Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [40]
Neil and I addressed a crowd of about three thousand people. “We left some footprints on the moon,” I said. “They were made ideally for all the people of this country, and all the people of the world.” Following the celebration, Neil, NASA administrator Dr. Thomas O. Paine, and I flew to New York for a meeting at the United Nations.
We presented UN Secretary General U Thant with a four-ounce lunar rock sent by President Nixon as a “gift from all the people of the United States.” The rock was to remain on exhibit at the UN in perpetuity Neil, Tom, and I were surprised when the secretary general took this opportunity to chide the major powers, and in particular the United States. Referring to Neil’s first words on the moon’s surface, Thant said, “It is a cause for deepest regret and dismay that in the year since that act, man on Earth has not made even a small leap toward peace in those brutally war-torn areas of Indochina and the Middle East.”
We looked at each other in amazement, shrugged, and left. What did Thant want from us? We did our part. We felt that the UN secretary general had simply used us to make a political statement stabbing the U.S. government.
That was one of the last events at which I’d see Neil for a number of years. He became more private and less interested in being on stage as an astronaut, or degrading his lofty status by lending his name to endorse commercial products. Neil did not enjoy being in public; he attempted to hold himself aloof, just as Charles Lindbergh did for many years. Lindbergh was known as Mr. Aviation, an American hero Neil emulated. Neil loved aviation; even his e-mail address in later years was, at one time, OWright2, for Orville Wright 2. But he wasn’t really a space guy. He didn’t really like to talk about the intricacies of space, though he was the most qualified test-pilot astronaut, truly Mr. Aviation. For the next forty years, about the only time Neil showed up in public as part of an event promoting space was at each of the five-year anniversaries of our July 1969 lunar landing. These events were hosted by the President of the United States at the White House. Apart from that, I simply didn’t see Neil or Mike often, although Mike later took a job with the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and helped guide the development of the capacious Air and Space Museum. More recently, Mike joined me on a salmon-fishing trip to Alaska. I have reached out occasionally by phone about possible reunion dates to get all the Apollo astronauts together, especially the twenty-four who have been to the moon and the twelve who walked on the surface, but as the years went by, my hopes for such reunions grew dimmer and dimmer.
INDEED, FOR MOST of my life, success has come relatively easily to me. Certainly I had worked hard, and I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. I was grateful to have had so many opportunities in which I had excelled and achieved at peak performance throughout my life. I had flown to the moon and gotten its dust on my feet. But what was there for me now? What new goal could I set? What could possibly top that accomplishment?
Sure, I had always come out smelling like a rose, but following the world tour, the bloom was off the rose in my life in almost every area. I was physically exhausted and emotionally drained. I sensed things going from bad to worse in my marriage. Guilt and despair began to envelop me. I felt a