The king of all trips
Apollo 11 was a lot of good things, including amazingly cool
I’m writing about the summer of 1969. Calm down, this is not about Woodstock. I would rather eat crushed glass than write about Woodstock. I remain irritated at people who swear they were there and in fact were drinking Cutty and water at Holiday Inns.
Woodstock is stuck somewhere between myth, cliché, and the brown acid making the rounds there that was not altogether spectacularly wonderful. Like the rest of us, the event gets smaller as it gets older.
Not so the Apollo 11 flight to the moon and back, a few weeks earlier. Not when we put two men on the moon while a third orbited above and brought them all safely home.
The moon mission made the thing at Max Yasgur’s farm look tiny and self-absorbed, which it was, although many of us didn’t realize it at the time. Herds of bloviators over the years have vastly inflated Woodstock’s importance and meaning, which can be reduced to two words: “No Rain.’’
Not so Apollo 11.
The success of Apollo 11 displayed American prowess to accomplish something extraordinarily difficult. It gave us bragging rights over the Soviets. But it had broader historical significance. It marked what turned out to be the apex of the best of American exceptionalism.
Some argue that the moon mission was but a brief respite from the deadly side of this exceptionalism, the war in Vietnam. They maintain the war subsumed the short, refulgent success of Apollo 11.
Nuts.
At no time since those days in July has the United States enjoyed the status it enjoyed during and after Apollo 11. The whole world stopped to watch. People from Montevideo to Moscow were held in suspended animation as they followed the mission. The Americans were leading mankind into space. God bless America.
When was the last time you heard those words from abroad? And let us not mistake the global sympathy for the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks with admiration for the United States.
Journalists dislike, for good reason, to issue breathless, absolute statements. But I can find no greater drama in human history in such a compressed timeline - nine days - than Apollo 11.
The dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima might have had a greater impact on the world today, but it wasn’t drama. No one knew it was happening, so no one could watch it in real time.
Apollo 11 is never dated. It transcended politics. There was a purity to the mission that secured its spot above the fray. It fused function and beauty. There was something very American about it, too. The mission was the product of our creativity, technical skills, and single-mindedness of purpose. A fractured country came together behind this effort. Name for me other efforts of such magnitude that have since brought us together.
The human face of Apollo 11 was as much the guy in black frame glasses and a short-sleeve, no-iron, white shirt in Houston as it was Neil Armstrong. Apollo 11 was the triumph of the nerds and middle-class America.
And it was romantic. A young, charismatic American president had challenged the country at the beginning of that decade to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
I make brief mention of this history because I’ve been reminded how many friends and colleagues were either not born in 1969 or too young to appreciate the mission. They missed the drama of Apollo 11.
No one knew whether Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would make it up from the lunar surface back to the command module skippered by Michael Collins orbiting above. No one knew if these guys would make it home at all.
(Taking nothing away from Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff,’’ the best account of Apollo 11, for anyone interested, is Norman Mailer’s “Of a Fire on the Moon,’’ which shows the brilliance the man could uncork on occasion.)
Today we still find yeasty pockets of conspiracy types who maintain the landing was a hoax by the government to fulfill Kennedy’s challenge on time and beat the Soviets to boot. We do love our conspiracies.
The Observer was reveling in the joys of Army boot camp at Fort Dix, N.J., during the summer of 1969 and missed Woodstock. But my friendly drill instructor rousted us from bed in the middle of the night and ordered us to repair to the recreation room to watch the landing, 40 years ago tomorrow.
This was, to the best of my memory, the only thing he ever did that didn’t hurt me. I don’t know what was stranger - watching the landing itself on a grainy black and white TV or wondering if we were hallucinating.
Apollo 11 marked the height of an American exceptionalism that began with the concept of Manifest Destiny, hatched in the 1840s. This theory held that America had a special dispensation to expand to the Pacific at the expense of everyone and everything in its path. It grew over time to become a global sense of entitlement.
Ronald Reagan carried the standard of American exceptionalism, and nativists still crow about it today. Its dark side informed the belligerent and disastrous foreign policy of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
No one seems hot to return to the moon. The funds aren’t there, for starters. We’ve got a trillion-dollar debt and are aiming at a trillion-dollar national health insurance plan while fighting two wars abroad.
Apollo 11 was, in my book, the coolest thing America has ever done in this kind of arena. It displayed this country’s penchant for risk. It was an astonishing technical success and a profound triumph over fear.
Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com. 
