All over America that Friday in November 1963, college football teams boarded airliners for their Saturday games. They took off in one country, where John F. Kennedy was president and where optimism and idealism were in the air, and some hours later they landed in another country, where Lyndon B. Johnson was president and the country was in a spasm of grief.
Last June, astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore lifted off for an eight-day journey on the Boeing Starliner space vehicle from a country led by Joe Biden. A few weeks from now, in March, after a prolonged delay, they will return to a different country, one led by Donald J. Trump.
In that time, long enough for a pregnancy to run from conception to birth, immense waves of change have washed over the U.S. and the world. The oldest president in American history has been replaced by the oldest person to be elected president. The rebels sitting in prison for having stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, now walk free. The independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent skeptic of vaccines, is now secretary of Health and Human Services, presiding over a bureaucracy with the power to regulate or ban vaccines.
And of course, the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs are no longer the champs.
Everything else has changed, too — changed utterly.
When the two former Navy test pilots slipped the surly bounds of Earth — a phrase from a poem by John Gillespie Magee Jr., a Royal Canadian Air Force fighter pilot — the ties between the United States and Canada, symbolized by a continent-wide undefended border, seemed unbreakable, and the trade links between the two giant North American countries provided prosperity and jobs on both sides of the border.
When the astronauts return to Earth, they will find the United States viewing Canada as a hostile trading partner and Canada in a fresh burst of nationalistic fervor, with Canadian hockey fans in NHL arenas booing the American national anthem and American liquor removed from Canadian provincial outlets. When the two went into space, the rapper then known as Kanye West was on record apologizing for an antisemitic rant. When they return, they will discover that the performer now known as Ye has repudiated his apology and declared himself a Nazi.
When Williams and Wilmore blasted off, no American officials paid any mind to Greenland, and the ownership of the vital isthmus in Central America was firmly in the hands of Panama. Now Donald Trump’s government has its eyes on owning Greenland and repossessing the Panama Canal.
Americans have been in periods of convulsive transformation before. The change between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1801 replaced the stodgy ethos of the federalists with the more free-wheeling Democratic-Republicans. The change between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson in 1829 replaced the patrician leadership of the established East with the democratic abandon of what passed for the Western frontier. When William McKinley, whose sudden prominence as Trump’s tariff whisperer, was assassinated in 1901, there began the reformist impulse of Theodore Roosevelt, so different from his predecessor that Sen. Mark Hanna, a McKinley confidant, exclaimed, “That damned cowboy is president of the United States!”
Americans have witnessed swift political change in modern times as well. Franklin Delano Roosevelt basically overhauled the United States in his First Hundred Days, passing more than six dozen important pieces of legislation and putting Prohibition into eclipse, while working to pull the country out of the Depression. In his early days as president, Ronald Reagan greeted the freed Iran hostages, established a task force on regulatory relief, and set in motion tax and budget cuts that began a redefinition of the role of government in American life.
But no American president began his tenure with the whirlwind of Trump, whose first month has produced a flurry of executive orders, massive changes in government personnel, an assault on the tenure of Washington bureaucrats, challenges to longstanding legal doctrines, an overhaul of several agencies and the Justice Department, and a series of measures that leave Congress — ordinarily jealous of its power and prerogatives — as an afterthought in the government.
Indeed, in a mere 2% of his presidency, Trump has taunted Canada with the notion of becoming the 51st state; threatened steep tariffs against Canada and Mexico; put the new duties on hold; spoken about taking over Gaza; let Elon Musk run roughshod over the federal bureaucracy; offered buyouts to tens of thousands of federal workers; put a virtual end to foreign aid; strong-armed the confirmation of Cabinet nominees who alarmed Democrats and some Republicans; renamed Mount McKinley and the Gulf of America; stopped environmental regulations; put restrictions on health officials; stripped diversity, equity and inclusion programs from federal agencies; begun vast deportations of migrants; and banned transgender people from women’s athletic teams.
None of this was imaginable when the two astronauts lifted off. Then again, Williams and Wilmore expected to be back on Earth in time to watch the late-June debate between Biden and Trump. That debate was the fulcrum of change during the time the two have been in orbit.
Right now, we don’t know how much of these changes have reached the astronauts, who have been sleeping in hammocks 250 miles from Earth.
During the 34-hour mission of the longest Project Mercury flight, in 1963, astronaut Gordon Cooper faced no culture shock when his Faith 7 capsule returned to Earth after 22 orbits. The San Francisco Giants were in first place in the National League when he took off. They were in first place when he landed.
But when NASA astronaut Frank Rubio left Earth for a record 371 days, the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives. When he returned, the Republicans did.
And then there was the case of Richard Fecteau, a CIA agent now age 98. When he and John Downey were shot down over Communist China in 1954, the Giants and Dodgers were in New York. When he was released 17 years later, the two teams were in California. He missed the Kennedy and Johnson years, the entire run of the American Football League and the whole pre-revival Broadway run of “West Side Story.”
Here’s a welcome and a warning, Williams and Wilmore: Awaiting you is a country you may not recognize.
David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
