Tuesday, November 02, 1999
Straight-arrow attitude cost him, Glenn says in new book
BY MARCIA DUNN
The Associated Press
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — John Glenn suggests in his new autobiography that a dressing-down he once gave his fellow Mercury astronauts about their skirt-chasing may have prevented him from becoming the first American in space.
“I was mad, and I read the riot act, saying that we had worked too hard to get into this program and that it meant too much to the country to see it jeopardized by anyone who couldn't keep his pants zipped,” Mr. Glenn writes in John Glenn: A Memoir.
“My views were in the minority, but I didn't care. I had made my point, and I didn't think being an astronaut was a popularity contest. I would turn out to be wrong about that.”
Not long after the incident, NASA asked the seven astronauts to vote on who should be the first one in space if they couldn't go.
Mr. Glenn, the straight arrow, ended up losing in 1961 to Alan Shepard.
John Glenn: A Memoir hits bookstores today, almost exactly one year after the astronaut-turned-senator returned to orbit at age 77 as the oldest space traveler in history.
In it, Mr. Glenn says his scolding of his colleagues was prompted by a front-page expose planned by a West Coast newspaper he did not identify. According to Mr. Glenn, a reporter and photographer had followed an astronaut and gotten compromising photos.
Tipped off about the article, Mr. Glenn called the reporter and photographer and also got the editor out of bed. He got the story killed.
“I talked about the godless Communists and how they were ahead of us, and how the press had to let us get back in the Space Race,” he writes.
““The story wasn't in the paper. To this day, and knowing the press much better now, I'm still amazed that it didn't run.”
Mr. Glenn does not identify the astronaut.
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