good opportunity to push back against to the monopoly that currently rules the book world. booktv will continue to bring new programs and publishing news and you can also watch the past programs any time at booktv.org. ♪♪ in october 1957 the soviets launched the world's first artificial satellite worrying american leaders that we are following behind technologically in the early 1960s, president kennedy said the u.s. was in an hour of mass danger as a soviet for running the space race and

1962 for instance friendship seven began the orbit of earth with u.s. astronaut john glenn onboard to getting america back into the space race at one of the most tense moments of the cold war. our program tonight features the author, historian and trader joined in conversation by chief white house correspondent for "the new york times," peter baker. if you missed the program, the recent program with peter baker and susan glasser, you can find it on the youtube page. we are in bizarre times when you start to recognize his living room. you can purchase your copy of

the book mercury rising john kennedy and the new battleground of the cold war at our local bookstore partner. our office receives a 10% discount by using the code. we have a full schedule of programs so remember to check out the website for newly scheduled events and now i'd like to welcome peter to moderate tonight's conversation. peter is "the new york times" chief correspondent for 20 years at the "washington post" including four years as moscow bureau chief in collaboration with journalist susan glasser and he's authored six award-winning books. thank you for joining us again.

the floor is yours. thank you so much. >> thank you for that kind introduction. i think you've got a terrific background there so we should be seeing more of that. i can't tell you how excited i am to be here tonight. jeff knows this story, so i'm going to tell you anyway. he's written the book because a few years ago i was thinking about who hadn't been the subject of a good biography and a long time and his mind came to mind so i started researching a little bit and went to calling people in ohio where the archives are and talking about what is available and i mentioned to my agent and jeff sessions was already doing that

book. not only jeff sessions was doing the book i wanted to do but almost certainly better and it turns out he has. we did get to have a nice lunch out of it. it was a final product here. mercury rising is a wonderful book i read it last year. i urge everybody to go get it and i'm going to read the quote from doug brinkley historian [inaudible] a time that brings the story alive again with both nostalgia and a riveting fast-paced narrative it isn't our first

conversation about john glenn. i guess it's our first public conversation and i am relieved and excited and disappointed i didn't get to write the book. thank you for joining me and the world affairs council for inviting us to have the conversation tonight. >> as everybody knows, he's the author of a number of other remarkable books on lbj and their fraught relationship. he wrote a fantastic book during the fdr era and this book tonight is fascinating because it comes at a time that it feels like heroes that are missing from our public sphere.

it goes to the first point you made, peter, we all know john glenn is a hero, but i wanted to go a little deeper than that to understand what it is about john glenn that caused such an incredible outpouring across the country when he died a little more than four years ago. what was it that we had when john glenn passed, what was it about the era that he represented or about the achievements that he represented and what it was the nation was able to do not just john glenn that the nation during the space race. i wanted to understand what it

was in 1962 after that flight that brought them out in the cold war to get a glimpse of john glenn and his motorcade after he had orbited the earth. what was it that was so important in that moment was it that he was the other astronauts referred to him. he wasn't able to accomplish this that caused him to convert at the beginning of his

presidency from being reluctant to convince the nation to space exploration to a few months later committing it to the most ambitious project in the nation's history says those are some of the questions i wanted to address in my research in the book. tell us where did you go, who did you talk to, what sources were available and what really surprised you? >> thankfully he saved about everything he touched or wrote and i'm not sure that that was the case of any of the other astronauts, but as you pointed out they are in columbus at ohio state and he's got an enormous archive but also all the years prior to that and his childhood.

he's got papers that he wrote and an autobiography he was assigned to write for a class at the age of 18 to imagine what he was going to be someday. he said he wanted to be a research chemist. he didn't want to admit what he really wanted to do is fly. that goal was already sort of deeply embedded for him, but i had access to those papers and found all sorts of fascinating stuff that had never been published before and we can talk about some of those things. i also was lucky to get the chance to interview both of his children who were very forthcoming about their father and i interviewed anyone i could track down who was associated with the program and i was very lucky to get to know some of the engineers and others. there is a gentleman that you might know joining us tonight

that said he might call in. he not only helped select john glenn as an astronaut but also helped to define the criteria by which they would select. he was there and present at the creation and about the mission at the times. in the chat function we are asking people to put questions. why do you think glenn was different than these other astronauts because there was this fraught relationship and tribal division between them.

scott carpenter's wife describes them as talk a little bit about that dynamic. it's really fascinating. there were seven mercury astronauts and the split happened pretty early on between five on the one side and they wouldn't admit that he was their leader. the other two as you mentioned were more like minded than they were with the others. the others, the majority of the group these were classic fighters you have seen them portrayed in the movies. they were kind of tough talking, profane. they weren't interested in pleasing anybody. they were interested in flying

and racing cars and frankly women that were not their wives. that was one of the issues that emerged between the two groups is whether the questions like that were at all anybody else's business. they felt what they did and what they called their extracurriculars was up to them but he lived by a different code and told them whether they liked it or not, they were all models and national assembles and is one of them messed up and it became public that it would be an embarrassment not just to their families, but the programs and the nations. >> he connects in the public. he's the first american in space. he really does connect with the

public. there is a number of aspects to this. glenn had spent some time on the national stage and was the only one of the astronauts in the years prior to the program he was the only one spending time in front of the movie cameras and television cameras. it was weeks as a contestant on the popular program on cbs after he had set a speed record flying a jet across the united states from la to new york so he had developed some skills but also was born with a lot of these skills. when you go back to the childhood as i did to try to describe the world with which he emerged he was one of those guys that had those skills and qualities from the beginning and he was given this opportunity to develop them so by this time it was introduced to the country

and the world as a part of this first core of astronauts. and literally climbing over each other to get to the astronaut and the others take a step back. they've never seen anything like this before and as i mentioned before, they were too cool for some of them including especially al sheppard he's charming the hell out of everybody and sort of sitting back looking around whispering something to the others there's not a moment in this press conference it's not clear to us at the moment is that there is a moment somewhere where they all recognize that he's changing the rules of engagement and they are

not sure that they like it and they are not sure that they like it or can help it. >> talk about the other man in your book for the new generation. he wasn't that interested in space and yet he becomes the godfather of this program before he became president of course, but there's something about his invocation that transcends even though he's the one that started the mercury program. tell us about kennedy in space. >> it really is one of the ironies associated fairly enough with the success of that program because he was reluctant as i said before to commit the country to it and its prestige and scientific expertise. so, kennedy in the late 50s and in particular 1960 when he

runs for president, space is assembled and that's what the great speechwriter said. it was mostly a symbol of the lack of energy and initiative and creativity and boldness kennedy's all in the 1950s. there was a sense and it wasn't just campaign platforms. there was a sense that had lost its age in the years after world war ii enjoying its material splendor a little too much and it's color televisions, enjoying its very large and colorful cards. what it wasn't doing was keeping up with the soviet union and so the incredible achievements beginning of course with sputnik in 1959 and 57 but followed in short succession of a whole wave to landing the first unmanned craft on the moon that they were

committing themselves to exploring outer space and the united states didn't seem to have the drive to do it so kennedy saw a great campaign issue and he ran on it including other things like a missile gap that didn't actually exist, and everyone could see it. the problem was kennedy didn't really have a plan to leapfrog the soviets in space. he talked about the dangers of being second in space and said to be second in space is to be second in the eyes of the world militarily and between three and totalitarianism but he didn't have a plan to be first. when he became president and took the oath of office, it wasn't anywhere near the list of the top of the concerns and it remained fairly low on the list until april of 1961 when the

soviets surprised the world by sending the first person into space and orbits the earth and delivered to such even though the united states expected it and kennedy himself expected it, no one was prepared for the blow that it dealt to the prestige around the world so kennedy understood immediately that he needed to compete. >> and the idea of course he wasn't even the first to orbit the earth on that first trip yet he seems to capture the imagination outside of our own borders. maybe that's because we got to see it. is that what your thought is? people outside of america seem to like it, right? >> they absolutely did. it's hard to overstate the degree to which he was an international celebrity and it really seemed to the americans and the rest of the world even

when nasa was elevating others, sheppard and gresham and putting them ahead they put him forward to speak for the program which was the bitter irony so the international appeal but it was also it had to do with the contrast between the program and the u.s. program. the soviets managed but no one's all the spacecraft. the soviets didn't announce and they also didn't let anybody see the launch. they didn't even reveal where the launchpad was.

but all of this was surrounded in sort of typical where they would do this in the plain light of day so when american rockets were exploding on the launchpad and going awry in the sea instead of in space, it was there for all the world to see. the flipside of that is when the americans triumphed and sent him around the world three times. the rest of the world came along for that ride as well and got to launch the watch -- watch the launch and they got to see the splashdown and participate in the celebration. a lot of the international commentary focused on this contrast between the two systems. >> is it just because he's a good political judge and saw

somebody he recognized from his own background? they do latch onto glenn not only as an american but as a democrat and a partisan figure they try to entice into politics. >> kennedy understood the space as a symbol and also john glenn as a symbol and as unlike any of the other astronauts he was able to sort of bear the symbolism on his shoulders. the story lined up. he became a hero in korea he was actually the other fighter jets were pilots or they wouldn't have gotten picked to be in the space program. but glenn was the most decorated combat veteran of the entire group so he and kennedy both had that experience in world war ii. but kennedy also saw a balance.

one of the amazing things about the kennedy inaugural is the balance that it strikes between invoking the nations traditional values and projecting forward to a new era in the 1960s into the future and kennedy was trying to strike that balance. john glenn is somebody that did exactly the same thing. john glenn was traditional in his values and conventional in all of the kind of comforting ways and at the same time he was in that silver spacesuit towards 1957 that set the speed record flying faster than a speeding bullet across the united states and now he was going off into this new frontier. so, glenn was an avatar of both what had traditionally made americans feel good about themselves and their country and what made them excited enough

and fearful about the future. >> of course all heroes are mythology stories and you've portrayed a three-dimensional character. i'm struck by tell the story about what he does when it's not a pretty picture it is a more complicated one. >> it's really not glenn at his best. one of the things to say is everyone expected john glenn to fly first. as i said he was the most famous and decorated pilot of the entire group and it just seemed a given that he was going to go first. the press felt that way and a door to john glenn and they were rooting for him and made no secret about that in the

article. >> the press in many ways was rooting so there was a sense of inevitability and glenn bought into it. the thing about these guys they were all at the top of their game. glenn was no exception and he also felt that there was another aspect of this beyond being able to do the best simulator and having the best instincts but it was also the ability to anybody and he felt frankly there was no concept when it came to that and he felt that was an important part of his job as an astronaut as well so when the head of the group brought the astronauts into his office and said just

before kennedy's inaugural he said i've made my decision and al sheppard is going to fly first and glenn, you are going to be back up it was almost worse that he was the backup than if he had been out of the rotation, but to be the backup twice, now as i mentioned before he was sort of the other leader of the group so there was competition that he didn't feel that way so the blow to his ego was like nothing he ever suffered to his life and it was going to be a public humiliation. nasa asked him to keep his eye on it and only sort of said these are the three finalists and that allowed the press to jump to the conclusion that they would be the winner. this went on for months after he knew he was not the winner and

he took it very hard. he was miserable and his friends found him difficult to deal with and i would say he refused to take no for an answer so he wrote a letter and said i think it should be me and i think i'm being unfairly punished which frankly was true. he didn't even respond to the letter so it was a dark period. we've seen the footage of the parades and so forth, so we know it comes out okay but most

people don't recognize is those three orbits, the last two mission control spent in a total panic. the less serious of the two was after a flawless first orbit at the end of that first circuit around the earth he began to report the capsule was skating to the right and the automatic thrusters would kick in and then it would drift again so glenn had to take over manual control and frankly he didn't mind doing that. none of them were happy about having to spend time on autopilot so ultimately that wasn't that dangerous but what seemed to me to be incredibly dangerous is around that time a

light went on on one of the consoles with all of the flashing lights and black ties. one went on that wasn't supposed to and said his heatshield had actually started to detach and it was supposed to detach a little bit just before splashdown after the heatshield had done its job it was supposed to detach a little bit to cushion the blow in the water. it wasn't supposed to detach in space and it was a little tiny gap that opened up then glenn would be incinerated on the way back into the atmosphere and there seemed to be nothing they could do to protect from that so they did a couple things. one, they debated and i questioned whether they could save him if the warning light was correct and the other is they kept going in the dark. they didn't tell him what was

going on. they began to ask indirect questions and this is in the transcript they said are you hearing any banging noises? that isn't what you want to hear when you are more than 100 miles above the earth. they think that he's going to panic and in that, they are underestimating but they are also misunderstanding the thing about these pilots which is that they don't panic. what they want is information and control. the flight controllers particularly the flight director felt that mission control was going to figure this out and there was no reason to worry so they asked him to move a bunch of questions that over time led him to kind of figure it out for himself. we are going to open up the questions here.

how did your opinion change while writing the book? >> thanks for joining us. the thing i didn't appreciate before i began to work on this project was just how interesting a character he was. he was as ambitious as the rest and tough-minded as the rest or tougher than some of them and just because he didn't talk about it or sort of have that same swagger some of the others did. when the commanding officer told them to get out of there when they were flying in, he actually

circled back, disobeyed orders and went in again and wound up with a whole tale the size of a basketball and managed to get back to base and posed for pictures. this was a tough-minded guy that got lost in a lot of the portrayals. how essential do you think that was? not all of them are fighter pilots and i think both of those skill sets on a certain and more obvious level, they were use to flying the high-performance and high altitude aircraft in dangerous situations. they were used to taking new

craft very high up in the area and testing the limits of this new equipment and understanding that at some point something was likely to go wrong. these were not safe occupations that they had. they had seen a lot of their colleagues die along the the way and they had the cool and the skills to push these and ultimately the spacecraft to the limit and themselves to the limit. i think for combat pilots like john glenn there's another level of coolness that sits in once you have been at many life-threatening situations and you have made it back to base. one of the stories that struck me when i learned about it was early in his time in korea, he was on a mission to the border

with his commanding officer who was the commanding officer shot down and he circled for a while and he knew long enough he was going to run out of fuel and wouldn't have enough to get back to the base in south korea yet he continued to circle in the hopes of identifying where it went down. with an altitude of 40,000 feet then the engine cut out as he knew it would the power went out and he glided at that point across the entire span of north korea. that coolness under pressure and that ability to separate yourself from the fact that you might just die is something that was really important for some of these astronauts that found

themselves in sort of terrifying what would be to anyone else a terrifying predicament. we have a question from barb who asks what was the relationship like with the director. he was such an instrumental figure and james webb was appointed by kennedy as the administrator of nasa and he inherited as a civilian space agency that was pretty low morale. the years of being behind the soviet union and of seeing their own rockets explode and their own payloads destroyed and really kind of ground down the space agency to such a point when kennedy was elected even though he was talking big about again leapfrogging the soviets in space there was concern that

he was just going to pull the thing up and allow the air force and other armed force branches to take over the space effort. for the agency and also its relationship with the white house and congress that someone who appreciated the kind of three-dimensional ability that john glenn brought to the space program. >> john sanders asks he

described the role in developing the space program. can you speak to lbj's role and how he evolved? >> he is one of the great unsung heroes of the program as soon john kennedy stood there before congress and said i believe this country should send a man to the moon by the end of the decade and bring them back safely, kennedy owned that program but that decision was actually driven more by lyndon johnson than anybody else. johnson was always convinced we should go. it was johnson after sputnik and 57 when he showed very little interest and when eisenhower was doing very little to respond, johnson stepped up to receive the mental space exploration to catch up. he also saw political opportunities without question he was quite frank about that with his advisers johnson was

committed and believe very strongly if the soviets controlled the space they would control life on earth. he understood this wasn't just a race but an existential struggle and it took others including kennedy a while to come around about johnson not only helped to frame the discussion but also put the decision in front of kennedy and had lined up support to force kennedy's hand. there really was no other solution at that point and johnson made sure of that. >> steve wants to know about the relationship and says that's very interesting would you tell us about that. >> john glenn and annie are one of the great love stories i think of the last century. this is a couple who were together for nine decades and how did they manage that? because they first met in a

playpen in their early town of the concorde. this was a town of about a thousand people and their families would get together every weekend they began to at a date when they were at an appropriate age, not two or 3-years-old when they were teenagers they began and he dated in college and they got married after pearl harbor. she had a severe start and disabling start. people would just turn and walk away or talk fast or around her

he managed to help her through the world until much later and was able to conquer it really bravely and remarkably, but the two of them have had an incredible partnership and always saw it as a partnership. >> raymond, i may be mispronouncing. i apologize says he was a scottish rite freeman and the freemasonry affected his life and commitment to service. >> if he did, i am not aware of it. the affiliation that was most important to him was membership in the presbyterian church he was very active in the church and as i said before he taught sunday school and delivered sermons. this was a big part of his

identity that was central to his identity but i don't know. that's an interesting question i will have to look into that. the speculation has always been jfk didn't want him to because he was too valuable that you seem to doubt that. where did you come down on that question. >> it's hard to prove a negative. there is no evidence that he ever said anything like that to anyone even in passing and there certainly was no order that filtered its way through. it was a rumor and i think ultimately it was a rumor that made him feel a little bit better about the fact that he was iced out of the rotation. with the senior officials either they didn't like all the

attention glenn got. they thought it was a distraction and they blamed him for seeking it although the spotlight really saw him. they felt that his celebrity colored him when he wanted to pick shepherd they were unhappy about the fact there would be blowback in the press as there was so there was something about glenn and also this willingness to tell it like it is but that wasn't generally his approach but when it came to the superiors he would tell them exactly what he thought and there was always the concern that he was talking to reporters on the side although there's not really any evidence of that so he didn't have a lot of supporters in the hierarchy at nasa and after his triumphant

flight, he was the head of the rotation and it took a couple of years before he really recognized this was the case but in 64 he left the program to run for the first time tell us about how that happened. talking about the children's reaction to what he is thinking about doing as a 70 something-year-old man. >> one of the things we underestimate when there is a successful mission we know he came back okay and as i said before we have seen the crowds this was agonizing. i mean, if you can just that your souls in the mind of a

couple of teenagers, and glenn was the oldest of the astronauts they were too old to remember but his kids were in high school so they were well aware of what was going on and they were incredibly scared and even left this out from time to time. at one point they said are you excited about your dad going to space and he said yes if he gets back alive. so this is what it felt like for him and this sense of relief we can't even imagine so here is glenn having served his fourth term in the senate that he wants to go back and space and never

got that chance and he puts in a word with president clinton that he would like to go to space he had all this data on how glenn reacted the first time around when he was 41. how will he react now in his 70s and he managed to convince everyone that the hardest to convince were his own family. she ultimately came around to the idea and david was quite frank with me about how unhappy he was and said to his father how can you put us through this again? it was agonizing but they came around and understood this is what he needed to do and this is what he was happiest doing and of course he came back safely. >> do you have a script that he

had written out for the first flight in case he did die and is that something we've never seen before? you feel the chills when you read something like this. to read the pages and realize what it was i knew that he had made a couple of recordings for his family that he sent but no one knew what they contained. there was one further message to his children and another one i wasn't able to locate but the script for his children begins by stating exactly what would be going on in the circumstances he

has written this out. he's in isolation at this point at cape canaveral and writes himself as this unscripted meditation life after death which he very much believes in to those how to behave themselves at a funeral so it's an intimate expression at this point when one emerged from time to time to speak to reporters he was completely relaxed and even putting the president at ease and said is this safe and he said absolutely. this is an incredibly poignant

letter and one of the last things that he says at the moment before the launch, he's strapped into his cap soul at the end of this rocket at cape canaveral and they patch them through to and need to say good by end of the last thing he says to her is did you get the recording so it's very important to him to leave this for his family. when i asked his children recently, they didn't know anything about it. but they never had to hear him. >> did you show them the script? >> i didn't but i did ask about it. >> paul henderson asks what he have had a better chance of winning the democratic nomination if he had one prior and i guess i was sort of add why wasn't he able to translate

that into the presidential race? it's a really interesting and puzzling question i would say they would have had a better chance if they had run earlier because for him, the translation problem is described and happened right away. it's really interesting that from again the first moments on in 57 and especially when he becomes an astronaut, people are talking about him as a future president. he has that quality he seemed to touch all at the right moment and yet when he runs for the senate it was a very brief contest for glenn because he

slipped and fell in a hotel room and damaged his inner ear so severely that he spent many months unable to walk and ran again in 1974 but in that race that the celebrity just wasn't enough and to the credit of the voters they wanted to know more about what he was going to do in the senate and they wanted to know more about what he stood for. it's hard to explain. i'm not sure that i have an explanation for it. the discipline that he had he was a really well-prepared senator as i'm sure you

remember. he did his homework and came to the hearings and took his job seriously. he wasn't there to just slap people on the back. he wasn't interested in that kind of thing but he didn't thrill to the crowds. he was elected as i said four times to the senate. but he didn't have that stuff. >> we have a number of questions to bring this forward and i will pull some of them together the lieutenant general the deputy chief of the space force recently spoke to the council what would you share with the newest branch of the armed

forces and what would john glenn think about the creation of the space force and is there any possibility of president trump being accredited as jfk with a moonshot and i were to sum it up by saying would he have wanted there to be. to avoid the militarization. in the arms race up he has heard all of these outlandish plans of

the military planners and defense contractors about what they wanted to do in the space space tobring these space statid fighter jets to engage in battle and they didn't like the sound of any of it. he thought it was a waste of money, number one but also incredible danger so the success dedicated to peaceful purposes as the space act put it for all of mankind was critically important nobody doubted that the intentions were peaceful. nobody believed that the purposes were peaceful so for the united states to be credible, they had to show the

technological mastery but it was a delicate thing for kennedy and in particular to manage both of them would probably regard it as something of a defeat to see the extent they had been militarized the purposes are not always peaceful. the united states as kennedy concluded has to compete on the terms that are being set today. the chinese are looking to go to the moon and the china is also building a space station and has been ramping up with the defense analysts call counterspace capability which means its ability to disable or destroy.

speaking how we moved away from the military aspect and the approach shifted after due to glenn's influence. that is a really good question. it's an insightful question. in the program they remain very strong. you can't beat that skill set. and there's a much greater sign for example as the program

continued they were made to feel somewhat embarrassed for the scientific experiments in space and got a lot of irritation among the others some of that starts to add after. the astronauts are symbols and there was from this set of ideals to be representing some of them. the problem better than others and set the program on that path. we really appreciate you doing this and i thank you for including me and i want everybody out there to make sure to purchase this good luck on

the rest of the book tour and congratulations. thank you to both of you i could listen to you for a lot longer. this is a fascinating conversation. you do a great job. thank you for that. and you did my job i was about to remind everybody to buy the book and you did it. thank you both. it was great to have you.

>> laughing at myself subtitled my education to congress on the farm and at the movies. former representative glickman served in congress for 18 years a native of wichita kansas he went on to serve as president clinton's agriculture secretary from 95 to 2001 and from 2004 he replaced jack as the chairman and ceo of the motion picture association for america until 2012 and in our interview we spent some time talking about his interest in humor.

>> on this episode of booknotes plus listen on c-span.org wherever you give your podcasts. >> you think this is just a community center? no. it's more than that.