fb-pixelJohn Glenn, astronaut and senator, dies at 95 - The Boston Globe Skip to main content

John Glenn, astronaut and senator, dies at 95

John Glenn.Jay LaPrete/Associated Press

John Herschel Glenn Jr. — twice an astronaut, four times elected to the Senate, once a presidential candidate, 149 missions as a combat pilot, and forever an American symbol and hero — died Thursday in Columbus, Ohio. He was 95.

Mr. Glenn was a test pilot, a Mercury astronaut, an advocate of moderation in the Senate and in the Democratic Party, a prescient voice of warning against nuclear proliferation, a space shuttle payload specialist, and a symbol of the vigor that Americans — whether as youthful dreamers or active seniors — brought to the 20th century.

“The last of America’s first astronauts has left us, but propelled by their example we know that our future here on Earth compels us to keep reaching for the heavens. On behalf of a grateful nation, Godspeed, John Glenn,’’ President Obama said Thursday.

Advertisement



Mr. Glenn’s death was announced by Ohio Governor John Kasich, who called him “Ohio’s ultimate hometown hero.’’ Though a cause of death was not announced, Mr. Glenn had heart-valve replacement surgery in 2014 and a stroke around that time.

Mr. Glenn was the last of the fabled Mercury Seven astronauts.

‘‘Today our nation bids farewell to one of the most iconic figures of the 20th century,’’ said Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky.

In 1962, Mr. Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth and then, 36 years later, at age 77, he became the oldest person to fly in space. He earned a parade in Lower Manhattan in 1962 that left 3.5 million tons of ticker tape on the street; in 1998, he earned a reprise, filling New York with well-wishers after his successful nine-day trip on Discovery.

Few Americans of his or any generation remained at the center of American life for so long, personifying his time and the American character for all time.

Advertisement



He explored the new frontier of space for a nation that defined itself by the frontiers it pierced. He embodied the New Frontier for a nation eager for challenge.

He was exceptional because he was in so many ways unexceptional — except for the 4 hours, 55 minutes of the flight of Friendship 7, which rallied an American space program that had fallen dangerously far behind the Soviets and rallied a nation that seemed stunned by the chill of the Cold War.

His was, in many ways, the classic American life. He grew up the son of a plumber in New Concord, Ohio, in the center of the country, and though he didn’t marry the girl next door, he began a courtship, love affair, and marriage with the girl just down Bloomfield Road, the former Anna Margaret Castor, that spanned 73 years.

He became arguably the least colorful, least iconoclastic, least wild-eyed test pilot in history. He was not especially articulate, especially visionary, or especially interesting. Scores of reporters combed his childhood and adult years, failing utterly in their desperate effort to uncover a single anecdote of note.

A Puritan among pugilists and a rector among reprobates, he fought in America’s wars of the mid-century, World War II and Korea, and retained an elemental and abiding fascination for the very field of aviation that had provided the only other American hero of his century who rivaled Mr. Glenn, Charles Lindbergh.

But while both men followed the jet stream of celebrity into politics, Mr. Lindbergh veered off into fringe and extreme corners of the political world while Mr. Glenn steered steadily toward the center.

Advertisement



His 1984 presidential campaign ultimately failed, but Mr. Glenn remained true to his “sensible-center’’ philosophy, a policy of prudence in fiscal affairs and vigilance in foreign affairs that might have appealed to the broad range of Americans who vote in a general election but did not appeal to the more narrow ribbon of liberals who vote in Democratic primaries.

Indeed, Mr. Glenn’s presidential campaign became a symbol of the candidate’s own symbolism. Americans wanted Mr. Glenn as a hero, but not as their president. Along the campaign trail he met thousands of voters who clamored for his autograph but who denied him their votes. In a blustery lake town in frosty New Hampshire in February 1984, Mr. Glenn encountered twins born the year he first went into space. One of the young men was named John. The other was named Glenn.

The name John Glenn is seared into the nation’s memory, and also onto its public monuments, schools, streets, parks, and public buildings — so many that Mr. Glenn’s senatorial office eventually lost track, so many that Mr. Glenn grew embarrassed as he visited the John Glenn Elementary School or was told of the dedication of John Glenn Drive.

Through all the attention and celebrity, Mr. Glenn remained essentially unaltered: He was an uncomplicated man in an increasingly complicated world. He retained a sense of Oh, wow! in an increasingly sophisticated society. He clutched ever more strongly to his family in an increasingly atomized culture. He was driven by instinct, manners — and honor.

Advertisement



All that plus one thing more: a kind of patriotism that pointed to a fast-disappearing past even for a man who was a symbol of a fast-approaching future.

Perhaps the most poignant moment of his presidential campaign was witnessed by almost no one.

One night late in January 1984, Mr. Glenn appeared, amid the flags of Texas, Mexico, and the United States, in an auditorium a few hundred yards from the border in Brownsville, Texas.

A mariachi band played “Amigo” and the “Beer Barrel Polka.” And before a local political leader introduced Mr. Glenn to the Mexican-American audience, he led the crowd in the Pledge of Allegiance. In a nearby holding room Mr. Glenn stood alone, at attention, reciting the words out loud in an empty room.

This movie-screenplay life — actually, Mr. Glenn was a focus in the film “The Right Stuff,’’ which opened in 1983 — was not, however, a life without strain and stress.

He was humiliated at his early failures in politics; he gained the Senate seat only after his third try. He was embarrassed at his failure to erase his campaign debt from the 1984 campaign. He was haunted by his minor role in the Keating Five affair, a savings-and-loan scandal that seemed to define the excesses of the high-octane 1980s. (The Senate Ethics Committee ruled that the senator had exercised poor judgment but that his activities did not reach the level requiring institutional action against him.)

Advertisement



But the difficulties were more than outweighed by the triumphs. As a test pilot he set a transcontinental speed record. As a senator, he forced the nation to examine forbidding questions of defense procurement, campaign finance, government reorganization, and the spread of nuclear weapons. As a senior, he reminded older citizens of their ability to remain active, vital, essential and even indispensable in American life.

His flight aboard Friendship 7 was one of the signature moments of the 1960s, combining the idealism, sense of adventure, and Cold War tensions of the John Kennedy years. Millions watched as Mr. Glenn was boosted into space atop an Atlas rocket (to the famous invocation of fellow astronaut Scott Carpenter, who bellowed “Godspeed, John Glenn’’) and as he glided, almost effortlessly, in his 9-by-7-foot capsule through three orbits of the Earth.

Then trouble struck. An indicator light suggested that the capsule’s heat shield, which separated the astronaut from the ferocious fire of Earth reentry, had shaken loose. NASA officials huddled and shuddered. They finally suggested that Mr. Glenn fire his retro rockets to begin his return to Earth but not to jettison the rockets afterward. The thinking: The straps holding the retro rockets would keep the heat shield in place.

Following an agonizing period when NASA controllers lost radio contact with their astronaut, Mr. Glenn’s capsule was found bobbing in the ocean, its human cargo unhurt and, characteristically, undaunted.

Mr. Glenn ached for a second flight; despite his inarticulateness in orbit, the journey stirred deep feelings in him, and a yearning for a return to space. President Kennedy vetoed the idea; Mr. Glenn was too precious a piece of New Frontier iconography to risk his death in space in a second mission. But as private citizen and then as a lawmaker, Mr. Glenn pressed his case, finally convincing NASA officials that the flight of a senior citizen in space might provide insights into the aging process on Earth.

It was a stretch of science and of logic, but not of sentiment.

Mr. Glenn won his seat on the Discovery along with a crew of five other men and a woman, one of whom wasn’t even born when Mr. Glenn first traveled into space.

The preparations for the flight were transformed into a festival of nostalgia, and many senators and President Clinton were present at Cape Canaveral when he returned into space in late October 1998.

The differences between Mr. Glenn’s first flight and his last stood as milestones for how much the space program, and the country, had changed in a third of a century. Mr. Glenn’s Mercury capsule weighed 4,256 pounds, while the Discovery weighted 153,819 pounds. Friendship 7 had one window, Discovery had 10. The original Glenn spacecraft had 20 circuit breakers, Discovery had 961. Mr. Glenn stowed 48 items in his capsule in 1962. His crew brought along 2,600 in 1998.

But one thing had not changed: John H. Glenn Jr.

In a wheelchair at Cape Canaveral the morning of that second launch was his Korean War wingman, a shrunken residue of a wild specimen whom Annie Glenn remembered as the most profane man she ever met. We remember him as the greatest hitter who ever lived: Ted Williams.

Aboard that Discovery flight, Glenn said, ‘‘To look out at this kind of creation out here and not believe in God is to me impossible.’’

Mr. Glenn’s first flight and his last were both great American adventures. His first flight and his last were moments of technology, vision — and courage.

His first flight and his last were billed as tests of the human body. In reality they both were — as Mr. Glenn’s entire life was — a tribute to the human spirit.


Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.