John Noble Wilford, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist for The New York Times who covered the Neil Armstrong-headlined first moon landing in 1969, passed away at his home in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was 92.
His niece, Susan Tremblay, told the NYT that the cause of Wilford’s death was prostate cancer.
‘MEN WALK ON MOON’
John Wilford gave the NYT readers an awe-inspiring and comprehensive account of Apollo 11’s touchdown and exploratory mission on the moon’s arid Sea of Tranquillity under the front-page banner headline “MEN WALK ON MOON,” on 21 July 1969.
“It was man’s first landing on another world,” he wrote, “the realisation of centuries of dreams, the fulfillment of a decade of striving, a triumph of modern technology and personal courage, the most dramatic demonstration of what man can do if he applies his mind and resources with single-minded determination.”
He added: “The moon, long the symbol of the impossible and the inaccessible, was now within man’s reach, the first port of call in this new age of spacefaring.”
John Wilford: Career
John Wilford, a Kentucky-born journalist, worked at The Wall Street Journal and Time magazine before joining The Times in late 1965. He, according to the NYT, combined a passion for scholarship with a detective’s eye for detail and the literary skills of a master storyteller.
Wilford’s journalism career spanned six decades, coinciding with milestone discoveries in the mysteries of dinosaurs and early human life, as well as in space exploration.
In 1965, Wilford was assigned his first major assignment for which he won a Times in-house publisher’s award — coverage of a maneuver by four astronauts on two spacecraft, Gemini 6 and Gemini 7.
He called it “man’s first rendezvous in the vastness of outer space.”
John Wilford Books
John Wilford’s assignments led to several books, starting with “We Reach the Moon,” about America’s space program. It featured details about former US President John F Kennedy’s commitment in 1961 to the success of Apollo 11.
The book was published 76 hours after Armstrong and his team splashed down in the Pacific Ocean.
His other books include:
- The Mapmakers, 1981
- The Riddle of the Dinosaur, 1985
- Mars Beckons: The Mysteries, the Challenges, the Expectations of Our Next Great Adventure in Space, 1990
- The Mysterious History of Columbus: an Exploration of the Man, the Myth, the Legacy, 1991
Why did John Wilford win the Pulitzer Prize?
In 1984, John Wilford won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for articles “conveying both the wonder and the reality of science,” including the race between the United States and the Soviet Union to develop weapons of war for outer space.
He was also a member of a Times team that won a Pulitzer for national reporting in 1987 for coverage of the fatal explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.
