Glenn: Flying Solo, His Way

By Robert Ajemian

Finally off the ground, with a candidacy both risky and uplifting

Looking to the presidential campaign, this article is the second in a series that will appear during 1983 probing the character and personality of each of the major candidates.

A denim jacket over his pinstripe suit and tie, John Glenn Jr. sat behind the controls of his ivory and red, twin-engine Beechcraft, ready to take off for a regular weekend of campaigning. It was 7 o'clock on a recent Friday morning, and today the candidate would head for Ohio, then loop all the way back to the northern tip of Maine. Glenn does not like to start his days so early. He is a man of endless patience, but overscheduling Glenn, aides know well, is one of the very few things that cause his temper to blow.

A few minutes after takeoff, his eyes scanned the blue sky at 10,000 ft. When he prepared to land at various stops along the way, the air controllers; who knew the identity of the approaching flyer, usually directed him down with a certain audible deference. Glenn put the plane on automatic pilot and began talking about his early flying days. He was asked how clearly he remembered the dogfights over Korea, when he shot down three MiGs the last week of the war. He remembered every detail, he said. Two of the enemy pilots had been very good, but the third was slow. Glenn moved his right hand, fingers straight, slowly upward toward the palm of his left to show how he had zoomed up from underneath and fired into the belly of the third MiG and then watched it drop to the Yalu River. As he talked, his eyes showed no emotion. Glenn long ago learned how to mask his feelings.

Wherever Candidate Glenn dropped out of the sky, in his home state or in Maine, where residents in one town hosed down their housefronts in preparation for his arrival, he was greeted with extraordinary warmth. It mattered little that the applause was always louder when he arrived than when he departed. After his speeches, voters lined up for autographs and snapshots. Like another hero and presidential candidate, Dwight Eisenhower, with whom he is frequently compared, Glenn's folk stature gives him tremendous believability with his audiences. Still, the crowds studied him carefully, trying to judge his competence. Is this space hero with the soapy talk about traditional values smart enough, they seemed to be asking, shrewd enough, to run the country? Will this man who has become almost a national icon, if unmasked, turn out to be an earnest bore?

John Glenn, of course, is no Eisenhower, a man who ran armies, and his candidacy is not the safe and generally predictable one that the laid-back Ike's was. Glenn's assets have been understated--and so have his liabilities.

The overriding trait of the two-term Senator from Ohio is his independent mind. Glenn is for nuclear power and says so in the face of the fiercest opposition. He publicly calls for the Israelis to stop building more settlements on the West Bank. He has defied organized labor by voting against its cherished picketing legislation, and union leaders have never really forgiven him. Glenn has uncommon political courage. Interest groups, no matter how sophisticated and strident, have learned that turning up the pressure only makes Glenn hang tougher. He cannot be intimidated.

He has a driving intelligence, gathering all kinds of facts and ideas before he finally makes up his mind and votes. Staffers wince when Glenn sets out to learn about an issue. He has a retentive mind and can bury listeners with details. During his eight years in the Senate, he has concentrated with little fanfare on foreign policy, defense and energy, and has mastered the intricacies of arms control. Colleagues will often follow his lead on defense issues because they know Glenn has done his homework. He was urging construction of a smaller, more mobile MX more than three years ago, and has watched the defense Establishment slowly come around to his position. His hard work and centrist approach have paid off enormously in Ohio. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan won Ohio easily, Glenn triumphed by 1.6 million votes, the largest margin ever in a Senate contest.

For all of that, Glenn is a political loner. The man who flew 149 combat missions, tested jets, and was the first man to orbit the earth obviously learned to draw strength from being alone. In the Senate he has almost no intimates. "It takes John forever to develop confidence in people," says one longtime associate. Says another colleague about Glenn's preference for keeping things in the family: "He used to tell us to give only your name, rank and serial number." Staffers sometimes yearn for him to pick up the telephone and swap support with other Senators on particular bills.

High among Glenn's liabilities is his absolute incapacity to develop an effective team around him. He is an awful manager. His 23 years as a Marine pilot trained him to be thoroughly responsible for himself, to check and double-check himself, but in the process he never learned how to surrender authority. Glenn turned out to be a man who has to make every decision. And he makes them slowly. Over the years, memos and phone calls have sat on his desk, unanswered. He is not a shrewd judge of people. He manages his time badly and needs others to organize him. But assistants soon learn they must accept Glenn's short leash. He is not at all a demanding boss but instead tolerates inefficiency with maddening forbearance. Some of his staff wish he would be blunter. But Glenn shuns confrontation. His way of showing disapproval is to fall into a sustained silence.

From the start, the solitary Glenn has taken a certain satisfaction in going his own way. When Robert Kennedy urged him in 1964 to enter politics, Glenn jumped into the Senate race without informing Ohio leaders (he later fractured a bone in his ear and withdrew). In 1974, against heavy opposition, he challenged Howard Metzenbaum, the party favorite and incumbent Senator. About 15 party and labor leaders summoned Glenn to a showdown meeting. This time, they threatened, they would fight him. Glenn said nothing would change his mind. He won after a nasty campaign; nine years later Glenn and Metzenbaum, who got himself re-elected in 1976, still loathe each other. The victory had its stings. One was Ethel Kennedy's refusal to campaign for Glenn. He had been working for Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles when R.F.K. was shot, and afterward escorted his children home. But as Glenn doped it out, Ted Kennedy, fearful of antagonizing Metzenbaum, was to blame for Ethel Kennedy's turndown. The episode caused permanent hard feelings.

Single-minded about his goals, Glenn often focuses on a particular point and is criticized for missing the broader picture. "He can see the pieces of the puzzle," says one Senator who serves with Glenn on the Foreign Relations Committee, "but he has trouble putting the puzzle together." The most extraordinary example of Glenn's fixation on detail occurred during the 1979 debate over the SALT II treaty. Jimmy Carter viewed the treaty as indispensable to further political initiatives with the Soviets and told Glenn so. Glenn focused on verification. He was convinced that the U.S. could not monitor the pact because of the loss of two tracking stations in Iran and the knowledge that the U.S. reconnaissance satellite had temporarily failed.

It was estimated that a dozen Senators would take their voting cue from Glenn. Thus enormous pressure was applied to get him to change his mind. Through top aides like Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Carter sent along secret information that backup monitoring would soon be ready. Prominent Senators leaned hard on him. Glenn would not budge. His position: as soon as adequate verification was reinstated, he would vote for the treaty. The President, frustrated at what he considered Glenn's tunnel vision, telephoned him at home early one morning to complain further. Carter afterward told his staff he had never been so mad at anyone in his life. Glenn says he never thought he would hear himself talk to a President that way. "It hurt the country," one of the men who tried to persuade him remembers. "Glenn's stand was always principled, but he clung to an issue that was not transcendental." For their part, admirers viewed Glenn's holdout as proof that he will not take refuge in a popular political position.

He has scorn for politicians he thinks go back on their word or are opportunistic. Even the everyday inflationary talk of politics bothers the earnest Glenn. He says that too much gets promised. When he sat listening to Walter Mondale tell a California convention of Democrats that if elected he would right now, today, get Soviet Leader Yuri Andropov on the hot line and arrange a meeting right now, that very afternoon, Glenn in private showed disdain. He spotted Candidate Alan Cranston wearing a button that read STOP ACID RAIN NOW and shook his head. The emphasized now was too much for him. Glenn will offer no pies in the sky. "I'm just not going to run that way," he said.

Some would say he could not. Though he has enough of the Marine fly-boy banter in him to mix easily with crowds, he is too prim about his public conduct to be the least bit theatrical. Glenn is a wooden speaker. But he has polished up his basic themes in the past six months and has somewhat improved his platform skills. Last month in Bangor, Me., the political loner seemed more comfortable with the stump ritual of holding out his arms and asking a group of local Democrats to please give him a hand.

Back in his plane over Ohio, Glenn pointed below to a narrow green field and said it was there he had made his first solo flight, at 19, in a 60-h.p. trainer. He traced his finger a couple of miles down a country road. "That's where I grew up," he said, looking down at New Concord, a tiny community of 1,800 in which his father had worked as a plumber. He located the county fairground and the railroad tracks where he used to play. Glenn makes much of the self-reliance he developed in New Concord and later in the Marines. In Washington, he drives his own car everywhere and mows the lawn himself. When his wife Annie needs to come to the capital, he drives alone to the suburbs to pick her up. He does the family shopping occasionally and makes household repairs, even though he is the wealthiest of the Democratic candidates. His assets amount to $6 million, which came mostly from investments he made in Holiday Inns when he was an astronaut.

In spite of his fame and enormous exposure, Glenn at 61 is a shy, rather old-fashioned man. In the office he never removes his jacket or loosens his tie. He seems austere, but he is not a scold and does not preach to anyone. When a member of his staff first applied for a job, he told Glenn directly that he was a homosexual. Impressed by his candor, Glenn considered the matter for a couple of days, then hired him. He resists all efforts to let himself be repackaged. Aides once suggested Glenn get a speech coach, and he curtly brushed off the idea. Annie Glenn happened to be there and shouted out, "No, no one is going to change John!"Glenn's inept managerial style and habitual procrastination have haunted his campaign.

Because he has turned up his nose at cultivating political allies, he had little choice but to put his longtime Senate assistant, William White, in charge. White, 42, knows how to organize his boss's workday but has little savvy about organizing a national political drive. It is already too late in the day for Glenn's campaign to employ any direct-mail program; the candidate dithered around for months and would not make up his mind. The indecision has cut seriously into money raising. Glenn's recent spurt in the polls--he drew close to Mondale and ran 17 points ahead of Reagan--was a golden opportunity to zero in on new funds. But Glenn is still put off by the business of hustling for money. While Mondale makes hundreds of calls each week, Glenn can bring himself to make only a handful.

He misses important opportunities. Late last year Bert Lance, Democratic state chairman in Georgia and head of a coalition of Southern leaders, met with Glenn and urged him to get in touch with the group. Lance heard nothing for months. Mondale in the meantime sent his campaign chairman to see Lance for support and openly laid out his strategy. A topflight political fund raiser, Tim Finchem, approached Glenn last fall about joining the campaign. Finchem, who waited three months for an answer, finally despaired, signed on with Mondale, and has since become one of the stars of that operation.

In his office one night recently, Glenn sat back and talked about himself and his campaign. His staff had gone home, and the room was totally quiet. He puffed on one of his carved pipes, this one in the shape of a bearded monarch. Glenn is a difficult man to unpeel. After years of dealing with an accepting public, he drifts easily into platitudes. One keeps wondering what now drives him. Obviously the ambition is still great. For it, Glenn had swallowed his pride and invited even the hated Metzenbaum to his presidential announcement in New Concord in April.

Why does he want to be President? he was asked. He gazed steadily at his visitor and answered without delay. "My ambition is really for the country," he said. "You may think that's just talk, but it's what drove me in combat, it's what drove me in the space program, and it's what drives me to be President." He sounded a little unreal, as if he were speaking for the symbol he had become. Yet he sounded convinced, too, and somehow convincing.

Does he have the capacity to see a great objective and go after it? What moves him most? What does he really care about? Asked these questions, he paused cautiously. Glenn seldom shows any emotion. One remembers that when the shield of his capsule heated up alarmingly as Glenn re-entered the atmosphere, his pulse rate rose by only one beat. He said he was deeply troubled about the country's eroding industrial base. He had witnessed the huge dislocation in his own cities of Youngstown and Akron and now in other shut-down plants around the country. "These high-tech promises are too easy," he said. "The fact is that millions of people will never get these same jobs back." He was into his homework now. Government could not just stand by, he said. There had to be some kind of massive plan to help workers through the years of pain ahead. The plan would have to pay for itself eventually, of course, to satisfy the fiscally conservative Glenn. He is more liberal on social issues like abortion and busing. Last week he picked up the endorsement of liberal Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, who made a point of describing Glenn as a progressive.

It was 9:30 p.m. now, and he stayed patiently with the discussion. Glenn's strengths, in many ways, are also his weaknesses. His refusal to bend, his lack of political cleverness, his stands on principle over narrow objectives make his candidacy both uplifting and risky. Can this gutty loner reach out to people and build coalitions? Can this fussy perfectionist form a Government and make it work? These are questions that people are entitled to ask themselves about a man who wants to be President. John Glenn, war hero, space hero, champion vote getter, for the past 40 years a veritable Mr. America, still must show he can put the required pieces of the puzzle together.

--By Robert Ajemian This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.