‘We are probably going to have some suicides as a result of this comet," he said. “The sad part is that I was really not surprised. Comets are lovely objects, but they don’t have apocalyptic significance. We must use our minds, our reason.” Sadly, there were more suicides — at least three by former members of the Heaven’s Gate cult, and one man unrelated to the group who left a suicide note reading, “I’m going on the spaceship with Hale-Bopp to be with those who have gone before me.” Could a pro-slavery Southerner have poisoned him with arsenic over this? He later wrote in his memoirs: “It was more than a gaffe. It was a ‘defining moment’ of the worst imaginable kind. I can’t overstate how discouraging and exasperating the whole event was.” (Note to younger readers: If it’s hard to understand from the vantage of 2022 why this was such a big deal — especially when today’s politicians regularly say and do stupid things, and President Trump’s tweets were riddled with spelling errors — you have to understand it was a different time. For all of the problems back then, politicians were held to a higher standard, and expectations of decorum and competence for leaders were much higher than they are now.)
