It is with no little irony that we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Lunar Landing under a full moon, amid a record-setting heatwave, in a country in which both science and the press are under attack, this time at highest levels of government.

We landed on the moon less than a year after the long, hot summer of 1968: when our cities burned after the assassinations of Martin Luther King; King's murder was followed by that of Ted Kennedy; and the most trusted voice in the mainstream press announced, during the Tet offensive in Vietnam, that that war was lost; George Wallace ran for President and won the electoral votes of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas; and Americans were being spat on in countries we had helped liberate only 23 years earlier.

Some still claim that the landing never happened, that the round-the-clock coverage of it was "fake news;" that King and Kennedy and those they inspired were un-American and should have gone "back where they came from."

Let us hope that this month's celebrations of the moon landing will help remind us of our country at its best and our once-vaunted ability to do "anything" if we set our minds to it.

The "heat" is truly on, literally and figuratively.

In 2019 and 2020 we need, more than ever, the kind of focus and national resolve that put us on the moon. That means renewing and maintaining our trust and pride not only in science but also in the institutions that resolved on our behalf to put us on the moon . . . and those that told us about it.