I undertook a new voyage to a new Heaven and World...

So it seemed to Christopher Columbus in 1500. In the closing days of 1968, all mankind could exult in the vision of a new universe. For all its upheavals and frustrations, the year would be remembered to the end of time for the dazzling skills and Promethean daring that sent mortals around the moon. It would be celebrated as the year in which men saw at first hand their little earth entire, a remote, blue-brown sphere hovering like a migrant bird in the hostile night of space.

Moved Permanently

The year's transcendent legacy may well be that in Christmas week 1968, the human race glimpsed not a new continent or a new colony, but a new age, one that will inevitably reshape man's view of himself and his destiny. For what must be surely rank as one of the greatest physical adventures in history was, unlike the immortal explorations of the past, infinitely more than a reconnaissance of geography or unknown elements. It was a journey into man's future, a hopeful but urgent summons, in Poet Archibald MacLeish's words, "to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now that they are truly brothers."

The realization may take a long time coming. Its harbinger, the odyssey of Apollo 8, was the product of centuries of scientific conjecture and experimentation. The mission's fantastic precision could never have been achieved without the creativity and dedication of the greatest task force ever assembled for a peaceful purpose: 300,000 engineers, technicians and workers, 20,000 contractors, backed by $33 billion spent on the nation's space effort in the past decade. Nor could Apollo's galactic galleon have ventured forth without the knowledge amassed by the earlier astronauts, from Alan Shepard and John Glenn on, who dared brutal hazards aboard relatively primitive craft in the laggard race to launch Americans into space. In large measure, too, the superb functioning of Apollo 8 was a result of heartbreak.

New Names for History

After the deaths of Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee, when Apollo 204 burned on its pad in January 1967, the translunar vehicle was extensively redesigned. Man's first voyage to the moon also bore the imprint of two farsighted Presidents: John F. Kennedy, who exhorted the nation to "set sail on this new sea," and Lyndon Johnson, who in more prosaic language insisted to Americans that "space is not a gambit, not a gimmick," but a realistic challenge that could not be evaded.

In the end, though, it was three lonely men who risked their lives and made the voyage. And in the course of that first soaring escape from the planet that is no longer the world, it was the courage, grace and cool proficiency of Colonel Frank Borman, Captain James Lovell and Major William Anders that transfixed their fellow men and inscribed on the history books names to be remembered along with those of Marco Polo and Amundsen, Captain Cook and Colonel Lindbergh. In 147 hours that stretched like a lifetime, America's moon pioneers became the indisputable Men of the Year.

For the American people, the astronaut's triumph came as a particularly welcome gift after a year of disruption and despond. Seldom had the nation been confronted with such a congeries of doubts and discontents. On their TV screens, Americans had watched in horror as Martin Luther King lay dead on a Memphis balcony and as an assassin's bullet pierced Robert Kennedy's brain in Los Angeles. While U.S. prestige declined abroad, the nation's own self-confidence sank to a nadir at which it became a familiar litany that American society was afflicted with some profound malaise of spirit and will.

The Paradoxical Planet

The principal focus, if not the prime cause of American frustrations, was the cruel, inconclusive war in Viet Nam. It had divided and demoralized the American people as had no other issue in this century. And it continued to divert a disproportionate amount of the national treasure and energy.

On March 31, the tide of opposition to his policies and personality led Lyndon Johnson to renounce another term as President and call for a partial bombing halt over North Viet Nam. On October 31, President Johnson ordered a total suspension of aerial attacks on the North. Yet by year's end the haggling still droned on in Paris, and the bloodshed continued on the battlefields. Celebrating Mao Tse-Tung's 75th birthday, Communist China exploded its second successful thermonuclear device. Even so puny a state as North Korea showed that it could humiliate the U.S. by pirating the intelligence ship Pueblo on the broad seas. It seemed a cruel paradox of the times that man could conquer alien space but could not master his native planet.

The U.S. and the Soviet Union still faced a perilous confrontation in the Middle East. In August, five years to the month after Khrushchev and Kennedy concluded the test-ban treaty, the long and delicate approach to a Soviet-American detente was reversed by Moscow's heavy-handed repression of a progressive regime in Czechoslovakia. For a few months it seemed as if Alexander Dubcek, the Czechoslovak party boss, might succeed in his breathtaking attempt to defy Moscow and build a humane, relatively liberal and more efficient Marxist regime in his country; the Soviet tanks that ended this attempt for the time being did not end the hopes he had expressed. But Moscow may have made eventual solutions more painful, not only for the nations of Eastern Europe but for Russia as well. While Russian troops policed the streets of Prague, a hardy band of Moscow intellectuals protested the invasion in the very shadow of the Kremlin.

Virus of Dissent

Mankind could be thankful at least that at no time in 1968 did the superpowers come close to an irreconcilable conflict. Yet nations around the world were confronted with a new kind of crisis, a virus of internal dissent. The spirit of protest leaped from country to country like an ideological variant of Hong Kong flu. Protest marches, sit-ins and riots attacked every kind of structure, society and regime.

In France, a near-revolution by students and workers came close to toppling Charles De Gaulle in May; its economic aftermath in November almost certainly discredited forever Gaullism's vaunted role as the power broker of Europe. In Egypt, students rampaged through the streets, burning buses and shouting against the "prefabricated slogans" of Gamal Abdel Nasser's regime. In Pakistan, mobs cried "Death to Ayub!" in protest against their President's neglect of long-festering economic and social problems, Germany, Italy and Japan were struck by the plague.

On the eve of the Olympics, Mexico was torn apart by savage gun battles between soldiers and students. Two months later, Brazil's generals, archetypes of the Latin American military elite, caught a whiff of dissent and hastily imposed a dictatorship on the continent's largest nation.

Upsetting Old Patterns

Nowhere was protest more prevalent or potent than in the U.S. Though the ghettos were spared the major racial holocausts of previous years, Martin Luther King's assassination ignited disturbances in 168 cities and towns and brought arsonists to within three blocks of the White House. Nearly everywhere black citizens demanded the right to run their own communities, their own welfare programs, their own schools and a growing number of militant Negro groups armed to protect themselves from what they considered an incurably hostile white society.

Strikes by public employees became increasingly commonplace, and union memberships increasingly disavowed contracts negotiated by their leaders, threatening to upset a pattern of stable labor relations built up over a generation. Even the two party system was threatened, as millions of Americans, mostly lower-middle-class voters demanding law and order and resentful of the Negroes' demands, responded to the egregious slogans of George Wallace.

On the campuses, groups of radical students sought nothing less than the destruction of the university. Columbia nearly fell to them last spring, and San Francisco State College was still reeling under their attacks as the old year closed. Despite the Administration's halting steps toward peace, massive antiwar demonstrations still took place in parks and arenas, men still burned their draft cards, priests and pedagogues still faced trial for attempting to subvert the Selective Service process.

In the U.S. as elsewhere in the world, there was an undeniable legitimacy to many of the dissenters' causes. When they clamored for greater participation in academic decision making or more meaningful curricula or better job opportunities in the ghettos, colleges and corporations and city halls generally approved willing to meet their demands at least halfway. Indeed, one of the most remarkable aspects of a remarkable year was the resilience of American society to such wide-ranging attacks on so many hitherto sacrosanct institutions.

The Clubs of August

For many of the young, Eugene McCarthy's antiwar campaign raised a brave new banner, and thousands of students trooped forth to crusade for a candidate who, for all his dry wit and charmingly unconventional style, proved in the course of the primaries too flaccid and vague to entertain any realistic hope of capturing the popular vote. Nonetheless, it was McCarthy who showed the vulnerability of Lyndon Johnson, and after the New Hampshire primary, Robert Kennedy could no longer resist the challenge to reassert what many of his followers seriously believed to be his legitimate cause against that of the pretender Johnson.

Kennedy waged an artful and compelling campaign, summoning from the young, the poor and the black a degree of enthusiasm, even worship, seldom witnessed in an American political campaign. Their hopes and aspirations dies with the young Senator, and the altruistic zeal for Mccarthy's crusaders turned to bitterness when it became obvious that their leader could never win the Democratic nomination. The young, the angry and the disenchanted registered their vote on the streets of Chicago, and they were answered by the clubs of August. The traumatic clash may well have cost Hubert Humphrey the presidency. Richard Nixon, starting earlier and astutely divining the mood of a majority outraged by violence and disorder, won the election less by promising cures for America's ills than by decrying them.

Small wonder, then, that those on earth saw it as a beleaguered battlefield—not, as Astronaut Lovell described it from his vantage point nearly a quarter of a million miles away, as "a grand ovation to the vastness of space." Sated with violence, sick of crisis, weary of politics and protest alike, the U.S.—and the rest of the world—needed few excuses to look to the heavens. As the year waned, they shifted their gaze to earth's placid, lifeless satellite—as Sir Richard Burton described it in 1880, "A ruined world, a globe burnt out, a corpse upon the road at night."

The Question of Priorities

Many students and intellectuals, inveighing against the "power structure" and the "Establishment," have been loud in their condemnation of America's commitment to space. It has been ridiculed by such authorities as Science Editor Philip Abelson as a "Moondoggle," by a congressional critic as a "Garish spectacular." Indeed, considering the proliferation of terrestrial problems—poverty, ignorance, racism, the decay of the cities, the rape of the environment, the deepening chasm between affluent and backward nations—it is easy to question the wisdom of spending billions to escape the troubled planet.

But that is to miss the essential point. Though the space program has in fact returned the nation untold dividend in technological advancement—and jobs—that is not its rationale or its ultimate justification. Man is propelled from earth to moon by the same instincts that led him from cave to college: the lonely search for knowledge, the fascination of attacking the impregnable, the creative impulse, shared with Tennyson's Ulysses, "to seek a newer world...to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars." The newer world opened up by the Men of the Year will surely, in time, reach far beyond the moon, but its radiance cannot fail to illuminate life on planet earth.

COVERS GALLERY: Click here to see the cover image from 1968

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