"Sometimes You Can Push Too Far!"
In such a fevered climate, there isn't much room for spontaneity. I am reminded of how the same issue sur­faced in 1959 on the Iowa farm of Roswell Garst when a horde of several hundred reporters, Harrison Salis­bury in the lead, chased Nikita Khrushchev and Garst across the cornfields.

There is the story that Garst was so annoyed at the ten­sion and the crush that he found time to kick Salisbury in the shin. Somehow, that sort of thing sticks out in an affair as managed as a Soviet leader's visit--or a moon flight--must be. The equivalent event during Apollo 11 came early on the morning of July 21, just after the moon walk, when Julian Scheer angrily ordered a tele­vision camera which was focusing straight at a bunch of sweating reporters frantically beating at their type­writers to be removed from the newsroom. When the camera would not move, the Assistant Administrator for Public Affairs angrily shoved a technician out of the way and began moving the camera, which was still on.

At many points during the flight, it was the custom of television newsmen at Houston to use the busy back­ground of the newsroom during brief newscasts from the Manned Spacecraft Center. But this particular camera had been in a main aisle on an unusually crowded and tense evening for a long time. Immediately under the lights was a group from the French news­paper Le Figaro (which very kindly printed an essay about Apollo 11 which I wrote for the Globe but which it did not have space for). The French reporters, led by the capable Ann Thinesse, uttered not a word of protest. Ann continued to work on one of her sober, stylish dis­patches in longhand. But meanwhile, a technician was telling Mark Bloom of the New York Daily News to bend down out of the way of the camera and when he wasn't quick enough about it the technician said, "Sometimes you can push too far, buddy." Mark thought so, too. He hit the ceiling and went off screaming, something he almost never does, to Scheer. Scheer then acted, to the inexpressible delight of the writer-journalists looking on One "big eye" flickered shut, if only briefly.

Affirming the Events
There is, unavoidably, a good deal of jealousy among writer-journalists toward television, the medium upon which they depend to witness such key events of a flight to the moon as the walk on the surface or the splashdown in the Pacific. A great many reporters, and many of their managers back in the home office, are convinced that more and more people are relying on television, that few people are reading much of the vast number of words they are writing and printing.

Certain it is that most people's view of an event such as Apollo 11 is shaped by what they saw of it on television, no matter how much better informed the best of the writer-journalists are than even the most enthusiastic television commentator, Walter Cronkite (who, quite frankly, makes a good many minor errors that nobody notices because he conveys a sense of personal involve ment in space flights). But it is also certain that people are reading more, not less, about a particular event be­cause they saw it on television; and they are reading with more care, because they feel, with some justice, that they know something on their own.

The more important point is that television not only is evanescent; it also is overwhelming. Too much happens too fast. Television thrusts raw events at people, and they may wish to make more considered judgments. The immediacy of television must be strengthened by analysis and reflection. Only then, a day or a month later, can fleeting impressions be converted into a permanent mental image. For this--and for a significanl proportion of the public--a writer is needed.