 Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. My name is Lyndon Nugent, and welcome to the LBJ Library. We have a wonderful program here, courtesy of the LBJ Presidential Library in Humanities, Texas. But first a couple of small points. The first is that as most of you know, Lyndon Johnson was committed to educating the people of this country. He got his start as a poor school teacher in rural South Texas, and he championed the funding of elementary, secondary, and higher education throughout his presidency. When questioned about the high cost of education, LBJ would frequently reply, if you think education is expensive, you should see the cost of ignorance. Now, our program tonight is an opportunity to do just that, to help educate the people of America. It is a great, wonderful interactive program that this library has put on for many years, because it brings us all together with an opportunity to visit with and listen to people that had the direct making and the direct carrying out of so many policies that have impacted this country. In addition, we get to spend an evening with a real American hero, and you simply cannot put a price tag on that. Now, for the second one, tonight's program tonight could not have taken place without the hard work of one man, and that is Mr. Mike Gillette. Mike has been a great friend of this library for many years. He currently serves as the director of Humanities, Texas, and is an advisor to the John Glenn School of Public Affairs. But speaking for myself, and Mark up to Grove, the director here at the library, our guest tonight is one of our childhood heroes, and we are both profoundly grateful to Mike Gillette for making this possible. Ladies and gentlemen, Mike Gillette. Thank you. I'm honored to be here. I feel a little bit like the guy that wandered through the wrong door and ended up on stage, however. Humanities, Texas is the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, another legacy of President Johnson's great society. We work with schools, libraries, and museums to advance heritage, culture, and education, and we're particularly proud to work with the LBJ Library frequently in conducting workshops for classroom teachers. Catherine Robb is a member of our Board of Directors, I'm pleased to say. The Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum attracts eight to 10 million tourists a year. And when you enter that majestic building, you encounter the milestones of flight, those celebrated breakthroughs that really charted the aviation history of this country, the Wright Brothers 1903 flyer that rose above the dunes at the Kitty Hawk, the spirit of St. Louis that carried Charles Lindberg across the ocean in 1927, and the Friendship Seven capsule in which John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth in 1962. These venerable icons, artifacts are some of the most treasured of our nation's history because they carried the men who bore this nation's hopes and dreams of conquering sky and space. But tonight we have not merely the conveyance, but the man himself half a century after his historic flight. The son of an Ohio plumber, a combat pilot in World War II in Korea, and one of the first original Mercury astronauts after he had been a test pilot in the 1950s. He had 10 years in private business before being elected to the United States Senate from Ohio and he served as a senator from Ohio for a quarter century. And then as we all know, he went back into space aboard the shuttle Discovery in 1998. His latest mission has been to encourage young people to become engaged in civic life and public service through his work on the John Glenn School of Public Affairs and you should know that when he first started thinking about this, his first stop was the LBJ School of Public Affairs to see what was happening here. Leading the conversation with Senator John Glenn is that world-class interviewer, our host and my friend Mark up to grove. So please join me in welcoming former Senator John Glenn and Mark. Thank you. Thank you. Well, Senator, welcome. We are honored to have you here today. 50 years ago last February, John Glenn made his famous orbital flight aboard Friendship 7 and became the third American and the fifth human being to venture into space. After that historic flight, Vice President Lyndon Johnson was on hand to greet him and called him a great pioneer of history. We are honored to have that great pioneer of history here at the LBJ Library and we're honored not only to have Senator Glenn but I also want to acknowledge that he brought his wife and partner of 69 years. They will be married 70 years as of April 6th of next year. Please welcome Annie Glenn as well. Senator, I'd like to start with something that I read in your memoir and found very interesting and that is that there's an object on your desk that is always there and it dates back to your childhood. It's your father's wrench. What is the significance of that object to you? Before I answer that question, let me just thank Mike for his kind remarks and Mike's been a good friend for a long time and really was instrumental in helping us start our School of Public Affairs up there. And that's when he was in the, working out of the National Archives in Washington and became a good friend and is on our board of advisors up there still and he's right that when we looked at how we were going to set up our school up there or an institute it was when it started out, this was the first place we came was down here to see what had happened here and then on out to Stanford to look at the Haas School out there and so on. So Mike's been a good friend and I don't think we would have the school up there the way it is and develop the way it is without Mike's help. So I wanted to, I'll give him a big hand myself. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much. Thank you for your time. Thank you. And so it's a pleasure to be back here again. Annie and I have spent more time here in Texas being stationed down at the space center and then previously when I went through flight training and there was later an instructor down at Corpus Christi Naval Air Flight Training down there. So we spend a lot of time in Texas feels like coming home to some extent. So I'm sorry to not answer your question directly. Oh, welcome home. Now if you repeat the question happily. I was interested to read in your memoir that your father's wrench is always on your desk. It is. What is the significance of that? Well, it's a little stills and pipe wrench about that long and my dad was a plumber and had a little plumbing shop in the small town. He was the town plumber and did new houses and so on when they were built but he worked very hard and was tough work. And my first job when I was a teenager and long in high school was during vacation periods or time periods, I'd be working with him. And that was hard work, digging septic tank holes and I hated every minute of it but that's it. But when after my dad had died and we were closing out some of the affairs and getting rid of some of his equipment, I had that and I thought I'd just keep that little wrench as a reminder that that's my heritage, the hard work that he did along with a lot of other people. And so I have, I've kept that on. I had it on my desk in Washington when I was in the Senate and I still have it at home now. And it just is a reminder to me of some of my own roots. Where did you get your love of flying? Flying was, it became, my dad and I when I was about eight or maybe nine, I think about eight years old, we drove by a little field where the fellow was taking people up for rides in an old two and open cockpit, two wing airplane. And my dad wanted to know, did I want to go up? Well, of course I did. And so he and I went up in that open cockpit with one seatbelt over both of us sitting there. And it flew around about 15 minutes or so and it was just fascinating to me to look down and see the cars and people so small down below and be able to look way out. And it was something that we didn't have a whole lot of money, of course, but after that I always built model airplanes and flew them, the old rubber band wind up models and not the kind that the airplane just snapped together now, but the old balsa ones where you really had to cut out the little pieces and put them together. And you could actually learn a little bit about flying and about airplanes from that, because we flew them and they'd crash and you'd put them back together again. But then later when I was in college in the middle of my junior year, there was a notice on the physics bulletin board that the government had a program called Civilian Pilot Training CPT and you could take that course and get a private pilot's license and get physics credit for it in college. And I thought it died and gone to heaven, that was great. And so I took that and that was in the spring of 41. And Annie was a, she was a music major and big pipe organ was very good at it. And the afternoon, the Sunday afternoon when she was having her organ recital in the chapel at the Muskingum College where we grew up in driving up to go to her recital, I heard on the car radio about Pearl Harbor and didn't tell her about till that evening. And then we decided that I was in the middle of my junior year. And since I had my private pilot's license and having gone through that CPT program, I thought it was my duty to do what I could. So I left college in the middle of my junior year and went into military training and flying. And once I got started, I loved it and never went back. You were in World War II and then under the Korean War and between the two flew in almost 150 combat missions. And that led to your being involved in the fledgling American space program. And I said, how did that come about, Senator? Well, World War II was, I was out in the islands for about a year there and then was back out in the Korean War also. And then out of that, by the time we got to the Korean War, we'd gotten to jet aircraft. And the Navy and Marine Corps had a whole stable of new aircraft just being developed and just coming out and going into tests. And I thought that'd be fascinating to be in test work and be able to improve airplanes and make them better for our country. And so I applied for that and got that when I came back from the Korean War and went through a test pilot training, then was on duty that in about three years doing test work on some of our new supersonic air, some of them supersonic airplanes, attack and fighter planes. So it was a fascinating period because there were big advances being made in aviation. And it was a great time to be doing test work because not all the bugs had been worked out of some of these airplanes yet. So we were doing a lot of good work. And so then I had just left that at a time when the space program was just starting. And so I volunteered for that and was accepted in that. And that was in the fall of 1958, beginning of 59. Had you any idea when you entered the space program that it would become as big as it would become, ultimately? No, I think people forget what the beginning of the space program really was, the man program. Excuse me. These were the depths of the Cold War. And we were under competition and there was writing about, was communism really the wave of the future in certain parts of the world and so on? It was being taken very seriously. And the Soviets at that time were claiming technical and engineering superiority and technical superiority to the United States because their spacecraft had gone up and flown and too often ours were blowing up on the launch pad. And they were using some of this to attract young people in from all over the world, give them their education in the Soviet Union and send them back out to their third world countries and they were making a lot of hay with this. And so those were really the early days of the space program that Lyndon Johnson, in fact, played such a key part in. Because when we decided we were gonna go ahead with the program, it was sort of the head of NASA was sort of selected by him and I think the history books show the very vital part that he played in the beginning of the space program. Jim Webb was selected as the first head of the new NASA National Aeronautics and Space which replaced the old National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, NACA, which had been in existence since I guess around the 1920s or 1918, something like that. So, but this was a competition with the Soviets and that's the impetus for it and the drive to get it going and get going and get caught up with something we all felt then. And it's one reason why we had such great congressional support for it, I think. We have in back of us a photograph of you with your six original seven colleagues in the Mercury program. And you've described that group as an elite group and an exclusive fraternity. What was it like to be in that very small group of? Well, we'd all been selected and there'd been, I think President Eisenhower actually made the decision that in, well, the first proposal had been that they would select, I would say, we're gonna select astronauts. Well, who are you gonna? Daredevils, parachutists, evil Knievel-type people who are gonna jump cars and underwater people, submarine, all sorts of things were suggested. And Eisenhower is one who, as I understand it, or the record shows, I think, actually made the decision that he won military test pilots and that was it. He figured we were accustomed more than anybody else to high speeds and military background that he thought was valuable. And so he's one that made that decision. But then out of that, then, there were the, NASA set up the qualification things then. You had to be under 5'11 that time, which I make by about an eighth of an inch all. That's amazing. And every time they would measure us in the space program, I'd stand up very tall and then just let it rise a little bit to make sure I still qualified. But you had to be under 5'11 college degree and test flying experience and things like that. And so there were about 100, they dropped out all the records of the people that had been through test pilot training. And I think there were about 130 some and then through a process of screening and all they worked it down to were the seven of us. Well, first off, there had been, I think maybe 160 or so that actually were qualified, but there were about 30 or 40 there that did not want to continue being considered. They want to continue with their careers the way they were. And so we, they started with this 130, whatever it was, and worked it down and then with the seven were selected and we were announced in April of 59. Was it a competitive environment? I mean, you're, you're... Oh yeah, we were all competitive as can be. You never saw seven more competitive guys in your life at one. But we were, it was a group and we were proud of being in a group and proud of each other in the group. But it was competitive because we all wanted to be on those first flights. And so it was a very competitive group. And, but when it came some, once somebody was selected, everybody then just did their job and that was it. The first flight, Alan Shepard took the first flight. Al did the suborbital flight up and down, yeah. Another suborbital flight. And then you did the orbital flight. Did you expect to be the first Senate? No, well, I wanted to be first in everything. Yeah, sorry. I'd like to be the first up and I'd like to be the first orbital too, but that wasn't the way the program worked. But no, the people say, well, how were you selected? I don't, I really do not know. Because Bob Gilruth, who was directing the program then, the main program, he called in the people that were doing our training and the physical trainers and everybody else. And then he made the decision and he made all the decisions in those early selections. So it's been a long time ago now. There are only two of us left. Scott Carpenter is still alive and we've lost all the others here. So it's a, I guess that points out our mortality eventually, but it's been, it was some experience back then that I think people forget came about because of competition with the Russians and that was the big drive of the Soviets and that was the big drive for it at that time. That's the reason we all wanted to get going and be on every flight and do what you could do. Lynn and Nugent and I were talking backstage about the fact that tomorrow is Halloween and when we were kids, every boy we knew and some girls wanted to be an astronaut for Halloween and not just any astronaut. We wanted to be John Glenn. And not with apologies to Wally Sharaw and Gordo Cooper, we wanted to be John Glenn. But- I can understand that. I don't think anybody could be prepared for that. We had, we knew that there was gonna be a lot of attention on the flight, but I don't think that the way the country picked up on this and the outpouring of feeling that came from those early flights, I don't think none of us could have anticipated that. And I don't think that was a good idea. I don't think that was a good idea. I don't think that was a good idea. I don't think that was a good idea. I don't think anybody could have anticipated that. And it was a surprise and we knew there was gonna be a tension, but the extreme outpouring of attention at that time and some of the things during a tick or tape parade, and you look over and you see very tough construction people, New York, for instance, on the building of their Wipon Tears, things, it was quite moving. My son and I rented the right stuff so I could give him a sense of things. I know that's wholly inaccurate, but there's one scene in there that is memorable and that's all the astronauts were at a reception and one Texan comes up to Alan Shepard and he says, which one are you? And he says, Alan Shepard and he says, oh, where's John Glenn? Well, the movie I recommend is Apollo 13. Right. I know the right stuff was written about us, but with all due respect, Tom Wolf's book I thought was pretty good. I like it. It's sort of stream of consciousness type writing, which I like. But when Hollywood got hold of it, they hammed it up so badly that I didn't go for the movie. It's okay as entertainment, but they advertised it as being almost a documentary of the early space days and it was anything but that. But Apollo 13, where Jim Lovell, who was a neighbor of ours down there got, when Jim got in trouble on that, that was the way they portrayed that in Apollo 13. That's exactly the way it happened. And so I always recommend that movie if people want to see a good space movie. One of the most anxious moments during your friendship seven flight was your re-entry into Earth's atmosphere and the fly by wire re-entry. Senator, can you talk about that and how it came about? Well, we'd had some troubles with the automatic control system on the flight that one of the little thrusters to the outside stuck and was wasting the peroxide. And so it meant that I was gonna have to cut the flight short and come back in if it didn't stop that. So I just pulled, turned the thing off and went to manual control. The plan had been to let it be on full automatic control for the first orbit and a half about and then try out these different systems, roll, pitch and yaw one at a time and then combine the two to see whether you can control it because there were some of the, you know, back in those days there were things that we didn't, a lot of things we didn't know what we could do and could not do. And that was one of them. Could you relate to looking outside through the little window here and actually control a three axis hand control? It didn't have rudder pedals like an airplane. We did that yaw control, which a rudder pedals do by twisting this way and pitch was this way and roll was this. And so we had practiced all this a lot. But you still had to prove that you could do this in space and orient the spacecraft the way you wanted. We all had a lot of faith that we'd be able to do this, but it's still something that hadn't been done before. And so when the automatic system failed, instead of going one axis at a time, I just cut them all off and went to manual control and that worked okay. And I stayed on that then for the rest of the flight until I got ready for re-entry. Now, what you're talking about, those were the automatic system was supposed to be used for re-entry. And there was a, there had been a, we don't have a spacecraft here that uses a model, but there was a different problem on re-entry that made it very interesting to say the least. If you're re-entering, and this is a spacecraft coming in this way and you have the heat shield under here, and on that heat shield then are your three retro rockets, which as you're in orbit coming around, they fire to slow you down enough so that your trajectory starts coming down into the upper parts of the atmosphere and slows you down and down you come. Well, there had been a, and normally then, here you come down and you fire these retro rockets and normally they are ejected into space and then you make a re-entry then coming down like this with the small part of the spacecraft back here. Coming down then with the heat shield ahead of you and it then takes care of all of the high heat, about 3,000 degrees on the face of the heat shield. What happened was that there was, and then when you come down and are getting down lower, when the shoots come out down low, then you don't have that, you don't have the retro pack on. Ordinarily when you fire the retro pack, it is ejected and you enter with a clean heat shield. Well, and then when you come down on the main parachute, there are latches pull and that whole heat shield drops about four feet down and it's like a rubber bag so you're landing in like on an air pillow. And the indicator, there were two ground stations received radio signals from the spacecraft that latch pulling had already occurred in space, which meant then if you're coming back in and the heat shield is just flopping around out here, the whole thing's gonna burn up probably. So what they decided to do and what they recommended which I did was make a re-entry after firing the retro rockets to slow down made the decision to leave those retro rockets in place because they were attached onto the spacecraft with some metal straps in the hopes that that retro pack being on there would help hold the heat shield in place until we got through the high heat of re-entry. Well, and so that's what we did, left it on. Well, it made for a very unusual re-entry in that during re-entry when you got high heat, the retro pack then burned off and there were big chunks of, and you're going this direction if I was in the spacecraft right now. So you're looking back along the track from what you just came and there were chunks of this burning off and coming around and I could see them out the window here. And that was interesting. So, anyway, it made for a very spectacular re-entry from where I was and it won't be repeated because we don't use that same kind of re-entry technique now. But it was, that's a long explanation of your short question here, but I should have brought along a model, I guess, so we could explain that better. But anyway, the automatic control system, when we came time for re-entry, I turned it on and the manual system both on. I had everything working during re-entry to take care of the vibrations and the rocking back and forth of spacecraft during re-entry. Well, 36 years after your historic friendship, seventh flight, you went back into space and became the oldest human being to do so at the age of 77. You have to keep bringing that up. That's what you're doing. As part of the space shuttle, sure. I'm gonna use this as one entry segue into this. I just thought you'd be interested in this. I received a letter from a boy in Illinois. This is an actual letter. I'm not making it up, it's true. And here's what he told me. And he writes this and he says, hi, I'm so-and-so and I'm nine years old. I'm in the third grade in such a school. I wish you'd come just recently. I had to do a biography report and I picked you because I wanted to learn more about the first American to orbit Earth. I loved reading about your life. When I had to do my presentation, I made a poster and dressed up like an astronaut. Then he asked a couple more questions. Then he finishes with this. I'm glad you're still alive because a lot of my classmates biography choices are already dead. I hope you write back. That kid got the fastest answer back you ever. No, I lost my whole train of thought. What led you going back into space at the tender age of 77? Well, two things really. One, I was in the Senate of course and during preparation for one of the votes on some of the astronaut space budget, I noted that NASA had charted some 52 changes in the human body that occur in space if you're up there for a number of days. There were about eight or nine of these things were very similar to the process of aging right here on Earth. For instance, the body's immune system changes in space. Well, you become less resistant to disease and infection up there for a while. You recover from that when you come back. But that happens to the older folks, most older folks right here on Earth. The body's ability to replace protein in the muscles changes up there. And the changes for old folks right here on Earth, some other things like that too. So the idea was that if we went up there, if it sent somebody up there that was already 75 to 80 in that age range, that these things had already happened to here on Earth, would this be additive? Or could we by comparing the reaction of the older person with the younger crew members maybe come up with something, some lead to what changes these, what turns these systems on and off in the human body? And maybe lead us to not only being able to have younger astronauts stay in space longer without harmful effects, or it might also enable us to learn some things about taking away some of the frailties of old age right here on Earth. So that was fascinating. And I talked to some of the NASA doctors about it. And they had been thinking about looking into some of this. It turns out for some time. And so I proposed that we do such a project and that also proposed that I'd be the one to do it. And of course, Dan Golden, who was the director of NASA at that, the administrator of NASA at that time, said that I'd get no freebies on waivers on physical exams or anything like that. And so I was able to pass physical exam and so that was that. But so we had experiments we did up there. While I was up there, I had 21 different body parameters, head, neck, and spandex, vestor, respiration, heart rate and volume, and EKG being monitored, sent down for four days with all that ray going. And I wish I could say that we had made some great breakthrough discovery. We didn't. But I still hope that they go ahead and I've talked to NASA about this, about continuing some of these experiments because, you know, in science, an example of one doesn't mean anything. And it was one in your typical scientific jargon. But if we had a, say, five or six people in this same age bracket that had been up there, then we know that's something that that's enough data then that you know there's no use to follow that or it gives us some lead to continue. And so that's what I hope we do one these days. So now the other reason for going back up again was the after my first flight in 62, and this sounds very unhumble and maybe it is, but it's what's in the books anyway. I wanted to go back up again second time want to get in rotation and go back up again. And they said, no, they didn't want me on rotation again and wanted me to do some management of training and things which I didn't much want to do. And this went on for about a year and a half that I wasn't being put back on again. I kept asking about it and they kept saying, well, headquarters doesn't want you to go up again right now. And so finally I gather I wasn't going to fly again then and always want to go up again. And later on in a biography of President Kennedy, this came many years later. This was a decade or more later. There was a biography came out in which they said that he had didn't want me to go up again at that time on whether it be if something happened, whether it be the political fallout from it or what. But he had told Nancy just, you know, I wasn't used again right then and I didn't know that at the time. It's because you were a national hero and he didn't want to whatever I was anyway. Anyway, the but that was the reason for it. So I had always wanted to go up again. I was sorry. I didn't get a second flight. And actually, I'd like to have been on one of the moon flights, but that's the I told Neil. Neil's a good friend. Of course, he died a short time ago. He's big loss. But I told Neil. I'm not given to fits of jealousy of anybody. But for him, I'll make an exception. We we hear constantly about our mounting federal deficit. But given our financial constraints, what should our goals in space be at this time in our history? Well, we're not at a very good time period right now in our space program because I don't know that most people know this or not, but we can't even send a we can't we don't have a way of sending our own people up to our own space station right now. We have to contract with the with the Russians and we send our people over and they're launched out of Kazakhstan and go up to our we pay him $60 million per astronaut to go up to station and bring him back down again after they've been whatever their term is up there because of the decision to do away with the space shuttle. And I disagreed with that. I think it was a mistake and it was a didn't have happened back in 04 and President Bush decided that he wanted to change the direction of NASA and made a speech in January of 04 to do exactly that. And they're going to establish a base on the moon. But said at the same time, we're not going to NASA was not going to have an increased budget to do this. Well, that's a little flaky to begin with. I thought but anyway, this was a NASA had to do this out of their current budget and to do this, he said that we're going to end the space shuttle at the end of 2010 and end the space station by 2015. And the space the space shuttle, they're expensive each flight was running about $400 million. So it's a way to save money. But I think to set a new goal like that and then cut out our own or the only means we had of getting our own astronauts in the space in what I think the most wonderful transportation system ever put together in that shuttle. It's just an amazing amount of complexity and technology in it. And I hate to see us do away with that, but that was a decision was made and the shuttle went down in 2010. So we have to launch our people with the Russians now and the constellation was canceled by President Obama then later on and went to this private idea of private industry competing then to design the new spacecraft. I met with President Obama in the summer of 2010. I guess it was and tried to get him to reverse the shuttle thing. I thought that we should have a replacement for the shuttle before we do away with it. And he said, well, we're that was when we were in the middle of some of the recession crunch. And he said, we just too much as he didn't disagree with my right now for it at all and just said we didn't have the mind to do it. So that's where we stand right now. So we're we're in the process. We have major three different contractors that are privately developing spacecraft space X that has made several launches recently with success is one of them. The Sierra Nevada is another one that's working on that. And Steve Lindsey are good friends from that flight is up there running their flight operations on that now and in Colorado and he'll do a good job on that of course and so they're going to be competitive in there and then there's one other Boeing I think is still looking at this also. So we'll have out of that private effort we will have somebody will finally provide the spacecraft that we'll be able now to go back and forth to our station. The station has been Obama did extend the station out to 2020 at least and talks are underway to extend it to sort of an indefinite period beyond that. And I think that's very important because it's the most unique laboratory ever put together. We can do the most unique research there. We don't know exactly what they we may find out of that but it's the ability to do basic research is so important to this country and keeping us ahead of the rest of the world and to me this is sort of the epitome of what we can do in in in with spacecraft and you say well what goods are going to be why who knows that's what research is all about remind of the old what the Disraeli the British prime minister was visiting a laboratory where Faraday had developed bottles of sparks would jump from one to the other and he said what good is it and Faraday replied what good is a baby. That's the story the story is told I wasn't there I'm not quite that old but but it's an example anyway of what do you know about research. Well we know that if we know one thing about this country it's that we we we were founded with a an emphasis on the individual that led us to give more education to more people and wound up with the best educated citizenry and then we had put more money into basic research and exploration in the laboratory micro as well as macro the big exploration to the West Coast and all but but micro exploration in the laboratory as well and that we learned the new things first with an educated citizenry and a little bit of investment and wow we just we we went from being a nothing nation on the East Coast in along about 1776 to by 1900 125 years later we're leading the world and I think that little formula is every bit as important today as it's been anytime in our history and this that's that's a shorthand for why I support the space station as much as I do and work for it while I was in the Senate. I want to talk about your years in the Senate but before I leave your aviation days I was interested to read in your memoir that you had occasion to be Charles Lindbergh you called every pilot's hero and you said you you felt a certain kinship with him can you talk about that meeting. Well yeah in World War II the old we were flying the the course there the old inverted gall wing Navy and Marine Corps fighter and it had a lot of problems starting out and the Navy had to take it off ship and it had some changes made to it. Well Lindbergh by that time was working for United aircraft I think it was up in New England and then he was he was flying doing some of the flying on checking out some of these things on the course there and he made the rounds of a number of squadrons and flying this airplane around the country to different squadrons to show the the changes that had been made and how good they were and how they worked and we were training in El Centro California at the Marine Corps air station there at the time he came to stop there and and several of us were able to fly his airplane the new airplane. Well then later on I was in a squadron out in the Pacific in the islands and he came out there later on and actually flew some missions with some may fill a couple of missions out of the squadron I was in so I didn't get to know him well but I did have a chance to meet him anyway. Lindbergh Glen I sort of captures the imagination. You entered into public service in 1974 as a US senator from your native state of Ohio. Why did you choose to go into public service? I guess it started back in high school. I had a teacher in high school who taught a course called civics and it was a study of government and politics and I guess growing up in a small Midwestern town it was sort of a you're just expected to be patriotic as far as that part of it went but this course in civics he was a wonderful teacher and he had a lot of examples and things and he just made this study of civics and government come sort of come alive with examples of people and so on and I always thought after took his course that one of the greatest things you could ever do would be to to represent other people in public office and I had no idea I'd ever be able to do that but later on after then when I was leaving NASA after the space flight and thought about what I wanted to do why decide maybe I my name was well enough no maybe I could do that and it wasn't something I had ever really thought that I would be able to do and so I ran and and lost first time I lost in the primary 1964 1964 and I lost in the primary and then Amy and I had to sit down and decide that we really want to continue with this because I had had a business connection at that time I was involved with and so we decided that the I hadn't been the person I was running against at that time and lost in the primary he'd been very active in the Democratic Party in Ohio and it contributed money to a number of different places and and it was a and so it was something I'm not making excuses for having lost I lost that was it but it was a narrow lost by only 13,000 votes in Ohio which was a pretty tight race and we decided that we would stick with this and so for the next four years I made the rounds of every rubber chicken dinner in 22 caliber peas and and not that the Democrats don't eat well don't we do but made the rounds and then the next time I made it and it was in the center for 24 years the center spoke to a number of students at the lbj school public affairs today and center when you were there you told a very moving story about Daniel anyway which really reflects the differences between Washington when you first entered into politics and Washington today would you mind relating that story yeah well I was talking we were talking about the civility in government and what's happened to us and and I think part of the problem is just that we've gotten so unsocial in Washington by the requirements of getting back home to campaign and so you only really are in there voting maybe three days a week or something like that and and the other days you may be in session but no everybody knows there's not going to be votes on those days and so it's and there's a lot less of the social life I think than there used to be and some of this is also because of the extreme amount of money it has to be raised to run so the day people are elected they start running for office again and raising money again and so just there isn't the same type social thing and I used as an example of one of the things that Bob Bird who is majority leader for a long time in the US Senate and Bob was somewhat of a controversial figure in his own regard but he started something that I think we ought to do again and it was a yet an evening where you invite all the senators Republican Democrat everybody and wives to a big dinner in the Senate caucus room and this he do this maybe every six weeks or eight weeks something like that and you're supposed to mix it up don't sit at table with somebody you knew and so you get get acquainted with somebody else and they and there'd be some entertainment the Republicans had these four senators that had gotten together and they love to do barbershop quartet type singing and so they and they weren't bad they were pretty good and so they'd they performed a couple of times and Bob Bird was a he'd been a championship fiddler in his younger days people didn't know that and and he performed a couple of times and then one time was Danny Inouye and Danny Inouye is a senator from Hawaii he was in the one of these Japanese battalions that was sent into Italy had an arm shot off and so when he was back and one day he he had volunteered to be to entertain at one of these things and what do you want to do we want to play the piano when he's one handed they said Danny you can't get that nope he wanted to play well then he told this story about how when he was at the recovery in the for a year or so after he had the arm shot off and they had crafts and things like that and teach people to play instruments and so on and he told him he wanted to play the piano he said no Danny only got one he said nope he wanted to play the piano he always wanted to do that and he was one handed well then he he and that night he told this story and then performed and played O'Danny boy and I'll tell you there wasn't a dry eye in the place well it's just little things like that little personal vignettes relationships of people that I think we have to get back to not that not that he has to perform all the time I didn't mean that but but these these things where you sort of have people know their personal experiences you know their families better I would like to see his friends in Washington this would be an upset of course but I'd like to see us have people voting from Monday morning at nine o'clock to Friday afternoon at five o'clock and straight through and you're going to stay in Washington that period and go that way for a while and then maybe have two weeks off while people go home and campaign and now they're running out of Washington back and forth all the time there's very little socializing and and there's more to it than just socializing it's the money that's involved in in the Supreme Court ruling on this united decision as it's called last year where now you can have anybody can give any amount and we have a our Senate race in Ohio shared Brown who's the incumbent senators being challenged now and some of the big the Carl Rove and some of his the pack there and the other the Koch brothers and so on shared by Relection Day estimates that they will have spent 30 million dollars against him in a Senate race and it's higher by far than anything ever done anywhere in the United States I think so we have to crack some of this money thing along with it to get back to civility and government but I think some of this just having more of a social contact type thing I think would help also far more money will be spent in this year's presidential race you yourself ran for president in 1984 there's a picture of that you would have to bring that up what did you learn from that experience I learned not to do it the way I did it's not a very good joke either but it's true well it's an experience that you'll you never forget that's for sure it's a big effort yeah and if I had to do over again and was in that same position I would you know they so much what you have to be out there we got this event plan and so on so on and I didn't think things were going right and I wanted to come off the road and reorganize and if I had done that I don't know the things would have worked out differently but I think it might have been a different approach to it but I was not that well organized for it and I saw that the ideas I had and what I was putting forward I firmly believed in those things but the way the campaign was organized just didn't sit and that was that was way back that was in the mid 1980s right so it's a long time ago now this presidential race will boil down to what happens in the battleground states perhaps the biggest battleground is your home state of Ohio what will happen there soon what happened not to put you on the spot but that's really often I'll tell you what I've tell a lot of other people I think that I think Ohio is gonna go for Obama I think it'll be tight it'll be a tight race he was up by about seven points on polling and I think it's running about four points now but that's from a number of different polls are about four points and I if I had to guess I guess it would hold about that I don't think we know what's going to happen now because of this hurricane up there were neither where they're not out on their able to go out and campaign and I think Obama is doing exactly what he should do he's got responsibilities as president in a situation like this and he went back to Washington that's what he's doing that's what he should do now well there's losing votes I don't I don't really know but I guess we love all the reasons why I feel the way I do I guess we'll leave out unless we give somebody equal time to come up and you've known ten presidents in your fifty years in the public eye John F. Kennedy forward are any of those men particularly memorable for you well they're all memorable their own way we talk about them briefly John F. Kennedy what what are your thoughts well I'm not going to get an analysis of every president but Kenny very personable had great ideas for the country I think and some of the things he was doing as well as trying to give everybody an equal opportunity I think we're very good and I think that's been key to me all through whoever I did know was this country is founded on on the on the opportunity we provide our people more than any nation in history and we can argue all day about whether some of it is is right politically or is it do we have too many social programs or what what do we do there I grew up in any and I grew up in a great depression so maybe I was some maybe some of my thinking got warped a little bit by that but we were early teenagers in the great depression and our house at that time our home faced the old national road route 40 that went through the first road to go clear cross country and it was not unusual at all a number of times I remember people walking up and knocking on the front door and telling mother they hadn't had anything to eat never hungry and wonder if she could give them something to eat and she always would fix them up late and they'd sit down on the back steps and and eat and things like that and you just there were there were four years where unemployment was over 20% one year it was right at 25% and there just wasn't any money well some of the programs were put in back then government programs did bring us out of that and didn't do it perfectly and we're not coming back perfectly right now but our problems are less than I think they were back then so we've come through some of these big times in the past and I think we'll I think we'll we learn better how to control some of these things and and those were those were tough days back then and people I remember in Columbus Ohio where we have a home now and spend most of our time I remember a my dad and I drove to we're up there one time and I saw a line of people I sort of said something about wonder what all that lineup is and he said oh they're waiting to get something to eat at the soup kitchen he knew where the thing was around there so there was that kind of stuff going on in our own lives that we don't read about we knew it we lived it right and and my dad had you know had the plumbing shop and when he was out doing plumbing jobs mother would be there and she'd tend the store where they had fixtures and all this kind of stuff for sale too but then in the Great Depression there wasn't any plumbing work who was going to pay to have a drain unplugged or you know it was building new homes and my dad actually went to work on WPA they're putting a new new one of WPA projects was to put a new water system in our little town and my dad wound up going on WPA and the one of the things at that time that I remember one of the most disturbing conversations I ever heard between my dad and mother was my dad saying he thought that we didn't have money to pay the mortgage and we're going to lose the home and I knew some other kids who had had that happened to them and I couldn't imagine where we're going with the going to split up the family we're going to do this going to do that and boy that was horrifying and when WPA came in well and then FHA came in they could make longer loans and stretch the loans out and that saved our house so does government have a role in these things yes I don't I don't buy this thing at the government should the defense is the only thing the government should do I think that the and support for for most of the social programs not all of them but most of the social programs the support has been pretty much across the board for for expenditures that we're going to be for everybody's good and it was President Eisenhower one of his great legacies that he was criticized some for at the time and had to really make a sales program on was of all things the interstate highway system and he finally he thought that was a great idea for the country and he finally sold the idea and got it through on the basis it was good for defense that if we ever were attacked in this country we'd be able to shuffle trucks and things around all over the place well it's revolutionized this country and it was a government thing that did it and should we have left that to the states that's what some of the people are good at the time now I don't think so and I'm not I'm not for developing a socialized society but my judgment when I was in the Senate was always based on this if we have a problem that everybody in the country faces together can we then devise a solution to help those concerns since all people face this whole thing together and that to me is sort of the judgment of whether we we should have federal programs versus letting the states do their own thing and that's that's one of the big arguments this time of course you've been you spent the last 15 years encouraging young folks to get in active in public service through as as Mike mentioned the John Glenn School of Public Affairs at Ohio State University tell us about the work that you're doing there well we're doing it it's worked out very well one of the other things I should imagine just a moment ago Lyndon Johnson's great society where he had really some and it came from some of his own experiences when he was a kid right where we are an hour in this general area here in Texas so anyway the Glenn School up there Mike Mike Gillette when he was in the archives up there and I was leaving the Senate after looking around recommended that we put all of our records and things back there at Ohio State where they had a good archival facility and they were interested in starting a Glenn Institute of Public Affairs which I was very interested in doing too when I retired in the Senate I didn't want to retire retire and go sit on the front porch someplace we want to do some continue doing some good if we could and so through that we had the through putting the things or artifacts and things up there that that they can use for either all the Senate records they use for some sort of study of what a Senate office was like during that period I was in there and they have that organized now and they're computerizing it so that it'd be available to people that want to do any research on something like that and the but the school then was an institute and it gradually is now changed into through some acquisitions and so on it's now a full fledged School of Public Affairs with an undergrad program and a master's program and doctoral program and the forecast were that it was by this time we'd be fortunate if we had a grand total in this thing of 175 to 200 people and we're already over 500 so it's going well that's great and like everything else what we need is is money to expand but it's doing well and we are are in the process of the person has been directing it up there is is retiring so we're in a process of searching for a new start of search committee for a new director very shortly and I hope that we not only go we've gone in the 240 some schools of public affairs around the country we've moved up to where we're about 20 listed by us news and some of those people as listing us is about 29 in this area of excellence so we're building fast and then getting a good a good faculty and and we look forward to this and I hope we can branch out and do some things in this civics area back in the high schools where I got my interest to begin with we mentioned a while ago I was interested in seeing and I don't know how many of you get prayed magazine in the Sunday supplement occasionally but in the September 30th issue was recounting what Sandra Day O'Connor former Supreme Court Justice has done right and it was a very interesting because it's something I had talked about some of in Ohio is is a she's got a real outreach program and it's computerized and it attracts is it's built I think Baylor helped her design this thing and the they have a design for the kids interest now where the kids are all going around tweeting blogging tweeting twattering twill whatever they do to each other and if they it's designed for the kids that are used to punch the button and seeing something come up and it's all designed for the different age groups and it's very interesting and I hope that in the near future we may be able to combine forces with what she's doing and do some things like that in Ohio and maybe expand it to other states too she was in this very auditorium and did that that civics program just about a year ago really she was yeah I hadn't been aware of it I don't think the thing has been very well publicized and I was glad to see this thing and prayed magazines is exactly what we talked about up there and because and the reason I feel strongly about it is I think I think most kids as a come out of grade school that's sort of a insular type thing I guess and when they get to junior high or high school that's where kids interest so hey there's a big world out there and they really suddenly realize they're part of it and I think it's where their interest maybe in government and politics can be wedded a little bit or can be encouraged at that level more than it can maybe at the college or university level I think by the time most kids get to college or university sort of have they may sort of have their ideas sort of made up about their relationship to their country and and if we can if we can help influence that in earlier age and I think that's well worthwhile. Well senator Lyndon Nugin put it aptly you are indeed an American hero. We are great for you for you being here tonight. Thank you so much. Well thank you all. Thank you.