May 29: On Top of the World, A President Is Born, She Led the Field at Indy

The highest points are not always geographical. May 29 belongs to three people who reached the top of something — one literally, standing at 29,032 feet with the world spread beneath them in every direction; one metaphorically, embodying for a generation the idea that the country could be young and brilliant and still ascending; and one in the specific, contested, thrilling sense of leading a field of thirty-three drivers around a two-and-a-half-mile oval in front of a quarter million spectators. Hillary and Norgay proved something about what the human body could endure. Kennedy proved something about what the presidency could inspire. Patrick proved something about who belongs on a starting grid. All three stories are about the particular courage required to go somewhere that the people around you have not yet gone.

The Summit

On May 29, 1953, at approximately 11:30 in the morning local time, Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa from the Khumbu region of Nepal, reached the summit of Mount Everest — 29,032 feet above sea level, the highest point on the surface of the earth — becoming the first people confirmed to have done so. They had been climbing since before dawn as part of a British expedition led by Colonel John Hunt, and they reached the summit after pushing through the last 300 feet together, cutting steps in the ice on the final ridge, and emerging onto a snow dome no larger than a dining room table. Tenzing planted flags — of the United Nations, Britain, Nepal, and India — and Hillary photographed him. Tenzing later said Hillary offered to photograph him in return and that he declined because he did not know how to use the camera. They stayed at the summit for approximately fifteen minutes before beginning the long descent.

The news reached London on the morning of June 2, 1953 — the day of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation — and was received as a gift of almost improbable timing: the new queen's realm, on the day of her crowning, had placed its flag on the top of the world. Hillary was knighted within days. Tenzing received the George Medal. The question of who stepped onto the summit first — Hillary or Tenzing — has been discussed for seventy years; both men consistently declined to specify, describing it as a team effort and a moment they reached together. That reticence was itself a kind of answer. Since 1953, more than 6,000 people have summited Everest, and the mountain's commercial accessibility has transformed its cultural meaning considerably. But the first ascent remains what it was on May 29, 1953: the answer to a question humanity had been asking for decades, delivered by two men who climbed through the night and stood for fifteen minutes at the top of everything.

Brookline, 1917

On May 29, 1917, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, the second of nine children of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. He grew up in a family of political ambition, Catholic faith, fierce competition, and wealth sufficient to insulate him from the privations that marked most American childhoods of the era — but not from the losses that accumulated as he aged. His older brother Joseph Jr., his father's preferred vessel for the family's presidential ambitions, was killed in a bomber explosion over the English Channel in 1944, redirecting those ambitions toward Jack. He entered Congress in 1946, the Senate in 1952, and the presidency in January 1961, the youngest person ever elected to the office, defeating Richard Nixon in one of the closest elections in American history. His inauguration address — "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country" — set a tone of generational purpose that the speech itself then had to live up to.

Kennedy's presidency lasted one thousand days. In that time he navigated the Bay of Pigs disaster, managed the Cuban Missile Crisis — thirteen days in October 1962 during which the world came closer to nuclear war than at any point before or since — proposed the Civil Rights Act that Lyndon Johnson would eventually sign, committed the United States to reaching the Moon before the end of the decade, and established the Peace Corps, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and a rhetorical vision of American purpose that his successor, his successor's successor, and every Democratic president since has measured themselves against. He was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. He was forty-six years old. The mythology that attached itself to his presidency in the years after his death — Camelot, the lost golden age — has complicated the historical assessment of what he actually achieved and left undone. What cannot be complicated is the quality of his hold on the imagination of the people who lived through his time: the particular electricity of a young man who seemed, for a thousand days, to believe that the future was genuinely open and that the country was equal to it.

Leading Laps

On May 29, 2005, Danica Patrick — twenty-three years old, in her first Indianapolis 500, driving for Rahal Letterman Racing — led nineteen laps of the race and finished fourth, the highest finish by a woman in the event's ninety-four-year history to that point. She had qualified in a competitive field, run with the leaders for much of the race, and taken the lead for the first time on lap 56, becoming the first woman ever to lead laps at the Indianapolis 500. Her car was lighter than most of the competition because she weighed less than her fellow drivers — a fact that generated its own debate about whether her pace reflected driving skill or physics — but the laps she led were led at racing speeds, in traffic, under pressure, against a field that had not previously had to consider the possibility that a woman might be faster. The race was won by Dan Wheldon. Patrick finished fourth. The crowd at Indianapolis Motor Speedway gave her a reception that left no ambiguity about what the moment meant to them.

We have met Danica Patrick once before in this series — her April 20, 2008 victory at the Indy Japan 300, which made her the first woman to win an IndyCar race. The 2005 Indianapolis 500 was the foundation on which that win was built: the race that introduced her to the sport's largest audience, established her credibility as a competitive driver rather than a novelty, and set the terms on which she would be evaluated for the rest of her career. The weight debate, the endorsement deals, the celebrity coverage, and the persistent skepticism of a portion of the racing community all followed from that afternoon in Indianapolis. So did the racing. Patrick started seventeen Indianapolis 500s, competed in NASCAR for seven seasons, and retired from full-time racing in 2018 having done more to make women's participation in professional motorsport imaginable than any driver before her. The nineteen laps she led on May 29, 2005 were the ones that started the argument — and she was never entirely finished winning it.