Mercury Rising: John Glenn, John Kennedy, and the New Battleground of the Cold War by Jeff Shesol
On February 20, 1962, John Kennedy joined millions of his fellow citizens by being in front of a television watching John Glenn lift off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, for this nation’s first manned orbital flight. I, a mere youth, was also glued to the TV. Unlike the Soviet Union that had put the first man in orbit ten months earlier with no publicity, the launch was a very public event, with hundreds of millions of people watching it all over the world.
This book tells the story of the events that led up to the Cape Canaveral countdown. Because the Soviets had beaten us in the first stage of the space race, there was enormous pressure on President Kennedy and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to have a successful flight. Given the many setbacks that the program suffered in the months leading up to the launch, a successful trip was no sure thing. During the flight, every ten minutes a voice rang out in the New York City subway system asking people to “Pray for John Glenn.” There were several problems that developed while Glenn was in orbit, and flight controllers were really worried that the capsule’s heat shield had loosened at launch and would not be able to bring Glenn back safely.
The narrative begins with the announcement of the original Mercury 7 astronauts on April 9, 1959, during the Eisenhower administration. Each man had an impressive resume with hundreds or thousands of hours flying time as well as experience as test pilots, risking their lives pushing the envelope of airplane performance. Most had air combat experience.
John Glenn, the oldest astronaut at 38, had the most impressive flight credentials. He had flown missions in WWII and in Korea and won five Distinguished Flying Crosses and nineteen Air Medals. That’s a lot.
Glenn was an All-American boy. He looked much younger than he was, had married his hometown sweetheart, and was a war hero. He also stole the initial press conference with a mixture of seriousness and self-deprecating humor. Despite his “Aw shucks” demeanor, he was very competitive and determined to get what he wanted. All of his fellow astronauts were alphas but he was probably the most alpha.
Glenn grew up in a tiny Ohio town. His nickname was Bud. One summer, his father, who was a plumber, arranged for father and son to go up in a WW1 bi-plane. Bud was hooked on flying. He was eight years old. Ten years later, Glenn signed up for a WWII pilot instruction program. He learned how to fly and joined the Army Air Corps. Right before he went off to war, he asked his girlfriend, Annie, to marry him. She said yes.
Glenn was sent to the South Pacific and saw a lot of action against the Japanese. He was a gifted pilot who was unafraid of doing new things like really steep dives to do a better job of bombing the enemy. He flew 59 missions and won a lot of medals before the war ended in 1945.
After the war, Glenn learned how to fly jets, which were new to the flying scene. He ended up in the Marines and started flying combat missions in 1952. His wingman on many missions was Ted Williams, a guy who normally made his living hitting baseballs. They became bunkmates and stayed close friends for their entire lives.
Williams had a succinct description of his fellow pilot: “The man is crazy.” Glenn would ignore anti-aircraft fire and fly much lower than normal to get to the enemy. Glenn was good at bombing but the real glory in the skies was plane-to-plane combat - dogfights, He joined a fighter-interceptor squadron and was very good at shooting down Chinese MIG planes.
After the Korean truce in 1953, John Glenn decided to stay in the Marines and become a test pilot at the Naval Air Test Center at Patuxent River, Maryland. A few years later he set a world record for traveling across the nation, flying a Crusader jet. (Try to name a plane “Crusader” today and see what happens.) That feat got Glenn a lot of national TV attention. He made a lot of speeches and charmed a lot of people across the land.
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. President Eisenhower made a point of downplaying the event, but polls showed that the American public was concerned that the Russians were winning the space race. After a few months, Ike figured out that having a successful space program was important. Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Senate majority leader, argued that winning in space was in the national interest. The fact that his state, Texas, home of NASA, would greatly benefit from an expensive space effort was no doubt part of his thinking.
Johnson’s prodding led to the creation of NASA in 1958. For many years, the idea was that the military would run the space program but LBJ thought that would be a mistake. He prevailed.
After three failures, in January, 1958, the US finally put a tiny satellite, Explorer 1, into orbit. NASA’s first administrator, T. Keith Glennan, wasn’t all that enthusiastic about pushing to put humans into earth orbit. He didn't think that it was a priority, boy once the Soviet Union sent a man into orbit, he reconsidered his view.
Glenn applied to be an astronaut and essentially was at the head of the class by most measures in the competition. He was an exceptional test pilot, wicked smart, in great physical shape, and had a charming personality. He was one of the Mercury Seven. His wife, Annie, was never enthusiastic about his wanting to be in space because she understood that his time would not be his own, but she supported him.
The newly-minted spacemen observed several flights of the Atlas rocket that was to take them into space. Most blew up, not a good beginning. After observing one such disaster, astronaut Alan Shepard said, “That’s our ride? Well, I'm glad they got that out of the way.” He also said, “I hope they fix that thing before we sit on it.”
In early 1959, the Mercury Seven spent a lot of time in Washington trying to build support for the manned space program. President Eisenhower was not sure that we actually had to send people into space in order to build up our space capacity. As it stood, the astronauts were literally just going along for the ride. They would have little or no operational control of the capsule. Being test pilots, they chafed at that, and over time NASA gave them more to do in orbit. At first there was no window in the capsule, a situation which the astronauts found unacceptable. They got their window.
One of the Mercury 7 would be the first American to orbit the earth. The press loved John Glenn, who was very at ease in answering their questions, and he was the odds-on favorite, which made him unpopular with his fellow astronauts. He also was a straight shooter, even a prude, who didn’t drive a Corvette and chase women, two popular activities among his colleagues. (I wondered how military personnel could afford a Corvette, but a Florida dealership sold them to the boys for $1, a very affordable price.)
Some of the astronauts got caught doing bad things - too much drinking, chasing and catching married women - but the press looked the other way, just as they did about President John Kennedy’s amorous activities. Alan Shepard was almost embarrassed when a photographer caught him in Tijuana, Mexico, having sex with a woman who wasn’t his wife. The photo was about to be published and go national. Shorty Powers, the NASA official in charge of keeping the astronauts tethered, went nuts. He called up John Glenn, the press’s favorite, and asked him to contact the reporter and his paper to kill the picture. It worked. Glenn saved Al Shepard’s butt, which was interesting in that Shepard and Glenn were considered to be the favorites to be the first American to orbit the earth.
Powers and Glenn warned the astronauts to control their behavior, but Shepard pushed back. Speaking for most of his colleagues, he argued that they could do whatever they wanted. Ironically, Shepard’s lack of restraint may have cost him the chance to orbit. He ended up in the capsule that went into space without orbiting. That was a big deal, but being the first to orbit was the main prize.
By late 1959, NASA still hadn’t figured out how to keep Atlas rockets from exploding on launch. That was a problem since the Atlas would carry the Mercury capsule into orbit. In September of that year, the Soviets crash landed a probe on the moon. An Atlas that was supposed to launch a satellite to orbit the moon blew up in October. Adding insult to injury, on October 4, the second anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, the world’s first satellite, the Russians sent a probe around the far side of the moon which sent back pictures.
Candidate John Kennedy was no fan of manned space flight but he used the “missile gap” as a central theme of his campaign. There was no missile gap; we had a lot more of those than the USSR. There was a space race gap. We were way behind.
JFK’s running mate, Lyndon Johnson, was enthusiastic about space exploration. As the majority leader in the Senate, he had gotten NASA to locate in Houston. As the competition with the Soviets ramped up, there would be more buildings and more jobs for his state.No one knew what the newly elected President Kennedy would do with NASA. On election day, a rocket testing the escape system for the Mercury capsule failed. Two weeks later, another rocket blew up on the launch pad.
As Eisenhower left office, he slashed NASA's budget. He was fed up with the consistent inability of the agency to successfully launch rockets. As it turned out, the Soviets also had a lot of rocket failures including an October 1960 explosion that incinerated a hundred people. Their launches were secret so no one saw their mistakes. About 50% of their launches failed, not as bad as the USA, but not good.
JFK’s science advisor did a report that was very critical of our space effort. It was a mess when Kennedy assumed office in January of 1960. LBJ understood the deficiencies of the current program but saw space as a way to show that America was better than the USSR.
Despite these setbacks, the Mercury program was about to decide who would do the two sub-orbital flights and who would orbit the globe. Glenn and Shepard were the finalists. People in the program liked Shepard and almost resented Glenn who seemed too good to be true.
LBJ was in charge of finding a new administrator for NASA and came up with James Webb, a successful businessman who also knew his way around Washington. It was a good choice.
Al Shepard initially got the nod to orbit, ticking off Glenn who pushed back mightily on the decisions but to no avail. A few months later, the NASA brain trust reconsidered and named Shepard, Glenn and Gus Grissom as the finalists for the flights. Once that was announced the other four astronauts felt humiliated but they put up a good front.
In 1961, things got better for NASA. They launched a monkey on a suborbital flight and it worked. Ham the chimp was a hero. A few months later, Atlas rockets stopped blowing up every time they were launched. Someone had fixed what was wrong. While JFK still wasn’t sold on manned space flight, he did give NASA an increase of $126 million to keep the program moving. LBJ had a lot to do with that budget boost. In April of 1961, Russian Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the earth. Nikita Khrushchev bragged to the world that the launch and successful return of Gagarin proved the superiority of the Soviet system. That got people in Washington to shift their thinking about manned space exploration. Maybe it was worth doing. Many members of Congress demanded that Americans get serious about beating the Russians.
A few weeks after Gagarin’s flight, the US was embarrassed by the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba that was supposed to take out Fidel Castro. It didn’t. JFK took full responsibility for the mess and his popularity reached 83%, twice as high as that of contemporary presidents.
JFK was shifting his thinking. He asked what we could do beat the Russians. He was told that we could possibly land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. JFK put LBJ in charge of doing a deep dive on the space program and come up with ways to improve it.
Glenn, Grissom and Shepard - The First Team as Life Magazine labeled them - were living in a Holiday Inn at Cocoa Beach, FL, and going over mission details at Cape Canaveral. The suborbital flight was supposed to have happened in the fall of 1960 but rockets kept blowing up. It still wasn’t clear who would be in the rocket. Glenn was back-up for both the imminent suborbital shot and the earth orbit launch. He was not happy. NASA announced that Al Shepard would be in the capsule for the suborbital flight that was scheduled for May 2. It was delayed until May 5. As back-up, John was very supportive of Al. Glenn taped a Playboy centerfold in the capsule, Freedom 7. No one knew where he got it since he had probably never looked at a Playboy, but it was funny.
The launch and ocean landing were perfect. Shepard tested the controls in the capsule and they worked to shift its positioning if needed. The flight was celebrated around the country, with people crying in the streets, maybe because the rocket didn't blow up.
The flight changed the course of the space program. New NASA administrator Jim Webb had pulled together a team that came up with a report that outlined what needed to be done to beat the Russians to the moon. He gave it to the president three days after Shepard’s trip. Two days later, on May 10, JFK gave the go-ahead to land on the moon. LBJ’s position had prevailed.
JFK announced his decision in a major speech to Congress. There was Republican grumbling about how much it would cost but since the Democrats had a thirty-vote advantage in the Senate and a ninety-one-vote edge in the House, getting the money was no problem.
JFK was way ahead of public opinion here. Almost 60% of the country didn’t think it made sense to land men on the moon. Even people at NASA wondered if they could even do it. The astronauts liked the decision but realized that they would probably be too old to go.
There was to be a second suborbital flight on July 21, with Grissom as pilot. The flight went well but somehow the hatch blew off before it was supposed to and Grissom had to abandon the capsule and watch it sink. He was OK but embarrassed. He maintained that the hatch just blew on its own, but many people think that he hit the hatch button inadvertently.
On August 6, a few weeks after the world saw an American astronaut lose a space capsule, Soviet astronaut Gherman Titov orbited the earth for 24 hours. He was an international celebrity. At the reception for Titov in Moscow, Khrushchev noted that Russians actually orbit the earth instead of just going up and down and falling into the ocean. In a shot across the Mercury space capsule’s bow, he did add that he was happy “that the American flier did not get drowned.”
In August, 1961, Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall to blunt the exodus of people leaving East Berlin to the freedom of West Berlin. At the end of September, Russia resumed nuclear testing, detonating 28 bombs within three months. That fall, Americans wanted to be ready for the next war, so many people constructed fallout shelters.
In November there were two more rocket mishaps which pushed back any possible launch date. In late November, Enos the chimp was launched and did two orbits before a successful return. It was a qualified success in that some things went wrong but the chimp was fine. After the flight, NASA announced that John Glenn would be on the first orbital flight. The other six astronauts were not happy. Many had come to resent Glenn and wanted Al Shepard to get the nod.
Glenn tended to gain weight so he ran five miles a day and watched what he ate. In December, he got a week off and went home to Virginia to see his family. His wife, Annie, was really nervous about the upcoming flight. She knew that there was a good chance that her husband would not come back alive.
JFK had come through a tough year, but he learned a lot about how to be president. At the end of the year, he had a 78% approval rating. He still wasn’t too enthusiastic about manned space flight despite the fact that the space race had really captured the public’s interest.
Glenn asked the principal of his two kids’ school to have the students come up with a name for his capsule. They did a good job in coming up with Friendship 7.
As Glenn was training for the mission, he kept pushing to have the flight plan include the astronaut actually taking control of the capsule. NASA wanted him to basically just sit there for three orbits and let the autopilot do everything.
Glenn was a super celebrity in the months before the launch. He was a natural on TV and his personal story about growing up in a tiny farm town in Ohio and marrying his high school sweetheart resonated.
Glenn was nervous about the flight but as a test pilot he got nervous a lot. He knew how much failure the space program had seen and everything had to go correctly for him to come back safely. He wrote a long letter to his family in case he didn’t make it. It was beautiful and eloquent. He also recorded two audio tapes, one for Annie and one for the kids, in case things didn’t work out. NASA also was worried, and they worked out how they would handle a disaster in space. Fortunately, no one read Glenn’s letter until many years later and NASA didn’t have to present bad news to the world.
There were four launch delays in early 1962, which gave Glenn more time to convince NASA to change a few things. He wanted a camera which wasn’t in the flight plan. He bought an inexpensive one and brought it to the engineers who figured out how to adapt it to work for a guy who wore heavy gloves while orbiting. The flight managers agreed that taking pictures was a good idea.
January 27 was scheduled for lift-off. Glenn sat in the capsule for over five hours as the flight crew took care of several equipment glitches. Eventually, the weather turned bad and the flight was scrubbed. Glenn was nonplussed but his wife was really upset. She wanted this to be over with and the fact that they still were fixing things right before take-off concerned her. NASA announced that the launch would take place on February 13. The reason for the long delay was that engineers found a few more problems with the Atlas rocket that had to be fixed. As it turned out, the rocket did not fly until February 20. The launch had to be scrubbed ten times before actual lift-off, mostly because of bad weather.
On launch day, things continued to go wrong. The Atlas’s guidance system had to be replaced while Glenn sat in the capsule. They had to replace a broken bolt on the hatch door. Annie talked to her husband a few minutes before launch, which looked like it might actually happen that day.
The final four-minute countdown was flawless, with Al Shepard doing the honors. The Atlas took off at 9:47 AM as fellow astronaut Scott Cooper said his own impromptu prayer: “Godspeed, John Glenn.”
At the White House, JFK and LBJ nervously watched on TV, as did 40 million other Americans – the largest daytime TV audience in history. Pope John XXIII prayed for a successful trip. CBS anchor Walter Cronkite yelled, “Go, baby!”
Five minutes after launch, Glenn was in orbit. He described the incredible view but he had work to do. The astronaut’s secretary had typed a four-and-a-half-foot long list noting all of Glenn’s tasks. Many of these involved seeing how the ship responded to manual piloting. Glenn and the other astronauts had prevailed and NASA had finally put in real controls. He took a lot of pictures but he was limited to just one roll of film since he couldn't change the film with his gloves on. (Younger readers - Google “film camera.”) He conducted medical tests to see how the body responded to space and weightlessness. Glenn’s heart rate and blood pressure remained remarkably stable.
The capsule started to shake a bit so Glenn took over manually and calmed things down. Back at mission control, an alarm light went on, indicating that the heat shield was loose. That would be very bad because the shield has to stay in place to keep the capsule cool enough to survive reentry. It was possible that the sensor or radio transmitter was sending a false signal but there was no way of knowing.
Glenn had a few other problems to deal with so he was busy. Flight personnel on the ground were really concerned. They asked Glenn some questions that he thought might have something to do with re-entry but no one ever told him about the possible problem. Mission control couldn’t figure out if the shield was loose so they told Glenn to start the process of coming home.
In Roanoke, Annie Glenn had ordered 25 buckets of fried chicken for the reporters in her front yard.
Reporters at mission control sensed that something was wrong. Shorty Powers, the voice of NASA, announced that they checked into a possible heat shield problem and decided that all was well. No one believed him. Walter Cronkite mused that perhaps there was a problem.
Friendship 7 went into radio silence once it hit the atmosphere. No one knew exactly how long that would be. When it reached four minutes, everyone was really concerned. A few seconds later, Glenn said “Loud and clear” in response to Shepard’s repeated call-outs to the capsule.
Glenn was twelve miles up and his capsule was shaking but, all of a sudden, things calmed down. The parachutes opened, the capsule landed in the ocean, and John Glenn walked into the history books.
The world was very happy. There was an impromptu ticker-tape parade in Manhattan. Bands played all over the country. JFK stopped working on his comments in the event of Glenn’s death. The president called the astronaut to congratulate him. The US Post Office issued a commemorative stamp. Ten million were sold in one day. Annie spoke to the press. She had a serious stutter but she was fine answering questions.
Glenn’s flight was important for a lot of reasons. He did have to use controls to fix problems in orbit, proving that astronauts needed to also be pilots in space. The Russians had been doing a lot of bad things around the world, but with Friendship 7, the US got some of its swagger back. Khrushchev sent a nice note to the president and, for a few days, the two countries were nice to each other.
A few days after the flight, Glenn was honored in a ceremony at Cape Canaveral. LBJ escorted the astronaut to the event, one of the few things in the vice-president’s portfolio. The Kennedy insiders had never liked Johnson and after Glenn’s return he was effectively cut off from doing any serious tasks. President Kennedy made a nice speech and handed out a medal as 100,000 cheered on.
Glenn briefed the press on his trip and revealed that he pretty much knew that there was a potential heat shield problem because of the questions he was asked. He was not happy about not being briefed on the actual situation. It turned out that the sensor switch was defective. The heat shield was fine.
On February 26, there was a huge parade in Washington, DC. Glenn addressed Congress and made the case that manned space exploration was critical to the nation’s future. He was very persuasive and support for NASA increased dramatically. On March 1, Glenn was feted in New York City, with four million people in attendance. Two days later he and his family went home to Ohio to one more celebration, this time with 1,600 people in attendance.
Glenn turned down invitations to 2,600 events. He was busy working with NASA on developing the Gemini two-man capsule and helping conceptualize the Apollo lunar landing program. He also made a lot of appearances and lobbied in Washington for more NASA funding. He wanted to fly in space again but he really was out of the astronaut training loop because he had so many other assignments.
Glenn’s space trip jump-started the American space program. He worked for NASA for many years and in 1974 was elected to the US Senate from Ohio and served three terms. He did make a short run for president in 1984 but was quickly out of the race. He wasn’t a great politician. His colleagues respected him but he wasn’t a back-slapper or a deal-maker, and he really was a bit of a prude.
Once in a while when he was in Washington he would go to the National Air and Space Museum and gaze at Friendship 7 which was a permanent exhibit. He wasn’t done with space flight. In October of 1998, he spent nine days on the Discovery space shuttle as a subject of experiments to test the effect of weightlessness on older people’s bone mass. After he returned, he was on the cover of Time Magazine just as he had been 36 years earlier when he first orbited the earth. Glenn died in 2016 at age ninety-five. His space capsule and mission uniform are still major attractions at the Air and Space Museum.
Bob’s Take
In the mid 1960’s I went to a Harry Belafonte concert at UMass with my girlfriend from Mount Holyoke and her roommate whose father was visiting her. He was John Glenn. The four of us sat in the front row. Belafonte introduced the astronaut. He forgot to introduce me. It was pretty neat.
Dave from Bucknell, who is related to my wife, Susan, served in the Korean War in the same unit as Ted Williams and John Glenn who flew missions together. That is also really neat.
Like many people in the 1960s, I was totally into the space race. Each launch was exciting. Fortunately the press didn’t report all of the failures. That would have been depressing.
President Kennedy was never very excited about manned space flight, but he had the sense that it was important to be first in space and beat the Russians to the moon. Given how inept we were in the first few years of the space race, it is impressive that we did get to the moon by the end of the decade. This July 20 is the 53rd anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s big step for mankind.
This was a very uplifting book. It brought me back to a time when there was such a thing as national purpose. Regardless of class, race, or political affiliation almost all Americans were supportive of space exploration.
