Welcome to the American Story.

Stories about what it is that makes America beautiful

and worthy of our love.

This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute.

I call this one

All of you on the good earth.

The year 1968 was not all roses for America.

We found ourselves in a seemingly endless stalemate in Vietnam

where the death toll approached 40,000 U.S. troops.

Growing opposition to the war caused the incumbent President

Linden Johnson to decline to run for re-election.

Assassin's bullets cut down civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

Riots tore through Chicago, Washington, D.C. and other great American cities.

The economy was plagued by rising inflation.

The Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia.

But on Christmas Eve, from a most unexpected place, America and the free world received a bit of good cheer.

It came in the form of a broadcast to the largest global television audience to date.

The story starts with President John F. Kennedy's speech to a special joint session of Congress several years before in May 1961, in which she

announced that it was time for a great new American Enterprise.

This enterprise would be to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth before the decade

was out.

JFK did not mince words about the purpose of this costly and risky venture.

...