Astronaut John Glenn - 28 February 1997

Let’s follow once again the poet WH Auden’s advice after he’d waded through a raft of obituary tributes. “Let us,” he said, “celebrate instead the vertical man.”

So let’s think of a former United States marine colonel, a vertical man indeed who became world famous literally overnight by lying on his back and (by some miracle) avoided being burned alive in, the experts figured, one second.

Thirty-five years to the day after that appalling experience, which the whole world followed and dreaded, the hero of it stood in the assembly hall of a small midwestern college most people have never heard of to announce that today, at 75, but still taut and straight-backed, he is going to retire after 22 years in the United States Senate.

This ageing hero from Muskingum College, Ohio, was born in 1921, and 20 years later, once out of college, he immediately became a naval aviation cadet. At the end of the second war, he found himself out in the Pacific with the marine aircraft wing in the Marshall Islands campaign. And after the war was over, he was on the North China aircraft patrol. He fought in Korea as a fighter pilot.

And then, when that was over, he joined NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which to ambitious young aviators in those days held the romantic appeal the Foreign Legion used to have for me. Well, frankly, not for me, but for some of my more muscular buddies.

The space programme cast a magical spell even before anybody had gone into space. And now, after many men and women of several nationalities have worked in space, spent months living there, even so the one space hero everybody remembers to this day is that same retiring 75-five year old from Ohio.

The name, of course, is John Glenn. And anyone who wasn’t there 35 years ago but checks the record of space flight may well wonder at Glenn’s peculiar fame since the year before him, a Russian, Yuri Gagarin, had been the first human to orbit the earth in space and four months later another Russian orbited the earth 17 times. So what’s so special about John Glenn’s three orbits in February 1962?

First, and most obviously, we only heard about the Russians. We took their government’s word that it had happened. We saw and heard Glenn throughout the whole riveting audio, which had whole populations, indoors and out, glued to television screens in their homes, in railway stations, in public square on four continents.

Let me try and recover the time and the feel of that unforgettable episode.

The show began with a mock-up of the inside of the capsule with the astronaut’s head and helmet in the foreground looking at the panels that John Glenn was controlling. At the base of the panel was a slot for the hours, minutes and seconds he’d be aloft. The numbers ticked away for the whole four hours and 56 minutes and induced a hypnosis all their own.

Whenever there was a conversation between Glenn and a tracking station somewhere in Spain, Africa, wherever, or a lump of space jargon came up that might mystify us, they’d wing us out to a lab in St Louis for instruction through a specially-constructed model, the core of the capsule.

One of the great things about the coverage, a note that testified to its honesty, is that it wasn’t slick. Mercury Control played back all its exchanges with Glenn however stumbling, misunderstood, ragged, and the dialogue was fairly continuous.

At the end of the first orbit, we heard that trouble of some sort had developed, and after a seeming age of checking the catechism of cabin and oxygen pressure and respiration and temperature of the capsule and the rest, it was an immense relief to hear Glenn cry out, “Boy, oh boy!” at the beauty of unidentified particles of light that swam past his window like fireflies.

And this was followed by a warming shout of thanks from Glenn to the people of Perth in Australia for having turned on all the city lights by night and spread sheets and blankets on rooftops as reflectors.

There was never for long a calm period. We’d all get fired up that he’d done two orbits and then we’d hear about another warning light showing he was using his gases too fast, so he had to fire the gases electrically and steer the ship by hand control. This happened as he was coming over the California coast on the second orbit and the question was whether to let him go for a third. He judged; he was in command. OK, they said, so off he went.

But on that orbit to those ranks of men sitting before computers in Houston, there was worse to come. During the first orbit, a warning light went on that seemed to signal loosening of the heat shield. Now this is a six foot in diameter dish fastened to the front end of the mushroom-shaped capsule. And below the shield was a linen bag that expands like a concertina to cushion the shock when the capsule hits the water, and below the bag are packages of rockets that break his speed and fire him out of orbit back into the earth’s atmosphere.

Binding the package were metal bands which burn away when the rockets are fired. There remained the plastic shield, which is the astronaut’s barrier against a fiery death indeed, for the shield is constructed to withstand a 3,000-degree heat which flares up when the capsule rips back into our atmosphere.

Mercury Control thought through two and a half orbits that the shield had come loose. They chose not to tell him, but they’d have to when the time came to fire the rockets. And when it came, they gave an order that he thought strange: retain the package that holds the rockets – a possible second line of defence to the vanished or vanishing heat shield. While he was puzzling this, they ordered the fire.

Now Glenn all this while thought the shield was secure. He thought the switch just happened to be on the blink. After the order, there was a crackle of static and the heavy swish of a carrier wave and nothing from Glenn. Understandable, we learn, because as soon as the capsule enters the ionosphere, there’s so much ionisation that no radio frequencies can get through anyway. But there was nothing for two and a half minutes, and then two words came squawking in, “Friendship 7”. Never did the word "friendship" have a more blessed sound.

When Glenn was back on earth, we learned he’d had his doubts too. When the capsule was tearing earthwards, he saw chunks of flame going by his window. He thought it was the heat shield burning up. It was in fact the rocket package burning up. He said he became suddenly “super sensitive along my backside.” It had given him, he mused, a moment of some concern.

The fame that engulfed Glenn after this is difficult to imagine. He joined the editorial board of an encyclopedia to which I also belonged. The chosen board consisted of experts on foreign affairs, domestic affairs, economics, sport, so on. There was Isaac Asimov for science, the Belgian statesman Paul-Henri Spaak for foreign affairs; a distinguished lot. Glenn was appointed to the new post of space consultant.

Now once a year, we went to an agreeable resort for four days for an annual meeting. Glenn’s first year, we were in Bermuda and it was impossible to go with him anywhere – to lunch, for a walk – without crowds magnetising from nowhere. We slipped one evening into a nightclub and upset the show and the diners to such an extent, we had to leave to resounding cheers.

About a year later, he’d gone from the world’s hero to being stopped on the street by, “Excuse me. Weren’t you John Glenn, the astronaut?”

By then, John Glenn had retired from the marines and the space programme and became the president of a soft drink company, a move that certainly helped to put the soft pedal on his fame.

A year or two later, our board’s annual meeting was in France, on the coast hard by Monte Carlo. And one day my oldest friend in the newspaper game, James Reston of the New York Times, and I were off to play golf at a crazy course on top of the mountains: a crumple of hills and wobbling, little valleys that only a lunatic or a Scot would have laid out. It was in fact done by Scottish officers waiting to be demobilised in 1919 right after the First World War.

To our surprise, John Glenn, who was not a golfer, asked if he might walk along with us. Of course. He had an ulterior motive – very odd and (we thought) very touching. He was thinking of running for Congress and, ambling along the fairways, wondered how you went about it.

We’d line up a shot, swing, resume the walk and toss out a line or two. “Must know your hometown union leaders, bankers, the police, construction companies, get out often and press the flesh.” Then there were insurance people, the conservation people, the cloth, many cloths – Catholic, Baptist according to their numbers. All sorts of mad advice. Some shrewd, I’ve forgotten now. Nothing came of it.

But I don’t know how much later, however in the elections of 1974, a tidal wave of Democrats swept into both houses in the wake of the Nixon abdication and John Glenn was suddenly the junior senator from Ohio. He kept getting re-elected.

He’s been there 22 years on the Foreign Affairs Committe, most notably of course on the space committee. But, to the administration’s discomfort, he at first deplored the excessive millions being spent on the space programme. He said the only good thing to come out of it was the non-stick frying pan. He changed his mind about that.

Throughout his time, he was a moderate Democrat. In Tom Wolfe’s vivid semi-novel/semi-documentary about the astronauts, The Right Stuff, Glenn comes out somewhat puritanical. It was in him nothing but a decent resistance to the unbuttoned counter-culture of the '60s. He has indeed one or two distinguishing qualities, which seem to get rarer and rarer in public men: he has been untouched by scandal and is still with the wife he married 53 years ago.

My old friend James Scotty Reston is gone now, but if he were here, I’m sure he’d agree with me that in the matter of politics and being a politician, John Glenn could teach us a thing or two.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.