petercat

Lessons in leadership from one of the greatest military commanders of modern times.

Dwight D. Eisenhower had unarguably one of the longest and most taxing leadership roles in American history. For two decades, the lives of thousands, sometimes millions, of people and the fate of great nations hung on his decisions.

As Supreme Allied Commander during World War II, Eisenhower oversaw the greatest amphibious assault in history, organizing the largest air and sea armadas ever assembled and commanding 160,000 men in the momentous Operation Overlord. ... [read more]

I was working nights on the studio crew at a TV station at the time, so I'd stay up until 4 am and sleep until noon. Usually I'd wake up to the clock radio playing the local NPR jazz station for a minute or so, before the hourly news summary came on, but I remember waking up to talking and subdued music. Then the news report started, calmly stating what had happened: "Two hijacked jetliners crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City this morning. Both towers have since collapsed."

They called me into work a couple of hours early (normally there was no studio crew from 12:30-3:30 pm) because we were doing local cut-ins to the CBS coverage. We stayed until about 1 am. I think people were just looking for familiar faces in the local reporters to help them make sense of it all.

Coverage continued all week. I agreed to work the Saturday morning shift (normally no local news shows, so no crew scheduled) until coverage ended at 11 am. The first non-news show in 5 days was a light, kids' education-information show -- which was probably the most gentle way to transition out of the horrors of the week.

I'm a true child of the Space Age -- I was born in late June, 1958, meaning I was conceived in the month after Sputnik was launched. I'm told that when I was a small child, it was my turn to say grace, and I asked for blessings on the two things most important to me: "Thanks, God, for peanut butter and satellites."

I grew up with Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. Built the model kits (somewhere in my sister's attic, there's a dusty cardboard box with AMT's Saturn V, CSM and LEM models), had posters, followed the TV coverage. And 40 years ago this week, I was glued to the TV following Apollo XI's trip to the Moon.

This week, I'm glued to the computer. To commemorate the anniversary, NASA is replaying -- in real time -- the audio of the mission communications and commentary. It's at The Apollo 11 Radiocast but it's a bit buggy. There are also separate pages at NASA with mission history, as well as the newly-released restored video of the moon walk.

Even better is We Choose the Moon, from the John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, a highly interactive site with not only audio, but also mission details, timers, and Twitter feeds of Capcom, Columbia and Eagle.

Jason Kottle's blog has a huge post detailing the anniversary coverage in various media. Of note are specials on the History Channel, starting at 8:30 (EDT) Monday with an "As It Happened" presentation of the CBS coverage of the mission and landing, especially poignant with Walter Cronkite's passing, followed by "Moonshot," a new 2-hour documentary on the mission.