Fighter Pilot. War Hero. Astronaut. United States Senator. Most people would be satisfied with only one of these respected titles. But for one small town Ohio boy, literally reaching for the stars was in his nature, and he ended up gaining all four. John Glenn was elevated to the status of American Hero part way through his long, remarkable life, when he became the first US astronaut to orbit the Earth in 1962. It was a mantle he successfully shouldered for more than 50 years, like a legend from a bygone era.
John Glenn was not only remarkable because of his achievements in the air, in space, and in the halls of Congress, but also because he was as close to flawless as a public figure can be. Both contemporaries and biographers struggled to find anything negative to say about him: in fact, the man was so strait-laced, so squeaky clean, and so genuinely kind to basically everyone he ever met, that many cynics assumed that it was some kind of act Glenn was putting on. But it wasn’t, it simply was the way he was.
For those of us who were too young to witness his daring deeds in person, it is difficult to understand just why the man was hero-worshipped the way he was, considering the cynical age that we live in now. But there was a time when every American, and many other people around the world, admired and respected John Glenn, and celebrated him as though he was a member of their own family. To try and understand why, all we can do here is simply tell his story and let you be the judge of whether he earned it or not.
Learning to Fly
John Herschel Glenn Jr. was born on July 18th, 1921, the son of John Senior, a World War I veteran who owned his own plumbing business, assisted by his wife Clara. The Glenn family lived in New Concord, Ohio, a typical Midwestern small town with a population of less than 900 residents. Glenn’s childhood was like something out of Norman Rockwell’s sketchbook: happy, idyllic, full of sports, outdoor play, and regular attendance at the town’s Presbyterian Church, to which he would be an adherent all his life.
Glenn was a student at Muskingum College when the Japanese Navy bombed Pearl Harbor, propelling the United States into World War II. Glenn immediately dropped out of college to join the military as a pilot. Initially, Glenn joined up with the Army Air Corps, but for some unexplained reason, they never called him up for service, so after several weeks of inactivity, he joined the Navy instead, making the decision to join the Marine Corps because he was impressed by their distinguished battle record.
Glenn became a fighter pilot, flying the F4U Corsair, a powerful fighter-bomber known for its distinctive “bent wing” design. He flew more than 50 combat missions in the Pacific Theater of the war, earning two Distinguished Flying Crosses and ten Air Medals. He ended the war as a captain, and could have left the military to return to civilian life along with most of those mustered into service during the war, but Glenn wanted to continue to fly, and so made the fateful decision to remain in the Marine Corps as the country returned to peacetime status.
Glenn would not be embarking on this adventure by himself. He met his future wife, Annie, when they were toddlers growing up together in New Concord, and John never looked at another girl for the rest of his life. They’d become a couple by the time they were in junior high school, and got married in 1943, just after John had earned his wings as a military pilot. The couple had two children together: Dave, born in 1945, and Lyn, born in 1947.
Earning Stripes
Major Glenn went to war again in February 1953, when he was assigned to a fighter squadron deployed to the ongoing war in Korea. He flew over 60 missions in the F9F Panther jet, providing close air support for troops on the ground. Glenn liked to be in the middle of the action: he earned the unfortunate nickname “Magnet Ass” from his squadron mates because his tendency towards flying low to the ground meant he took a lot of hits from flak guns. One of Glenn’s wingmen during his Korean War service was Ted Williams, who in civilian life was in the middle of a Hall of Fame baseball career with the Boston Red Sox. The two would remain close friends for the rest of their lives.
With the war drawing to a close, Glenn was transferred to an Air Force squadron flying the top-of-the-line F86 Sabre, whose job it was to intercept enemy MiG fighters in a combat zone known as “MiG Alley.” Glenn successfully shot down three MiGs, the last one coming less than a week before the armistice that ended the conflict on July 27th, 1953. During his brief tour of duty there, Glenn received another two Distinguished Flying Crosses and eight Air Medals.
Glenn almost immediately jumped from one dangerous job to another, becoming a test pilot in 1954. Testing experimental aircraft is a highly dangerous profession, as evidenced by the fact that the first test flight Glenn embarked on nearly killed him when the oxygen system onboard the aircraft failed in flight. But the job apparently wasn’t THAT strenuous for John Glenn, to hear him tell it later, the hardest part was having to learn calculus in order to pass Test Pilot School.
Glenn first came to the attention of the nation’s media in 1957, when he set a new transcontinental flying record: traveling from California to New York in 3 hours, 23 minutes on board an F8 Crusader fighter jet. For a few months after the flight, Glenn was a minor celebrity, being awarded his 5th DFC from President Eisenhower. He was also invited to participate as a contestant on the popular TV game show Name That Tune, partnering with 10-year-old child actor Eddie Hodges to win the $25,000 grand prize. Glenn didn’t know it at the time, but this was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to media attention being focused on him.
Racing into Space
The same day that John Glenn was appearing on Name That Tune, the Soviet Union astonished the world when they successfully launched the first manmade object, Sputnik, into orbit around the Earth. With the Cold War at its height, the American government feared that the Soviets would gain a permanent advantage over them in this new frontier, which would not only represent a dramatic loss of prestige, but also had military considerations (assuming the Soviets ever figured out how to put nuclear weapons into space.)
NASA was established in 1958, and its first mission, Project Mercury, was to put a man into Earth orbit and return him safely to the ground again. The Space Race was on, and now NASA had to select the men who would be their first “astronauts” (a new word cobbled together from the Ancient Greek words astron and nautes, which translates to “star sailor”). Initially, all manner of adventurers were considered, including mountain climbers and deep sea divers, but President Eisenhower believed the best people for the job were military test pilots, since they were accustomed to the stresses of high-performance aircraft, were familiar with aircraft engineering, and could troubleshoot potential problems in flight.
John Glenn was one of 110 military test pilots that met the initial criteria for an astronaut, and he jumped at the chance to apply. He was one of 32 finalists sent to the Lovelace Clinic in New Mexico for days of extensive medical testing, and then even more tests were conducted at the Aeromedical Laboratory on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, including stress and psychological testing, all to ensure the astronauts would be perfect physical and mental specimens that gave them the best chance to survive the rigors of outer space.
Glenn passed all the tests with flying colors, and was appointed as one of NASA’s first seven astronauts in April 1959. Glenn was the only Marine among the “Mercury Seven,” which also included Navy pilots Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, and Alan Shepard, as well as Air Force pilots Gordon Cooper, Gus Grissom, and Deke Slayton. He was also the only one of the seven who seemed comfortable in front of a TV camera, appearing far more eloquent and charismatic than his colleagues, which quickly made him the media darling of the group.
Into the Unknown
A few weeks after their introductory press conference, the Mercury Seven witnessed firsthand how dangerous the job they’d signed up for was when they saw a test launch of the Atlas rocket that was supposed to take them into space failed dramatically when the rocket exploded soon after lifting off. After staring at the fireball in stunned silence for a few seconds, Glenn turned to Alan Shepard and quipped “Well, I’m glad they got that one out of the way.”
Glenn and the other astronauts spent the next two years training, learning as much as they could about space, and helping to design the Mercury spacecraft they would be using. They were also immensely public figures, subject to attention from the media and the public wherever they went. Glenn handled the publicity much better than his wife Annie did: she struggled with a stutter whenever she spoke, something she was very self-conscious about. In one famous exchange, Annie refused to allow the head of the space program, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, into her home with a pack of reporters. Glenn’s bosses at NASA tried to force him to get her to comply, but he put his foot down, threatening to resign and made a big media story out of it if they didn’t leave his wife alone.
While Glenn maintained a cordial and professional relationship with the other Mercury astronauts, he wasn’t particularly friendly with any of them except Scott Carpenter. The rest of them found Glenn’s “clean Marine” persona clashed too much with their own. Glenn never drank, smoked, or even cursed, regularly attended church on Sunday, and certainly never contemplated cheating on his wife the way some of the other astronauts did. It was definitely a departure from the rough and tumble military world that the others had come to NASA from, that was for sure.
Much to Glenn’s disappointment, he was not selected to be the first of the Mercury astronauts to go to space. That honor went to Alan Shepard, who rocketed to space on May 5th, 1961, on board the Freedom 7 spacecraft. Glenn wasn’t selected as the second astronaut to make a spaceflight either: Gus Grissom was, in July 1961.
But now it was Glenn’s turn, and he had a considerably more prestigious (and dangerous) assignment: the first two astronauts had made brief, suborbital flights using smaller rockets, but Glenn was to be the first to go into orbit around the Earth, and thus the first to spend a lengthy amount of time in space. It would also necessitate using the larger Atlas rocket to get him there…the same rocket that Glenn and the others had watched explode in 1959.
Touching the Stars
On February 20, 1962, John Glenn was strapped into his space capsule, Friendship 7, finally ready to make his orbital launch after months of delays and false starts. All across America, there was a great deal of anticipation as well as anxiety surrounding the launch, because no one knew what was going to happen. There was a not-indistinct possibility that the 40-year-old astronaut would be killed during his mission: President Kennedy’s aides had already prepared a speech in case Glenn didn’t make it back to Earth alive. Not only was the launch itself dangerous, but NASA scientists weren’t exactly sure what effect prolonged weightlessness would have on the human body. Would Glenn’s eyes function normally? Would the fluid in his inner ear be disrupted, causing spatial disorientation? Was it even possible to swallow food in space, or even breathe properly? No one knew, well, except the Soviets, who’d already sent two cosmonauts into orbit, but they weren’t telling.
It seemed the only man who was calm about the whole affair was Glenn himself, who appeared relaxed and cheerful even during the most violent part of the rocket launch. Everything worked properly, and within a matter of minutes, Glenn found himself weightless, looking out the window at the Earth below him. He was in orbit! Over the next five hours, Friendship 7 orbited the planet three full times, each revolution taking 88 minutes and 30 seconds to complete. Glenn seemed awestruck at what he was experiencing in his communication with the ground, from the beauty of the multiple sunrises he witnessed to the lights of cities like Perth, Australia, that he could see on Earth’s darkened side.
Glenn performed several experiments while in his cramped capsule: he consulted an eye chart every twenty minutes to report on any changes to his eyesight (there weren’t any,) and he sucked applesauce out of a tube to successfully prove it was possible to eat in space. He also reported that he wasn’t experiencing nausea or any other negative effects that could be caused by weightlessness. However, as his flight reached its conclusion, NASA realized there was a problem with Glenn’s spacecraft: they weren’t sure if the heat shield that was supposed to protect the capsule when it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere was still in place. If it came off, the craft would burn up in the atmosphere, taking Glenn with it.
The decision was made to leave the small maneuvering rockets, which were usually jettisoned, strapped overtop of the heat shield prior to re-entry, in the hope that if the shield WAS loose, the straps would hold it in place. But that was also dangerous: any trace of fuel inside the rockets could trigger an explosion that would destroy the capsule. However, fortune smiled on John Glenn this day, as the equipment held together long enough for him to make it back into the atmosphere. His capsule, slowed by parachutes, splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean and was picked up by a US Navy destroyer. When Glenn got out of his capsule and stepped out onto the deck, a sailor painted white outlines around the astronaut’s feet to mark where he had stood. It was the first sign of things to come: for better or worse, John Glenn was now a national hero.
The Conquering Hero
An estimated 40 million households had watched television coverage of Glenn’s flight, making it the biggest TV event in US history up to that point. When Glenn returned to the United States, it seemed like everyone in America wanted to see him, to talk to him, to shake his hand, get his autograph, or take his picture. At a stroke, he was suddenly the most famous and popular man in the country. He was given a standing ovation in Congress when he was invited there to speak about his experience, he was wined and dined and given medals by President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson, and an estimated four million people showed up to watch a ticker tape parade in Glenn’s honor in New York City.
Glenn was fine basking in the attention for a little while after his famous flight, but eventually, he wanted to turn his attention towards a second spaceflight. NASA was already planning Project Gemini, which would pave the way for Project Apollo, whose goal was to land astronauts on the Moon. But his newfound status as a national treasure worked against him in this regard: Glenn heard later that President Kennedy had personally requested he be taken off the schedule for future flights. It would be too much of a loss if he was killed now. There would be no more space travel for John Glenn, at least for now.
Not wanting to be a figurehead, Glenn left NASA in 1964. He got a job on the board of directors of the RC Cola Company, but increasingly his thoughts turned towards politics. Glenn and his wife had become good friends with Robert Kennedy, the late JFK’s brother, and was an active participant in RFK’s run for President in 1968, which ended in California with his assassination. Glenn served as one of the pallbearers at Kennedy’s funeral. It had been Bobby Kennedy who had encouraged Glenn into a second career as a politician, running for Senate in his home state of Ohio in 1964 before a fall in the bathtub and resulting concussion forced him out of the race.
Glenn tried again in 1970, losing the Democratic primary race, before proving that the third time’s the charm in 1974, being elected amidst a wave of backlash against the Republican Party in the wake of the Watergate scandal. In Congress, Glenn was known as something of a technocrat, often taking interest in matters such as government organization that most people found boring. He wasn’t a particularly great public speaker, which is probably why, despite several candidates considering him, he was never picked as a Vice Presidential running mate during his political career. Glenn also made a run for President himself in 1984, but his campaign was a disaster, and he was forced to drop out well before the Democratic National Convention.
Blasting Off Again
Senator Glenn had already decided to retire from politics following the completion of his fourth and final term in 1999. After all, he’d spent nearly a quarter century in Washington and was now 77 years old. As he said in his retirement speech, “There is, as yet, no cure for the common birthday.”
There had always been, in the back of his mind, a yearning to go back into space. After years of lobbying, he got his chance in 1998, when the director of NASA announced that Glenn had been selected as a mission specialist for an upcoming flight of the space shuttle Discovery. The official reason for his selection was that, as a senior citizen, Glenn could participate in experiments designed to see what effect a weightless environment had on the aging process. But the good publicity that went along with it was probably an ulterior motive: in the years since Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon in 1969, America had grown bored with the space program, not even bothering to learn the names of most of the astronauts that were going up anymore.
But America’s superstar spaceman proved he could still draw a crowd, as more than 250,000, including President and Mrs. Clinton and the three surviving Mercury astronauts, gathered at Cape Canaveral, Florida, for the launch of STS-95, the largest crowd to come out for a shuttle launch in years. Glenn’s second spaceflight was considerably longer than his first, as Discovery spent nine days in space, orbiting the Earth 143 times. There was also considerably more space to move around in the shuttle than there had been onboard Friendship 7, which was back on the surface on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. 36 years after his first flight, Glenn set a record as the oldest astronaut in history, which is unlikely to be broken anytime soon (NASA seemingly having no interest in sending up any more septuagenarians.)
John Glenn continued to be an active public presence in his retirement years, helping establish the Glenn College of Public Affairs at Ohio State University and continuing to speak and write on subjects relating to space travel. He also guest starred as himself on an episode of Frasier. He received an entire library’s worth of awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but throughout it all he never let his fame go to his head. He was the same person he’d always been, kind to everyone he met. Very few people who interacted with him ever had anything bad to say about him.
John Glenn died on December 8th, 2016, at the age of 95. He was buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery, not far from the grave of his good friend, Bobby Kennedy. President Obama ordered the nation’s flags to fly at half-staff in his honor, and Americans from all walks of life paid tribute to him. Many recognized that it was the end of an era: Glenn was the last of the Mercury Seven to pass away. Others have argued that with his passing, the country has lost something it may never get back: a universally beloved icon, the last of the traditional “American heroes.” As for the space program, with NASA making plans to return to the Moon, and to send astronauts to Mars after that, it remains to be seen if the kind of excitement the country saw during the heady days of John Glenn’s trailblazing flight will make its return. Wherever he is now, John Glenn would almost certainly be rooting for them: that’s just the kind of man he was.
