B6 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22 , 2020
Book World
THE LAST
AMERICAN
HERO
The
Remarkable
Life of John
Glenn
By Alice L.
George
Chicago Review.
316 pp. $30heroism than on any medical results. And
having moved through all of Glenn’s life
without ever deviating from his own recount-
ing of it, the busy final 17 years between his
memoir and his death are only hastily covered
in this book’s epilogue. It’s a missed opportu-
nity to tell us something new.
As an overview of a fascinating career, this
book concisely shows how, despite technologi-
cal leaps such as the space race, human
character is what will always fascinate us
most. We learn a lot about what Glenn did, but
we never learn why he did those things or who
he was, which would be key to what the author
promised to explore. Glenn was a complex
man from a complex age, far deeper and more
interesting than this book suggests.Francis French is a space historian and, with
astronaut Al Worden, a co-author of “Falling to
Earth: An Apollo 15 Astronaut’s Journey to the
Moon.”was behind the public image are unlikely to
find it in this book. Times when we obtain a
deeper glimpse of Glenn’s character — such as
how a deeply religious man felt dropping
napalm on people during combat — are refer-
enced from his memoirs. Often-disputed sto-
ries, such as President John Kennedy’s alleged
grounding of Glenn after one spaceflight, are
never fully examined, they are simply repeat-
ed. Glenn’s wife, Annie, a fixture of his life so
consistent that they almost operated as a
single individual, is a ghostlike figure in this
book whom we never get to know.
In 1997, Glenn announced that he would
retire from the Senate at the end of his term in
1999 and immediately set his sights on per-
suading NASA to fly him in space again.
Glenn’s reasoning — that it would allow the
agency to test the effects of space on seniors —
is never questioned here, although NASA’s
decision was based far more on political
support, public excitement and the nature ofsecondhand accounts of what happened to
illustrate how, for a brief time, John Glenn
became the person a whole nation followed in
space.
The book has moments of intriguing in-
sight. It is illuminating to see Glenn in the
America of 1968, a very different place from
the one that made him famous, campaigning
for Bobby Kennedy on a civil rights platform.
To understand Glenn’s sorrow when he had to
tell Kennedy’s children that their father had
been murdered is heartbreaking. Glenn, it
seems, had changed along with the 1960s, and
we glimpse the molding of the political candi-
date ahead, one who would run for president
in the 1980s.
George’s description of the Sen. Glenn of the
next few decades — bland, indecisive and a
dull public speaker — seems a long way,
however, from the “last hero” she promised.
Readers also hoping for the promised insight
into Glenn’s personality and a look at who heT
here could hardly be a more provoc-
ative book title than “The Last
American Hero” to examine a figure
from 20th-century history. Not only
might a reader wonder what the
word “hero” denotes here, they may also
puzzle why there can be no more heroes to
follow.
John Glenn, the third American to fly in
space, veteran of two wars, former senator, is
certainly a fine, honorable choice for such a
biography. Glenn — like Neil Armstrong, Buzz
Aldrin and Sally Ride — transcends the genre
of space history and is known to the general
public, even if only as a vague memory of one
who flew into orbit during the dawn of the
space race. This is the first major book to tell
Glenn’s story since his death in late 2016 at age
95, so the perfect time for analysis and evalua-
tion of his life. Author Alice George also has
the chance to analyze more objectively than
Glenn’s own comprehensive 1999 memoir.
George’s biography breezes through Glenn’s
busy, ever-changing career with promises to
examine his life in an inspirational way, seeing
him as a memorial to a more honest time
before the Watergate era of national cynicism.
It’s a well-worn approach historians have used
to describe Glenn for almost half a century.
George makes a good case that Glenn was
heroic without being perfect. Perfection is not
realistic nor human — but Glenn here certain-
ly comes close to being a hero from central
casting, with a life in public service, a lifelong
marriage to a woman he met as a toddler and a
general sense of always trying to do the decent
thing. He was confident without being cocky,
combative only at moments of righteous in-
dignation, safe and steady as a senatorial
policymaker, reliable as a pilot.
One of the original Mercury astronauts,
Glenn was chosen by NASA in a team of seven
to fly America’s first space missions. Like the
others, he was surprised that this group —
selected to focus on engineering test flights
and medical scrutiny — became instant celeb-
rities, feted as national heroes years before the
rockets were ready to fly them. Unlike the
other six, however, Glenn sensed both oppor-
tunity and responsibility, rising to the chal-
lenge of speaking as a national representative
during the height of the Cold War. He captured
an all-American ideal that the other, worldlier
aviators did not care to exude, and George
chronicles through numerous press reports
how Glenn came to represent NASA and
America far more than his peers and bosses
ever expected.
This may go some way to explaining why
Glenn’s first spaceflight grabbed national at-
tention in a way the two American missions
preceding his did not. Few generally recall the
third person to do something, yet Glenn is the
only one the public remembers. George
whisks through news clippings and laterBIOGRAPHY REVIEW BY FRANCIS FRENCHAnother portrait of John Glenn as an inspirational, if imperfect, hero
ROBERT A. REEDER/THE WASHINGTON POSTJohn Glenn, center,
trains at Johnson
Space Center in
Houston for his
return to space, at
age 77, in 1998.
Glenn had been one
of the original
Mercury astronauts
and became the first
American to orbit
the Earth in 1962.ROME IS
BURNING
Nero and the
Fire That
Ended a
Dynasty
By Anthony A.
Barrett
Princeton.
334 pp. $29.95mentioned by Barrett, perhaps has greater
claims as a classical watershed. It ended
Antony’s and Cleopatra’s aspirations to re-
shape the Roman Empire by softer Greek
concepts of “harmonia,” and it precipitated
the end of the 500-year-old Roman Republic,
which had some elements of democracy, and
replaced it with an imperial dictatorship that
could produce a Nero.
Whatever the case, “Rome Is Burning” is a
lucid analysis of Nero and the Great Fire,
enhanced by Barrett’s clear, engaging style, his
obvious love of his subject, and an extensive
selection of maps, schematics and photo-
graphs. Historically minded visitors to Rome
as well as Roman-history enthusiasts will
appreciate the erudition and context with
which he illuminates one of the great stories —
and personalities — of the ancient world.Diana Preston is a historian and author. Her latest
book is “Eight Days at Yalta,” about the 1945 Yalta
Conference.Roman coinage at one stage fell to 80 percent
— also alarmed them. Convinced that Nero
had become a self-aggrandizing liability, they
decided he must go.
Nero was the last of the Julio-Claudian
dynasty, which had ruled Rome since the first
emperor, Augustus. Henceforth emperors
would compete for the throne. Barrett sug-
gests that the political and economic instabili-
ty wrought by this regime change — together
with radical building innovations initiated by
Nero in the wake of the fire, such as using
concrete to produce dramatic, distinctive
vaulting that revolutionized Roman architec-
ture — makes the event a tipping point in
classical history. “Rome Is Burning” is part of
Princeton University Press’s “Turning Points
in Ancient History” series.
This is an intriguing argument. Nero’s
death was certainly followed by political tur-
moil — the notorious “Year of the Four Emper-
ors.” Yet significant though the fire’s impact
was, the Battle of Actium a century earlier, andthe rumors, some even suggesting that Nero
sang about the destruction of Troy while
watching his city go up in flames. (The idea
that Nero “fiddled while Rome burned” was a
still later embellishment — Romans did not
have fiddles.) A particularly potent and dubi-
ous part of the mythology, repeated in novels
like Henryk Sienkiewicz’s late-19th-century
“Quo Vadis,” is that, to deflect suspicion from
himself, Nero blamed Rome’s Christians for
the fire, orchestrating wholesale and grue-
some public executions. Barrett shows the sole
source of this idea to be a short — fewer than
100 words — and much-disputed passage by
Tacitus.
What seems clear is that the Great Fire
created a gulf between the emperor and the
Roman elite. Many resented being expected to
help pay for Nero’s grandiose plans to rebuild
Rome, including the construction of his ex-
travagant Domus Aurea (Golden House). The
debasing of the currency in the fire’s after-
math — the proportion of pure silver inT
he name Nero immediately conjures
an image of a demented, olive-
wreathed emperor demonically fid-
dling in the red glow of a burning
Rome — a picture that has endured
to modern times, providing irresistible fodder
for plays, operas, films, even rock songs. In
“Rome Is Burning: Nero and the Fire That
Ended a Dynasty,” historian Anthony A. Bar-
rett, professor emeritus at the University of
British Columbia, navigates through the com-
plex evidence surrounding the Great Fire of 64
A.D. to show that much popular perception of
Nero is illusory.
The written sources’ paucity, obvious bias
and distance in time from the event, together
with ambiguities in the archaeological evi-
dence — Barrett draws on new research here —
present formidable obstacles. As he disarm-
ingly and frankly acknowledges, little is cer-
tain beyond that the fire started near the
Circus Maximus and, with a brief respite,
burned for nine days. The wind-whipped
blaze’s precise extent and the number of
casualties, as people ran through narrow
streets to escape, can only be guessed. By an
ironic quirk of fate, later fires, particularly one
in 80 A.D., destroyed many records of this
earlier conflagration. “Rome Is Burning” is
therefore an analysis of the causes and broad
course of the Great Fire and its political,
economic and architectural consequences,
rather than a detailed narrative of events and
people.
Perhaps, as Barrett suggests, no comparable
historical disaster is so closely associated with
one individual. Barrett shows how, on becom-
ing emperor in 54 A.D., aged just 16, Nero was
Rome’s “Golden Boy” — a “people’s emperor.”
Yet just four years after the fire, his position
untenable, he took his own life. Deducing how
and to what extent the fire contributed to this
is tricky. The three main textual sources are
Tacitus, Suetonius and Cassius Dio, none of
them Nero’s contemporaries, thus reliant on
earlier sources, and all hostile to him. As a
scholar who has written widely on imperial
Rome, including about Nero’s reign, Barrett —
who provides translations of the three ac-
counts — guides the reader expertly through
the complexities of interpretation, giving an
object lesson in handling sources.
In so doing, he dismisses as “very unlikely”
the suggestion that Nero ordered the burning
of his capital — an act that would have been
both illogical and difficult. In explaining why
contemporaries suspected he did, he lays
some responsibility on the emperor himself.
In the aftermath of the fire — as so often with
disasters — grieving, homeless survivors
wanted someone to blame, and Nero seemed a
credible villain. After all, this was a man who
had had his own mother, Agrippina, mur-
dered, and also his wife.
Subsequent generations of writers built onHISTORY REVIEW BY DIANA PRESTONW hat was Emperor Nero really doing while Rome burned?
HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGESEmperor Nero
surveys the damage
in Rome after the
Great Fire of 64
A.D. One dubious
story holds that he
blamed, and
punished, the city’s
Christians for the
devastating blaze.