The Press: Calm Voice from Space

Last year, when Russia sent Cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov into successive space orbits, in neither case did Soviet officialdom reveal anything about the flights until both men were safely aloft. Last week, as U.S. Astronaut John Glenn whirled three times around the globe to his place among American heroes (see THE NATION), the entire world watched his flight. If the U.S.’s open invitation scored any points in the cold war, a share of the credit belongs to Lieut. Colonel John Anthony Powers, 39, whose deep, deliberately composed voice, issuing from millions of radio and TV sets, kept up a running account of the first U.S. manned orbit.

As public affairs officer for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Project Mercury since 1959, Powers has become just about the best-known public relations man in the world. But he is not the usual picture of a PRO. By trade he is a U.S. Air Force pilot and a combat veteran of two wars.

Snatching Gliders. What “Shorty” Powers lacks in size—he is 5ft. 6 in., weighs 145 lbs.—is balanced by a deep-dyed dedication to his job and an inexhaustible ambition to be seen and heard. Too small for football at high school in Downers Grove, Ill., a westside Chicago suburb. Powers turned cheerleader instead. He is still remembered as the most boisterous crowd rouser in the school’s history. But he was just the right size—and temperament—to be a fighter pilot, and after graduation he enlisted in the Air Corps in 1942.

From then on, Shorty volunteered for duties that carried both the possibility of glory and the element of risk. He did not go into fighters but into transports, which in wartime can be just as rugged. He was one of six pilots who volunteered to learn the dangerous technique of snatching fully loaded troop gliders off the ground, later spent the tag end of the war ferrying gasoline in vulnerable cargo planes to General Patton’s command in Germany. He saw duty in the Berlin airlift of 1948-49-winged in and out of Berlin 185 times. When Korea came along, he volunteered, flew 55 night bombing missions in B-26 light bombers, collected more than his quota of flak—and ultimately the Bronze Star, the Air Medal, the D.F.C. and combat promotion to major.

In his post at NASA, Powers has developed a showman’s skill—and a banty rooster’s assurance. Scarcely anyone but newsmen and the astronauts knew who Shorty was until 3 o’clock one April morning in 1961, when John G. Warner, a young United Press International rewrite-man in Washington, roused Powers from sleep at Langley Air Force Base, Va. Russia had just orbited Gagarin, and for long minutes, Powers patiently, even graciously, resisted the U.P.I, man’s insistence on waking one of the astronauts for comment. At last, his patience exhausted. Shorty blurted the ill-advised statement that no one has since let him forget: “If you want anything from us, you jerk, the answer is that we’re all asleep.”

Telling Everything. At Cape Canaveral, a few newsmen criticize Powers for putting words in the astronauts’ mouths (“A-O.K.,” an expression attributed to Astronaut Shepard, is actually Powers’ inspiration), and for basking in the reflection of their glory (he always talks in terms of “we,” leading newsmen to call him “the eighth astronaut”). Describing what Glenn had for breakfast before last week’s launch and whom he had it with. Powers let it be known that he was there, too. “I got there a little late,” he confided to newsmen.

But Shorty earns the respect of spacebeat reporters as a man who knows his subject and puts in 30-hour days getting it to the press. He has spent as much as three hours briefing newsmen on a shoot. In NASA’s private conferences, when it is being decided what information can be released, and when cautious heads propose discretion, Shorty Powers is always the one who insists that “we’ve got to tell the news guys everything.”

By necessity, the openness with which the U.S. conducts its space shoots has put Shorty Powers in the limelight, too. He would be the last to mind. Well aware of his role, he cultivates the deep, composed voice that, to a tense world last week, suggested that the nation’s first attempt at manned orbit was no more critical than a takeoff from Idlewild. “I must not raise my voice,” says Shorty Powers. “I must give the people an objective report without any display of emotion. Millions will be hanging on my every word.” As a matter of fact, millions are.