Bill Anders, 1933-2024

It's hard to describe the meaning of the Apollo 8 moment, but I'll try...

Cartoon I drew for Smerconish.com today…

For those of you not alive or sentient then, let me give you the abbreviated version of the year 1968, even through the lens of a then-eight year old suburban boy.

It was terrible.

The horrors of 1968 are a now-familiar litany to anyone with a sense of history, and Walter Cronkite once later described it the worst year in a slum of a decade. Vietnam and the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the ascendancy of Richard Nixon and the collapse of the Great Society, the skull-cracking catastrophe of the 1968 Democratic Convention, riots, fear of the collapse of civil order, and more defined those twelve months.

So when December, 1968 came into focus, the nation needed a breather, some good news, anything to shake the angry, depressed, shellshocked American spirit awake from the nightmare of ‘68.

Three men gave it to us: Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders, the crew of Apollo 8.

Bill Anders died last Friday at 90, piloting a vintage plane. I hate it when people say, oh, he would have wanted it that way, or, oh, he died doing what he loved, so I will engage in a little self-loathing and say that may well have been the case. I saw the video of the fatal accident yesterday and thought, I hope he just passed out and that was that.

Apollo 8 was the first lunar mission, and also the first crew to use the gargantuan Saturn V rocket. America was rapt, bound in trauma and looking to catch a break, even for a moment.

In 1968, space shots were national communal affairs. When I was in elementary school, every single Gemini and Apollo launch and splashdown was an occasion for the school to roll out the black and white televisions on huge steel pedestals mounted on casters. This is history, the children (me) were told. Watch this. It’s important.

When do we do that now? We shoot each other cat videos on Instagram as the future of American democracy hangs the balance.

Nowadays, space launches merit 90 seconds or so on CNN, maybe more if they’re manned. American joie de vivre for these launches is tempered somewhat by the looming presence of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the billionaires contractors who frequently step in front of the cameras during the drama. Hi, mom! Lookit this model rocket ship I had built!

Good publicity, you know, and Bezos even went on one of his own rockets, as did Star Trek actor William Shatner and talk show host and NFL star Michael Strahan. But that was a sideshow in comparison to the last month of 1968.

All molecular motion on television networks stopped in 1968 for Apollo 8.

My clearest memory of Apollo 8 was the live Christmas Eve broadcast from the command module. I was not raised in a religious home, but the crew’s reading of Genesis may have been the most moving moment in the history of broadcasting. I was certainly familiar with religious themes (it helped to have all the neighborhood kids tell me that I was going to burn in hell when they got back from church on Sunday morning), and I would say I was religion-curious, if only to avoid the ninth circle of Hades.

Davy and Goliath weren’t cutting it for me as a religious experience, shall we say. I wasn't religious, but the reading made me feel like the world wasn’t just sugar cereals, the Washington Senators, and Chevy Impala station wagons. The crew of Apollo 8 tapped into the immensity of the universe in way that no previous mission had: look at this, three men in a tub, heading to the moon, and they somehow made infinity palpable.

President John F. Kennedy, the man who made the political decision to go to the moon in 1961, had a sign on his desk that said, “O Lord, thy sea is so great, and my boat is so small.” That was it felt like to watch these three engineers and fighter pilots read Genesis.

They humanized space.

As I watched this terribly affecting space reading, I was riveted. In fact, when the broadcast ended, I ran outside into the front yard in Springfield, Virginia and looked at the moon. I had to connect with them, somehow, someway. It was pretty cold out, but just seeing the moon and visualizing three men my dad’s age up there really was, well, marvelous and comforting at once.

Anders’ moment on his only mission was taking the arresting photographs of our blue planet rising from the gray/yellow moonscape, a luminous oblate spheroid where we all lived and loved, and, let us not forget, also waged war and assassinated our leadership. He entitled the most familiar photo “Earthrise,” and it soon hung on the wall of the Oval Office and seemingly every other wall in the world. It hung in our national consciousness: look what America can do when we’re not murdering each other.

The beauty of the earth from space concealed the terrible things we all did and continue to do to each other.

Usually when I see some celebrity or the other has died, it doesn’t make stop in my tracks. The death of Bill Anders caused me to exclaim, “Oh, no,” and it’s not like I followed his career after 1968. I recalled the 2023 deaths of Frank Borman, the Apollo 8 mission commander, and Ken Mattingly, the Apollo astronaut who was instrumental in saving the crew of Apollo 13, whose commander was Jim Lovell, the last survivor from Apollo 8. Mattingly was also one of the Apollo 8 CAPCOMs (capsule communicator).

The death of Bill Anders also caused us to remember a beautiful moment for humanity that he helped execute and document, and for that alone we should mourn him.

Cartoon I drew for the San Francisco Chronicle last year…