When we hit major anniversaries the tendency is to focus on the anniversary -- and where we were in life and what we were doing and thinking at the time -- and we sometimes forget the context, or how the passage of time seems to compress so many other events, or even erase them. I always think of the moon landing as the smile at the end of the 1960s . . . 

When we think of the 1960s, we think of a decade of tragedy, and America in cultural and spiritual meltdown, with a war in Vietnam, its death toll rising every week in those years, and more and more Americans turning against the military and political establishment because of it . . . When we think of the 1960s we think of promises crushed and important lives extinguished by assassins and their guns -- John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Bobby Kennedy . . . We think of riots that devastated neighborhoods in our cities, including Baltimore.

Even in the Apollo project, to put a man on the moon, there was a horror: Three astronauts, including one of the original Mercury astronauts, Gus Grissom, were killed in a fire in the Apollo Command Module during a preflight test at Cape Canaveral on Jan. 27, 1967. Grissom, along with Roger Chaffee and Ed White, were training for the first crewed Apollo flight. . . .  After 1968, one of the most tragic years for our country, came 1969, and that summer night when, it seemed, the whole world was watching . . .  the Sunday night Armonstrong then Aldrin stepped foot on the moon . . . the smile at the end of an unhappy decade . . . .