Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (38 page)

Even the presidential motorcade, which took the president right beneath the sixth-floor window of Oswald, wasn’t determined until November 18, four days before the assassination. It wasn’t made public until November 19, three days before the assassination. Does any rational person believe that a conspiracy to murder the most powerful man on Earth, the president, would be hatched just three days before the assassination? Again, it’s all sublime silliness, but it took me the equivalent of thirteen volumes of four-hundred-word pages, not because it’s not a simple case but because of the conspiracy theorists—and they never end. I got sucked into the abyss. I couldn’t get out. Finally my editor said, “Vince, we’re going to press.” If he hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here now. I’d probably be up to twenty volumes.

John Glenn

Born and raised in Ohio, John Glenn enlisted in the Army Air Corps after Pearl Harbor and fought in the Pacific Theater in World War II as well as the Korean War. Recruited by NASA, he became the first American to orbit the Earth on February 20, 1962. Six weeks after the president’s assassination, Glenn resigned from NASA to run for public office, eventually serving as US senator for his home state from 1974 to 1999. The recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal, Distinguished Flying Cross (five times), and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he became the oldest person to fly in space in 1998.

I
grew up at a time when the word “astronaut” hadn’t been invented yet. It was something new. If I had a hope at that time, it was that I could learn to fly. My dad had taken me up in an old two-seater, a biplane, and I was hooked on aviation from that time on. But we didn’t have much money, and to take flying lessons was something in the future.

In 1946 Stalin said that Democracy and Communism couldn’t live in the same world together. The Soviets set out to do us in, and there wasn’t any doubt about it. They were active in that. China went Communist; we had the Korean War and later the Vietnam War. All these were parts of the Cold War, a deadly competition. Between 1946 and the early 1950s, a lot of people thought maybe Communism really was the wave of the future. They [the Communists] had had a lot of success around the world. When they wanted to take over a country, they just did it: Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Berlin Blockade. I don’t think people knew for sure what direction this whole thing was going. The Communists were helping a lot of third-world countries, trying to get their support, and sometimes with great success.

Then it came time to have a space program, and lo and behold: In 1957 they sent up
Sputnik,
which they had in Earth orbit while we were still trying to get ours off the launch pad without blowing up. Castro aligned himself with them, ninety miles off our coast down here, and we had the Cuban Missile Crisis later on. We look back now and think,
That was destined to happen,
but we didn’t know that then at all.

Kennedy wasn’t in office very long till he decided to activate the program to put Cuban refugees back into Cuba, which resulted in the Bay of Pigs. He had made the decision, [but the plan] started under President Eisenhower originally. Right after that, the Russians put up Gagarin and made an orbit around the Earth. We thought our first person in space—Al Shepherd on the suborbital flight—was going to be the first in space. But the Russians beat that by about three weeks. It was against that backdrop of a dual failure that President Kennedy made a very gutsy decision, as we looked at it then—to establish a program for Earth orbit, which we hadn’t learned how to do yet. From that we established a program to the Moon, which came after Al Shepherd’s suborbital flight and before my orbital flight.

Kennedy knew what he was doing. I don’t think we’d have someone stand up today and say, “We’re going to Mars. We have X billions, and
we have to do that.” We had the background of the Cold War, from shortly after the end of World War II, and we had the Korean War and the Vietnam War, where we had been opposed by the Soviets.

It was a positive objective. It wasn’t just responding to something the Soviets had done, like the Berlin Blockade or the Wall. This was setting a positive objective, and we kept it open for everybody around the world to share in that. That had been the policy from the start, and it was very important. Kennedy announcing the Moon program startled me and a lot of other people. Some of our high government officials and the president, I believe, had downplayed
Sputnik
: Don’t worry about this beeping pineapple or grapefruit or whatever it was going around the world. But that attitude quickly changed, and we had to be competitive.

The problem was that in some respects we were behind in the manned space program because we were better than they were technically. That sounds backward, but the ICBMs built for nuclear weapons were the ones that we had to convert and use for manned space flight. We had been able to miniaturize nuclear weapons, but the Soviets hadn’t. They still had to build big nuclear weapons, so they had big boosters. When you convert that over, they could practically put a house in orbit if they wanted, where we were limited to about four thousand pounds, which is the reason the
Friendship 7
was so small. We couldn’t put a bigger one up there because we didn’t have a big enough booster to do it.

We were very conscious that this was a competition with the Soviets for big stakes. I didn’t believe the United States was second-best, but for a long time they had been playing up this idea of the United States being second-best technically. They were having success in space while we were still all too often blowing up on the launch pad. We felt that and wanted to get going as soon as we could. It was quite a shock when Gagarin made that flight and beat us into space.

The first time we got together with Bob Gilruth, director of NASA at that time, he said, “We’re all feeling our way.” We were experienced test pilots, and seven of us were selected. He wanted us to work on the program and help in the design and all the things we needed to do to find out how we were going to go into space.

The program was there, Project Mercury. They had outlined and put together the ideas for the capsule and the limitations we’d have on it. Kennedy had already set the path. It was some eight years later before we actually landed on the Moon, but the path of what we had to do—to let Neil [Armstrong] and Buzz [Aldrin] go up there and do that—was pretty well set.

We had to do some of the first steps, though. We didn’t know how to orbit yet for sure. We’d done a suborbital flight, but we had a lot to learn. We put a little eye chart with different size print on it on the instrument panel because the ophthalmologists thought my eyes might change shape and I wouldn’t be able to see. It’s still in there, as a matter of fact. It was twenty-three inches from the bridge of my nose to that chart—I remember that figure for some reason. Then we were supposed to report feelings of dizziness or nausea, vertigo from strange movements in the inner ear. There was a lot we had to know, so we were working as hard as we could to learn these things so we could go ahead with the lunar program.

As far as doubts about participating, I didn’t have any. Gilruth told us at the first meeting, if any of us ever had doubts, just say the word. We were on loan from our individual military services, and we’d go back with no questions asked. There was an escape pass if we wanted, but of course nobody even thought of going back.

Anybody who didn’t like to be in small spaces would have been eliminated early on. We’d all been fighter pilots and test pilots; we were accustomed to being in small, cramped spaces, but it wasn’t very big. We had some camera cases covered up with a little cloth thing with Velcro on the end of it that came down and then the control handle. The board switch was over on the other side with a little plunger on top. If we operated that during launch and turned that handle inboard about forty-five degrees, it would set off an explosive thing that detached us from the booster going
up and activated the escape tower that would pull this up and away from an exploding booster if we had a problem. The “abort handle” is the name; everybody called that the “chicken switch.”

We practiced and practiced so that everything was automatic. If we had a particular emergency, a drop in pressure or something, we knew exactly what to do. I did have trouble with the automatic stabilization control system, the SCS.

I had reservations. I can’t say that I was 100 percent convinced, but it was important for the country. You just train for it and do it. I’m sure the confidence of the seven of us who were in training as astronauts was higher than the average person in this country because we’d been trained. The more you know about something, the more confidence you have in being able to deal with it. But there were moments when I thought,
What if this thing blew up?
We’d seen some blowups. We’d watched some of the missile failures. But we were also convinced that those problems had been solved and that this flight was going to be OK. So we went ahead and did it, whatever risk there was. We accepted that risk as we did during test flying in new airplanes.

I had met Kennedy at a reception here in Washington, and we had shaken hands. I didn’t know him well. I got to know him better when I had been selected for the orbital, the flight of
Friendship 7.
He asked me to brief him on the plan for the mission. I went in to brief him, and I thought it was going to be a short few minutes, and that would be it.

But he was really interested; he had a real curiosity about exactly what we were going to do and how we were going do it. I finally said, “Mr. President, you’re asking questions that I would like to answer, but I’d like to do it with a model and some graphics. What if I came back in ten days or two weeks and went through this in real detail?” He said, “Absolutely.” When I came back, he asked questions, and we spent about an hour in the Cabinet Room at the White House.

We had things planned minute by minute for the whole flight. But of course we got up there, and we couldn’t see out there. Where we saw out—the little window we looked out of—that’s only about fifteen inches. We looked out, and we looked down, and we saw all nations at a glance,
even though we weren’t up as high as they go now. It was very impressive, and we had time to think a little bit about it. But it was very busy; the whole flight was planned very carefully.

When I looked out at the first dawn, it looked like there were millions of fireflies, not blinking on and off but turned on. They were a steady, luminous, greenish glow, like fireflies on a summer evening. We didn’t know what they were. I reported them, and that happened each dawn. The scientists determined that they were little water particles coming out of the heat exchanger on the spacecraft, as they’re supposed to do, and they were collecting and then freezing.

Scott Carpenter, on the second flight, saw the same thing. He tapped the side of the spacecraft, and a whole shower of them went out. They’d been collecting on there, and they were water particles, I’m sure. But why the glowing yellow color? I don’t think we know to this day why that first light of sun coming through the atmosphere and then back out to the spacecraft going around the Earth had that glowing, luminous color.

After the flight was successful and the spacecraft had been returned to the Cape, Kennedy came down and they had a celebration. The hatch was off to the side so that he and I could both stand and look into the spacecraft I had just used. He was recalling what I had briefed him on about a month or a month and a half before. He was a very curious person, and I’ve thought a lot about that since. Most people who accomplish a lot are people like that, who are really curious about everything around them.