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Nostalgia for Apollo 11 took several forms. CBS closed its newscast by reminding us how giddy Walter Cronkite had been about a man on the moon--"the man who took us there and back," as CBS anchor Katie Couric put it. ABC anchor Charles Gibson, who emulated Cronkite's space enthusiasm when he visited the Johnson Space Center in Houston this spring (here and here), confessed that landing on the moon "still gives you chills 40 years later." Filing A Closer Look, Gibson claimed that the astronauts "uplifted America's spirit" at a time when "the Vietnam War was going badly, protest marches, America's youth in open rebellion." Subsequently, "NASA has never had the level of public support it had right after Apollo 11, hard to accept for those of our generation so thrilled by what we had seen." CBS' Bob Orr noted that the anniversary celebration "is tempered by disappointment that America, in the four decades since, has not probed deeper into the unknown."
NBC filed a montage feature of a trio of remembrances. Astronomer Neil de Grasse Tyson, an African-American, remembered his own family being "basically disenfranchised" even as "the greatest epic adventure this species has ever undertaken" got under way. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin claimed "there was a real fear that if Russia were to get…to the moon before us, that maybe the moon launch could have been used in a weapon way, a war way." Politician John McCain did not know about a "small event like a moon landing." He was a prisoner of war at the time.
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