TIME space travel  When Man Met Moon  The cover of Time Magazine
on July 25, 1969 The cover of Time Magazine on July 25, 1969
Forty-five years after the giant leap for mankind, TIME
remembers the July 25, 1969, issue  There’s always something
grandiose about gazing back across the gulf of history. Today,
we know so much about what was to come, and the people of the
past knew so very little. It’s impossible to read through TIME’s
July 25, 1969 issue—which was released 45 years ago this week,
will be re-released in full on Time’s tablet edition next week
and featured the epochal Apollo 11 moon-landing on its cover—and
not indulge in some of that generational smugness. There is the
good-news story about a lull in the fighting in Vietnam—a story
that feels a lot less good when you know that the war would drag
on for six more years and kill more than 15,000 additional
American soldiers. There was the laudatory profile of Attorney
General John Mitchell, the man nicknamed “Nixon’s heavyweight,”
who would later come