Of man & the Moon

The people of the U.S. went about their normal summer pursuits--the kind that make no headlines--with more affluence and enthusiasm than ever be fore. The World's Fair clocked its 18 millionth visitor, and baseball's National League registered nearly three-quarters of a million more customers than in 1963. In California twice as many U.S. families were traveling to the Orient as two years ago. Riding a wave of unprecedented prosperity, Americans were buying more of everything--sailboats and sports cars, wigs and swimming pools (see U.S. BUSINESS).

Amid all this prosperity in the summer of 1964, a nagging concern pushed its way to the surface. Its touchstone was the Negro revolution, punctuated by the angry Negro riots that erupted last month in Harlem and Rochester, and one of its side effects was a phenomenon that had come to be called the "white backlash." There were other vague feelings of frustration, notably about U.S. participation in the faraway war in Viet Nam.

President Johnson took note of this unease. "There is among our people a deep discontent," he told a group of educators in the White House Rose Garden. "It is not the discontent of a single segment--or a single section. It reaches through the whole of our society. The most prosperous, the best housed, the best fed, the best read, the most intelligent and the most secure generation in our history--or all history --is discontent. Why?" Perhaps, mused the President, it is because "we have not put our capacities to work. Our cities show it. Our schools show it. Our rural areas show it. Our rivers and streams show it. The edges of our society show it. We haven't been keeping faith with tomorrow--or with ourselves --and we ought to realize it."

In this affluent summer of discontent, it was a matter of relief and pride to Americans of all stripes that U.S. space scientists had at last scored a spectacular success with a space shot and had delivered history's first closeup pictures of the moon's surface (see SCIENCE). BULL'S-EYE! cheered the headlines, and for the moment at least, most of the argument about whether the moon program is worth its cost was forgotten while the nation joined in the cheering. "This is a great day for science and a great day for the U.S.," exulted University of Arizona Professor Gerard Kuiper, head of a team of scientists at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Lab, which prepared the shot. From all over the world flowed praise. "A stupendous achievement," said Kenneth Gatland of the British Interplanetary Society. Even Moscow joined the chorus.

At this moment of pride and prosperity--and disquiet--there had to be an awareness that man's most immediate challenges still lay on earth, and that the U.S. should and must meet them.

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