In the second episode of a sixty-eight million dollar event miniseries envisioned by Tom Hanks and executive produced by Ron Howard, John Slattery as Walter Mondale says he wants to end child hunger. “And if getting what I want means we don’t go to the moon, so be it.” He is the villain of the hour. In the fourth episode, some shit goes down. It’s 1968. Newsreel footage of cataclysm in the Deep South and Chicago, the Vietnam War. MLK dead, Bobby Kennedy dead. Vague and urgent unrest. Against this turbulence, a roomful of men in short-sleeve white shirts and black ties send three astronauts around the moon ten times. On their way back, the crew gets atta-boy telegrams from Charles Lindbergh, thirty years into his fascist period, and LBJ, refusing to let some dumb hippies steer us out of armed conflict. They also get one from a civilian, a lady named Valerie Pringle. It reads: “You saved 1968.” The score swells. Implore America to heal itself and we will do the most spectacularly irrelevant thing you’ve ever seen. Thirty years later, we’ll still be crowing about it. What ever happened with that other thing? It probably worked out fine.