John
Glenn, a freckle-faced son of Ohio who was hailed as a national hero
and a symbol of the space age as the first American to orbit Earth, then
became a national political figure for 24 years in the Senate, died on
Thursday in Columbus, Ohio. He was 95.
Ohio
State University announced his death. Mr. Glenn had recently been
hospitalized at the university at the James Cancer Center, though Ohio
State officials said at the time that admission there did not
necessarily mean he had cancer. He had heart-valve replacement surgery
in 2014 and a stroke around that time.
He had kept an office at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs, which he helped found, and also had a home in Columbus.
In
just five hours on Feb. 20, 1962, Mr. Glenn joined a select roster of
Americans whose feats have seized the country’s imagination and come to
embody a moment in its history, figures like Lewis and Clark, the Wright
brothers and Charles Lindbergh.
To
the America of the 1960s, Mr. Glenn was a clean-cut, good-natured,
well-grounded Midwesterner, raised in Presbyterian rectitude, nurtured
in patriotism and tested in war, who stepped forward to risk the unknown
and succeeded spectacularly, lifting his country’s morale and restoring
its self-confidence.
It
was an anxious nation that watched and listened that February morning,
as Mr. Glenn, 40 years old, a Marine Corps test pilot and one of the
seven original American astronauts, climbed into Friendship 7, the tiny
Mercury capsule atop an Atlas rocket rising from the concrete flats of
Cape Canaveral in Florida.
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