The All - American All - American

Among our college generation, war is unpleasant to contemplate, unfashionable to defend, and seems uncomfortably close. And as a consequence, military types are not afforded too many looks of glazed admiration. They tend to raise visions of General Jack D. Ripper and have suspect IQ's.

So it would be temptingly easy to dismiss Col. John H. Glenn, Jr., U.S.M.C.(ret.) and astronaut as little more than a huge boy scout made good. Tall, tanned, fit, graceful, handsome, just shy enough, pleasant, polite, friendly, modest, sincere--just think of any epithet related to "clean-cut," and it probably applies to the colonel. A country lad who went to Muskingham College, a United Presbyterian Church school in his home town of New Concord, Ohio, married the girl a quarter of a mile down the road, joined the Marine Corps in 1941 and stayed for 18 years, Glenn seems about as complicated as a cornflake. Susan Sontag would adore him.

And it is just all this conventional wholesome aura that makes Glenn remarkable. It's almost impossible to believe that he's for real, not a screen fiction or a male advertising manikin. It's almost impossible to believe he's for real, he is such an embodiment of the traditional American ideal. Describe him to a Cliffie and she would call him uncool; introduce him to her and she'd flip.

Stretched out casually on a plot of Business School grass, the setting sun glinting off his freckled pate and space capsule cufflinks, Glenn talked about himself last Thursday with a pair of Summer News reporters. He came to Harvard to address an annual summer school educators conferencet, being held this year on juvenile delinquency, at the invitation of Dana Cotton, dynamic, multi-titled Harvard administrator. They met one day when Glenn walked into Cotton's office with his son David (now Harvard '68) who was looking the University over.

To the great relief of his two-man audience, be immediately established that he neither pretends to be an expert on education nor has begun to make the after dinner circuit. (He ended up next day showing some NASA films of "Ed White's float in space" in lieu of giving a talk.)

After his 1963 orbital flight, he explained, he realized that continuing to work full-time for NASA would make him "the world's oldest used astronaut--not especially good career planning."

Looking around for some more palatable mode of existence, he thought the Senate "was something I'd be interested in. It wasn't just a personal thing. We need people in Congress with technical experience and I've had 23 years in the military, a department which takes the biggest proportion of our national budget."

Then, last fall, the man who had flown 159 missions in World War II and Korea and filled in as a test pilot in between discovered the truth of the statistic that most accidents happen in the home. While he was hanging up a mirror in his bathroom, a throwrug slid out from under Glenn and threw his head against the bathtub. The hairline crack in his skull incapacitated his sense of balance for about nine months and probably cost him the title of United States Senator From Ohio.

But a much more hellish spectre to Glenn was the possibility of permanent injury. So, characteristically, to put as much stress on himself as possible he flew as often as he could, a sort of kill or cure thereby that proved successful.

Now, Glenn serves as a consultant for NASA, keeping up with the latest details of the space program (although he ironically stayed up until 1:45 a.m. Thursday night, trying to catch a glimpse of the Mars picture on the wrong television channel.) and does a lot of work for (you guessed it) The Boy Scouts of America, In addition he is on the board of Directors of Royal Crown Cola, "purely as a matter of business, not just PR. I didn't want any part of using my name for advertising."

The 44-year-old leatherneck is almost comically nonchalant in describing his space experience, "You just go up, fly around, do your job, and come down." It's like flying an airplane, but "you're much more dependent on your physical senses," he summarizes. The closest he ever came to rhapsodizing Friday was while showing a breathtaking color slide of an astronaut's-eye view of the earth. Said he, "It's nice to look at this thing in between your chores."

Glenn, of course, is a national hero, and he takes the responsibility of the role modestly but seriously. "The flight did create a lot of attention, particularly among young people," he notes, quietly, "and this hero business does amount to something." It was 30 percent amusing, 30 percent saddening, and 40 percent embarrassing to watch middle-aged adults flocking around a reluctant but obliging "John: and asking him for his autograph "for my son who is going to be an astronaut." (The prize must go to the distinguished foreign professor who handing him the pad, confided gruffly, "Frankly, I don't give a damn, but it's for my son.")

No, collectors of Batman comic books, John Glenn, isn't "cool," but a man with his qualities doesn't need to be.