This week in 1968, something wonderful happened. Perspective changes everything and today, it may seem unexceptional. But in that time, it changed the world’s view of America and ours of ourselves. Apollo 7, manned by Walt Cunningham, Wally Shira, and Don Eisley, did the seemingly impossible.
Context is important for understanding what happened then and what it means today. A series of events, beginning in 1960, began to rock and reshape America, creating deep fissures and self-doubt.
On the plus side, but not without pain, race relations took a major turn. While some civil rights leaders sought to keep peace, riots jumped the rails. Meantime, America’s proxy war with Communist China and Russia, Vietnam, deepened. A nation not used to domestic violence facing threats and the horror itself.
Three assassinations occurred: a president, a presidential candidate, and a top civil rights leader. Leftist terrorism gained a foothold; bombings occurred on campuses, in courthouses, and at the Pentagon.
The radical left pressed its advantage, setting cities afire. The White House was surrounded by buses to prevent it being overrun. Johnson was president, and the police were called pigs.
Data points are worth recalling. Four black students in February 1960 initiated a “sit-in,” 75,000 followed nationwide, race and anti-war to feminism. In May 1960, a US high-altitude spy plane, the U-2, was shot down over Russia. Pilot Gary Powers was sentenced to ten years in prison and later exchanged a blow to the US.
Then came Soviet space leadership, already a threat in the 1950s. The Soviets put up the first orbiting ICBM, satellite (Sputnik), dog, then two dogs, rocket to the Moon, Venus, and Sun, the first man (Gagarin), the first woman (Tereshkova), first probe to Mars.
The US – via President John F. Kennedy – threw down, challenging the Soviets to put men on the Moon, a surrogate for nuclear war, to test both nations’ technical prowess and systems of government. Americans united but reeled.
JFK began our charge for the moon, but in 1963, he was himself assassinated. Martin Luther King, spokesman for nonviolence and individual racial equality, was killed. Then, Robert F. Kennedy, in 1968. America was in rolling shock.
Even the start of the decade was rough: the loss of Cuba to communism, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, US figure skating team killed in a plane crash. By mid-decade, President Johnson pushed round-the-clock bombings of Vietnam, and hope seemed nowhere.
In July 1967, mass race riots rocked US cities, the USS Pueblo was seized by North Korea, and the first Apollo crew (later called Apollo 1) were killed in a fire on the launch pad. Could it get any worse?
The nation was reeling as that awful year 1968 arrived. MLK was killed in April, RFK in June. By the time October came, the nation was in the pits, and yet this was a mission of daring, this Apollo 7 mission.
Having lost three Apollo astronauts on the ground behind the Soviets, we did not give up the program. Never losing sight of the goal or stakes, out to prove self-determining republics win, Apollo 7 prepared.
For personal insight, having spoken countless times with Apollo 7’s Walt Cunningham, he knew exactly what was at stake – how down the nation was, how vital it was that this pioneering mission succeed.
He also knew that this was about more than daring or even a titanic contest between the US and Soviets, freedom versus communism. It was about setting the trajectory for the Cold War and who would win.
Cunningham, Shira, and Eisley – to borrow a line from the newly debuted Beatles – would “carried the world upon their shoulders. They had to succeed, period. They had no fear, just focus, hope, and courage.
The Saturn rocket – the largest ever built – launched “flawlessly” just past 11 a.m. on October 11 and flew 10 days and 20 hours. Having never put an Apollo capsule in flight, America’s crew tested everything and performed what papers called a “101 percent perfect” mission.
Decades later, Apollo 11 lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin said he and Neil would never have been able to walk on the moon were it not for the perfect Apollo 7 flight.
So, here is “the rest of the story.” The entire nation was glued to that flight, as nothing until the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969. The whole world was glued. Soviets and Chinese glued. It was a “must succeed” event; if it failed, as Walt later noted, there might not have been another.
It succeeded, and because it did, a wave washed over America and the world. We now knew again that we could dare with abandon, dream, and do. We got to the moon, the Soviets never did. In less than two decades, the Soviet Union was history, and the Cold War was over.
But this was the tipping point, Apollo 7’s splashdown, exactly this week, 1968. Wonderful things do happen, and they can still, in one fell swoop changing history, changing the world, and changing what we think of ourselves. May we never forget that, because good things lie ahead if we will only believe and work for them. History is proof.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.
