I struggle to say that I remember things fifty years ago. Remembering things fifty years past is a reminder of mortality. Maybe that’s why it’s uncomfortable to say it.

Memory is never fifty years old because memories don’t age. They’re always in the present in our mind. We are ageless in our memories.

Fifty years ago, on my birthday, we sent three men to the Moon.

I remember it as if it were—–

Not fifty years ago.

The Vietnam War was eroding our national will. The Civil Rights movement forced us to look at ourselves more than we wanted to look and it provoked intense emotion expressed in various ways. The Cold War over freedom and oppression was a daily factor. But there still was a residual of the optimism and it was nowhere better expressed than what was to happen that day.

The radio station I was working for in Jefferson City at the time (it’s no longer in Jefferson City) had no national network. So we couldn’t follow the buildup at Cape Canaveral, as it was then called, as intensely as the other station in town, a Mutual affiliate. But we were paying attention and on our newscasts we did let our listeners know what was happening.

This was in the days of 15-minute newscasts in the morning, during the noon hour when Derry Brownfield, our farm director, updated the farmers in central Missouri on the daily markets and agricultural news, and during drive-time in the afternoon.

The script for the 7 a.m. newscast that morning is in a landfill somewhere. But I can hear my younger voice closing the newscast noting the significant events unfolding in Florida. I had brought to the station that morning an LP record of one of John Kennedy’s greatest speeches and I had dubbed part of it onto a cartridge tape. I played part of his speech at Rice University from September 12, 1962—the part that is in bold type below:

“Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it–we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.

“Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world’s leading space-faring nation.

“We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.

“There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

“…Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, “Because it is there.”

“Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.”

I remember after the tape ended with Kennedy saying, “That challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

I said, “And that’s why we are going to the Moon today.”   And closed out the newscast.

On this fiftieth anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, it’s important we think about John Kennedy’s 1962 speech. In recent years some presidents or presidential candidates have said we need to go to the Moon again and Mars, too. But their remarks have caused only little ripples in the public mind.

—Because, coming from them, they’re just words. They don’t call on you and me to want to reach for something great. They don’t challenge us to think that, as President Kennedy mentioned earlier in his speech, “William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.”

We do not hear calls today for “answerable courage.” We don’t hear those who lead or want to lead us speak of “new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.” Some observers believe proclamations about returning to the moon and heading for Mars are intended to gin up a few votes in an election cycle. And the public knows it and is unmoved.

Fifty years ago was a beginning and a beginning of an end. We are people of short attention spans who too easily spend our time looking within where we are apt to find narrowness and selfishness instead of looking out where we find challenges to meet, good that we can do, rights that we can win.

Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley was one of the few people granted an in-depth interview with Neil Armstrong, who bore the public burden of being the first man on the moon by becoming a very private person. Brinkley tells in his new book, American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race, of asking Armstrong “why the American people seemed to be less NASA crazed in the twenty-first century than back during john F. Kennedy’s White House years.”

Oh, I think it’s predominantly the responsivity of the human character. We don’t have a very long attention span, and needs and pressures vary from day to day, and we have a difficult time remembering a few months ago, or we have a difficult time looking very far into the future. We’re very “now” oriented. I’m not surprised by that. I think we’ll always be in space, but it will take us longer to do the new things than the advocates would like, and in some cases, it will take external factors or forces which we can’t control.

Kennedy had the external factors. The Cold War and the Soviet early successes in space. The Bay of Pigs debacle and the need to get beyond it. The Civil Rights effort that was mushrooming. And other issues. But his speech at Rice University was a challenge for the country to move forward at a time when it could become consumed by other issues—and it did.

By the time my brother-in-law and I watched the midnight launch of Apollo 17, the final Apollo mission to the moon, from the press site at Cape Kennedy slightly more than three years after this historic day in 1969, we as a people were so looking inward at the war, the civil rights struggle, the ongoing Cold War, and by then Watergate that the cancellation of three moon flights that were originally scheduled stirred little public regret. The idea of doing things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard” seemed lost. And they seem lost, still, today.

Of the twenty-four men who flew to the Moon, the only people who have seen the entire earth and watched it shrink into the surrounding blackness, only twelve survive. Only twelve of the twenty-four walked on the moon and only four of them are still walking on the earth: Buzz Aldrin, now 89; Dave Scott, 87; Charlie Duke, 83, and Harrison Schmitt, 84. The other eight moonwalkers have, as one source put it, “left the earth forever.”   All three of the first men to see the moon up close (Apollo 8) are still with us, though. Frank Borman and Jim Lovell are 91. Bill Anders is 85.

Some historians wonder if Apollo was worth it, if going to the Moon and bringing back a few hundred pounds of rocks was worth the $24 billion total expense in the 1960s and early 70s, at a time when we were spending $30 billion each year on the Vietnam War. One of them, Andrew Smith, whose Moon Dust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth, was published for the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11 and has been republished for the fiftieth, recalls an earlier Kennedy speech, the one to Congress in 1961 in which he set the goal of sending men to the Moon and returning them to Earth within the decade. He says the Moon goal resulted from Kennedy’s recognition that the Cold War “was going the be won or lost in the so-called Third World, and that cultural factors would influence the loyalties of wavering nations as much as economics did.” He maintains Kennedy wanted to capture imaginations throughout the world, a way to make democracy the system of choice, and also wanted something Americans could enthusiastically support. The answer, says Smith, was “theatre—the most mind-blowing theatre ever created,” that the Apollo program was “performance, pure and simple.”

Smith argues that the lasting value of the missions isn’t the science behind them or the rocks the men brought back. It is that these missions for the first time allowed us to see the entire earth, alone in the vast blackness of space. “It’s clear that the answer had nothing to do with engineering or technology, that what it did…was afford us the enormous privilege of seeing ourselves for the first time as small.”

Edgar Mitchell, who walked on the moon with Alan Shepard on Apollo 14 told Allen, “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch!’”

While Dave Scott and Jim Irwin were on the Moon with the Apollo 15 flight, Al Worden was by himself in the Endeavour, the command module orbiting above them. For sixty-seven hours, Worden was alone in the universe, often out of touch with anyone, anywhere, when he was traveling behind the Moon. He shared his thoughts in his 1974 book, Hello Earth, Greetings from Endeavour. One of his poems reads:

Now I can see where I’m going and am impatient to get there—                                       What will I see? The wounds of ageless strife, the anguish of cooling and petrifying, the punctures of an infinity of coolness?                                                                                   No signs of healing, or love, or care, or compassion?                                                         She is not healed. All the scars are there—from birth.                                                        Poor lady of the night.                                                                                                          But we love her and she knows it full well, for she has been faithful all these years.          And what of the scars on the planet earth?                                                                         Will she end up like the lifeless old moon, revolving slowly, hanging naked in the sky?     Life is too precious to let ego-centered ideas snuff it out.                                                   The moon must teach us, not only of age and geology, planets and solar puzzles            But of life, else we end up like her.

Smith says, “Was Apollo worth all the effort and expense? If it had been about the Moon, the answer would be no, but it wasn’t, it was about the Earth. The answer is yes.”

So today, fifty years after the launch of Apollo 11 on my bearthday, let us look beyond the event and ponder the thoughts of Mitchell and Worden and Smith.

And Kennedy. And be unafraid of doing things because they are hard—-even if the hardest of things is seeing ourselves.

(Photo credits: Apollo 11 launch, Al Worden’s photo of the Moon and Earth, and Apollo 17’s Harrison Schmitt unfurling the flag with a tiny earth in the background, and the “blue marble” photo from Apollo 17 all are from NASA)