Yesterday was the thirty-fifth anniversary of the first manned landing on the moon. Yesterday I remembered the day, and toyed with writing something about it, but didn’t have time to do it justice. I still don’t, but I will write a little anyway.

That day is the first memory I can put a date on. I was six years old. It is hard now to know what is an actual memory from that day, and what is something that I learned from reading about the event afterwards. How much did I really understand at the time? How much have I learned later and projected back into my memory of the day? I don’t know.

I remember it as a Sunday. The actual landing was in the late afternoon, and the first walk was in the evening, around 9 or 10 PM. I got to stay up late to watch them step out of the lunar module. It was a very special day, watching TV on a Sunday, and staying up late.

I remember the tension as Armstrong and Aldrin were descending to land the lunar module. No one knew if they were going to make it or not. There might be a terrible accident. Perhaps where they landed would not be stable. Maybe they would hit too hard, disabling the lunar module. There were so many things that could go wrong, and there were so many unknowns that the landing was extremely stressful.

What prompted me to write tonight was reading a National Review article that contained something I had not heard before. President Nixon was ready to deliver a speech eulogizing the astronauts if the worst should happen and they would die in the landing attempt.

Exactly 35 years ago, on July 20, 1969, the “Eagle” landed and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon. It was a risky mission, like any great adventure into the unknown — so risky that William Safire, then a White House speechwriter, drafted a never-delivered just-in-case speech for President Richard Nixon, to tell the nation that “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.”

It makes perfect sense to be prepared, but I had never heard this. The phrase from the speech quoted in the article is particularly stirring (I would argue that the word should be “God” or “Providence” rather than “Fate”, but I understand why they chose the word “Fate”). The parallelism of “explore in peace” and “rest in peace” is very well put. It would most likely be one of those phrases that lived on long after the speech itself, working its way into the national consciousness, like the phrase “One small step for man. One giant leap for mankind.” But I am so glad that we remember Neil Armstrong’s words rather than Nixon’s eulogy.