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.
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