Christmas Moon: America in Winter

 

In December 1972, on the day when Apollo 17, the final Moon mission, left lunar orbit to return to Earth, their wake-up call was an evocative, soaring, and strangely somber love song, a major hit that year, “The First Time Ever I saw Your Face”, sung by Roberta Flack. “I thought the sun rose in your eyes…”

It was a proud but bittersweet moment for NASA and for the country. JFK’s challenge had been met, and then some. Only four years earlier, Apollo 8’s reading of a Bible verse while orbiting the Moon on Christmas Eve was a beloved worldwide television spectacular. Now we were leaving.

“And I knew our joy would fill the Earth.
And it would last ’til the end of time…”

“The First Time Ever I saw Your Face” was recorded in 1969 and went almost unnoticed when it was first released. The producer warned Flack that the song’s rhythm was too slow, but she stuck to the tempo she preferred. In 1970, she got a phone call from Clint Eastwood, the TV actor who’d become famous doing westerns in Italy and Spain. He wasn’t yet a megastar. He was directing his first film, Play Misty for Me, and wanted to buy the rights to use “The First Time.” Misty, a dark, timely thriller about a casual hookup and an obsessed stalker, was the Fatal Attraction of its day. Eastwood and Flack agreed on a price, $2000, and then Flack asked if she could re-record it. “It’s too slow”, she said, finally conceding the point. “No, it’s not”, insisted Clint. They used it as is, his judgment was perfect, the film brought the song back, and it became a major hit.

People were intrigued by the combination of Roberta Flack’s yearning voice with a melancholy, contemplative reserve. Maybe it fit the times. The country was wracked by rising rates of crime, street violence, and anger. The endless fountain of postwar prosperity was fading. Racial protests and student protests against the Vietnam war had been going on forever by then. Blacks didn’t feel much attachment to the space program, which most considered irrelevant to solving more important problems on Earth, problems that concerned them. We were no longer willing, in JFK’s words, “to bear any burden”, whether it be for Saigon or the Moon.

A tiny, poignant reminder of those times can sometimes be glimpsed in photos and films of the period, even Scorsese’s Mean Streets: a car window decal of the American flag, about three by four inches, with a photo of the Full Moon in place of the starfield. Distributed in the millions by the New York Daily News, then a conservative, blue-collar tabloid, it was proudly titled “Good Old U.S.A.—First on the Moon”. It was a nationalist sentiment, less popular on Central Park West than in outer-borough New York, where for a couple of years you saw the flag decal everywhere, on aircraft carrier-sized Fords, Chevies, Pontiacs, and Dodges. The bridge and tunnel crowd. My people. Perhaps, even if only metaphorically, your people too.

The tumult of 1968-‘71 was deeply, lastingly counterproductive for the American Left. They expected 1972 to be a pushover, yet they could see the country was slipping away. Everything they did boosted the poll numbers of the loathed, despised Nixon, who they felt had won 1968 on a fluke, backed by the country’s haters. The angry reaction of the middle class and blue-collar whites to pretty much everything, since riots and crime started spiking in the Sixties, was now too visible to ignore.

It was a time when audiences had grown impatient with Dragnet-style cops who politely followed the rules. We told the box office that we were ready for badasses who’d throw away the rulebook if that’s what it took to clean up the streets. Two months after Play Misty for Me opened, Clint Eastwood found the role that, more than any other, would define him with the public, “Dirty Harry” Callahan.

Another fall 1971 film captured the feeling of the era, America’s shock at how badly and how quickly things fell apart in the cities. The French Connection was the story of a pair of NYPD detectives who unravel a heroin delivery. The movie begins with a Christmastime drug raid on a local bar in a bleak, rundown Black neighborhood. But the injustices you see in the film aren’t all one-dimensional. It never stops comparing the posh hotels where the drug lords hang out with the freezing, dirty alleys where stakeouts keep the plainclothes detectives up all night. Popeye Doyle, Gene Hackman’s memorably obsessed, flawed cop, became the bitter hero the filmmakers didn’t glamorize.

The French Connection was more than a big hit. It would influence the look and feel of police dramas for a generation. Like Play Misty for Me, French Connection would also create a memorable scene with the help of an overlooked 1969 tune that would become a belated hit recording two years later, when the movie came out.

“Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon” was a tribute to the Apollo program written by Jimmy Webb, one of the most successful songsmiths of the time. On the surface, it’s a bold, bouncy affirmation of the jazzed-up national spirit and the bright optimism that the success of the space program brought out in most of the nation. In the film, it’s an onstage musical number at a Mafia-ridden New York nightclub, sung by a charismatic trio of Black women, The Three Degrees.

“Has to make you glad to be alive!

Has to make you glad to be ali-i-ive! Yea-ah! Yeahhh!”

But the effect is cooler, more ironic and detached, darker than the song itself. For a few riveting moments of dramatic contrast, while this joyous, soaring uplift is going on in the background, the image in the foreground is Popeye Doyle at the bar, his expression frozen with the realization that across the restaurant, he’s spotted known Mafiosi breaking bread with rich, crooked, politically connected lawyers. The song is all excitement and hope for the future, but the cynical ‘70s reality was, the cities were going to hell. That was also a major theme of the next megahit crime film, The Godfather, which opened in the spring of 1972.

That December, Bob Hope was in Vietnam in what was billed as his final overseas Christmas tour. We were leaving Vietnam, step by step. The boundless confidence of the foreign policy of the early ‘60s seemed like a long, long way back. The media weren’t paying much attention to Hope anymore, but his Vietnam shows had changed over the years, recognizing that there was a slightly different mix of young American soldiers now. The 1972 Christmas show featured the racy humor of Redd Foxx and the racy curves of Lola Falana. Black country singer Charley Pride was aboard, as was stunning model Jayne Kennedy.

G.I. audiences grew more cynical over the nine years of Hope’s Vietnam tours, but they rose to their feet to cheer a most special guest, astronaut Alan Shepard, American’s first man in space, and commander of the Apollo 14 landing mission. He carried personal greetings from President Nixon. In less than two years, Nixon would be gone. In less than three, South Vietnam fell. But that was in the future while a man who’d walked on the Moon walked among our men in uniform.

238,000 miles away, Roberta Flack’s voice woke the Apollo 17 astronauts. They pressed the button to fire the rockets, and begin America’s final ride home from the Moon. It seemed hard to believe, then and now, after all that we’d done, so recently and so passionately, to get there.

And the moon and the stars were the gifts you gave
To the dark and the endless skies, my love/ To the dark and the endless skies…”

We knew it would be a long time before we went back. Nobody had any idea just how long. Half a century later, we still don’t.

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  1. Susan Quinn Contributor
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    A beautiful post, Gary. I love that song by Roberta Flack, and will always associate her with it. And now we live in FL, and watch the launches from our kitchen window. So much has changed since the ’70’s. Thanks

    • #1
  2. David Foster Member
    David Foster
    @DavidFoster

    General Bernard Schriever, who ran the USAF missile-development program, was profiled by Time Magazine in a 1957 cover story.  The article referred to Schriever and his crew as “tomorrow’s men.”  In my post about Schriever, I noted that:

    In retrospect, this was true only if one defined “tomorrow” as the interval between the appearance of the article and, say, July 1969.  Actually it could be argued that Schriever was a man of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, the era of the Panama Canal and the Hoover Dam and the Empire State Building. In our current era, the execution of such projects has become difficult almost to the point of impossibility.

    The post is here: A Fiery Peace in a Cold War.

    • #2
  3. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Thanks for your kind words, Susan! Here’s a fan-created montage from The French Connection, backed by Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon. 

    There are poignant moments in the past that are premonitions of the future; at about 2:00 to 2:05, the building under construction in the background is the World Trade Center. 

    • #3
  4. SkipSul Inactive
    SkipSul
    @skipsul

    It’s funny how we’re always mining the past to try to predict the present, much less the future.  The signs are all there, if we can read them, but so are the signs of many things that never do come to pass – and I wonder what hit movies and music of 1971 today are forgotten because they point to nothing, but seemed important at the time.  Like the images in Galadriel’s mirror, which is which is something not even the wise can always discern.

    Jonathan Pageau is an Orthodox Christian writer and wood carver (and friend of Jordan Peterson) who likewise studies the signs of the times to see what might yet be coming, looking for archetypes and patterns rather like a Jungian, but with a Christian lens.  His youtube / podcast series The Symbolic World would I think be of great interest to you.

    • #4
  5. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    I am familiar with Sargon of Akkad. Whenever he goes into his “I am an atheist” spiel, I fast-forward through the next five minutes. The rest of his stuff is pretty good.

    I’ll have to look up Mr. Pageau.

    • #5
  6. SkipSul Inactive
    SkipSul
    @skipsul

    Percival (View Comment):

    I am familiar with Sargon of Akkad. Whenever he goes into his “I am an atheist” spiel, I fast-forward through the next five minutes. The rest of his stuff is pretty good.

    I’ll have to look up Mr. Pageau.

    In this discussion Jonathan ribs gently on this, as both Sargon and Pageau are vehemently agreeing that the “New Atheism” is an intellectual and moral failure, and an arrogant and smug one at that.

    • #6
  7. Richard Easton Coolidge
    Richard Easton
    @RichardEaston

    My father saw the launch live and said it was tremendous. Three years later he briefed six Navy astronauts about GPS including two of the Apollo 17 crew. He said that they were extremely smart engineers.

    L-R Cernan (Apollo 17), Mattingly, dad, Evans (Apollo 17), Crippen and Kerwin in dad’s office at the Naval Research Lab.

    • #7
  8. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Richard Easton (View Comment):

    My father saw the launch live and said it was tremendous. Three years later he briefed six Navy astronauts about GPS including two of the Apollo 17 crew. He said that they were extremely smart engineers.

    L-R Cernan (Apollo 17), Mattingly, dad, Evans (Apollo 17), Crippen and Kerwin in dad’s office at the Naval Research Lab.

    A great picture, Richard!

    • #8
  9. Richard Easton Coolidge
    Richard Easton
    @RichardEaston

    Here I am in 2012 with Jack Schmitt the other member of Apollo 17’s crew.

    • #9
  10. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    When John F. Kennedy declared, “We choose to go to the Moon”, he was reaffirming a program he inherited from the Eisenhower administration. Even the name—Project Apollo—had already been picked out. But Kennedy, who could easily have dumped the program, as his science advisors recommended, instead chose to give the ‘60s one of its final defining moments, and a too-rare positive one.

    So many other of the country’s big projects of the early Sixties hadn’t worked out as hoped: optimism over civil rights, urban renewal, construction of new college campuses, overseas wars.

    • #10
  11. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    SkipSul (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):

    I am familiar with Sargon of Akkad. Whenever he goes into his “I am an atheist” spiel, I fast-forward through the next five minutes. The rest of his stuff is pretty good.

    I’ll have to look up Mr. Pageau.

    In this discussion Jonathan ribs gently on this, as both Sargon and Pageau are vehemently agreeing that the “New Atheism” is an intellectual and moral failure, and an arrogant and smug one at that.

    Sargon is not what I would call a evangelist (anti-evangelist?) but still, to me it is like someone announcing that they are color-blind. The more time you spend on it, the more tedious it becomes. The big problem with the “new” atheists is that Augustine blew their best arguments to splinters and rags over a millennium and a half ago.

    • #11
  12. SkipSul Inactive
    SkipSul
    @skipsul

    Percival (View Comment):

    SkipSul (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):

    I am familiar with Sargon of Akkad. Whenever he goes into his “I am an atheist” spiel, I fast-forward through the next five minutes. The rest of his stuff is pretty good.

    I’ll have to look up Mr. Pageau.

    In this discussion Jonathan ribs gently on this, as both Sargon and Pageau are vehemently agreeing that the “New Atheism” is an intellectual and moral failure, and an arrogant and smug one at that.

    Sargon is not what I would call a evangelist (anti-evangelist?) but still, to me it is like someone announcing that they are color-blind. The more time you spend on it, the more tedious it becomes. The big problem with the “new” atheists is that Augustine blew their best arguments to splinters and rags over a millennium and a half ago.

    And this is something Sargon concedes easily here: the New Atheists were empty suits.

    • #12
  13. Boss Mongo Member
    Boss Mongo
    @BossMongo

    Gary McVey: Another fall 1971 film captured the feeling of the era, America’s shock at how badly and how quickly things fell apart in the cities. The French Connection was the story of a pair of NYPD detectives who unravel a heroin delivery. The movie begins with a Christmastime drug raid on a local bar in a bleak, rundown Black neighborhood. But the injustices you see in the film aren’t all one-dimensional. It never stops comparing the posh hotels where the drug lords hang out with the freezing, dirty alleys where stakeouts keep the plainclothes detectives up all night. Popeye Doyle, Gene Hackman’s memorably obsessed, flawed cop, became the bitter hero the filmmakers didn’t glamorize.

    Man, I love Popeye Doyle and, for his entire filmography, Gene Hackman.  I’ve seen him out and about on his bike or walking on Islamorada’s millionaire mile.  I was either running a long run or doing a ruck march (back when I could do such things).

    Unlike some other celebs I’ve bumped into down here, Hackman was and is immediately recognizable.  Hey, that’s Popeye Doyle!  I am, of course, as an international man of mystery (back when I could do such things) way too cool to drop in genuflection and and ululate a Wayne’s World “Not Worthy” iteration.  Just a head chuck and a thumbs up.  Got the same back.  Very cool.

    When Hackman got clipped by a pickup on his daily bike ride in Islamorada, they life-flighted him out from the football field of Coral Shores High School, from whence 3 of 4 graduated.  He’s kinda sorta part of the community down here.

    BTW, the film of his that left the biggest impression for me was The Domino Principle, in which he played Roy Tucker, a guy I had a lot of empathy for even as a kid.  Trust no one.

    • #13
  14. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Boss Mongo (View Comment):
    BTW, the film of his that left the biggest impression for me was The Domino Principle, in which he played Roy Tucker, a guy I had a lot of empathy for even as a kid. Trust no one.

    Man, how did I miss that one?

    • #14
  15. Boss Mongo Member
    Boss Mongo
    @BossMongo

    Percival (View Comment):

    Boss Mongo (View Comment):
    BTW, the film of his that left the biggest impression for me was The Domino Principle, in which he played Roy Tucker, a guy I had a lot of empathy for even as a kid. Trust no one.

    Man, how did I miss that one?

    Well worth your time.

    • #15
  16. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    I have to give Eastwood props for steely confidence in going with the slow version we know today. After all, he wasn’t fully “Clint Eastwood” yet; to the music industry people around Flack, he was just a young white actor, who hadn’t proved himself as a jazz and music expert in his own right. 

    Eastwood’s films are an interesting case. He’s certainly got a conservative standpoint, but he doesn’t go out of his way to make his films a cliched idea of conservative subjects. He’s not family friendly each and every time. He doesn’t shy away from the subject of sex if the plot demands it. 

    • #16
  17. I. M. Fine Inactive
    I. M. Fine
    @IMFine

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    I have to give Eastwood props for steely confidence in going with the slow version we know today. After all, he wasn’t fully “Clint Eastwood” yet; to the music industry people around Flack, he was just a young white actor, who hadn’t proved himself as a jazz and music expert in his own right.

    Eastwood’s films are an interesting case. He’s certainly got a conservative standpoint, but he doesn’t go out of his way to make his films a cliched idea of conservative subjects. He’s not family friendly each and every time. He doesn’t shy away from the subject of sex if the plot demands it.

    I had never heard the story about “First Time … ‘ in Play Misty for Me. But it makes perfect sense. As you state, Eastwood is a musician (he even composes movie scores now), and I’ve always felt his musicality manifests itself in his signature pacing of his films. Which includes the sex scenes. Bridges of Madison County comes to mind; the film seems almost to follow a musical score. (Always such a pleasure to read your posts, GMcV. You’re missed.) 

    • #17
  18. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    That’s quite interesting to have you connect all those things about the year 1972 for us. I haven’t seen any of those movies, but of course have heard the Roberta Flack song many times. The most exciting thing I remember about that year is that our oldest was born that autumn.  I hadn’t been particularly excited about the prospect of having kids, just figuring it was a part of life. Then she made her appearance in the delivery room, and everything changed. So to me, that’s the background (or foreground) against which all these other things happened. Without your writeup, I couldn’t have told you that that was when they happened.

    • #18
  19. Randy Weivoda Moderator
    Randy Weivoda
    @RandyWeivoda

    Great post, Gary.  It occurs to me that although I have heard about “The French Connection” since I was a kid, I’ve never seen it.  I’ll have to try to keep an eye out for it.

    • #19
  20. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Randy Weivoda (View Comment):

    Great post, Gary. It occurs to me that although I have heard about “The French Connection” since I was a kid, I’ve never seen it. I’ll have to try to keep an eye out for it.

    You’ve never picked your feet in Poughkeepsie?

    You definitely want to see that movie, Randy.

    • #20
  21. Clavius Thatcher
    Clavius
    @Clavius

    Gary McVey: 238,000 miles away, Roberta Flack’s voice woke the Apollo 17 astronauts. They pressed the button to fire the rockets, and begin America’s final ride home from the Moon.

    I hope it was the last departure in the 20th Century, but not the final ride home from the Moon.

    • #21
  22. aardo vozz Member
    aardo vozz
    @aardovozz

    Boss Mongo (View Comment):

    Gary McVey: Another fall 1971 film captured the feeling of the era, America’s shock at how badly and how quickly things fell apart in the cities. The French Connection was the story of a pair of NYPD detectives who unravel a heroin delivery. The movie begins with a Christmastime drug raid on a local bar in a bleak, rundown Black neighborhood. But the injustices you see in the film aren’t all one-dimensional. It never stops comparing the posh hotels where the drug lords hang out with the freezing, dirty alleys where stakeouts keep the plainclothes detectives up all night. Popeye Doyle, Gene Hackman’s memorably obsessed, flawed cop, became the bitter hero the filmmakers didn’t glamorize.

    Man, I love Popeye Doyle and, for his entire filmography, Gene Hackman. I’ve seen him out and about on his bike or walking on Islamorada’s millionaire mile. I was either running a long run or doing a ruck march (back when I could do such things).

    Unlike some other celebs I’ve bumped into down here, Hackman was and is immediately recognizable. Hey, that’s Popeye Doyle! I am, of course, as an international man of mystery (back when I could do such things) way too cool to drop in genuflection and and ululate a Wayne’s World “Not Worthy” iteration. Just a head chuck and a thumbs up. Got the same back. Very cool.

    When Hackman got clipped by a pickup on his daily bike ride in Islamorada, they life-flighted him out from the football field of Coral Shores High School, from whence 3 of 4 graduated. He’s kinda sorta part of the community down here.

    BTW, the film of his that left the biggest impression for me was The Domino Principle, in which he played Roy Tucker, a guy I had a lot of empathy for even as a kid. Trust no one.

    Nice trailer, and great tag line. But the line was much better when delivered by Herod to his friend( the Emperor of Rome) in “ I , Claudius”.

    • #22
  23. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    1972 is also when protesters put stickers on subway ads that read, “This ad insults WOMEN”, and picketers signs said “Do women have to be naked to enter the Metropolitan Museum of Art?” (this referred to a perceived lack of female artists, not to a novel interpretation of “Free Admission Day”). 

    In 1970-72, there was far more left wing and racial violence than today, far more police killed, far more bombs going off. It wasn’t a happy time. That’s why I refer to those days as “Woke War I”. To paraphrase a line in Ford v Ferrari, “We’ve fought a war here before”.

    In ten years, America came back; in twenty, even New York City came back from the brink. But in life as in politics, there are no final victories. 

    • #23
  24. Boss Mongo Member
    Boss Mongo
    @BossMongo

    aardo vozz (View Comment):
    Nice trailer, and great tag line. But the line was much better when delivered by Herod to his friend( the Emperor of Rome) in “ I , Claudius”.

    Never watched that.  Loved the book, which I’ve read four or five times now.

    • #24
  25. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Boss Mongo (View Comment):

    aardo vozz (View Comment):
    Nice trailer, and great tag line. But the line was much better when delivered by Herod to his friend( the Emperor of Rome) in “ I , Claudius”.

    Never watched that. Loved the book, which I’ve read four or five times now.

    BritBox might have it. I saw it when it came out.

    Mike Duncan gave it a mini-review in his “The History of Rome” podcast. He noted that Robert Graves was a bona fide member of the “Livia killed everybody school” when it came to the period before Claudius became emperor.

    Made me laugh, anyway.

    • #25
  26. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Sian Phillips was fantastic as Livia. Meaner than a snake.

    • #26
  27. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Boss Mongo (View Comment):

    aardo vozz (View Comment):
    Nice trailer, and great tag line. But the line was much better when delivered by Herod to his friend( the Emperor of Rome) in “ I , Claudius”.

    Never watched that. Loved the book, which I’ve read four or five times now.

    That line about “The Hun is either at your feet or at your throat” was very timely when it was written. 

    • #27
  28. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Another prominent image of 1972. Notice that “despite” its conservative political message, it’s as smartly designed as any ad of the period. Volkswagen pioneered the ’60s style of having only a couple of main points, punctuated by periods, and surrounded by white space. If the name of the Committee to Re-Elect the President hadn’t been turned so easily into “c.r.e.e.p.”, it would get more recognition today as the operation behind an FDR/Landon scaled victory. 

    • #28
  29. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Maybe you recognize something familiar in this story. A great nation that feels humiliated, that’s been through tough times and a bitter comedown is unlikely to turn to an ascetic saint for leadership. Sometimes it takes an intelligent, ruthless SOB who doesn’t need much approval from his supposed “betters”.

    Sentimentalized? Sure. But that’s the Nixon that we knew at the time, the one America voted for twice.

    • #29
  30. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    And we’re not the only country that’s ever been in this situation, needless to say:

    I have to laugh…even the hands are posed similarly to Norman Rockwell’s original. 

    • #30
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