Stopgap speaker's stop-Hillary days

Daily Point

McHenry’s moment in old New York

Suddenly, Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina has become speaker pro tempore of the U.S. House, overseeing the chamber until a new speaker is agreed upon. The ejection of his friend, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, thrust him into the post.

Instantly, McHenry’s angry slam-down of the gavel went viral. But those who have followed New York politics for a long time might remember McHenry from his days as a young GOP operative who ended up in the camp of then-Rep. Rick Lazio, the Brightwaters Republican who lost the 2000 Senate election to Hillary Clinton.

Then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani withdrew late in the cycle. His replacement Lazio — after leading in some polls against the departing president’s wife — committed a memorable gaffe by striding into her space on the debate stage and trying to prod her into signing a campaign-finance agreement. None of his advisers — surely not McHenry — took a hit for suggesting that stunt to Lazio, who in the years since only references the tactical error in a good-natured, self-deprecatory way.

McHenry’s clearest role was as creator and administrator of hillaryno.com, a website designed to draw contributions in the early efforts to stop her rise. “Born in Illinois and carried to power in Arkansas, with no connection of any kind to New York,'' one posting said in early 1999, ''Hillary has set her sights on the New York Senate seat and maybe … probably … set her sights even higher.''

As the campaign approached, those who clicked on the site were informed that they could donate to Friends of Giuliani, a federal fundraising committee, either through the mail or online. But Giuliani faced a difficult race and declined to run after being diagnosed with prostate cancer and making a nasty public issue of his second divorce. So the site was deployed in the service of the Lazio campaign.

McHenry was also known in 2000 as a national operative for the ultimately victorious George W. Bush campaign. McHenry was first elected to Congress in 2004. He may not be involved with New York politics anymore. But in Washington, McHenry will undoubtedly find solidarity going forward with Long Island’s GOP delegation, whose members were also staggered by the overthrow of McCarthy, in whose favor they all voted on Tuesday.

— Dan Janison dan.janison@newsday.com

Pencil Point

Showtime!

For more cartoons, visit www.newsday.com/nationalcartoons

Reference Point

When winning the war was rocket science

A Soviet spacecraft named Luna 3 launched on Oct. 4, 1959, and Newsday’s editorial board wrote about it the very next day.

That’s because the Space Race was in full flower, and the board was worried that America was losing. That board saw prowess in space as the modern equivalent of ships, airplanes and ballistic missiles — the nations with the biggest ones were the world’s most important powers.

“A Russian space satellite is now racing toward a path around the moon, broadcasting scientific information in the high, piercing note of a violin string keyed to ‘A’ above middle ‘C.’ This is a huge accomplishment, and one that should frighten us — not so much because of its military applications, but because of the effect it is bound to have upon world opinion,” the board wrote in a piece called “Skunked Again.”

“We know now that in the exploration of outer space, the Russians are years ahead of us.”

The Space Race had begun exactly two years earlier, when the Soviet Union unexpectedly launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first satellite. That in turn launched what is now known as the Sputnik Crisis in the U.S. and other Western nations suddenly fearful and anxious about a technology gap between themselves and the Soviets. Overnight, the Space Race became an integral part of the Cold War.

“The best estimates in Washington indicate that two years will elapse before we draw even with the Russians,” Newsday’s board wrote. “Those two years, unless well and aggressively used, could be fatal to the balance of world power.”

Luna 3 was designed to orbit the moon and take photos of its heretofore unseen dark side, and the 17 pictures it transmitted back to Earth — of 29 taken in all — were of poor quality but nevertheless exciting. But the mission added to the urgency in the United States to catch up to what was perceived as Soviet technological prowess, which was seen as a threat to our national security.

Newsday’s board wondered whether the nation had “the guts and the courage to buckle down” and meet the challenge posed by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who had recently contended that the American capitalist system was weak.

“It is up to the President, at this worrisome moment, to take the leadership,” the board wrote. “If not, then through sheer laziness we may fulfill the prediction made by Khrushchev: That he will bury us. But do we need to dig the grave and crawl into it ourselves?”

In hindsight, of course, the board’s worries were somewhat overwrought. Sputnik led America to make massive investments in research, education and national security, which led to President John F. Kennedy’s epochal “We Choose the Moon” speech less than three years later.

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” Kennedy told a crowd at Houston’s Rice University on Sept. 12, 1962.

Kennedy promised to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, and seven years later Neil Armstrong became the first human to stand on the lunar surface on July 21, 1969, after Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

Russia is still playing second — or worse — fiddle in the race to the moon. The United States still is the only country to land humans on the moon. And Russia’s first lunar lander in 47 years crashed into the surface in August, a few days before India successfully landed its own lunar probe.

Newsday’s board did not know that 64 years ago, when it wrote, “Obviously, if we can’t stay even with the Russians, if not ahead of them, the rest of the world is going to reappraise our position in a drastic way.”

The two nations changed places in the Space Race over those seven decades, but in the end the board was right about reappraising reputations.

— Michael Dobie michael.dobie@newsday.com, Amanda Fiscina-Wells amanda.fiscina-wells@newsday.com

Subscribe to The Point here and browse past editions of The Point here.