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RN, Apollo, And Obits

July 2, 2009 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon 

The Smoking Gun is featuring documents that the Nixon White House prepared before the Apollo 11 mission in the event that it ended in tragedy.  Discover mutters that reading the plan “gives us the creepy feeling of reading the obituary of someone who is still alive.”  I hate to break this to the folks at Discover, but news organizations do write obituaries of prominent people while they are still alive.   (That practice was the premise of a couple of episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, a Nixon-era sitcom set in a Minneapolis TV newsroom.)

If they have any sense of responsibility, presidents and other decision-makers draft “worst-case” contingency plans.  So do lots of other people.  Radio listeners here in Southern California are accustomed to ads for Forest Lawn Mortuaries.

So, like, this is news?



Comments

5 Responses to “RN, Apollo, And Obits”

  1. Robert Nedelkoff on July 2nd, 2009 11:47 am

    Nothing new about it – Bill Safire, who worked on drafts of what RN might have said if Apollo 11 had ended tragically, wrote about it in his 1975 book Before The Fall. (He said that Frank Borman, the Mercury astronaut who later headed Eastern Airlines, suggested that such a speech be ready if the worst happened.) But the story is considered topical now, I guess, because the Obama administration has been talking, in somewhat vague terms, about sending men (and, this time, women) back to the moon.

    I always liked what Walter Cronkite said when John Glenn returned to space in the 1990s. Some reporter asked Uncle Walter, who is only 5 years or so Glenn’s senior, if he’d thought of asking NASA for permission to join an orbital mission. The famous voice growled back: “For me it’s the moon or nothin’!”

  2. MK on July 2nd, 2009 5:09 pm

    Robert is right. In fact, NARA released the records some time ago. I believe that Nixon’s lawyers questioned initially whether they should be released but the archivists at NARA persuaded them that the “in the event of failure” speech was poignant. And in no way reflected badly on RN. And that was no reason for anyone to argue for restriction.

    NARA was right about how it would “play.” Reporters characterized it as poignant, proving Nixon’s lawyers’ initial concerns wrong. On July 9, 1999, a newswire reported that “A contingency statement was prepared for Nixon, an eerie, poignant tribute that he would deliver while the astronauts were still alive but when there was no longer any hope for them.” The article described the document as being at NARA.

    A few weeks later, the Fresno Bee reported on July 20, 1999 that “Reaching the moon and returning safely with the technologies available in July, 1969, was a long-shot not even all the people involved could fully appreciate at the time.

    But NASA and the country’s political leaders understood. Indeed, documents just obtained from the national archives show NASA was prepared to cut off the astronauts’ communications in the event of failure, leaving them to die in silence and isolation on the lunar surface. And Richard Nixon already had a speech written to tell the American people about their deaths.”

    That such a speech was prepared shouldn’t be a surprise. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower had drafted an “in the event of failure” message before the D-Day landings. I’ll look for a link and post it, I think it is on NARA’s site.

  3. MK on July 2nd, 2009 5:11 pm

    Here is the link to the NARA site which links to Ike’s D-Day draft message:

    http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/d-day-message/

  4. David Frisk on July 2nd, 2009 9:42 pm

    As usual, RN is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. This isn’t historical dialogue. It’s liberal theology.

  5. MK on July 3rd, 2009 5:49 am

    I don’t think the damned if you do, damned if you don’t approach is limited to any one president or political party or ideology. No one can claim the moral high ground on that one, in my view. I think this particular story was triggered by the anniversary of the event, more so than anything else. As for reporters, anyone who has observed or worked with disclosures of materials knows that they will look for the “good stuff” and anchor their stories on that. Nothing wrong with that, per se, it just reflects the perceived need to hook readers, as far as I can tell. Very different goal than that to which good historians should aspire, which is to provide a comprehensive narrative of what happened, and to the extent is known — sans unwarranted speculation — why it happened.

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