Good morning, it's Tuesday, Feb. 20. Sixty-two years ago today, at 8:35 a.m., United States Marine Corps Lt. Col. John Glenn placed a phone call to his wife, Annie, from Florida's Cape Canaveral. "Well," Glenn said with studied nonchalance, "I'm going down to the corner store and buy some chewing gum."
Why do we care what a U.S. Marine -- even a storied combat pilot -- told his wife on this date in 1962? Because John Glenn was speaking in code, that's why. Annie knew it. He was going somewhere very far from the "corner store," as I'll relate in a moment.
John Glenn was a 40-year-old astronaut when he relayed that understated message over the phone to his wife. When I wrote that he was speaking in code, I didn't mean government code. It was Glenn family code. "Chewing gum" was a phrase John and Annie Glenn employed to steady each other's nerves as Glenn flew off on some dangerous assignment or another. There had been many in his storied career: 59 sorties over open water in the South Pacific during World War II; 90 combat missions during the Korean War; a 1957 flight from California's Los Alamitos Naval Air Station to Bennett Field in New York in which he set the trans-America speed record.
But there had never been a flight like this one. At a time when the United States needed a Cold War icon, John Glenn was strapped into his capsule, Friendship 7, as an Atlas rocket prepared to launch him into orbit. At home in Arlington, Virginia, Annie Glenn sucked in her breath and replied simply, "Don't take too long."
The dutiful Marine obliged his wife and a waiting nation, orbiting Earth three times -- and traveling some 81,000 miles -- in just 4 hours, 55 minutes, and 23 seconds. "Boy, that was a real fireball of a ride!" Glenn radioed as the capsule completed its nerve-wracking re-entry into Earth's atmosphere.
By 4:10 that afternoon, Glenn was on the phone with President John F. Kennedy. "I have just been watching your father and mother on television," JFK told him, "and they seemed very happy."
John Glenn, who cheated death so many times, lived to be 95, passing away in the winter of 2016. He was buried the following spring at Arlington National Cemetery where Kennedy, who also answered the call of service, was laid to rest at too young an age.
The Sixties are receding from America's national memory now. Finally. New generations and new national upheavals replace the old.
But it's worth taking a moment this morning to recall that on this date in 1962, an American veteran from the heartland state of Ohio was given an important task by his government. And when his country asked, John Herschel Glenn Jr. always answered the call.
He enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1942 and fought in World War II and the Korean War, became a NASA astronaut in 1959, served in the U.S. Senate from 1975 to 1999, and ran for president in 1984. John Glenn didn't win the Democratic Party's nomination that year, and wouldn't have defeated Ronald Reagan in any case.
But when Barack Obama draped the Presidential Medal of Freedom around Glenn's neck in 2012, it was hard to think of an American who had earned it more.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon
