Book called mercury rising, which is the story of John Glenn John kennedy and the space race in the context of the cold war. Jeff comes to us from the west wing riders group, which he founded as a speech writing business along with a strategic operation and this comes from his experience as a speechwriter for president clinton, and he did a number of landmark speeches for the 42nd president. He also has a background in history from Brown University and was a Rhodes Scholar and so has a masters degree in history from oxford. His previous books are on fascinating. X in and of themselves one on Franklin Roosevelt and his tussle with the us supreme court. The other is speaking of tussles on the conflict between Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and so we were just talking before we went on camera. Jeff is just so good at developing dramatic tension and i would say about this book, which i thoroughly enjoyed and i think i may have mentioned to him. I certainly did others that when im getting ready to moderate a book discussion. I assign myself so many pages of the book to read a day so that i make sure im finished with it by the time the discussion begins and this one i assigned myself some time ago 10 pages a day, but it was literally a pageturner so i kept going past the 10 the 10 pages and read it in record time. So i highly recommend it to you. Its a little bit like if any of you out there have seen the movie apollo 13. I watched that movie every time its on tv and i always burst into tears when theyre all rescued and i know theyre rescued but the tension always remains in this book. We know that john glenn eventually. Successfully goes into space and becomes the First American to orbit the earth but there again is just that that tension and that wondering will this happen and how it how it will happen. So be sure to pick up the book. Its a great great gift for the upcoming holiday season, and i know you will love it and maybe there will be a movie about it jeff so welcome jeff. We also welcome your questions not just at the end of our hour today. Please begin to give us your questions as we go along because we want to be sure to include them as we go through our discussion the other thing that i mentioned to jeff and in preparing for today, was that this feels like such a personal book to me because of my generational cohort . I feel like i knew all the characters starting with sputnik, which is one of the first characters in the book and thats because my dad used to tell tales of stopping at a park on the ohio river in our hometown of louisville to watch after work at this big open park sputnik go overhead and seem so interesting and and foreign and somewhat scary as he told has he told the story, but he had grown up in dayton, ohio and been taken to the bicycle shop. Where the Wright Brothers just discovered their concept of wanting to fly. So he always had a thing for aviation then my mother took me to see John F Kennedy in our hometown of louisville in 1960. My dad a couple years later took us to see eisenhowers so two more characters in this book and then finally my aunt and uncle lived at merritt island, florida right next to Cape Canaveral at the very time that jeffs books takes place about the mercury project and one time they brought us a pr packet of the mercury project. And so it had biographies of all the mercury astronauts and a beautiful glossy 8 by 10 photograph of a rocket taking off so i got many term papers out of that in grade school and finally for that point in second grade. I came home and said to mother i have to write an essay on the person, im most admire and she said right on john glenn because obviously that was the person she most admired at that time. So with that jeff, lets open up. Thanks so much for being here and bringing this great book to us. And thanks also to christina and mike and woody and rob and all of our tech team that makes this possible, um want to talk to you about the space race. I was listening this morning to golden oldies from the 60s and they literally introduced these songs from the 60s and they said this is the soundtrack of the space race and they had a clip of president kennedy speaking in 1962 his famous speech at Rice University in houston about we choose to go to the moon and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard so tell us how did he jump into this space race . How did it become a race . And can you place it in that context of the cold war . Well, first of all barbara, thank you for that really generous introduction. Thanks to you and christina and all of you for for having me here today. Im excited to talk with all of you about all of this and lets start with with the race. Whats interesting about that term space race. Is that both eisenhower and kennedy really resented it . They really shied from calling it a race for from frankly admitting that it was a race because they felt that to to adopt that terminology was to get backed into a competition with the soviet union that we might lose. In fact that we were losing from the very beginning from the moment when the soviets sent that first satellites sputnik into orbit around the earth in october of 57 and there was a whole series of firsts that followed that where this soviet domination of the of the heavens was was well established within the first from the first moments of the space race, so eisenhowers that if he sort of talked it down a little bit that he might take the edge off the competition because frankly eisenhowers really he wasnt invested in it literally or figuratively he wasnt emotionally invested in and he wasnt politically invested in it and he really refused as long as he could to invest federal dollars in some kind of competition with the soviet union for what purpose. He didnt really see the purpose eisenhowers had only one particular interest in space and that was reconnaissance satellites. He hoped that he could replace those very dicey and dangerous you too spike plane flights over the soviet union and replaced them with with spy satellites who could do the same thing more effectively in guard against the possibility of a Surprise Nuclear attack beyond that. He had no interest in science and space he had even less interest in human beings in space. He saw no justification for it. His eisenhowers enemies on the moon so he didnt see why we needed to suit up literally a military pilots test pilots and send them into into space. So this was a attention throughout the remainder of eisenhowers presidency. Interestingly when john kennedy emerges, uh enters this discussion in 1960. He really had very little time for space prior to that. He was not like some other politicians particularly interested in talking about it in 5758, but in 1960 kennedy saw the power of space as a political issue that the failure of the United States to compete effectively with the soviet Union Represented as far as kennedy was concerned all of the ways in which the United States had lost its initiative its drive. Its vigor as he said during the eisenhowers years and so he ran in part on closing the space gap but the truth, is that when he entered office, he had a lot of other pressing priorities. I know well talk about those and space really wasnt one of them and he too avoided the term space race as long as he possibly could really until april of 1961 when the soviets achieved the greatest first of all, which was sending the first human being into space eureka garden. So we really were behind what call it what you will if you dont want to call it a space race and if eisenhower and kennedy at first didnt want to do that and in part, i guess you dont want to identify a race that you are behind in and tell us jeff about all of the disasters aside from the political disasters. The kennedy was facing but the disasters that we kept achieving if you will in the in the rocketry realm after sputnik and all way through 1961. Well, the first disaster was simply getting beaten to the punch by the soviets and that was sputnik as were discussing, but but there was also sputnik 2 which was only a month later in november of 1957. They sent a much heavier craft into space into orbit carrying a dog like it now like it didnt make it back to earth like it died in space, but the fact that the russians were able to heave something as heavy as that into orbit around the earth and actually have an animal in it survived for a period of time was absolutely incredible and in fact scientists in the United States and engineers wondered allowed on the front pages of the New York Times whether the the soviets had discovered some new form of energy some new form of propulsion that could account for their ability to do this with ease and they hadnt they had just a simply much more powerful rocket than we did. But again, there was a sense of awe at what the soviets were able to achieve meanwhile as as you suggested barbara here in the United States. We were regularly treated to the spectacle of our rockets blowing up on the launchpad. Now the russians had their own rockets blowing up on their own launch pads, but nobody saw it because of course soviet union was a totalitarian regime and there was absolutely there was so much secrecy surrounding the soviet Space Program that nobody even knew where the launchpad was. It happened to be in the middle of kazakhstan, but there were a lot of rumors that it was in a lot of other places and that we just didnt know and so when the soviets had their own horrific accidents and they certainly had some we didnt know about it. Whereas the United States being of course an open society with a free press and inviting the press from around the world to watch anytime one of our rockets blew up on the launchpad anytime one of our little squirrel monkeys was put in the nose cone of one of these things and was meant to be shot into space and wound up getting shot into the atlantic because the the missile had to be blown up because it was going in the wrong direction. World knew about an instantly and so there was a sense of mounting failure in the United States and the world was watching well, we already have a question jeff from one of our viewers today lisa and its it really fits right in squarely with what were talking about. And that is that, you know after the soviet union collapsed a lot of documents were opened and scholars and writers and authors have been going through those for years to get a portrait of what was happening in the soviet union certainly at that time. Did you find that you had access to any of these sources that might not have been available before the soviet union collapsed . Well, i did by virtue of others research. I did not spend time in the russian archives myself. I dont speak russian so i wouldnt be able to read the documents, but there have been some really impressive dog and historians who have been doing that digging and unearthing some really fascinating and unknown stuff about the soviet Space Program. So ive benefited from from their research and one of the things that they revealed is what we just discussing a minute ago, which is again the failures of the soviet Space Program in in 1960. They had a rocket explode on the launch pad that killed a hundred people. We had nothing like that happen here in the United States. I mean there were a lot of rockets exploding, but they werent they werent killing people and weve been very lucky in in that regard and also frankly taking more precautions than the russians in the taken they also and i think this wasnt known if i remember right . I think this might not have been known until the 1990s but one of their cosmonauts died in a horrific training fire again, nobody knew about any of this for for many decades because of the nature of the regime. Well tell us in in light of the title of your book mercury rising. Tell us about project mercury and again in my minds eye. I see that that portrait of the the astronauts in their spacesuits and tell us about how they were chosen and then a little bit about the Competition Among them. That one of the many enlightenments i had from reading the book. I didnt realize i knew from the you know the movie and the book the right stuff that that yes, they were competitive people, but i just didnt realize the personal and professional competition that went on among them. It was an incredibly intense competition. I think they engaged first in an incredible competition as youre saying just to become astronauts and we can talk a little bit about that. But of course the moment they had been selected as the seven the first group of astronauts the first group of americans who had a shot going into space the competition then began to become that First American and so they were all competing against one another they had to operate as a team as a unit. They were all training together. They were all learning together and yet they were well aware and they were quite open about this that that they were competing with one another to become the first because they were competitive guys and because there was a sense that the first person in space would be immortal then we go down in all of human history. There was a lot of talk in the press right from the beginning that this would be the new columbus. That was always the Reference Point entering this this new frontier of space and they all wanted to be that and they all had a shot at it. And so the competition could be quite quite quite intense. But but first, how did they get there . There was some discussion in the early days of nasa nasa was created. Thats a story in itself that we could talk about was the creation of nasa which is something that eisenhowers essentially against his his will in 1958. There was just enough political pressure that he ultimately had to had to go ahead and do something and created a civilian space agency and drew man in space as it was referred to at the time drew man in Space Programs away from the military and invested it in this civilian organization nasa and then there was the question of who could qualify to be an astronaut. I mean, what is the skill set of an astronaut at that point . They werent even necessarily talking about astronauts flying these capsules one of the interesting things that i found was a lot of tension between within the program and much debate among scientists and engineers as to whether human beings were even capable of functioning in a weightless environment capable of functioning in space or whether all sorts of horrible. Things and they listed them in these memos and it can be comical in retrospect, but it wasnt comical at the time all the horrible things that might happen to a human beings body and brain and eyes and everything nervous system up in space and so on the part of those who were designing the equipment that they were going up in their general their previous predisposition was to make sure that the astronauts left well enough alone kept their hands off the controls and had the whole thing fly on autopilot. In fact, there was some discussion in the late 1950s that the best way of achieving that would be to shoot them full of sedatives before they went up into space so they would be too out of it to mess with anything. Mean this was this was the bias against the pilot so they didnt necessarily werent necessarily sure that they needed the most skilled pilots and yet as the discussion evolved it seemed clear that if you were going to put someone in a High AltitudeHigh Performance highspeed aircraft that it probably ought to be somebody who had done that before even if they hadnt ever been to space of course, and so eisenhowers limited the pool to military test pilots. Theres also the sense that because they were in the military they could be trusted to keep this whole thing confidential to the extent that it needed to so that was the pool and then there was a question of balance the air force pilots navy pilots. John glenn was a marine pilot and he almost was overlooked because the navy wasnt that interested in bringing marines into its pool and that was an error that was caught at the last minute making it possible for john glenn to become an astronaut. So those selections were made and then as i said, the the astronauts were announced to the public in april of 1959. They walked out on the stage at the old nasa headquarters, which was in the Dolly Madison house just across the street essentially from the white house and instantly they were on the cover of every magazine life magazine in the newsreels and and then the real competition began as i said before. Well, thats interesting the main character really in this book is john glenn, and thats an you get so many books in one with your tone. And thats because its its also a biography really of john glenn and there you really you could tell delved into his papers which are i believe at ohio state talk to his family his his two children on his widow. Annie only just recently passed away. So well talk a little bit more about her because shes also an important character in the story, but tell us about john glenn for people who dont remember that time or have perhaps forgotten some of the details of his life. He really had kind of an allamerican background in me. He absolutely did. I mean he grew up in a tiny little town and when we talk about small town america, this is small town america. Its a little town still little called new concord ohio thats in southeastern, ohio and at the time the population was about a thousand. Little its about a mile across that was his world and it was, you know, pretty monocultural town as you would expect totally white almost totally presbyterian a little bit methodist, i believe and it was some idyllic in in the way that small town white middleclass Middle America has long seemed idealic to to certain americans and that was his environment. He emerged from that yet a close knit relationship with this with his parents. He did well in school. He did not suffer unduly during the depression. It was pretty happy childhood a pretty