasure and energy.

     On March 31, the tide of opposition to his policies and
personality led Lyndon Johnson to renounce another term as
President and call for a partial bombing halt over North Viet
Nam. On October 31, President Johnson ordered a total suspension
of aerial attacks on the North. Yet by year's end the haggling
still droned on in Paris, and the bloodshed continued on the
battlefields. Celebrating Mao Tse-Tung's 75th birthday,
Communist China exploded its second successful thermonuclear
device. Even so puny a state as North Korea showed that it could
humiliate the U.S. by pirating the intelligence ship Pueblo on
the broad seas. It seemed a cruel paradox of the times that man
could conquer alien space but could not master his native
planet.

     The U.S. and the Soviet Union still faced a perilous
confrontation in the Middle East. In August, five years to the
month after Khrushchev and Kennedy concluded the test-ban
treaty, the long and delicate approach to a Soviet-American
detente was reversed by Moscow's heavy-handed repression of a
progressive regime in Czechoslovakia. For a few months it seemed
as if Alexander Dubcek, the Czechoslovak party boss, might
succeed in his breathtaking attempt to defy Moscow and build a
humane, relatively liberal and more efficient Marxist regime in
his country; the Soviet tanks that ended this attempt for the
time being did not end the hopes he had expressed. But Moscow
may have made eventual solutions more painful, not only for the
nations of Eastern Europe but for Russia as well. While Russian
troops policed the streets of Prague, a hardy band of Moscow
intellectuals protested the invasion in the very shadow of the
Kremlin.

Virus of Dissent
     Mankind could be thankful at least that at no time in 1968
did the superpowers come close to an irreconcilable conflict.
Yet nations around the world were confronted with a new kind of
crisis, a virus of internal dissent. The spirit of protest
leaped from country to country like an ideological variant of
Hong Kong flu. Protest marches, sit-ins and riots attacked every
kind of structure, society and regime.

     In France, a near-revolution by students and workers came
close to toppling Charles De Gaulle in May; its economic
aftermath in November almost certainly discredited forever
Gaullism's vaunted role as the power broker of Europe. In Egypt,
students rampaged through the streets, burning buses and
shouting against the "prefabricated slogans" of Gamal Abdel
Nasser's regime. In Pakistan, mobs cried "Death to Ayub!" in
protest against their President's neglect of long-festering
economic and social problems, Germany, Italy and Japan were
struck by the plague.

     On the eve of the Olympics, Mexico was torn apart by savage
gun battles between soldiers and students. Two months later,
Brazil's generals, archetypes of the Latin American military
elite, caught a whiff of dissent and hastily imposed a
dictatorship on the continent's largest nation.

Upsetting Old Patterns
     Nowhere was protest more prevalent or potent than in the
U.S. Though the ghettos were spared the major racial holocausts
of previous years, Martin Luther King's assassination ignited
disturbances in 168 cities and towns and brought arsonists to
within three blocks of the White House. Nearly everywhere black
citizens demanded the right to run their own communities, their
own welfare programs, their own schools and a growing number of
militant Negro groups armed to protect themselves from what they
considered an incurably hostile white society.

     Strikes by public employees became increasingly
commonplace, and union memberships increasingly disavowed
contracts negotiated by their leaders, threatening to upset a
pattern of stable labor relations built up over a generation.
Even the two party system was threatened, as millions of
Americans, mostly lower-middle-class voters demanding law and
order and resentful of the Negroes' demands, responded to the
egregious slogans of George Wallace.

     On the campuses, groups of radical students sought nothing
less than the destruction of the university. Columbia nearly
fell to them last spring, and San Francisco State College was
still reeling under their attacks as the old year closed.
Despite the Administration's halting steps toward peace, massive
antiwar demonstrations still took place in parks and arenas, men
still burned their draft cards, priests and pedagogues still
faced trial for attempting to subvert the Selective Service
process.

     In the U.S. as elsewhere in the world, there was an
undeniable legitimacy to many of the dissenters' causes. When
they clamored for greater participation in academic decision
making or more meaningful curricula or better job opportunities
in the ghettos, colleges and corporations and city halls
generally approved willing to meet their demands at least
halfway. Indeed, one of the most remarkable aspects of a
remarkable year was the resilience of American society to such
wide-ranging attacks on so many hitherto sacrosanct
institutions.

The Clubs of August
     For many of the young, Eugene McCarthy's antiwar campaign
raised a brave new banner, and thousands of students trooped
forth to crusade for a candidate who, for all his dry wit and
charmingly unconventional style, proved in the course of the
primaries too flaccid and vague to entertain any realistic hope
of capturing the popular vote. Nonetheless, it was McCarthy who
showed the vulnerabilty of Lyndon Johnson, and after the New
Hampshire primary, Robert Kennedy could no longer resist the
challenge to reassert what many of his followers seriously
believed to be his legitimate cause against that of the
pretender Johnson.

     Kennedy waged an artful and compelling campaign, summoning
from the young, the poor and the black a degree of enthusiasm,
even worship, seldom witnessed in an American political
campaign. Their hopes and aspirations dies with the young
Senator, and the altruistic zeal for Mccarthy's crusaders turned
to bitterness when it became obvious that their leader could
never win the Democratic nomination. The young, the angry and
the disenchanted registered their vote on the streets of
Chicago, and they were answered by the clubs of August. The
traumatic clash may well have cost Hubert Humphrey the
presidency. Richard Nixon, starting earlier and astutely
divining the mood of a majority outraged by violence and
disorder, won the election less by promising cures for America's
ills than by decrying them.

     Small wonder, then, that those on earth saw it as a
beleaguered battlefield -- not, as Astronaut Lovell described
it from his vantage point nearly a quarter of a million miles
away, as "a grand ovation to the vastness of space." Sated with
violence, sick of crisis, weary of politics and protest alike,
the U.S. -- and the rest of the world -- needed few excuses to
look to the heavens. As the year waned, they shifted their gaze
to earth's placid, lifeless satellite -- as Sir Richard Burton
described it in 1880, "A ruined world, a globe burnt out, a
corpse upon the road at night."

The Question of Priorities
     Many students and intellectuals, inveighing against the
"power structure" and the "Establishment," have been loud in
their condemnation of America's commitment to space. It has been
ridiculed by such authorities as Science Editor Philip Abelson
as a "Moondoggle," by a congressional critic as a "Garish
spectacular." Indeed, considering the proliferation of
terrestrial problems -- poverty, ignorance, racism, the decay
of the cities, the rape of the environment, the deepening chasm
between affluent and backward nations -- it is easy to question
the wisdom of spending billions to escape the troubled planet.

     But that is to miss the essential point. Though the space
program has in fact returned the nation untold dividend in
technological advancement -- and jobs -- that is not its
rationale or its ultimate justification. Man is propelled from
earth to moon by the same instincts that led him from cave to
college: the lonely search for knowledge, the fascination of
attacking the impregnable, the creative impulse, shared with
Tennyson's Ulysses, "to seek a newer world . . . to sail beyond
the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars." The newer
world opened up by the Men of the Year will surely, in time,
reach far beyond the moon, but its radiance cannot fail to
illuminate life on planet earth.