RESTORING AMERICA’S MOJO

Speechwriter, cartoonist, and author Jeff Shesol was a founding partner of Washington, DC-based consulting firm West Wing Writers. He wrote speeches for President Bill Clinton from 1998-2001. From 1994 to 1998 he wrote Thatch, a nationally syndicated comic strip. Mercury Rising: John Glenn, John Kennedy and the New Battleground of the Cold War (Norton, 2021) is his third book.

The idea of manned space flight was not new. In the mid-1950s, the Air Force, Navy, and Army each had been working on competing plans. Those rivalries drove President Dwight Eisenhower to strip the military