The last American hero
“Could I ask for a show of hands how many are confident that they will come back from outer space?”
As Tom Wolfe noted in “The Right Stuff,” this was a particularly awkward question to ask a group of astronauts, especially those who had yet to puncture the atmosphere in a space capsule. But at the 1959 press conference unveiling the Project Mercury astronauts, a reporter posed just that question.
Of course, not raising one’s hand meant that he thought he was going to either be blown to bits on takeoff, cast adrift in space or roasted by the heat upon reentry. So each of the astronauts raised his hand.
Near the end of the table, John Glenn raised both hands.
Glenn didn’t have reason to be so confident. The Atlas rocket that soon would be thrusting him into the great beyond had a pesky habit of exploding in a fiery ball once it left the launch pad. Perhaps the Marine’s 149 combat missions in World War II and Korea instilled a faux certainty that he was indestructible.
And while the human form of John Glenn left us last week, John Glenn the American Hero still lives on. In fact, Glenn’s death at the age of 95 is a reminder that there may never be another figure like him in our country. As Wolfe wrote in a later essay, “John Glenn, in 1962, was the last true national hero America has ever had.”
Just months before Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth in a spacecraft, Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov had circled the Earth 17 times on the
capsule. The “space race” with the Soviet Union was an existential battle; any nation that controlled the heavens also controlled the weapons that could be fired from above.
Thus, Glenn’s voyage on Friendship 7 wasn’t merely notable because a man was willing to strap a missile between his legs and ride it into space, the future of the United States as a nation was believed to be at stake.Had the Atlas rocket exploded, it would have cost Glenn more than just his life — many Americans were afraid that such a failure would have granted the Soviets a near monopoly on space and put them in peril.
It’s difficult to think of any modern figure who is as universally beloved as Glenn continues to be. As soon as any American figure gains notoriety, it is now a sport to see who can be the first to tear him or her apart. Even Americans who are above reproach are now subjected to parasitic websites whose sole agenda is to dole out buckets full of reproach.
Had modern media existed in 1962, it would have not gone unnoticed that all the Mercury Seven astronauts were white males. Or that they enjoyed fast cars and the teeming crowds of young, available women who descended on their training facilities.
It was actually Glenn, the deeply religious Presbyterian, who was able to get his fellow astronauts in line and succeed in suppressing stories about his colleagues’ indiscretions.
Of course, in 2016, media manipulation for the greater good of the program would be an impossibility. Further, in the era of social media, one could fully expect a website to start digging around Glenn’s church and exposing some of his faith’s more “extreme” views.
Sadly, with Glenn’s passing, we may not ever know what a real hero is anymore. This is perhaps why America just elected a con man as president; dignity, virtue and personal courage now appear to be mere fetishes. And it now seems the Era of True American Heroes is as far distant as the time before man ventured into space.