Jeff Shesol - Mercury Rising: John Glenn, John Kennedy, and the New Battleground of the Cold War

John Glenn, John Kennedy,
and the New Battleground of the Cold War

JEFF SHESOL

To Rebecca

What we are doing here in the United States is having a good hard look at how a great nation faces a great problem.

JAMES WEBB,
ADMINISTRATOR OF NASA,
APRIL 13, 1961

You lived and died alone, especially in fighters. Fighters. Somehow, despite everything, that word had not become sterile. You slipped into the hollow cockpit and strapped and plugged yourself into the machine. The canopy ground shut and sealed you off. Your oxygen, your very breath, you carried with you into the chilled vacuum, in a steel bottle. If you wanted to speak, you used the radio. You were as isolated as a deep-sea diver, only you went up, into nothing, instead of down. You were alone. At the end, there was no one you could touch.

JAMES SALTER,
GODS OF TIN

J OHN F. KENNEDY spent most of the morning of February 20, 1962, as the rest of America did: in front of a television. When he woke up he turned on the set in his bedroom, so he and his wife, Jacqueline, could watch the countdown to the launch of John Glenns spacecraft, Friendship 7, and when he arrived in the Oval Office he clicked on the television there. Another set was on in the family quarters, where Jackie remained, and another in the third-floor playroom, where four-year-old Caroline and her friends were watching the broadcast.

It was this way almost everywhere. One block north of the White House, a crowd gathered at a construction site to watch the workmens TV; at a nearby hospital, patients strong enough to leave their beds made their way, on foot or by wheelchair, to watch the set in the lobby. At Grand Central Terminal in New York, where CBS had mounted a twelve-by-sixteen-foot screen in the mezzanine, nearly ten thousand commuters stood side by side, heads angled upward. Ten months earlier, when the Soviet Union had launched the first man into spaceYuri Gagarin, who won the place in history that Glenn and the other Mercury astronauts had sought for themselves and their nationit had done so in secrecy. But Glenn, as the New York Times columnist James Reston wrote, was taking the whole country along for the ride.

The country had been on edge for months. Americans had watched, with mounting dread, as Glenns flight was postponed due to heavy cloud cover, postponed due to high seas in the Atlantic, where his capsule was supposed to splash down, postponed due to what NASA, with studied imprecision, called technical difficulties. Every delayten scrubs by mid-Februarygave the press more time to ruminate about the many ways an astronaut might die.

In October 1957 the Soviet Union had become the first to send a satelliteSputnikinto orbit, and then, in short succession, the first to put an animal into orbit, the first to land an unmanned craft on the moon, and the first to record images of the far side of the moon. American rocketsless powerful than Soviet boosterstended, with alarming frequency, to explode on the launchpad or send their payloads into the sea. By April 1961, when Gagarin made his single orbit around the Earth, the specter of Soviet domination of the heavens had acquired, for many Americans, a grim sort of inevitability. Alan Shepards ballistic flight three weeks later, which made him the first American in space, did little to lift the pall of self-doubt.

Congress was losing patience. Committees held emergency hearings and demanded a crash campaignround-the-clock shifts at NASA facilitiesto catch up. Unless we do something very imaginative, one congressman snapped, America is lost. The next step, many feared, was a Russian nuclear base in orbit, or on the surface of the moon. Some critics said that the space program was moving too fast already, cutting corners, taking cavalier risks. The Nation urged the administration to quit playing Russian roulette and to call off manned missions indefinitely. All seven astronauts should be disqualified at once, the magazine argued, for the perfectly sound reason that they have become too famous to burn in public.

And John Glenn was the most famous of the Mercury Seventhe only one who had been famous before he became an astronaut. In July 1957, he had appeared, smiling and waving on the tarmac in front of his F8U Crusader, on the front page of newspapers across the country; he had just flown from Los Angeles to New York in three hours and twenty-three minutes, a record. At the airfield in Brooklyn, as a band played Anchors Aweigh, the Marine Corps major had leapt down from the cockpit, hugged his wife, Annie, and their two children, and said that everything went smooth as silk. SUPERSONIC CHAMPION, the New York Times anointed him. But Glenns appeal went well beyond those heroics, or the numerous medals he had won in World War II and Korea. He was, simply put, everything America wished to see in itself in an age of insecurity: he was cool under pressure, yet warm and good-humored; he spoke of God and country without irony, but also without sanctimony; he brought the self-effacing values of the small town to the fiercest kinds of air combat. All of the Mercury Seven were admired, but Glenn was the one America adored.

This was why, at 9:47 a.m., when Glenn was finally launched into orbit, most Americans were subdued, almost silenteven many of the fifty thousand spectators who spread across the sand dunes, highways, and motel balconies of Cocoa Beach to watch the rocket rise. On the New York City subway, a crackling voice on the loudspeakers implored riders to please say a little prayer for him. The request was heard every ten minutes for the duration of the flight.

KENNEDY HAD HIS OWN reasons to be anxious. His first year as president had been difficult and perilousa year in which we have talked our extinction to death, as the poet Robert Lowell wrote. Mounting crises had, it seemed, drawn the United States and Russia ever closer to mutual destruction: Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, convinced he could bully the young president into submission, browbeat him at a summit in Vienna; pledged to support wars of liberation in every part of the world; threatened repeatedly to seize West Berlin; approved the construction, almost overnight, of a concrete wall to divide the city; and resumed nuclear testinga relentless display, over the plains of central Asia, of apocalyptic power. There are limits, Kennedy told an adviser toward the end of 1961, to the number of defeats I can defend in one twelve-month period.

The space race, in that light, was one more theater of war, one more arena in which the United States was on the defensive. Since the launch of Sputnik, Soviet superiority in space had fueled doubts about American resolve. Satellite pessimism, a political scientist called it, and in the free world it was on the rise. In a Gallup poll, 44 percent of British respondentsand a similar proportion in France and West Germanysaid that the Soviets would have the strongest military in ten years time; only 19 percent chose the United States.

No one, thereforebesides Glenn himselfhad more riding on the flight of Friendship 7 than Kennedy. His fate and Glenns were bound together. Yet he could do nothing to ensure the flights success. For all the power of his office, the president was a spectator today. He could only watch the television and hope.