ERIC HOFFER, that relentlessly middlebrow longshoreman turned philosopher, applauds the Apollo program as "a triumph of the squares." The historic journey to the moon is infinitely more than that, of course, and Hoffer's phrase is mildly offensive. But he does have a point. The laconic Apollo 11 astronauts who returned to earth last week, and many of the people in science and industry who made the trip possible, epitomize the solid, perhaps old-fashioned American virtues. So do the thousands who came to see them off at the Cape and those who celebrated their return with flags and patriotic bumper stickers —few love beads among them, fewer bell-bottom trousers and no disparaging words about the nation. The moon landing was a mind-stretching leap into the future and an accomplishment shared by all America and indeed by the world. But it was especially an accomplishment of "middle America."
It was also a vindication of some traditional strengths and precepts in the American character and experience: perseverance, organizational skill, the willingness to respond to competition—even the belief that the U.S. enjoys a special destiny in the world. Like the World War II Manhattan Project that created the Abomb, the space program exemplifies a particularly American genius.
That gift is the ability to muster massive resources of men, materials and expertise to convert abstract scientific theory into awesome, tangible technological achievement.
Greatest Since Creation. It is only an accident of history that Richard Nixon occupied the White House when the U.S. first landed men on the moon, but the coincidence seems apt. No less than Neil Armstrong, he is the smalltown boy who rose to fame, the upright citizen, the doer somehow left a bit unsophisticated despite his success and prominence. Nixon could scarcely contain his exuberance as he waited on the flag bridge of the carrier Hornet for the Pacific splashdown. Waving his arms, he exclaimed: "Oh, boy! Oh, boy!" As the Apollo command module bobbed in the sea, Nixon shouted down to the flight deck to ask the Navy band to play Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.
The President was the soul of middle America when he greeted the astronauts. Peering through the glass window of the quarantine van, he cried: "Gee, you look great!" He inquired whether they knew the results of the All-Star game. He chatted on and on, with somewhat feeble witticisms about asking the astronauts' wives for a date (coyly revealing that he really meant a state dinner). While there was a certain unpretentious charm to it all, it was also an awkward performance, and its triviality was strongly at odds with the solemnity of what had been accomplished. To describe the feat, Nixon reached for a superlative and found a big one. "This," he announced, "is the greatest week in the history of the world since the creation." That seemed somewhat sweeping for a President who has instituted weekly religious services at the White House: in the Christian view, the birth of Christ surely must rank as a greater event in the world's chronology since Genesis.