Operation Moonglow

by Teasel Muir-Harmony

  Hungarian stamp issued to commemorate Apollo 8. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)

  Less than a month after the Apollo 8 mission, Richard Milhous Nixon took the oath of presidential office on January 20, 1969. Borman had been surprised when he received an invitation to Nixon’s inauguration. He had heard that the incoming president felt reticent about the space program. But when the Bormans found their seats on Inauguration Day, they were on the main platform behind the podium. It was at this moment that Borman said he discerned Nixon’s genuine curiosity about spaceflight as well as the role that the astronauts would take on for the new administration.78

  As Nixon stood at the podium, just after noon, with temperatures hovering around freezing, he immediately invoked space imagery: “In throwing wide the horizons of space, we have discovered new horizons on earth.” Project Apollo and the presence of Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman at the inauguration helped the president deliver his message to the American people and the world: the Nixon administration would renew domestic morale and national prestige.

  Under “leaden skies,” a seventeen-minute address followed. Nixon, “reaching widely for inspiration,” according to New York Times reporter Robert Semple Jr., referenced poets, presidents, and the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” But to Nixon, the main message of his address was clear: peace. “The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker,” he said. Drawing on the well-known story of Apollo 8, he illustrated his point: “Only a few short weeks ago we shared the glory of man’s first sight of the world as God sees it, as a single sphere reflecting light in the darkness. As the Apollo astronauts flew over the moon’s gray surface on Christmas Eve, they spoke to us of the beauty of earth.” Quoting MacLeish, Nixon continued: “To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in the eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together.…”

  As he ended the address, underscoring his peace theme, Nixon turned to the Apollo 8 story again: “In that moment of surpassing technological triumph, men turned their thoughts toward home and humanity—seeing in that far perspective that man’s destiny on earth is not divisible.”79

  Although Nixon repeated MacLeish’s line about being “riders on the earth together” again in his closing sentence, many people around the world and within the United States still felt deeply divided in January 1969. Peace seemed an unlikely prospect. Protesters lined parts of Nixon’s inaugural parade route shouting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF [Viet Cong] is going to win.” The new president looked through his limousine window and spotted the Viet Cong flag lifted above the crowd of protestors. Before the procession reached the White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, members of the crowd threw rocks and beer cans. Never before had an incoming president received such treatment.80

  When Nixon entered office, the Vietnam War dominated headlines. Three hundred American soldiers were dying every week. More than half a million US troops in Vietnam were fighting what was rapidly becoming a more and more unpopular war at home. Foreign policy, not domestic affairs, was Nixon’s primary interest when he entered office, describing domestic policy as “building outhouses in Peoria.”81 He set his sights on ending the Vietnam War, improving relations with the Soviet Union, and diffusing tension in the Middle East. In the long run, he knew US-Chinese relations also had to improve. One of his first steps, and his first public action as president, was a tour of European capitals, where he hoped to informally discuss policy with foreign leaders and reinforce the stature of the United States. But before he traveled to Europe himself, he decided to send Frank Borman to pave his way. After the moon heroes’ enthusiastic reception in European capitals, Nixon would follow days later while the celebratory hum still filled the air.82

  In the warm afterglow of the Apollo 8 mission success, Nixon saw the benefit of identifying himself and his administration with America’s space program. Although it had been proposed by one of his fiercest rivals—John F. Kennedy—Nixon shrewdly co-opted Project Apollo in support of his foreign relations agenda. When in the company of astronauts, “The color comes to [Nixon’s] face and a bounce to his step,” observed Life writer Hugh Sidey. It was a phenomenon that journalists nicknamed Nixon’s “moonwalk.” Nixon’s fondness for the astronauts was akin to that of a father or the “all-star teammates he never knew.” Sidey speculated that the Apollo astronauts distilled “what Nixon considers to be the best in this country… in his single-minded manner, he seems to be trying to assess and grasp the spirit of the astronauts, almost as if he wanted to bottle it and merchandise it.”83

  Nixon took to Borman immediately, making him the space program’s “symbolic representative.”84 As Bill Safire, Nixon’s speechwriter, explained, Borman was “the kind of well-organized, highly motivated, intelligent serviceman Nixon admired, the product of a mission the President identified with.…” He also exemplified “the old-fashioned virtues, what the President thought of as the American Character.”85

  The Apollo 8 crew and President Richard M. Nixon before astronaut Frank Borman’s European diplomatic tour, 1969. (NATIONAL ARCHIVES)

  The Nixon administration planned for the Apollo 8 commander and his family to visit nine cities in eight European countries over the course of eighteen days.86 The objective of the trip was clear: “to support US foreign policy.” Secondary motivations included demonstration of the peaceful nature of the US space program and the interest in sharing knowledge far and wide. The tour should emphasize the “scientific, technological, and educational values of [the] US space program,” the planning documents outlined.87

  Ahead of Borman’s tour, the secretary of state fielded requests from US embassies in Europe. “Belgrade, Vienna, and Berlin” were seen as ideal candidates “because of their proximity to Eastern Europe where a demonstration of American interest would be particularly appreciated.” This type of tour could be especially fruitful in dramatizing US concern in the “post-Czechoslovakia period,” reasoned USIA officials. The Department of State sent the request to NASA Acting Administrator Thomas Paine even before the Apollo 8 crew had splashed down in Pacific waters, but the final selection of stops included Western European nations only.88

  On February 2, a frigid Sunday, the Borman family departed Andrews Air Force Base bound for London. They “were never given a script,” according to Borman. Instead, they received State Department diplomatic and protocol briefings and then “were simply told you are an ambassador… try to do your best.” As he saw it, his main objective was to “cast the country in a favorable light,” so he promoted the idea of “one world” united through the US space program during press conferences, lectures, film screenings, and dinners. Simon Bourgin and Nicholas Ruwe from the State Department’s Office of Protocol escorted the Borman family, providing guidance along the way. US embassies in each city planned the party’s itinerary, down to hotels, meals, and meetings.89

  Shortly after his arrival in London, Borman, “completely self-possessed and in breezy form,” lectured to seven hundred scientists at the Royal Society, spoke with the press, and toured London. When Susan Borman stopped in at Fortnum and Mason for a tea cozy, she was recognized and asked for her autograph.90 During their audience with Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace, Borman presented her with a framed reproduction of Earthrise as well as a scale model of the Saturn V rocket. Prince Andrew, who was soon to be nine years old, and his younger brother, Edward, immediately unwrapped and then claimed the model for themselves. After they took it apart, Borman helped them put it back together, a gesture that “seemed to disarm [his] hosts.”91

  “The problem is to get people thinking as Earthmen, rather than as Americans or Russians… because we really are,” Borman explained on BBC’s Panorama, a current affairs television program. The Ministry of Technology in London had a similar message for him. During his meeting with thirty top representatives from the defense sector, the Ministry of Technology, and universities, Borman was told “[we are] immensely pro
ud of you—we regard you as a citizen of the whole world.” At the US Embassy, he gave NASA achievement awards to the station manager of the NASA Communications Switching Station in London and the director of the United Kingdom’s post office telecommunications system.92 And at the press conference, Borman made a point of praising the British engineer who had developed the predecessor to the fuel cells used on Apollo 8.

  “Admittedly,” he later granted, “this was a little diplomatic buttering-up gesture, the kind that made the State Department happy, but I didn’t mind. Those fuel cells were excellent.” Borman’s praise of the fuel cells also boosted his message: international cooperation in the peaceful exploration of outer space.93

  Between giving a lecture at the Royal Society to press conferences and meetings, the Bormans attended Canterbury Tales at the Phoenix Theatre and dined at the Ivy Restaurant, a mainstay in London’s Theater District. The manager surprised the family with a cake cut into the shape of a half moon. The entire restaurant started singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” As Bourgin recalls, they arrived back at the Hilton Hotel “at 1 am full of champagne and cheer.”94 From London, the Bormans flew to France.

  “Frank was the biggest thing in Paris since Lindbergh,” Bourgin concluded after the two-day stop in the City of Light. French radio gave updates on his movements throughout the city, enabling thousands of people to gather at each of his stops, some getting “close enough to shake his hand, ruffle his close cropped hair and rip two buttons off his overcoat,” reported the New York Times. Parisians gathered at the Élysée Palace shouted “Nous vous adorons” as he passed. As he left the palace after his meeting with French president Charles de Gaulle, a crowd blocked his exit. While the guards cleared a path for the vehicle, Borman hopped out of the car and shook hands. Later, another crowd of two hundred greeted him at the Hotel Crillon, an eighteenth-century luxury hotel at the foot of the Champs-Élysées. Closing in around him asking for autographs, the crowd cheered the space traveler when he finally let the embassy aides whisk him away. At City Hall, Jules Verne’s grandson gave Borman a copy of From the Earth to the Moon and remarked on the similarities of the voyages. In return, Borman presented a framed engraving of the Apollo 8 splashdown with a note that read “Jules Verne is one of the pioneers of the space age,” a gesture that bound the two nations’ histories together.95

  The stakes were high for Borman’s Paris visit. Nixon saw de Gaulle as key to next steps in his new foreign policy strategy: ending the war in Vietnam and establishing a relationship with Communist China. Given that France maintained diplomatic relations with North Vietnam and the People’s Republic of China, Nixon reasoned that Paris was the logical location for establishing secret communication channels with Hanoi and Peking. But de Gaulle was a notoriously prickly figure. In 1966 he removed the NATO headquarters from France.96 US ambassador Sargent Shriver concluded that “it’s an undeniable fact that with de Gaulle as with French scientific elite and the public at large, Borman’s visit was a very good thing for US prestige in France.”97

  In France as in England, Borman had an internationalist message: “I hope this will blend people of the world together so that we will all begin to look at ourselves as Earthlings, rather than as Germans, the Dutch, or Americans.…” In Bonn, after an Apollo 8 film showing in the Beethoven Hall to a crowd of fifteen hundred students and government officials, he made a very similar point: “I believe this research will teach us that we are first and foremost not Germans or Russians or Americans but earthmen.”98

  The next stop “paid public relations dividends in this country beyond our expectations,” reported US Embassy officials in Brussels. Enthusiasm for the Apollo 8 flight in Belgium had been so heightened, even among critics of the American government, that embassy staff “looked forward to Col. Borman’s visit,” expecting that it would “extend and enlarge upon the favorable aura created by the flight itself.” Not only did the visit affect formal US-Belgian relations; it also paid “exceptional dividends in terms of… the Belgian attitude toward things American.” The anti-American slogans that usually appeared before dignitaries’ visits were nowhere to be seen.99

  The Borman family, “so eminently marketable,” impressed the Belgian press and public. News coverage of the visit was “unvaryingly and, in some cases, extravagantly laudatory.” The US Embassy observed that leftist media must have “recognized that any critical shafts directed at the skipper of Apollo 8 would be poorly received here.” As Bourgin described it, the Brussels press conference was “fairy-tale like,” without “one sour note.” Borman even received a standing ovation after one of his public lectures, a rarity in Belgian culture.100

  Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman gives a lecture in Germany, 1969. (NATIONAL ARCHIVES)

  Queen Fabiola and King Baudouin, whom the State Department labeled a spaceflight enthusiast, hosted the Borman family at the palace for an intimate dinner on February 9. After the meal, the king invited his staff and their families to view Apollo 8 with his American guests. As at all screenings of the film, Borman provided commentary and answered questions. At similar events throughout Brussels, US Embassy staff were impressed with how Borman projected “both an extraordinary knowledge of his field, a willingness to get down to detail on all questions, and an innate modesty.” When he did not know the answer to a question, he would respond with “that is somewhat beyond my field of competence, but I will get the information for you.” According to Bourgin’s report, the “visit helped put many Emb[assy] officials—and certainly USIS—in working relationship with Belg[ian] counterparts whose closeness made almost simultaneous gearing up for Nixon visit remarkably smooth.”101

  A winter storm grounded the party in Brussels. Instead of waiting for the icy runways to clear, the Bormans boarded a train for The Hague, the next stop on their itinerary. And although a member of the US Embassy staff overheard someone shout “Yankee, go home” when the family arrived in the Netherlands and the press found the shifts in schedule frustrating, on the whole the embassy deemed the visit another “solid success.”102

  At The Hague Congress Building, an imposing modernist structure, Borman screened Apollo 8 and lectured to an audience of 550, including Queen Juliana, Prime Minister de Jong, other high-ranking officials, scientists, and the public. Standing in the center of the stage, without the aid of a lectern, Borman held a microphone in his hand, “self-assured and unassuming, relaxed and wide awake,” as he described his voyage around the moon. When he presented the framed copy of Earthrise, he modified the joke he had told President Johnson: “And here I have for you a photograph of the Netherlands.” The Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, the Dutch equivalent of the New York Times, was impressed by the sizable audience and conjectured that “people did not only come to listen to Borman, but also to experience his presence; to be personally involved, more directly yet than by looking at television, in the unique experience which he personifies.”103

  Ahead of his meeting with Pope Paul VI, Bourgin showed Borman a “fancy-language talk that Washington suggested he use in [his] address.” Borman replied he “better use his own improvised remarks,” quipping that he read that the pope thought the Apollo 8 crew “were very simple men” and he “wouldn’t want to disappoint him.…”104 But Borman was wrong about the pope, who personally took the initiative to schedule a longer meeting with the astronaut. He had been a space enthusiast for years. NASA cultivated a relationship with the Vatican throughout the 1960s, hand-delivering photographs from the Ranger probe and inviting a papal delegation to the Apollo 8 launch.105

  A Sunday-morning audience in the pope’s private library was followed by a tour of the Vatican Observatory in the Alban Hills, south of Rome, and dinner. Borman presented a papal medal that the Apollo 8 crew had carried around the moon, and Pope Paul VI gave him rare copies of the Bible. The Apollo 8 crew’s Christmas Eve reading from Genesis “was a big hit in Rome,” recalled Borman. The pope praised the flight, noting that “for that particular moment
of time, the world was at peace.”106

  In Italy a forty-five-minute television special replaced the major weekly news program. It not only captured the attention of ten million viewers, but according to Bourgin, it was also “quite a thing, considering Italian Communist Party Congress, [the] Berlin crisis, Arab-Israel, etc.”107

  In Spain, Susan Borman met with sixty members of the press in the salon rojo (red salon) at the Hilton Hotel in Madrid. She was asked a range of questions, primarily focused on how she felt during the flight. When a reporter wanted to know if the Apollo 8 flight had changed her husband, she replied that “he returned more humble. Only three men have seen the world so small and you can’t have that experience and not feel humble and insignificant.” Mirroring the messaging of the tour, Susan Borman expressed how women throughout the world could relate to how she felt during the flight: “A woman who loves her family—her husband and children—has shared similar anxieties in one way or another.”108

  Borman placed a wreath at the statue of Christopher Columbus, symbolically linking not only space and ocean exploration but the United States and Spain as well, much like other diplomatic tours had done.109

  One of the most important takeaways from the tour, according to Bourgin, was that the US underestimated the impact of Apollo 8. “It’s still going,” and if “properly exploited,” according to Bourgin, it’s “still [the] greatest source for policy support abroad.” Borman noted of the diplomatic tour that he found “extreme identification of people in all walks of life in Europe with our flight. They were very well informed about it and looked on us as representatives of Earth.”110