MERCURY RISING:

John Glenn, John Kennedy, and the New Battleground of the Cold War

Book Review:

Jared L. Height


There is something truly awe-inspiring, if a bit frightening, about a person who is willing to have themselves strapped to the top of an eighty-two-foot tall Atlas LV-3B rocket full of explosive liquid oxygen and kerosene, have it set alight and launched into orbit over the Earth traveling at 17,500 miles per hour with no guarantee of safety or return. However, John Glenn was just that someone, and for a good reason; with the Cold War between the United States and the Soviets heating up, Americans needed him in space.


After the Soviet Union’s successful launch of the first successful satellite into space, Sputnik, in late 1957, the United States had been playing catch up in the space race ever since. Publicly, Eisenhower downplayed the country’s role in space exploration, at one point telling reporters, “It is not necessary to be first in everything.”1 However, this did little to belay America’s Cold War fears. Ultimately, he agreed that something more needed to be done, and Project Mercury was created with the goal of manned orbital flight. Jeff Shesol’s book, Mercury Rising: John Glenn, John Kennedy, and the New Battleground of the Cold War, tells the background of Project Mercury and how it aimed to reach this goal.


Shesol provides a vivid and often riveting description of NASA’s Project Mercury and its quest to send a man into space. Focusing primarily on Glenn, the book offers a rich, although somewhat sentimental, history of the program, its seven astronauts, and its relationship with the public and various government leaders. Shesol’s narrative culminates in the gripping account of Glenn’s launch in 1961. This launch had faced repeated schedule pushbacks and interrupts. It was also set against a backdrop of expanding nuclear tests between the two world powers, Kennedy’s failed Bay of Pigs in Cuba, unsuccessful diplomatic talks, and Yuri Gagarin’s successful space mission beating the United States to the punch. 


Some scenes in the book are dramatically depicted and give an appreciation for how tense the circumstances were. As Glenn was strapped into the module awaiting countdown talking to his wife, Annie, he spoke an old wartime sign-off, "I'm just going down to the corner store to get a pack of gum," as a way to calm her fears.2 Shesol underscores the intensity of the situation by then recounting the almost mechanical rapid-fire back and forth checklist that Glenn went through with NASA. At times, Shesol also explains events in almost poetic prose, observing that the sun "seemed to flatten into the horizon, almost to melt, pooling liquid light across the curve of the Earth" when describing how Glenn watched the sun set over the Indian Ocean while orbiting in the Friendship 7 capsule.3


This mission, to put a man in space, and to a significant degree, the man himself, had the power to captivate millions and bring schools, businesses, and governments to a halt as they watched the launch with excitement, apprehension, and anticipation. It also gave hope to a country that both needed to see and believe in its government's Cold War mission to demonstrate its superiority in science, technology, and ideology. Although sometimes nostalgic in its recollection, Shesol's expansion of this history is both compelling and convincing.


  1. Jeff Shesol, Mercury Rising: John Glenn, John Kennedy, and the New Battleground of the Cold War, (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2021), 151.
  2. Ibid, 258.
  3. Ibid, 266.