Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 45 of 263 · 20 per page

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Some unlikely figures became victims of the Inquisition’s implementation of the policy. The Society of Jesus was still as much an object of suspicion as the young Iñigo de Loyola, and the nobleman who had pioneered Jesuit general education projects, no less a figure than Francisco de Borja, Duke of Gandía, former Viceroy of Catalonia now turned Jesuit, was hounded out of the country before becoming an outstanding Superior-General for the Society.23 The Inquisition even ruined the career of Bartolome Carranza, Archbishop of Spain’s primatial see of Toledo, and a distinguished Dominican theologian. He had been an important assistant to Cardinal Pole in the English Marian experiment, but he had made the mistake of learning too much about Protestant heresy during his conscientious efforts to refute it. As a result Carranza spent nearly seventeen years in prison deprived even of attendance at Mass, and although briefly rehabilitated, he died a broken man when he might have been an ideal Counter- Reformation leader for Spain. Moreover, Carranza’s arrest had been triggered by the Inquisition’s alarm at the content of the Catechism which he had drafted for use in Marian England, and which was eventually to appear as a banned book in the Indexes issued by both the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions. Carranza’s Catechism was nevertheless taken up to form the basis for the Tridentine Catechism authorized by the Pope after the Council of Trent, a final touch of black comedy in this dismal affair.24 Also troubled by Spanish officialdom were two religious later to become among the most famous personalities in the history of Christian mysticism, Teresa of Ávila and Juan de Yepes (John of the Cross). In the Inquisition’s terms, both were automatically suspect by the fact that their families were conversos, and they might be seen as emerging from that maelstrom of religious energy released by the religious realignment of Spain in the 1490s (see pp. 584–91). They both joined the Carmelite Order (and their close personal relationship also attracted official worries); Teresa sought to bring the Carmelites to realize more intensely the significance of their origins in the wilderness by a refoundation of the order in which the men and women of the Reform would walk barefoot (Discalced). She struggled to persuade the Church authorities to make a leap of imagination, to allow the women who joined her to engage in a Carmelite balance of contemplation and activism. The journeyings of the soul characteristic of the mystic in every century would be paralleled by journeyings through the physical world, as and when necessary. Through many troubles and setbacks, Teresa developed what one of her admirers has called ‘a gift for making men give her the orders she wanted to obey’.25 Teresa is often remembered now in the dramatic and highly sexualized statue of her ecstasy which Gianlorenzo Bernini sculpted for the Church of Our Lady

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Get to the Cape as quick as you can; you’ve been appointed to the investigative committee.” The news stunned Borman, who considered Ed White the brother he’d never had. And it devastated Borman’s wife, Susan, who counted Pat White among her best friends. Borman told Slayton he’d fly to Florida right away but first needed to stop at the Whites’ home in Houston. When he and Susan arrived, Pat was hysterical. She was the mother of two children, ages ten and thirteen, who suddenly had no father. Even in her raw grief, just hours after receiving the news, a Washington bureaucrat had informed her that despite Ed’s wishes to be buried at West Point, the three fallen astronauts would all be laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery. “Give me the guy’s name,” Borman said. He had the man on the phone a minute later. “It’s already been decided in Washington,” the man insisted. “I don’t give a good goddamn what’s been decided,” Borman said. “Ed wanted to be buried at West Point and that’s what’s going to happen, and I’ll go all the way to President Johnson to make sure it happens, so you better fucking well do it.” Four days later, White was buried at West Point. Borman and Lovell were among the pallbearers. Anders also attended. After the funeral, Borman began his work on the investigative committee convened by NASA. He was the only astronaut on the panel, a sign that NASA considered him to be among its best. His first job was to help supervise the disassembly of the Apollo 1 spacecraft at Cape Kennedy in order to determine the cause of the fire. Days later, he became the first astronaut to enter the cabin. He found a burned-out nightmare. Rows of equipment and panels had been charred and covered in soot, debris was scattered everywhere. Hoses connecting the astronauts to their life support systems were melted. No matter where he looked, Borman could see no color, only grays and blacks. That night, he joined Slayton and others at a restaurant in Cocoa Beach called The Mousetrap, a NASA haunt. Borman seldom drank to excess, but the smell of the scorched spacecraft needed bleaching, and he started in early. He raised toasts to his fallen brothers, then threw his glass into the fireplace. White was among the straightest arrows Borman had ever known—honest to a fault, a true patriot, and a man who didn’t mess around with the sports cars or fast women so readily available to astronauts. For both men, family came first. The Bormans and Whites often shared a house on a lake near Houston for fishing trips. Borman couldn’t remember missing someone as much as he missed Ed White that night. Borman spent the next two months inside the burned spacecraft, studying the design, searching for flaws, making fixes in his mind. In April 1967, Congress held hearings into the cause of the fire, and Borman was called to testify.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  variety of Orthodoxy far to the north began revealing its potential as leader among the Orthodox: I outline the development of Russian Christianity. The Western Latin story resumes with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which tore the Western Church into fragments, but which also launched Christianity as the first world faith. From 1700, the three stories converge once more, as the world was united by the expansion of Western Christian empires. Despite their present variety, modern Christianities are more closely in touch than they have been since the first generations of Christians in the first-century Middle East. I seek to give due weight in these narratives to the tangled and often tragic story of the relations between Christianity and its mother-monotheism, Judaism, as well as with its monotheistic younger cousin, Islam. For most of its existence, Christianity has been the most intolerant of world faiths, doing its best to eliminate all competitors, with Judaism a qualified exception, for which (thanks to some thoughts from Augustine of Hippo) it found space to serve its own theological and social purposes. Even now, by no means all sections of the Christian world have undergone the mutation of believing unequivocally in tolerating or accepting any partnership with other belief systems. In particular I highlight the huge consequences when the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century monarchs of the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal) reinvented their multi- faith society as a Christian monopoly and then exported that single-minded form of Christianity to other parts of the world. I develop the theme which became (rather to my surprise) a ground-bass of the narrative in my previous book, Reformation: the destruction of Spanish Judaism and Islam after 1492 had a major role in developing new forms of Christianity which challenged much of the early Church’s package of ideas, and also in fostering the mindset which led in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the Enlightenment in Western culture. Here I examine the role of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European Christian empires in creating a reaction of fundamentalist intolerance within other modern world faiths, principally Islam, Judaism and Hinduism. Deeply embedded in Christian tradition is a vocabulary of ‘repentance’ and ‘conversion’, both words which mean ‘turning around’. So this book describes some of the ways in which individuals were turned around by Christianity, but also the ways in which they could turn around what Christianity meant. We will meet Paul of Tarsus, suddenly struck down by what he heard as a universal message for all human beings, who then quarrelled fiercely with other disciples of Jesus who saw their Lord as a Messiah sent only to the Jews. There is Augustine of Hippo, the brilliant teacher whose life was turned around by reading Paul, and who, more than a thousand years later, deeply influenced

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  activities; the funds raised by the head of the Church in Armenia went to pay for two tank divisions in the Red Army.71 After the war was over, this institutional toleration continued. In 1946 Stalin allowed the formal extinction of the languishing rival Russian Church organization which the Soviet government had encouraged, the ‘Renovationist’ Church. This had started life as a genuine attempt by radical clergy to produce a reforming version of Orthodoxy during the abortive revolution of 1905 (see p. 851), but it had turned into little more than a means of disrupting Orthodox activity and parroting Communist propaganda. Stalin realized that he was better served by a subservient Orthodox leadership which would have some credibility with other worldwide Christian leaders. That is how his successors used the Moscow Patriarchate, even while they resumed vicious attempts to end any popular religious life in that same Church.72 When the Soviets swept back into Ukraine, Stalin abruptly terminated the official life of the Greek Catholic Church, which had flourished in the wake of the Red Army’s retreat before the Nazis. In 1946 a puppet synod in Ukraine declared void the Union of Brest of 1596, and the Church disappeared into a forcible union with the Orthodox Church in Moscow for nearly half a century.73 As Soviet armies inexorably followed up the Western Allies’ uncomfortable acceptance that Stalin would make Eastern Europe a Soviet sphere of influence, the various national Orthodox Churches apart from Greece followed the Moscow Patriarchate into an unhappy combination of collaboration and persecution at the hands of Communist satellite regimes. Catholics and Protestants had more external contacts to sustain them, but for that reason, they were generally more likely to be regarded as enemies of the new ‘Peoples’ Democracies’. WORLD CHRISTIANITY REALIGNED: ECUMENICAL BEGINNINGS In 1945, Europe was a continent of ruins, in the throes of the largest population movements in its recorded history, as displaced peoples sought their homes again or sought to escape assorted retributions, while others trudged wretchedly through the devastation to conform to new political boundaries created by the victorious Allies’ power deals. A number of subsidiary wars still raged in the Balkans and on the plains of Eastern Europe. A horrified consciousness was dawning, although slow to find public expression for some decades, that several million people, mostly Jews, but also Roma, homosexuals, Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others who did not conform to Nazi requirements, had disappeared, not in warfare, but cold-bloodedly herded into human abattoirs for

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.” The next evening, April 4, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, King prepared for another rally. As he stood on the balcony outside his second-floor room, he called down to the parking lot to Ben Branch, a musician, and asked him to sing a special song for him at the event that night, an old spiritual, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” one of King’s favorites. A moment later, a bullet tore through King’s jaw, severed his necktie, and ripped open his neck. Ralph Abernathy, King’s close friend and fellow civil rights leader, rushed to King and cradled him in his arms. “Martin, Martin, it’s going to be all right,” Abernathy said. An hour later, King was pronounced dead at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Memphis. That night, America started to burn. Riots and violence broke out in 130 cities across the country. Over the next several days, 65,000 Army and National Guard troops were dispatched to try to keep the peace. In Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley ordered his police superintendent to shoot to kill arsonists and shoot to maim or cripple looters. In Washington, D.C., soldiers stood guard on the White House lawn as fires raged just blocks away. On the night King was shot, Robert Kennedy was scheduled to give a speech in Indianapolis. When news of the assassination reached city officials, they warned Kennedy that his safety could not be guaranteed. He went anyway. When he arrived at the corner of Seventeenth and Broadway, he climbed onto the back of a flatbed truck and stood out in the open. Wearing his late brother John’s dark overcoat, he spoke to the mostly black crowd without looking at notes. “For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with—be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.” Never before had Kennedy spoken publicly about his brother’s assassination. He called for compassion and asked for a prayer for the King family. By the end of a week of rioting throughout the country, thirty-nine people had died, thousands had been injured and arrested, and millions of dollars of property damage had been done. Indianapolis, however, had stayed calm. —In mid-April, John Lennon and George Harrison became the last two Beatles to leave India after traveling there in February to study meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. They’d grown disenchanted with the spiritual leader after hearing he’d made a pass at women who’d joined their pilgrimage.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  dream, of becoming an Air Force general, come true. Susan knew: She was no longer his mission. The letter broke her heart. By the end of his third year, Borman ranked near the top of his class. For her part, Susan had enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania’s dental hygiene school, following in her mother’s footsteps. While there, she was offered a contract with the Ford Modeling Agency in New York, which she declined. During quiet moments, Borman wondered if he’d made the mistake of a lifetime by letting her go. In the summer of 1949, Borman was one of a select few cadets chosen to tour postwar Germany. For him, the biggest impression came at the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. There, he saw the firing range and gallows used to execute Jewish prisoners, and the ovens used to cremate them. And he saw families, East German refugees, living in tiny stalls in the barracks, separated from other families only by hanging blankets; these were people who’d chosen to give up everything and flee to the West rather than live under Communist rule. The trip sickened and saddened him, and it reinforced his certainty that America was a force for good in the world, a country that stepped up to help suffering people and defend freedom. When Borman returned from Germany, he only missed Susan more. She had returned to Tucson after earning her degree, and was chosen over seventy-one other contestants as the city’s representative at a Mardi Gras festival in Mexico. The local newspaper showed her draped in a silver-blue mink cape and wearing over a thousand dollars’ worth of silver and turquoise. In case Borman had forgotten what he’d lost, the newspaper noted that the selection was based on “beauty, poise, personality, charm, and intellect.” Borman graduated eighth in a class of six hundred seventy at West Point. It was a beautiful ceremony, but all he could see were the swarms of girlfriends and fiancées who’d come to shower love on his classmates. His only comfort came from knowing he’d been among those selected for a coveted spot in Air Force flight training, and from driving his parents back to Arizona in the new car he’d purchased, a blue Oldsmobile Rocket 88 stretch coupe with a V-8 engine and a bench seat in back. Borman had sixty days’ leave before reporting for flight training at Perrin Air Force Base in Sherman, Texas. On the first of those days back

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.27 The prophets were not the only people who contributed to the refashioning of the national cult during the eighth century. After the destruction of the northern kingdom, the people of Judah brooded on the recent catastrophe and on how to defend what was left. Their fierce debate about the future was played out in an appeal to the past – in fact, a large-scale reinterpretation and invention of the past. What we know of the story can be gleaned through the history written by the winners in the struggle, preserved for us in the second Books of Kings and Chronicles. The kingdom’s political turbulence culminated in a coup d’,état which around 640 BCE killed King Amon of Judah and installed his young son Josiah as a puppet ruler. As the boy grew up, his energy and zeal were harnessed to push forward a reform programme which, in the way of such innovations in the ancient world, was presented as the rediscovery of a venerable document: a code of law, attributed to Moses himself. With impeccable timing, this set out regulations, particularly for sacrifice, which had not been applicable at the time of the Exodus from Egypt, but which were judged extremely relevant to the age of Josiah. In its present developed form, the law code is to be found in the Pentateuch as the Book of Deuteronomy (this name ‘second law’ was provided by Greek translators of the Hebrew scriptures). Significantly the place of its discovery was the Temple in Jerusalem, and the lucky find was made by the High Priest of the Temple.28 Throughout the Deuteronomic Code, there is an emphasis on the pure worship of Yahweh alone, and it orders its devout readers to be savage to those within Israel who might suggest religious deviations – even the closest of relatives and friends, even one’s own son or wife: ‘[Y]our hand shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people.’29 It also emphasizes the idea of ‘covenant’, a treaty: Yahweh has made a covenant with his people and it is up to them to keep its conditions. In the more developed vision of this idea, texts written later than this period such as those incorporated in the Book of Genesis would emphasize that Abraham was the first to receive the covenant and had been told to ensure that his male descendants were circumcised as a sign of their faithfulness to it, but Deuteronomy concentrates on the covenant as it was made with Moses, when God gave Ten Commandments on Mount Horeb (Sinai) as the centrepiece of an intricate set of laws.30 There were more laws to come in a period much later than Josiah’s reign, but they were likewise back-projected to

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  My mother put down the cot for me in the front bedroom, and supervised my getting ready for bed. She turned off all the electric lights, and I could see her from my bed, two rooms away, sitting at the same kitchen table, reading the Daily News by a kerosene lamp, and waiting for my father. She always said it was because the kerosene lamp reminded her of “home.” When I was grown I realized she was trying to save a few pennies of electricity before my father came in and turned on the lights with “Lin, why you sitting in the dark so?” Sometimes I’d go to sleep with the soft chunk-a-ta-chink of her foot-pedal-powered Singer Sewing Machine, stitching up sheets and pillow-cases from unbleached muslin gotten on sale “under the bridge.” I only saw my mother crying twice when I was little. Once was when I was three, and sat on the step of her dental chair at the City Dental Clinic on 23rd Street, while a student dentist pulled out all the teeth on one side of her upper jaw. It was in a huge room full of dental chairs with other groaning people in them, and white-jacketed young men bending over open mouths. The sound of the many dental drills and instruments made the place sound like a street-corner excavation site. Afterwards, my mother sat outside on a long wooden bench. I saw her lean her head against the back, her eyes closed. She did not respond to my pats and tugs at her coat. Climbing up upon the seat, I peered into my mother’s face to see why she should be sleeping in the middle of the day. From under her closed eyelids, drops of tears were squeezing out and running down her cheek toward her ear. I touched the little drops of water on her high cheekbone in horror and amazement. The world was turning over. My mother was crying. The other time I saw my mother cry was a few years later, one night, when I was supposed to be asleep in their bedroom. The door to the parlor was ajar, and I could see through the crack into the next room. I woke to hear my parents’ voices in english. My father had just come home, and with liquor on his breath. “I hoped I’d never live to see the day when you, Bee, stand up in some saloon and it’s drink you drinking with some clubhouse woman.” “But Lin, what are you talking? It’s not that way a-tall, you know. In politics you must be friendly-friendly so. It doesn’t mean a thing.” “And if you were to go before I did, I would never so much as look upon another man, and I would expect you to do the same.”

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  of the most important centres of Judaism outside the homeland. THE EXILE AND AFTER This renewed catastrophe was a key event in the history of the people of Israel. Maybe if the exile in Babylon had lasted more than half a century, the impetus to preserve and enhance a Jewish identity might have been lost, but as it was the exiles who returned were able to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem; it was reconsecrated in 516 BCE. There could be no independent native monarchy now, for the rebuilding was thanks to the generous spirit of the new conqueror Cyrus and his successors. So the Temple and its priesthood became the absolute centre of Jewish identity, as well as being the only significant institution in Jerusalem, and remained so for the next half-millennium. Those who rebuilt the Temple were helped by the exiles who had remained in Babylon, but by contrast and significantly, they refused help from local people who had not been deported in this or previous disasters, and who may have also included exiles whom the Babylonians had brought to Palestine from elsewhere. The exiles and their descendants continued to feel condescension or hostility to these others as ‘the people of the land’, a people who had not shared in the sufferings of God’s chosen people – had not sat by the waters of Babylon and wept remembering Zion.32 Many of these despised people built a rival temple on Mount Gerizim in the central Palestinian territory known as Samaria, and hence they were called Samaritans (a word of contempt to Jews); in very reduced numbers, they still live round their sacred mountain now. Much later, Jesus told a characteristically provocative story about a Samaritan who was kinder than any of the representatives of Jewish respectable society, and one Gospel writer also portrays Jesus as having mightily impressed the Samaritan community after a friendly and candid encounter with one of their women.33 The voice of the former exiles and the continuing exiled community in Babylon, who jointly regarded themselves as the true representatives of mainstream Judaism, was now heard in the increasing volume of sacred writings added in this ‘Second Temple’ period. Their preoccupations and the results of their new experiences went on permanently to colour Jewish religion. For instance, it may have been the fact that the scene of their exile was Babylon on the River Euphrates that led them to cherish the idea that the Patriarch Abram had come to their Promised Land from Ur, a city then near the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They learned ancient tales, like the story well known throughout the Middle East about a great flood, and incorporated them in their

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  own narrative of the ancient past. Jews still in Babylon picked up an interest in the long Babylonian tradition of observing and speculating on the stars and planets, and began contributing their own thoughts to the subject. More profoundly, post-Exilic Jews puzzled about how a loving God could have allowed the destruction of his Temple and the apparent overturning of all his promises to his people. One answer was to try to let God off the hook by conceiving of a being who devoted his time to thwarting God’s purposes: he was called the Adversary, Hassatan, and although he was a fairly insignificant nuisance in the Hebrew scriptures, he grew in status in later Jewish literature, particularly among writers who were influenced by other religious cultures which spoke of powerful demonic figures. Hassatan caught the imagination of the Christian sect, and by the time that the Christian Book of Revelation was written, he had become a figure of cosmic significance now called Satan, depicted as the final adversary for God in the End Time.34 Judaism was nevertheless reluctant to make too much of any rival to God, having put such effort into affirming his sole and cosmic power. Some Jews felt that any questioning of or search for understanding of their tragedy was impious as well as a waste of energy. This is the message in the Book of Job, a tale which is the classic cry of pain and anger against unjust suffering, and which provides Satan’s first major debut in biblical literature. Job’s suffering arises not out of anything that he has done, for he is one of God’s most loyal servants; it results from a peculiar and apparently heartless wager between God and Satan about his loyalty. It can only be resolved when Job fully submits to the mysterious will of God. A later writer nicknamed Qoheleth, the ‘Preacher’ or ‘Teacher’ (Greeks tried to translate this as ‘Ecclesiastes’), approached the same problem in a different way. Dispensing with any story as a vehicle for what he wanted to say, he made a series of observations which form one of the most compelling and unexpected expressions in any sacred literature of resignation at the futility of human existence: All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun … In much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow. Qoheleth’s smile at human folly is chillier than that of the Greek Cynics or Stoics; at the end, it falls away and dims into a description of the decay of old age moving towards the grave. Yahweh provides no comfort, but ‘the spirit returns to God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity.’35 But this was not the only mood in post-Exilic Jewish literature. It was capable

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  post-millennialism (see p. 759), was particularly hospitable to this ‘first-wave’ feminism. Women offered themselves for missionary work overseas, a huge asset in cultures where men could not communicate face to face with the opposite sex. At home women involved themselves in a great range of causes envisaging radical change in social behaviour, especially the abolition of slavery, and a war on that male-dominated subversion of quiet family evenings and secure finance, indulgence in alcohol. They were active in matters where men might easily be compromised if they showed excessive interest, most obviously the welfare of millions of poverty-stricken young women forced into prostitution. The English Evangelical Josephine Butler, daughter of a liberal- minded Whig MP, took his hatred of slavery to the streets of Britain. She told the story of hearing a woman’s cry from the window of her comfortable Oxford home: ‘a woman aspiring to heaven and dragged back to hell – and my heart was pierced with pain. I longed to leap from the window, and flee with her to some place of refuge.’ Instead she concentrated on rather more systematic and effective campaigns against male indifference to the humiliation of women who ended up selling their bodies. She aroused horror that such a well-brought-up married lady could talk on public platforms about venereal disease. ‘That dreadful woman, Mrs Butler’ was the comment of one leading Oxford High Churchman, Canon Henry Liddon.34 A PROTESTANT ENLIGHTENMENT: SCHLEIERMACHER, HEGEL AND THEIR HEIRS Despite their often curiously overlapping trajectories, the two halves of Western Christianity diverged significantly in at least one respect. The relationship of Protestantism to the Enlightenment was much more ambiguous and less confrontational than that of Rome: it embraced a theological and scholarly project to make sense of the new intellectual landscape rather than condemn it. At the heart of northern Europe was Berlin, capital of a Prussian Hohenzollern monarchy which had led Germany’s successful resistance to Napoleon. One important element in the national renewal which the Hohenzollern took as their sacred duty was the creation in 1810 of a new university, a project conceived at the lowest point in their campaigns against the Emperor of the French. Steeped in the Pietist tradition, King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia was aware not only of the grievous damage done to European education by the dispersal of the Jesuits and the Revolutionaries’ closure of a clutch of great Catholic universities, but also of the general decay in the Protestant university system. There were

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Much of the questioning was aggressive and antagonistic, full of second-guesses and should-haves and pointed fingers, but Borman held firm, hiding nothing and acknowledging NASA’s responsibility, but never allowing congressmen to kick the agency just because it was down. He still ached for the loss of his friend, Ed White, but never allowed those emotions to spill into his report. Near the end of the hearings, he offered some of its most memorable testimony. “We are trying to tell you that we are confident in our management, and in our engineering, and in ourselves,” Borman said. “I think the question is really: Are you confident in us?” A few days later, he told lawmakers, “Let’s stop the witch hunt and get on with it.” At NASA, it seemed there wasn’t a person, from the administrator to the janitors, who didn’t cheer him on. In the end, Congress took his advice and NASA continued on its mission to land men on the Moon. Having survived the inquest, NASA approached Borman with an extraordinary offer: Take temporary leave from the astronaut program to head up the team tasked with implementing design changes to the command module. He accepted on the spot. He and others worked to make the new version of the capsule the most advanced, and safest, spacecraft ever built. Borman could only hope there hadn’t been another tragedy as he landed his jet at Ellington Air Force Base and made his way to Slayton’s office. He suspected something unusual was afoot when he was asked to close the door behind him. Slayton addressed him without even sitting down: “We just got word from the CIA that the Russians are planning a lunar fly-by before the end of the year. We want to change Apollo 8 from an Earth orbital to a lunar orbital flight. A lot has to come together. And Apollo 7 has to be perfect. But if it happens, Frank, do you want to go to the Moon?” The idea startled Borman. Apollo 8 was meant to fly in December, just four months from now, but certainly not to the Moon. Apollo 8 was a conservative mission designed for low Earth orbit, perhaps at 125 miles altitude. It was one of several essential steps leading up to a manned lunar landing, hopefully before the end of 1969. Everything went in steps at NASA. Everything. But Slayton meant exactly what he said. He wanted Borman to change missions and fly to the Moon. At a distance of 240,000 miles. In just sixteen weeks. Slayton didn’t discuss the fact that the lunar module couldn’t possibly be ready by then. He didn’t discuss any of the other myriad reasons NASA couldn’t be ready to fly men to the Moon by year’s end. In fact, Slayton gave very few additional details. He didn’t even ask if Borman cared to talk things over with his wife or crew.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  started in early. He raised toasts to his fallen brothers, then threw his glass into the fireplace. White was among the straightest arrows Borman had ever known—honest to a fault, a true patriot, and a man who didn’t mess around with the sports cars or fast women so readily available to astronauts. For both men, family came first. The Bormans and Whites often shared a house on a lake near Houston for fishing trips. Borman couldn’t remember missing someone as much as he missed Ed White that night. Borman spent the next two months inside the burned spacecraft, studying the design, searching for flaws, making fixes in his mind. In April 1967, Congress held hearings into the cause of the fire, and Borman was called to testify. Much of the questioning was aggressive and antagonistic, full of second-guesses and should-haves and pointed fingers, but Borman held firm, hiding nothing and acknowledging NASA’s responsibility, but never allowing congressmen to kick the agency just because it was down. He still ached for the loss of his friend, Ed White, but never allowed those emotions to spill into his report. Near the end of the hearings, he offered some of its most memorable testimony. “We are trying to tell you that we are confident in our management, and in our engineering, and in ourselves,” Borman said. “I think the question is really: Are you confident in us?” A few days later, he told lawmakers, “Let’s stop the witch hunt and get on with it.” At NASA, it seemed there wasn’t a person, from the administrator to the janitors, who didn’t cheer him on. In the end, Congress took his advice and NASA continued on its mission to land men on the Moon. Having survived the inquest, NASA approached Borman with an extraordinary offer: Take temporary leave from the astronaut program to head up the team tasked with implementing design changes to the command module. He accepted on the spot. He and others worked to make the new version of the capsule the most advanced, and safest, spacecraft ever built. Borman could only hope there hadn’t been another tragedy as he landed his jet at Ellington Air Force Base and made his way to Slayton’s office. He suspected something unusual was afoot when he was asked to close the door behind him. Slayton addressed him without even sitting

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  firing, hitting the senator once in the head and twice in the right armpit. As Kennedy collapsed, Romero cradled his head to protect it from the cold concrete and tried to comfort the senator, who had been kind to him a few days earlier and had treated him as an equal. Photographers snapped photos of Romero holding Kennedy. The images would become among the most memorable of the twentieth century. Pandemonium erupted throughout the hotel; supporters held their heads, sobbed, and screamed “No! No!” and “Not again!” Police seized the shooter, a twenty-four-year-old Jordanian American named Sirhan Bishara Sirhan. In his pocket they found a newspaper story noting Kennedy’s support for Israel. Kennedy was rushed to the hospital, where he clung to life. In England, the British Broadcasting Corporation told its audience, “We pray for the American people that they may come to their senses.” Early the next morning, on June 6, Kennedy died of his wounds. Across the country, people walked around dazed. In New York City, WPIX-TV broadcast the image of a single word—SHAME—and let it run for two and a half hours. People of all colors and classes and ages gathered spontaneously at railroad tracks to glimpse the train that carried Kennedy’s body from New York City to Washington. When it passed, mothers holding babies waved, children saluted, the elderly tried to stand. Black and white Americans chased the train, running on the tracks together until the last car disappeared. — Richard Nixon became the Republican nominee for president on the first ballot at the party’s national convention in Miami in early August. His running mate, Maryland governor Spiro Agnew, had backed the Civil Rights Movement but now scolded black people, and some of their leaders, for not disavowing so-called black racists. He and Nixon would run on a campaign of law and order, one aimed at a “silent majority” and voters shaken by the events of the year. The Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago later in August. As protests erupted around the city, McCarthy seemed unwilling

• From Scandalous Liaisons (2007)

  Sebastian settled atop her and lowered his lips, effectively silencing her forthcoming questions with devastating kisses. His hard, expert mouth moved over hers, weakening her defenses, reminding her of the pleasure to be found in his arms. He rolled, taking her with him, freeing his hands to roam with questing tenderness. Hot flicks of his tongue caressed the roof of her mouth and stroked against hers. Lord, she’d almost forgotten how well the man could kiss! His mouth was wicked, divine, and he kissed her as if he were feasting on the taste of her. Her womb clenched on the verge of orgasm. She wiggled her hips until his cock was wedged at the moist entrance to her body. “Wait!” he gasped, tearing his mouth from hers, but she paid him no heed, sliding onto his throbbing cock with a pleasured moan. “Olivia!” Instantly his torso bucked off the bed, lifting her with him, and he was coming deep within her, crying out hoarsely as his hot seed spurted with wrenching shudders. His arms came around her in a crushing embrace, his body shivering with powerful tremors. Olivia held him close, wondering at the feel of him, hot and hard and jerking beneath her. When he was drained, she followed him back into the pillows. “Ah, sweeting,” he murmured hoarsely, stroking her spine. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t stop it. It’s been too long.” “I understand.” “Give me a moment to regain my senses, and I will pleasure you until morning.” His words, meant to entice, filled her with dread. She slipped off him while he was still too sated to stop her. Sitting on the edge of the bed, Olivia ran a hand through her hair, dislodging her hairpins. “You left me, Sebastian.” “I had good cause,” he insisted, rolling to face her. “Originally I agreed to stay only for the short time you asked of me. But when you told me you loved me, it changed everything. I realized I loved you and wanted to be with you, but I had my men to take care of, and my ship. I had to sever my ties with them before I could begin anew with you.” Olivia brushed away the tear that escaped and took a deep, shuddering breath. So much resentment, fear, and even a touch of wary hope warred within her that she was overwhelmed with emotion. She looked over her shoulder at her husband, her heart aching at the sight of his resplendent nakedness and his beloved hair, spread out across her lacy pillows. Somehow the highly feminine trappings of her bed only emphasized his potent masculinity. But it was his gaze that most devastated her, full of longing and love and a hint of fear. She looked away, unable to bear it. “You were gone for four months.”

• From Scandalous Liaisons (2007)

  “Listen.” Sebastian dropped his face to within inches of his father’s. “You will stay away from my wife. Do not approach her for any reason. If I discover that either you or Carr went within seeing distance of Olivia, I’ll kill you.” His fingers tightened further, until his entire hand ached with the force he exerted. Then he released his father and moved off the bed. The marquess rolled to the edge of the mattress and cast up his accounts on the Aubusson rug. “I-I’ll . . . cut . . . you off . . .” he choked out, his stomach heaving. Sebastian laughed derisively. “If only that were possible. But everything is entailed except for your money, and I have no need of it. Spend it, burn it. I don’t care.” His father spat on the floor. Sebastian headed toward the door. “Remember, Father. Stay away from my wife.” After making the appropriate arrangements for Olivia with his solicitor, Sebastian stood on the deck of the Seawitch, watching the London skyline shrink as he left England behind. Like a coward, he wanted to flee the mess that was his family, and he fought the temptation to give in to the urge. It would be so easy to leave all the ugliness and never return, to escape the life for which he had no desire and find freedom elsewhere. But he had Olivia now, and he would suffer any ordeal, accomplish any feat, journey anywhere, as long as he could have her and be with her daily. He must free himself of his past—release his men, make arrangements for his ship, and sever his ties with the Robidoux brothers. He wasn’t certain how he would survive the upcoming weeks without his wife, but it was too dangerous to bring her with him. As England faded from view, Sebastian knew he would return as soon as he was able. He’d left his heart behind, and he could not live without her. Olivia barely made it through her morning toilet, consumed as she was by a dull, aching emptiness. She’d been so certain she could convince Sebastian to stay, or to at least take her with him, but part of her was not surprised that he had fled. It was a long-standing habit with him to run from his troubles. In his youth, he’d used drink and women to escape. Later, he’d used the sea and, for a time, her body. But apparently she hadn’t been sufficient. She’d stay in bed if she could, wallowing in the linens scented of his skin and their lovemaking, but her father was here and she had to attend to him. Olivia couldn’t conceive how she would manage to survive the day, but the effort had to be made. In the dining room, she filled her plate from the covered platters on the sideboard. Then she preceded the footman to the parlor, where her father sat reading his paper. “Good morning, Livy,” he greeted jovially.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  1967, when three astronauts rode an elevator to the top of a Saturn IB booster at Cape Kennedy in Florida and strapped themselves into their capsule for a simulated countdown. In three weeks they would do it for real, taking Apollo 1—the kickoff of NASA’s new Apollo program—into orbit around Earth. At 6:31 P.M., one of the astronauts screamed into his microphone a word that sounded like “Fire!” Two seconds later, another cried out. His first word was unclear—either “I” or “We” —but the rest was unmistakable: “got a fire in the cockpit!” That was followed by garbled, desperate words and an agonized scream. Some thought they heard an astronaut saying “We’re burning up!” After that, there was nothing but silence. Flames spread through the capsule. None of the astronauts could overcome the cabin’s highly pressurized atmosphere and move the inward-opening hatch. Seconds later, the capsule ruptured. Technicians rushed to the scene but were beaten back by heat and fire; almost six minutes passed before they could get inside. Rescue personnel found the crew, already expired from asphyxiation, their space suits fused to the melted interior of the spacecraft. Seven hours passed before the bodies could be removed. Until now, the American space program had owned an excellent safety record; even a chimpanzee named Ham, who’d flown on a suborbital mission in 1961, had come through it safely. Suddenly, three American heroes had died without ever leaving the launchpad, and in a way that seemed entirely preventable. Hundreds of grown men at NASA were reduced to tears by the accident. Media reports blamed an electrical spark for igniting the pure oxygen environment of the spacecraft’s cabin. But to many, there seemed a more basic explanation. “There’s reason to believe that establishing a deadline of 1970 for the Moon flight contributed to their deaths,” said NBC News anchor Frank McGee. Like many, he thought that by rushing, NASA was risking safety. After surviving the congressional investigation into the fire, and enduring months of delay while instituting new safety measures, NASA was ready to resume flight operations. On November 9, 1967, controllers counted down the final seconds to the launch of Apollo 4 (Apollo 2 and 3

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  titled The Beatles, it quickly came to be known as the White Album, for its stark white cover. It was worlds apart from their 1967 album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Neither the songs nor the sides seemed connected, or to flow from one another; some of the lyrics were overtly political; and each member seemed, more than ever, to be writing solo material rather than as part of a whole. Two weeks after the White Album’s debut, the Rolling Stones released their own classic, Beggars Banquet. The LP featured the track “Sympathy for the Devil,” sung by Mick Jagger from the perspective of Lucifer, asking “Who killed the Kennedys?” and answering “After all, it was you and me.” In “Street Fighting Man,” Jagger, who admired the spirit of revolution during 1968 and had even joined big protests, seemed to lament that the best help he could give was by singing. — As America entered the final two weeks of the year, a grim statistic emerged from Vietnam. More than sixteen thousand Americans had died in the war in 1968, by far the bloodiest year to date by a factor of almost 50 percent. At their offices in New York City, the editors of Time magazine decided on its Man of the Year. Their criteria did not include virtue—only that the selected person be the one who most affected the news and embodied what was important about the year. Previously, the magazine had named luminaries such as John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, and Mahatma Gandhi. For 1968, they chose THE DISSENTER. Chapter Fourteen

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  next several days, 65,000 Army and National Guard troops were dispatched to try to keep the peace. In Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley ordered his police superintendent to shoot to kill arsonists and shoot to maim or cripple looters. In Washington, D.C., soldiers stood guard on the White House lawn as fires raged just blocks away. On the night King was shot, Robert Kennedy was scheduled to give a speech in Indianapolis. When news of the assassination reached city officials, they warned Kennedy that his safety could not be guaranteed. He went anyway. When he arrived at the corner of Seventeenth and Broadway, he climbed onto the back of a flatbed truck and stood out in the open. Wearing his late brother John’s dark overcoat, he spoke to the mostly black crowd without looking at notes. “For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with—be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.” Never before had Kennedy spoken publicly about his brother’s assassination. He called for compassion and asked for a prayer for the King family. By the end of a week of rioting throughout the country, thirty-nine people had died, thousands had been injured and arrested, and millions of dollars of property damage had been done. Indianapolis, however, had stayed calm. — In mid-April, John Lennon and George Harrison became the last two Beatles to leave India after traveling there in February to study meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. They’d grown disenchanted with the spiritual leader after hearing he’d made a pass at women who’d joined their pilgrimage. When asked by the Maharishi why he was departing, Lennon said, “Well, if you’re so cosmic, you’ll know why.” Later that month, student activists occupied five buildings at Columbia University, took a dean hostage, and issued a series of demands. Among other things, the students insisted that the university

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  “Frank, we’ve had a bad fire on Pad Thirty-four and we’ve got three astronauts dead—Gus Grissom, Ed White, and one of the new boys, Roger Chaffee. Get to the Cape as quick as you can; you’ve been appointed to the investigative committee.” The news stunned Borman, who considered Ed White the brother he’d never had. And it devastated Borman’s wife, Susan, who counted Pat White among her best friends. Borman told Slayton he’d fly to Florida right away but first needed to stop at the Whites’ home in Houston. When he and Susan arrived, Pat was hysterical. She was the mother of two children, ages ten and thirteen, who suddenly had no father. Even in her raw grief, just hours after receiving the news, a Washington bureaucrat had informed her that despite Ed’s wishes to be buried at West Point, the three fallen astronauts would all be laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery. “Give me the guy’s name,” Borman said. He had the man on the phone a minute later. “It’s already been decided in Washington,” the man insisted. “I don’t give a good goddamn what’s been decided,” Borman said. “Ed wanted to be buried at West Point and that’s what’s going to happen, and I’ll go all the way to President Johnson to make sure it happens, so you better fucking well do it.” Four days later, White was buried at West Point. Borman and Lovell were among the pallbearers. Anders also attended. After the funeral, Borman began his work on the investigative committee convened by NASA. He was the only astronaut on the panel, a sign that NASA considered him to be among its best. His first job was to help supervise the disassembly of the Apollo 1 spacecraft at Cape Kennedy in order to determine the cause of the fire. Days later, he became the first astronaut to enter the cabin. He found a burned-out nightmare. Rows of equipment and panels had been charred and covered in soot, debris was scattered everywhere. Hoses connecting the astronauts to their life support systems were melted. No matter where he looked, Borman could see no color, only grays and blacks. That night, he joined Slayton and others at a restaurant in Cocoa Beach called The Mousetrap, a NASA haunt. Borman seldom drank to excess, but the smell of the scorched spacecraft needed bleaching, and he