- Year
- 1970
- By
- CBS News / Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc.
- Section
- Apollo · Mission reports & chronologies
- Shelf
- L5, L1, R6
- Catalog
- Catalog F · NASA Missions
Full title 10:56:20 PM, EDT 7/20/69: The Historic Conquest of the Moon as Reported to the American People by CBS News over the CBS Television Network, published by CBS in New York in 1970.
This was a limited edition, not sold to the public but presented individually to network VIPs—affiliate executives and advertisers—with a personalized business card laid in as a gift card; this copy carries the card of Robert D. Wood, who had become President of the CBS Television Network in February 1969, five months before the landing.
The dust jacket is embossed with the cratered lunar surface in relief, set with a small color photograph, cropped to the shape of a television screen, of Buzz Aldrin beside the flag on the Sea of Tranquility.
The book opens with an epigraph from Archibald MacLeish’s poem “Voyage to the Moon,” commissioned by the New York Times and run on its front page the day after the landing, followed by a preface credited simply to “CBS” describing the volume as the record of how CBS News met “the most demanding challenge yet put to electronic journalism.” The roughly 170 pages that follow reproduce the coverage itself: television-screen stills paired with transcribed on-air commentary from Walter Cronkite, Roger Mudd, Mike Wallace, and Dan Rather, with analysis throughout from astronaut-turned-commentator Wally Schirra.
