I had just taken over as Moscow bureau chief when I went with my new bride, Marie-Jeanne to the residence of Jacob Beam, the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union for the annual July 4 party. It was one of the few occasions in those cold war days when prominent Russians could mingle easily with Americans. And sure enough I struck up a conversation with Andrei Solzhenitsyn, the poet,[who died in 2010 in Mpscpw] whose popularity in Russia was akin to Babe Ruth in the United States. I asked him to write a poem that we could publish in case Apollo 11 succeeded. He then puled a piece of paper from his pocket and wrote: “A Luna Kanula,” which was a palindrome which means the same backwards and forward and translated, said, “The Moon Has Sunk.” He and I struck up a modest friendship during my time in Moscow. He and his wife invited us to his apartment once and we reciprocated.

There had been some speculation that the Soviet Union might try to upstage Apollo 11 with an unmanned spaceship that would land on the moon and return to earth with some moon fragments. And sure enough on July 14th I led the NYTimes with a dispatch: “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 planned 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 it is still very much in the space business. As usual few details were released on the latest Soviet space venture.” On July 17th paper I reported that the Soviet Union “reported promptly” via Tass “about the successful launching of Apollo 11, but maintained silence for the third consecutive day on its own unmanned spacecraft Luna 15 which is also heading for the moon.” The main Soviet TV news show at 8:30 p.m., Moscow time, about 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. But recently, watching the films from the 50th anniversary, I was satisfied.

In the paper of July 18th, I reported that “the Soviet Union broke its silence on Luna 15 and said the unmanned spaceship had become the moon’s latest artificial satellite. But I also noted that the Soviet media’s coverage of Apollo 11 surpassed that given any previous American space effort. Pravda, in fact, wished “the courageous crew a happy journey.” Finally, on July 21, on the historic front page which announced: “Men Walk on Moon,” i had a story at the bottom of column one which reported that Luna 15 had reached the moon’s surface and ended its operations. That meant the mission had failed to accomplish anything significant. My pride of place was lost however to Archibald MacLeish’s long poem. I did have a follow up front page story the next day which summed up the Soviet failure to match the Americans.