Note: Only forum leaders may delete posts.
*HTML is ON *UBB Code is ON Smilies Legend
Smilies Legend
Richard Nixon liked space flight. "I can remember Nixon coming off a phone conversation with the astronauts," John Ehrlichman recalls. "And you know, they are up on the moon, and [Nixon was] as high as a kite. He got a big charge out of them. Then when the astronauts would come to the White House for dinner afterwards, he would always be enormously stimulated by contact with these folks. He liked heroes. He thought it was good for this country to have heroes. Like other presidents before and since, he basked in the reflected glory of spacefarers. When the crew of Apollo 11 returned from the first landing on the moon, he was aboard the aircraft carrier USS Hornet to greet them. He then used this triumph to gain diplomatic advantage, for after hailing the achievement, he set out on a nine-day world tour that took him to capitals in Southeast Asia, India, Pakistan, and Europe. Significantly, he had planned this tour well in advance of the Apollo 11 flight, anticipating its safe return. "The President had rather daringly pegged his trip to the success of this operation," Tom Paine later remarked. "Had he gone out to the Pacific to be present at the splashdown and had there been some kind of an accident, it might have harmed considerably his ability then to have the successful trip, which was his first trip abroad as President. I was scared to death that we would have a fiasco or even a tragedy. We just wondered whether he knew the odds as well as we did. Well, fortunately Apollo 11 was a success, and in the ensuing world trip, everywhere the President went, the only thing about the United States that anybody wanted to talk about was of course the lunar landing." Yet while Nixon willingly embraced Apollo, which he had inherited from Lyndon Johnson, he took his time in committing the nation to new initiatives, whether in space or in other areas of technology. Between 1960 and 1980, such civilian initiatives were largely a province of Democrats: Kennedy and Johnson with Apollo and NASA, Jimmy Carter with his ambitious synthetic-fuels program in the late 1970s. When George Shultz presented Nixon with NASA's plan for the space shuttle and urged him to accept it, he did.
Contact Us | The Source for Space History & Artifacts
Copyright 1999-2024 collectSPACE. All rights reserved.