Ordinary Supermen

Between 1959 and 1963, NASA-approved stories about American astronauts ran in 28 issues of Life. The coverage started with an 18-page spread in mid-September of 1959, which included color photographs of the astronauts in training by the famous Life photographer Ralph Morse. Later coverage would also include images of the astronauts with their families, in their living rooms, in their yards, and -- in the case of Scott Carpenter, in a 1962 piece -- camping in Colorado. The Life stories depicted America's designated star-sailors as they were on Earth. Or, at least, they claimed to.

President Kennedy, David Halberstam would note, saw Life in those early days of television as "the most influential instrument in the country." And the young executive, who had bet a hefty portion of his legacy on shooting the moon, exploited Life's power to portray the nation's newly appointed space travelers as heroic frontiersmen. "With NASA's cooperation," Mark Bynes puts it, "Life magazine lionized and sanitized the original Mercury astronauts," furthering "the process of turning the astronauts into bland good guys." Which was a process actively supported by Life's publisher, Henry Luce, a man who believed in the influential power of the photograph and whom Halberstam once called "the world's most powerful unacknowledged political propagandist." Luce's magazine, Tom Wolfe would remark, behaved toward the astronauts like the "Victorian gent": when it came to portraying the possessors of the right stuff, Wolfe noted, the magazine labored to set "the proper emotion, the seemly tone."

From science fiction to Glenn models a Mercury-era spacesuit (NASA)

One way Life accomplished this was to do the politest thing possible: let the astronauts themselves set the tone for their coverage. Several of the Life's articles about the astronauts carried the bylines of the astronauts. Which wasn't to say, of course, that they were also written by the astronauts. The Mercury Seven were helped along in their contractually literary efforts by the Life writers Loudon Wainwright, Don Schanche, and Patsy Parkin. And each of their stories contained common elements. Harlen Makemson lists it like so: "an anecdote from test pilot days, followed by descriptions of astronaut training, an acknowledgement of danger, a sense of duty in accepting the mission, and a projection of what the first flight might be like," he writes, "were elements of virtually each story."

So while "there was no explicit editorial direction" for the stories, one of the Life ghost writers noted, "the deal Life made with NASA and the seven individuals created a strong bias toward the 'Boy Scout' image, because all pieces under the astronauts' bylines had to be approved by them as individuals, as a group, and by [NASA publicity head] Shorty Powers and whomever happened to be in charge at the moment in Washington."

Gordon Cooper, Prime Pilot for the final Mercury flight, stands confidently upon his privately-owned Beechcraft Bonanza. (NASA)

That editing-by-committee approach led to stories that read, almost inevitably, as NASA press releases. In a 1973 article for the Columbia Journalism Review tellingly titled "The Selling of the Astronauts," Robert Sherrod described his visit with a team of Mercury members and the Life writers that followed in their wakes. The group passed the time rather pleasantly, Sherrod reported. One astronaut cooked steaks for the Life crew. Another made pancakes for his son's Cub Scout pack. Another told stories about his rise to astronaut-hood. The astronauts tried their hardest, in other words, to serve up a good story. "These three astronauts ... went sailing together," Sherrod noted, "though they didn't really like each other very much."