(Wednesday, Dec. 20, 1995)
HOW TO SILENCE THE HARD-BITTEN
By Paul Harral
There are a few columns over the years that I am particularly fond of, and this is one of those. In my varied assignments for a number of employers over the years, the most exciting was that of covering the Apollo series for United Press International.
This column was first published in the Business section of the Star-Telegram on Dec. 23, 1988, hence the reference to 20 years ago in the text.
Wire service bureaus are hurry, hurry places not prone to much sentiment: there isn't time and it's counter-productive to the task at hand.
Wire service reporters - both AP and UPI - like to think of themselves as tough and cynical and hard-bitten.
Twenty years ago there was reason to be tough and cynical and hard-bitten and unemotional.
The year opened in Vietnam with the Tet offensive. It was a bitter shock when a small squad of Vietnamese seized the U.S. Embassy in Saigon and held it for six hours on Jan. 31.
Late in March of that year, during a television speech, President Lyndon Johnson - the politician's politician - announced he would not run again.
On April 4, The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed as he stood on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Riots broke out in 125 cities, with the worst of the rioting in Baltimore, Chicago, Kansas City and Washington.
Two months later, on June 5, U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was fatally wounded at a Los Angeles hotel.
Just before midnight on Aug. 20, 600,000 Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops crossed into Czechoslovakia, crushing the liberal government of Czech Communist Party First Secretary Alexander Dubcek.
It may be that mention of some of these events trigger what psychologists call "flashbulb memories" in you - memories so vivid that you can relive in detail the event. The attack on Pearl Harbor caused that kind of memory. So did the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
But these flashbulb memories are not always about major events. You may relive precisely the treasured Christmas gift as a small child, or watching your father stuff newspaper into his hat so he could go milk the cow during a hailstorm.
The common thread through this memory game our minds play is that the event is significant to us personally. And in later years, we can take that memory out and relive it, even if it is painful, for there is no guarantee that flashbulb memories are only of nice events.
We are the collective of our experiences and our memories of those experiences.
If you had been in the United Press International news bureau at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas, 20 years ago tomorrow - Dec. 24, 1968 - you would have seen that no-nonsense approach to news coverage by men and women handling one of the biggest stories of their lives.
For the first time, men from Planet Earth were in orbit around the Moon.
And in just a few minutes, Apollo 8 astronauts Air Force Col. Frank Borman, Navy Capt. James A. Lovell Jr. and Air Force Maj. William Anders were going to turn on their spacecraft's television camera and let us see the Moon as it really is.
As that stark and beautiful vista came onto our television sets that night, the astronauts read to us from 250,000 miles away:
"In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.
"And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep."
And on the horizon we saw something Mankind had dreamed of for thousands of years. We saw Earthrise.
A UPI writer that night recorded it like this:
"In the beginning, God . . ."
"The words cut like a cosmic sword across the quarter million miles from the Moon to the Earth."
But my flashbulb memory is not of the television or of the reading or even of what we wrote that night.
It is of the silence that fell over the tough and cynical and hard-bitten and unemotional men and women in the UPI bureau at those words from space.
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Harral is vice president and editorial director for the Star-Telegram. His e-mail address is harralstar-telegram.com. You may telephone him at (817) 390-7836 or write him at P.O. Box 1870, Fort Worth, TX 76101.
(Copyright Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Posted by permission.)