Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 (10 page)

Read Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 Online

Authors: Robert Zimmerman

Tags: #History, #United States, #20th Century, #test

 

Page 40
So while Bill thought they were going steady, she took the pin off so she could date other boys. Yet the two kept corresponding. By this time, Anders had thought about his future and had made some hard choices. First, he decided that he wanted to switch his commission to the Air Force. Flying combat jets seemed much more exciting than sitting on a ship.
Second, he decided that he wanted to marry Valerie Hoard. The Ring Dance was coming, and he began a full campaign to convince Valerie to marry him. When he came home that Christmas he drove her to the top of Mt. Helix, overlooking San Diego, and as the sun was setting formally proposed.
Valerie hesitated. She loved him and wanted to marry him, but this all seemed too fast. She was still only seventeen, was a straight "A" student in school, and wanted to go to college.
"You can't possibly say no to me," nineteen-year-old Bill argued. "If I get in the Air Force I'll get a two-month leave. It'll be the perfect opportunity for a honeymoon."
Upon returning to Annapolis, Bill's gentle but persistent campaign continued. New letters arrived daily, many including jewelry brochures showing Valerie a selection of engagement rings, all miniature variations of his class ring. She wrote back, describing how one ring, with a single small diamond surrounded by a cluster of even smaller diamonds, was the one she liked best. But she did not tell him to buy it.
At the same time she began taking instruction in Catholicism. Valerie had been raised as a casual Protestant. Her parents had left the choice of her church entirely up to her, and on Sunday her church of preference was usually determined by the church her friends attended.
Bill, however, had been raised a Catholic, and he took its sacraments seriously. If he was going to marry Valerie she had to convert. Though she hadn't yet committed to marriage, Valerie decided she had better find out about his religion, just in case. Twice a week she attended classes at two different churches, learning the theology of Catholicism.
Though she still wasn't sure she was ready for marriage, by June Valerie had decided to convert. She also knew that Bill had bought her a ring (though he wouldn't show it to her). And she had agreed to attend June week. She had never been to the East Coast, and the glamour of the Ring Dance seemed too

 

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June 26, 1955. Bill and Valerie Anders on their wedding at the Naval Chapel, San Diego.
good to miss. She saved her money and flew across the country with all her formal clothing.
Today she remembers this time with wistful good humor. "I was so young." Each night they went to another formal dance, dressed to the nines. Valerie wore crinoline skirts with long leather gloves" much like Scarlet O'Hara." On the night of the Ring Dance Valerie wore Bill's class ring on a blue ribbon around her neck. At the center of the dance floor was the huge replica of the ring.
Thoughout the evening Bill and Valerie danced. Finally the last shreds of hesitancy faded, and Valerie knew that the time was right. They drifted through the ring, and she took his ring from the ribbon around her neck and placed it on his finger.
He took from his pocket a small box, and from it removed a miniature ring with a single small diamond surrounded by a cluster of smaller diamonds.

 

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He placed it on her finger, they looked at each other for one long silent moment, and then kissed.
Valerie had finally said yes.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Three years later. Valerie was in San Diego with one-year-old Alan and one-month-old Glen, while Bill was an interceptor pilot stationed in Iceland.
He pulled up to his cruising altitude of 30,000 feet and headed southwest. For almost a year Anders had been patrolling the skies above Iceland, intercepting any unidentified aircraft that drifted into radar range. Most of the time they turned out to be commercial passenger jets flying slightly off course. During the winter, when the Iceland night lasted almost twenty-four hours, he would take off into a sparkling sky, the Northern Lights shimmering ghostlike above the horizon. The ground radar station would guide him to the plane, and his radar operator would shine a searchlight on its tail in order to read its number.
Now it was summertime, and the sun was bright and the sky clear blue. According to radar, the unidentified blip was coming from the northeast. Only Soviet military planes came from this direction, skirting Norway by flying over the Arctic Ocean. Anders turned due east in order to intercept the intruder before it reached Iceland.
Until he got close enough to actually see it, Anders had no idea what he was facing. If this blip heralded the beginning of a full-scale Soviet military attack, he would be fighting for his life. If it was a commercial jet he dared not misidentify it and shoot it down by mistake.
And if it was a merely a Soviet bomber on a routine mission, he would have to firmly escort it on its way, while simultaneously avoiding an international incident.
Ground radar guided Anders towards the intruder. When he was within twenty miles his radar operator picked it up on the F-89's own radar, and vectored the plane in from the side. Soon a speck appeared. The two planes were now less than 1,000 yards apart, and Anders could see that it was a Soviet bomber. Gingerly he swung around so that he was approaching it from the side. He had to make it

 

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clear to the other plane who he was and what his weaponry represented. He also had to make it clear that he would only attack if threatened. He knew that they had their guns trained on him as well.
Very carefully he eased up alongside, mere yards apart. Slowly he worked his way forward so that he was parallel with the Soviet plane's cockpit. He stared at the pilot and co-pilot, who stared back in turn. From what Anders could see, the Soviet bomber was alone and did not appear to be hostile.
For a few minutes the two planes flew in formation together as they headed west and out into the Atlantic. Then Anders noticed that his fuel was getting low, and asked his base for new instuctions. Knowing that the Soviet bomber was clear of NATO airspace, ground control directed him to break off, and he headed back to Iceland.
Before he did, Anders grinned at the Soviet crewmen and gave them the finger in farewell. The Soviets smiled back and held up a sign in English which read ''We screwed your sister!"
Another day in the Cold War had ended.
Khrushchev
On July 24, 1959, Nikita Khrushchev and Vice President Richard Nixon stood before an exhibit of an American kitchen in Moscow and, with news reporters and dignitaries crowded around, argued the merits of communism and capitalism. Khrushchev, a blunt undiplomatic man who never minced his words, looked at the display of ordinary American home appliances and scoffed, "I was born in the Soviet Union, so I have a right to a house. In America if you don't have a dollar you have the right to choose between sleeping in a house or on the pavement."
Nixon responded, "To us, diversity, the right to choose, the fact that we have 1,000 builders building 1,000 different houses, is the most important thing . . . We do not wish to have decisions made at the top by government officials."
16
Khrushchev looked Nixon in the eye and laughed. "We have existed not quite forty-two years," he said, waving an arm at the American exhibit.

 

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"In another seven years we will be on the same level as America. When we catch up with you, in passing you by, we will wave to you."
17
In the decade since Frank Borman had visited Berlin, the Cold War had only intensified, the Soviet Union emerging from World War II as an aggressive challenger to the Western World. And epitomizing that challenge was Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party and Premier of the Soviet Union.
Born in 1894, Khrushchev was a small, blustery man with a round face and round body. His father had been a poor man, struggling to survive first as a railroad worker, then as a farmer, and finally as a coal miner. When Nikita was thirteen he joined his father in the mines, apprenticing as a blacksmith.
18
When the communists seized power in 1917 he quickly joined the revolution. Though his knowledge of communist and Marxist ideas was somewhat simplistic, "slogan-Marxism" as it were, he accepted its goals fully and with passion.
19
By the early 1920's he was fighting in the civil war against the White Russians. Soon after he was placed in charge of one of the very mines he had worked in years before. He subsequently rose swiftly through the party's ranks. In ten years he became a major political player under Stalin, surviving the purges of the late 1930's and instigating a few of his own when he was placed in charge of the Ukraine in 1938.
20
By 1953 he became head of the Soviet Communist party, and took full power in 1958.
Like many of his fellow communists, Khrushchev was never afraid to speak his mind about his faith in communism and his desire to see it dominate the world.
21
In November 1956 while attending a diplomatic reception in the Polish Embassy in Moscow, Khrushchev so eagerly proclaimed this faith that the envoys from a dozen Western countries walked out. "Whether you like it or not," he told them, "history is on our side. We will bury you!"
22
Khrushchev believed that all power began with the state, and by doling out that power as the state deemed best a better society could be created.
23
"Centralization was the best and most efficient system," he wrote in his memoirs. "[Everything] had to be worked out at the top and supervised from above."
24
Such supervision included not only all economic activity and property rights but also all philosophical, religious, and intellectual thought.

 

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The Western concept of liberty of conscience, where all citizens are free to choose their own religion or express their own personal beliefs, was alien to Khrushchev. Even when he allowed a "thaw," an easing of political oppression after the death of Stalin, Khrushchev placed limits on freedom.
We were afraid the thaw might unleash a flood, which we wouldn't be able to control and which could drown us, [washing] away all the barriers and retaining walls of our society. . . . We wanted to guide the progress of the thaw so that it would stimulate only those creative forces which would contribute to the strengthening of socialism.
25
Though dissidents and political opponents were no longer executed, many careers were still destroyed. Some were imprisoned, or exiled from the country. Books were banned, newspapers censored. And nothing could be published without government approval.
26
Where religion was concerned, Khrushchev did not even allow a thaw. He saw religious expression as an evil that had to be stamped out. Soon after Khrushchev took power, a 1959 Pravda editorial stated that "religion is inimicable to the interests of the working masses . . . [hindering] the active struggle of the people for the transformation of society."
27
For the human race to rise to the new level, party workers had to strive for the "complete eradication of religious prejudices."
28
These words signaled the beginning of an anti-religious campaign that in five years eliminated more than 10,000 churches in the Soviet Union, almost half of the entire country's places of worship. The property of believers was confiscated, priests arrested, and churches bulldozed, all in the name of atheism and rational thought.
29
Khrushchev's faith in communism and the government's ability to guide society was also reflected in his unwillingness to tolerate political opposition. In 1953, soon after the death of Stalin, the East German government attempted to collectivize the country's farmers. The result was a revolt, nationwide strikes, and the sacking of the Communist Party offices in almost every major city. To regain control, the Soviet army rolled into East Germany, killing more than eight hundred people and re-establishing a sympathetic Communist government.
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