Fierce patriotism rose like a sudden swamp fog around America. Morale zoomed from worst to first and got people talking about the moonshot again. Astronauts Shepard and Slayton summed up the post–Friendship 7 euphoria best: “The distance to the moon was starting to lessen.” Because everything seemed to have changed on one memorable American morning, a California journalist suggested that February 20 be a national holiday ever afterward. “Orbit Day? Space Day? Glenn Day?” Bob Wells of the Long Beach Independent asked readers to weigh in, and a dozen decent ideas came forth.
Kennedy flew to Cape Canaveral three days after the Friendship 7 flight, to receive a briefing from Glenn and pose for a series of photo ops, where he treated the astronaut as if he were a brother. Bursting with pride, Glenn brought his wife, Annie, and their two children to meet his friend the president. Over the days that followed, at Cape Canaveral and then back in Washington, astronaut and president spent many hours together, delivering public relations victories both for JFK’s New Frontier and for NASA. Glenn was not a wit on par with Kennedy, but he could more than hold his own on history and politics. Jackie Kennedy noted that both men projected an aura of “cool” self-control. The president was riveted as Glenn told him about seeing three sunsets and three dawns in just his four-hour, fifty-six-minute flight.
As the two families spent more time together over that summer of 1962, the First Lady became, as her friend Cyrus Sulzberger recalled, “vastly impressed by John Glenn, the astronaut. She says he is the most controlled person on earth. Even Jack, she said, who is highly self-controlled and has the ability to relax easily and to sleep as and when he wishes, to shrug off the problems of the world, seems fidgety and loose compared to Glenn. Glenn is the most dominating man she ever met.”
Joining the chorus singing Glenn’s praises was von Braun. He was thrilled that now the United States had put up three astronauts (Shepard, Grissom, and Glenn) compared to only two Soviets (Gagarin and Titov). At a press conference from Florida, the rocketeer said that with Glenn’s Mercury flight, America had taken a “Bunyan step” forward toward the moon. Soon, a genuine friendship was forged between the rocket scientist and the charismatic astronaut. When Glenn went on a goodwill mission to West Germany and Switzerland a few years later, he wrote a postcard in German to von Braun that read, “Here I am in Lucerne and you are in Huntsville. What a switch!”
A week after Glenn’s flight, Kennedy again met with the space hero at the West Palm Beach airport to fly back to Washington together on Air Force One. In the coming months, Kennedy commissioned the French-born industrial designer Raymond Loewy—whose logos for Lucky Strike cigarette packages and Ritz cracker boxes were popular—to revamp Air Force One. Following JFK’s orders, the words United States of America were emblazoned on the blue-white fuselage. Jackie had wanted her five-year-old daughter, Caroline, to meet Glenn, so they came to the Air Force One tarmac for a quick meet-and-greet. “We were on the plane, and the president boarded, and behind him came Jackie with little Caroline, holding her by the hand. Jackie said, ‘Caroline, this is the astronaut who went around the Earth in the spaceship,’” Glenn recalled. “‘This is Colonel Glenn.’” Caroline stared at Glenn with a look of confusion in her eyes. She started looking all around Air Force One, a deep sadness engulfed her face. Fighting back tears, her voice trembling, she asked, “But where’s the monkey?”
JFK found himself saying nice things about Ham and Enos to please Caroline. Once Air Force One lifted off, Kennedy proofread the speech Glenn planned to deliver to a joint session of Congress. It was solid. “I still get a hard to define feeling inside when the flag goes by,” Glenn later told the assembled lawmakers. “I know you do too.” Perhaps someday, Glenn hoped, Old Glory would be planted on the moon. Later that day, at a White House Rose Garden ceremony, Kennedy connected his own lifelong affinity for sailing in the Atlantic to NASA’s exploration of the cosmos. “We have a long way to go in this space race,” the president said with Glenn by his side. “We started late, but this is the new ocean, and I believe the United States must sail on it and be in a position second to none.”
Glenn returned the respect of the Kennedys, becoming a valued member of their inner circle. He and Bobby Kennedy, whose knowledge of space was quite limited, grew especially close. But Jack was the one who encouraged Glenn to consider a career switch to electoral politics. Asked about his political affiliation, Glenn replied that he was registered as an independent, sparking a concerted and ultimately successful effort by the Kennedy brothers to woo Glenn to the Democrats. Glenn had become such a valued New Frontier icon, given a ticker-tape parade in New York City reminiscent of Lindbergh’s in 1927, that NASA official Charles Bolden reported that JFK didn’t dare “risk putting him back in space again.”
From the start, Glenn recognized that the president had a rare intelligence and a lively interest in even some minute details of the space program. Glenn was happy to oblige, giving Kennedy a friendly education in the hard science of space and providing a firsthand understanding of what going there had been like. Two years later, Glenn recalled JFK’s ability to remember details from a conversation they’d had in the weeks preceding the flight: “When I came back, he recalled quite a number of these things I had said in [our] preflight meeting on the 5th of February. Most of the things that we had expected in space flight were encountered and he recalled these all very accurately. He evidently had remembered all the things we talked about that day.”
Vice President Lyndon Johnson watches as Lieutenant Colonel John Glenn shakes hands with John F. Kennedy, on February 23, 1962, the day the president presented the astronaut with NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Glenn received the award after orbiting the planet three times in his little capsule, Friendship 7.
Ralph Morse/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
As Glenn came to know Kennedy better, in weekends on Cape Cod or at White House dinners, he tried to answer a fundamental question: Just what was the president’s personal interest in space exploration? JFK was the driving spirit putting America into the business of space, yet his motivations remained something of a mystery to Glenn. Was it just smart politics? Or did Kennedy truly enjoy the prospect of a manned voyage to the moon? Some observers contended that the president was interested only in the Cold War and that if there had been no Soviet Union, there would have been no moonshot. Had a more benign nation such as Denmark, Australia, or Brazil marshaled its resources to lead the way into space, would JFK have backed a $25 billion American effort to surpass it?
Ultimately, John Glenn believed that Jack Kennedy indeed would have. “His attitude toward the whole project changed a little bit as time went on,” Glenn recalled in a 1964 oral history interview. “I think early in the program, from statements I have read and from personal remarks when we were together, that he saw it originally as more of a competitive thing with the Russians. That we couldn’t let them best us in this scientific field. Period. This, of course, is one phase of the program. However, those of us in the program have felt that the program is completely worthwhile even if there was no such place as Russia, just on the basis of being an exploration and research capability. I think his statements and his feelings on this came more around to the latter as time went on.” Glenn believed that Kennedy at heart was an avatar of “public discovery,” pushing for science and exploration both to advance human knowledge and for the economic value they’d bring. “His vision set an inspiring example, and I saw that the Kennedy charisma could move millions to contribute to something I thought was vital,” Glenn wrote of JFK, “a democracy of energized participation in which people shared their talents with the nation and kept it improving and evolving.”
The success of Glenn’s mission created a popular culture boom around all things space. His ticker-tape parade in New York City was like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, with Glenn standing in for all the helium balloons. Fashion designers in Soho such as André Courrèges, Paco Rabanne,
and Pierre Cardin went astro-chic in advertisements in Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar. Architect John Lautner built his iconic Chemosphere in the Hollywood Hills, which hovered like a flying saucer above the valley, while Eero Saarinen built his elegant Gateway Arch in St. Louis (constructed between 1963 and 1965) with a futuristic feel. Seeing UFOs in your own backyard became the strange rage. Edward Craven Walker designed the Astro lamp (aka lava lamp) to give owners an outer space experience in their own bedrooms. The injection-molded and stackable Polyside chair was modeled after satellites, while kitchen appliances were marketed as Space Age gadgetry. Prototypes of rocket automobiles were designed, while TV shows such as Lost in Space and The Jetsons became wildly popular. In the world of music, the hit song became “Moon River,” composed by Henry Mancini with lyrics by Johnny Mercer; it won the 1962 Grammy Award for Record of the Year and Song of the Year. Handsome TV host Andy Williams made “Moon River” the theme of his popular show. When Bobby Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, went to California for a brief holiday they picked John Glenn up at the airport with Andy Williams in tow. “It was so wonderful,” Ethel Kennedy recalled. “We were all in a car together, driving around, singing ‘Moon River.’ It was a grand kick.”
TO OBSERVERS AT home, Friendship 7 seemed to have catapulted America into the lead in space, though in truth Glenn’s three orbits paled beside Gherman Titov’s seventeen laps and the overall greater complexity of the Vostok 2 mission. Nevertheless, NASA’s manned space program was clearly gaining momentum. Friendship 7 was the triumph of Kennedy’s “soft power” approach to convincing the world that American technology was more advanced than Soviet. When Kennedy presented Glenn the NASA Distinguished Service Medal on February 23 for his successful mission, the astronaut graciously averred that he was just a “figurehead” for the New Frontier’s “big, tremendous effort.”
Notes of congratulations poured into the White House that late February, from schoolchildren, teachers, fellow politicians, and average citizens, and Kennedy happily answered a random selection. A number of people wanted to use Glenn for Cold War propaganda advantage over the Soviets. “May I humbly offer a suggestion to your Excellency?” Carl H. Peterson wrote Kennedy. “Would it not be a splendid idea to appoint our famous Astronaut Col. John Glenn to be an Ambassador of Good Will to all Nations of the World that will want to know what is in outer space which Col. Glenn can explain so well? This could inadvertently make the road for Khrushchev rockier.”
In fact, Glenn’s flight seemed to have shocked Khrushchev into an uncharacteristic silence. Eventually, he sent the obligatory congratulatory note to the White House, expressing stilted praise for Glenn’s courage before echoing Kennedy’s own suggestion about space cooperation at their meeting the previous June. “If our countries pooled their efforts—scientific, technical and material—to master the universe,” he wrote, “this would be . . . acclaimed by all peoples who would like to see scientific achievements benefit man and not be used for ‘cold war’ purposes and the arms race.”
Not wanting to suggest that Kennedy was using the Glenn launch “for ‘cold war’ purposes and the arms race”—though he clearly was, as was Khrushchev—the White House lost no time in responding publicly. Within hours of receiving the premier’s dispatch, the president was standing at a press conference, duly celebrating Glenn’s mission but giving even more time in his introductory remarks to the Soviet leader’s suggestion and, even more so, his own history of calling for U.S.-Soviet cooperation in space. “I am replying to his message today,” JFK told the assembled reporters and his television audience, “and I regard it as most encouraging.” With the arrival of Khrushchev’s message of goodwill, the science of space disappeared and the two leaders’ tit-for-tat game returned—the one in which the need to be seen winning the propaganda war was almost as important as actually winning the Cold War.
THAT SPRING, THE Kennedy administration sponsored Friendship 7 on a second mission. The craft was loaded onto a giant C-124 cargo plane and sent on a thirty-city “Around the World with Friendship 7” tour to promote U.S. space achievements; one wag called it “the Fourth Orbit.” At the Science Museum in London, throngs of spectators showed up on opening day, so many that thousands of would-be visitors had to be turned away. Around the world, newspaper photos showed Freedom 7 next to a trumpeting elephant in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), a mariachi band in Mexico, and a children’s choir in Nigeria. People often waited for three or four hours just to see the pride of McDonnell Aircraft and NASA. In Tokyo, half a million people queued up to photograph themselves next to the capsule when it was on display at a downtown department store. In India, over 1.5 million people lined the streets of Bombay (now Mumbai), hoping for a glimpse of the space capsule. Every balcony, window, and roof was jammed with enthralled spectators.
Like Glenn himself, Friendship 7 was a golden advertisement for Kennedy’s New Frontier agenda, and a fine public relations counterstatement to the Soviets’ trumpeting of Gagarin one year before, not to mention the commemorative stamps, coins, postcards, and other mementos that had celebrated Soviet space superiority ever since Sputnik. As Glenn wrote McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national security advisor, the “fourth orbit” wasn’t merely a propaganda extravaganza but “a well-thought-out scientific [education] program that could eventually benefit all peoples of the world as the scientific exploration it is.”
The incredibly popular Glenn visited the Seattle World’s Fair on May 10, which showcased the landmark Space Needle. Mobs of people followed the astronaut around, craning their necks for a glimpse of his reddish crew-cut head, hoping for an autograph or photo. Accompanied by von Braun, Glenn traveled on the futuristic Monorail and rode the elevator to the top of the Space Needle, which had been built especially for the exposition. The highlight was when Glenn attended a NASA conference at the Seattle Opera House that day. Gherman Titov had already appeared at the World’s Fair and claimed he “saw neither angels or gods” in space. Asked for a comment on that assessment, Glenn shrugged it off, claiming his orbit had reaffirmed his bedrock Christian values and democratic beliefs.
Surrounding Glenn at the opera house were members of the “100,000 Foot Club,” a group of test pilots who had attained that altitude in balloons, rockets, and other aircraft. But Glenn, who gave a better-than-decent presentation, was the man everyone wanted a piece of. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer joked that the NASA press conference might as well have been Glenn and “eight guys named Joe.” What nobody realized was that the quiet Purdue University graduate and Korean War ace sitting next to the panel chairman was the man who would eclipse even Glenn’s fame and achieve Kennedy’s moonshot challenge by the end of the decade: Neil Armstrong.
Colonel John Glenn at a ticker-tape parade in New York City.
Ralph Morse/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Kennedy tours Marshall Space Flight Center with von Braun.
Bob Gomel/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
16
Scott Carpenter, Telstar, and Presidential Space Touring
Space represents the modern frontier for extending humanity’s research into the unknown. Our commitment to manned programs must remain strong even in the face of adversity and tragedy. This is our history and the legacy of all who fly.
—JOHN GLENN
Had John F. Kennedy lived to a fitting old age, he might have looked back on the late winter and spring of 1962 as the sweet spot of his presidency. In early April, his approval rating stood at 79 percent, as reported by pollster George Gallup. The number of Americans who reported disapproving of him was just 12 percent, with 9 percent expressing no opinion. Even more startling than the overall high rating was the fact that most respondents couldn’t point to anything that Kennedy had done wrong. “He has yet to provoke any solid bloc of opposition to his programs or actions,” Gallup noted on April 2. Only seven months out from the midterm elections, the Republicans still hadn’t found a major issue to damage Kennedy and his party. The
only public gripe, according to the poll, was that he was absent from the White House too often, notably at his family’s oceanfront homes on Cape Cod and Palm Beach.
If America’s aerospace industry shareholders had been polled, Kennedy would probably have scored 100 percent favorable. Instead of dispensing the entire plum of Project Apollo development to a single contractor, the administration spread the financial allocations among hundreds of happy companies. It was the New Frontier’s infrastructure stimulus approach applied to a lunar voyage, space exploration, computer science, and aeronautical activities in general, making it possible for NASA “to acquire billions’ worth of exotic new hardware and specialized features without overrunning the initial cost estimates and without even the slightest hint of any procurement scandal in that vast empire.”
As noted, due to the Saturn V rocket’s massive size and complexity its three stages would be produced by three separate companies. Boeing won the contract to build the first stage (SI-IC, with five F-1 engines) at Michoud Operations in New Orleans, Louisiana, a 1.8-million-square-foot manufacturing facility that had built Patton and Sherman tanks for the Korean War. Located beside Bayou Sauvage and offering ship access to the Gulf of Mexico, Michoud adopted the slogan “from muskrats to moon ships.” Just weeks after choosing Michoud, NASA determined that the Saturn V test site would be on the Pearl River, in Hancock County, in southwestern Mississippi, only a half-hour drive from Michoud.
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