Word: mckone
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...Force reported the plane lost, the Russians piously joined in the search. For ten days, until Khrushchev returned from a junket to Austria, they remained silent about the attack. Then they announced that they had shot the plane down over Soviet waters near the Kola Peninsula. Olmstead and McKone, the only survivors, were in prison. They would, cried Nikita, be tried as spies, "under the full rigor of Soviet law." Such vehemence seemed only natural after the loud propaganda that followed the capture of U-2 Pilot Powers and Khrushchev's intransigence in Paris...
...their stand. Henry Cabot Lodge, then U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., made an eloquent presentation of the American case, explained how U.S. radars had tracked the doomed plane until the moment it was shot down-well out over international waters. But the Russians were unmoved. They held Olmstead and McKone incommunicado, let them see each other only twice, refused to permit U.S. embassy personnel to visit them. All that the Russians returned of the plane or its crew was the body of the pilot, Captain Willard G. Palm. Captain Oscar L. Goforth, Major Eugene E. Posa and Captain Dean...
That's John. Unlike U-2 Pilot Powers, who began talking almost from the moment of his capture, Olmstead and McKone bore their imprisonment bravely. Once every two weeks-all they were allowed-the prisoners wrote home. From their letters, their anxious families could piece together the loneliness of men who dared not guess what their futures promised, what their country could or would do to save them. At her home in Topeka, Kans., near Forbes Air Force Base, John McKone's wife Connie read and reread every word she received. "The handwriting is John...
When she felt lowest, Connie McKone consoled herself by recalling the survival training that John got after he joined the Air Force and graduated from navigator and bombardier school in 1954. That tough course would be useful now. "I want to come home so badly," John wrote. "Kiss each of the children for me and pray God I will be home soon...
...Like McKone, Bruce Olmstead seemed to worry more about what his ordeal would mean to his family than what it would do to him. His own spirit, which he showed from the moment he joined the Air Force after graduating from Kenyon College in 1957, was more than enough to sustain him. Brought up in a devout Episcopal family, Olmstead made the most of a Catholic Bible surprisingly provided by his jailers. He read Scriptures and spent hours making up sermons. "Often in his letters home," said his brother, Dermatologist Brent Olmstead, "he'd include a little prayer...