David Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and a Pulitzer Prize-winner for his coverage of U.S. politics.
He set a transcontinental speed record in an F8U Crusader fighter, he fought in the Second World War and Korea, he flew combat missions with the baseball slugger Ted Williams as his wingman, he was elected to the United States Senate four times, he was a leading early contender for the Democratic presidential nomination – but John Herschel Glenn Jr., who died Thursday at age 95, will be remembered in history for 4 hours and 55 minutes in February, 1962.
In that crowded, anxiety-filled period of time – when he became the first American to orbit the Earth and then, when NASA officials feared that his Mercury spacecraft heat shield had come loose, he made a late-flight adjustment intended to prevent him from being incinerated on re-entering the Earth's atmosphere – Mr. Glenn became an American hero, rivalling only another aviator, Charles Lindbergh, in the pantheon of American icons and adventurers.
Read more: Aviation icon John Glenn, first American to orbit Earth, dies at 95
In photos: Former astronaut John Glenn dies at 95
Born in the centre of the country, defining the centre of American politics and occupying the centre of action and attention as the United States pierced the bonds of Earth's gravity in the Cold War space race, Mr. Glenn, the last of the Original Seven astronauts of Project Mercury to die, was the signature American of his time – a fighter pilot who married the girl down the street, a symbol of American virtue at a time of international tension, a moderate at a time when U.S. politics was veering to the extremes.
But as a young reporter who covered one of his space flights and two of his political campaigns, one for the White House, my most vivid memory is rooted far from his native Ohio – and far from the centre of the country. It occurred a few hundred yards from the Mexican border, in Brownsville, Tex. A Mariachi band was playing Amigo and, incongruously, the Beer Barrel Polka.
Then a hush came over the room and a local politico led the crowd in the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag, a hoary ritual regularly ignored if not ridiculed by cynical campaign correspondents. I peeked through a slender opening in the door to a holding room where the candidate was told to await his introduction. There Mr. Glenn stood alone, at attention, reciting the words out loud to an empty room.
Months later the Glenn campaign, hoping for a breakthrough in the wintry Iowa caucuses, scheduled an event in the remote, far northwestern corner of the state. The weather was horrible – gusty winds, blowing snow, blizzard conditions. Mr. Glenn and his entourage took off from the state capital, Des Moines, and prepared to land at the air strip at Sioux City when the Convair 580 twin-engine campaign plane swerved abruptly to the right.
Reporters and staff aides alike were terrified. Mr. Glenn unbuckled his seat belt and strode quietly, but purposefully toward the cockpit. There he stood with the pilot, calmly but expertly guiding him to a safe landing many minutes later.
With the plane settled at the airfield, Mr. Glenn left the cockpit to the cheers of the relieved correspondents aboard. Michael D. McCurry, the deputy campaign press secretary, leaped to his feet. "The issue in 1984," Mr. McCurry, who later would become the impeachment-era spokesman for president Bill Clinton, bellowed, "is leadership."
Mr. Glenn was a hero unlike any other. He was a sturdy emblem of pride to aviators who marvelled that he flew until he was 90 years old. (He passed his flying certification at that age and the next day put his plane up for sale. "He wasn't going to stop flying because he couldn't fly any more," Mary Jane Veno, his closest aide, told me Wednesday afternoon, after word of the senator's imminent demise began circulating. "He stopped flying because he could still fly.")
But he also was a hero to millions of Americans who, in hushed school auditoriums or in front of a giant screen at Grand Central Station in New York, watched black-and-white telecasts of his Mercury 7 space capsule soaring into the Cape Canaveral sky atop a primitive Atlas booster rocket.
"Godspeed, John Glenn," his fellow Mercury astronaut, M. Scott Carpenter, said as the booster reached into the heavens. The phrase would stay with Mr. Glenn until the day he died, and inevitably will be recited at his funeral.
His presidential campaign defined the limits of celebrity in American politics, at least until Donald J. Trump appeared on the scene a third of a century later. Mr. Glenn was propelled into new notoriety as The Right Stuff movie, about the Mercury astronauts, was released just as the 1984 campaign was getting under way. The Iowa caucuses were held on the exact anniversary of his path-finding space voyage.
But Americans wanted Mr. Glenn preserved in memory, in that silvery space suit or perhaps during his remarkable Manhattan ticker tape parade, but not as president. His campaign fizzled but his aura survived. He would be boosted into Earth orbit again, at age 77, and would earn a second parade as the oldest man ever to fly in space.
But an unforgettable moment came late on a dark afternoon on a near-empty street in a New Hampshire lake town, his presidential campaign sputtering to a close but Mr. Glenn still exuding thumbs-up optimism. There he met a set of twins born the very year he first went into space. One introduced himself as John. The other's name was Glenn.