As we marked the 30 year anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger
disaster this past week, I knew that I wanted to hear President Ronald Reagan’s
iconicly comforting speech once again.
Having read most of President Reagan’s speeches from his long career, I
appreciate well crafted rhetoric that truly inspires the listener. The day of the challenger disaster was no
different. Scheduled to give the State
of the Union Address to Congress that very night, Reagan’s plans for January
28, 1986 took a much darker turn after the seven person crew of the space
shuttle Challenger died instantly when their ship exploded 73 seconds after
liftoff from Kennedy Space Center in Florida due to a faulty rubber seal. No doubt having just spent days refining a
major policy speech that was destined to be postponed, the president took the
national television stage from behind his desk in the oval office instead. He spoke of the first couple’s personal sadness
at the news of such a great loss. He
continued to speak of a resolute vision to continue space exploration despite
tragedy. But he ended his speech with
these haunting words: “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw
them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and
"slipped the surly bonds of earth" to "touch the face of
God."[1]
What most people don’t know is that the president was actually quoting
from a poem written by a Canadian fighter pilot who had joined the Royal
Canadian Air Force during World War II.
Born in Shanghi, China in 1922, John Gillespie Magee, Jr. was the son of
Canadian and American parents serving as Anglican missionaries to the
region. He was an avid writer of poetry
as a young adult. One such poem he
titled High Flight after composing it in August of 1941. He included it in a letter to his father, now
a minister, on September 3, 1941. On
December 11, only four days after America was attacked at Pearl Harbor, the young
pilot took off in a Spitfire on a training mission near Lincolnshire, England. Diving out of the clouds at high speed, he
collided midair with another plane at 1,400 feet – a height too low for a
parachute to successfully open. Magee
died at the age of 19, but his poem lives on in the Library of Congress today
and in the hearts of millions because of its first and last lines: "Oh! I
have slipped the surly bonds of Earth […] Put out my hand, and touched the face
of God."[2] A fitting, if not prophetically chilling
connection to the midair disaster 45 years later, neither the Challenger crew
nor Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee should be forgotten.
[2] Full
text of High Flight: "Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
- Put out my hand, and touched the face of God."
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