Neil Armstrong Becomes the First Man on the Moon: July 20, 1969
- Catholic Textbook Project
- Jul 21
- 4 min read
This text comes from our book, The American Venture.
The America over which Richard Nixon served as president was a nation divided—over the war in Vietnam, over issues of race, and even over what is morally right and wrong. The year 1968 had revealed just how deep the divisions were; the questions for 1969 were whether and how those divisions could be bridged. Could a new president restore unity to a fractured country?
Though Nixon’s policy towards peace protests was to ignore them, he did take active measures to end the war in Vietnam. Within the first month of his administration, Nixon and South Vietnam resumed the peace talks with North Vietnam and the Viet Cong that had begun in the Johnson administration. In June 1969, however, Nixon announced that the talks were going nowhere and he would begin to withdraw American troops from the war zone—if, that is, the South Vietnamese could take on the defense of their country and the North Vietnamese did not increase attacks on remaining American forces. But despite troop withdrawals, the war would continue into Nixon’s second term.
Unlike the “progressive” presidents, Kennedy and Johnson, Nixon treated the race question with “benign neglect.” Yet, Nixon was progressive enough not to whittle down the size and scope of the federal government—though he did veto a number of health and education bills the Democratic-dominated Congress sent him. Yet, the president expanded the federal government’s reach over the nation’s natural resources when, in 1970, he called on Congress to allocate $10 million to clean up the nation’s rivers and lakes. It seems he hoped the environment would be an issue that could unite Americans. “Restoring nature to its natural state,” said Nixon, “is a cause beyond party and beyond factions. It has become a common cause of all the people of this country.”
Most Americans could come together in welcoming America’s great space triumph—the first landing of a man on the moon. On July 20, 1969, television beamed images of astronaut Neil Armstrong descending from his spacecraft onto the moon’s surface. “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” Armstrong said. To the three astronauts, across 200,000 miles of space, Nixon said, “for one priceless moment in the whole history of men all the people on this earth are truly one—one in their pride in what you have done and one in our prayers that you will return safely to earth.” This was just the first of five more moon landings the U.S. would conduct between July 1969 and December 1972.
Nixon’s landslide presidential win in 1972 over his Democratic challenger, a peace candidate, Senator George McGovern, seemed to indicate the public’s approval of the Republican administration. Nixon secured a resounding victory, taking 60.7 percent of the popular vote and the electoral votes of all the states except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, both of which went for McGovern. The Republicans, however, did not do so well in the congressional elections. In the House of Representatives, the Republicans added only 12 seats to their ledger, far fewer than the 41 they needed to capture that branch of Congress, while they secured only two seats in the Senate, where the Democrats maintained a commanding lead of 56 to 42 seats.
With the moon landings, the United States had won the space race against the Soviet Union. The landings, too, indicated that the United States was also winning in the race for world dominance. It was from this position of strength that President Nixon in 1972 began making friendly overtures to both Communist China and the Soviet Union. In February 1972, Nixon became the first U.S. president to visit China. There, for eight days, he met with, and was entertained by, Red China’s leaders. Nixon called his visit “the week that changed the world.”
Besides expanding their cultural, educational, and journalistic contacts, the United States and China agreed to broaden trade between their two nations. Though the United States still formally recognized Taiwan’s government as the government for all China, the Nixon administration, in October 1972, agreed to remove its objections to Red Chinese membership in the United Nations. Subsequently, the United Nations admitted China and expelled Taiwan.
Nixon traveled to Moscow to meet with Soviet premier Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev in May 1972. They met to discuss progress in talks on the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), which sought to limit the number of intercontinental missiles able to carry nuclear warheads. Nixon and Brezhnev, however, forged other agreements as well: on limiting atomic weapons; protecting the natural environment; sharing medical, space, and technological knowledge; and forming a joint trade commission. Nixon was even allowed to address the Russian people by television. To reciprocate the good will, the United States government entertained Brezhnev in Washington in June of the following year.
The end of the Vietnam War the following year could have begun a long period of national healing. Yet it would not be so. Revelations of scandals in the Nixon administration surrounding the break-in and bugging of the Democratic national headquarters at the Watergate building in Washington, D.C. during the 1972 campaign would force Richard Nixon to resign the presidency in August 1974. This scandal would reopen wounds that, it seemed, had just begun to heal.
