[Senate Document 105-34]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]



105th Congress, 2nd Session  - - - - - - - - - - Senate Document 105-34


 
                               John Glenn

                         U.S. SENATOR FROM OHIO

                                TRIBUTES


                           IN THE CONGRESS OF
                           THE UNITED STATES





                                                         S. Doc. 105-34

                                      Tributes

                                Delivered in Congress


                                     John Glenn

                                United States Senator

                                      1974-1998

                                         ---


                           Compiled  under the  direction

                                       of the

                              Secretary of  the  Senate

                                       by the

                     Office of  Printing  and Document Services



                                      CONTENTS

             Biography............................................. vii
             Proceedings in the Senate:
                Tributes by Senators:
                    Bond, Christopher S., of Missouri..............   6
                    Boxer, Barbara, of California..................  41
                    Burns, Conrad, of Montana......................  20
                    Byrd, Robert C., of West Virginia..............   6
                    Daschle, Tom, of South Dakota..................  26
                    DeWine, Mike, of Ohio........................ 4, 31
                       Staff letter................................  31
                    Dodd, Christopher J., of Connecticut...........  38
                    Domenici, Pete V., of New Mexico...............  25
                    Feingold, Russell D., of Wisconsin.............  32
                    Ford, Wendell, of Kentucky.....................  24
                    Grams, Rod, of Minnesota.......................   1
                    Johnson, Tim, of South Dakota..................  19
                    Kempthorne, Dirk, of Idaho.....................  22
                    Lautenberg, Frank R., of New Jersey............  19
                    Leahy, Patrick J., of Vermont..................  10
                       Glenn Counts Down to Launch With Complete 
                         Support From Wife and Colleagues--Senator 
                         Set to Repeat History, Roll Call..........  13
                    Levin, Carl, of Michigan..................... 1, 17
                    Lott, Trent, of Mississippi....................  33
                    Sessions, Jeff, of Alabama.....................   4
                    Thurmond, Strom, of South Carolina.............  16
                Order for printing of individual Senate documents..  43
             Proceedings in the House:
                Tributes by Representatives:
                    Hall, Tony P., of Ohio.........................  45
                    Ney, Robert W., of Ohio........................  45
             Articles and Editorials:
                `A Genuine American Hero' Says He'll Retire; Glenn 
                  Announcement Made on Anniversary of Historic 
                  Mission, Plain Dealer............................  51
                Age Keeps Glenn From 1998 Run, Columbus Dispatch...  53
                Seniority Bites, Roll Call.........................  55
                Sunday Profile: John Glenn; Return to Glory, 
                  Atlanta Journal and Constitution.................  56
                John Glenn's Mission of Discovery, Cincinnati 
                  Enquirer.........................................  61
                Back to the Future, Time Magazine..................  66
                The Last Heroes; John Glenn Flies Us Back to the 
                  Age of Innocence, Life Magazine..................  72
                Glenn Returns to Space: The Overview, New York 
                  Times............................................  75
                Glenn To Slip Bonds of Age in Space, New York Times  77


                                      BIOGRAPHY

               For John Glenn, the opportunity to represent Ohioans in 
             the U.S. Senate marks the summit of a distinguished career 
             that has included military service, the U.S. space 
             program, corporate management and national politics.
               As Senator, John Glenn has worked to build a legislative 
             record that reflects the changing needs and growing 
             concerns of the Nation. In the 105th Congress, he is the 
             ranking minority member of both the Governmental Affairs 
             Committee and the subcommittee on AirLand Forces in the 
             Senate Armed Services Committee. He also serves on the 
             Select Committee on Intelligence and the special Committee 
             on Aging.
               He is considered one of the Senate's leading experts on 
             technical and scientific matters, and is widely respected 
             for his work to prevent the spread of weapons of mass 
             destruction. He has used his position on the Governmental 
             Affairs Committee to root out waste in government and to 
             clean up the Nation's nuclear materials production plants.
               John Herschel Glenn, Jr. was born on July 18, 1921, in 
             Cambridge, OH. Shortly after his birth, his family moved 
             to nearby New Concord where he later attended New Concord 
             High School. After graduation he enrolled in Muskingum 
             College, and began learning to fly at the New Philadelphia 
             airfield. Directly after Pearl Harbor he enlisted in the 
             Naval Aviation Cadet Program. He was commissioned in the 
             Marine Corps in 1943 and served in combat in the South 
             Pacific and the Korean conflict.
               Glenn served several years as a test pilot, setting a 
             transcontinental speed record in 1957 for the first flight 
             to average supersonic speeds from Los Angeles to New York.
               In 1959 John Glenn was selected to be one of the first 
             seven NASA astronauts in the U.S. space program. Three 
             years later, on February 20, 1962, he made history as the 
             first American to orbit the Earth, completing three orbits 
             in a 5-hour flight. Throughout both his wartime and 
             peacetime service he received many honors, including the 
             Distinguished Flying Cross (6 occasions), the Air Medal 
             with 18 clusters, and the Space congressional Medal of 
             Honor.
               After 23 years of distinguished service to his country, 
             Glenn retired from the Marine Corps in 1965. He took an 
             active part in politics and early environmental protection 
             efforts in Ohio while pursuing a career as an executive 
             with Royal Crown International. He won his Senate seat in 
             1974, carrying all 88 counties of Ohio, and was reelected 
             in 1980 with the largest margin in Ohio history. Ohioans 
             returned him to the Senate for a third term in 1986, and 
             in 1992 he again made history by being the first popularly 
             elected Senator from Ohio to win four consecutive terms. 
             In 1997 John Glenn returned to Muskingum College in New 
             Concord, OH, to announce he would retire from the Senate 
             upon the completion of his fourth term.
               John Glenn and Anna Margaret Castor were married in 
             1943. They have a son, Dave, and a daughter, Lyn, and two 
             grandchildren. Annie and John Glenn have homes in 
             Columbus, OH, and Washington, DC.


                                      TRIBUTES

                                         to

                                     JOHN GLENN

                              Proceedings in the Senate

                                                Thursday, May 14, 1998.
               Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, this is also the final defense 
             authorization bill for three other members of our 
             committee--Senators Glenn, Coats and Kempthorne. They will 
             be leaving us this year, also through their choice. We 
             will miss them keenly. They have all made tremendous 
             contributions to the work of the Armed Services Committee 
             and to the national security of our country. Sometimes 
             their ways were similar and sometimes they were different, 
             but we are grateful for their contributions. I wanted to 
             note that as we get to work on the defense authorization 
             bill.

                                                 Monday, July 20, 1998.
               Mr. GRAMS. Minnesotans were there at the dawn of the 
             Space Age, and I look forward to the role our State will 
             play as the next chapter of America's space history, the 
             era of the International Space Station, is written.
               I believe the Nation's space programs, such as the 
             International Space Station, represent important 
             investments in America's future. The scientific and 
             technological benefits of this ambitious initiative are 
             impressive and will produce a high rate of return on the 
             American taxpayers' investment in aeronautical and space 
             programs. Among these benefits, the space station will 
             provide new insight into industrial research for air and 
             water purification, waste management and recycling, 
             computer technology, and environmental engineering. Most 
             notable is the progress being made in the biomedical 
             field.
               The promise of a long-term, zero gravity environment has 
             scientists poised to conduct research into the development 
             of cures for diabetes, cancer, emphysema, and immune 
             system disorders. Moreover, the study and eventual 
             findings of why astronauts who spend extended periods of 
             time in space often experience weakening of their hearts 
             and blood vessels may lead to the diagnosis and treatment 
             of heart disease. It should also be noted that the 
             International Space Station is supported by many of this 
             Nation's most prominent medical and research 
             organizations, including the American Medical Association, 
             the Multiple Sclerosis Association of America, the 
             American Medical Woman's Association, Bristol-Myers 
             Squibb, and Mount Sinai Medical Center. Clearly, the space 
             station promises to make significant contributions to the 
             study of medicine.
               Mr. President, the International Space Station will help 
             to maintain U.S. leadership in space while promoting 
             international cooperation. This international laboratory 
             in orbit will bring American, Russian, European, Japanese, 
             and Canadian astronauts together in search of a common 
             goal: to develop further advances in science and 
             technology that will benefit future generations.
               More importantly for the young people of America, the 
             space station will inspire greater interest in our 
             Nation's space programs. With this in mind, I would like 
             to commend some of the colleges and universities in my 
             home State of Minnesota for their commitment to 
             encouraging the involvement of our country's future 
             leaders in our aeronautical and space industry.
               Mr. President, since 1989, NASA has administered the 
             ``Space Grant'' program to enhance aerospace research and 
             education in the United States. This program is an 
             effective partnership among universities, the aerospace 
             industry, and Federal, State, and local governments that 
             assists in the recruitment and training of professionals 
             in aerospace science, engineering, and technology.
               In my home State, the Minnesota Space Grant Consortium 
             is comprised of nine academic institutions along with the 
             Minnesota Department of Transportation. Those nine 
             institutions are: Augsburg College, Bemidji State 
             University, Bethel College, College of St. Catherine, Fond 
             du Lac Tribal and Community College, Macalester College, 
             Normandale Community College, the University of Minnesota-
             Twin Cities, and the University of St. Thomas.
               For the last several years, these institutions have 
             worked effectively together to promote aerospace science 
             through fellowships and scholarships, the development of 
             new courses in Physics and Geology, the establishment of a 
             new Space Studies minor among the consortia members, and 
             public lectures relating to space science and engineering.
               I met recently with Emily Eelkema, a native of 
             Minneapolis and a senior at the University of Minnesota 
             studying Aerospace Engineering. Emily is a participant in 
             the NASA Academy on Aeronautics at the Dryden Flight 
             Research Center in California, and was initially selected 
             for this honor through the Minnesota Space Grant 
             Consortium.
               Those selected for the NASA Academy are among the 
             brightest students in the country and have expressed a 
             deep interest in NASA aeronautical space research. I was 
             extremely impressed by Emily's grasp of Dryden's flight 
             research program and her life-long interest in aeronautics 
             and space activities. I am encouraged to learn of her 
             goals of becoming an astronaut and playing an important 
             role in the design of a manned Mars mission. Her 
             commitment to a career in this exciting field makes me 
             optimistic about the future of our space program.
               Mr. President, the commemoration of ``Space Week'' would 
             not be complete without paying tribute to a true American 
             hero, our colleague Senator John Glenn. On October 29, 
             Senator Glenn will embark on a second journey into space, 
             this time aboard the space shuttle Discovery, as a payload 
             specialist responsible for conducting space-based research 
             on aging. His work may lead to further understanding by 
             scientists about the process of aging, and help reduce the 
             number of individuals requiring long-term medical care in 
             their later years.
               Many deserving accolades have been placed upon Senator 
             Glenn for his accomplishments throughout his career as a 
             marine, the first American to orbit the Earth, and a U.S. 
             Senator. I believe no commendation has captured the 
             essence of John Glenn's commitment to public service than 
             that bestowed upon him more than 35 years ago by President 
             Kennedy during a visit to Cape Canaveral, FL.
               Upon presentation of NASA's Distinguished Service Medal 
             to Lieutenant Colonel Glenn, President Kennedy spoke of 
             Glenn's historic orbital flight when he said, ``His 
             performance was marked by his great professional 
             knowledge, his skill as a test pilot, his unflinching 
             courage, and his extraordinary ability to perform the most 
             difficult tasks under conditions of great physical stress 
             and personal danger. His performance in fulfillment of 
             this most dangerous assignment reflects the highest credit 
             upon himself and the United States.''
               Mr. President, I encourage all Americans to reflect upon 
             the benefits of our Nation's space programs during this 
             Space Week. As we approach the 21st century, Americans can 
             share a sense of national pride as we move forward in our 
             epic journey--a journey filled with uncertainty, yet with 
             great promise--into the space frontier.

                                             Thursday, October 1, 1998.
               Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from 
             Texas. We both share a keen interest in space. I will also 
             be speaking on the topic of the 40th anniversary of NASA, 
             which is today.
               Mr. President, next month, from launch pad 39B at Cape 
             Canaveral, the space shuttle's main engines will fire up, 
             the solid rocket motors will ignite, and the crew of seven 
             will be sent off into orbit around our home planet. One of 
             those seven will be the distinguished Senator from Ohio. 
             More than 36 years after his first flight, John Glenn will 
             again orbit the Earth in a United States spacecraft.
               I have here a picture of Senator Glenn taken 36 years 
             ago with Dr. Wernher von Braun in Huntsville, AL, my home 
             State. They are shown here discussing a proposed lunar 
             landing craft. What an imagination, what a vision, what an 
             exploring capacity they had. Shortly after that first 
             orbital flight, they were already planning a trip to the 
             Moon--a vision that many thought could never be achieved 
             and was achieved so successfully.
               Senator Glenn's remarkable story is a subplot to the 
             remarkable story of the National Aeronautics and Space 
             Administration. On October 1, 1958, just 6 months before 
             the distinguished Senator from Ohio was named as one of 
             the original Mercury astronauts, NASA was born. Today, 
             NASA marks its 40th anniversary of service to this Nation.

                                             Thursday, October 8, 1998.
               Mr. DeWINE. I thank my colleague.
               Mr. President, I rise today to discuss two important 
             provisions in this bill--provisions that honor two 
             distinguished Ohioans who are retiring from public service 
             this year--Lou Stokes and John Glenn.
               Mr. President, the bill before us would name the 
             Veterans Administration Medical Center in Cleveland, OH, 
             the Louis Stokes VA Medical Center. That is a fitting 
             tribute for a number of reasons.
               First, Lou Stokes is a veteran, serving our country in 
             the U.S. Army during the Second World War.
               Second, as ranking member of the House Appropriations 
             Subcommittee on Veterans' Affairs, Lou Stokes has 
             demonstrated that he is a true champion on behalf of his 
             fellow veterans.
               Third, Lou Stokes in recent years has dedicated his 
             attention to improving the quality of care at the facility 
             that will bear his name. He has been working tirelessly 
             with me to provide funds to improve this facility for our 
             veterans in northeast Ohio. This bill in fact contains 
             $20.8 million to improve the ambulatory care unit at the 
             Stokes Medical Center. This is the latest of a lifetime of 
             examples of how Lou Stokes has made a difference--a 
             difference for veterans and for all his constituents.
               I also am pleased and proud that the bill before us 
             contains a provision that, in my view, represents the 
             deepest feelings of the people of Ohio regarding our 
             senior Senator John Glenn.
               Mr. President, it would be fair to say that the 
             imagination of Ohio, and indeed of all America, has been 
             captured by Senator Glenn's impending space voyage. It is 
             an inspiring odyssey. It is exiciting--it reminds us of 
             the spirit of American possibility we all thrilled to when 
             John Glenn made his first orbit back in 1962.
               Senator Glenn's return to space as a member of the crew 
             of the space shuttle Discovery marks the culmination of an 
             incredible public career.
               This is a man who flew 149 heroic combat missions as a 
             marine pilot in World War II and the Korean war--facing 
             death from enemy fighters and antiaircraft fire.
               And none of us who were alive back in 1962 can forget 
             his historic space flight. I was in Mr. Ed Wingard's 
             science class, at Yellow Springs High School in Yellow 
             Springs, OH--we were glued to the TV. Our hearts, and the 
             hearts of all Americans, were with him that day.
               John Glenn reassured us all that America didn't just 
             have a place in space. At the height of the cold war, he 
             reassured us that we have a place--in the future.
               And that, Mr. President, brings me to the purpose of the 
             legislation I am introducing. Even as we speak, in 
             Cleveland, OH, there are some hardworking men and women of 
             science who are keeping America strong, who are keeping us 
             on the frontier of the human adventure. They are the 
             brilliant, persevering, and dedicated workers of the NASA-
             Lewis Space Research Center.
               People who understand aviation know how crucially 
             important the cutting-edge work of the NASA-Lewis 
             scientists is, for America's economic and technological 
             future.
               Mr. President, what more fitting tribute could there be 
             to our distinguished colleague, Senator Glenn, than to 
             rename this facility--in his honor.
               That, Mr. President, is the purpose of this legislation. 
             It recognizes not just a man's physical accomplishments--
             but his spirit. It inspired us in 1962. It inspires us 
             this year. And it will remain strong in the work of all 
             those who expand America's frontiers.
               The facility would be renamed the National Aeronautics 
             and Space Administration John H. Glenn Research Center at 
             Lewis Field--to honor our distinguished colleague, and 
             also the aviation pioneer for whom it is currently named. 
             George Lewis became Director of Aeronautical Research at 
             the precursor to NASA in 1919. It was then called the 
             National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, or NACA.
               Lewis visited Germany prior to World War II. When he saw 
             their commitment to aeronautic research, he championed 
             American investment in aeronautic improvements--and 
             created the center which eventually bore his name.
               He and John Glenn are pioneers on the same American 
             odyssey. Ohio looks to both of them with pride--and with 
             immense gratitude for their leadership.
               And I am proud, today, that we were able to include this 
             in the bill. I thank my colleagues for that, and I also 
             want to thank our good friend, Louis Stokes, who has been 
             instrumental in shepherding this measure honoring Senator 
             Glenn in the other body.

               Mr. BOND. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Ohio.
               I, too, join with him in expressing appreciation for the 
             services of our colleague, Senator Glenn, and our 
             colleague on the House side, Congressman Stokes. I believe 
             it is very important that we recognize them in this bill. 
             I thank him for his comments.

               Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, the Random House College 
             Dictionary defines the term ``hero'' first as ``a man of 
             distinguished courage or ability, admired for his brave 
             deeds and noble qualities,'' and second as ``a small loaf 
             of Italian bread.''
               There is, of course, a wide disparity in these two 
             definitions. I think I shall appropriately use the initial 
             definition to describe the hero of whom I am about to 
             speak, Senator John Herschel Glenn, Jr. I have had the 
             honor of serving with him in the Senate for the last 24 
             years.
               He is a gentleman. He is a great public servant to all 
             the Ohioans whose beliefs and values he has so ably 
             represented in this body.
               As Senator Glenn prepares to officially retire from the 
             Senate and take up his wings of flight once again, I shall 
             take a few minutes to thank this distinguished Senator 
             from Ohio for all that he has done for our Republic as a 
             U.S. Senator and as a hero.
               I thank him for his achievements as a Senator. I thank 
             him for his dedication to the Senate Governmental Affairs 
             Committee, on which he has served since 1975.
               Following his personal motto: ``You Keep Climbing,'' 
             Senator Glenn has moved up in the ranks.
               From 1987 to 1995 he served as the chairman of the 
             committee, and then as the ranking Democratic Member until 
             the present time.
               As a member of the committee, Senator Glenn has worked 
             to protect our Nation and its people, using his expert 
             knowledge to combat the issue of nuclear proliferation, to 
             protect our fellow Americans from all the environmental 
             dangers that are associated with the byproducts of nuclear 
             weapons, and is making the Government more accountable for 
             waste and fraud.
               As a member of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, 
             on which I am pleased to serve with him, Senator Glenn has 
             worked to ensure that the United States military remained 
             ready and strong in the perilous aftermath of the cold 
             war.
               He has shared a concern over the dangers of chemical 
             weapons. He has joined with others of us in attempting to 
             ensure that our military has absorbed the lessons of the 
             gulf war and is prepared to protect our troops from low 
             levels of chemical weapons.
               On these two committees, Senator Glenn has served as a 
             voice of reason and common sense.
               Senator Glenn is a hero for all of us to emulate as a 
             result of his honor and dedication to his country, his 
             family, and his own high standards.
               I have asked this question in the Senate before: ``Where 
             have all the heroes gone?''
               To this question I have no definitive answer, but I do 
             know where this hero is going to go * * * again.
               Senator John Glenn is a steam engine in britches; he is 
             atomic energy in the flesh.
               The senior Senator from Ohio has been a daredevil 
             virtually all of his life.
               Not one to know when to slow down, Senator Glenn has 
             risked life and limb, both on the Earth's surface and in 
             the vastness of space which encompasses it, for one thing, 
             and one thing only--the United States of America.
               John Glenn has been uniquely blessed to have had the 
             opportunity to soar above this Earth of ours, soar like an 
             eagle, surveying the beauty of creation that is God's 
             Green Earth.
               To quote William Shakespeare in ``twelfth night,''

               Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some 
             have greatness thrust upon them.

               Senator Glenn is one who has achieved greatness through 
             his service to his country; he is truly a great American 
             hero.
               Not only a veteran of World War II, having served in 
             combat in the South Pacific after he was commissioned in 
             the Marine Corps in 1943, John Glenn is also a veteran of 
             the Korean war.
               Having survived 149 combat missions as a marine, our 
             hero--our hero, my hero, your hero--our hero wanted to 
             move on to a more challenging career as a test pilot of 
             fighter and attack aircraft for the Navy and Marine Corps. 
             And then, looking for new and extreme ways to test his 
             mortality, on February 20, 1962, Astronaut John Glenn 
             gently squeezed his body into the Friendship 7 rocket and 
             became the first American to orbit the Earth at almost 
             18,000 miles per hour.
               Think of that. When I was young, I read a book by Jules 
             Verne titled, ``Around the World in 80 Days.'' John Glenn 
             went around the world in 89 minutes.
               This may well have been the pinnacle of John Glenn's 
             life and career.
               On that fateful Tuesday in 1962, not only was America 
             waiting with nervously clenched fists for news on 
             Lieutenant Colonel. John Glenn's condition after his 
             return to Earth, but the whole world was watching.
               People from all nations prayed for the safe return of 
             this brave man.
               Mr. President, I quote from an article entitled ``Man's 
             `Finest Hour.' '' I have been saving this article, now, 
             for almost 37 years--``Man's `Finest Hour','' by the late 
             David Lawrence, which was originally published in the 
             March 5, 1962, edition of U.S. News and World Report:

               Miracles do happen when the world shows its humility in 
             prayer.
               The voices that besought Almighty God to save the life 
             of Colonel Glenn can speak again, as even more of us 
             petition him to save humanity from nuclear war.
               For those prolonged minutes of prayer on Tuesday, 
             February 20, constituted man's ``finest hour''.

               Now, if the Good Lord is willing, on October 29, our 
             friend and colleague--and hero--John Glenn, still brimming 
             with vital energy, will be leaving the relative comfort of 
             Mother Earth far behind.
               It is always a melancholy time when the institution of 
             the U.S. Senate has one of its finest Members move on. But 
             it is a glad time when one of its Members moves on to 
             something greater.
               ``Excelsior, ever upward.'' That is the motto of John 
             Glenn. He has bigger fish to fry, so he is ready to get 
             away from Washington, DC--far, far away.
               Senator Glenn's return to space aboard shuttle Discovery 
             will add another significant page to the annals of 
             history.
               The capacity in which Senator Glenn will be operating on 
             the Discovery is representative of the way in which he had 
             lived the last three decades of his life, despite his 
             global fame--modestly and without great fanfare.
               I am certain that he will perform his mission on 
             Discovery with the same diligence and sense of duty that 
             he has shown in serving his great State of Ohio in the 
             U.S. Senate.
               The world in 1998 is a lot different from that world of 
             1962, when John Glenn was first catapulted into space. 
             Similarly, the space shuttle Discovery is about as close 
             in design to the Friendship 7 rocket as an old Oliver 
             typewriter--I was trying to remember the name of an old 
             typewriter I had around the house when I was a boy--about 
             as close in design to the Friendship 7 rocket as an old 
             Oliver typewriter is to a home computer.
               The one thing that shall remain constant in this most 
             recent launch is that the world will once again be 
             watching, gripping chairs, biting fingernails, and saying 
             its prayers for the Glenn family. For John Glenn, and for 
             all the crew members of Discovery, and for Annie, that 
             sweet little wife of John's.
               It is hard to relate, to those Americans who were not 
             yet born in 1962, the thoughts and emotions of the world 
             on Tuesday, February 20, of that year.
               Technology has become so advanced that flights into 
             space are routine.
               Men and women are able to live for months at a time in 
             floating space stations.
               America tends to take for granted the risks that our 
             Nation's astronauts take to perform scientific 
             experiments, carefully placing communications satellites 
             into orbit, and repairing important instruments of 
             observation--all of which make life on Earth much more 
             enjoyable.
               In 1962, the risks were greater and there were many 
             unknown factors that experience has now brought to light 
             and revealed and smoothed over.
               Senator Glenn's return to space brings that all back, 
             and reminds us of the tremendous changes wrought by 
             Americans within the career of one man.
               So, this evening I take this opportunity to wish the 
             best of luck to John Glenn and to Annie and to others of 
             his family.
               I anxiously anticipate Discovery's safe return to Earth, 
             and I extend my best wishes, and those of my wife Erma, to 
             Senator Glenn and to Annie for many years of health and 
             happiness after he returns to Earth and leaves the Halls 
             of the Capitol behind.
               Thank you, thank you, thank you, Senator Glenn.

                                               Friday, October 9, 1998.
               Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, it is a time when Senators say 
             goodbye to Senators who are leaving, and I was privileged, 
             in 1974, to be elected with a very special class of 
             Senators, a very large class of Senators--nearly a dozen--
             who came to this body. We developed personal friendships. 
             Of that class, there are only four left: The distinguished 
             senior Senator from Ohio, Mr. Glenn; the distinguished 
             senior Senator from Kentucky, Mr. Ford; the distinguished 
             senior Senator from Arkansas, Mr. Bumpers; and myself. 
             Each of the other three have announced their plans to 
             retire this year. In some ways I feel like the lonely 
             person who is given the chore to turn out the lights after 
             everybody else leaves, because I will be the last of the 
             class of 1974.
               I am going to speak of each of them, but I wish to speak 
             now and to give tribute to a great statesman, a person who 
             is recognized as a true American hero and a very good 
             friend of mine, John Hershel Glenn, Jr.
               As I said, we both arrived in the Senate at the same 
             time in 1974. There was a big difference, however. I came 
             here as a 34-year-old unknown county prosecutor from rural 
             Vermont. John Glenn arrived here as a living American 
             legend. We have served together now for 24 years and it is 
             with the fondest memories that I recollect his time here. 
             I remember the very first day I met him. The two of us had 
             gone over to see the legendary Jim Eastland, President pro 
             tempore of the Senate. That is probably the only time, 
             then or since, I have ever seen John Glenn look at all 
             nervous, was going in to see Senator Eastland. Senator 
             Glenn was nervous. I was terrified. There is a big 
             difference.
               But John Glenn will be remembered here in the Senate as 
             a man who advocated a role for Government in daily life, 
             but he never stopped trying to make Government more 
             efficient. He is one of our leading experts on science and 
             technology. He has always been a tireless advocate for 
             government-sponsored scientific and health research. He 
             brought tremendous intellect and dedication to the task of 
             preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction. I 
             remember when the United States and the Soviet Union were 
             locked in a wasteful nuclear arms race, John Glenn was a 
             voice of reason and moderation.
               He has used his seat on the Armed Services Committee to 
             advocate for our men and women in uniform, while at the 
             same time looking out for wasteful spending. I remember, 
             when I and others began to have doubts about the costly B-
             2 bomber--$2 billion a plane--that I read papers and memos 
             about it. John Glenn went out and flew it, then came back 
             and said its cost outweighed its benefits. I credit him 
             for saving the taxpayers a lot of money.
               He used his position in the Governmental Affairs 
             Committee to expose waste in Government and to clean up 
             the Nation's nuclear materials production plants.
               In his conduct here in the Senate, John has always been 
             nonpartisan, polite, accommodating, but always true to his 
             beliefs. His personality reminds me of Longfellow's words, 
             ``A tender heart; a will inflexible.''
               It is hard for us to think of John Glenn before he was a 
             national hero, but not so long ago he was a smalltown boy 
             like many of us. He was born on July 18, 1921, in 
             Cambridge, OH. He grew up in the tiny town of New Concord, 
             OH. But, like millions of Americans, his life was forever 
             changed by World War II.
               Many of us know the details of what makes John Glenn a 
             hero, but I want to repeat them for my colleagues. Shortly 
             after Pearl Harbor, he was commissioned in the Marines 
             Corps. He served as a fighter pilot in the South Pacific. 
             He stayed in the marines, and when the Korean war started, 
             John Glenn requested combat duty. He ended up flying 149 
             combat missions in both wars. How good a pilot is our 
             colleague from Ohio? In the last 9 days of fighting in 
             Korea, he downed three Chinese MiG fighters in combat 
             along the Yalu River.
               In July 1957, he set a speed record from Los Angeles to 
             New York, the first transcontinental flight to average 
             supersonic speed.
               An avid pilot to this day, John has over 9,000 hours of 
             flight time in a variety of aircraft. To put that 
             statistic in perspective, to equal that mark you would 
             have to fly 8 hours a day, every day of the year, for 3 
             years.
               Probably the flight that I remember the best, the one I 
             enjoyed as much as any, was when John Glenn and I flew to 
             the northeast kingdom of Vermont in a small float plane at 
             the height of glorious fall foliage. John and Annie Glenn 
             were staying with Marcelle and I at our farm in Middlesex, 
             VT. John had borrowed the plane from a friend of mine in 
             Vermont. We flew up and set down in one of those little 
             Vermont ponds with the fall foliage around it. There 
             happened to be a trapper's convention there. Some of the 
             people there were calling him Colonel Glenn, not Senator 
             Glenn. They kind of put up with me being there, but he was 
             the hero.
               Of course I do remember also the look on John and 
             Marcelle's and Annie's faces when we landed in Montpelier 
             Airport in a heavy crosswind. John turned to me after he 
             taxied up and said, ``You know, I have never been so 
             frightened landing anything in my life,'' which almost 
             stopped my heart to hear him tell it. But when we got out 
             of the plane, John was wearing--this is accurate now--a 
             skunk-skin cap which the trappers had given him.
               He stepped out of the airplane with me shaking and 
             quivering behind him. Annie turned to Marcelle and says, 
             ``Marcelle, I told you we never should have let those boys 
             go off by themselves.''
               We all know what happened in a far more dramatic time 
             when John strapped himself into a tiny capsule on top a 
             gigantic tube of volatile fuel on February 20, 1962. When 
             he landed 4 hours 55 minutes later, John Glenn not only 
             became the first American to orbit the Earth, but he 
             boosted the psyche of our Nation in a way not seen equaled 
             before or since.
               Cicero said a man of courage is also full of faith. It 
             should be said that John Glenn is a man who puts all his 
             faith in God.
               All his accomplishments here in the Senate, in the 
             cockpit, in the capsule, all pale before the one true 
             constant in John Glenn's life, and that is the love he 
             shares with his beautiful wife Annie. They are truly a 
             couple for the ages and role models for all of us. Married 
             for 55 years, they have two wonderful children, John David 
             and Carolyn Ann, whom we all know as Lyn.
               When the space shuttle Discovery surges into space later 
             this month, the cabin will be cramped with the seven 
             astronauts aboard. But sitting with John in spirit, as she 
             has for so many years, will be Annie. They are truly 
             inseparable. No matter how fast or far he travels, she is 
             always with him.
               Mr. President, later this month the eyes of the Nation 
             and the world will focus on Cape Canaveral, FL. We will 
             watch as a marvelous machine, built by Americans, flown by 
             an international crew, roars into the heavens in the name 
             of science, and on board will be our colleague from Ohio, 
             a great Senator, an expert pilot and extraordinary 
             American hero, my friend, John Glenn. I intend to be there 
             to cheer him on.
               Once again, as he has done in so many ways over the 
             years, John Glenn will make us turn our eyes toward the 
             heavens, and like all who will be there, I will say, 
             ``Godspeed, John Glenn, and thank you.''
               Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that an article 
             from Roll Call about Senator Glenn be printed in the 
             Record.
               There being no objection, the article was ordered to be 
             printed in the Record, as follows:

                          [From Roll Call, October 5, 1998]
               Glenn Counts Down to Launch With Complete Support From 
                 Wife and Colleagues--Senator Set to Repeat History
                                    (By Ed Henry)
               He's survived 149 combat missions as a marine, orbited 
             the Earth three times at 17,544 miles per hour as an 
             astronaut and endured 24 years of partisan battles as a 
             Senator.
               But John Glenn says that one of the toughest missions of 
             his life came as a husband: convincing his wife, Annie, 
             that it was a good idea for him to be shot into space 
             again at the end of this month.
               ``Let's say she was a little cool with this whole idea 
             to begin with--that's the understatement,'' Glenn said in 
             an interview about the October 29 space mission. ``She 
             didn't react too kindly when I first started talking about 
             this some time ago.''
               The 77-year-old Ohio Democrat said that while the 
             couple's two children were not excited about the Discovery 
             launch either, ``Annie was the main one to convince.''
               Slipping into the lingo of an old marine, Glenn noted 
             that based on all of the dangers he's already faced, he 
             could have gotten ``bagged'' long ago.
               ``There were lots of times that things could have gone a 
             little bit different way, but they didn't,'' he said. 
             ``But I think all my life, I guess, you don't look back 
             and think what might have been or where you might have 
             gotten bagged or whatever. You look forward. There are 
             risks in everything you do.''
               Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), one of the couple's 
             closest friends, said Annie was ``apprehensive'' about the 
             fact that her husband was heading into space so close to 
             his retirement from the Senate.
               ``She had some reluctance because he was coming to a 
             time in his life when they were going to have more time 
             together,'' said Leahy. ``They are an extraordinarily 
             close couple--they're sort of the role model for all of us 
             in our own marriages.''
               Nobody underestimates the strength of Annie Glenn, who 
             toughed her way through her husband's February 20, 1962, 
             Mercury mission, when he flirted with death in the 36-
             cubic-foot Friendship 7. She also had the guts to stand up 
             to then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson by refusing to let 
             him come into her home for a photo-op, out of fear for how 
             her stutter would look in front of Johnson and so many 
             network TV correspondents.
               She was sitting up in the House gallery on that day in 
             1962 when Glenn jubilantly told a joint session of 
             Congress, ``I want you to meet my wife, Annie * * *. Annie 
             * * * the rock!''
               And Glenn was there for Annie, Leahy recalled, when she 
             conquered her stuttering problem 20 years ago. ``We don't 
             think of them as John or Annie,'' he said. ``We think of 
             them as JohnandAnnie--it's just one word.''
               In finally deciding to hop aboard for this mission, 
             Annie thought back to a vow her husband had made on the 
             day they wed 55 years ago.
               ``One thing that she's reminded me of is that on our 
             wedding day, along with the vows, one of the things I told 
             her that day or that night sometime was that I would 
             pledge to her I would try to do everything I could to keep 
             life from ever being boring,'' said the Senator.
               Then he added with a laugh, ``And she's reminded me of 
             that several times in the past, and this time, too, that 
             she'd just as soon have things be a little bit more 
             boring.''
               Since critics have said the upcoming 9-day mission is 
             merely a joy ride, Glenn has done his homework. With great 
             specificity, he can recount how the research about how a 
             senior citizen is affected in space will do a great deal 
             for the 34 million seniors in America.
               ``She gradually over a period of time became an 
             enthusiast for this,'' he said. ``She's changed her view 
             on this, as has my whole family, so she's excited about 
             it.''
               Senator Dale Bumpers (D-AR) said he spoke to Annie last 
             week and she revealed that NASA will be providing a laptop 
             so she can communicate with her husband in space.
               ``I said, `Annie, aren't you apprehensive at all about 
             this flight?' '' recalled Bumpers. `` `She said, `I'm 
             never apprehensive about anything John really wants to 
             do.' ''
               Annie Glenn will not be the only person close to the 
             Senator lending her support at Cape Canaveral. A 
             bipartisan delegation of Senators will be heading down to 
             Florida on an official CODEL authorized by Majority Leader 
             Trent Lott (R-MS) and Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD).
               Daschle plans to be there for the launch, even though he 
             faces reelection back in South Dakota less than a week 
             later. Because Lott has a scheduling conflict, he will be 
             sending Senate Appropriations Chairman Ted Stevens (R-
             AK)--who helped come up with the idea of a trip--to lead 
             the Republican side.
               ``Senators have a way of coming together when another is 
             involved,'' Lott said in an interview.
               The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Greg Casey, who is 
             organizing the trip, does not have a complete list of 
             Senators attending yet. The trip will originate from 
             Andrews Air Force Base on the morning of the launch.
               ``We have a lot of interest from Senators,'' said 
             Secretary of the Senate Gary Sisco, who will also attend.
               Glenn said that while colleagues have not discussed the 
             launch with him, he's heard whispers about it and feels 
             gratified.
               ``It's a good feeling to know that there are going to be 
             people there that you have worked with all these years--
             that they think enough about it to be down there,'' he 
             said.
               Another person who was supposed to be at the Cape was 
             Alan Shepard, his onetime rival in the Mercury program, 
             who recently died. Glenn admits that Shepard's death 
             reminded him of his own mortality, but the Senator insists 
             he's not worried about his safety.
               ``I've always been very aware of my own mortality 
             anyway,'' said Glenn. ``I got over that teenage 
             immortality bit a long time ago.''
               Glenn suggested he is at peace with his decision. ``I 
             have a deep religious faith and I have all my life,'' he 
             said. ``I don't believe in calling on your religion like a 
             fire engine, you know, `Oh God, get me out of this mess 
             I've gotten myself into and I'll be so good even you won't 
             believe it.''
               He added, ``But I think * * * we should all live so that 
             if something like that happens to us it won't be a big 
             shock. It's a shock. It would be a shock, of course. 
             Nothing can be 100 percent safe. Everyone knows that. But 
             I think the safety record NASA has had through the manned 
             space program has been absolutely amazing.''
               Besides his combat missions in Korea and World War II, 
             Glenn faced danger in 1962.
               ``Some of the ophthalmologists predicted your eyes might 
             change shape,'' he said. ``It was serious enough that if 
             you look at the Friendship 7 over there in the Air and 
             Space Museum now, up on top of the instrument panel 
             there's still a little eye chart that I was to read every 
             20 minutes to see if my eyes were changing.''
               When asked why he took such risks, without so much as a 
             blink Glenn responds, ``I thought it was valuable for the 
             country.''
               Colleagues say it is this modesty--as well as Glenn's 
             relationship with his wife--that they will remember most.
               ``He's one of my favorite people in the whole world 
             because he wears his heroism with such extraordinary 
             modesty,'' said Senator Carl Levin (D-MI).
               Senators like 51-year-old Tim Johnson (D-SD) seem awed 
             by getting the chance to serve with Glenn.
               ``It's like serving with a legend,'' said Johnson. ``The 
             fact that I served with John Glenn is something I'll tell 
             my grandkids.''
               As a young Navy pilot, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) 
             revered Glenn and says the upcoming mission will remind 
             everyone of that.
               ``I know it will just affirm in people's minds that 
             we're privileged to have known a great American hero,'' he 
             said. ``I am honored to be in his company. I am serious. I 
             am honored to be in his company.''
               Senator Richard Bryan (D-NV) said he will try to be in 
             Florida, partially because of a simple expression of love 
             he saw when Bonnie Bryan and Annie Glenn recently traveled 
             together to Saudi Arabia. From across the globe, Mrs. 
             Glenn placed a phone call to her husband in the Senate 
             cloakroom.
               Bryan recalled, ``He was very excited and came up to me 
             and said, `I've got Annie on the line, would you like to 
             talk to Bonnie?' John and Annie have this very special 
             relationship--you can sense that.''
               Leahy recalled riding in the back seat one time as the 
             Glenns kept teasing and poking fun at one another in the 
             front seat.
               ``The two of them are like a pair of teenagers,'' he 
             said.
               But a much sadder occasion reminded Leahy of his 
             affection for the couple. When Leahy's mother died last 
             year, he found out that the Glenns had been trying to lift 
             her spirits during her illness.
               ``One of the things I found on her bed stand was a 
             handwritten note from John and Annie,'' said Leahy. ``They 
             both had written a couple of paragraphs in the letter. 
             These are very special people.''
               For Glenn, his frequent trips to Houston for training 
             seem to have been a sort of fountain of youth.
               Every time Glenn returns from Houston, said Senator 
             Richard Lugar (R-IN), he's been updated about the status 
             of the mission. ``It's wonderful to see someone so engaged 
             and lit up with enthusiasm,'' he said.
               It has also reminded Glenn about the differences between 
             his two careers.
               ``Here of course, the political lines are drawn and you 
             have confrontation and you have to put everything through 
             a political sieve to know what's real and what isn't in 
             people's minds,'' he said.
               ``Back when I was in the Mercury program or in the 
             program down there now, it's such a pleasure to work in 
             that program because everything is so focused on one 
             objective that everybody's agreed on.''
               The similarities between the two jobs, he concluded, are 
             limited.
               ``Both fields take a lot of dedication to accomplish 
             anything. That would be a big similarity, dedication to 
             country and dedication to what you're doing. But that's 
             about where the similarities end.''

               Mr. THURMOND. Mr. President, though the 105th Congress 
             will soon come to a close, and each of us will return home 
             to meet with constituents, or take fact finding trips 
             throughout the Nation or the world, one of our colleagues 
             has not only already left town, but is headed for a most 
             unusual destination, that of outer space. I speak, of 
             course, of our friend, John Glenn who is ending his career 
             in the U.S. Senate.
               Like most people, I first learned of John Glenn in 1962 
             when he orbited the Earth, but when the people of Ohio 
             elected him to this body in 1974, I had the opportunity to 
             come to know him personally. In the subsequent years, we 
             worked closely together on a number of issues, especially 
             those related to national security as we served together 
             on the Senate Committee on the Armed Forces. Naturally, 
             his experiences as a Marine Corps officer gave Senator 
             Glenn valuable insight into defense matters and he played 
             an important role on the Committee and in working to help 
             provide for a military adequately capable of protecting 
             the United States.
               The same qualities that made John Glenn a successful 
             marine and astronaut, served him well here in the U.S. 
             Senate. Without question, he is a determined man who has 
             earned our respect for his honor, ability, and dedication. 
             His desire to serve our Nation is an inspiration, and in 
             keeping with the highest traditions of public service. 
             Without question, he has set an excellent example for 
             others to follow and it is my hope that more people, from 
             Ohio and throughout the United States, will follow his 
             lead and find a way to make a difference in their 
             communities and to our Nation.
               Mr. President, the U.S. Senate will just not be quite 
             the same place without the presence of Senator John Glenn. 
             We appreciate the many ways in which he has served so 
             admirably and wish both he and his lovely wife Annie 
             health, happiness, and success in the years ahead.

               Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, when the 105th Congress 
             adjourns sine die in the next few days, the Senate will 
             lose one of our Nation's true heroes, and one of my 
             personal heroes, Senator John H. Glenn, Jr. of Ohio. I 
             rise today to pay tribute to this great American, a man I 
             feel genuinely honored to call my friend.
               All of us old enough to remember John Glenn's flight 
             into orbit around the Earth on February 20, 1967 aboard 
             Friendship 7 stand in awe of his courage and strength of 
             character. But this enormous accomplishment followed on a 
             distinguished record of heroism in battle as a marine 
             officer and pilot. He served his country in the Marine 
             Corps for 23 years, including his heroic service in both 
             World War II and the Korean conflict. And, in turn, his 
             remarkable accomplishment in the history of space flight 
             has been followed by an extraordinary Senate career over 
             the past 24 years, as the only Ohio Senator in history to 
             serve four consecutive terms.
               For the 20 years that I have been in the Senate, I have 
             served side by side with John Glenn in both the 
             Governmental Affairs Committee which he chaired for many 
             years and now serves as ranking minority member and the 
             Armed Services Committee where he serves as the ranking 
             minority member of the Subcommittee on Airland Forces. 
             More recently, I have served with John Glenn on the Senate 
             Select Committee on Intelligence. This has given me a 
             front row seat to watch one of the giants of the modern 
             day U.S. Senate do the hard, grinding work of legislative 
             accomplishment.
               Over the years, John Glenn has led the fight for 
             efficiency in government, for giving the American people 
             more bang for that tax ``buck''. He was the author of the 
             Paperwork Reduction Act. He has worked to streamline 
             Federal purchasing procedures, and led the fight to create 
             independent inspectors general in Federal agencies. He was 
             the point man in the Senate for the Clinton 
             Administration's battle to reduce the size of the Federal 
             workforce to the lowest levels since the Kennedy 
             Administration. He and I have fought side by side to block 
             extreme efforts to gut regulatory safeguards in the name 
             of reform and for the passage of a sensible approach to 
             regulatory reform to restore confidence in government 
             regulations. Throughout his career, John Glenn has made 
             himself an enemy of wasteful spending and bureaucracy, yet 
             a friend of the dedicated Federal worker.
               John Glenn has steadfastly served as a powerful advocate 
             for veterans. He led the effort to bring the Veterans 
             Administration up to cabinet-level and to provide benefits 
             to veterans of the Persian Gulf conflict.
               On the Armed Services Committee, John Glenn has brought 
             his enormous credibility to bear time and again both in 
             that Committee and on the Intelligence Committee on the 
             side of needed programs and weapons and against wasteful 
             and unnecessary ones like the B-2 bomber.
               Perhaps John Glenn's most important role, however, has 
             been as the author of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act 
             and as the Senate's leader in fighting the proliferation 
             of nuclear weapons around the world. In this area, the 
             Senate will sorely miss his clear vision, eloquent voice 
             and consistent leadership.
               Mr. President, John Glenn, of course, has remained the 
             strongest and most effective voice in the Senate for the 
             Nation's space program. Many of us will be on hand to 
             watch the launch of his second NASA mission later this 
             month, 31 years after the first. At age 77, John Glenn has 
             volunteered to go back into space to test the effects of 
             weightlessness on the aging process, and once again 
             inspires our Nation and sets an example for us all--an 
             example of courage, character, sense of purpose, and, yes, 
             adventure.
               No person I've known or know of has worn his heroism 
             with greater humility. John Glenn is, to use a Yiddish 
             word, a true mensch, a good and decent man.
               John Glenn and his beloved wife, Annie, are simply 
             wonderful people. They, their children and grandchildren 
             are the All-American family. My wife Barbara and I will 
             keenly miss John and Annie Glenn as they leave the Senate 
             family.

               Mr. JOHNSON. Mr. President, I rise today to pay tribute 
             to a special colleague and a true American hero, John 
             Glenn of Ohio.
               During his distinguished career, Senator Glenn has used 
             his boundless energy and expertise to work for effective 
             and efficient government and world peace. He is one of our 
             most beloved national figures and a role model to people 
             of all ages and all backgrounds from all over the world.
               I was a teenager when the Nation watched in awe as John 
             Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. I 
             never would have guessed during those spectacular early 
             days of the space program that someday I would have an 
             office next to his in the U.S. Senate. It has been my 
             great privilege to serve with him and to know him as both 
             a friend and a colleague.
               Today, he is at Cape Canaveral preparing to visit space 
             again. I know my colleagues share in my admiration and 
             pride for Senator Glenn as he boldly goes once more into 
             space. I wish him an exciting journey, a safe return and 
             wonderful retirement.

                                            Saturday, October 10, 1998.
               Mr. LAUTENBERG. Mr. President, I rise today to bid 
             farewell to an American hero, a great Senator and a 
             wonderful friend--Senator John Glenn. Senator Glenn is 
             retiring after serving the people of Ohio for four terms.
               But his service to our country did not begin in the 
             Senate, nor will it end here. Senator Glenn served in the 
             Marine Corps during World War II and fought in combat in 
             the South Pacific. He also fought with valor in the Korean 
             conflict and ended up flying 149 missions in both wars. He 
             has received numerous honors including six Distinguished 
             Flying Cross and the Air Medal with 18 clusters.
               He later became a test pilot and set a transcontinental 
             speed record in 1957 for this first flight to average 
             supersonic speed from Los Angeles to New York. In 1959, he 
             was selected to be one of seven astronauts in the space 
             program. Three years later, he made history as the first 
             American to orbit the Earth, completing a 5 hour, three 
             orbit flight.
               His heroism inspired me and all of the American people. 
             He received the Space congressional Medal of Honor for his 
             service.
               After 23 years in military service, he retired in 1965 
             and went into the private sector. Despite his outstanding 
             service to his country, it was not enough for John Glenn. 
             He ran for the Senate in 1974 and is now completing his 
             24th year.
               Despite his fame, Senator Glenn was a workhorse, not a 
             showhorse in the Senate. He took on complicated issues 
             like nuclear proliferation, troop readiness, government 
             ethics, civil service reform and campaign finance reform. 
             He did his work with great diligence and thoroughness, 
             with his eye on accomplishment not partisanship.
               If you add his 23 years of military service to his 24 
             years of service to the people of Ohio, that is 47 years 
             of dedication to our Nation.
               But even this is not enough for John Glenn. On October 
             29th of this year, he will return to space on a shuttle 
             mission. He will be the oldest person ever to travel in 
             space but even then his journey will not be over.
               He will continue to represent the best of the American 
             spirit and be an informal Ambassador for scientific 
             exploration.
               I wish him, his wife Annie, his children and 
             grandchildren the very best for the future.

               Mr. BURNS. Mr. President, five Senators will move on at 
             the closing of this session of the 105th Congress. And 
             they are Senators that have, with the exception of one, 
             been here ever since I joined this body back in 1989.
               Dirk Kempthorne from Idaho was elected after I was. And 
             now after one term he has elected to go back to his home 
             State of Idaho.
               It seems like it becomes more and more difficult, as 
             time goes by, to attract men and women to public service, 
             and especially to public service when there are elections.
               He brought a certain quality to this Senate. On his work 
             on the Environment and Public Works Committee, he was 
             sensitive to the environment and all the public 
             infrastructure that we enjoy across this country. It just 
             seemed to fit, because he had come here after being the 
             mayor of Boise, ID. And his very first objective was to 
             tackle this business of unfunded mandates. He took that 
             issue on and provided the leadership, and finally we 
             passed a law that unfunded mandates must be adhered to 
             whenever we tell local government, State government that 
             it is going to take some of your money to comply with the 
             laws as passed by the Federal Government.
               He, like me, had come out of local government. He knew 
             the stresses and the pains of city councilmen and mayors 
             and county commissioners every time they struggle with 
             their budget in order to provide the services for their 
             people, when it comes to schools and roads and public 
             safety--all the demands that we enjoy down to our 
             neighborhoods.
               We shall miss him in this body.
               To my friend, John Glenn of Ohio, who has already made 
             his mark in history that shall live forever, he has left 
             his tracks in this body. And not many know--and maybe not 
             even him--but I was a lowly corporal in the U.S. Marine 
             Corps when he was flying in the Marine Corps. So my memory 
             of John Glenn goes back more than 40 years to El Toro 
             Marine Corps Air Station in Santa Anna, CA.
               As he goes into space again at the end of this month, we 
             wish him Godspeed. He gave this country pride as he lifted 
             off and became the first American to orbit the Earth. And 
             he carried with him all of the wishes of the American 
             people.
               To Dan Coats of Indiana, a classmate, we came to this 
             body together in 1989. Our routes were a little different, 
             but yet almost the same--he coming from the House of 
             Representatives and me coming from local government.
               He is a living example of a person dedicated to public 
             service. But it never affected his solid core values. He 
             has not changed one iota since I first met him back in 
             1989.
               The other principal is on the floor today. It is Wendell 
             Ford of Kentucky. I was fortunate to serve on two of the 
             most fascinating and hard-working committees in the U.S. 
             Senate with Senator Ford: the Commerce Committee and the 
             Energy Committee. Those committees, folks, touch every 
             life in America every day.
               We flip on our lights at home or in our businesses. We 
             pick up the telephone, listen to our radio, watch our 
             televisions, move ourselves from point A to point B, no 
             matter what the mode--whether it is auto, train or plane. 
             Yes, all of the great scientific advances this country has 
             made, and research and the improvement of everyday life 
             and, yes, even our venture into space comes under the 
             auspices of the Commerce, Science and Transportation 
             Committee and the Energy Committee. Those two committees 
             play such a major role in the everyday workings of 
             America.
               Wendell Ford was one great champion and one of the true 
             principals in formulating policies that we enjoy today. He 
             played a major role in each and every one of them.
               Again, it was my good fortune to work with Senator 
             Bumpers on two committees: the Small Business Committee 
             and the Energy Committee. There is no one in this body 
             that has been more true to his deeply held beliefs than 
             Senator Bumpers. Our views did not always mesh--and that 
             is true with Senator Ford. It was their wisdom and the way 
             they dealt with their fellow Senators that we worked our 
             way through difficult issues and hard times with a sense 
             of humor. I always say if you come from Arkansas you have 
             to have a pretty good sense of humor. My roots go back to 
             Missouri; I know we had to develop humor very early. 
             Nonetheless, it was the integrity and the honesty that 
             allowed us to settle our differences, even though we were 
             180 degrees off plumb.
               I think I have taken from them much more than I have 
             given back to them. This body has gained more than it can 
             repay. This Nation is a better Nation for all of them 
             serving in the U.S. Senate.
               In our country we don't say goodbye, we just say so 
             long. But we say so long to these Senators from our 
             everyday activities on the floor of the U.S. Senate. I am 
             sure our trails will cross many times in the future. 
             Should they not, I will be the most disappointed of all.

               Mr. KEMPTHORNE. Mr. President, I appreciate you 
             presiding as you do in such a class fashion. I would like 
             to make a few comments here. I have been touched and 
             impressed by the fact of colleagues coming to the floor 
             and paying tribute to those Members who are departing. I 
             have listened because, as one of those Members who are 
             departing, I know personally how much it means to hear 
             those kind comments that are made.
               Senator Ford, who just spoke, is leaving after a very 
             illustrious career. I remember when the Republican Party 
             took over the majority 4 years ago and I was new to the 
             position of Presiding Officer, it was not unusual for 
             Wendell Ford, who knows many of the ropes around here, to 
             come and pull me aside and give me a few of the tips of 
             how I could be effective as a Presiding Officer. I think 
             probably one of the highest tributes you can pay to an 
             individual is the fact that you see their family and the 
             success they have had. I remember when Wendell Ford's 
             grandson, Clay, was a page here. I think Clay is probably 
             one of the greatest tributes paid to a grandfather.
               Dale Bumpers, often mentioned here on the floor about 
             his great sense of humor, is an outstanding gentlemen. He 
             is someone whom I remember before I ever became involved 
             in politics. I watched him as a Governor of Arkansas and 
             thought, there is a man who has great integrity, someone 
             you can look up to. And then to have the opportunity to 
             serve with him has been a great honor.
               John Glenn. Whenever any of the astronauts--the original 
             seven--would blast off into space, my mother would get all 
             the boys up so we could watch them. I remember when John 
             Glenn blasted off into space. Again, the idea that somehow 
             a kid would end up here and would serve with John Glenn is 
             just something I never could dream of at the time. In 
             fact, John Glenn became a partner in our efforts to stop 
             unfunded Federal mandates. You could not ask for a better 
             partner.
               Speaking of partners, he could not have a better partner 
             than Annie. I had the great joy of traveling with them 
             approximately a year ago when we went to Asia. That is 
             when you get to know these people as couples. I remember 
             that we happened to be flying over an ocean when it was 
             the Marine Corps' birthday. On the airplane we had a cake 
             and brought it out, to the surprise of John Glenn. But you 
             could see the emotion in his eyes. I know the Presiding 
             Officer is a former U.S. Marine, so he knows what we are 
             talking about.
               Dan Coats. There is no more genuine a person than Dan--
             not only in the Senate but on the face of the Earth. He is 
             a man of great sincerity, a man who can articulate his 
             position so extremely well. He is a man who, when you look 
             into his eyes, you know he is listening to you and he is 
             going to do right by you and by the people of his State of 
             Indiana, and he has done right by the people of the United 
             States. He is a man who has great faith, a man to whom I 
             think a number of us have looked for guidance.
               When you look at the Senate through the eyes of a 
             camera, you see just one dimension. But on the floor of 
             the Senate we are just people. A lot of times we don't get 
             home to our wives and kids and sometimes to the ball games 
             or back-to-school nights. There are times when some of the 
             issues don't go as we would like, and it gets tough. At 
             these times, we hurt. There are people like Dan Coats to 
             whom you can turn, who has said, ``Buddy, I have been 
             there and I am with you now.'' So, again, he is an 
             outstanding individual.

                                              Monday, October 12, 1998.
               Mr. FORD. Mr. President, as the 105th Congress comes to 
             a close, I want to take a moment to say thank you to my 
             fellow colleagues who, like me, will be retiring this 
             year.
               I came to the Senate in 1974 with Senators Glenn and 
             Bumpers. It was a different time, when campaigns were 
             still won by going door to door, when the Senate itself 
             was much more open to compromise and bipartisanship.
               Despite the changes in the Senate, Senator Bumpers has 
             continued to be a voice for his State, never giving up the 
             fight for something in which he believed. And when the 
             Senate itself began to listen, they began to respond. In 
             fact, after fighting 19 years to reform the National Parks 
             concessions operations, he finally won approval of the 
             legislation on last Thursday.
               And while it's true the Senate long ago lost its 
             reputation as a place of eloquent debate, my colleague 
             from Arkansas has proven time and again the power of words 
             with his skillful oratory, whether the issue was arms 
             control, education or balancing the budget. In all my 
             years here in Washington, I was never so moved as I was by 
             a speech he gave on preserving the Manassas, VA, Civil War 
             Battlefield. He not only changed votes, but he reminded 
             his colleagues and the American people that our greatest 
             strength lies in our ability to give voice to our beliefs 
             and to our constituent's concerns.
               Like Mark Twain who came into this world with Halley's 
             comet and left this world with the return, Senator Glenn 
             came into the public eye with his historic orbit around 
             the Earth and he will close out his public career with 
             another historic flight into space. In between, he's 
             demonstrated over and over that he's truly made of the 
             ``right stuff.''
               As the ``Almanac of American Politics'' wrote, he is 
             ``the embodiment of the small town virtues of family, God-
             fearing religion, duty, patriotism and hard work * * *''. 
             And over the years, he has brought the same fight and 
             determination that made him a brilliant fighter pilot to 
             his efforts to expand educational opportunities, increase 
             funding for scientific research, to clean up nuclear waste 
             sites, promote civil rights and to make our government 
             more efficient.
               Despite their long list of contributions in the Senate, 
             perhaps their greatest contributions to this Nation are 
             still to come. Senator Bumpers has talked about going back 
             to Arkansas to teach and Senator Glenn has said once he 
             gets back down to Earth, he'll work to steer young people 
             toward public service. I can't think of a greater honor 
             than to say I've served alongside these two men and shared 
             their vision of a better America.
               I also want to thank my two retiring colleagues on the 
             other side of the aisle. We may not have always agreed on 
             which road to take, but I believe we always shared a deep 
             commitment to our country and its betterment. Whether you 
             agree or not with Senator Coats' position on the issues, 
             everyone in this Chamber will agree he's willing to roll 
             up his sleeves and do the hard work necessary to 
             accomplish his goals. He's brought the same tenacity to 
             the Senate that found him at 3 percent in the polls when 
             he began his first congressional bid and had him winning 
             by 58 percent on election day. He got that win the old-
             fashioned way, organizing block by block and pressing his 
             case one-on-one.
               Senator Kempthorne has only been a part of this 
             institution for just one term, but he has already proven 
             that he can work with his colleagues to pass laws, like 
             the unfunded mandates bill, in a place where it's often 
             easier to move mountains than a piece of legislation. The 
             Safe Drinking Water Act of 1996 was a perfect example of 
             his ability to bring together scientists, activists on 
             both sides of the issue, and public health experts to 
             craft legislation that each one had a stake in seeing 
             succeed. So while he may have spent just a short while in 
             these halls, he demonstrated that it is only through 
             compromise that we can achieve solutions in the best 
             interest of the Nation.
               So Mr. President, let me tell my fellow retirees what a 
             privilege it has been to serve with you over the years and 
             how grateful I am for your commitment to public service 
             and the American people.

               Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I would like to pay tribute 
             on my behalf, and on behalf of the people of New Mexico, 
             to a true American patriot, Senator John Glenn. It has 
             indeed been a privilege to serve in this Chamber for 24 
             years with a man of such honor and distinction.
               Although I only served with Senator Glenn on the Senate 
             Governmental Affairs Committee for a brief time, I have 
             been able to witness firsthand John Glenn's legendary 
             fairness and leadership. I doubt there has ever been a 
             Senator who could match his dogged determination. He 
             worked tirelessly for many years to cut government waste 
             and improve the efficiency of government, and I applaud 
             his efforts.
               Since his arrival in 1974, John Glenn has championed the 
             cause of space exploration and research, an area of 
             particular interest and importance to my home State of New 
             Mexico. He has long understood, and I strongly concur with 
             him, that the United States has a unique opportunity and 
             obligation to the pursuit of knowledge and exploration of 
             the heavens. Thanks to Senator Glenn's continuing sense of 
             duty and service to his country, we will expand our 
             understanding of space and its effects on the human body.
               The success of our space program has enabled our 
             children to dream of different worlds, our scientists to 
             explore the nature of matter and the origins of time, and 
             us to be able to look up into the night sky and to 
             understand what we see. John Glenn played a crucial role 
             in achieving this success. His flight on Friendship 7 was 
             one of the first indications of the greatness of America's 
             space program. His flight on Discovery will be a 
             continuation of the greatness John Glenn helped 
             established--and a confirmation of the contributions 
             senior Americans can, and do, make in our society.
               John Glenn's life as a military hero, space pioneer, and 
             statesman is the stuff of legends. Although his time here 
             in the Senate draws to a close, he assures us that the 
             legend will grow when he takes off on the shuttle 
             Discovery later this month. It truly has been a pleasure 
             to work with the distinguished Senator from Ohio. Good 
             luck, John Glenn, and God Bless.

               Mr. DASCHLE. Mr. President, on Saturday, I had a chance 
             to talk about our good friend, Dale Bumpers. I'd like to 
             take a few minutes to talk about four other friends who 
             will be leaving us at the end of this Congress.
               Shortly after he left the White House, Calvin Coolidge 
             was called on to fill out a standard form. After filling 
             in his name and address, he came to a line marked 
             ``occupation.'' He wrote ``retired.'' When he came to the 
             next line, labeled ``remarks,'' he wrote ``Glad of it.'' I 
             suspect that our colleagues who are retiring at the end of 
             this Congress are also ``glad of it''--at least in some 
             small measure. But, in addition to relief, I hope they 
             also feel a sense of pride--both for what they have 
             accomplished here, and the dignity with which they have 
             served.
               In a short time here, Dirk Kempthorne has made all of 
             our lives a little better. Thanks in large part to him, 
             the Safe Drinking Water Act is now the law. Senator 
             Kempthorne has also reminded us of the importance of State 
             and local involvement in our decisions. We will all miss 
             him.
               I had the good fortune to travel with Senator Kempthorne 
             to the Far East. As most of our colleagues know, as we 
             travel we get to know one another even better. I know him 
             and I admire him and I wish him well in his life after the 
             Senate. I also applaud him for the nature with which he 
             has continued to work with all of us. He has a very 
             conciliatory, very thoughtful, a very civil way with which 
             to deal with colleagues on issues. If we would all follow 
             Dirk Kempthorne's example, in my view, we would be a lot 
             better off in this body. His manner, his leadership, his 
             character, his personality is one that we are going to 
             miss greatly here in the U.S. Senate.
               We will also miss Dan Coats. With his thoughtful 
             approach and uncompromising principles, Senator Coats has 
             followed his heart above all else. And, as a result of his 
             support of the Family and Medical Leave Act, millions of 
             Americans are able to follow their hearts, too, and spend 
             more time with their families when they need them most.
               When Senator Coats announced his retirement in 1996, he 
             said, ``I want to leave (politics) when I am young enough 
             to contribute somewhere else * * * I want to leave when 
             there is still a chance to follow God's leading to 
             something new.'' Wherever Senator Coats and Senator 
             Kempthorne are led, we wish them both the best. I am 
             confident that they will continue to contribute much to 
             their country and to their fellow citizens.
               And we will surely miss our own three departing 
             Senators.
               Dale Bumpers, Wendell Ford and John Glenn are three of 
             the sturdiest pillars in this institution. They have much 
             in common. They came here--all three of them--in 1974. For 
             nearly a quarter-century, they have worked to restore 
             Americans' faith in their government.
               Their names have been called with the roll of every 
             important question of our time. And they have answered 
             that call with integrity and dignity.
               They are sons of small town America who still believe in 
             the values they learned back in Charlestown, AR; 
             Owensboro, KY; and New Concord, OH. They are also modest 
             men.
               Perhaps because they had already accomplished so much 
             before they came to the Senate, they have never worried 
             about grabbing headlines here. Instead, they have been 
             content to work quietly, but diligently--often with 
             colleagues from across the aisle--to solve problems as 
             comprehensively as they can. They have been willing to 
             take on the ``nuts and bolts'' work of the Senate--what 
             John Glenn once called ``the grunt work'' of making the 
             Government run more efficiently.
               They were all elected to the Senate by wide margins, and 
             reelected by even wider margins. And they all would have 
             been reelected this year, I have no doubt, had they chosen 
             to run again.
               What I will remember most about each of them, though, is 
             not how much they are like each other they are, but how 
             unlike anyone else they are. Each of them is an American 
             original.
               As I said, I've already shared my thoughts about Dale 
             Bumpers. No Senator has ever had more courage than Dale 
             Bumpers.
               And no Senate leader has ever had the benefit of a 
             better teacher than Wendell Ford.
               No leader has ever enjoyed such a loyal partnership as I 
             have. No leader has ever had a better friend and 
             counselor.
               For the past 4 years, Senator Ford has been my right 
             hand and much more. He is as skilled a political mind, and 
             as warm a human being, as this Senate has ever known.
               Carved inside the drawer of the desk in which Wendell 
             sits is the name of another Kentucky Senator, ``the Great 
             Compromisor,'' Henry Clay. It is a fitting match.
               Like Henry Clay, Wendell Ford believes that compromise 
             is honorable and necessary in a democracy. But he also 
             understands that compromise is, as Clay said, ``negotiated 
             hurt.''
               I suspect that is why he has always preferred to try to 
             work out disagreements behind the scenes. It allows both 
             sides to bend, and still keep their dignity.
               In 1991, Wendell's quiet, bipartisan style convinced a 
             Senator from across the aisle, Mark Hatfield, to join him 
             in sponsoring the ``Motor Voter'' bill. Working together, 
             they convinced the Senate to pass that legislation. To 
             this day, it remains the most ambitious effort Congress 
             has made since the Voting Rights Act to open up the voting 
             booth to more Americans.
               Wendell Ford has served the Bluegrass State as a State 
             senator, Lieutenant Governor, Governor and U.S. Senator. 
             His love for his fellow Kentuckians is obvious, and it is 
             reciprocated.
               In his 1980 Senate race, Wendell Ford became the first 
             opposed candidate in Kentucky history to carry all 120 
             counties. In 1992, he received the highest number of votes 
             ever cast for any candidate in his State.
               Throughout his years in the Senate, Senator Ford has 
             also been a tenacious fighter for the people of Kentucky. 
             He has also been a leader on aviation issues, a determined 
             foe of government waste and duplication, a champion of 
             campaign finance reform, and--something we are especially 
             grateful for on this side of the aisle--a tireless leader 
             for the Democratic Party.
               He chaired the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee for 
             three Congresses, from 1976 through 1982. And, in 1990, 
             Democratic Senators elected him unanimously to be our 
             party whip, our second-in-command, in the Senate--a 
             position he still holds today.
               We will miss his raspy and unmistakable voice, his good 
             humor and wise counsel.
               Finally, there is John Glenn. What can one say about 
             John Glenn that has not already been said?
               In all these 24 years, as hard as he tried to blend in 
             with the rest of us, as hard as he tried to be just a 
             colleague among colleagues, it never quite worked, did it?
               I used to think that maybe I was the only one here who 
             still felt awed in his presence. Two years ago, on a 
             flight from China with John and a handful of other 
             Senators and our spouses, I learned that wasn't so.
               During the flight, we were able to persuade John to 
             recollect that incredible mission aboard Friendship 7, 
             when he became the first American to orbit the Earth. He 
             told us about losing all radio communication during 
             reentry, about having to guide his spacecraft manually 
             during the most critical point in reentry, about seeing 
             pieces of his fiberglass heat panel bursting into flames 
             and flying off his space capsule, knowing that at any 
             moment, he could be incinerated.
               We all huddled around him with our eyes wide open. No 
             one moved. No one said a word.
               Listening to him, I felt the same awe I had felt when I 
             was 14 years old, sitting in a classroom in Aberdeen, SD, 
             watching TV accounts of that flight. Then I looked around 
             me, and realized everyone else there was feeling the same 
             thing.
               I saw that same sense of awe in other Senators' faces in 
             June, when we had a dinner for John at the National Air 
             and Space Museum. Before dinner, we were invited to have 
             our photographs taken with John in front of the Friendship 
             7 capsule. I don't think I've ever seen so many Senators 
             waiting so patiently for anything as we did for that one 
             picture.
               A lot of people tend to think of two John Glenns: 
             Colonel John Glenn, the astronaut-hero; and Senator John 
             Glenn. The truth is, there is only John Glenn--the 
             patriot.
               Love for his country is what sent John into space. It's 
             what brought him to Washington, and compelled him to work 
             so diligently all these years in the Senate.
               People who have been there say you see the world 
             differently from space. You see the ``big picture.'' You 
             see how small and interconnected our planet is.
               Perhaps it's because he came to the Senate with that 
             perspective that John has fought so hard against nuclear 
             proliferation and other weapons of mass destruction.
               Maybe because he'd had enough glamour and tickertape 
             parades by the time he came here, John chose to immerse 
             himself in some decidedly unglamorous causes.
               He immersed himself in the scientific and the technical. 
             He looked at government with the eyes of an engineer, and 
             tried to imagine ways it could work better and more 
             efficiently.
               As early as 1978, he called for Congress to live by the 
             same workplace rules it sets for everyone else. More 
             recently, he spearheaded the overhaul of the Federal 
             Government procurement system, enabling the Government to 
             buy products faster, and save money at the same time.
               In 1974, the year he was elected to the Senate, John 
             Glenn carried all 88 counties in Ohio. In 1980, he was 
             reelected with the largest margin in his State's history. 
             The last time he ran, in 1992, he became the first Ohio 
             Senator ever to win four terms.
               As I said, I'm sure he would have been reelected had he 
             chosen to run again. But, as we all know, he has other 
             plans.
               For 36 years, John Glenn has wanted to go back into 
             space. On October 29, he will finally get his chance. At 
             77 years old, he will become the oldest human being ever 
             to orbit the Earth--by 16 years.
               Many of us will be in Houston to see John and his 
             Discovery crew mates blast off. If history is any 
             indication, I suspect we will be wide-eyed once again.
               In closing, let me say, Godspeed, John Glenn and Dale 
             Bumpers, Wendell Ford, Dirk Kempthorne and Dan Coats. You 
             have served this Senate well. You are all ``Senators' 
             Senators,'' and we will miss you dearly.

                                             Tuesday, October 13, 1998.
               Mr. DeWINE. Mr. President, as my colleagues well know, 
             my distinguished colleague from Ohio, John Glenn, is 
             busily preparing for his extraordinary and inspirational 
             return to space. As our best wishes are with him and his 
             wife Annie as they begin the next chapter in their 
             wonderful lives, I would like to take a moment to read a 
             fine tribute to Senator Glenn by those who also dedicated 
             their lives to public service--as members of John Glenn's 
             staff. I am honored to read the following letter addressed 
             to him:

                                                     October 9, 1998.
             The Hon. John Glenn,
             U.S. Senator, Washington, DC.
               Dear Senator: As your four terms in the U.S. Senate come 
             to a close and as you prepare to return to space for the 
             first time since your historic 1962 orbital flight, those 
             who have had the honor and the privilege to serve as 
             members of your Senate staff would like to express our 
             gratitude to you.
               Although there have been many staff changes over the 
             years, you have allowed us to pursue extraordinary careers 
             in government and experience opportunities that few can 
             ever know. Some of us have been on your staff since 1975 
             and many more have served well beyond the average tenure. 
             Beyond our professional careers, you and Annie have made 
             us feel welcome. You generously shared your time with us 
             as our families and children have grown. Your commitment 
             to family is evident in your 55 years of marriage to Annie 
             and that example must have contributed to the eight office 
             marriages in which both spouses first met as staff 
             members.
               We have always been proud to assist a public servant who 
             is held in such high regard. We witnessed that admiration 
             and respect firsthand as we accompanied you in your 
             travels throughout the country and around the world and 
             when we see the many people who come to your offices to 
             conduct business.
               Your patriotic service in war and peace, in space and in 
             the Senate is an inspiration to us. While you remind us 
             that there may be no cure for the common birthday, you 
             have proven time and again that with determination and 
             hard work dreams do come true.
               Thank you for helping our dreams come true, too. 
             Godspeed John Glenn.

                Mary Jane Veno, 1975; Christine S. McCreary, 1975; 
                  Patricia J. Buckheit, 1975; Ernestine J. Hunter, 
                  1975; Barbara Perry, 1975; Diane Lifsey, 1975; Kathy 
                  Connolly, 1975; Linda K. Dillon, 1977; Dale Butland, 
                  1980; Peggy McCauley, 1980.
                Ron Grimes, 1984; Kathleen Long, 1984; Don Mitchell, 
                  1984; Michael Slater, 1985; Rosemary Matthews, 1985; 
                  Peter McAlister, 1987; Jack Sparks, 1989; Micole C. 
                  Dauray, 1989; Shannon L. Watson, 1989; Tonya 
                  McKirgan, 1990.
                Suzanne McKenna, 1990; Sebastian O'Kelly, 1990; Vicki 
                  Butland, 1991; Nathan Coffman, 1992; Holly Koerber, 
                  1993; Mike Entinghe, 1993; Vickie Eckard, 1993; Bryce 
                  Level, 1993; J.P. Stevens, 1994.
                Kevin Cooper, 1995; Alberta Easter, 1995; Holly 
                  Kinnamon, 1996; Jan Papez, 1995; Ayris Price, 1996; 
                  David McCain, 1997; Yolanda Brock, 1997; Jill Jacobs, 
                  1997; Dan Emerine, 1997.
                Marc Saint Louis, 1997; Coleen Mason, 1997; Rochelle 
                  Sturtevant, 1997; Elizabeth Stein, 1997; John Hoctor, 
                  1997; Rob Mosher, 1997; Mary Goldberg, 1998; Maggie 
                  Diaz, 1998; Christopher Davis, 1998.

               Mr. President, all of us share the sentiments expressed 
             in this heart-warming tribute. It is a reminder of how 
             fortunate we are to have the opportunity to work with 
             dedicated staff who share our pride in representing our 
             fellow citizens in the U.S. Senate.

                                           Wednesday, October 14, 1998.
               Mr. FEINGOLD. Mr. President, today I want to take this 
             opportunity to thank Senator John Glenn for his long and 
             distinguished service in the U.S. Senate. He has served 
             this body with great dignity, and with an unparalleled 
             commitment to our country.
               Of course, Senator Glenn is known for a great deal more 
             than his Senate service, as the first man to orbit the 
             Earth and a hero in both World War II and the Korean war. 
             But his contributions here in the Senate, all by 
             themselves, have made for Senator Glenn the legacy of an 
             American hero.
               I worked with Senator Glenn in 1993 on an amendment to 
             the Clean Water Act, which was just one of his many 
             efforts to focus environmental protection efforts on the 
             Great Lakes region. The Great Lakes States owe a great 
             debt to Senator Glenn for his work in this area, which has 
             included chairing the Senate's Great Lakes Task Force and 
             helping to get Great Lakes regional offices for the 
             Environmental Protection Agency and the Fish and Wildlife 
             Service.
               As the chair and ranking member of the Senate 
             Governmental Affairs Committee, Senator Glenn has been 
             fairminded and provided outstanding leadership on the 
             committee, in particular during the recent hearings into 
             campaign finance violations. During those hearings, 
             Senator Glenn showed his keen understanding of the flaws 
             in the current system and his commitment to its reform. As 
             someone who cares deeply about campaign finance issues, I 
             was grateful for his leadership.
               Senator Glenn has also worked tirelessly on nuclear 
             proliferation issues, and been a valued member of the 
             Armed Services Committee, the Select Committee on 
             Intelligence, and the Special Committee on Aging.
               Now Senator Glenn is moving on to his newest challenge, 
             and, as usual, making history. At the age of 77, he will 
             again launch into space, this time for a 9-day ride on the 
             shuttle Discovery. Most of us would be content being the 
             first man to orbit the Earth, flying 149 combat missions, 
             and breaking a transcontinental flight speed record in a 
             Navy jet. But then John Glenn has more determination, more 
             talent and more courage than most of us can imagine. He 
             must know that he is not just respected and famous, he 
             must know that he holds a special place in the hearts of 
             his fellow Americans and in American culture, yet there is 
             no humbler man in the Senate. We admire him for that, we 
             thank him for his dedicated service to the U.S. Senate, to 
             the people of Ohio and to America. We wish him every 
             success on his next mission, and wish him all the best in 
             his retirement.

                                           Wednesday, October 21, 1998.
               Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, in this last day of the 105th 
             Congress, I think it is appropriate that we take a little 
             more time to express our appreciation and our admiration 
             for our retiring Senators. I look down the list: Senator 
             Bumpers of Arkansas; Senator Coats of Indiana; Senator 
             Ford, the Democratic whip, of Kentucky; Senator Glenn, who 
             will soon be taking another historic flight into space; 
             and Senator Kempthorne, who I believe is also going to be 
             taking flight into a new position of leadership and honor. 
             This is a distinguished group of men who have been 
             outstanding Senators, who have left their mark on this 
             institution. I believe you could say in each case they 
             have left the Senate a better place than it was when they 
             came.
               Have we had our disagreements along the way? Sure, 
             within parties and across party aisles. I have to take a 
             moment to express my appreciation to each of these 
             Senators. I especially want to thank Senator Ford for his 
             cooperation in his position as whip. We worked together 
             for a year and a half as the whip on our respective side 
             of the aisle and we always had a very good relationship. 
             Of course, I have already expressed my very close 
             relationship for Senator Coats and for Senator Kempthorne.
               To all of these Senators, I want to extend my fondest 
             farewell.
               As majority leader, I feel a responsibility to speak for 
             all of us in bidding an official farewell to our five 
             colleagues who are retiring this year.
               It was 1974 when Dale Bumpers left the Governorship of 
             Arkansas to take the Senate seat that had long been held 
             by Senator Fulbright. There are several Senators in this 
             Chamber today who, in 1974, were still in high school.
               Four terms in the Senate of the United States can be a 
             very long time--but that span of nearly a quarter-century 
             has not in the least diminished Senator Bumpers' 
             enthusiasm for his issues and energy in advancing them.
               He has been a formidable debater, fighting for his 
             causes with a tenacity and vigor that deserves the title 
             of Razorback.
               It is a memorable experience to be on the receiving end 
             of his opposition--whether the subject was the space 
             station or, year after year, mining on public lands.
               Arkansas and Mississippi are neighbors, sharing many of 
             the same problems. From personal experience, I know how 
             Senator Bumpers has been an assiduous and effective 
             advocate for his State and region.
               No one expects retirement from the Senate to mean 
             inactivity for Senator Bumpers, whose convictions run too 
             deep to be set aside with his formal legislative duties.
               All of us who know the sacrifices an entire family makes 
             when a spouse or parent is in the Congress can rejoice for 
             him, for Betty, and for their family, in the prospect of 
             more time together in a well earned future.
               Senator Dan Coats and I have a bond in common which most 
             Members of the Senate do not share. We both began our 
             careers on Capitol Hill, not as Members, but as staffers.
               I worked for the venerable William Colmer of 
             Mississippi, chairman of the House Rules Committee, who 
             left office in 1972 at the age of 82. Senator Coats worked 
             for Dan Quayle, who came to Congress at the age of 27.
               Despite the differences in our situations back then, we 
             both learned the congressional ropes from the bottom up.
               Which may be why we both have such respect for the 
             twists and turns of the legislative process, not to 
             mention an attentive ear to the views and concerns of our 
             constituents.
               Now and then, a Senator becomes nationally known for his 
             leadership on a major issue. Senator Coats has had several 
             such issues.
               One was the constitutional amendment for a balanced 
             budget. Another was New Jersey's garbage, and whether it 
             would be dumped along the banks of the Wabash.
               The garbage issue is still unresolved, but on other 
             matters, his success has been the Nation's profit.
               He has championed the American family, improved Head 
             Start, kept child care free of government control, and 
             helped prevent a Federal takeover of health care.
               His crusade to give low-income families school choice 
             has made him the most important education reformer since 
             Horace Mann. His passionate defense of children before 
             birth has been, to use an overworked phrase, a profile in 
             courage.
               Senator Coats does have a secret vice. He is a baseball 
             addict. On their honeymoon, he took Marcia to a Cubs game. 
             And when he was a Member of the House, he missed the vote 
             on flag-burning to keep a promise to his son to see the 
             Cubs in the playoffs.
               To Dan, a commitment is a commitment. That is why he is 
             national president of Big Brothers. And why, a few years 
             ago, he kept a very important audience waiting for his 
             arrival at a meeting here on the Hill.
               He had, en route, come across a homeless man, and spent 
             a half-hour urging him to come with him to the Gospel 
             Rescue Mission.
               Here in the Congress, we must always be in a hurry. But 
             Senator Coats and his wife, Marcia, have known what is 
             worth waiting for.
               They have been a blessing to our Senate family, and they 
             will always remain a part of it.
               Senator Wendell Ford stands twelfth in seniority in the 
             Senate, with the resignation of his predecessor, Senator 
             Marlow Cook, giving him a 6-day advantage over his 
             departing colleague, Senator Bumpers.
               He came to Washington with a full decade of hands-on 
             governmental experience in his native Kentucky. He had 
             been a State senator, Lieutenant Governor, and Governor. 
             With that background, he needed little time to make his 
             mark in the Senate.
               In that regard, he reminds me of another Kentuckian who 
             make a lasting mark on the Senate.
               Last month, I traveled to Ashland, the home of Henry 
             Clay, to receive a medallion named after the man once 
             known as Harry of the West. Senator Ford was a prior 
             recipient of that award, and appropriately so.
               Henry Clay was a shrewd legislator, a tough bargainer, 
             who did not suffer fools lightly. That description sounds 
             familiar to anyone who has worked with Senator Ford.
               He can be a remarkably effective partisan. I can attest 
             to that. There is a good reason why he has long been his 
             party's second-in-command in the Senate.
               At the same time, he has maintained a personal autonomy 
             that is the mark of a true Senator. He has been outspoken 
             about his wish that his party follow the more moderate 
             path to which he has long adhered.
               Senator Ford's influence has been enormous in areas like 
             energy policy and commerce. Contemporary politics may be 
             dependent upon quotable sound-bites and telegenic 
             posturing, but he has held to an older and, in my opinion, 
             a higher standard.
               One of the least sought-after responsibilities in the 
             Senate is service on the Rules Committee.
               It can be a real headache. But it is crucial to the 
             stature of the Senate. We all owe Senator Ford our 
             personal gratitude for his long years of work on that 
             Committee.
               His decisions there would not always have been my 
             decisions; that is the nature of our system. But his work 
             there has set a standard for meticulousness and gravity.
               All of us who treasure the traditions, the decorum, and 
             the comity of the Senate will miss him.
               We wish him and Jean the happiness of finally being able 
             to set their own hours, enjoy their grandchildren, and 
             never again missing dinner at home because of a late-night 
             session on the Senate floor.
               There are many ways to depart the Senate. Our colleague 
             from Ohio, Senator John Glenn, will be leaving us in a 
             unique fashion, renewing the mission to space which he 
             helped to begin in 1962.
               In the weeks ahead, he will probably be the focus of 
             more publicity, here and around the world, than the entire 
             Senate has been all year long.
               It will be well deserved attention, and I know he 
             accepts it, not for himself, but for America's space 
             program.
               For decades now, he has been, not only its champion, but 
             in a way, its embodiment.
               That is understandable, but to a certain extent, unfair. 
             For his astronaut image tends to overshadow the 
             accomplishments of a long legislative career.
               In particular, his work on the Armed Services Committee, 
             the Commerce Committee, and our Special Committee on Aging 
             has been a more far-reaching achievement than orbiting the 
             Earth.
               With the proper support and training, others might have 
             done that, but Senator Glenn's accomplishments here in the 
             Senate are not so easily replicated.
               This year's hit film, ``Saving Private Ryan,'' has had a 
             tremendous impact on young audiences by bringing home to 
             them the sacrifice and the suffering of those who fought 
             America's wars.
               I think Senator Glenn has another lesson to teach them. 
             For the man who will soon blast off from Cape Canaveral, 
             as part of America's peaceful conquest of space--is the 
             same marine who, more than a half century ago, saw combat 
             in World War II, and again in Korea.
               His mission may have changed, but courage and idealism 
             endure.
               In a few days, along with Annie and the rest of his 
             family, we will be cheering him again, as he again makes 
             us proud of our country, proud of our space program, and 
             proud to call him our friend and colleague.
               Senator Dirk Kempthorne came to us from Idaho only 6 
             years ago. He now returns amid the nearly universal 
             expectation that he will be his State's next Governor. It 
             will be a wise choice.
               None of us are surprised by his enormous popularity back 
             home. We have come to know him, not just as a consummate 
             politician, but as a thoughtful, decent, and caring man.
               This is a man who took the time to learn the names of 
             the men and women who work here in the Capitol and in the 
             Senate office buildings.
               In fact, his staff allots extra time for him to get to 
             the Senate floor to vote because they know he will stop 
             and talk to people on the way.
               During the memorial ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda for 
             our two officers who lost their lives protecting this 
             building, Senator Kempthorne noticed that the son of one 
             of the officers, overwhelmed by emotion, suddenly left the 
             room.
               Dirk followed him, and spent a half-hour alone with him, 
             away from the cameras. The public doesn't see those 
             things, but that's the kind of concern we expect from him.
               His willingness to share credit gave us our Unfunded 
             Mandates Act and Reauthorization of the Safe Drinking 
             Water Law. And his eye for detail and pride in his own 
             home State led to the transformation of that long, sterile 
             corridor between the Capitol and the Dirksen and Hart 
             office buildings.
               Now, as tourists ride the space-age mechanized subway, 
             they enjoy the display of State flags and seals that form 
             a patriotic parade. It delights the eye and lifts the 
             spirit.
               If you've ever visited Idaho, known its people, and seen 
             its scenic wonders, you don't have to wonder why he's 
             leaving us early.
               You wonder, instead, why he ever left.
               Years ago, he explained his future this way: That he 
             would know when it was time to leave the Senate when he 
             stopped asking ``why'' and started saying ``because.''
               We're going to miss him and Patricia, and no one needs 
             to ask ``why.'' Even so, we know the Governor will be a 
             forceful spokesman on the Hill for all the Governors.
               They could not have a better representative. The Senate 
             could not have a better exemplar. We could not have a 
             better friend.

               Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I've been fortunate to be a 
             Member of the U.S. Senate for nearly 18 years, and I have 
             seen a lot of Members come and go. But I must admit that I 
             have never seen anyone make a more dramatic exit than our 
             colleague from Ohio. Then again, who in this Chamber would 
             expect anything less?
               John Glenn is a man who has served his Nation as a 
             marine fighter pilot in World War II and Korea, flying a 
             total of 149 combat missions.
               He has served as a test pilot in the first era of 
             supersonic jets--an occupation where attending a 
             colleague's funeral was as common as a new speed record.
               Then of course, John Glenn became a part of our national 
             consciousness when he was chosen to be one of the seven 
             Mercury Astronauts. As much as any event since World War 
             II, his historic flight aboard Friendship 7 on February 
             20, 1962 united this Nation and made us believe that there 
             are no limits on what we as humans and as Americans can 
             accomplish.
               For the past 24 years, John Glenn has served the people 
             of Ohio and this country as a U.S. Senator. He has 
             performed his duties with an uncommon grace and dignity. 
             He is a credit to this institution and I am proud to call 
             him a friend.
               And now, on October 29th, in perhaps his last act as a 
             U.S. Senator, John Glenn will return to the heavens aboard 
             the space shuttle Discovery, becoming the oldest man to 
             ever travel in outer space.
               It is very common in this body to feel emotions of deep 
             admiration and respect for one's colleagues, but John 
             Glenn is the rare Senator who inspires feelings of sheer 
             awe.
               I was trying to think of what would be an appropriate 
             way to pay tribute to my friend from Ohio, and to put into 
             perspective how remarkable and inspiring is his impending 
             voyage aboard Discovery. And I was reminded of the famous 
             farewell of another American hero to whom Senator Glenn is 
             linked historically.
               I'm sure all of my colleagues remember Ted Williams--and 
             those of us from New England remember him quite fondly. 
             The Boston Red Sox left-fielder is considered by many to 
             be the greatest hitter who ever lived. The last man to 
             ever hit .400 and the winner of two Triple Crowns, Ted 
             Williams' ability to hit for both power and average has 
             never been matched.
               One fact most people don't know about Ted Williams is 
             that he served in the same squadron with John Glenn during 
             the Korean war. Our friend from Ohio was the squadron 
             commander, and the Mr. Williams was his wing-man. People 
             talk about Ruth and Gehrig as the best one-two punch in 
             history, but John Glenn and Ted Williams isn't half bad.
               As the story is told, when Ted Williams went to Korea, 
             he knew he would be going into combat. Therefore, he was 
             going to pick the best person to fly alongside him. He had 
             been told that John Glenn was one of the best test pilots 
             in the world, so he sought out our colleague in the 
             reception center before shipping out. And while Ted 
             Williams sought out John Glenn, in tapping Ted Williams to 
             be his wing-man, John Glenn was saying that Williams was 
             the best and sharpest pilot he had in his squadron.
               Ted Williams had many great moments on the baseball 
             diamond, but no moment more perfectly encapsulates his 
             career than his last major league at-bat on September 28, 
             1960. And as John Glenn prepares for his Discovery 
             mission, I cannot help but be reminded of that crisp 
             autumn afternoon at Fenway Park.
               The game was meaningless in the standings, with the Red 
             Sox limping to the end of their worst season in 27 years. 
             But the day was significant for it was the last time that 
             Hub fans would ever get a glimpse of Number Nine's classic 
             swing. After going 0 for 2 with two fly outs and a walk, 
             Ted Williams came to the plate in the bottom of the eighth 
             inning for what was sure to be his last at-bat. Writer 
             John Updike was at the game, and his accounts of that day 
             are considered scripture by baseball fans everywhere.
               As Updike wrote: ``Understand that we were a crowd of 
             rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be 
             produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met 
             and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we 
             had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy, the 
             season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always 
             lurk, around the corner in a pocket of our knowledge of 
             the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the 
             times, which you now and then find in sports, when a 
             density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an 
             event out of the future.''
               As many of my colleagues already know, Ted Williams did 
             not disappoint. In his final swing, he hit a one-one pitch 
             that soared majestically through the air before 
             disappearing into the right-field bullpen.
               As John Updike wrote, ``Ted Williams' last word had been 
             so exquisitely chosen, such a perfect fusion of 
             expectation, intention, and execution.'' Well, I feel that 
             Senator John Glenn's final word has been just as 
             exquisitely chosen.
               Here is a man whose career of service to this country is 
             unparalleled. Taken separately, his service as a marine 
             pilot, as an astronaut, and as a Senator are 
             extraordinary. Put together, they are mythic.
               Thirty-six years ago, John Glenn convinced a nation that 
             there are no limits to human potential. At the end of this 
             month, he will once more extend the envelope of human 
             accomplishment. John Glenn's mission on the Discovery is 
             his home run in his last at bat. I only wish that they 
             could find a seat on the Discovery for John Updike.
               Ted Williams' last home run reminds me of John Glenn, 
             not simply because it shows that both men know how to go 
             out in style. It does so because the emotions that were 
             stirred in this fabled at-bat are the very same emotions 
             that have made John Glenn an American hero.
               It is that feeling of indefensible hope, our desire to 
             believe in something that is bigger than ourselves. Simply 
             put, it is our belief in heroes.
               Life will always be full of disappointment and 
             tribulations. But it helps us to conquer the everyday 
             battles in our own lives when we see someone whom we 
             admire accomplish great things. And we cheer for those 
             persons, because in them, we see the best in ourselves. By 
             believing in them, we believe in ourselves.
               When you read John Updike's description of the mood in 
             Fenway Park before that last at bat, it could just as 
             easily be a description of the mood in the Grandstands 
             watching Senator Glenn's launch from Cape Canaveral later 
             this month, or in every American living room when John 
             Glenn boarded Friendship 7 thirty-six years ago.
               Reason insists that we be practical. That we accept our 
             limitations. Yet we hold out hope that we can achieve 
             things once unimaginable, that we can do better. And John 
             Glenn has shown us time and again, as an astronaut, as a 
             test pilot, as a marine, and as a Senator that we can do 
             better.
               Surprisingly, the fact that John Glenn and Ted Williams 
             served together in Korea remained largely a secret until 
             10 years ago, when Senator Glenn appeared at a reception 
             to honor Ted Williams on his 70th birthday. At the end of 
             the evening, Ted Williams, a man not known for lavishing 
             praise on others, spoke about his former commander. He 
             said, and I quote: ``I was so happy and proud of the fact 
             that I knew him. John Glenn is an extraordinarily 
             talented, brave hero. He's a hell of a man. It's just too 
             bad that he's a Democrat.''
               When Ted Williams is singing your praises, you must be 
             doing something right, and aside from his comments about 
             Senator Glenn's politics, I couldn't agree more with Mr. 
             Williams' statement.
               What we seem to forget about Senator Glenn's departure 
             is that, while he is going into space at the end of the 
             month, he is also coming back. I understand that he plans 
             to set up an institute at Ohio State to encourage young 
             people to become involved in politics and public service. 
             In today's climate, it may be harder to turn young people 
             on to politics than it was to put a man into orbit in 
             1962. But as a public servant, I cannot imagine a better 
             advocate for the profession of public service than John 
             Glenn. He reminds all of us, young and old, that there is 
             honor in service to others and to your country.
               While I am certain that he will keep busy, I hope that 
             he and Annie will have a chance to relax and enjoy his 
             retirement. They have certainly earned it.
               So as I bid my friend farewell and good luck in his 
             future years, and in particular his mission, I will repeat 
             those words made famous by Scott Carpenter 37 years ago: 
             ``Godspeed, John Glenn.''

               Mrs. BOXER. Mr. President, in 1962, a few weeks before 
             becoming the first American to orbit the Earth, John Glenn 
             appeared on the cover of Life magazine under the header, 
             ``Making of a Brave Man.'' John Glenn is indeed a brave 
             man, but to those of us who have served with him in the 
             U.S. Senate, he is much more. He is a skilled legislator, 
             a good friend, and an honorable and decent person.
               For the generation who remembers John Glenn's historic 
             trip to space 36 years ago, his return this month abroad 
             the space shuttle is truly special. At that time, the 
             United States was in the midst of the cold war with the 
             Soviet Union. The Soviets could boast many achievements in 
             space, including the launching of the first satellite. It 
             was a tense time, and ours hopes as a nation were with 
             John Glenn and the U.S. space program.
               On February 20, 1962, America held it's collective 
             breath as Glenn's Friendship 7 capsule circled the Earth 
             three times. During this mission, John Glenn showed us why 
             he was our hero. When a faulty signal erroneously warned 
             that the capsule's heat shields might come loose, he 
             remained calm and cool, even as he watched fiery bits of 
             spacecraft flash past him during reeintry into the Earth's 
             atmosphere. The entire country beamed with pride at this 
             heroic accomplishment.
               President Kennedy called space ``a new ocean'', and John 
             Glenn will go down in history as one of it's first and 
             most important explorers. His flight opened the door to 
             future missions, such as the Mercury program, Gemini 
             program, and eventually the Apollo program that put man on 
             the Moon.
               In a few weeks, America will once again beam with pride 
             when John Glenn lifts off from Kennedy Space Center abroad 
             the space shuttle Discovery. As opposed to his first 
             mission, which lasted 5 hours, this mission is scheduled 
             to last 9 days. During that time, Senator Glenn will 
             participate in a number of experiments designed to find 
             parallels between the physical stress of space flight and 
             the natural aging process.
               Scientists are hopeful of finding out why astronauts and 
             the elderly suffer from similar ailments, such as bone and 
             muscle loss, balance disorders and sleep disturbances. 
             Understanding these physiological characteristics may open 
             the door to new and innovated treatments. I am sure 
             Senator Glenn is as excited about these potential 
             breakthroughs as he is about his return to space.
               As a Senator, John Glenn has been a wonderful advocate 
             on many important issues. Along with his hard work on 
             space, technology and science issues, Senator Glenn has 
             also been a strong voice on the need for his country to 
             increase it's investment in education. So many times, I 
             have seen Senator Glenn with school children in the Hart 
             Senate Office Building, and I know that he inspires our 
             next generation of leaders as he does us.
               So as Senator Glenn leaves the Senate, I want to give 
             him my thanks for all that he has done for this country. 
             Like all Americans, my thoughts and prayers will be with 
             him as he makes history yet again. I wish him well on this 
             and all his future missions.

                                         ---

                  ORDER FOR PRINTING OF INDIVIDUAL SENATE DOCUMENTS

               Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that 
             there be printed as individual Senate documents a 
             compilation of materials from the Congressional Record in 
             tribute to Senators Dan Coats of Indiana, Dirk Kempthorne 
             of Idaho, Dale Bumpers of Arkansas, Wendell Ford of 
             Kentucky, and John Glenn of Ohio.
               The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Craig). Without objection, it 
             is so ordered.
               Mr. LOTT. These clearly are five great Senators who have 
             served their States and their country so well. And I am 
             sure they will continue to do so, albeit in a different 
             arena. Of course, I have said here, Dan Coats has been one 
             of my closest friends for the past 20 years. I will miss 
             him here but I will be with him in other areas.
               And, of course, John Glenn makes history once again 
             flying off into space. And many Senators and their spouses 
             will be there to see that event.

                              Proceedings in the House

                                               Friday, October 9, 1998.
               Mr. NEY. Mr. Speaker, my colleagues and I rise today to 
             pay tribute to an American and Ohio hero. More than 35 
             years ago, John Glenn made history as the first American 
             to orbit the Earth. On October 29, he will once again make 
             history as the oldest man to travel into space. On behalf 
             of the people of Ohio and the country, along with the rest 
             of the members of the Ohio delegation, I would like to 
             thank Senator Glenn for his dedicated service to our 
             country and wish him the best of luck on his upcoming 
             mission.
               John Herschel Glenn, Jr., is a true American hero. He 
             has served his country honorably in the Marine Corps, in 
             the U.S. Space Program and as a Member of the U.S. Senate. 
             On February 20, 1962, he became a national figure after 
             becoming the first American to orbit the Earth. Senator 
             Glenn, a native of Ohio, has represented the working 
             families of Ohio as their Senator since 1974. His upcoming 
             shuttle mission and retirement at the end of this Congress 
             will punctuate the end of a remarkable stretch of public 
             service that will leave an indelible mark on our society.
               October 29, 1998, marks a triumphant day for our Nation 
             when Senator Glenn returns to space aboard the space 
             shuttle Discovery. Nearly 37 years after his initial trip 
             into space, he will again represent his country and our 
             State as a member of Discovery Mission STS-95. As he 
             prepares for his upcoming mission, the members of the Ohio 
             delegation wish to salute the Senator from Ohio. As he 
             prepares for the upcoming mission, we salute the Senator 
             and native of New Concord, OH. Godspeed, John Glenn.

                                            Thursday, October 15, 1998.
               Mr. HALL of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I rise to pay tribute to 
             a friend and fellow Ohioan, who will very soon be 
             embarking upon two great adventures. I am speaking, of 
             course, of Senator John Glenn. In a few days, he will be 
             returning to space aboard the space shuttle Discovery. 
             Shortly thereafter, Senator Glenn will be ending his long 
             and distinguished service in the other body of this 
             Congress.
               Senator Glenn has served our country in an astonishing 
             number of ways. He fought in the Pacific in the Second 
             World War, and served in Korea. He has been awarded the 
             Distinguished Flying Cross on six occasions, and holds the 
             Air Medal with 18 clusters. In 1959, he was chosen by NASA 
             as a Project Mercury astronaut. Three years later, on 
             February 20, 1962, he became the first American to orbit 
             the Earth.
               In 1974, after a few years in the private sector, 
             Senator Glenn was elected to his current position as a 
             U.S. Senator from Ohio. During his 24 years of service in 
             the Senate, he has devoted enormous energy toward ensuring 
             the security of our country and people, and he has worked 
             to build a responsible and responsive Federal Government. 
             He is an acknowledged expert and leader in nuclear non-
             proliferation efforts, and has tirelessly worked to better 
             the lot of working-class families and to protect the 
             environment.
               Now, as Senator Glenn prepares for retirement, he has 
             agreed to serve our Nation yet again, returning to space 
             in order to add to the body of human knowledge. I am very 
             pleased and proud that Senator Glenn, a true legend and a 
             hero, will again be a very visible example to our Nation--
             an example of service to our country and service to all 
             humanity.
               A new generation of Americans will watch the launch of 
             Discovery later this month, and hear from their parents 
             and grandparents the many stories of how John Glenn served 
             his country. They will hear of his bravery in wartime, his 
             skill in the development and piloting of experimental 
             aircraft, and his calm handling of the exceeding 
             dangerous, ground breaking orbits aboard Friendship 7. 
             They will also hear that he spent 24 years as a Senator 
             from Ohio, working in innumerable ways to better our 
             Nation. That he has set this example for all Americans may 
             be his most lasting contribution. Who can judge the effect 
             of such an example of personal sacrifice upon the children 
             of our country, and upon all Americans?
               For these years of service and untiring dedication, I 
             would like to thank Senator Glenn. And, on the occasion of 
             his return to space, I congratulate him and wish him a 
             fruitful flight and a safe return. I will miss his 
             leadership here in Congress, as will all Ohioans. However, 
             I will always remember him as an example of what a true 
             American should be.


                               ARTICLES AND EDITORIALS

                     [From the Plain Dealer, February 21, 1997]
                 `A Genuine American Hero' Says He'll Retire; Glenn 
                Announcement Made on Anniversary of Historic Mission
                                  (By Joe Hallett)
               On the 35th anniversary of his historic space flight, 
             Senator John Glenn returned home to complete another 
             mission, announcing yesterday that he would retire from 
             the Senate when his fourth term ends in 1998.
               Saying ``there is still no cure for the common 
             birthday,'' Glenn cited his age, 75, as the reason for his 
             retirement. He acknowledged, however, that he did not 
             relish quitting the Senate. ``Although my health remains 
             excellent, and my passion for the job burns as brightly as 
             ever, another term in the Senate would take me to the age 
             of 83,'' Glenn told an overflow crowd in the quaint Brown 
             Chapel at Muskingum College, where he and his wife, Annie, 
             graduated more than 50 years ago.
               Glenn pledged to be ``one of the hardest-working 
             Senators in Washington'' for the next 2 years and to spend 
             his time afterward teaching and challenging young people.
               His low-keyed, yet impassioned, 45-minute speech to a 
             largely student audience mixed remembrances from a 
             remarkable career with a sermonette about the danger to 
             democracy posed by the ``blemishes of apathy and 
             cynicism.''
               And it spun into motion the inevitable jockeying within 
             the Democratic Party to replace Glenn--a seemingly 
             daunting prospect with popular Republican Governor George 
             V. Voinovich poised to seek his party's Senate nomination 
             in 1998 and already sitting on $1.3 million for the race.
               Former Cuyahoga County Commissioner Mary O. Boyle, on 
             hand for Glenn's speech, and widely identified as an early 
             front-runner for the Democratic Senate nomination, held 
             off announcing her candidacy, saying: ``It's John Glenn's 
             day.''
               Republicans acknowledged as much, graciously bowing to 
             Ohio's senior Senator by pocketing the harsh commentary 
             that surely would have accompanied a re-election 
             announcement and instead praising Glenn. Voinovich called 
             Glenn ``a genuine American hero,'' adding that ``John 
             Glenn's place in our Nation's history is secure.''
               President Clinton agreed. He issued a statement saying: 
             ``Senator Glenn is a patriot and hero. His lifetime 
             devotion to public service as a veteran, an astronaut and 
             a U.S. Senator has earned him the deep respect of all 
             Americans.''
               Clinton added, ``I will sincerely miss Senator Glenn's 
             advice and leadership on Capitol Hill. Ohio and the Nation 
             owe him much thanks for his dedication and spirit. ``
               Nowhere has Glenn secured a greater place in the hearts 
             of his constituency than here, a town of just over 3,000 
             nestled in the hills 70 miles east of Columbus. At the 
             high school bearing his name, students know of his orbital 
             flight only from their history books and parents' 
             teaching, yet they readily express a personal connection.
               ``A lot of people when they get famous forget where they 
             came from, but not him,'' said Jeff Connell, a 17-year-old 
             senior.
               ``He's not like a stereotypical celebrity,'' said senior 
             Traci Bates, 17. ``I think he comes back here because he 
             likes to.''
               English teacher Mary Ann DeVolld, 45, remembers when 
             Glenn came to the high school in 1984 to launch his failed 
             bid for the presidency, saying community pride in their 
             hometown hero has never waned.
               ``It's an American dream story,'' DeVolld said. ``For a 
             teacher, it's inspiring to be able to point to John Glenn 
             and tell your students that you can be whoever you want to 
             be.''
               Yet, even here, few argued with Glenn's decision to 
             retire.
               ``After 75 years,'' said tow truck operator John Smith, 
             ``let somebody younger get in there with new ideas.''
               Said James Pohlman, a Columbus lawyer and long-time 
             Glenn friend who wiped away tears as he left Brown Chapel: 
             ``John has served with great distinction, but as he said 
             it is time to close the door on a career.''
               The obvious personal affection that oozes from this 
             community for its favorite son has not always translated 
             into political support. While handily defeating Republican 
             Mike DeWine statewide in 1992, Glenn lost his 
             overwhelmingly Republican home county of Muskingum by 
             4,384 votes.
               Aide Dale Butland said Glenn wrestled with the question 
             of retirement, deciding just ``within the last few days'' 
             not to seek re-election. But once made, there was no doubt 
             about where and when Glenn would announce his decision.
               With 77-year-old Annie, his wife of 54 years, their son 
             and daughter and two grandchildren on hand, Glenn told the 
             tale of his life, starting with December 7, 1941, the day 
             Annie, his high school sweetheart, was to give an organ 
             recital in the very chapel where he stood. En route, Glenn 
             heard on the car radio that the Japanese had bombed Pearl 
             Harbor--``news that completely changed the direction of 
             our lives.''
               A few days later, Glenn volunteered for the Marine Corps 
             and eventually flew 149 combat missions in World War II 
             and Korea as a fighter pilot. After a stint as a test 
             pilot, he entered the space program, becoming the first 
             American to orbit the earth. Nary a day passes that he is 
             not asked about the historic 1962 mission, Glenn told the 
             chapel audience, adding that he has a ready answer to the 
             question, ``How did you feel?''
               Said Glenn: ``I felt exactly how you would feel if you 
             were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on 
             top of 2 million parts--all built by the lowest bidder on 
             a government contract!''
               Glenn is Ohio's longest-serving elected U.S. Senator--
             Republican John Sherman served 32 years in two stints from 
             1861-97, when the Ohio General Assembly appointed 
             Senators--and said he was proud of his career. He noted he 
             had cast 8,894 Senate votes on behalf of Ohioans and cited 
             his work to diminish the threat of nuclear weapons and to 
             make the Federal Government more efficient.
               But Glenn aimed the brunt of his speech at students, 
             imploring them to take responsibility for their lives, to 
             reject the enemies of democracy--``cynicism, apathy, 
             selfishness, hostility toward government, and incivility 
             toward one another.''
               Glenn told the students that people are happiest and 
             most fulfilled when they devote themselves ``to something 
             bigger and more profound than merely their own self-
             interest.''

                                         ---

                   [From the Columbus Dispatch, February 21, 1997]
                            Age Keeps Glenn From 1998 Run
                                  (By Alan Johnson)
               In a place where his life changed and on the anniversary 
             of the historic day that launched his career, John Glenn 
             yesterday announced that he won't seek a fifth term in the 
             U.S. Senate.
               Glenn, 75, said his age--not his health, boredom, or the 
             ``poisonous atmosphere'' of public life--prompted his 
             decision.
               ``Although my health remains excellent and my passion 
             for the job burns as brightly as ever, another term in the 
             Senate would take me to the age of 83,'' Glenn said. 
             ``There is still no cure for the common birthday.'' The 
             Senator started the day with a Washington, DC, ceremony 
             marking the anniversary of the 1962 flight in which he 
             became the first man to orbit Earth as one of the original 
             Mercury 7 astronauts.
               Several hours later, at almost precisely the hour he 
             splashed down 35 years ago, Glenn began his countdown to 
             retirement by addressing a packed audience in his hometown 
             of New Concord.
               Speaking to about 500 people--including family members, 
             longtime friends, politicians, and students--at Brown 
             Chapel at Muskingum College, Glenn said he will work 
             during his retirement on educational programs with young 
             people nationwide ``to teach and to challenge.''
               His decision to retire was disappointing to many 
             political supporters of the four-term Democrat but was 
             welcomed by Tom Miller, a retired three-star Marine 
             General and Glenn's friend of 55 years.
               ``I'm delighted,'' said Miller, who met Glenn in 1942 at 
             flight training school. ``He's served his country long 
             enough.''
               The two men from small-town, disciplined families--one 
             from Ohio, the other from Texas--became fast friends and 
             roommates, flying side by side in the Pacific in World War 
             II and later as test pilots.
               Glenn went on to become an astronaut; Miller rose 
             through the ranks and retired as head of Marine aviation.
               In 1962, Miller was a military aide to President 
             Kennedy, assigned to the Glenn family during the space 
             shot.
               ``I've been pounding on him even before the last term 
             that he could be a far more powerful spokesman to the 
             youth of this country in another position,'' Miller said. 
             ``I think it's been hard for him to be a good politician 
             with his kind of moral integrity.''
               Glenn chose Brown Chapel for his announcement because he 
             was headed there December 7, 1941, for an organ recital by 
             his future wife, Annie Castor, when he heard over the car 
             radio that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, 
             signaling the United States' entry into the war.
               The news prompted Glenn to postpone his marriage plans 
             and enroll in the Marines--a move that propelled him to a 
             career in aviation and later the space program.
               During a Senate career dating from 1974, Glenn took a 
             leadership role in several legislative initiatives, 
             including nuclear non-proliferation agreements, the 
             creation of inspector general watchdogs in Federal 
             agencies, and the cleanup of contaminated nuclear weapons 
             sites in Ohio.
               Glenn used his 45-minute speech to outline his strong 
             feelings about an apathy he feels has seized America and 
             to urge young people to do something about it.
               ``Personally, I feel sorry for those who seem to measure 
             their patriotism by how often and how viciously they can 
             criticize our government,'' Glenn said.
               ``We didn't win our world leadership by bemoaning our 
             fate, by overemphasizing our shortcomings, by carping 
             about what was bad--but by building on what was good.
               ``For me, politics is not and has never been a dirty 
             word,'' Glenn said. ``For me, public service remains what 
             people of religious faith refer to as a `calling.' ''
               Democrats must now scramble to find a candidate to 
             replace Glenn in the 1998 Senate race. Governor George V. 
             Voinovich, a Republican, has announced his plans to seek 
             the office.
               ``There's no way we're going to replace John Glenn,'' 
             said David J. Leland, chairman of the Ohio Democratic 
             Party.
               ``We've been fortunate to have him representing Ohio 
             this long.''
               Among the pool of Democrats likely to seek the position, 
             Mary O. Boyle's name is mentioned most often. The Cuyahoga 
             County commissioner attended Glenn's announcement 
             yesterday but refused to disclose her plans.
               ``This is John Glenn's day,'' Boyle said.
               Voinovich issued a statement praising Ohio's senior 
             Senator as ``a genuine American hero.''
               ``His service began long before that historic flight 
             into space 35 years ago and continues to this day. John 
             Glenn's place in our Nation's history is secure.''
               At the Washington event, Glenn commemorated the 
             anniversary of his orbital flight by announcing plans for 
             a nationwide Space Day on May 22.
               Speaking to students at the Challenger Learning Center 
             at an inner-city junior high school, Glenn said Space Day 
             will allow schools and communities to celebrate 
             achievements in science and math evolving from the space 
             program.
               After hearing about Glenn's decision, colleagues in 
             Washington lauded him.
               GOP Senator Mike DeWine, who unsuccessfully challenged 
             Glenn in 1992, said Glenn has put service to his country 
             above all else.
               ``From his military service in World War II and as a 
             fighter pilot in Korea to his historic spaceflight that 
             galvanized the attention of the entire world, John Glenn 
             is truly a modern American pioneer,'' DeWine said. ``His 
             sense of duty and honor to his State--and to his Nation--
             has continued in the U.S. Senate, where his presence is 
             legendary.''
               ``Every once in a great while, someone comes along who 
             is an inspiration for a generation,'' Senate Minority 
             Leader Tom Daschle said. ``John Glenn has been an 
             inspiration for two generations. He is a genuine American 
             hero.''
               Daschle, of South Dakota, said he was ``disappointed but 
             not surprised'' by Glenn's decision to retire. ``The 
             Senate will miss him, and I will miss him personally,'' he 
             said.
               White House press secretary Michael McCurry, who worked 
             on Glenn's presidential campaign, called Glenn ``a true 
             patriot.''
               Paul Johnson, executive director of the Democratic 
             Senatorial Campaign Committee, said Glenn is taking a 
             well-deserved rest after a distinguished career as a war 
             hero, an astronaut, and a Senator.
               ``John Glenn answered his country's call,'' Johnson 
             said, ``and we join the Nation with our thanks.''

                                         ---

                         [From Roll Call, January 26, 1998]
                                   Seniority Bites
             members with collective 437 years of service in the house 
             and senate are leaving political office, taking with them 
              some colorful memories, major legislative achievements, 
                                and political lessons
                             (By Francesca Contiguglia)
               When Representative Lee Hamilton (D-IN) first came to 
             Congress in 1965, septuagenarian House Speaker John 
             McCormack (D-MA) had trouble remembering the freshman's 
             name.
               All that changed on the eve of a Caucus vote for 
             Speaker, when McCormack called for Hamilton's vote. 
             Hamilton said he would not be supporting the Speaker.
               ``From that day on, McCormack remembered my name,'' said 
             Hamilton.
               That's just one of the dozens of lessons learned over 
             the years by Hamilton and the 17 other Members retiring at 
             the end of this year. But even after a collective 390 
             years of service, 437 including resigning Members, some of 
             these Members have regrets about not mastering those 
             lessons sooner.
               ``I only wish I had known in 1975 what I know now,'' 
             said Senator Dale Bumpers (D-AR), who is retiring after 
             four terms in the Senate. ``I would have been a more 
             effective Senator.''
               ``You must live through the battles and develop an 
             institutional memory,'' said Bumpers. He counsels 
             newcomers to remember that ``you only have so many battles 
             in you,'' so pick them carefully.
               Bumpers has picked plenty of battles, having been known 
             as an unabashed liberal who is an adamant supporter of 
             arms control. He once accused Reagan of not wanting ``to 
             spend money on anything that does not explode.'' Bumpers, 
             who is also known as a passionate orator, tells newcomers 
             to remember that the life of a legislator can be 
             frustrating.
               ``My goal from the time I was 12 years old was to come 
             to Congress,'' he said.
               ``But it's not long till you realize you're just one of 
             the hundred,'' a sobering realization, he said.
               Other Senate retirees include Glenn and Senators Wendell 
             Ford (D-KY) and Dan Coats (R-IN). ``There's never been 
             three finer men serve in the U.S. Senate than those 
             three,'' said Bumpers.
               Although Glenn is a national hero, he has had his share 
             of disappointments.
               He dropped out of the 1984 presidential race after a 
             surprisingly weak showing.
               He later was dragged through the mud during the Keating 
             Five affair, even though the Senate Ethics Committee 
             cleared him of any wrongdoing.
               ``One of the greatest miscarriages of justice was Glenn 
             being brought into the Keating Five hearings,'' said 
             Bumpers. ``You couldn't hold a gun on me and make me think 
             John had done anything wrong, ever in his whole life.'' 
             Glenn's clean-cut image was also scarred a bit by his role 
             as ranking member in the Senate Governmental Affairs 
             campaign finance investigation last year.
               Republicans accused Glenn of being a defense attorney 
             for the Clinton administration and said he muffed a golden 
             opportunity to make a bipartisan case for reform on the 
             eve of his retirement--a charge that Glenn vociferously 
             denied.
               Ford, who came to the Senate in 1974 along with Bumpers 
             and Glenn, has distinguished himself as a fierce defender 
             of the institution both as chairman of the Rules and 
             Administration Committee and as Democratic Whip for 7 
             years.
               Known as a plain-spoken man from Kentucky, Ford has 
             looked out for one of his State's top industries: tobacco. 
             With an ever-present cigarette in his mouth--either during 
             congressional hearings or in the hallways of power--Ford 
             has made sure that Senate rules allow individuals to smoke 
             on his side of the Capitol.
               Now 73, Ford is not slowing down. He gave a speech in 
             September 1996 for a departing colleague, Senator James 
             Exon (D-NE), and said, ``I hope you live to be 105 and I'm 
             one of your pallbearers.'' Coats has spent less time in 
             the Senate than his retiring colleagues, but he has made 
             his mark for being upbeat and humorous, making his staff 
             ``more like a family,'' according to his press secretary 
             of 9 years, Tim Goeglein.
               Goeglein recalled Coats's first day in the Senate. The 
             staff was unpacking the office when a squirrel snuck in 
             through an open window and ran about wreaking havoc. Coats 
             ran off a list of puns and jokes about having a small 
             rodent running around a Senate office.
               One of Coats's larger causes was the line-item veto, 
             which passed in the 104th Congress. But he has also been 
             devoted to family causes. Among other things, he supported 
             the Family Leave Act and sponsored a law allowing parents 
             to block dial-a-porn numbers.
               Outside of politics, Coats is an enormous Chicago Cubs 
             fan and has said if he weren't a Senator, he'd want to be 
             the shortstop for the team. His wish almost came true on 
             his 50th birthday, when he was called from the stands at 
             Wrigley Field to throw out the first pitch, a surprise 
             arranged by his staff.

                                         ---

             [From the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, July 19, 1998]
                     Sunday Profile: John Glenn; Return to Glory
               the astronaut-turned-senator from ohio trains to soar 
               through space and history again, to prove that senior 
                       citizens can still have the right stuff
                                (By Scott Montgomery)
               A carnival-sized crowd in blue suits and neckties 
             abruptly pulled up stakes at the end of the speech, and 
             the carpeted warehouse in which NASA keeps its biggest 
             space training equipment ebbed into a hush. The departure 
             of the President can do that to a room, even one this big 
             and industrial: drain it of people so quickly it feels 
             like the air has left, too. Spectators, security officers, 
             television cameras with their clacking bird legs, all 
             suddenly gone. Out. But not everyone split with President 
             Clinton after his tour of the Johnson Space Center on this 
             hot April afternoon. The seven bright crew members of the 
             space shuttle Discovery still kicked around on NASA's 
             royal blue carpet, buzzing a bit from the VIP glow. With 
             one exception. Payload specialist John Glenn was not high 
             on the thrill of having been with the President, something 
             the Senator does now and then in his day job. Instead he 
             gloried in something more precious: hanging out with his 
             space ship crew. Away from the glare, off camera, Glenn 
             reveled in the camaraderie of being John rather than 
             Senator Glenn, dribbling out M&Ms to all hands, swapping 
             tastes of the space food that was sampled by Clinton. 
             Biting a steaming fork of rehydrated shrimp cocktail 
             offered by a crew mate who declared it ``the Cadillac of 
             space food.'' ``Oh, this is great!'' Glenn said, mouth 
             open, chewing, hot. ``May have shrimp for breakfast, 
             lunch, and dinner, I don't know. I found out one thing in 
             tasting it: Stir it up a little bit. If you get down to 
             the corner (of the plastic bag) where that horseradish is 
             concentrated, ohhhhhh!'' America is waiting for John 
             Glenn's return to glory with the shuttle launch in 
             October, but Glenn himself is not. For him the glory is 
             already back. He is tenacious yet patient in the pursuit 
             of any mission, and those traits have served him well. 
             That's why he broke the coast-to-coast flight record in 
             1957. Why, in 1962, he became the first American in orbit. 
             And that is why, come October 29, at 77 he'll be the 
             oldest human to fly in space. The mission is already under 
             way. It means endless training on shuttle systems and 
             poring over experiment manuals. It's dangling down the 
             side of a life-sized shuttle trainer and mastering--at 
             long last since he's been so slow warming to the new 
             computers in his Senate office--the high-powered laptops 
             that run science experiments aboard the shuttle. ``I'm 
             enjoying every minute of it,'' Glenn said that day in 
             Houston, ``want to spend all the time here I can getting 
             ready.'' Believe that.
               By the time Lieutenant Colonel Glenn rocketed through a 
             clearing sky above Cape Canaveral on that late February 
             morning in 1962, he already knew something about fame. 
             Before the ticker tape parades and the presidential 
             medals, Glenn, a native son of small-town Ohio, had 
             introduced his face to America. He teamed with youngster 
             Eddie Hodges, who went on to a brief Broadway career, to 
             win about $25,000 on the television game show ``Name That 
             Tune'' in October 1957. A former glee club member and a 
             life-long devotee to a good barbershop quartet, Glenn made 
             big money by quickly recognizing such tunes as ``Far Away 
             Places.'' ``Some gal just walked up to him * * *,'' 
             remembers Glenn's longest, closest friend, retired Marine 
             Corps Lieutenant General Tom Miller, 75. ``She didn't 
             recognize him or anything, said, `How'd you like to be on 
             a show?' '' Recognize him? Yeah, Glenn was famous even 
             before that. Months before this CBS talent scout spotted 
             him shopping in New York, Glenn made headlines by setting 
             an across-country speed record flying the F8U jet at 
             supersonic speeds from Los Angeles to New York.
               Glenn made the trip faster than if he'd ridden a bullet 
             fired from a .45-caliber gun.
               Anyone who saw him make that speed record his personal 
             mission knew Glenn would be a guy who didn't just beat the 
             odds, he'd wear them down. ``He always starts from behind 
             and winds up in the front ranks,'' said retired Admiral 
             James Stockdale, who was in Glenn's class at test pilot 
             school. Stockdale became famous as Ross Perot's running 
             mate in the presidential election of 1992, but before his 
             late-in-life political debut he was a fighter pilot, 
             Vietnam prisoner of war and Congressional Medal of Honor 
             winner. He tutored Glenn in physics and calculus at the 
             test pilot school in Patuxant River, MD, in early 1954 
             because Glenn had left college before graduating to fly in 
             World War II. In exchange, Glenn taught the Naval Academy 
             grad to fly jets. ``He knew within himself that he had the 
             capacity to learn fast enough to keep up with almost any 
             academic experience,'' Stockdale said. By launch day in 
             October, Glenn will have spent nearly 500 hours in 
             training for the mission. He will know the essentials of 
             living in orbit from sleeping to using the bathroom (the 
             toilet is vacuum sealed with spring-loaded clamps that 
             hold the astronaut in place). He'll understand the 
             rudiments of the shuttle life support systems and radio 
             operations, and he's been put in charge of the flight's 
             still and video photography. When he's done Glenn still 
             won't be schooled in how to fly the shuttle, but he'll 
             qualify for a job as a television news cameraman. ``When 
             the Senator's down here we try to keep him busy because we 
             do have him for a limited period of time and we want him 
             to be as prepared with all the orbiter systems as we 
             can,'' said Curt Brown, Glenn's shuttle flight commander. 
             ``Plus, he has a whole suite of life science experiments 
             that he has started.'' He returns to Washington saddled 
             with reading material. ``Not only do we load him up,'' 
             ``but he loads himself up * * *,'' said Steve Williams, 
             training manager for Glenn's flight. Industriousness is 
             not something Glenn developed for NASA. Or the Marines for 
             that matter. Growing up in New Concord, a pretty 
             Presbyterian town about 70 miles east of Columbus, Glenn 
             got a car only when he made a clunker on his dad's Chevy 
             lot run. That old Chevy was a convertible. Its top had 
             long ago rotted away, so Glenn drilled holes in the floor 
             to drain the rain, and has had ragtops ever since. Yes, 
             even today.
               And he only got money as a boy by harvesting and selling 
             rhubarb from the family garden. ``I was the rhubarb king 
             of New Concord,'' he boasts.
               Flying was something Glenn took to as soon as he could. 
             Muskingum College, right there in New Concord, offered 
             flying lessons for physics credit. The class was taught on 
             a grass field 50 miles away, but that didn't deter Glenn. 
             No surprise there, he just drove. A second chance. To this 
             day, Glenn insists the whole space shuttle thing began 
             accidentally. He swears he wasn't fishing for a way back 
             into the astronaut program, to get that second space shot 
             he was denied during Project Mercury. President John F. 
             Kennedy reportedly had decided Glenn was too popular to 
             risk his life with another rocket flight. Glenn was 
             preparing for NASA's budget hearings in the summer of 
             1996. He stumbled across a medical chart that listed the 
             physiological reactions the human body has to prolonged 
             weightlessness: muscle atrophy and cardiovascular shifts, 
             sleeplessness, and weakening of the immune system. 
             Brittling of the bones. Dozens of changes to the body that 
             astronauts endure in weightlessness before recovering 
             fully soon after returning to the gentle pull of Earth's 
             gravity. Glenn had a thought. He snatched a medical book 
             on geriatrics, and found another chart listing the many 
             painful effects of normal human aging. Muscle atrophy and 
             cardiovascular shifts, sleeplessness, and weakening of the 
             immune system. Brittling of the bones. As a man in his 
             70's, Glenn was becoming familiar with some of these 
             conditions, though he has been stalling them as best he 
             could with a diet of perpetual moderation and a devotion 
             to brisk 2-mile walks four or five times a week. NASA 
             already was working with the National Institute of Aging, 
             a part of the National Institutes of Health, on some of 
             these same issues but experts there hadn't yet proposed 
             sending an elderly person into space to see if an aged 
             body would react differently than younger astronaut bodies 
             do. ``I got into this thing and developed what I thought 
             was a rationale for somebody (in his age group) going,'' 
             Glenn said, ``to look into these particular areas. And if 
             I could do it, why, fine.'' But Glenn admits it wasn't 
             really that casual for him. What Glenn saw in those 
             medical books was a mission. Within months he was on the 
             floor of the Senate taking it to the public. ``I wish I 
             could have the very personal attention of every person in 
             this country who is 60 years of age or older,'' Glenn said 
             from the floor. ``One thing that has happened in the look 
             into the life and biosciences in the NASA program has been 
             that we find some notable parallels between what happens 
             to astronauts in space and what happens to the elderly 
             right here on Earth. ``And if we can find what triggers 
             some of these similarities, perhaps we will have a whole 
             new handle on approaching difficulties that people have 
             right here on Earth.'' Before that, he'd gone to see NASA 
             Administrator Dan Goldin, a President Bush-appointee who 
             found himself being asked to approve sending into space a 
             man born not many years after the Wright Brothers 
             triumphed at Kitty Hawk. But, of course, the issue was 
             more than age because this was not just any fit-as-a-
             fiddle grandfather. John Glenn is a national icon, a cold 
             war and real war hero, the very personification of 
             America's pioneering work in space. Glenn didn't just ride 
             America's first space capsule into orbit, he designed the 
             instrument panel. It would be like bringing back Henry 
             Ford to race the Indianapolis 500. It was an opportunity 
             of great poetry and great danger. ``The space frontier is 
             unforgiving to error,'' Goldin said. ``It was a very big 
             decision that had to be made.'' Nobody wants to be the guy 
             whose decision to send America's John Glenn back into 
             space accidently kills him. Goldin made a list of 
             requirements to be met before he'd agree to the flight. 
             The science experiments would have to be legit, Glenn's 
             health would have to be a certainty, the White House would 
             have to stay out of the process, and Glenn's wife, Annie, 
             would have to be consulted.
               ``You know what she said to me? Goldin said of Glenn's 
             wife since 1943. `` `This is what John wants to do. I've 
             been with him for 55 years, I'm going to support him.' '' 
             And all the while, Glenn just kept coming.
               Glenn told his 52-year-old son David, a physician in 
             California, about all the medical tests he'd undergone and 
             the younger Glenn concluded that NASA had done everything 
             but an autopsy. But Glenn was not content to sit back and 
             wait. He started calling Goldin. To check. How's it going? 
             What's cooking on my idea for a shuttle flight? Have you 
             heard anything new? Can I get you any more information? 
             Active man. Not many things make John Glenn squirm. Nerves 
             of steel are part of the legend, part of the hero package. 
             After all, he's a fighter pilot who flew 149 combat 
             missions in World War II and Korea and collected a host of 
             medals in the process despite losing a friend to anti-
             aircraft fire in his first combat mission. Glenn has met 
             with world leaders, and even made a hearty but failed 
             attempt to become one, losing his 1984 bid for President. 
             He was in California with Bobby Kennedy the night he was 
             killed, and flew to Boston in the morning to tell the 
             Kennedy children. He's faced difficult things, and that's 
             not to say things don't affect him, but he handles them. 
             Whatever it is, he deals. But something does unnerve 
             Glenn, or at least take him out of his stride, make him 
             less sure-footed than his fighter pilot confidence would 
             like: the whole topic of his flight that doesn't deal with 
             the specific--the scientific research, the procedures, the 
             quantifiable. Goldin has been up-front in saying that 
             while defensible scientific research made the Glenn flight 
             possible, that's not all that's going on. Goldin says he 
             wanted to give Glenn the second space flight he didn't get 
             before, because such ``inspiration is a part of the 
             American psyche.'' Glenn might be flattered, but he's not 
             letting on: ``I've heard him say that * * * that it goes 
             beyond (science). And I suppose there's that aspect to it, 
             that someone going up at my age * * * whether it will be 
             an inspiration, I don't * * *. Define inspiration. ``Will 
             it make me an inspiration to older people to be more 
             active or will it affect younger people's view that the 
             elderly are not people just to be put away in a bin? You 
             know, will there be that aspect to it? I suppose there 
             will. But * * *. We didn't set out to design it to do 
             that.'' Some of Glenn's reticence may be to deflect the 
             charges of critics who say his flight has little 
             scientific value and is instead a nostalgic adventure. 
             John Pike, director of space policy for the Federation of 
             American Scientists, doesn't oppose Glenn's return to 
             space, just the rationale being proffered. ``The question 
             you have to ask is, why are we doing this?'' Pike said. 
             ``We're doing it because it's John Glenn, we're not doing 
             it because he's a geezer.'' Glenn, of course, bristles at 
             this idea, pointing out that the National Institute on 
             Aging had a pair of conferences to discuss his flight. 
             ``They brought in experts from all over the country,'' 
             Glenn said. ``They thought there was real merit to this 
             thing.'' ``Agreed,'' says Pike. ``The science is not 
             `completely bogus,' but neither is it essential,'' he 
             said. The space program would benefit most from Glenn's 
             flight if Glenn would embrace the cultural significance of 
             a space hero returning to orbit. ``It's not useful, it's 
             glorious,'' Pike said. ``I wish he would get off this 
             medical stuff and give us some pep talks.'' Glenn will be 
             involved in two age-related experiments, as both a 
             researcher and a guinea pig. One will study what causes 
             muscle weakening in space. The other will look into sleep 
             patterns by comparing Glenn and others in the crew. For 
             those two studies, Glenn will give blood 12 times in 9 
             days. Flight engineer Scott Parazynski, who's on his third 
             shuttle mission, will insert a catheter into Glenn's arm 
             so he'll only be stuck with a needle four times. Glenn 
             will talk about the science all day. He can recount from 
             memory the minute details of each shuttle procedure he 
             must know, tossing in extra info like how fast the ship 
             will be traveling when he does this thing or that. He can 
             talk about the crew with him on this flight, effusively 
             respectful of each one of them. But he's never been one to 
             offer details from his heart. Even going back to Project 
             Mercury, America's first space program. Glenn talked 
             longest and soonest in those press conferences with the 
             seven original astronauts, but it was all about the work, 
             not the feeling he got from the work. Example: That first 
             orbital flight concluded with a harrowing period during 
             re-entry into Earth's atmosphere when everyone thought his 
             heat shield might have slipped loose, which would have 
             meant instant incineration of the capsule. America waited 
             long minutes in one of the Nation's first truly unifying 
             television moments to see if the shield was still attached 
             and Glenn was still alive. In retelling that moment, Glenn 
             described his state of mind in the capsule as `concerned.' 
             And that's not today, looking back on a tough moment 36 
             years ago, that's back then. On the Navy destroyer that 
             picked him up. So now, faced with the cultural 
             significance of his return to space as an elderly man, the 
             shameless romance of it, the grand potential for it to 
             inspire young and old * * * well, you heard him, that's 
             not part of the mission. ``I guess I leave it to other 
             people to make observations about whether they think 
             that's going to occur or not,'' Glenn said. ``If it's 
             going to have that effect, and other people think it will 
             have that effect, well fine, maybe that's a good, maybe 
             that's a good benefit from it.''
               Although the Glenns concede that the family was at first 
             ``cool'' to the idea of his return to space, everyone has 
             since climbed aboard. Glenn has had both his children and 
             the two grandchildren out to Houston for a tour of the 
             simulators he'll begin training in shortly. And Annie is 
             with him for most of his sessions at the space center. 
             ``I'm very lucky that I can learn what's going to affect 
             him,'' she said flatly. ``And I can watch him in training 
             or attend classes. And he's really so excited. So 
             tickled.'' But for the science, he wants to make clear. 
             The science. After every question about what it means to 
             him personally, Glenn swings back to the mission like a 
             compass finding true north. ``I always wanted to go up 
             again,'' he'll say, ``but that's sort of beside the 
             point.'' Until finally, in his Washington office with the 
             Senate computer behind him cued to the shuttle Discovery's 
             Web page, he lets a door drift open. Yes, there was 
             something about the first space flight that moved him. And 
             held him. In a rare, fleeting moment, he confesses that 
             much. Behind the cold warrior exulting in the power of 
             American ingenuity there was this guy from Ohio who as a 
             kid made model airplanes and as a grown up got to look 
             down on the Earth the way angels do. He agrees, now, that 
             it was spiritual. ``Not spiritual in the idea that you 
             expect to run into God or anything like that,'' he says. 
             ``But a spiritual quality in that having such a different 
             vantage point to look at creation, even though you're not 
             that far away from Earth, but to look at it from that new 
             kind of vantage point can't help but give you a greater 
             appreciation for all this creation we live in.'' But he's 
             squirming. This is clearly off the mission. Tenacity and 
             discipline don't help explain the way a single day in 
             orbit, 4 hours and 55 minutes in a metal can no bigger 
             than a refrigerator, could grip a person's imagination for 
             the rest of his life. ``I suppose when you've had an 
             experience like that you're a little different person when 
             you come back,'' Glenn says, trying. ``You've seen things 
             that very few people have ever seen, and that can't help 
             but * * *. I guess it maybe makes you * * * maybe a little 
             more tolerant of life in general or you're not quite so 
             prone to be critical of everything that happens.'' He 
             shrugs. ``Maybe that's a poor way to put it, I don't 
             know.''

                                         ---

                   [From the Cincinnati Enquirer, August 16, 1998]
                          John Glenn's Mission of Discovery
                                 (By John Johnston)
               Just as John Glenn rocketed into history 36 years ago as 
             the first American to orbit Earth, he's poised to make 
             history again as the oldest person ever in space.
               Senator John Glenn has letters from critics saying he is 
             too old to be an astronaut.
               Send someone younger into space, they say.
               The letters, tucked away at his Bethesda, MD, home, were 
             written more than 36 years ago. At the time, Mr. Glenn, 
             the oldest of the seven Mercury astronauts, was training 
             to become the first American to orbit Earth. ``I got 
             letters saying, `You shouldn't go up there. You're going 
             to be almost 41,' '' says Mr. Glenn, who turned 77 last 
             month.
               It seems absurd now. As ridiculous, maybe, as the 
             psychiatrists who in early 1962 urged NASA to replace Mr. 
             Glenn. After weather and technical problems forced several 
             postponements--in all, his flight aboard Friendship 7 was 
             delayed 11 times before its February 20 launch--some 
             experts worried the stress was too much to bear.
               ``Which was ludicrous,'' Mr. Glenn says.
               So maybe it's no surprise how relaxed he appears now. 
             Less than 3 months before he is scheduled to fly in space 
             shuttle Discovery and become the oldest human ever in 
             space, he courts a confidence not unlike that which 
             carried him safely through two wars, a stint as a test 
             pilot, and the uncertainty of the early astronaut program.
               His casual, unhurried style belies his celebrity status; 
             the accessible Senator looks well-wishers in the eye as he 
             shakes their hands, answers questions, signs autographs.
               One of his closest friends, retired Marine Lieutenant 
             General Tom Miller, says Mr. Glenn may be ``physically, 
             more tired (from training). But mentally, in my view, he's 
             much more at ease with what's going on. He's back in his 
             own realm.''
               Since January, he has juggled two full-time jobs: 
             astronaut training in Texas and Florida, Senate work in 
             Washington. Meanwhile, he's tried to cater to a slew of 
             journalists eager to cover the biggest space story in 
             years.
               ``I keep trying to find John Glenn's breaking point,'' 
             Mary Jane Veno, his longtime administrative assistant, 
             says half-jokingly, ``and I only find my own.''
               Says Scott Carpenter, his friend and former Mercury 
             astronaut: ``He's dedicated and he's busy, and John 
             thrives on that.''
               On a hot, steamy Thursday in the Nation's capital, Mr. 
             Glenn's packed schedule includes a permanent Subcommittee 
             on Investigations hearing, a Senate Armed Services 
             Committee meeting and a Democratic Policy Committee 
             luncheon.
               But he also makes time for a TV reporter and a newspaper 
             writer. A magazine journalist is scheduled to interview 
             him by phone. They all want to talk about space.
               And he has several photo opportunities in his office, 
             including one with two 17-year-olds, Jacob Hodesh of 
             Wyoming and Christopher McCracken of Alliance. They're 
             Ohio's representatives to Boys Nation, an American Legion-
             sponsored program that teaches youths about government. Of 
             course, Mr. Glenn chats about going back to space.
               Later, he speaks to a group of Cleveland State 
             University graduate students attending a conference on 
             urban terrorism. Someone dutifully asks a terrorism 
             question; everyone else wants to know about space.
               And there are tourists who catch a glimpse of the 
             Senator exiting the Senate subway below the Capitol; their 
             eyes widen as they fumble with their cameras, but he's too 
             fast, he's gone. You can read their lips: ``That's John 
             Glenn!'' Surely they'd like to hear him talk about space, 
             too.
               He is an icon because of space.
               When the Soviet Union in 1961 demonstrated its 
             superiority in space by putting man in Earth orbit, a 
             fearful and vulnerable America needed to prove it could 
             compete; some U.S. leaders felt the survival of the free 
             world was at stake.
               Enter John Glenn, the red-haired plumber's son from New 
             Concord, OH. He flew 4 hours, 55 minutes aboard tiny 
             Friendship 7 and gave a doubting country a reason to 
             believe in itself. When he landed safely, ``tears ran like 
             a river all over America,'' Tom Wolfe wrote in The Right 
             Stuff.
               He was showered with ticker tape in New York City and 
             praised by President Kennedy. As an elected official, 
             though, he never came close to matching his astronaut 
             glory.
               Much of his 24-year Senate career has been devoted to 
             non-glamorous issues such as nuclear non-proliferation and 
             cutting government waste. But his hero status has endured, 
             despite lingering campaign debts from a failed 1984 
             presidential bid and a brush with a savings-and-loan 
             scandal in which he was cleared of wrongdoing.
               A model of his old spacecraft sits on a display case in 
             his fifth-floor office in the Hart Senate Office Building. 
             Piles of paperwork vie for attention on his desk. A large 
             photo of his wife, Annie, sits near scale models of space 
             shuttles.
               ``I've always wanted to go up (in space) again, just 
             from a personal experience standpoint,'' he says. ``This 
             time around, there's another purpose to it.''
               He won't allow any conversation about the shuttle 
             mission to go more than a sentence or two before he 
             injects the ``R'' word: research.
               ``We have the opportunity now to get into some areas of 
             research with regard to aging that I think have the 
             potential of being extremely valuable in the future,'' he 
             says. ``I feel fortunate to be able to qualify physically 
             to be the one do to the research.''
               Mr. Glenn, a payload specialist on the seven-member 
             crew, will be a human test subject in geriatric 
             experiments that examine similarities between the aging 
             process and what occurs to astronauts in weightlessness.
               Older people, for example, tend to lose bone and muscle 
             mass, have trouble sleeping, and experience decreased 
             cardiovascular strength. That also happens to astronauts 
             in space, but they soon recover on Earth.
               The Senator became aware of such similarities several 
             years ago while reading a book on astronaut physiology. 
             After consulting with experts, in summer 1996, he asked 
             NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin to consider including 
             geriatric studies on a shuttle mission, with Mr. Glenn on 
             board.
               While NASA sought experts' advice, organized scientific 
             conferences, and held the proposal up for peer review, Mr. 
             Glenn kept in touch with Mr. Goldin. Frequently.
               ``Can you help me with this friend of yours?'' the NASA 
             chief said one day in a phone call to Lieutenant General 
             Miller. ``He's driving me out of my gourd.''
               The general knows all about Mr. Glenn's aggressiveness, 
             dating to their days as fighter pilots in World War II and 
             Korea.
               In Korea, ``He was in a different (fighter) group,'' 
             Lieutenant General Miller says. ``I knew how he flew. I 
             flew down specifically to give him some hints on things 
             not to do. I should have known he wouldn't listen to me. 
             On two different flights, they blew his airplane all to 
             pieces.''
               Fellow fliers nicknamed him Old Magnet Ass, but Mr. 
             Glenn gave as good as he got, earning five Distinguished 
             Flying Crosses in two wars.
               Lieutenant General Miller chuckles about another story, 
             saying the Senator ``won't own up to this.'' It harks back 
             to the days when the Millers and Glenns were next-door 
             neighbors in Arlington, VA, and John sought to be named to 
             the Mercury program.
               ``He was basically 6-foot (tall) by his naval aviation 
             medical records,'' the general says. But the maximum 
             height for astronauts was 5 feet 11 inches. So, ``every 
             once in a while, he'd have a couple of big books on his 
             head.''
               Maybe it was just a joke, the general says. Or maybe 
             not. Regardless, at the January press conference 
             announcing Mr. Glenn's return to the space program, NASA's 
             Mr. Goldin described him as ``the most tenacious human 
             being on the face of this planet.'' His biggest challenge?
               ``I'm far less facile on computers than my colleagues 
             are. A year or so ago, the staff here almost insisted I 
             get this thing,'' he says of the PC at his desk. He 
             chuckles. ``I'm up to where I can get my e-mail most of 
             the time.''
               A message scrolls across the monitor, installed by his 
             teen-age grandsons during a visit the week before: ``John 
             Glenn (Grandpa) is the greatest Senator--grandpa of all 
             time.''
               And perhaps one of the most physically fit. In Houston, 
             he has rappelled down the side of the space shuttle and 
             been spun around a centrifuge. The demands of astronaut 
             training haven't exhausted him, he says.
               For years, he's kept in shape by power walking a couple 
             of miles four or five times a week at home in Bethesda. 
             More recently, he began working out with weights.
               ``I get aches and pains once in a while like everybody 
             else. But I don't have any rheumatism or arthritis or 
             anything like that. Never have.''
               Ms. Veno, who talks with him several times a week when 
             he trains in Houston, says conversations typically go like 
             this:
               Ms. Veno: Is it physically demanding?
               Mr. Glenn: Oh, yeah, it's really tough.
               Ms. Veno: Are you handling it?
               Mr. Glenn: Oh, yeah.
               Ms. Veno: Would you tell me if you weren't?
               Mr. Glenn: Oh, heck no.
               Training has caused him to miss 34 of 212 Senate votes 
             this year. But he says he has not and will not break a vow 
             to be in the Senate whenever his vote could mean the 
             difference on major legislation.
               This month, while the Senate is in recess, he's back in 
             Houston.
               ``I don't think with something like this you can ever 
             say you're satisfied with your level of training,'' he 
             says. ``I always wanted another 3 days before any final 
             exam I ever took.''
               October 29, he says, will be ``the final exam, big 
             time.''
               Anna ``Annie'' Glenn, his wife of 55 years, probably 
             would prefer he skip it.
               ``She didn't really try to talk me out of it,'' Mr. 
             Glenn says. ``But I knew from her attitude toward it that 
             she was really not in favor of this.''
               Another chuckle.
               ``She didn't have to say anything. She knew that I 
             always wanted to go back up again. She's known that for 35 
             years. But certainly neither one of us ever thought it 
             would happen.''
               Mrs. Glenn, hoping to forestall an onslaught of 
             reporters, declined to be interviewed for this story.
               The Senator got permission from mission commander Curt 
             Brown for Mrs. Glenn to attend briefings in Houston. The 
             Glenns' son and daughter, David and Lyn, and David's 
             children, Zach and Daniel--all of whom have voiced concern 
             about Mr. Glenn's upcoming flight--also have been to 
             Houston.
               Observing the training firsthand has made family members 
             more comfortable, the Senator says. NASA officials have 
             joked that if for some reason John Glenn cannot fly, 78-
             year-old Annie will be ready.
               Lieutenant General Miller says if tragedy were to occur, 
             the Glenn family ``would understand that the sacrifice was 
             done in the interest of helping others. They've accepted 
             that now, and they're all behind him, 100 percent.''
               Some observers, though, have criticized Mr. Glenn's 
             return to space as a nostalgia trip he earned by defending 
             the Clinton administration during last summer's Senate 
             campaign finance investigation.
               ``That's the biggest canard we ever had around here,'' 
             the Senator says. ``I never had one conversation with the 
             President or the Vice President or any of the staff in the 
             White House--not one--during that whole thing.''
               He also brushes aside critics who say little will be 
             learned from sending one aging astronaut into space. 
             ``Where on Earth do you start a data base? You start it 
             with one data point and add to it as you go along.''
               Critics are nowhere to be found this day. A receptionist 
             in the Senator's outer office has a caller from North 
             Carolina on the line. Mr. Glenn is his hero, the caller 
             says. He'd like two autographed photos--of Glenn the 
             astronaut and Glenn the Senator.
               Sorry, the receptionist says. ``We have so many 
             requests.'' About 400 a week. Only one autograph per 
             person, she explains. (For the record, requests for 
             autographed astronaut photos are outpacing Senator photos 
             more than 2-to-1.)
               Others call or write to say the upcoming mission 
             inspires them. A 76-year-old Tiburon, CA, woman wrote that 
             despite having a leg amputated, she learned to fly a 
             helicopter 3 years ago.
               ``I'm so glad that you can go up again,'' her letter 
             says. ``GO! GO!''
               A flight to inspire?
               Even some space experts think Mr. Glenn's flight will 
             have more inspirational than scientific value.
               John Pike, director of space policy for the Federation 
             of American Scientists, says he would like to hear Mr. 
             Glenn ``talk more about `the right stuff' and talk less 
             about all this medical research foolishness.''
               The Senator suppresses that notion like a gyroscope 
             correcting a wobble. He'll only go so far as to say 
             inspiration could be ``a good side benefit.''
               Others have suggested it's much more than that. NASA's 
             Mr. Goldin has said of Mr. Glenn's flight: ``Is it just 
             science? No. Inspiration is part of the American psyche.''
               Says Mr. Glenn: ``You don't do these things as a stunt. 
             This isn't like going over Niagara in a barrel or walking 
             a high wire between the World Trade Center buildings. 
             You're doing it because of basic research that may benefit 
             people right here on Earth.
               ``If people like what we're doing in some way, and 
             admire that, well, so be it. And that's good.''
               Some observers have speculated Mr. Glenn is reluctant to 
             talk about the inspirational value of his flight because 
             it will give ammunition to those who say he's getting a 
             joy ride.
               ``I don't think that's it at all,'' says Ms. Veno, his 
             aide. ``I think it's consistent with his reaction to the 
             hero aspect. I think for people like John, it's hard to 
             accept that they have that kind of impact. He probably 
             thinks that's attaching more importance to him than he 
             deserves.''
               Len Weiss, who has worked with the Senator for 22 years, 
             agrees. He is minority affairs director of the Senate 
             Governmental Affairs Committee. ``I don't think a fear of 
             criticism is determining what he says about this flight. 
             He says what he believes. What you see is what you get.''
               What you see, often, is a man passionate for detail. A 
             technocrat who enjoys poring over official reports that 
             even Mr. Glenn has said would make most people's eyes 
             glaze over.
               But Ms. Veno says her boss ``really is a pretty 
             emotional person, which a lot of people don't have the 
             privilege of seeing.''
               You wonder what his emotions were on February 20, 1962. 
             What he was thinking and feeling when he looked out the 
             window of Friendship 7. What he will think on October 29 
             as he blasts off from Launch Pad 39B.
               ``This isn't something where you go up there and say, 
             `Here I am looking back at the world, and this has changed 
             my life forever,' '' Mr. Glenn says.
               But then he softens a bit. He recalls some astronauts 
             found God in space. Jim Irwin returned from the moon and 
             created an evangelical ministry, High Flight. Charlie Duke 
             became a born-again Christian and president of Duke 
             Ministry for Christ.
               ``Did I have an experience like that? No,'' he says. But 
             Mr. Glenn, a lifelong Presbyterian, took his faith 
             seriously before he left Earth's gravity. And still does. 
             At home, he and his wife say grace before every meal.
               But yes, he was moved, he says.
               ``When you're up there, you're viewing things from a 
             different vantage point than human beings have ever looked 
             at Earth. You get a new appreciation for the fragile 
             little existence we have here.
               ``You fly over the Middle East, and you look down, not a 
             cloud in the sky, and you think of all the problems 
             through the centuries that have come out of that area, and 
             it's so beautiful, looking down on it. You think, with all 
             these manmade problems we've got there, why can't we solve 
             some of these things. You can't help but think a few 
             things like that.''
               He is not thinking about research now.
               ``Ever since I was a kid, I've thought sunrises and 
             sunsets were particularly beautiful. Up there, you see a 
             sunrise or sunset occurring at 18 times normal speed. Up 
             there, you see the colors of the rainbow right across the 
             whole spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, 
             violet.''
               Photos can't quite capture that luminous quality in the 
             way the human eye can, he says.
               ``It gives you a new appreciation for God's creation, I 
             guess, and certainly a new appreciation of the fragility 
             of the world in which we live.''
               Mr. Glenn has strayed as far off course as he cares to.
               ``This is set up on a very tight timeline, and we're 
             going to be very, very busy. But I can guarantee you, when 
             I am not absolutely engrossed in something else, I am 
             going to be over at the window.''
               It's Friday morning, and in a few hours, the old 
             astronaut will leave for Boston to meet with a researcher 
             who is heading up one of the geriatric experiments.
               Most likely they won't discuss sunrises and sunsets.

                                         ---

                        [From Time Magazine, August 17, 1998]
                                 Back to the Future
               after waiting 36 years, john glenn at last prepares to 
               return to space; the mission is different, but the man 
                                  remains the same
                 (By Jeffrey Kluger with reporting by Dick Thompson/
                                      Houston)
               John Glenn has a curious tendency to fly machines that 
             try to kill him. He flew them in the Marines; he flew them 
             with the Air Force; he flew them as a civilian. And each 
             time he did, the fact that they were trying to kill him 
             never seemed to trouble him much. One telling incident 
             happened in 1953, during the Korean War. A World War II 
             veteran and a longtime combat aviator, Glenn had been 
             assigned to fly F9F Panther jets in an attack squadron 
             running raids out of Pohang. During one especially hellish 
             run, Glenn encountered an unexpectedly heavy barrage of 
             anti-aircraft fire. A cloud of shrapnel ripped one bomb 
             from the undercarriage of his Panther, then another. A 
             second blast punched more than 200 holes in the skin of 
             his plane. Glenn struggled for a few moments to keep his 
             wounded aircraft stable and then realized the effort was 
             futile. Keying open his microphone, he called out levelly 
             to the squadron leader, ``I'm going to ease out of here.''
               The leader, who was too far away to spot the flak coming 
             up from the ground, challenged him. ``Why?'' he asked. ``I 
             don't see anything hot down there.''
               ``Well,'' Glenn answered, more bemused than flip, ``the 
             leader normally doesn't.'' With that, the 32-year-old 
             flyer peeled off for Pohang.
               Last week in Houston, John Glenn, the 77-year-old senior 
             Senator from Ohio, was learning his way around another 
             potentially lethal flying machine. Clad in a blue full-
             body garment shot through with a webwork of cooling tubes, 
             he stepped into a NASA training room at the Johnson Space 
             Center and glanced at a space-shuttle simulator standing 
             in front of him. A technician then helped him struggle 
             into a heavy orange flight suit. Stuffed into the backpack 
             of the 90-lb. pressure garment was a huge load of survival 
             equipment: a life preserver, an emergency food and water 
             supply, a pair of emergency oxygen bottles, a bouquet of 
             rescue beacons, and an array of other gear.
               There was no chance that Glenn would need any of this 
             equipment during a training session here on solid ground. 
             But on October 29, when he climbs into a mid-deck seat on 
             the shuttle Discovery and prepares to rocket into space 
             for a 9-day mission, he'll face a real, if remote, chance 
             that the craft could spin out before it reaches space and 
             wind up in the drink. If it does, the septuagenarian 
             Senator will need all the survival hardware he can get.
               By rights, Glenn, who is concluding a 24-year political 
             career and easing into senior statesmanship, ought to be 
             beyond such concerns. By choice, he's not. In less than 3 
             months--36 years after he blasted into the sky inside the 
             titanium pod of a Mercury spacecraft--he'll return aboard 
             the relatively lavish space shuttle. Even as Congress's 
             August recess begins and the rest of Washington's 
             lawmakers decamp for their favorite vacation spots, Glenn 
             will be in Houston and Florida for his most intensive 
             month of training since being assigned to the mission.
               To hear NASA's detractors tell it, Glenn is manifestly 
             unfit for space travel of any kind. Flying into orbit more 
             than a third of a century after he last made the trip, 
             more than a dozen years after most people his age have 
             begun retiring, and only months after the death of fellow 
             Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard illustrated the frailties 
             of even the most resilient flesh, is, they argue, at best 
             showboating and at worst reckless.
               Not so, says NASA. Long ago, the agency noticed a 
             parallel between the changes that happen to a body in 
             space and those wrought by aging on Earth. What better way 
             to study this phenomenon than to send an aged astronaut 
             into orbit? And what better aged astronaut than the one 
             who made the country's first trip?
               That's the official story. Perhaps more to the point is 
             that back in the 1960's, NASA was a place for heroes. 
             Every time men rocketed into space, they took a greater 
             risk than on their previous flight, reached for a more 
             audacious and dangerous goal--and almost always succeeded. 
             But after the 4 extraordinary years between 1968 and 1972, 
             when the United States was sending crews to the moon, the 
             agency retreated to the familiar backwaters of near Earth 
             orbit. Aside from a few high notes like the Hubble-
             telescope repair mission and the horror of the Challenger 
             explosion, human space travel became downright dull. And 
             with the first components of the NASA-led International 
             Space Station set to launch within months, things seemed 
             likely to stay that way. For a public that had grown to 
             expect great things from NASA, this was pale stuff indeed. 
             If anything could rekindle the magic of the vigorous NASA 
             that was--instead of the flickering NASA that is--it might 
             be the return of the man who first lit the agency's fires.
               NASA will never admit this publicly, of course, and when 
             Glenn goes back to the pad next October, he will go as 
             just another crew member, a lowly payload specialist 
             setting off for a week or so of work. But even NASA 
             Administrator Daniel Goldin seems to concede that when he 
             inks the name Glenn onto a flight manifest, he writes more 
             than just a name. ``There is,'' he declared the day he 
             announced Glenn's return to space, ``only one John 
             Glenn.''
               By most accounts, John Kennedy is the key to why Glenn 
             still has the itch to fly in space. When Glenn went aloft 
             on February 20, 1962, the United States was taking its 
             first toddling steps on its long march to the moon. 
             Although he was 40, Glenn figured he still had a lot of 
             flying ahead of him. When he returned to Earth, he found 
             otherwise. Like any other astronaut, he periodically 
             approached Bob Gilruth, head of the Mercury program, to 
             inquire about his position in the flight rotation; unlike 
             any other astronaut, he was routinely stonewalled. 
             ``Headquarters doesn't want you to go back up,'' Gilruth 
             would say to him, ``at least not yet.''
               At first, Glenn accepted this with a shrug, but as time 
             went by and more and more of his astronaut brothers were 
             chosen for the Gemini and Apollo programs that followed 
             Mercury, he grew increasingly frustrated. Finally, in 
             1964, he resigned from NASA. ``It was only years later 
             that I read in a book that Kennedy had passed the word 
             that he didn't want me to go back up,'' Glenn says. ``I 
             don't know if he was afraid of the political fallout if I 
             got killed, but by the time I found out, he had been dead 
             for some time, so I never got to discuss it with him.''
               Glenn spent the next decade working in private industry, 
             most notably (and incongruously) as an executive with the 
             Royal Crown Cola company. In 1974 he parlayed his still 
             glittering name recognition into a seat in the U.S. 
             Senate. Even as a Member of Congress, he remained smitten 
             with space travel, but as an aging lawmaker who hadn't 
             been in a flight rotation or ready room in years, he 
             accepted the fact that his professional flying career was 
             over. And it was--at least until 3 years ago.
               In 1995 Glenn, a member of the Senate Special Committee 
             on Aging, was paging through a textbook on space 
             physiology when a thought struck him. Doctors had long 
             since identified more than 50 changes that take place in 
             an astronaut's body during weightlessness, including blood 
             changes, cardiovascular changes, changes in balance 
             control, weakening of the bones, loss of coordination, and 
             disruption of sleep cycles. As a lay expert on aging, 
             Glenn recognized that these are precisely the things that 
             happen to people on Earth as they grow older. ``I figured 
             we could learn a lot if we sent an older person up, 
             studied what the effects of weightlessness were, and tried 
             to learn what turns these body systems on and off,'' he 
             says. And he had an idea of just who that older person 
             should be.
               Approaching the space agency directly with a notion this 
             outrageous was, of course, not the way to go. If 20 years 
             in Washington had taught Glenn anything, it was that 
             bureaucratic balance wheels have to be turned gently. He 
             decided to start by contacting a few NASA physicians and 
             asking them, almost casually, if they had ever looked into 
             the astronaut-geriatric parallel. Why, yes, they had, the 
             doctors said. As a matter of fact, they had published a 
             little pamphlet on the topic. Would Glenn like a copy?
               Would he ever! Armed with those few scraps of data, the 
             Senator contacted the National Institute on Aging and 
             suggested that the group might want to hold a conference 
             to investigate the phenomenon further. The NIA agreed, and 
             held two meetings during the following year, compiling a 
             mound of research that strengthened the data base 
             considerably.
               Finally, in the summer of 1996, Glenn was ready. He 
             approached NASA Administrator Goldin and formally pitched 
             his case for returning to space. ``I told him there are 34 
             million Americans over 65, and that's due to triple in the 
             next 50 years,'' Glenn recalls. ``And I told him someone 
             ought to look into this.'' Goldin, savvy about the wiles 
             of flight-hungry astronauts--even flight-hungry astronauts 
             who haven't flown in 34 years--saw medical merit in the 
             argument and offered Glenn a deal. If the science held up 
             to peer review, he promised, and if Glenn could get past 
             the same physical every other astronaut must pass, NASA 
             would seriously consider his proposal. But, Goldin added, 
             ``we've got no open seats just for rides.''
               It wasn't a decision made lightly. In the months that 
             followed, Goldin wrestled with the matter, agonizing over 
             what he considered his John Glenn problem. At one point, 
             he sought counsel from Tom Miller, Glenn's oldest friend 
             and Marine Corps comrade. `` `Can you imagine if something 
             happened [during the mission]?' '' Miller recalls Goldin 
             asking. `` `My heart says yes, but my brain says no.' ''
               The scientists and doctors were less ambivalent. By 
             early this year, they had finished their preliminary 
             reviews and concluded that both Glenn's science and his 
             health were sound enough to justify the mission. Shortly 
             afterward, on January 15, Glenn was in his Senate office 
             meeting with a group of constituents from Ohio State 
             University when he got word that Goldin was on the line 
             for him.
               Stepping into the bullpen of cubicles just outside his 
             door, Glenn picked up the phone and, after some good-
             natured stalling and suspense building by Goldin, learned 
             that he would indeed be returning to space and that the 
             announcement would be made the next day. Until then, Glenn 
             was to say nothing. The Senator thanked the Administrator, 
             hung up the phone and went back to work without a word to 
             his staff. ``He's a military man,'' says press secretary 
             Jack Sparks. ``He knows how to take an order.''
               When word got out the following morning, the reaction 
             was largely positive, particularly in Congress. Glenn will 
             not be the first lawmaker to fly in space. Senator Jake 
             Garn of Utah and Representative Bill Nelson of Florida 
             both took shuttle rides in the giddy, all-aboard days 
             before the Challenger disaster. In the eyes of many, 
             however, Garn and Nelson were mere junketeers, politicians 
             who wangled a trip into orbit largely for the sake of 
             going up--or, in the case of the famously space-sick Garn, 
             throwing up. Glenn is no mere joyrider. ``John has worked 
             hard to prepare for this,'' says Senator Wendell Ford of 
             Kentucky. ``He's not doing it for the publicity. He is 
             doing it to make a contribution.''
               The response was not quite as enthusiastic at home, 
             where Annie Glenn, the astronaut's wife of 55 years, had 
             to be told the news. Having sweated through her husband's 
             149 combat missions and one 5-hour Mercury mission, Annie 
             had long since become accustomed to Glenn's doing outsize 
             things and incurring outsize risks. In the eighth decade 
             of life, however, she justifiably assumed all that was 
             behind her. ``Annie was a little cool to the idea to begin 
             with,'' Glenn confesses. But in the tradition of a 
             military and NASA wife, she listened to his reasons for 
             wanting to return to space, familiarized herself with his 
             mission and then, as she had done so many times before, 
             proceeded to help him train for it.
               That training will be something of a new experience for 
             Glenn, who is used to being the captain of any ship he 
             flies. The flight plan for the October mission lists seven 
             Discovery crew members, from Curt Brown, the commander, to 
             Steve Lindsey, the pilot, through three mission 
             specialists, and two payload specialists. Glenn's is the 
             last name on the list. No sooner did the crew first meet 
             last January than Glenn made it clear that the chain of 
             command was fine with him. ``They wanted to call me 
             Senator, and I said no,'' he says. ``I'm coming down here 
             as John. I'm a payload specialist, and Curt's the flight 
             commander--and whenever they forget that, I correct 
             them.''
               Even a lowly yeoman like Glenn will have his hands full 
             getting ready to fly aboard his new ship. The first time 
             Glenn flew, he was in a mere demitasse of a spacecraft--
             one with a single window, 56 toggle switches and barely 36 
             cu. ft. of habitable space. The joke around NASA in that 
             earlier era was that you didn't so much climb inside a 
             Mercury capsule as put it on.
               The shuttle, by contrast, is a veritable flying 
             gymnasium, with 10 windows, more than 850 toggle switches 
             and roughly 332 cu. ft. of space for each of the seven 
             crew members. If astronauts got the 36 cu. ft. the Mercury 
             pilots got, the shuttle could in theory accommodate a crew 
             of 64. And Glenn must learn every inch of this new 
             territory. ``We're teaching him how to live and how to 
             sleep and how to clean up, just basic habitability in 
             space,'' says Brown. ``Now we go to space to work. We 
             don't go just to survive.''
               More nerve-racking than mastering what goes on inside 
             the shuttle, though, is mastering what could go on 
             outside. One of the most hair-raising parts of Glenn's 
             training involves emergency escape procedures. Crew 
             members on shuttles must be prepared to ride slide-wire 
             baskets down from the launch pad if a fully fueled shuttle 
             threatens to blow; shimmy down an escape pole and 
             parachute away from the ship in the event of a postlaunch 
             emergency below an altitude of 20,000 ft.; and rappel down 
             ropes from the hatch if the spacecraft makes an emergency 
             landing on tarmac. On his Mercury flight, Glenn's only 
             safety measure was an escape rocket designed to ignite and 
             carry the spacecraft out of danger if his Atlas rocket 
             appeared likely to explode.
               Not everything about the shuttle will be more difficult. 
             During the Mercury days, the astronauts pulled a gravity 
             load of up to 7.9 Gs during their ascent, meaning that a 
             pilot like Glenn who weighed 168 lbs. would briefly feel 
             as if he weighed a whopping 1,327. Shuttle astronauts 
             generally pull no more than 3 Gs, and Glenn, who has not 
             added much weight to his still fit frame in the past 36 
             years, should tolerate that burden easily.
               Then too, there are creature comforts aboard the shuttle 
             that the Mercury pilots didn't dare dream about. Glenn's 
             only meal on his first, brief mission in space was a tube 
             of applesauce he sucked through a straw. The shuttle 
             offers a decidedly better bill of fare, including such 
             delicacies as smoked turkey, Kona coffee, and dried 
             apricots. All the meals are sealed in plastic packets, 
             each of which is coded with a colored dot to indicate 
             which crew member it is intended for. The color code for 
             Brown, the commander, is red; for Glenn, a payload 
             specialist, it's purple. ``The shrimp cocktail they fix is 
             very, very good,'' says Glenn, ``as good as what you'd get 
             at Delmonico's. Curt likes shrimp, and I always tell him 
             that when he's on the flight deck and I'm hungry, I'm 
             going to go looking for a red dot.''
               But Glenn is going aloft to do more than tuck into the 
             cuisine. Discovery will ferry a number of payloads in its 
             cargo bay, including a Spartan satellite that will be 
             released into space to take readings of the sun, a pallet 
             of sensors to measure the ultraviolet environment of 
             space, and several new components for the Hubble Space 
             Telescope that need to be tested in the extreme conditions 
             of space. Most important, the ship is carrying the 
             Spacehab science module, a pressurized laboratory that is 
             connected to the crew compartment and provides additional 
             space for conducting medical experiments. It is here Glenn 
             will be doing most of his work, processing blood and urine 
             samples from the rest of the crew and sitting still for 
             the battery of tests that will be run on him.
               Those tests would try the patience of any patient. 
             Throughout the flight, Glenn's heart rate, respiration, 
             blood volume and pressure will be monitored regularly. 
             Doctors on Earth want to analyze his blood for immune 
             function and protein levels, and this will require taking 
             so many samples that throughout the flight, Glenn will 
             wear a catheter implanted in his arm, allowing easy access 
             to a vein without a new needle stick each time. He will 
             wear a suit wired with sensors to measure his sleep cycles 
             and will swallow a horse-pill-size thermometer that will 
             take temperature readings as it passes through his body.
               These and other findings will be compared with base-line 
             readings taken before lift-off, which are already being 
             assembled. Glenn routinely walks around the grounds of 
             NASA's Houston facility with monitors strapped to his 
             wrist and belt. When he returns from space, he will face 
             yet another battery of tests, including an MRI to look for 
             changes in his spinal cord and bone-density tests to look 
             for mineral loss. ``All of this,'' Glenn says, ``gives us 
             the potential not only of dealing with the frailties of 
             our already aged population but of helping younger people 
             avoid problems as they get old.''
               Or so NASA says. Not everyone in the space community 
             agrees. Alex Roland, a former NASA historian and chairman 
             of the Duke University history department, has been 
             outspokenly skeptical of Glenn's mission, questioning its 
             scientific value and dismissing it as a trivial or even 
             foolish use of NASA's scarce resources. If critics like 
             Roland are right, the mission's science is merely a fig 
             leaf. If it's a fig leaf, what is it covering? ``This 
             space flight is the same as the first one,'' says John 
             Pike, director of space policy for the Federation of 
             American Scientists. ``It had everything to do with making 
             the country feel good. It's about the right stuff, not 
             science. Which is fine with me.'' Newsman Walter Cronkite, 
             whose coverage of the Mercury missions made him as much of 
             a television icon as the astronauts, agrees that Glenn's 
             upcoming flight ``is bringing back a public interest in 
             space flight.''
               Whether or not this is true, there is no denying that 
             Glenn's 1998 mission will be rich with echoes from his 
             1962 mission. Once again there will be the program-
             preempting coverage; once again Annie Glenn and her family 
             will be seen watching anxiously as the rocket that carries 
             the head of the household explodes off the ground and 
             falls back to Earth; once again there should be the 
             triumphal return.
               The first time Glenn flew, the family stayed at home in 
             Arlington, VA, watching the launch on TV, since the Glenns 
             were reluctant to pull their son and daughter out of 
             school for the trip to Cape Canaveral. This time wife, 
             children and the Glenns' two grandsons will all be there 
             for lift-off. Glenn takes a small, whimsical pleasure in 
             pointing out that his grandsons, who will be 16 and 14 in 
             the fall, are the same age his son and daughter--now 52 
             and 50--were the last time he flew.
               For anyone contemplating Glenn's return to space, this 
             kind of existential ciphering is irresistible. The country 
             is now further in time from Glenn's first trip into orbit, 
             for example, than Glenn's first trip into orbit was from 
             Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic. A man who was 
             Glenn's current age when Glenn was born would himself have 
             been 17 years old when the Civil War began. Then too, 
             there are the people who saw Glenn's first flight who 
             either will or won't be here for the second. Khrushchev, 
             Kennedy, Johnson, Mao Zedong--all towering figures in 
             1962, all dust now. Castro--communism's beachhead in the 
             West then, old and isolated now. Queen Elizabeth--young 
             and remote monarch then, old and remote monarch now.
               That kind of perspective shifting, that kind of standing 
             back from the pointillist portrait of history, may be what 
             Glenn's return to space is really all about. Glenn and 
             NASA will never wholly concede this spiritual point, but 
             Glenn and NASA don't have to concede it. John Glenn flew 
             in 1962, and an exuberant country decided it just might 
             live forever. Thirty-six years later, an older, more sober 
             Nation could use a little of that feeling again.

                                         ---

                         [From Life Magazine, October 1998]
              The Last Heroes; John Glenn Flies Us Back to the Age of 
                                      Innocence
                               (By Richard B. Stolley)
               In the mock-up of the shuttle Discovery at the Johnson 
             Space Center in Houston, John Glenn is running through a 
             protein-turnover experiment that involves the collection 
             of blood and urine from crew members for analysis. NASA 
             instructors are demonstrating how to use a centrifuge. 
             ``Will I have this book with me?'' he asks, referring to a 
             manual in his hand.
               ``Yes, John,'' an instructor says. Everybody uses first 
             names here.
               ``Have these ever failed?''
               ``No. You check this, check that, and if it doesn't 
             work, you call us.'' Glenn pauses, grins mischievously and 
             says, ``You mean, `Houston, we have a problem?' '' There 
             is a slight intake of breath in the mock-up, strained 
             mouths, uneasy faces. John Glenn is making a feisty joke 
             of one of NASA's dark hours, the Apollo 13 crisis. 
             ``Well,'' an instructor finally murmurs, ``let's hope you 
             don't have to say that.''
               Is there a happier 77-year-old in America? Not likely. 
             John Glenn is going back into space for 9 days beginning 
             October 29, and this son of Ohio is in hog heaven.
               After he became the first American astronaut to orbit 
             the earth in 1962, Glenn wanted to fly again. NASA 
             officials demurred. The massive adulation that greeted his 
             splashdown convinced them that Glenn was more valuable 
             selling space travel than doing it. Glenn found out years 
             later that his friend President Kennedy, basking in the 
             astronaut's popularity, also opposed his return to space. 
             ``Maybe he was afraid of the political fallout if 
             something happened to me,'' Glenn says. ``All I know is 
             that they didn't want to put me back up again.''
               After 18 months of PR and paper-pushing, Glenn got 
             discouraged and quit NASA. He tried corporate life, then 
             went into politics. About 3 years ago, as the increasing 
             number of older Americans began attracting scientific 
             attention, Glenn sensed an opportunity to talk himself 
             back into space. ``It became apparent to me that age might 
             be an advantage instead of a disadvantage,'' he recalls. 
             ``There are about ten things in a human body that change 
             in space that are like the frailties of old age.'' Glenn 
             recruited the National Institute on Aging, which endorsed 
             the idea that knowledge gained from studying a senior 
             citizen in space and afterward would be valuable. NASA set 
             two ground rules: The mission had to make scientific sense 
             to its own doctors, which it eventually did, and Glenn had 
             to pass the same rigorous physical exam as the other crew 
             members--``No waivers.''
               He passed, although he protests, ``I don't think I'm in 
             such superb shape as everyone else seems to think.'' There 
             is some truth in this: Compared with shuttle teammates, he 
             crawls in and out of hatches with a noticeable creakiness. 
             His waist, inevitably, has broadened; below the belt is a 
             whisper of a paunch.
               Still, the man looks great and appears amazingly 
             vigorous. He has exercised all his life, and today he 
             fast-walks two miles a day and lifts weights. He has never 
             smoked cigarettes and gave up his pipe two decades ago. He 
             occasionally drinks wine with dinner. Food is another 
             matter. He admits to being a continual dieter. ``If I ate 
             like I'd like to eat,'' he says, ``I'd weigh 300 pounds in 
             thirty days.'' Since the prospect of space beckoned, he 
             has concentrated on fish, grains, beans, fruits, and 
             vegetables and stayed away from red meat.
               The physical demands of the flight will be strenuous, of 
             course, but nothing like those of Glenn's 1962 mission. 
             The sheer size of the spacecraft is a factor; for Glenn, 
             this will be like traveling in a Greyhound instead of a 
             Geo. Back then the issue was not successful experiments 
             but survival. Doctors weren't sure whether humans could 
             take eight G's going up and coming down; in the shuttle, 
             it's a maximum of three G's. ``As test pilots,'' Glenn 
             says, ``our job was to find out what we could and couldn't 
             do. Did our eyeballs change shape? Would inner-ear fluid 
             move differently? Could we even swallow? We were trying to 
             put a lot of basic issues to rest.''
               The terrifying vastness of what was unknown back then 
             makes Glenn (and his Mercury buddies * * * ) seem heroic 
             beyond contemporary measure. But in the face of this 
             observation, John Glenn squirms. He deals with the subject 
             of fear better.
               ``Was I afraid to the point where it overcame what I was 
             supposed to be doing?'' he says. ``No. Apprehensive. Keyed 
             up. Aware of every little bump and jiggle and watching 
             everything very carefully. I had a pretty high level of 
             confidence that the thing wasn't going to blow up. I did 
             have a couple of major problems that the scientists 
             weren't sure I could handle. At the end of the first 
             orbit, the danged automatic system screwed up and a 
             thruster got stuck. Rather than use up all the fuel, I 
             just went manual on everything. Scientists weren't sure I 
             could control the spacecraft. That settled that question. 
             Then we had the heat shield problem: Will he burn up or 
             won't he? I was apprehensive, yes, but not fearful to the 
             point it interfered. And that's the way I feel this 
             time.''
               Danger has been as much a part of Glenn's life as his 
             Ohio roots. As a Marine fighter pilot, he flew combat in 
             World War II, then again in Korea, where he shot down 
             three Communist MIGs. After that he tried his hand and 
             nerve as a test pilot in the era of the first supersonic 
             jets. ``We lost a lot of people,'' he says matter-of-
             factly. ``I never had to bail out, but I had a lot of very 
             weird things happen. We spent more time than we liked 
             going to funerals. It wasn't very pleasant.'' That test-
             pilot experience led to his selection as one of the 
             original Mercury team, the seven whom author Tom Wolfe 
             would immortalize with a macho label: ``the Right Stuff.'' 
             John Glenn has no reason to remember the book fondly. It 
             describes him as the Presbyterian Pilot, excessively 
             pious, scolding his fellow astronauts on issues of 
             morality, grandstanding with the press, lobbying 
             shamelessly to be first American into space (an honor that 
             would go to Alan Shepard * * * ).
               Yet Glenn actually enjoyed the book. ``Tom Wolfe writes 
             with a stream of consciousness that I sort of like,'' he 
             says. ``Most of his account was reasonably factual, 
             although I was neither the pious saint nor the other guys 
             the hellions he made them into.'' The movie, Glenn had no 
             use for. ``Hollywood made a charade out of the story and 
             caricatures out of the people in it.''
               Movie aside, how does he feel about the term ``the Right 
             Stuff?'' An immediate ``Oh, I don't like it.'' He pauses. 
             ``I don't try to define it,'' he says, then tries to do 
             exactly that. ``I suppose the Right Stuff means a 
             willingness to sort of be out there on the edge, where the 
             danger level is supposedly much higher, but you are 
             willing to take that risk, and that's supposedly supposed 
             to be the Right Stuff. I don't know. It's a willingness to 
             risk for whatever gain, I guess.''
               Glenn is reminded, ``Tom Wolfe did it in only three 
             words.''
               He smiles sheepishly. ``I guess that's what it means.''
               Whatever it meant in 1962, Glenn had it. The cold war 
             was at its fiercest, and the American psyche was being 
             battered. ``We thought we led the world in science and 
             technology,'' Glenn recalls. ``All at once they were 
             challenging us on our grounds. We tried to send up 
             satellites and failed. We wanted to be first with a manned 
             flight, and damned if they didn't beat us on that, too. 
             They taunted us that Americans were going to sleep under a 
             Soviet moon. There was a mentality that people forget 
             today, but it was very real back then.''
               The effort to put Glenn into orbit was a near fiasco, 
             played out in complete openness, unlike the secret and 
             sinister Soviet program. Glenn's launch was postponed a 
             depressing 10 times. He still winces at the memory. ``It 
             would be announced that Glenn is going on such and such 
             date, and then no, it's been canceled because of something 
             or other. Once I was on the way to the pad in the van when 
             the flight was canceled. Damn, we flopped again. We 
             couldn't get this thing off. It was almost like it was 
             designed for suspense by Hollywood.''
               On the 11th try, February 20, at 9:47 a.m., millions of 
             nervous, prayerful Americans watched on TV as John Glenn's 
             tiny capsule, which he and his family had named Friendship 
             7, roared into orbit. It circled the globe three times and 
             landed safely in the Atlantic. Suddenly, the cold war was 
             a standoff. America went joyfully hysterical. There was a 
             parade in Washington, then another in New York with a 
             blizzard of ticker tape. ``Overwhelming,'' says Glenn. 
             ``Beyond anything we had envisioned.'' He sat the family 
             down--wife Annie and their teenage kids, David and Lyn. It 
             was classic Glenn: so genuine and yet fodder for cynicism. 
             ``I said, look, we are the same kind of people we were 
             before. I'm still putting my pants on one leg at a time. I 
             don't want anybody getting any big poppycock ideas. We'll 
             just be our own folks. And that's exactly what we did. 
             That seemed in its own right to attract attention, and 
             made people feel even closer to us.''
               Before New York had swept up the last of the confetti, 
             John Glenn was an American hero. Today, to many, the four-
             term Democratic Senator is still one. Does he object to 
             that assessment? He tries to.
               ``Look,'' he says, ``I don't know what people think * * 
             *.''
               He is interrupted. ``Senator, you know exactly what they 
             think.''
               ``Well, I know what they think,'' he admits, ``but I 
             don't look at myself that way. I don't come in every day 
             and think I'd better do this in a certain way because I am 
             a hero. I never thought that in my whole life. And I'm not 
             starting it now. If other people look at me as someone 
             they admire because of what I've been fortunate enough to 
             take part in, I don't recoil from that, nor do I try to 
             advance it.''
               By January, John Glenn--twice an astronaut, 24 years a 
             Senator, newly retired from both--will be out of a job. 
             But he is a man who needs some sort of mission, so he has 
             come up with one. He plans to set up an institute at Ohio 
             State University that would involve young people in 
             politics and public service--a quest as daunting as 
             shooting rockets at the moon. He knows that many Americans 
             today feel ``politics and government are so dirty they 
             can't possibly get their hands messed up in it.'' And he 
             knows that leaders more articulate than he have preached 
             the gospel of public service without success. But perhaps 
             the young will listen to a space traveler. ``If they do, 
             fine,'' says Glenn. ``If they don't, well, I'll give it my 
             best shot.''
               Today, his best shot is aimed at understanding this 
             body-fluid centrifuge. He's training as hard as he is 
             because fouling up one of the experiments, as opposed to 
             personal safety, is his major concern. He looks up and 
             emphasizes: ``Make that `concern.' Not `fear.' ''

                                         ---

                   [From the the New York Times, October 30, 1998]
                        Glenn Returns to Space: The Overview
                36 years later, glenn lifts off for his space encore
                               (By John Noble Wilford)
               John Glenn, an astronaut again at 77, returned to orbit 
             today in the space shuttle Discovery for a rendezvous with 
             the memory of a time when exploits of early astronauts 
             held the world in thrall and for a long-awaited encore, 
             this time as the oldest traveler in outer space.
               At 2:19 p.m., after two suspenseful delays, the 
             shuttle's two rockets and three engines ignited in flames 
             and billowing vapors and lifted the seven-member crew--
             including Mr. Glenn, the retiring Democratic Senator from 
             Ohio and the first American to circle the planet--into an 
             orbit some 345 miles above Earth.
               ``Liftoff of Discovery with a crew of six astronaut 
             heroes and one American legend,'' intoned Lisa Malone, the 
             countdown commentator, at the moment the shuttle rose into 
             a cloudless blue sky.
               Although Mr. Glenn's flight had been criticized in many 
             quarters as a publicity stunt and political payoff with 
             little scientific value, an estimated 250,000 visitors to 
             the Kennedy Space Center and surrounding communities, one 
             of the biggest crowds to see a shuttle departure, followed 
             Discovery's ascent, watching until it was no more than a 
             vanishing point of light more than 5 minutes after 
             liftoff. President Clinton, watching with Mrs. Clinton 
             from the roof of the Launch Control Center, was the first 
             sitting President to see a space launching here since 
             Richard M. Nixon watched the takeoff of Apollo 12 in 1969.
               In an interview on CNN before the liftoff, Mr. Clinton 
             pointed out that today's flight--the last mission before 
             NASA begins launching the International Space Station in 
             December--was the end of an era. ``So John Glenn began 
             this first phase of our space program, and he's ending it 
             just before we start on the space station,'' Mr. Clinton 
             said.
               A few hours after Discovery reached orbit, Lieutenant 
             Colonel Curtis L. Brown, Jr., the commander, looked over 
             at Mr. Glenn.
               ``Let the record show, John has a smile on his face and 
             it goes from ear to ear,'' Colonel Brown told Mission 
             Control. ``We haven't been able to remove it yet.''
               In his first radio communication with Mission Control, 
             Mr. Glenn was ebullient. ``A trite old statement: zero-G 
             and I feel fine,'' he said, paraphrasing his first 
             reaction to zero gravity, in 1962.
               Looking down on the Hawaiian islands, Mr. Glenn said: 
             ``Today is beautiful and great. I just can't even describe 
             it.''
               More than 36 years ago, on February 20, 1962, Mr. Glenn, 
             then 40, rocketed aloft from here to become the first 
             American to orbit the planet. Alone, squeezed into a tiny 
             Mercury capsule, he made all of three orbits of Earth on a 
             flight that lasted 5 hours. Today, aboard the relatively 
             commodious Discovery, with 70 times the room of the 
             Mercury capsule, Mr. Glenn began a mission planned to last 
             9 days.
               Two younger astronauts, Colonel Brown and Lieutenant 
             Colonel Steven W. Lindsey, both of the Air Force, were at 
             the controls of Discovery. From his passenger seat in the 
             compartment below the flight deck, Mr. Glenn felt the bump 
             at liftoff and the increasing vibration and noise of the 
             first 2 minutes of surging rocket power, 20 times the 
             thrust of the Atlas rocket that first put him in orbit. 
             When Discovery's two solid-rocket boosters were jettisoned 
             after a little more than 2 minutes, Mr. Glenn felt a 
             sharper jolt and might have caught sight of a flash of 
             light in the tiny compartment window.
               In many ways, it was a more comfortable ascent this 
             time. At most, the rocket power exerted on Mr. Glenn's 
             body pressures about three times the normal force of 
             gravity at sea level. The pressure was certainly nothing 
             like the G-forces from the Atlas, which reached eight 
             times normal levels.
               As the shuttle's three hydrogen engines burned, Mr. 
             Glenn could begin to relax to the steady whirring of 
             turbines and fans. Eight and a half minutes after 
             ignition, he and the other Discovery astronauts had 
             reached orbit and, unbuckling the straps that secured them 
             during liftoff, experienced the floating sensation of 
             weightlessness. On his Friendship 7 flight in 1962, Mr. 
             Glenn never got the chance to unbuckle and had no place to 
             stretch out.
               For the rest of the day, the crew moved slowly about 
             Discovery, opening the cargo-bay doors and activating the 
             systems and scientific instruments in the pressurized 
             Spacehab module in the cargo bay where astronauts are to 
             conduct many of their experiments.
               Generally overlooked in the avid attention on Mr. Glenn 
             was the multinational crew, including a Japanese and a 
             Spanish astronaut, which is to get busy on Friday with 
             dozens of astronomy observations, tests of hardware for 
             the Hubble Space Telescope, and experiments on the effects 
             of a low-gravity environment on insects, fish, and humans.
               Much of the scientific work will be handled by Dr. 
             Stephen K. Robinson, an engineer; Pedro Duque, an 
             aeronautical engineer from Spain who is representing the 
             European Space Agency; and Dr. Chiaki Mukai, a Japanese 
             physician and medical researcher. Mr. Glenn's primary duty 
             will be to act as a test subject for investigations of 
             physiological changes from space flight that appear to 
             parallel changes in aging humans. His attending physician 
             for many tests will be Dr. Scott E. Parazynski.
               Such studies point up one of the sharpest contrasts 
             between this flight and Mr. Glenn's first. ``Back then, 
             the issue was not successful experiments but survival,'' 
             Mr. Glenn said in a recent magazine interview. ``Doctors 
             weren't sure whether humans could take eight G's going up 
             and coming down. As test pilots, our job was to find out 
             what we could do and couldn't do.''
               NASA officials said Discovery was operating normally, 
             but engineers said they were investigating the apparent 
             loss of a small, insulated aluminum panel near the tail. A 
             videotape of the launching showed the panel dropping off 2 
             seconds after main-engine ignition, 5 seconds before 
             liftoff. The panel appeared to be the cover over a stowed 
             parachute, which is deployed at landing to slow the 
             shuttle on the runway.
               At a news conference, Donald R. McMonagle, a shuttle 
             official at the Kennedy center, said the incident was not 
             expected to pose any additional risk or cause any change 
             in mission plans. The shuttle could land without the 
             ``drag chute,'' which was added to the shuttles for extra 
             braking force only after more than 50 safe landings 
             without parachutes. The problem presented ``no hazard to 
             operations of the vehicle in orbit,'' the official said.
               A more detailed analysis of the problem is expected to 
             be made on Friday, Mr. McMonagle said.
               The day of Mr. Glenn's second launching broke warm and 
             clear, with no signs of technical trouble on Discovery at 
             Pad 39-B. Before his first mission, Mr. Glenn had to wait 
             out 10 postponements because of weather or mechanical 
             problems between December and February 20 before he 
             finally lifted off.
               Today's countdown proceeded smoothly toward a scheduled 
             2 p.m. liftoff. At a pause at T-minus-9 minutes, Scott 
             Carpenter, the astronaut who was Mr. Glenn's backup pilot 
             in 1962, echoed his famous farewell to the Mercury flight, 
             which was ``Godspeed, John Glenn.''
               Speaking to the Discovery crew, Mr. Carpenter said, ``At 
             this point in the count, it seems appropriate to say to 
             the crew, good luck, have a safe flight, and to say once 
             again, Godspeed, John Glenn.''
               But Discovery was not going anywhere yet. Alarms sounded 
             in the cockpit and were recorded at Mission Control in 
             Houston. The countdown was halted while engineers 
             considered possible problems with the cabin pressure in 
             the crew module, and soon established that there was 
             nothing to fear. Then, at T-minus-5 minutes, the count was 
             interrupted again as one private airplane and then another 
             were spotted flying into restricted airspace near the 
             Kennedy launching area.
               The liftoff seemed trouble-free, until the examination 
             of video recordings revealed that a piece of metal seemed 
             to break loose and hit the nozzle of the shuttle's center 
             engine. Investigators were trying to find out if it was 
             indeed the parachute panel--a piece of waffle-textured 
             aluminum 18 inches wide, 22 inches long, and 1.7 inches 
             thick--that fell off.
               ``At this point, we know of no impact on the mission,'' 
             Mr. McMonagle said of the problem.
               One of the most important maneuvers of the mission is to 
             come on the fourth day. The Discovery astronauts plan to 
             release a small satellite called Spartan for 2 days of 
             observations of the Sun's corona, or outer atmosphere, and 
             its effects on the space environment throughout the solar 
             system. The satellite is to be retrieved before the 
             shuttle returns to Earth. Landing is scheduled for 
             November 7 here at the Kennedy center.
               The mission is the 92d by a shuttle since the reusable 
             craft were introduced in 1981. And it is the 121st 
             American flight of astronauts since John Glenn made 
             history with his first flight. Shortly after 7 p.m. today, 
             Mr. Glenn passed his old space flight record of 5 minutes 
             under 5 hours, with 8 days yet to go on the return flight 
             he had longed to take since February 1962.

                                         ---

                     [From the New York Times, January 17, 1998]
                         Glenn To Slip Bonds of Age in Space
                              (By Katharine Q. Seelye)
               He wears glasses now; he is paler and balding. But he 
             still has his freckles and the Midwestern blend of modesty 
             and self-assurance he always displayed as an American 
             hero.
               ``I'll give it my very best try,'' John Glenn said today 
             at a packed news conference at NASA headquarters here, 
             where officials announced that they were sending the 76-
             year-old Ohio Senator back into space after a 36-year 
             absence. Mr. Glenn said that he had lobbied NASA for 2 
             years to reprise his epic flight of 1962, which launched 
             him into history as the first American in orbit. Dan 
             Goldin, the NASA Administrator who gave the go for Mr. 
             Glenn's autumnal space shuttle mission, called him ``the 
             most tenacious human being on the face of this planet.''
               Senator Glenn has enjoyed other successes since slipping 
             the bonds of Earth in his 9-by-7-foot capsule, including 
             the distinction of being the only person Ohio has elected 
             to the Senate for four consecutive terms (he retires this 
             year). But nothing he has achieved in politics has come 
             came close to rivaling the worldwide acclaim he received 
             as an astronaut, and there was some speculation today that 
             Mr. Glenn wanted to cap his career the way he began it--by 
             lighting the candle, in the jargon of astronauts.
               ``Zero-G, and I feel fine,'' a suddenly weightless John 
             Glenn radioed 36 years ago, with the world holding its 
             breath as Mr. Glenn circled the globe, scoring one for the 
             United States after the Soviet Union had launched two men 
             into orbit and was winning the space race at the height of 
             the cold war. Afterward, four million New Yorkers gave him 
             a ticker-tape parade that rivaled the one for Charles 
             Lindbergh.
               Mr. Glenn asserted today that he wanted to go back into 
             space because he was intensely interested in geriatrics. 
             On his own initiative, he said, he had studied some of the 
             similarities between aging on Earth and flying weightless 
             in space, including the loss of bone mass, a weakening of 
             the immune system and a slackening of muscles. He proposed 
             to Mr. Goldin that he go back into space to study them 
             further, to help ``lessen the frailties of old age'' and 
             prevent problems for young astronauts.
               But in the course of his lengthy news conference, Mr. 
             Glenn returned to the novelty factor--he would be the 
             oldest person to go into space. And he acknowledged that 
             he was keenly aware of his place in the American psyche.
               Besides, he argued to those who suggested NASA might 
             have picked him for the public relations value--he was as 
             good a choice as anyone.
               ``If I can pass the physical, why not me to do this kind 
             of experimenting?'' he recalled asking Mr. Goldin in the 
             summer of 1996.
               There is little doubt that Mr. Glenn can pass the 
             physical. Doctors say he is in excellent health. A former 
             Marine fighter pilot, he exercises every day, and he said 
             he expected to be in even better shape by the time the 
             space shuttle Discovery is launched in October.
               He also spurned suggestions that his selection was a 
             political reward for defending President Clinton and Vice 
             President Gore during the Senate hearings last year on 
             campaign finance practices.
               ``Nothing could be further from the truth,'' the Senator 
             asserted. ``There were never any directions, there were 
             never any requests from the White House.''
               It was Mr. Glenn's partisan performance during the 
             hearings--in response to partisan tactics by the 
             Republicans--that in some eyes diminished his reputation 
             as an amiable Senator. His character--his sense of decency 
             and fair play--had always been his strength. But these 
             apolitical qualities, combined with a public speaking 
             style that was less than electrifying, kept him from 
             playing a major role in the Senate and helped doom his 
             1984 bid for the Presidency, for which he remains $3 
             million in debt.
               He was first elected to the Senate in 1974 and delved 
             into nuclear proliferation and, later, issues related to 
             aging. But he was also touched by the Keating Five 
             scandal, in which he and four other lawmakers were accused 
             of doing favors for a wealthy campaign contributor. The 
             Senate Ethics Committee concluded that Mr. Glenn had only 
             ``exercised poor judgment'' in arranging a meeting, but it 
             tarnished his Mr. Clean image.
               Throughout Mr. Glenn's career, it was clear that his 
             trip into space was never far from his mind. He announced 
             his retirement from the Senate on February 20, 1996, the 
             35th anniversary of his orbit. And at one merry moment 
             during the campaign finance hearings, when the Republicans 
             had displayed a particularly complicated chart, Mr. Glenn 
             mused: ``Is this supposed to be an orbital track?''
               Even today, it was evident that the chance to leave the 
             planet again was more important to him than whatever might 
             await in Washington. Said Mr. Goldin: ``One of the 
             conditions for Senator Glenn to fly is, I have an iron-
             clad commitment from him that his Senate duties will not 
             interfere with the activities of training for the space 
             shuttle.''
               Mr. Glenn, the son of a plumber, had sought to enter 
             politics 2 years after his 1962 orbit of Earth, announcing 
             his candidacy for the Senate in 1964. But a fall in his 
             bathroom injured his inner ear and he had to drop out of 
             the primary.
               He still wanted to return to space, but was turned down. 
             ``I always wanted to go back up again,'' he said today, 
             adding obliquely: ``At that time, headquarters didn't want 
             me to go back on flight status again. And so, after a year 
             or so, I went on to other things.''
               It was unclear whether he was referring to a time when 
             John F. Kennedy was President or when Lyndon B. Johnson 
             occupied the Oval Office.
               With Mr. Glenn's political career on hold, he went into 
             private business, serving on the boards of Royal Crown 
             Cola and the Questor Corporation. He oversaw four Holiday 
             Inns. In 1970, Mr. Glenn ran for the Senate again, but 
             lost the Democratic primary to Howard Metzenbaum. The seat 
             was up 4 years later, and this time, Mr. Glenn beat Mr. 
             Metzenbaum.
               In 1979, Tom Wolfe published ``The Right Stuff,'' an 
             examination of the dawn of the American space program and 
             the qualities that, in Mr. Wolfe's phrase, would ``bring 
             tears to men's eyes.'' The 1983 movie based on the book 
             was expected to give Mr. Glenn a big advantage in the 
             presidential campaign, when he presented himself as an 
             alternative to the more liberal Walter Mondale. But 
             support never materialized, and he dropped out. Mr. Glenn 
             held his Senate seat in 1992 against a challenge from Mike 
             DeWine, whose campaign slogan asked: ``What on Earth has 
             John Glenn done?''
               Mr. Glenn announced his retirement last year after it 
             was clear that Ohio's popular Republican Governor, George 
             Voinovich, who had built up a substantial war chest, would 
             present a particularly strong challenge.
               But all of those battles melted away today as Mr. Glenn 
             grinned his way through the announcement of the news he 
             had waited so long to hear. His first words, typically, 
             were in homage to his wife, Annie, his childhood 
             sweetheart, who sat in the front row adjacent to a 
             battalion of cameras that were recording the moment for 
             history. She brought her own instamatic and took her own 
             pictures, occasionally wiping a tear from the corner of 
             her eye.
               Mr. Glenn said his wife and children were initially 
             ``not enthusiastic'' about his upcoming flight but that 
             they understood it was important for him.
               With the image of the Challenger disaster still 
             imprinted in American minds, Mr. Goldin was quick to say 
             NASA ``tripled the reliability of the Space Shuttle since 
             the early 1990's.''
               Nonetheless, he said, an experienced flyer like Mr. 
             Glenn ``knows that there's a finite probability he may not 
             come back.'' He said that the decision to send Mr. Glenn 
             into space should not send a message ``that it's safe to 
             fly in space.'' Rather, he said, ``This is a signal that 
             we're trying to do the maximum space research to benefit 
             the American people and to inspire people.''
               Mr. Goldin insisted that the agency was not exploiting 
             Mr. Glenn's popularity as a ploy to win more money. ``We 
             will not pander to the American public self-servingly to 
             get more money for this agency,'' Mr. Goldin said, but 
             added: ``Is it just science? No. Inspiration is part of 
             the American psyche.''
               If Mr. Glenn was afraid of the flight, he did not let 
             on. His only fear, he said, was that he might not ``do a 
             good job.'' He added: ``I was concerned about that back in 
             1962. I will be concerned about that again.''

                                   
