“The whole world knows that we covet no territory,” announced Herbert Hoover. Or was it Dwight Eisenhower who said that? (“The United States does not covet a single acre of land that belongs to another.”) Or perhaps John F. Kennedy (“This nation does not covet the territory of any people”), Lyndon Johnson (“We threaten no regime and covet no territory”), Gerald Ford (“America covets no one else's land”), or Ronald Reagan (“We Americans covet no foreign territory”)? The disavowing of territorial ambitions is a hallowed, bipartisan presidential tradition, like pardoning a turkey at Thanksgiving or hosting the annual Easter egg roll.

On the cratered surface of the moon, a small stainless steel plaque commemorates the remarkable visit made by “men from the planet earth” who “came in peace for all mankind” in the summer of 1969. It bears the name of the three men who made the journey, Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin, and Michael Collins. And it features the name of one man who did not: President Richard M. Nixon.

On July 15, 1969, while more than one million space enthusiasts flocked to Florida's Cape Canaveral to celebrate the final countdown of the Apollo 11 launch the following day, a less festive gathering took place just a few miles away in an empty field outside the western gate of the Kennedy Space Center. On one side of the clearing stood NASA's chief, Thomas O. Paine, with several space agency administrators, while at the other end waited the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SCLC) president, Ralph Abernathy, with twenty-five poor African American families, four scruffy mules pulling two rickety wagons, and, much to Paine's dismay, a phalanx of newspaper reporters and television news crews. When Abernathy's group began slowly marching hand-in-hand singing “We Shall Overcome,” Paine and his entourage walked forward to meet them in the middle of the field. Abernathy then took a microphone, nodded toward the Apollo 11 rocket towering in the distance, and explained that his Poor People's Campaign had not traveled to the cape to protest the Apollo launch, but instead to demonstrate against the country's distorted sense of national priorities. “I want NASA scientists,” he explained to the gathered press, “to tackle problems we face in society”.