Chapter 14: A hero born
Theme: April 1961 to March 1962. Describes the public relations problems of a program in the national limelight, and the gradual adaptation of the astronauts and other project personnel to the demands of the press.
Like a monster serpent stretched along the sand, Cocoa Beach lies between the Banana River and the Atlantic Ocean about half way down the Florida peninsula. At the north end the head bulges into the sea with fang-like towers from which it spits forth flaming projectiles. Down its sandy back runs the central stripe of Highway 1A for fourteen miles until it ends in a scaly wooded tail at Melbourne beach. Cocoa Beach has one main artery from which all its business is nourished. Most of its buildings are motels, restaurants, beach apartments and other temporary accommodations, and the transient population frequently outnumbers the permanent citizens. Except for an occasional convention, or the few tourists who are side-tracked before they can get farther down the peninsula to the more well-known recreation spots, the motels cater primarily to the visiting engineers and technicians who are sent by their companies to work at the Cape. One to two weeks before a manned flight however, a peculiar transformation takes place. Large vans marked with the insignia of the television networks appear in the motel parking lots. Black tentacles of wire bundles stretch from the trucks through gaping windows to portable switchboards. Roofs sprout unruly antenna wigs. The staccato rhythms of typewriters and teletype machines compete with the Muzak. In the evening, restaurants are filled, the clubs bulge, and Cocoa Beach swells with suspense-tinged gaiety.
In this society there are two elite classes. One is made up of those magic names of the networks: Cronkite, Bergman, Hackes, Neal, Kaplow, whose faces are familiar visitors to everyone’s home, but are rarely seen in the flesh. The other aristocracy is a group of individuals known primarily to those who work in the aerospace industry or cover it for the public. These less familiar names are Gilruth, Williams, Kraft, White, Douglas, and of course, Carpenter, Glenn, Schirra, and Cooper. The relationship between these two groups was a strangely schizophrenic one on both sides.
The aristocracy of the press was as anxious as all Americans to see the project a success, and to have our country catch up with the Russians. On the other hand, they wanted to pass on the real flavor of the effort. They sensed that behind closed gates there must be an interesting drama of day to day decisions being played out by the principal actors, but they had immediate access only to the NASA newsroom and its prime spokesman, Shorty Powers. It was partly, therefore, with a sense of frustration that they filled the bars, looking for the opportunity to button-hole the project engineers when they returned from the Cape in the evening.
The NASA staff also had a clearly ambivalent reaction to the press. They were well aware that they occupied the center stage, and that what appeared in news media would have a strong effect upon the life of the project. It was, however, this very realization that annoyed them. Most of the senior staff of the Space Task Group had been drawn from the old NACA, where they had been responsible for research projects which rarely came to the public attention. Never before Mercury had they had to make decisions with an eye on political implications and the reaction of the public. They were used to making their decisions entirely on the basis of technical requirements, and perhaps a good deal of the success of the project can be credited to the fact that they continued to do so.
However, public relations problems continued to arise and their annoyance with the need to take time to consider these questions led to an antipathy towards public affairs activities. This attitude resulted in the public affairs matters being left as much as possible to Shorty Powers, who was not bashful about acting as the project spokesman. This raised some criticism that he was monopolizing the publicity spotlight. Nevertheless, Shorty was strongly encouraged to take full responsibility for the public relations area, and technical personnel were discouraged from giving any information to the press.
The attitude of senior management tended to make the technical staff sensitive to the danger of issuing statements embarrassing to the agency. This policy frequently resulted in Shorty Powers not being fully informed on agency decisions, officials concluding that information could be kept from the public by not relaying it even to their press relations staff. Thus, Powers was sometimes caught in a position of apparently misinforming the press. Frequently, too, he had to deal with the problem that the information sought by the press was classified and could not be made available. In one such case, a delay in John Glenn’s launch was due to a booster malfunction which could not be detailed because of security regulations. Despite the difficulties presented by this half-cordial, half-suspicious attitude on the part of both parties, the project wound up with an extremely good public image. It was well deserved, in view of the high level of success of the program. At the same time, it was an overly benign, sugar-coated icing which covered the layers of the human effort by which the project was nourished.
Their attitudes partially conditioned by management, the astronauts tended to look upon public relations activities with the same distaste shown by other technical personnel. Their reactions to the publicity surrounding their flights provided examples of the differences between the men.
Perhaps no part of this story is more interesting than the publicity build-up given to the man that Life Magazine characterized as “destined for great things” -- John Glenn. Why was he singled out from the other six for the nation’s adulation? Two Americans and two Russians had already been in space, and more were waiting to make even longer flights. But this man so moved the nation that Time Magazine reported, “Every so often a nation produces a genuine hero, raised above the multitude by acts of valor or virtue in times of war, crisis, or national frustration. He may come from any walk of life, so long as he fills the nation’s need to elevate its vision and swell its pride. From Washington to Sergeant York, from Lindbergh to MacArthur, the U.S. has had its share of heroes. But few have encountered the universal approval and adulation that last week engulfed astronaut John Glenn.”
John attracted this attention with an unusual mixture of personal characteristics: a typically American family background, an attractive personality, skill in working with people, and an unusually intense interest in the political and social impact which the project could make upon this nation. Beginning in the spring of 1961 and continuing for a year until the time of his own flight, there was a gradual building of publicity on John Glenn. Here was an opportunity to see a hero born.