Negative Press Reactions

While the White House debate over the Moyers proposal was out of the public view, such was not the case as both The Washington Post and The New York Times published editorials critical of Richard Nixon’s granting himself a central role in celebrating the lunar landing. Nixon was deeply suspicious of the media, and especially the elite Eastern newspapers; less than a month into his presidency, he had told one of his speechwriters “they are waiting to destroy us.” In this case, he had reasonable cause for his anger. The Post objected “with special sarcasm” to the fact that Richard Nixon’s signature was on the plaque that would be left on the Moon, saying “how dare the space program be treated as some run-of-the-mill public works project!” A rather snarky Times editorial was captioned “Nixoning the Moon.” It noted that “Mr. Nixon’s attempt to share the stage with the three brave men on Apollo 11 when they attain the moon appears to us to be rather unseemly.” It criticized the plan to have the president “share a split television screen with the two lunar pioneers” and noted that an “unnecessary” presidential conversation with the astronauts as they walked on the moon would cut into the “extremely precious time” available to Armstrong and Aldrin to carry out their scientific program. The Times concluded that such a “public­ity stunt” was “unworthy of the President of the United States.” Richard

Nixon learned of this editorial at his Camp David presidential retreat; typi­cally angry and vindictive, he “wanted action” in response to the Time’s criticism, directing Haldeman to “ban” the Times from the White House and to organize attacks on the newspaper’s views. Nixon assistant Buchanan was asked, in coordination with Borman, to stimulate letters to the editor of the Times critical of the paper’s position.19

The rejected idea of naming the Apollo spacecraft “John F. Kennedy” may have caused confusion among some subsequent accounts of the Apollo 11 mission. On occasion, it has been suggested in books and documentary films that NASA requested the White House to assign the newly commissioned aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy as the recovery ship to be in the central Pacific as the Apollo H crew splashed down after their historic journey, and that the Nixon White House rejected that request. For example, Craig Nelson in his book Rocket Men states that “NASA had asked for aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy to take part [in the recovery] as a tribute to the president’s original vision; the Nixon White House gave them USS Hornet instead.”20 Nelson gives no evidence for this claim, and the research associated with this book did not reveal either a request for the Kennedy from NASA or a denial (which surely would have come) from the White House of such a NASA request. In addition, the carrier Kennedy and her battle group were on a just-begun deployment as part of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean Sea in mid-1969; it would have taken a major effort to re-deploy the Kennedy to the Pacific Ocean for the sole purpose of being the recovery ship for Apollo H. So the notion that the Kennedy might have served as the Apollo H recov­ery ship if not for Nixon White House ill-will is almost certainly one of the long-standing inaccuracies in the history of Apollo H. (The worst, of course, being that the mission never happened and that there has been since 1969 a well-orchestrated conspiracy to conceal this reality.)