New issue of '49th Parallel' Out - my Taft review is featured

The Spring 2011 issue of 49th Parallel is now out  - you can find it here. It includes my review on The Political Principles of Robert a Taft.

Writing the review article was an interesting and challenging experience. I read all the time, but applying an academic frame of mind to what I was reading and coming up with a constructive critique that might make other readers consider the text was a new experience. I worry still as to whether I was fair and just - although the review will probably only be read by a very tiny number of people - and most of them won't care a jot about what I have to say!

Still, there's a much longer article for the same academic journal in peer review at the moment, and another review article to research - this time on Truman and Immigration. All part of the rich academic learning experience.

JFK's moon pledge through the wrong end of the telescope

50 years ago today John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a new president struggling to capitalise on the 'honeymoon period' of his first 100 days in office stood before the two houses of Congress addressing both the US political elite and the nation as a whole. His 'Second State of the Union' speech is best remembered for his pledge to send a man to the moon and return him safely to the earth before the decade ended. But perhaps that's because Kennedy was dead two and a half years later and because Johnson ensured his legacy was, indeed, to take America to the moon.

For historians, this popular recollection presents a problem. Kennedy didn't stride to the lectern in triumph - and at the time, the moon pledge did not hugely stand out in a speech that covered an awful lot of other ground before turning to the heavens.  The reality of what Kennedy had to say that day has been distorted by subsequent events and it's important to separate the veneration of a presidency unfulfilled from the nuts and bolts of a middling Kennedy speech.

The following is a portion of my Masters Dissertation, completed for Brunel University in 2009 and is copyright Mark Shanahan 2011

Hindsight would have it that Kennedy stood before Congress on May 25th 1961 with the moon landing at the centre piece of a directive that swiftly galvanised 400,000 Americans in every state of the Union into a relentless drive to the moon where this time, the Soviets would finally be beaten. However, it is worth deconstructing the myth to look at the reality of Kennedy’s speech and the degree of direction it actually provided.

Undoubtedly the speech was meant to revive the spirit of optimism of the early weeks of the Presidency and, in the run-up to the June summit with Khrushchev was planned to show Khrushchev that Kennedy was not the callow youth the older leader took him for. But the speech gained so much resonance across the world and across four decades of regular repetition not as a whole, but because one section, towards the end, was pounced upon by the media and endlessly replayed – especially after Kennedy’s death, and most especially once the pledge to put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth before this decade is out had been achieved.


The speech was a set-piece: it was unusual for the President to address Congress directly, but Kennedy valued the public platform and knew it was essential to recapture the high ground at a time when his new presidency could lose all momentum and credibility due to the body blows inflicted on it by the Bay of Pigs failure and Gagarin’s success.

On May 25th, the Washington Post remarked on the short notice given that the President would address Congress in person saying: “There was no public expectation that the President would speak on urgent national needs.” The article later stated: “Ever since the Cuban invasion fiasco, the bloom has been off the bright rose of the early days of the Administration. Now may be the time to recreate the spirit of the January 30th State of the Nation Speech.” The networks were primed to take the speech live and transcripts were made available for print journalists to have as soon as Kennedy stepped down from the podium.

But the moon announcement actually comprised only the last fifth of the speech. Before reaching that most famous passage, Kennedy had talked about stimulating the economy at home, fostering global progress by fighting the advance of communism, extending the US Information Agency and tripling the budget for fallout shelters at home – essentially all the issues raised in the media and rejected by Eisenhower a little over two years previously. The space passage came after calls for an Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, almost as an afterthought. That’s certainly how the Los Angeles Times reported it the following day, in an editorial that was distinctly critical of Kennedy’s address. Robert T Harman wrote: “We expected extraordinary proposals....but he outlines rather ordinary plans...leaked to favourite TV and newspaper reporters days and weeks ago, so there was little impact of surprise. (The speech) was something of a dud....slightly spiced with a 10-year space adventure which Mr. Kennedy didn’t seem too certain of himself.”

The speech did receive national front page coverage and the space pledge drew the headlines. But equal focus on the analysis was placed on the other elements of the speech. Don Shannon, writing the lead news article for the Los Angeles Times, for instance noted that Kennedy had “urged Congress to back a multi-billion programme to put an American on the moon and counter the Soviet Union on earth.” He reflected Congress was split on the ‘omnibus’ plan and “noticeably cool on all except his call for a US challenge in space.” It is perhaps unsurprising that the Los Angeles Times was critical of Kennedy’s speech. California had backed Nixon in the 1960 election (just), and the Times was noted for its conservative stance.

The Democrat-leaning Washington Post was slightly more positive – but only slightly. In its news lead, John G Norris reported: “He (Kennedy) committed the United States to an all-out race to overtake Russia in space and to be the first to put men on the moon...”It is time”, said the President, for a great new American enterprise; time for this nation to take a clearly-leading role in space achievement.”

The news report chimed with the intent of the President, picking up on his request for a spending boost for space, arms and the jobless, but undercut this when stating that the proposals would be unsatisfactory to liberals since they favoured big business. Equally Norris noted, they would not satisfy conservatives since the spending boosts would not go far enough. Interestingly, in the ‘Freedom Doctrine’ editorial within the same issue, going to the moon does not even rate a mention.

That pledge is often reported today as a directive for NASA. But that was not within Kennedy’s power. Instead Kennedy was posing a question – would Congress agree to the proposal and would it authorise the funding? Congress could have said no, indeed with just 15 minutes of actual space flight behind them and a very uncertain path to the moon, logic appears to have been outmanoeuvred by the strength of Kennedy’s rhetoric.

Two Republican Representatives are quoted opposing Kennedy’s call for support: The Los Angeles Times reports Representative Steven Derounian from New York saying: “Not once did I hear him say a word pledging that we would not retreat one inch from the communist tyrants. This was a tired speech full of apologies.” Fellow member of the House, Representative Glenard P Lipscomb added: “This was a lot of words with not enough justification of needs.”

A counterview comes from James Baughman, biographer of American media giant Henry R Luce, the proprietor of Life, Time, and Fortune magazines. In an email exchange with this writer, Baughman recalled his research on Luce and the space programme, noting: “I’m struck, even now, by how few sceptics I could find, in the press and politics, regarding the space programme. I can think of only one senator, Norris Cotton of New Hampshire, who gently questioned JFK’s man on the moon proposal.”

With the hindsight of the President’s assassination and the subsequent success in landing a man on the moon in 1969, the rest of the speech has been forgotten. The final section has been raised to a mythical level at odds with its immediate reaction. It actually took a lot of legwork on Capitol Hill by Vice President Johnson, already the father of space legislation, to ensure that Congress supported Kennedy’s man on the moon funding request. This was achieved by promising a space-industry job boost, with the programme of works for Gemini and Apollo divided up among contractors in every State of the Union.

Kennedy was driven by political motives unrelated to any commitment to a moon landing. He had no great scientific or even romantic attachment to the race to the moon, but had done his homework prior to the May 25th speech. On April 20th, just after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy wrote to Johnson, the space expert in the Administration, asking for the answers to five questions: “Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to land on the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man? Is there any other space programme which promises dramatic results in which we could win?” Johnson assembled a committee of advisors including Frank Stanton, head of the broadcaster CBS, Donald Cook of American electric Power, George Brown from engineering company, Brown and Root, Air force Missile Chief Bernard Schriever, Senator Kerr, the newly-appointed chairman of the Senate Space Committee and NASA Administrator Jim Webb. In both a telephone conversation with Johnson and through a detailed five page memo, Von Braun provided a detailed argument to go to the moon. Johnson was convinced, and pulled the rest of the panel towards his view.

By April 23rd, Johnson had provided the answers and Kennedy had shifted his position from his immediate comments following Gagarin’s launch. At his press conference that day, he said: “If we can get to the moon before the Russians, then we should.” Johnson’s panel had convinced Kennedy that a lunar landing was viable for the Americans – but not for the Russians who were way behind on technology and would need an unfeasibly large rocket to lift their larger, heavier technology out of earth orbit and on the way to the moon. That panel was probably swayed more by Johnson’s strength of feeling than by a logical belief that a moon landing could be achieved within a decade. Even his phrasing: “Before this decade is out”, gave Kennedy a get-out card. Even if he fulfilled a complete two-term presidency, Kennedy would almost certainly be out of office before the moon landing. If it failed, it would not be on his watch – and potentially could be laid at the feet of Johnson, the Administration’s most persuasive space advocate. And that would likely be the case if the Soviets got there first as well.

Whereas the media had initially set the space agenda for Eisenhower, Kennedy had turned the tables. He was now attempting to set the agenda, using the New Frontier of space as a way to regain standing and challenge the Soviets to what Wolfe describes as ‘single combat’ on the Cold War battlefield. Domestically, the speech coalesced all thinking around space on one goal. The public, press and networks were now focused on one message that summed up the “invention, innovation imagination, decision” of Americans.

The President’s claim that: “No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long range exploration of space, and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish” recalled the romance and adventure of Lewis and Clark. Coupled with the relief and outpouring of positivity that Shepard’s successful Mercury flight had achieved, and the carefully-nuanced image of an All-American Astronaut elite ready to struggle against the unknown travails of space, the mixture was potent. Congress would never turn Kennedy down, and the perceived failure to get an American into space first could be turned into a positive: a catalyst for America’s next great adventure. However, not all the elements were truly aligned yet, and a Gallup poll completed as Kennedy spoke showed that the public remained sceptical of the President’s pledge being delivered. Asked whether participants viewed the US or Russia as being ahead in the Space Race, the response was evenly split. And on which would be first to send a man to the moon, 34% said the US, 33% said Russia and 33% didn’t know . There was clearly still much work to be done on public opinion.

Rep. Lipscomb’s comments on the speech: “This was a lot of words with not enough justification of needs” were prescient. Kennedy had put the building blocks in place to turn the media and public opinion on space from adversary through ally to involved partner. He had set a goal that defined the next lap of the space race. He had made space a core part of the Administration’s policy. He had control of the agency that would deliver space success. But still there were sceptics in the media and in Congress. The US had just 15 minutes of space experience and was clearly still some way behind the Soviets. The moon seemed an awfully long way away.

Books, books and a day out in Kent

Delving into Craig Allen's Eisenhower and the Mass Media, while flicking through Dan Rather's The Camera Never Blinks....James Hagerty's Diaries are on their way.

In the quest to finally finish my literature review, I'm on the hunt for William Safire's Before the Fall and Samuel Rosenman's Walking with Roosevelt. If anyone has a copy of either they don't want, please get in touch.

Hoping to head into campus this afternoon to pick up a couple of theory titles: Hill's The Policy Process: a reader and Greenaway's Deciding Factors in British Politics but have to wait for one (any?) member of my family to get home to let the rest in before I can go.

Meanwhile, I now have confirmation that I'm giving a presentation on June 15th at the SE Regional Hub History conference at the University of Kent.....it'll be a variation of the 240,000 mile cul de sac theme.

Anyway back to the books.

The Presidents and the Press (and TV & Radio)

My supervisors' comments back on my first PhD chapter plus the response from the room to my presentation at this year's research conference have all been good - today I'm tired but boosted by the feeling that I'm finally on the right lines after rather floundering my way through the first year and a bit of PhD life.

My Literature Review is pretty much complete in terms of early space race literature and also presidential leadership literature from the time (Wright Mills, Neustadt, Sorensen, McDougall et al). But what's missing is the body of text (if such a body exists) on the interaction of the Presidency and the media. I'm especially interested in titles covering the WW2-Vietnam period but would stretch to cover the Teddy Roosevelt - Ronnie Reagan period if there were uneful ideas to uncover and apply to 'my' Presidents: Ike and JFK.

My target to get this third leg of the Literature Review complete is mid-June - if anyone can suggest any titles, I'd love to hear them.

Old paper is exciting

Is there any reason why I should be inordinately excited about receiving bundles of paper from the Kennedy and Nixon Presidential libraries? Given the fact that I'm funding my own PhD while attempting to run my own micro-business on the side, the chances of a trip to Boston or the Los Angeles environs this year are somewhere between exceedingly slim and nil. So, the last few weeks has involved a large degree of online searching plus liaison with the archive researchers at the above institutions to dig out some useful research material (with its attendant vast photocopying bill) from Kennedy and Nixon's 1960 campaign files.

The task now is to analyse the papers to see if a) there was more than a hair's breadth of difference between the proposed space policies of these two doughty Cold War campaigners during the campaign; b) to see if the papers offer any likely pointers to how Nixon may have acted on NASA and the manned space programme had he won in 1960; and c) if there are any indications in the papers on how highly Kennedy rated space as an agenda item for his 1961 policy making before he moved into the White House. 

Plenty then to get my teeth into over the next couple of months.  

Build a rocket boys

How appropriate that I should be writing my Research Student Day presentation while Elbow's 'Lippy Kids' with its excellent refrain 'Build a rocket boys' fills the background with a bit of tuneful (prog) rock.

After several months of a fairly isolated student existence, I'm feeling a bit more part of the research community at the moment. I began to get a bit more momentum into the work as a deadline approached for my revised hypothesis/structure and literature review and I started playing my hypothesis past a few of the big players - the likes of Logsdon, Launius, Hansen and McCurdy and McDougall while asking for their views on what a Nixon presidency in 1961 might have looked like in terms of space policy.

My current working hypothesis (based on my growing realisation that I don't think there was a direct causal effect of the media on Executive decision making) states: More than 50 years on from President Kennedy’s inauguration, a myth persists that the USA’s triumph in landing a man on the moon expanded the nation’s frontiers into the heavens – and that this expansion owes its success to the policy-making of Kennedy. In recent years, this established wisdom has been reinforced by anniversary-driven hagiography, popular television rehash and, most of all, through the lionising of JFK.


This thesis will take an evidential approach in debunking the myth by presenting Kennedy as the master of political expediency, and re-evaluating Eisenhower’s role in developing effective space policy that was not limited by a race to the moon. The thesis will show how Eisenhower, from his inheritance of competing armed forces rocket programs, through the International Geophysical Year’s satellite development to his response to the Sputnik Autumn of 1957 set in track a process that enabled the creation of an agency that could deliver a space programme that, step-by-step, would open space in its widest sense to the American spirit of exploration. Using primary evidence from NASA’s Historical Collection and the Eisenhower Presidential Library, primary evidence from the Kennedy Presidential papers and recordings, and by extrapolating what a Nixon Presidency in 1961 might have meant for space policy, the thesis demonstrates that far from stretching America’s frontier to the heavens, Kennedy’s space policy was little more than an expedient reaction to the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the first earth orbit of Yuri Gagarin. Source material from both Eisenhower and Kennedy’s White House circles shows that Kennedy hijacked Eisenhower and NASA’s systematic and logical plan for space exploration, replacing it with a single-focus event: high on symbolic achievement, but entirely limiting in terms of truly extending America’s frontier into space.

The thesis will add to the discourse on the politics of the early years of space endeavour by making a first attempt to compare and contrast directly Eisenhower and Kennedy’s space policy decision making, highlighting Eisenhower’s low-key response to the Soviet ‘smoke and mirrors’; preference for unmanned space missions; and desire to separate scientific and military uses of space, with Kennedy’s direct challenge to Khrushchev which coalesced all NASA’s focus into the race for the moon. It also speculates on what might have been different had Nixon triumphed in the 1960 Presidential election.

In using space policy as the case study for Presidential decision making, this paper applies another contextual layer: the changing role of the media as the 1950s gave way to the 1960s and ushered in a new era of television news and debate; a new breed of space-enthralled journalist, and a new passion for all aspects of popular media: space as conquered by its ‘all American Boys’.

In summary, this paper re-evaluates Eisenhower’s contribution to the United States’ journey into space and, in so doing, places Kennedy’s mass-appeal rhetoric and policy making in true perspective: not as the champion of Apollo, but as the limiting factor that caused America to lose its way as it sought to push its frontier to the heavens.

None of the greats have knocked back my hypothesis and the general response has been positive. Now it sits with my supervisors for their comment - and it'll be open to the scrutiny of the Brunel research community on May 4 (may the fourth be with me!).

I've just been through a Saturday school where I had the chance to try out a shortened version of my presentation which drew precisely no questions.....probably not good - but the audience was made up of economists, organisational learning experts, educators and IT pros, with only one other historian in attendance. Still, I would have liked to elicit at least some reaction - but it was a long day and everyone was rather more concerned with their own presentation.

Anyway, it was just good to get together with other PhD students and have the kind of nerdy conversation that you just can't have at home - although why my kids aren't more interested in the US separation of government, I'll never know. 

Kennedy, Glenn and 'frontier rhetoric'

With all the 'Kennedy 50th' interest, this seems as good a time as any to post the final piece from my Masters disso. All the following content is copyright Mark Shanahan 2011

Chapter 3: God speed John Glenn

In his inaugural address, Kennedy has challenged the US public saying: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” In the case of Astronaut John Glenn, his task was to restore American prestige and fill the credibility gap between Kennedy’s speech to Congress in May 1961 and eight months of further space activity that had seen one more sub-orbital flight in the Mercury Programme, and 17 orbits by Russian Cosmonaut Gherman Titov. Kennedy’s rhetoric in his speech to Congress in May 1961 was not enough on its own to convince either the media or the American public that the US would win the race to the moon. The nation had already fallen short both in the race for satellites and the race to put a man into space. Now Kennedy and NASA needed a significant step forward to align the media and the nation behind the drive for the moon. With the flight of John Glenn, the politicians and space administration worked far more proactively to manage Glenn’s flight as an event. The result, as this chapter will show was a high point in the US space programme where the nation was truly uplifted by NASA’s achievement.

The flight’s success on February 20th 1962 cemented the public-media-and governmental alliance behind Kennedy’s pledge to send a man to the moon and return him safely to the earth before the decade was out. From the choice of astronaut, naming of the capsule, and mission announcement months before take-off (unlike Shepard and Grissom’s sub-orbital shots) NASA and the Executive were at pains to identify the mission with Kennedy’s foreign policy agenda. Their goal was to finally win Congress and the American public over to belief that manned spaceflight and an aggressive drive for the moon was at the heart of the nation’s interests.


When the Mercury Seven were first presented to the media through a Washington press conference on April 9, 1959, they were not a particularly prepossessing bunch. Most had little to say that was either interesting or original . Introduced by NASA’s first Director of Public Information, Walter T Bonney , the ‘lonesome marine’ John Glenn stood out for his down-home humour and implicit leadership of the group. Already a ‘name’ for his July 1957 transcontinental speed record when he flew from Los Angeles to New York in 3 hours and 23 minutes and his subsequent appearances on the hit NBC TV show Name That Tune, Glenn established an immediate rapport with the journalists present. As Tom Wolfe wrote in The Right Stuff, “John Glenn came out of it as tops among seven very fair haired boys...all seven emerged collectively in a golden haze....A blazing aura was among them all.” Though Shepard, regarded as both the brightest and the best pilot among the Seven, got the nod to be the US’ first man in space, NASA knew that the key flight in the programme would be the first orbital mission. Glenn was pencilled in for this journey at a very early stage.


The US still needed reassurance that Kennedy’s aspiration would be achieved. There was still residual opposition to the pledge both among the American public and, particularly, among Republican Senators and Representatives. Representative Tom Pelly of Washington described the lunar programme as: "a spectacular piece of nonsense.... the most inflationary proposal in American Political History” . Meanwhile Senator Gordon Allot of Colorado noted the space race connotation, calling Kennedy’s pledge: “a useless contest with the Russians...(Can) such a contest be worth...the cost to the American people?” Yet as Time noted, Pelly was able to muster only 83 house members to oppose the President’s spending plans in 1961. The eventual vote on the budget package – including NASA’s increased budget - was passed by 352 to 59. Still, with just Shepard’s 15 minute hop to Bermuda to demonstrate the country’s space flight excellence, the US population was divided on whether the US had caught up with the Soviets as a space power.

In June 1961, a Gallup Poll asked: “Congress has been asked to approve a program, costing 7 to 9 billion dollars during the next five years, to enable the US to send a man to the moon and bring him back safely. Do you think Congress should adopt the program or reject it?” Only 42% of respondents said adopt it, while 46% said reject it, with the remainder having no opinion. It was hardly a ringing endorsement of Kennedy’s rhetoric. When the Mercury Program was once again eclipsed by Titov’s 24-hour orbital trip a New York Times editorial noted that Washington officials were concerned by NASA's "easy pace" in implementing the lunar landing programme outlined by President Kennedy.


However, NASA had a PR coup planned. Glenn’s flight was announced as soon as the chimp Enos had been recovered safe from the Atlas-Mercury 5 flight test in November 1961. It was quite contrary to NASA’s previous reluctance to confirm any astronaut until they had to, but Glenn’s trip was different. Until Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, Glenn was the US space programme’s number one All-American Hero: the epitome of Tom Wolfe’s ‘Right Stuff’. Glenn’s flight, the first by an American into orbit, presented him as a pioneer and clearly evoked the spirit of frontier adventure. In interviews, the astronaut himself stated the flight would ‘pave the way’ for voyages to ‘the moon and beyond’”. Life magazine was working hard to present a rounded image that reflected Kennedy’s ‘New Frontier’ boldness: the lean marine with the buzz cut, square jaw and easy smile, with the nuclear family for the nuclear age of the perfect wife and two teenage boys, slotted easily into the pioneer spirit encouraged by NASA. His striving for the new frontier of space rapidly captured the imagination.
 Glenn was the perfect fit for the Astronaut NASA had originally envisaged when inviting applicants for the role. Described by Life’s John Dille as “the senior man on the team...sternly self-disciplined and almost ascetic in his pursuit of perfection”, he was also “warm, convivial and friendly.” He certainly fitted the picture of ‘daring and courageous men, cool and resourceful under pressure’ that Dille gives as NASA’s requirements for its first astronauts. Yet Glenn was actually little different from the six other married fathers, all highly experienced test pilots, who comprised the Mercury Seven. But more than Shepard and more than Grissom, his image had been cultivated within NASA and presented through carefully chosen words and pictures made readily available by NASA’s Public Affairs team to an eager, if somewhat lazy, media. In the last years of printed media’s dominance over television, they were more than ready to lap up the wealth of material provided by NASA. It is worth noting that the media operated at two distinct levels. Most newspapers had a Washington reporter and they were briefed and managed by NASA Administrator James Webb and his HQ Public Affairs team. This team  worked closely with Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s Press Secretary, and discussed space matters with reporters at a high policy level, ensuring all commentary around Mercury and subsequent NASA programmes was in line with the President’s wider political agenda.


However, a second level of space reporter had emerged, with a beat that ran from the Langley Research Facility to Cape Canaveral. These ‘on the spot’ reporters covered events in the space calendar – astronaut announcements, launches and tests. Their language was a mix of technical reporting and awe at the achievements of the programme and its astronauts. As the previous chapter explained, this second breed was far removed from the questioning journalism that would emerge as the decade rolled on. Norman Mailer was still on the periphery of the group, and the likes of Jay Barbree and Martin Caidin who covered every launch were, by their own admission, undemanding.

Paul Haney worked in public Affairs for NASA before becoming a special correspondent for ITN. He explained NASA’s policy on managing the media at the Cape. “NASA issued technical releases on every aspect of the flight, but they were rather dull. They were designed to be informative rather than inspiring. Most of the people I worked with were either ex-military and didn’t want to reveal anything beyond the technical specification about the flights, or were career civil servants originally hired from regional newspapers. Their role was to answer reporters’ questions but not to offer any opinion on strategy or the higher meaning of space exploration. They were also to be a barrier between reporters and our key NASA managers. Where were succeeded best as a team was in providing lots of ready-made copy and images. Much of the copy was generated in Washington, and pictures, such as the now iconic Mercury Seven in pressure suits at Langley, were made freely available for the press to use. Almost every reporter worked to very tight deadlines and probably too many too readily accepted the material NASA provided and reproduced it without much editorial analysis.


“Our team on the ground were much happier talking about valves and heat shields than pioneering missions to new frontiers. We left that to Pierre Salinger’s people and the Life editorial writers. However, I eventually found myself using their language and imagery on later Mercury and Gemini flights. It just seemed to seep into the set-piece announcements.”


Strangely, a string of 10 postponements allowed the public to get to know Glenn better. His flight was tentatively scheduled for December and postponed further in January after Glenn had spent six hours strapped into the tiny Mercury spacecraft . The delays allowed ample time for the press to venerate Glenn as a hero before he had even left the launch pad. Crucial to this process was Life which lavished attention on the ‘unswerving and self-denying man’ and his dedication to the ‘stern, dangerous pursuit’ of spaceflight. Even the name of his craft was significant: Friendship 7 was at once homely and inclusive and carried an implicit message of global friendship – albeit under an American flag.

By the time Friendship 7 launched on February20th 1962, Life had run a number of emotive spreads on Glenn, his training schedule and his family, providing the public with the heroic personification of the US space program. Through no fault of his own, Glenn’s flight was less than heroic. Glenn reached orbit and was cleared for orbital flight. However, before even one had completed, he was in trouble. The automatic attitude control system was malfunctioning, prompting a persistent drift to the right. Glenn corrected this by switching to manual control. But telemetry on the ground showed a further, more threatening problem. A reading suggested that Glenn’s heat shield may have been partially dislodged during separation from the Atlas rocket. If the shield was damaged, it would almost certainly cause the Mercury craft to burn up as it attempted re-entry to the earth’s atmosphere. NASA controllers decided to bring Glenn down as quickly as possible – at the end of his third orbit, and instructed him not to jettison his retro rocket pack as it was felt this may hold the potentially errant heat shield in place. Controllers were ‘less than candid’ with Glenn, while the watching media and public knew nothing of the potential disaster waiting to happen.


While it was Soviet policy not to announce anything about their space flights until success was assured, NASA trumpeted the fact that they operated all their missions in the full media glare. Yet in this case, they chose not to inform their pilot of the full nature of the danger he faced. Therefore, since Public Affairs Announcer Shorty Powers monitored the capcom feed and interpreted astronaut communications for the world’s media, no-one beyond the mission controllers were aware of the difficulties the flight faced. It could be argued that NASA was playing the Soviet game. More likely it was weighing the odds of damage limitation aimed at preserving NASA and US prestige should Glenn perish.


Glenn landed safely and, together with NASA, was hailed by the American public, even though Gagarin had beaten him into orbit by almost a year. The flight dominated every news bulletin and every newspaper across the country and, indeed, much of the world. The Los Angeles Times, so recently a critic of Kennedy, covered the story under the title ‘Astronauts’ Epic’ . I t dominated pages 1-7, 10-12, 14-15 and 19, using a large number of photographs supplied by NASA. In a show of confidence, the agency was also able to report to the newspaper that Glenn’s flight was the US’ 67th successful space launch, compared to 13 for the Soviets. What is perhaps most notable is the way that both Johnson and Kennedy were inextricably linked with the flight and the celebration of its success. The newspaper quoted Johnson who said: “This is a great day for the free world and therefore for all humanity...outer space has become a pathway for mankind and we hope and pray that it is a pathway to peace.” Kennedy kept up the voyager metaphor and was quoted by the Los Angeles Times saying: “We have a long way to go in this space race. We started late. But this is a new ocean and I believe the United States must set sail on it and be in a position second to none. “


Suddenly the politicians sounded like those journalists who, in 1959 compared the Mercury Seven to Columbus, De Gama and the other great explorers of history. Glenn addressed Congress saying: “I am certainly glad to see that pride in our country and its accomplishments are not a thing of the past.” His implication was that his Mercury flight had renewed that pride in Americans.


On February 21 1962, the New York Times declared the flight to be “one of the greatest dramatic events in modern times.” The paper’s leader writers were quick to contrast the worldwide publicity surrounding Glenn’s flight with the secrecy shrouding the Soviet space programme. On the same day, the Washington Post lauded Glenn, stating: “the new spaceman, holding his life in his own hands as test pilots have always done, can bring his fragile craft more surely to its destination than any quantity of automatic control.” This was a thinly veiled attack on the Soviets who made a virtue of the automation of their craft. At a more parochial level, regional newspapers across the US pledged themselves firmly behind NASA. The Hartford Courant in Connecticut for instance asserted that ‘American heroism has entered a new period.’


While the drive for the moon was a naked attempt to beat the Soviets in a world-awing set-piece, pride in American accomplishment was at the root of both Kennedy and NASA’s drive for space. McDougall describes Congress’ support of Kennedy’s pledge to land a man on the moon as: “the greatest open-ended commitment in peacetime by Congress in history.” Drawing on the almost mythical stature of the narrative of Lewis and Clark’s trailblazing across the American west a century before, the drive for space created a new narrative echoing America’s frontier myth. In telephone remarks to NASA’s first Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Space , Kennedy expressed America’s determination to be “a pioneer in the New Frontier of Space.” The language of the media and the Administration was coalescing around a new frontier hero, created through a magnificent adventure and underpinned by a carefully constructed image.

NASA’s filmed record of the flight The Voyage of Friendship 7 , released in the weeks following Glenn’s return stressed the adventure and chose not to dwell on the risks the flight encountered. The colour film which received nationwide and international distribution replayed the voyager image and focused on ‘a captain of a new kind of ship about to set sail on a new ocean, the infinite ocean of space’. In-flight film shows Glenn actively piloting the craft – far removed from the passenger status of Gagarin and Titov. Noting that the launch was broadcast live across the US by all the major networks who, in turn, carried the launch to ‘all nations of the free world’, the film stresses the ‘open’ nature of America’s voyage into space uniting 4,000 contractors across the nation, while the Mercury-Atlas’s course is charted across ‘the emerging nations of Africa’ with the implication that the mission may help win their support for the US. Glenn’s flight over the Atlantic, where he is seen controlling the craft, is compared to Lindbergh’s first solo Atlantic crossing. This parallel had been first aired in Life prior to the flight, and found its way into a number of subsequent media reports.


Back in the US, with more time to reflect, the news magazines were certain that NASA was back on track in beating the Soviets to the moon. Glenn featured on the covers of Time, Newsweek and Life in the first week in March, with Time reporting: “In terms of national prestige, Glenn’s flight put the US back in the space race with a vengeance, and gave the morale of the US and the entire free world a badly needed boost.” In the wake of the Berlin Wall dispute and Khrushchev’s carefully orchestrated smoke and mirrors in space, the still-new President Kennedy badly needed media positivity. He would have welcomed Newsweek’s response in the same week which noted that Glenn had: “lifted the self-doubt that had plagued the United States since the first Sputnik flashed through the night skies.” No longer need America be tormented by “the nagging suspicion that the American political and economic system was somehow inadequate to the new challenges which the space age posed.”


The positive media coverage around the world was echoed in the hundreds of thousands of letters Glenn received from over 100 countries including the Soviet Union. The well-named Friendship 7 went on tour across 17 countries, with a well-oiled NASA publicity machine ensuring millions had the opportunity to look inside the craft. Finally, in a PR triumph, on the first anniversary of the flight, Friendship 7 was presented to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington where it was displayed alongside Lindbergh’s Spirit of St Louis. This was a very deliberate action aimed at evoking the same spirit of exploration, triumph over adversity and conquering new frontiers that Lindbergh had stirred among Americans with his first solo aeroplane crossing of the Atlantic 35 years earlier.


The alignment of the planets politic and media was complete on March 1 1962 when President Kennedy accompanied Glenn and his wife Annie through the streets of New York where the returning hero enjoyed a tickertape parade. This followed a similarly joyful reception in Washington DC when Vice President Johnson joined Glenn in the motorcade on their way to address Congress on February 26th – a triumphal valediction of the Mercury missions capturing an image of national success and national pride. 1961-62 was NASA’s ‘golden year’ . Tthe cover of Life on March 9, 1962 with a smiling Glenn taking the adulation of the Washington crowd as Johnson looks on neatly distilled the apogee of the Mercury programme, and finally set a solid foundation of public and media support for the Apollo programme to come. Kennedy had used success in the space race to strengthen his own position, and it’s worth noting that his approval rating peaked at 83% in the fortnight following Glenn’s flight.


How much this was a product of an active space policy by Kennedy’s Administration or even simple relief that Glenn’s flight had put the US back in the space race is open to debate. But this writer would argue that the ‘triumph’ would not have reached such a peak without an active public relations effort that used the rhetoric of the Administration, the creative writing and powerful photographic imagery of Life and the extensive reach of the NASA public affairs machine to turn an already impressive man and extraordinary enterprise into a world-uniting, heroic event. The flight of Friendship Seven was a totem for Kennedy, and enabled him to regain much of the prestige he had lost following the US failure in the Bay of Pigs.