Glenn’s Retiring, but in Fighting Trim

“There is still no cure for the common birthday,” Democrat John Glenn told fellow Ohioans last February when he announced he would not seek a fifth Senate term next year.

But last week, as he marked his 76th birthday, the erstwhile space hero appeared to have a new lease on political life. As the lead Democrat on the Senate committee probing campaign finance abuses, he has displayed a zeal for political combat, in the process surprising some of his constituents while frustrating the committee’s Republicans.

This represents a striking departure from Glenn’s above-the-fray persona, an image grounded in the hero status he enjoys as the first U.S. astronaut to orbit the Earth.

“A lot of people in Ohio have been very surprised by the fact that he has been stridently partisan in the hearings,” said John Green, a University of Akron political scientist.

Glenn says his uncharacteristic approach is reflective of his own bruising experiences with the American way of funding elections.

He also scoffs at the notion that in the twilight of his Senate career, he has turned into a political hack, willing to defend his party right or wrong. “I haven’t kicked anybody in the pants that didn’t deserve to get kicked in the pants,” he said in an interview.

In Glenn’s view, it is the senators making up the Republican majority on the committee, led by Tennessee’s Fred Thompson, who are the ones guilty of partisanship. The GOP panel members, he charges, are more interested in “locking up a few people” than in genuine campaign finance reform, which he says is his objective.

“I have been fretting and fuming about campaign finance reform for the past 15 years,” Glenn said. “And it’s gotten worse. In the last election [the contribution process] was raised to such a new high art form that it’s ridiculous.”

Glenn learned about the vicissitudes of campaign financing the hard way when, while seeking the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination, he borrowed more than $2 million from Ohio banks in a vain effort to keep his struggling candidacy afloat.

“I don’t think he realized how hard it would be to raise money if he had to drop out of the presidential race,” said pollster Bill Hamilton, who worked for Glenn in that campaign. “He thought, ‘I’ll go out and raise it [even after dropping out] because I’m John Glenn and I flew around the Earth’ and all that.”

It didn’t work out that way. In fact, 13 years later, Glenn is still struggling to clear the loan off the books after the Federal Election Commission recently rejected his plan to pay the $1 million in principal he owes because his proposal did not cover $1.3 million in interest.

Even more searing was Glenn’s involvement, with four other senators, in the scandal centered around savings and loan executive Charles H. Keating Jr., who was trying to deter a federal probe of his business dealings. Though Glenn’s role as one of the so-called Keating 5 was relatively minor, the Senate Ethics Committee proceeded with an investigation of him. Ultimately, in 1991 the committee concluded that he was guilty of nothing more than “poor judgment” in setting up a 1988 meeting between Keating and then-House Speaker Jim Wright (D-Texas).

“That was bad stuff,” Glenn recalled. “It was the most unpleasant situation in my life.”

Looking back, Glenn acknowledges that these experiences have helped to shape his view of the imperfect system of campaign financing. “It gives me a background that few people have in knowing how to deal with this problem.”

As for the current hearings, Glenn said he thought he had an informal agreement with Thompson to conduct them in a bipartisan fashion. But then, he complained, the Republican majority abruptly issued a flood of subpoenas targeting alleged Democratic fund-raising improprieties, while holding to a relative trickle similar requests by Glenn and his fellow party members aimed at possible GOP abuses.

“That blew bipartisanship,” Glenn said.

Operating on his own, Glenn on the first day of the hearings announced an offer by John Huang, a central figure in the probe, to testify under a grant of “limited immunity.” That revelation stole part of the thunder from Thompson’s opening statement that the committee had evidence of a Chinese plot to “subvert” the U.S. political process.

Glenn also angered Republicans when he suggested his own reading of the evidence did not support Thompson’s claim.

As the hearings resume today, Glenn is looking forward to taking on the first key GOP witness--former party national Chairman Haley Barbour, who is accused of illegally funneling foreign money into Republican campaign coffers through a think tank. Barbour is scheduled to testify Thursday.

Beyond that, Glenn insists that his main goal will remain “fundamental campaign reform,” which he views as necessary to combat public alienation with politics. “I don’t think we’ll ever get taken over in this country by Russia, China or anybody else,” the former combat pilot said. “But we can become a lesser nation if our people have such cynicism that they participate less in the political process.”