Word: soviet
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Feoktistov was different from other Soviet flyboys. For one thing, he was an egghead, a prominent spacecraft designer who also had the guts to fly the technology he helped develop. For another, he snubbed the Communist Party--professional suicide in the U.S.S.R. "I had many enemies who did not want me to make that flight," he famously told the Boston Globe in a 1998 interview. "Once we took off, I remember thinking, That's it. No one can get me off this spaceship...
Feoktistov stayed with the Soviet space program after his return to Earth, helping to design its later fleet of ships, including the elegant Mir space station. Like only a handful of other cosmonauts and astronauts, he lived to see a crater on the moon bear his name. And like too many of them--the Deke Slaytons and Gus Grissoms and Wally Schirras and others--he now passes into celestial memory...
...Postcard: Minneapolis," about kids learning Mandarin, brought back memories of high school, when we built bomb shelters to survive a Soviet nuclear attack and gasped at communist atrocities in China. With the U.S. over its head in debt, knowing Mandarin might be a good idea. What a difference a half-century makes...
...Nkrumah, Ghana's pan-Africanist, earned a B.A., and M.A., in the U.S. Zimbabwean Robert Mugabe is a former teacher who was raised, in part, by the Jesuits and earned four university degrees by correspondence in prison. Mbeki too spent years in exile studying Marxism in Britain and the Soviet Union. Even Mandela was a chief's son and one of the country's first black lawyers before he became a revolutionary. For these men, the struggle was as much intellectual as physical. (See pictures of South Africa after 15 years of ANC rule...
...Obama sees Iran as a potential partner because it shares a loathing of al-Qaeda, Nixon saw Communist China as a potential partner because it loathed the U.S.S.R. Nixon didn't stop there. Even as he reached out to China, he also pursued détente with the Soviet Union. This double outreach - to both Moscow and Beijing - gave Nixon more leverage over each, since each communist superpower feared that the U.S. would favor the other, leaving it geopolitically isolated. On a smaller scale, that's what Obama is trying to do with Iran and Syria today. By reaching...