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A contingency PR plan was in place in case the Apollo 11 mission failed, with President Nixon’s speech ready to be delivered if the astronauts were stranded on the moon. The speech was crafted by William Safire and is now archived in the National Archives.
In July 1969, the world watched and nervously waited for Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to maneuver their lunar module on the surface of the Moon, an engineering feat previously only dreamed of in science fiction. So it’s no surprise to learn that there was a contingency PR plan in case the historic mission went awry. A speech was ready to be delivered by President Richard Nixon if the astronauts were stranded on the lunar surface. So, if the worst happened, instead of remembering “one giant leap for mankind,” we might recall the opening sentence of Nixon’s worst-case scenario speech: “Fate ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace stay on the moon to rest in peace.”
Prepare for the worst:
Speechwriter William Safire, who would go on to have a Pulitzer Prize-winning career at The New York Times, crafted the words Nixon never had to speak.
Now archived in the National Archives, the existence of Nixon’s speech first surfaced in 1999, the 30th anniversary of the moon landing.
If the lunar module launch failed, it was expected that the stranded astronauts would slowly starve to death – or from what Safire called “deliberately ‘closed communications’” – a euphemism for suicide.
