Politics & Power Quote by John Glenn

It lands like a breach of protocol: an astronaut, trained to embody calm competence and patriotic mission, accusing his own government of chemical betrayal. Glenn’s parenthetical - “(the DOE)” - is the tell. He’s not railing at a vague “they”; he’s indicting a specific bureaucracy with a specific mandate, and the bureaucratic acronym makes the charge feel clinical, documentable, unromantic. That’s why the line cuts: it drags “national security” out of the heroic register and forces it to share a sentence with “poisoning.”

The intent is pressure, not poetry. Glenn is leveraging his rare credibility as both war hero and scientific insider to say: you don’t get to hide behind secrecy when the harm is domestic and measurable. The subtext is even harsher: the state is willing to treat its own citizens as acceptable collateral, and it’s doing so while keeping the public emotionally invested in the security story. “In the name of” is the pivot - a phrase that signals ritual justification, the kind leaders invoke when they need the public to stop asking for specifics.

Contextually, this fits the late-20th-century American hangover from the Cold War: nuclear testing, radiation exposure, and environmental contamination around weapons production sites, all laundered through classified necessity. Coming from Glenn, the line also interrogates the mythology of technological progress. The same system that put him in orbit could, with equal confidence and less scrutiny, contaminate a town’s water. That’s the cultural sting: mastery without accountability isn’t greatness, it’s menace.