By the end of June, I had become bureau chief with Henry’s departure for Asia. Clearly the big story was the planned Apollo 11 launch in mid-July in which the astronauts aboard, Scott Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were to try to land their space capsule on the moon’s surface, do some exploring and then return to earth. Michael Collins would be flying the original ship around while they were on the moon. This was clearly a risky mission, but it was clearly an unhappy time for Soviet space scientists.
Meanwhile, Harrison Salisbury, who had been The Times’ correspondent in Moscow from 1949 to 1954, and was a leading Kremlinologist, was in New York and was in the process of starting the Times’ Op-Ed page. In that capacity he sent me a note asking that I try to get some significant Soviet poet to write a poem about Apollo 11’s mission if it takes place. He also shipped me a carton of his latest book on the Russian success during World War II in outlasting the Nazi siege of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and gave me a list of people he wanted the book sent to.
As it turned out, I was able to find a poet. On July 4, 1969, U.S. Ambassador Jacob Beam held the annual American reception on the grounds of Spasso House, where the ambassador lived. At the reception, I introduced myself and Marie-Jeanne to Andrei Voznesensky, who at that time was a major public figure, whose poetry readings could fill stadiums. When I asked him to write a poem, he took out some paper, and wrote out in Russian, a poem which was a palindrom–the same backwards and forwards—“A Luna Kanula”. Literally, it means in English “The Moon has disappeared.” The poem was printed in The Times on July 21.
There had been some speculation in the Unite States that Moscow might try to steal some of the thunder from the planned Apollo 11 launch. And sure enough on July 14, I wrote a story that led The Times, saying: “The Soviet Union launched an unmanned spaceship toward the moon today [July 13], just three days before the scheduled blastoff of America’s Apollo 11 on a manned lunar landing mission.
“The launching of the Luna 15 mission appeared to observers here as a deliberate effort by the Soviet Union to steal some of the moon publicity away from the United States and demonstrate that it is still much in the space business. As usual few details were released on the latest Soviet apace venture.”
On July 17, I reported that the Soviet Union “reported promptly” to the Russian people “about the successful launching of Apollo 11 but maintained silence for the third consecutive day on its own unmanned spacecraft. Lina 15, which also is heading for the moon.” The main Soviet TV news show at 8:30 pm Moscow time–four hours after the actual launching, “showed about five minutes of tape of the lift-off at Cape Kennedy.” I always felt cheated missing the actual live coverage of the Apollo mission myself.
The next day, I reported that “the Soviet Union broke its silence on Luna 15 today and said the unmanned spaceship hf become the moon’s latest artificial satellite. “Soviet radio, TV and newspapers continued to give heavy coverage to Apollo 11, surpassing the news given to any previous American space effort. Pravda, for instance, carried a dispatch from New YOrk on its front page, and a background article and picture of the three man crew on an inside page. The newspaper wished “the courageous crew a happy journey.”
Finally, on July 21, the historic front page which announced “Men Walk on Moon,” I reported at the bottom on that front page that Moscow had announced that Luna 15 had reached the moon’s surface and ended its operation, meaning it had failed to scoop up moon rock and return to earth. My pride of authorship was lost, however, in the later editions when the paper ran a long poem by Archibald MacLeish, and pushed my story inside the paper.
The Voznesenskys invited Marie-Jeanne and me to his apartment in a coop building reserved to the elite in Moscow. And he once came into our apartment at “SadSam” to borrow an LP record. But our contacts faded. He died in 2010 at the age of 77. I also met the other major Soviet poet of that era, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, at his apartment in Moscow. Yevtushenko died in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2017 at the age of 84. He had been teaching half the year at the University of Tulsa. I had also lost contact with him.
