Mr. Rogers, WarGames, and the intersection of culture and technology

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On September 1, 1983 at 3:26am Tokyo time, Korean Airlines flight number 007 flying from New York City to Seoul after stopping in Anchorage was shot down by a Soviet fighter jet after it entered Soviet air space.

A Soviet Su-15 interceptor fired two air-to-air missiles at the Boeing 747, destroying the commercial airliner and killing 269 people. There were twenty-two children under 12 years old aboard. And the generally accepted theory for why the plane entered Soviet airspace is that the autopilot malfunctioned, unintentionally placing the plane inside Soviet airspace.

Larry McDonald was one of the 62 Americans on that flight. He was a politician and member of the US House of Representatives representing Georgia. A trained doctor and flight surgeon who served in the US Navy, McDonald consistently introduced legislation that was anti-communist:

• He wanted to award honorary US citizenship to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn was a Russian dissident, most famous for writing a book titled the Gulag Archipelago which described the horrible conditions inside the Soviet Gulag system. McDonald also invited Solzhenitsyn to address a joint session of Congress.
• McDonald introduced legislation to prohibit communist countries from using US federal funds to finance the purchase of American agricultural products.
• He created a committee in Congress to conduct an investigation of human rights abuses by communists in Southeast Asia.

In 1979, a few years before his death, McDonald founded the Western Goals Foundation. According to news reports, the Foundation was created in order to “blunt subversion, terrorism, and communism” by filling the gap “created by the disbanding of the House Un-American Activities Committee and what [McDonald] considered to be the crippling of the FBI during the 1970s”.

So, to be plain, Larry McDonald hated communism. And now he was dead, shot down by the Soviets in a commercial, civilian airliner. A sitting US Congressman and 61 other Americans dead at the hands of the Soviets.

Four days later, President Reagan took to the airwaves in an evening address to the American people: