Great new, lively episode with historian and author Jeff Shesol on the earliest and arguably darkest days of the Cold War and how they were inexorably intertwined with America’s space race with the former Soviet Union. The cast of characters includes Eisenhower, JFK, Khrushchev, and John Glenn. Please have a listen.
Historian and former Clinton presidential speechwriter Jeff Shesol chats about his new book, “Mercury Rising: John Glenn, John Kennedy and the New Battleground of the Cold War” just out from W.W. Norton. Shesol makes the case that the Cold War and the Space Race were inextricably intertwined in ways that are rarely appreciated in most conventional histories of the subjects. Shesol gives us a great inside look into this mostly-forgotten early era.