Old Year Out, New Year in

Extract

The last days of the old year underlined the painful truth once again — America is the blind giant, its three astronauts circling tlie moon in a dizzying display of technologic expertise, while on earth its diplomats and statesmen played out the bizarre farce attending the release of the Pueblo crewmen from North Korean captivity and simultaneously lapsed into an exchange of invective with the Saigon junta we once hailed as a vehicle for the constitutional salvation of South Vietnam.

The Apollo 8 journey was, of course, wholly admirable—a stunning reversal of America's space fortunes in little more than a decade. What money, organization, application, and no doubt a vast engineering talent can do, the United States has done in space.