He even bought a farm and started to grow corn and raise cattle. But within a few years he had accepted an academic job at a university in the Ohio city of Cincinnati. After he returned home he was given a parade in New York and embarked on a 22-nation world tour. He passed into the history books and he was assured of global fame. For Armstrong himself, the moment was a mixed blessing. It was a popular rumour at the time that some people even peered up at the moon through telescopes hoping to catch a glimpse of the American citizens they now knew were walking around up there. Those without the then expensive devices booked into motel rooms so they could watch too. Families huddled around their television sets in awe together. Just as ordinary people had been scared witless by the thought of a beeping Russian probe overhead, so they now celebrated the triumph of the moon landing. But, in eight short years, the Apollo programme dragged the country ahead. Suddenly, there was a fear that America might never catch up. The nation had been startled and terrified by the Russian success in putting the first satellite, Sputnik, into space.

The landing sent a message that America could compete in and win the cold war. Armstrong's step was witnessed by a global audience on television or radio that some estimate at a staggering 600 million people вЂ“ the largest ever for a single event and an amazing one-fifth of the world's population at the time. Staring up in the night sky at that silvery circle above would never be the same for anyone again.

America was a country that in eight short years had lived up to the command of its slain hero president and put a man on the moon. The 1960s saw vast and unsettling social change, the beginnings of white flight and urban decline and the upheaval and national trauma of Vietnam.Д«ut for that single moment staring heavenwards вЂ“ as the world focused on the sheer derring-do and genius of American ingenuity вЂ“ none of that really seemed to matter. This was a tumultuous period that had seen Kennedy slain, the civil rights movement triumph and then despair over the killing of Martin Luther King and the spreading blaze of race riots. The event, coming as it did at the end of the turbulent 1960s, functioned as a brief national antidote to the whole decade. Indeed, in many ways Armstrong's triumph was a much-needed feelgood counterpoint to the horrors of the Kennedy killing. Kennedy had died back in 1963, laid low by an assassin's bullet in another one of those moments that all Americans remember. He was also fulfilling the dreams of that other icon of muscular American patriotism, President John F Kennedy, who had urged his nation in 1961 to go forwards to reach for the moon вЂ“ and put one over the Soviets at the same time. The man doing the walking was born in the small town of Wapakoneta, Ohio: about as all-American as you can get. The flag planted on the moon was an American flag. The rhetoric was universal, but it was really a wholeheartedly American triumph.

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