Magical History Tour

Like many in the crowd, Kelly Bellanger could scarcely believe what she read in the museum case. The display, included in a unique National Archives traveling exhibit, was of a speech written for President Richard M. Nixon in 1969. It said, in part:

“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice. These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.”

“Thank God they never had to use this,” says Bellanger.

Count Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin among those who would agree. Aldrin, who now lives in Los Angeles, says he learned just a few years ago about the prepared remarks, which became moot when the spacecraft that carried the first two lunar explorers to the surface of the moon launched them flawlessy back toward Earth, ending fears they would be stranded, waiting to die without possibility of rescue.

The author of the speech, Nixon aide William Safire, now a columnist for the New York Times, says he thought the remarks had sunk into obscurity long ago. He never imagined that instead they would be unearthed at the National Archives in the 1990s and later tour the nation, including a stop in Los Angeles next month.

Bellanger was among the throngs of visitors to the exhibit at its last stop before L.A., the Witte Museum in San Antonio, Texas. “American Originals: Treasures from the National Archives” will be on display at the Los Angeles Central Library from Oct. 4 through Jan. 4, 2004. The exhibit features 25 historic documents, including the Louisiana Purchase Treaty, the Emancipation Proclamation and Germany’s surrender in World War II. But it’s Safire’s words that drop jaws, perhaps because so many viewers remember the uncertainty and drama of that first moon landing 34 years ago.

“I was thinking of the crews of the Challenger and Columbia and their families as I read it,” says Linda Heinze, another of the San Antonio visitors.

Asked about his own never-delivered speech, Safire says that at historic moments, speechwriters often turn to poets, as he did for Nixon: “I drew on a poem by Rupert Brooke (‘The Soldier’). ‘If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.’ I played on that on the last line of the speech.”

Indeed, the speech ends with: “Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts. For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.”

Was it common practice to have speeches ready in case of such a disaster? “No, at least I don’t know of any,” Safire recalls. “It just occurred to me when Frank Borman, the astronaut who was our liaison with NASA, and I were discussing the Apollo flight and he said, ‘Is there a plan for disaster?’

“That brought me up short. I prepared a memo including a brief speech.”

Twenty-one hours after touching down on the moon, the spacecraft, Eagle, lifted off to rendezvous with the command module and astronaut Michael Collins, and the three men returned to Earth safely on July 24, 1969. Safire’s memo, “In Event of Moon Disaster,” was filed away.

“I had forgotten completely about it,” Safire says. “I never kept a copy. Thirty years went by. Your colleague dug it up,” he said, referring to Jim Mann, a former reporter in the Los Angeles Times’ Washington Bureau who found the speech while doing research in the National Archives.

“People are amazed at the Safire document,” says Stacey Bredhoff, curator of the exhibit. “The moon landing was such a triumph. To read that, you realize just how badly things could have gone.”

The National Archives and Records Administration, established in 1934, oversees the management of all federal records, some 4 billion documents, photographs and films--including a letter from the King of Siam to President Abraham Lincoln offering to send two elephants “to be let loose and multiply in the continent of America. Inhabitants of America will be able to catch them and tame and use them as beasts of burden . . . . “ Lincoln politely declined.

Other documents in the exhibit are not so innocent.

During the 19th century, Americans grew to dominate Hawaii’s economy and politics. When Queen Liliuokalani assumed the throne of the sovereign Kingdom of Hawaii in 1891 and tried to reassert the will of the native Hawaiian people, she was deposed by a group of American businessmen, with the support of the U.S. Navy. On the afternoon of Jan. 17, 1893, the group proclaimed establishment of a Provisional Government, to which the United States Minister then extended diplomatic recognition.

On display in L.A. will be a letter from Queen Liliuokalani unsuccessfully pleading her case to the U.S. government: “Oh, honest Americans, as Christians hear me for my down-trodden people. Their form of government is as dear to them as yours is precious to you.”

After a congressional investigation, President Grover Cleveland on Dec. 18, 1893 described the takeover as an “act of war, committed with the participation of a diplomatic representative of the United States and without authority of Congress.” Though Cleveland called for the restoration of the Hawaiian monarchy, the Provisional Government would not relinquish power. Instead, on July 4, 1894, it declared itself the Republic of Hawaii.

Cleveland’s successor, President William McKinley, signed the Newlands Joint Resolution on July 7, 1898 providing for the annexation of Hawaii. The self-declared Republic of Hawaii then ceded sovereignty over the Hawaiian Islands to the United States. On Aug. 21, 1959, Hawaii became the 50th state in the Union.

Elsewhere in the exhibit is a letter Benedict Arnold wrote to George Washington on Sept. 25, 1780. During the Revolutionary War, Arnold assumed command of the strategically important fort and garrisons at West Point, N.Y., then secretly offered them up to the British at a price of 20,000 pounds. The scheme was discovered and he fled to the British, leaving his wife behind in haste.

Arnold’s letter, written as he was safely aboard the British warship Vulture, proclaims his wife’s innocence and pleads with Washington to protect her “from every insult and injury that the mistaken vengeance of my Country may expose her to. . . . She is as good and as innocent as an angel and is incapable of doing wrong.”

Washington obliged. He allowed Margaret Shippen to choose between remaining in Philadelphia or crossing British lines to be with her husband. She eventually chose the latter. After her death, it was discovered that she had indeed participated in the plot.

The exhibit will include a number of items of special interest in California, including John Wayne’s World War II application to the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor to the CIA); a logbook listing the death of Private First Class Sadao Munemori of Los Angeles, who, as a member of the celebrated 442nd Japanese American combat team, threw himself on a German grenade that rolled near two of his comrades on April 5, 1945; a 1916 letter from Pancho Villa to Gen. Emiliano Zapata, proposing that Zapata, the leading revolutionary general in southern Mexico, join forces with him to launch a campaign against their common enemy, the United States; and Chinese leader Sun Yat-sen’s Immigration File, 1904-1925.

For the fashion conscious, there is Levi Strauss’ 1873 patent infringement lawsuit regarding “an improvement in fastening pocket openings.” The use of copper rivets at the edges of the pocket openings “to prevent the ripping of the seams at those points” became the trademark feature for Levi blue jeans. A court recognized the “new and useful invention in the art of making pantaloons.”

The document touches anyone who’s ever donned a pair of Levi’s. But it is the items from their own lifetimes that viewers in San Antonio seemed to find most relevant. Those include President John F. Kennedy’s nearly indecipherable handwritten draft of his inaugural address on a yellow legal pad, dated Jan. 17, 1961, three days before his inauguration.

“People are fascinated that his handwriting was so bad . . . it makes him more human somehow,” Bredhoff says.

Kennedy began constructing the speech in late November, soliciting suggestions from friends and advisors. He asked one of his aides, Ted Sorensen, to study the Gettysburg Address to try to glean the secret of its success. While his colleagues submitted ideas and drafts, clergymen provided lists of biblical quotations. Kennedy wrote down 15 statements, most of which made their way into the final speech, after many refinements.

He distilled his memorable phrase, “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country,” from his less lyrical, “Ask not what your country is going to do for you--ask what you can do for your country.”

Kennedy delivered another of his more famous speeches on May 25, 1961, telling Congress: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth,” Kennedy said.

Eight years later, Aldrin and Armstrong successfully made the trip to the moon and back. Aldrin says he didn’t learn of Safire’s undelivered remarks until a few years ago.

Did he ever consider that he and Armstrong might become marooned on the moon?

“No,” he says, sitting in his spacious Westwood home. “We were success oriented, as I think everyone is in the Apollo space flight program.”

What if the spacecraft had failed to launch, stranding them? “We would spend all the time trying to fix what the problem was. Roosevelt said, ‘The only thing to fear is fear itself.’ Fear is a mentally blocking emotion; it clouds your ability to think clearly. You concentrate on what’s ahead of you, or if fear creeps in, perhaps you should get into a different business.”

This is not the first time the national archives has sent treasures to Los Angeles. In 1948, a red, white and blue Freedom Train came to L.A., “the most beautiful train you’ve ever seen,” says Jim McCredie of Banning, one of 29 Marines who guarded the trove as it made its way to all 48 states. The train carried more than 100 artifacts, including President Lincoln’s “reading copy” of the Gettysburg Address, Francis Scott Key’s handwritten “The Star-Spangled Banner” and Christopher Columbus’ description of his first voyage to the New World.

In Los Angeles, it stopped next to the USC campus. “Construction people built a real stage and all day long we would have stars performing for the people that were standing in line,” McCredie recalls. “Hoagy Carmichael played his beautiful song ‘Ol’ Buttermilk Sky.’ The whole idea was re-initiating interest in our country’s history.”

The president of the American Heritage Foundation sent directives to the mayors of each city where the exhibit was to stop, ordering “that all people no matter what their color must be allowed into the train,” McCredie says. “When that hit the South, something hit the fan. Some Southern cities did not like the idea. They said, ‘How about special hours for blacks?’

“We said ‘No way.’

“ ‘How about two lines? One for whites, one for blacks?’

“We said, ‘No way.’ So we did not go to Memphis, Tenn., or Birmingham, Ala.”

Sixteen years later, in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights,” Johnson said in remarks that accompany the act in the exhibit. “We have talked for a hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter--and to write in the books of law.”