Cronkite’s most imaginative guest was Arthur C. Clarke, author of the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The British-born science fiction popularizer augmented the Cronkite broadcast perfectly. Clarke had first auditioned to be Cronkite’s astrobuddy during Apollo 10 in May 1969 and imagined the world of the twenty-first century. He comprehended the vastness of space. Unlike Aldous Huxley, who feared the “global village” in Brave New World, Clarke celebrated that all countries were tuned into the celestial spectacle. Cronkite had chosen Clarke over Isaac Asimov because he considered him something of a prophet. Back in 1956, in a letter to space law pioneer and expert Andrew G. Haley, Clarke had written with great prescience about what would become Telstar, GPS, and satellite TV. What Clarke envisioned was the world of a thousand-channel cable TV systems providing “global TV service” that would make possible a “position-finding grid” whereby “anyone on earth could locate himself by means of a couple of dials on an instrument about the size of a watch.”
The CBS Television network was in full swing for the Apollo 11 mission, coast to coast and beyond. Cronkite could talk directly to stations in eight U.S. cities. A roving mobile unit drove all over Greater New York collecting the opinions of everyday people. Cronkite didn’t want to hear anything negative about NASA on his broadcast. Bill Plante, for example, clashed with him over CBS’s Apollo 11 reaction coverage. Plante had been asked to conduct the man-on-the-street segment in New York City, and in Harlem and the Bronx he got a surprise: a lot of New York residents thought Apollo 11 was a waste of money that would be better spent winning the war on poverty. There were many Nancy Cronkites in America who saw the Apollo program as a bad use of time and money for environmental reasons. “Walter had so bought into space,” Plante recalled, “that any criticism of the moon launch in 1969 was anathema to him. But he let it air.”
What differentiated Cronkite from Armstrong was the effusiveness with which he spoke about the Moon. To Armstrong—the Korean War fighter pilot of seventy-eight missions—the lunar walk was an assignment. Armstrong was repulsed by the efforts of journalists who insisted that fame could supercede true accomplishment. While Cronkite had to make Apollo 11 seem romantic for television ratings, Armstrong demurred. When asked decades later in an interview whether he ever looked into space in the summer of 1969 and thought how beautiful the Moon was, a stony-faced Armstrong replied, “No, I never did that.”
Although Cronkite stayed his on-stage avuncular self, he didn’t respect critics of Apollo 11. Kurt Vonnegut, riding the wave of publicity generated by the recent publication of Slaughterhouse-Five, appeared on Cronkite’s Apollo 11 broadcast full of scorn toward all things NASA, even calling the astronauts “short-haired, white athletes” infatuated with pressure cookers. Cronkite was “bitter” toward Vonnegut, a friend, for being so cruel to the bravest Americans he knew. When Norman Mailer belittled the Apollo 11 astronauts in his book Of a Fire on the Moon, deriding them with bohemian bravado as “three young executives announcing their corporation’s newest subdivision,” Cronkite cut ties with him for five or six years.
Amused by Cronkite’s lunar devotion, Schirra decided to play a long-running “gotcha” gag on Cronkite when they were live and killing time during slow moments of the Apollo 11 broadcast. “Walter,” Schirra said, “you are a world-class journalist. You were a wire-service writer, a war correspondent, and you are respected by us in the military. Now, what I want to know, Walter, is this. What are you going to say when a man first steps on the moon? What are the words you will utter at this historic moment?”
Cronkite was tongue-tied, giving Schirra a scolding look that was priceless. Cronkite hemmed and hawed. And then he just moved onto a different subject. “This was the first—and last, for that matter—time that I ever saw him flustered,” Schirra recalled. “I put it to him again shortly before lift-off. ‘Walter, have you any great words in mind?’ Cronkite can be terribly intense, and he’s very serious about his broadcasts. He’s not one for kidding around. But I had gotten hold of a bone, like a naughty puppy dog, and I wasn’t going to let go.”
Over the course of the coverage, Cronkite had on-air help from two hundred prerecorded film “bank pieces” he could draw upon (such as short biographies of the key scientists who had masterminded the mission). Also available to vary the mix: entertainment segments and remote feeds from a full-scale simulated lunar module. Cronkite, however, was the personality who held all the pieces and segments together. “Walter and his guests discussed the epochal events evolving a quarter of a million miles away,” CBS science advisor Richard C. Hoagland recalled, referring to Cronkite’s elevated chair as a “megalithic throne.” The voices of Mission Control could always be heard clearly, staccato advisories under or next to the comments of Cronkite, Schirra, and Clarke.
By Thursday, July 17, Cronkite had left Cape Kennedy to broadcast from Studio 41 at West Fifty-seventh Street in New York. His desk had been raised twenty-four feet above the studio floor. An artist had created a mock Milky Way as a background. Serving as bookends for Cronkite were two globes, each six feet in diameter: a Rand McNally model of the Moon and a Plexiglas conception of what Earth would look like from the astronauts’ perspective. A record-breaking sixteen CBS cameras were trained on Cronkite sitting at his anchor desk. Four additional “slave” cameras were locked on clocks offering countdown information for the various stages of the Apollo mission. To keep the coverage from feeling stilted, dolly cameras were used to seek out different angles.
Joel Banow—CBS News’ go-to director for its space coverage from Mercury to Skylab—got an idea from MGM’s adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey: the talking computer, HAL. Much like UNIVAC back at the 1952 and 1956 political conventions, the hooky HAL was now hired to liven up the Cronkite broadcast by offering color commentary.
Frank Stanton knew that Cronkite was doing an inspired job as Apollo 11 anchorman. All the key CBS reporters of the Apollo 11 mission—Ike Pappas and Ed Rabel among them—were doing the best work of their careers. Cronkite was slated to be live for twenty-four and a half of the crucial thirty-one hours surrounding the moon landing. He had only one extended break, lasting six and a half hours. The UPI writer Dick West described what it was like to watch more than twenty-four hours of moon coverage—as millions of people did, all over the world. Halfway along, he wrote, he developed a condition “in which one’s eyeballs become uncoordinated as a result of peering too long at Walter Cronkite.” The sense of global togetherness was called Cronkititis. “His sustained presence and attractive self-confidence,” Jack Gould wrote glowingly in The New York Times, “were nothing short of remarkable.”
Through pooled TV coverage, the global audience on July 20 was glued to the Tube waiting for the Eagle to make its powered descent to the Moon’s surface. After boning up on NASA trivia before going on air, Cronkite started his live broadcast at 10:00 a.m. EST, offering a five-minute progress report on the Apollo 11 mission right off the bat. At 11:00, after a religious program called Nearer to Thee, on which theologians and artists talked about God in space, Charles Kuralt did an ethereal piece to open what CBS News called “Man on the Moon: The Epic Journey of Apollo 11.” Using Genesis as his text—harking back to that poignant Christmas Eve of 1968—the virile-looking Kuralt spoke about the spiritual aspects of space travel, showing beautiful images of planet Earth taken by other NASA astronauts and satellites. Cronkite, combining ad-libbing and filler material, turned the nerve-racking journey of the Eagle to the Moon into high-suspense theater. The interplanetary drama began when Michael Collins, aboard Apollo 11, released the module Eagle carrying Armstrong and Aldrin to their destination.
Eagle: Roger, understand. Go for landing. 3000 feet. Second alarm.
Cronkite: 3000 feet. Um-hmmm.
Eagle: Roger. 1201 alarm. We’re go. Hang tight. We’re go. 2000 feet. 2000 feet, into the AGS. 47 degrees.
Cronkite: These are space communications, simply for r
eadout purposes.
Capcom: Eagle looking great. You’re go.
Houston: Altitude 1600. 1400 feet. Still looking very good.
Cronkite: They’ve got a good look at their site now. This is their time. They’re going to make a decision.
Eagle: 35 degrees. 35 degrees. 750, coming down at 23. 700 feet, 21 down. 33 degrees.
Schirra: Oh, the data is coming in beautifully.
Eagle: 600 feet, down at 19. 540 feet down at 30—down at 15 . . . 400 feet, down at 9 . . . 8 forward . . . 350 feet down at 4 . . . 300 feet, down 3½ . . . 47 forward . . . 1½ down . . . 70 . . . got the shadow out there . . . 50, down at 2½, 19 forward . . . altitude-velocity lights . . . 3½ down . . . 220 feet . . . 13 forward . . . 11 forward, coming down nicely . . . 200 feet, 4½ down . . . 5½ down . . . 160, 6½ down . . . 5½ down, 9 forward . . . 5 percent . . . quantity light 75 feet. Things still looking good, down a half . . . 6 forward . . . lights on . . . down 2½ . . . forward . . . 40 feet, down 2½, kicking up some dust . . . 30 feet, 2½ down . . . faint shadow . . . 4 forward . . . 4 forward, drifting to the right a little . . . 6 . . . drifting right . . .
Cronkite: Boy, what a day.
Capcom: 30 seconds.
Eagle: Contact light. O.K. engine stopped . . . descent engine command override off . . .
Schirra: We’re home!
Cronkite: Man on the moon!
Eagle: Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed!
Capcom: Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You’ve got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.
Tranquility: Thank you.
Cronkite: Oh, boy!
Capcom: You’re looking good here.
Cronkite: Whew! Boy!
Schirra: I’ve been saying them all under my breath. That is really something. I’d love to be aboard.
Cronkite: I know. We’ve been wondering what Neil Armstrong and Aldrin would say when they set foot on the moon, which comes a little bit later now. Just to hear them do it. Absolutely with dry mouths.
When Cronkite officially heard the words, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed,” at 4:17 p.m. EST he became emotional. Tears filled his eyes. Also Schirra’s. They were struck dumb with admiration for America. Clarke, sitting beside Cronkite and Schirra, later said it felt like “time had stopped in Studio 41.” For a while, Cronkite kept the broadcast silent, glasses in hand, shaking his head from side to side in disbelief. Schirra, like millions of viewers, was anxious to hear what immortal words Cronkite would utter for the history books.
The previous day, the two had met for a quick dinner at the old Regency Hotel on Park Avenue to discuss the impact of the anchorman’s words. Schirra had even gone through Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations to offer Cronkite ideas from Aristotle and T. S. Eliot. Now that the time-frozen moment had arrived, Schirra looked at Cronkite with anticipation. “Wow,” the great journalist said. “Oh, boy!”
No two words could have been more apropos than “Oh, boy!” There was cunning in the ring of honest human simplicity. Cronkite, lost in thought, was oblivious to the audience and he was speechless. Yet, in truth, “Oh, boy” was a successful trope he had used since the Project Mercury days. It worked again for Apollo 11.
For Cronkite’s CBS team, the post-landing coverage was the hardest part of the marathon broadcasts. Cronkite and Schirra had a lot of time to kill, with only the static-infused voices of the Apollo astronauts as reliable guides to what was happening. At that point, the banter between Cronkite and Schirra mattered the most. They had to build the suspense back up in a reverential way, getting people ready for a moon walk that was six hours and thirty-nine minutes away. Cronkite filled that void with reams of fresh information provided by the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston and friendly banter with Schirra and Clarke. Then the matchless moment began, the Eagle door opened, and Armstrong started his descent.
Cronkite: There he is. There’s a foot coming down the steps.
Houston Voice: OK, Neil. We can see you coming down the ladder now.
Armstrong: OK. I just checked getting back up to that first step. It didn’t collapse too far. It’s adequate to get back up.
Houston Voice: Roger. We copy.
Armstrong: It’s just a little jump.
Cronkite: So there’s a foot on the Moon, stepping down on the Moon. If he’s testing that first step, he must be stepping down on the Moon at this point.
A billion people were watching on TVs all around the globe. Not many seconds had elapsed since the hatch opened when Armstrong said: “One small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.” Unfortunately, those perfect words, prepared by Armstrong himself, were partially indecipherable due to static. Cronkite worked his Houston contacts to get the phrase right. And it was Cronkite, more than any other TV personality, who made hay out of Armstrong’s choosing to say mankind, not America. “The step on the Moon was an awesome achievement,” CBS News president Richard Salant recalled, “so was its reporting on television, because it emphasized television’s extraordinary ability to unify a disparate world through communicating with so many people, in so many places, and thus providing them with a common—and an extraordinarily satisfying—experience.”
Before long, Aldrin joined Armstrong on the Moon to collect rock samples and plant Old Glory on its surface, to Cronkite’s obvious delight. The hatch was open on the Moon for two hours, thirty-one minutes, and forty seconds. As Armstrong and Aldrin bounced around on the Moon, Cronkite told viewers the two men were “like colts” finding their footing. He had gotten a lead from the White House that President Nixon would soon talk by radio-telephone to the Apollo 11 astronauts. Cronkite reported that fact first. Armstrong and Aldrin had moved the existing camera, which had been activated by Armstrong as he descended the ladder, to be mounted in a fixed position on the tripod so that the world could watch their moon exploration live. This had been Cronkite’s hope since he promoted cameras back in 1963 with Gordon Cooper orbiting Earth on Faith 7, the last of the Mercury missions.
After hours of exulation over Armstrong and Aldrin’s antics, Cronkite raised the specter of how the astronauts were going to get home. Once Armstrong and Aldrin reboarded the Eagle, what would happen if its rockets didn’t fire? Would they die on the Moon? Could they return safely to the mothership, where Collins was waiting for them? The most pressure-packed moment of the mission was yet to come: the liftoff of the lunar module. Cronkite built up the tension for these next phases of the mission. When the Eagle module did reunite with the mothership, Cronkite once again expressed his relief in a slang colloquialism: “Hot diggety dog!”
NBC’s Chet Huntley and David Brinkley were boring compared to Cronkite; their attitude was oddly blasé, treating the excitement as a so-so affair. At ABC both Frank Reynolds and Jules Bergman came off as too academic and lacking any chattering warmth. When Cronkite ended CBS’s historic thirty-two-hour broadcast, he signed off with this observation: “Man has finally visited the Moon after all the ages of waiting and waiting. Two Americans with the alliterative names of Armstrong and Aldrin have spent just under a full Earth day on the Moon. They picked at it and sampled it, and they deployed experiments on it, and they packed away some of it to pack with them and bring home.” Sounding like a child, he hoped someday to touch the lunar rocks and dust that the Apollo 11 astronauts were bringing home with them.
Talk about Iron Pants. Cronkite had stayed live on CBS TV for seventeen and a half hours straight. After a brief nap, he went back on the Tube for another nine hours. He claimed he never noticed the “fatigue factor.” The New York Times saluted him for his “seemingly effortless performance.” It applauded Cronkite’s having read Archibald MacLeish’s original poem “Voyage to the Moon” as a broadcast wrap-up of “Man on the Moon.” Like Carl Sagan—best known for making space and science accessible—Cronkite was able to
break down aerospace concepts for the average American without dumbing them down. Wussler, the executive producer for CBS, had pulled off miraculous television, making the well-schooled Cronkite the broadcaster beneficiary. Cronkite agreed that Apollo 11 was the high-water mark of television; he called it the new “Golden Age of American Greatness.” With his raw, nationalistic pride, he was in stark contrast to Eric Sevareid, though, who, like Armstrong, publicly fretted that Apollo 11 would lead to the militarization of space. “History has never proceeded by a rational plan,” Cronkite said, “not even science knows what it is doing beyond the immediate experiment. It is possible that the divine spirit in Man will consume him in flames, that the big brain will prove our ultimate flaw, like the dinosaur’s big body.”
Cronkite fervently believed that out of all the momentous acts of the sixties—the Kennedy assassinations, the March on Washington, Freedom Summer, César Chávez’s boycotts, Medicare and Medicaid, women’s liberation, the Vietnam War debate, take your pick—the Apollo 11 mission to Earth’s moon was the most historically significant of all. Cronkite’s bold claim was credible. An astonishing 94 percent of all American homes had elatedly tuned in for the historic moon walk of Neil Armstrong on July 20, 1969. “It was a wonderful story of achievement, and everybody at Cocoa Beach and the Space Center at Cape Canaveral was looking up,” Cronkite recalled. “They were looking toward the stars rather than looking down with the depressed state of world affairs, civil rights and Vietnam going on at the same time. So this was a relief story to all of us.”
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