Word: commandant
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...Palm Springs, Calif., for a New Year's vacation. There, at one point, photographers discovered him strolling with Hollywood Executive Bob Evans. Kissinger's deputy, General Alexander Haig, was "on leave," and outgoing Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird was in Hawaii saying farewell to the Pacific Command. Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler was on a week's vacation in California. Behind this all too casual facade was the Administration's determination that once the decision to bomb had been made, there was little to do but keep the line to Hanoi open, probing and pushing...
...aircraft I watched depart, only one of them had to use its "drag bag"-the drag parachute used to abort a takeoff because of a technical difficulty. A reserve craft quickly took its place. That mass departure, timed to the split second, was a feat the Strategic Air Command ought to teach the world's commercial airlines...
...there it is!" shouted one of U.S.S. Ticonderoga's sailors. Barely four miles off the bow of the big carrier, Apollo 17's command ship America emerged from the puffy clouds, drifting easily under its three billowing orange-and-white parachutes. Then, while a television-equipped helicopter hovered almost directly above it to give the world its first bird's-eye view of a splashdown, the command ship dropped into the gently rolling Pacific. Less than an hour later, Apollo 17's three astronauts-Navymen Gene Cernan and Ron Evans and slightly seasick Civilian Geologist Jack...
...Apollo's three-day homeward voyage, the astronauts had exceptionally smooth sailing. "America has found some fair winds and following seas," said Cernan after the main engine had successfully lifted the command ship out of lunar orbit. As the spacecraft emerged from behind the moon for the last time, the astronauts aimed their TV camera at the surface below and sent back the first live pictures of features on the backside that are invisible from earth, including the giant Tsiolkovsky Crater (named for the Russian space pioneer). Next day, some 180,000 miles from earth, Command Module Pilot Evans...
...Challenger, in a dramatic pyrotechnic display, lifted off from the moon's mountain-rimmed Taurus-Littrow valley. Two hours later, Cernan and Astronaut-Geologist Jack Schmitt reunited with Ron Evans, who was whirling overhead in America. Then, after two more days of observing the moon from the orbiting command ship, the astronauts fired themselves out of lunar orbit and began the three-day journey home. By week's end, the final U.S. expedition to the moon was headed for its scheduled splashdown this week in the South Pacific, 400 miles south of Samoa...