Political Quotes

“Mr. President, on behalf of Senator Portman and myself, I am proud to have submitted this bipartisan resolution--joined by 18 Senators, 10 of whom served with John Glenn in the Senate. Fifty-years ago next week, on the morning of February 20, 1962, John Herschel Glenn, Jr. of Ohio became the first American to orbit the Earth. I was 9 years old. Like other families around Ohio, I watched him on television at home in Mansfield with my parents and two brothers. The broadcast also showed John Glenn, Sr. and Clara Glenn, John's parents, watching anxiously. Across the country, others were listening on transistor radios. In New York City, the subway system broadcast the liftoff and flight progress over loud speakers. In Grand Central Station, CBS News set up a large 12 foot by 16 foot screen over the main ticket window--by the time of lift-off 10,000 people had packed the terminal. Like millions of Americans, they watched Walter Cronkite set the scene. Our Nation was in the midst of the Cold War--worried about Russian nuclear aggression, worried about the race into space. Cronkite would later say that: It was a time when the intricacies of science were complicated by deep American doubts and anxieties over where we stood in the race with Russian science. With the arms race in a dead heat, space had become the scoreboard of Cold War competition.…”