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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 died with the young Senator, and the altruistic zeal of 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. That 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 of 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.