The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT William E. Bohn The Great Circumnavigator WE HAVE ADDED Our boy's name to the list of great round-the-world travelers. Ferdinand Magellan didn't quite make it, of course;...
...some clever and meddling Philippinos interfered with his plans...
...For once, the negativists were silenced...
...I was amused during my long day at the television set to see how popular the entire project has become...
...It was a strictly public affair...
...But one of his underlings, along with a crew of 18 other men, did finish the trip, and I never could understand why they didn't get the credit...
...On the day of the Glenn flight, even the most hidebound Congressmen seemed eager to get into the act...
...But when billions are expended in order to cultivate neighborliness with the moon, there is hardly a peep of opposition...
...Perhaps I am kidding myself...
...The speeds which were tossed about during the television broadcasts of Colonel John Glenn's flight are symbols of our violent introduction to a shockingly new world...
...The nation seemed to be pulling together for Colonel Glenn's magnificent effort...
...Though he indubitably completed the journey in person, Cook's tour took a leisurely three years...
...Making full use of our marvelous means of communication, television cameras took us from one part of the country to another in a matter of seconds...
...We were rapidly brought in touch with all sections of our geography and all classes of our citizens: From Florida to Virginia, New York to Washington, Ohio to Illinois, California to Florida—back and forth, up and down across the map of our nation...
...The major point is that attainment of this terrific speed, along with the ability to move weightlessly through space, opens up chances of sailing out and away to other heavenly bodies...
...Nowhere, from any section or any class, was a dissenting note to be heard...
...The man who does get the credit for being the first undisputed round-the-worlder is Commander James Cook, an Englishman who came a couple of centuries after the great Portuguese and had the British Admiralty behind him...
...Premier Khrushchev wrote that he hopes his country and ours may cooperate in the field of space at a very early date...
...We are ready to move ahead, it would seem, not merely out into space but into a much more daring and doubtful venture in human cooperation...
...Yet the important thing about Glenn's achievement is not that we can now speedily envelop this tiny planet—though that by itself has some importance...
...But would it not be wonderful if the unity which usually seems to come to us only in time of war, or some similar period of national stress, were to result from the great and peaceful conquest of space...
...To people who until recently have been amazed by the speed of jet planes, our broadcasters talked carelessly of whizzing through space at a rate of 17,500 miles an hour...
...On February 20, the day of the great circumnavigation, I had a notion that we Americans were achieving a degree of unity among ourselves which exceeded anything of the sort we had reached in the past...
...The President replied—without the least bit of dry hemming and hawing which usually prevents useful diplomatic communication from getting under way —that we long ago made the same suggestion and we are ready "to meet in any forum to discuss carrying it out...
...And less than 100 years ago, in the 1870s, when an imaginative French humorist set out to thrill his public with a project which seemed utterly impossible, the best he could do was describe The Tour of the World in Eighty Days...
...In the excitement of it all, I recalled that our space program has already cost a good many billions of dollars—and that this is only the beginning...
...The élan of this great sky-climbing act also carried us way beyond any heights we have hitherto reached in our relations with the Soviet Union...
...And I thought of how when any public-spirited official wants a nickel for some good cause—education, for example —up goes a cry for the need for greater economy...
Vol. 45 • March 1962 • No. 5
