War hero * * * Astronaut * * * Millionaire businessman * * * Senator Is John Glenn’s next big step into the White House?

Press, 23 September 1983, Page 17

War hero * * * Astronaut * * * Millionaire businessman * * * Senator Is John Glenn’s next big step into the White House?

From

MILES BENSON,

, Newhouse

News Service, in Washington.

Airline pilots do not quite kneel to kiss John Glenn’s hand, but they come back to the passenger cabin to stand respectfully in the aisle, introduce themselves, ask for his autograph, or invite him to the cockpit for a photograph. He is a prince of their profession, the nerveless test pilot of America’s first Earth orbital space flight. In Indianapolis, Glenn is hailed as the hero who flew 149 missions in the Second World War and Korea, gunning down three MiGs.

To conservative Democrats in Edwardsville, Illinois, “he brings back the times when we felt good about ourselves as a nation.”

In Cincinatti, Ohio, he is the favourite son that toastmasters proudly introduce as “the next president of the United States — Senator John Herschel Glenn jun.”

The political career of John Glenn, aged 62, was born at 9.47 a.m. on February 20, 1962, when an Atlas rocket hurled him into orbit on his first and only space flight, as an awestruck nation watched on television.

Today, 21 years later, the surging support for Glenn to be president reflected in current public opinion polls, is based largely on his celebrity as a space pioneer, says Greg Schneiders, his press secretary. “That support is broad but squishy-soft,” Schneiders adds. “A lot of people don’t know his political record, or even that he’s a Senator now. Yet he’s just what the Democrats have needed for a long time — a charismatic moderate.”

Glenn’s celebrity has been strong enough to boost him swiftly into the top rank of Democratic presidential contenders and persuade many analysts that his folk-hero status makes him the strongest potential challenger to Ronald Reagan.

The former astronaut has started to describe confidently his own nomination as “not just a possibility — now it’s a probability.” Glenn’s race for the White House strums a strong nostalgic chord in American political culture, evoking

images of “the man on the white horse.” In his case, a white rocket. However, Glenn says voters should play less attention to “image” and more attention to “character.” Dunking a doughnut in his coffee during an interview, he talked about the qualities he hopes voters will see in him. “Trust is number one. I think there’s that kind of basic feeling toward me going in. Honesty, basic intelligence, integrity.

“I’ve never liked the word ‘image.’ It’s as if you are conjuring up something less than real. Reputation is what people think you are. Character is what you really are.”

Glenn is asked if his character is any different from his reputation. “Oh, I suppose so,” he replies. “I don’t know where.”

He certainly is not “a moralising Presbyterian prude,” which is how he believes he comes across in the pages of “The Right Stuff,” Tom Wolfe’s best-selling book about America’s original seven astronauts.

“I don’t think you get too prudish after 23 years in the Marine Corps,” he says.

True, he did lecture his fellow astronauts against what he terms “pretty flagrant and open extracurricular activity” with female admirers. As Glenn tells it, that was because he was worried about adverse publicity damaging public support and funding for the space programme. He recounts pleading one night with a San Diego newspaper editor to kill one such story and some embarrassing pictures. “The next morning I told our people they ought to keep their goddamned zippers up and locked. That’s an accurate quote,” Glenn recalls, but “it wasn’t on any preachy moralising basis.” Glenn, a plumber’s son from a small town — New Concord, Ohio — left the space programme in 1965 to take a job as vice-president

of Royal Crown Cola Company, became president of Royal Crown International, and is now a multimillionaire thanks in part to stock options and real estate holdings. In the Senate, where Glenn has served since 1974, he is known as a slow-moving, cautious centrist, respected for expertise on strategic defence issues and military affairs generally (he was the principal architect of the 1978 Nuclear NonProliferation Act). He has rarely assumed a leadership role in pushing for major social programmes, and he has on occasions alienated organised labour by opposing legislation that would allow multi-union picketing at construction sites. He concedes that his being a former astronaut probably is not enough to get him all the way to the White House; that he must now build a campaign on the issues. His supporters as well as his critics agree that Glenn is having trouble finding his issues.

On his feet in front of an audience, he is a mediocre performer. He offers a sing-song pa-

tois of patriotic generalities and exhortations: “Let’s set some goals and go for it” is a favourite punch line.

When pressed for details on many of the issues he brings up himself — the role of United States troops in Lebanon, the American farm programme, reducing Federal spending for entitlement programmes, bringing China into nuclear arms reduction talks (which he calls essential) — Glenn often is unwilling or unable to provide solutions, or outline proposals of his own. “I don’t know exactly how we accomplish it, but we’ve got to try,” is a common response. An exception is Glenn’s straightforward call for tax increases. “If we can’t cut the budget by ?US2OO billion dollars — and we can’t — then we have to be honest enough to say we’re going to start in with a tax increase,” Glenn declares at almost every campaign stop.

Even on taxes, however, he leaves key questions unanswered. How much of an increase? How soon? Who would be asked to pay more?

“I wouldn’t want to say right now, this far in advance, exactly how big an increase it would be,” he explains. It would depend, he adds, on the size of the deficit and the level of unemployment. Nor can he say how he would raise revenues.

“There are a number of different ideas,” Glenn notes. “We can undo some of (Reagan’s) tax cut that went mainly to middle and upper income people. I think the fairness issue dictates we undo some of that, at least.

“We might want to consider the value of added tax, or to be more honest about it, just call it a

(national) sales tax, which is what it actually is.” Without the pressure of a deadline for action, Glenn “can take an excruciatingly long time to make up his mind about something,” says a Senate aide. “He likes to have all of what he calls the ‘eeis’ — essential elements of information — and then he’ll take his sweet time studying them.” The trait triggers doubts that Glenn possesses strong ideological beliefs, and concern that he might turn out to be a political wild card if he makes it to the White House. “Neither liberals nor conservatives really could be sure just where he would come down,” the Senate aide notes.

In 1979, Glenn voted against ratification of the S.A.L.T. II Treaty, arguing that the loss of United States monitoring facilities in Iran and a malfunctioning spy satellite made it impossible to verify Soviet compliance. Those difficulties have been rectified, Glenn says, and he would now support the treaty. More recently, at some political cost, Glenn voted for the modernisation of United States nerve gas stockpiles as a deterrent against Soviet use of similar weapons. Glenn’s eloquence improves noticeably when he defends Democratic social programmes that began in the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

“In those days we had 51 per cent of our population at or near the poverty level,” Glenn says. “Then, through those intervening decades as Democratic programmes were put in place, we moved tens of millions of people out of poverty and into middleclass status, with a home, a car, perhaps a camper behind the house, and the kids in a decent school. “I’m the first to admit that perhaps we went a little far in some of those programmes, or we

weren’t careful enough about watching the debt build up. But when the President (Reagan) talks about the ‘tax-tax-spend-spend-Democrats’ I think about what was accomplished during those years, the greatest peaceful social transformation in history, To some of Glenn’s supporters, the notion of a Marine fighter pilot in the White House has special appeal. “With Glenn we won’t have all these little countries making trouble all over the world,” says Mike Cleary, a Glenn volunteer in Cincinnati. “They’ll be afraid of him, afraid to make him mad.”

Glenn, however, does not anger easily, a discipline he relates to his fighter pilot training. “Getting mad could get you killed,” he says. He was angry on a recent Thursday morning, although it didn’t show. Up at 6 a.m. to greet factory workers at the John Deere plant in Waterloo, lowa, Glenn had just learned from news reports that the Soviet Union had shot down a Korean 747 passenger plane with 269 people aboard, including 55 Americans.

“It’s bad enough people getting killed in war-time situations in combat, but to take 269 innocent lives, people on vacation, 269 people just going down.” He was asked how he would handle it if he were President, what questions he would ask first. “First, you’d want information as to whether the plane was over any very sensitive Soviet installation,” Glenn says. “You’d want to get a statement from the Soviets as to why such a barbaric, inhumane, stupid act occurred. How far up the Soviet chain of command was it authorised?

“What do you do? Go shoot down a Russian airliner? If that’s the question, no, you don’t handle a situation like this by trying to do something hideous in return.

“I think we should lead a whole chorus of international condemnation and take the strongest diplomatic actions we can take. Hold this up before the world for what it is.

“Maybe we could go beyond that. I don’t know.”