Current mood:	nostalgic
Current music:	Oldies from the summer of 1969

Yes, that’s the way it was
It was a Sunday afternoon quite unlike any other I’ve ever known. From lunchtime on until the early hours of the morning, we sat in our downstairs family room, transfixed by what we were watching on our TV set.

For some strange reason, as I look back 40 years at July 20, 1969, one of my clearest memories is of the way CBS News came out of one of the rare commercial breaks taken during that day’s wall-to-wall coverage of the Apollo 11 mission. “This afternoon,” the announcer’s voice intoned, “a landing on the moon! Brought to you by the International Paper Co.”

Talk about the ultimate product placement.

A few weeks later, while on a late-summer vacation at the lake, I wrote a column for the first-day-of-school issue of my high school newspaper noting the bizarre way past and present had merged during that eventful summer of 1969. We had watched an ancient royal ritual, the investiture of Britain’s Prince Charles as the Prince of Wales, as it happened earlier that same month, thanks to satellites in outer space. If you don’t remember what that was like, here’s a clip from YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS8OXdtSoCs

Likewise, an estimated 528 million viewers around the world tuned in as astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin guided their landing craft to the surface of a prehistoric orb in the sky. According to the ratings services, 93 percent of U.S. televisions were tuned in to the moon landing that afternoon (God only knows what the other seven percent were watching). And like 45 percent of American TV sets, ours was tuned to CBS, where veteran newsman Walter Cronkite, a longtime space program enthusiast, and Wally Schirra, one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts, were anchoring the coverage. (NBC had 34 percent of the viewing audience that day while ABC had 14 percent. That was it back then; just the three networks. No cable news channels.)

Of course, what we were watching was primitive by today’s standards. There was no live telecast from the lunar module carrying the two astronauts to the surface. So we saw a CBS animated simulation of what was happening while we listened to the live audio of the exchanges between Armstrong and Aldrin and the NASA communicator in Houston.

But that was still plenty exciting. You could hear the tension in Cronkite and Schirra’s voices as they commented between the terse, dispassionate exchanges between the astronauts and NASA. The last couple of minutes, Walter and Wally didn’t say anything, just listening with the rest of us as Aldrin guided the craft over the moon’s surface, looking for a suitable landing spot. I shudder to think what it would have been like had something gone wrong, with us hanging on every word. The simulation didn’t account for all the hovering time, so it ran ahead of real time, showing the craft down prematurely.

Finally, at 4:18 p.m. Eastern Time, we heard Aldrin say, “Contact light …” and Schirra exhaled, “We’re home.” Exulted Cronkite: “Man on the moon!” Then came Armstrong, sounding completely calm: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

The camera cut to Cronkite, as he took off his glasses and rubbed his hands together. “Oh, boy!” Schirra was wiping a tear from one of his eyes.

“Wally, say something,” Cronkite grinned, “I’m speechless.”

Later that evening, when CBS’ Roger Mudd asked Spiro Agnew what he thought of the moment, the usually loquacious vice president was uncharacteristically forthright: “If Cronkite doesn’t know what to say, don’t expect me to come up with anything too good.”

Thanks to YouTube, we can relive those tense moments and Cronkite and Schirra’s elation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_sWmD6NvMY

The biggest thrill was still to come, with first Armstrong and then Aldrin scheduled to climb out of the lunar lander and set foot on the moon’s surface that evening. Here, we actually got to see what was happening, sort of, as a live TV camera deployed from the side of the landing craft showed the shadowy, ghostly image of Armstrong moving slowly down the ladder. It was difficult to tell what you were seeing; Cronkite thought Armstrong was actually on the lunar surface when he was still on the final step. Then, at 10:56 p.m., came the crackling first words from the moon’s surface, which Armstrong flubbed slightly by leaving out an article: “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”

It was tough to catch — I remember us saying to one another, “What did he say?” — and Cronkite and Schirra couldn’t quite make it out either, and had to get someone else to provide a transcription.

Watching the CBS footage now, it’s amusing to see Armstrong ignoring the proper order in which he was supposed to do things on the surface, breaking out his camera and taking pictures like a starstruck tourist while Houston gently kept nagging him to get the “contingency sample” of lunar soil that was supposed to be the first order of business in case the trip outside the lander had to be cut short. Then, for two and a quarter hours, we watched Armstrong and Aldrin bounce in and out of the camera’s view and finally set up an American flag and read the plaque on the base of the lander, which would remain on the moon, noting that “we came in peace for all mankind.” They also took a call from the Oval Office and I remember regretting that Tricky Dick had to be a part of this great occasion.

Again, the CBS footage is on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2XGFSPIhiM&NR=1

Despite the late hour, 125 million Americans stayed up to watch the moon walk, almost twice the number the networks had projected. Finally, at 1:11 a.m., with the astronauts and their moon rocks safely inside, the hatch to the lander was closed. The next day, they blasted off from the moon to rejoin Michael Collins, who was orbiting above in the Columbia spacecraft. Remarkably, that was something we actually got to see live, thanks to that camera left behind on the surface. The following Thursday, July 24, my brother Jonathan’s 12th birthday, the Columbia splashed down and the most momentous voyage in mankind’s history came to an end.

This past Friday evening, in preparation for writing this, I decided to search online for the moon landing footage and was delighted to find the CBS coverage. That was how I watched it then, and that’s how I wanted to relive it now. It was almost as thrilling this time around as it was 40 years ago. Later Friday night, when I got back on the computer to check e-mail, I discovered that at 7:42 p.m., just minutes after I had finished rewatching one of his most memorable broadcasts, 92-year-old Walter Cronkite had breathed his last.

Talk about past and present colliding!

There’ve been numerous tributes to Cronkite this weekend from all the many TV news outlets that now vie for our attention. We’ve been reminded of how he became the most trusted man in America. We’ve seen the clip of him swallowing hard to try and keep his composure after announcing the death of President Kennedy. We’ve been told again how Cronkite’s clearly labeled 1968 commentary after a trip to Vietnam, concluding that the U.S. had reached a stalemate in the war there, prompted LBJ to say, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."

But most importantly we’ve been reminded that the way Cronkite became the man that various polls named the most trusted in America was by reporting the news without spin or slant or gimmicks. When he signed off each weekday evening, saying, “That’s the way it is,” you didn’t have to worry about checking out other sources to see competing and/or clashing versions of the way it was.

It’s to the credit of the current crop of network news anchors that they recognize the greatness of Cronkite and that they know they can’t come close to being half the journalist he was. Or to having the sort of relationship with viewers that he had or the impact he had.

This is not a great time for journalism. Newspapers, where Cronkite’s generation of broadcasters got their start, are barely hanging on. Network television news is a pale imitation of the days of Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, with more fluff than substance. The audience is splintered between the three traditional networks, who are increasingly less relevant to young viewers, and the cable networks, where the vogue is for shouting pundits rather than solid reporting, and the ratings leader is a thinly veiled propaganda arm of the Republican party. And more and more people get their news on the Internet, where anything goes and little is vetted in the race to get there first and attract the most page views.

It’s unfortunate, especially for my children’s generation, but the news business today is a landscape as foreign to the likes of Walter Cronkite as that desolate moonscape was 40 years ago to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

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