by Tom Wolfe
There was even a press conference at which the chimpanzee appeared. “Enos” he was, of course. At the press conference Bob Gilruth announced that John Glenn would be the pilot for the first manned orbital flight, with Scott Carpenter as the backup pilot. Deke Slayton would take the second flight, with Wally Schirra as the backup pilot. All the while the astronaut who took the first flight was sitting right there at the table (quoth the brethren, sotto voce). Number 85 stole the show, which was only just. He took the flashbulbs and all the talk and hubbub without blinking or even fidgeting, as if he had been waiting all along for his moment in the spotlight. Of course, the ape had been, as it were, overtrained for such a moment and was long past being able to let such things alter his behavior. Number 85 had been in rooms full of bright lights and large numbers of human beings before. Noise, vibrations, oscillations, weightlessness, space flight, fame—what earthly difference did it make compared to the shocks and the box?
At the outset neither Glenn nor his wife, Annie, foresaw the sort of excitement that was going to build up over his flight. Glenn regarded Shepard as the winner of the competition, since he looked at it the way pilots had always looked at it on the great ziggurat of flying. Al had been picked for the first flight, and there was no getting around that. He had been the first American to go into space. It was as if he were the project pilot for Mercury. The best Glenn could hope for was to play Scott Crossfield to Shepard’s Chuck Yeager. Yeager had broken the sound barrier and become the True Brother of all the True Brothers, but at least Crossfield had gone on to become the first man to fly Mach 2 and, later on, the first man to fly the X–15.
Not even when reporters began arriving in New Concord, Ohio, his old hometown, and pushing his parents’ doorbell and roaming and foaming over the town like gangs of strays, looking for anything, scraps, morsels of information about John Glenn—not even then did Glenn fully realize just what was about to happen. The deal with Life kept all but Life reporters away from him, and so the other fellows were out trying to root up whatever they could. That seemed to be the explanation. The Cape hadn’t turned into a madhouse yet. As late as December, Glenn could go out to the strip on Route A1A in Cocoa Beach with Scott Carpenter, who was training with him as back-up man, out to that little Kontiki Village joint, whatever the name of it was, and listen to the combo play “Beyond the Reef.” John got a kick out of “Beyond the Reef.” By early January, however, it was madness to try to get to the Kontiki joint or anywhere else in Cocoa Beach. There were now reporters all over the place, all of them rabid for a glimpse of John Glenn. They would even pile into the little Presbyterian church when John went there on Sunday and turn the service into a sort of muffled melee, with the photographers trying to keep quiet and muscle their way into position at the same time. They were really terrible. So John and Scott now stuck pretty much to the base, working out on the procedures trainer and the capsule itself. At night, in Hangar S, John would try to answer the fan mail. But it was like trying to beat back the ocean with a hammer. The amount of mail he was getting was incredible.
Nevertheless, the training regimen created a curtain around John, and he didn’t really have as clear an idea of the storm of publicity … and the passion of it all … as his wife did. At their house in Arlington, Virginia, Annie was getting the whole storm, and she had practically no protection from it and few happy distractions. John’s flight was first scheduled for December 20, 1961, but bad weather over the Cape kept forcing postponements. He was finally set to go on January 27. He was inserted into the capsule before dawn. Annie was in a state. She was petrified. This had little to do with fear for John’s life, however. Annie could take that kind of pressure. She had been through the whole course of worrying over a pilot. John had flown in combat in the Pacific Theater in the Second World War and then in Korea. In Korea he was hit seven times by flak. Annie had also been through just about everything that Pax River had to inflict upon a pilot’s wife, short of the visit of the Friend of Widows and Orphans at her own door. But one thing she had never done. She had never had to step outside after one of John’s flights and say a few words on television. She knew that would be coming up when John flew, and she was already dreading the moment. Some of the other wives were at her house for the Danger Wake, and she asked them to bring some tranquilizers. She wouldn’t need them for the flight. She would take them before she had to step outside for the ordeal with the TV people. With her ferocious stutter … the thought of millions of people, or even hundreds, or even five … seeing her struggling on television … She had been in front of microphones with John before, and John always knew how to step in and save the day. She had certain phrases she had no trouble with—“Of course,” “Certainly,” “Not at all,” “Wonderful,” “I hope not,” “That’s right,” “I don’t think so,” “Fine, thank you,” and so on—and most of the questions from the television reporters were so simpleminded she could handle them with those eight phrases, plus “yes” and “no”—and John or one of the children would chime in if any amplification was called for. They were a great team that way. But today she would have to solo.
Annie could see the impending catastrophe easily enough. All she had to do was look at the television screen. Any channel … it didn’t matter … she could count on seeing some woman holding a microphone covered in black foam rubber and giving a declamation on the order of:
“Inside this trim, modest suburban home is Annie Glenn, wife of Astronaut John Glenn, sharing the anxiety and pride of the entire world at this tense moment but in a very private and very crucial way that only she can understand. One thing has prepared Annie Glenn for this test of her own courage and will sustain her through this test, and that one thing is her faith: her faith in the ability of her husband, her faith in the efficiency and dedication of the thousands of engineers and other personnel who provide his guidance system … and her faith in Almighty God …”
In the picture on the screen all you could see was the one TV woman, with the microphone in her hand, standing all by herself in front of Annie’s house. The curtains were pulled, somewhat unaccountably, inasmuch as it was nine o’clock in the morning, but it all looked very cozy. In point of fact, the lawn, or what was left of it, looked like Nut City. There were three or four mobile units from the television networks with cables running through the grass. It looked as if Arlington had been invaded by giant toasters. The television people, with all their gaffers and go-fers and groupies and cameramen and couriers and technicians and electricians, were blazing with 200-watt eyeballs and ricocheting off each other and the assembled rabble of reporters, radio stringers, tourists, lollygaggers, policemen, and freelance gawkers. They were all craning and writhing and rolling their eyes and gesturing and jabbering away with the excitement of the event. A public execution wouldn’t have drawn a crazier mob. It was the kind of crowd that would have made the Fool Killer lower his club and shake his head and walk away, frustrated by the magnitude of the opportunity.
Meanwhile, John is up on top of the rocket, the Atlas, a squat brute, twice the diameter of the Redstone. He’s lying on his back in the human holster of the Mercury capsule. The count keeps dragging on. There’s hold after hold because of the weather. The clouds are so heavy they will make it impossible to monitor the launch properly. Every day for five days Glenn has psyched himself up for the big event, only to have a cancellation because of the weather. Now he has been up there for four hours, four and a half, five hours—he has been stuffed into the capsule, lying on his back, for five hours, and the engineers decide to scrub the flight because of the heavy cloud cover.
He’s drained. He makes his way back to Hangar S, and they start taking the suit off and unwiring him. John is sitting there in the ready room with just the outer covering of the suit off—he still has on the mesh lining underneath and all the sensors attached to his sternum and his rib cage and his arms—and a delegation from NASA comes trooping in to confront him with the following message from on high:
My wife?
Yes, she won’t cooperate, John. Perhaps you can give her a call. There’s a phone hookup right here.
A call?
Absolutely befuddled, John calls Annie. Annie is inside their house in Arlington with a few of the wives, a few friends, and Loudon Wainwright, the writer from Life, watching the countdown and, finally, the cancellation on television. Outside is the bedlam of the reporters baying for scraps of information about the ordeal of Annie Glenn—and resenting the fact that Life has exclusive access to the poignant drama. A few blocks away, on a quaint Arlington side street, in a limousine, waits Lyndon Johnson, Vice-President of the United States. Kennedy had appointed Johnson his special overseer for the space program. It was the sort of meaningless job that Presidents give Vice-Presidents, but it had a symbolic significance now that Kennedy was presenting manned space flight as the very vanguard of his New Frontier (version number two). Johnson, like many men who have had the job of Vice-President before him, has begun suffering from publicity deprivation. He decides he wants to go inside the Glenn household and console Annie Glenn over the ordeal, the excruciating pressure of the five-hour wait and the frustrating cancellation. To make this sympathy call all the more memorable, Johnson decides it would be nice if he brought in NBC-TV, CBS-TV, and ABC-TV along with him, in the form of a pool crew that will feed the touching scene to all three networks and out to the millions. The only rub—the only rub, to Johnson’s way of thinking—is that he wants the Life reporter, Wainwright, to get out of the house, because his presence will antagonize the rest of the print reporters who can’t get in, and they will not think kindly of the Vice-President.
What he does not realize is that the only ordeal that Annie Glenn has been going through has been over the possibility that she was going to have to step outside at some point and spend sixty seconds or so stammering a few phrases. And now … various functionaries and secret-service personnel are calling on the telephone and banging on the door to inform her that the Vice-President is already in Arlington, in a White House limousine, waiting to pull up and charge in and pour ten minutes of hideous Texas soul all over her on nationwide TV. Short of the rocket blowing up under John, this is the worst thing she can imagine occurring in the entire American space program. At first Annie is trying to deal with it gracefully by saying that she can’t possibly ask Life to leave, not only because of the contract, but because of their good personal relationship. Wainwright, being no fool, doesn’t particularly care to get caught in the middle like this and so he offers to bow out, to leave. But Annie is not about to give up her Life shield at this point. Her mind is made up. She’s getting angry. She tells Wainwright: “You’re not leaving this house!” Her anger does wonders for her stutter. It flattens it right out temporarily. She’s practically ordering him to stay. Annie’s stutter often makes people underestimate her, and Johnson’s people didn’t realize that she was a Presbyterian pioneer wife living in full vitality in the twentieth century. She could deal with any five of them with just a few amps from the wrath of God when she was angry. Finally, they’re getting the picture. She’s too much for them. So they start trying to bend arms at NASA to get someone to order her to play ball. But it has to be done very rapidly. Johnson is sitting out there a few blocks away in his limousine, fuming and swearing and making life hell for everyone within earshot, wondering, in so many words, why the fuck there isn’t anybody on his staff who can deal with a housewife, f’r chrissake, and his staff is leaning on NASA, and NASA is bucking the problem up the chain, until in a matter of minutes it’s at the top, and the delegation is trooping into Hangar S to confront the astronaut himself.
So there’s John, with half his mesh underlining hanging off his body and biosensor wires spouting from out of his thoracic cage … there’s John, covered with sweat, drawn, deflated, beginning to feel very tired after waiting for five hours for a hundred tons of liquid oxygen and RP-1 kerosene to explode under his back … and the hierarchy of NASA has one thing on its mind: keeping Lyndon Johnson happy. So John puts in the call to Annie, and he tells her: “Look, if you don’t want the Vice-President or the TV networks or anybody else to come into the house, then that’s it as far as I’m concerned, they are not coming in—and I will back you up all the way, one hundred percent, and you tell them that. I don’t want Johnson or any of the rest of them to put so much as one toe inside our house!”
That was all that Annie needed, and she simply became a wall. She wouldn’t even discuss the matter any further, and there was no question any longer about Johnson getting in. Johnson, of course, was furious. You could hear him bellowing and yelling over half of Arlington, Virginia. He was talking about his aides. Pansies! Cows! Gladiolas! Webb could scarcely believe what was going on. The astronaut and his wife had shut the door in the Vice-President’s face. Webb had a few words with Glenn. Glenn wouldn’t back down an inch. He indicated that Webb was way out of line.
Way out of line! What the hell was this? Webb couldn’t figure out what was happening. How could the number-one man, himself, the administrator of NASA, be way out of line? Webb called in some of his top deputies and described the situation. He said he was considering changing the order of the flight assignments—i.e., putting another astronaut in Glenn’s place. This flight required a man who could comprehend the broader interests of the program better. His deputies looked at him as if he were crazy. He’d never get away with it! The astronauts wouldn’t stand for it! … They had their differences, but on something like this the seven would stand together like an army … Webb was beginning to see something he had never quite figured out before. The astronauts were not his men. They were in a category new to American life. They were single-combat warriors. If anything, he was their man.
One could imagine what would happen if Webb tried to exercise his authority nonetheless … Here comes the showdown … the seven Mercury astronauts on the TV … explaining that in the very moments when their lives are on the line, he, Webb, is meddling, trying to curry favor with Lyndon Johnson, being vindictive because John Glenn’s wife, Annie, would not let the hideous handwringing Texan into her living room to emote all over her on nationwide television … He sits in his office suite in Washington while their hides are up on the tip of the rocket … One could see the lines drawn in just that way. Webb would be issuing denials, furiously … Kennedy would be the umpire—and it wasn’t too hard to figure out which way the decision would go. The changing of the assignments was never mentioned again.
Not long thereafter an old friend visited Webb in his corner office, and Webb unburdened himself.
“Look at this office,” he said, making a grand gesture across a room with all the trappings of Cabinet-level rank known to the General Services Administration syllabus. “And I … cannot … get … a … simple … order … carried out!”
But in the next moment his mood changed. “All the same,” he said, “I love those guys. They’re putting their lives on the line for their country.”
Dryden and Gilruth decided to postpone the launch for at least two weeks, to the middle of February. Glenn made a statement to the press about the delays. He said that anybody who knew the first thing about “the flight test business” expected delays; they were all part of it; the main thing was not to involve people who became “panicky” when everything didn’t go just right … Glenn went home to Arlington for a three-day weekend. While he was there, President Kennedy invited him to the White House for a private get-together. He did not invite Webb or Johnson to join them.
On February 20 Glenn was once again squeezed inside the Mercury capsule on top of the Atlas rocket, lying on his back, whiling away the holds in the countdown by going over his checklist and looking at the scenery through the periscope. If he closed his eyes it felt as if he were lying on his back on the deck of an old ship. The rocket kept creaking and twisting, shaking the capsule this way and
that. The Atlas had 4.3 times as much fuel as the Redstone, including 80 tons of liquid oxygen. The liquid oxygen, the “lox,” had a temperature of 293 degrees below zero, so that the shell and tubing of the rocket, which were thin, kept contracting and twisting and creaking. Glenn was at the equivalent of nine stories up in the air. The enormous rocket seemed curiously fragile, the way it moved and creaked and whined. The contractions created high-frequency vibrations and the lox hissed in the pipes, and it all ran up through the capsule like a metallic wail. It was the same rocket lox wail they used to hear at dawn at Edwards when they fueled the D—558—2 many years before.
Through the periscope Glenn could see for miles down the Banana River and the Indian River. He could just barely make out the thousands of people along the beaches. Some of them had been camping out along there in trailers since January 23, when the flight was first scheduled. They had elected camp mayors. They were having a terrific time. A month in a Banana River trailer camp was not too long to wait to make sure you were here when an event of this magnitude occurred.
There were thousands of them, off on the periphery as Glenn looked out. He could only see them through the periscope. They looked very small and far way and far below. And they were all wondering with a delicious shudder what it must be like to be in his place now. How frightened is he! Tell us! That’s all we want to know! The fear and the gamble. Never mind the rest. Lying on his back like this, with his legs jackknifed up above him, stuffed blind into the holster, with the hatch closed, he couldn’t help but be aware of his own heartbeat from time to time. Glenn could tell that his pulse was slow. Out loud, if the subject ever came up, everyone said that pulse rates didn’t matter; it was a very subjective thing; many variables; and so on. It had only been within the past five years that biosensors had even been put on pilots. They resented them and didn’t care to attach any importance to them. Nevertheless, without saying so, everyone knew that they provided a rough gauge of a man’s emotional state. Without saying so—not a word!—everyone knew that Gus Grissom’s pulse rate had been somewhat panicky . It kept jumping over 100 during the countdown and then spurted up to 150 during the lift-off and stayed that high throughout his weightless flight, then jumped again, all the way to 171, just before the retro-rockets went off. No one—certainly not out loud—no one was going to draw any conclusions from it, but … it was not a sign of the right stuff. Add to that his performance in the water … In his statement about people who get panicky over the flight test business, Glenn had said you had to know how to control your emotions. Well, he was as good as his word. Did any yogi ever control his heartbeat and perspiration better! (And, as the biomedical panels in the Mission Control room showed, his pulse never went over 80 and was holding around 70, no more than that of any normal healthy bored man having breakfast in the kitchen.) Occasionally he could feel his heart skip a beat or beat with an odd electrical sensation, and he knew that he was feeling the tension. (And at the biomedical panels the young doctors looked at each other in consternation—and then shrugged.) Nevertheless, he was aware that he was feeling no fear. He truly was not. He was more like an actor who is going out to perform in the same play yet once again—the only difference being that the audience this time is enormous and highly prestigious. He knew every sensation he would feel once the event began. The main thing was not to … “foul up.” Please, dear God, don’t let me foul up. In fact, there was little chance that he would forget so much as a word or a single move. Glenn had been the backup pilot—everyone said pilot now—for both Shepard and Grissom. During the charade before the first flight, he had gone through all of Shepard’s simulations, and he had repeated most of Grissom’s. And the simulations he had gone through as prime pilot for the first orbital flight had surpassed any simulations ever done before. They had even put him in the capsule on top of the rocket and moved the gantry away from the rocket, because Grissom had reported the odd sensation of perceiving the gantry as falling over, as he witnessed the event through his periscope, just before lift-off. Therefore, this feeling would be adapted out of Glenn. They put him in the capsule on top of the rocket and instructed him to watch the gantry move away through his periscope. Nothing must be novel about the experience! On top of all that, he had Shepard’s and Grissom’s descriptions of variations from the simulations. “On the centrifuge you feel thus-and-such. Well, during the actual flight it feels like that but with this-and-that difference.” No man had ever lived an event so completely ahead of time. He was socketed into the capsule, lying on his back, getting ready to do precisely what his enormous Presbyterian Pilot self-esteem had been dying to do for fifteen years: demonstrate to the world his righteous stuff.