Pilots & Astronauts
The Right Stuff.
by Tom Wolfe.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 436 pp. $12.95.
“All must hope,” Jules Verne wrote, “that someday America would penetrate the deepest secrets of that mysterious orb. . . .” A century later the prescient novelist could have watched the thing unfolding, live, before his eyes. American men sealed themselves inside a vessel very like the “cylindro-conical projectile” of Verne’s own creation, sped off to a distance beyond any ever traveled before, and poured out of their ship for a float upon the face of the moon. No doubt the American flag they hoisted on Verne’s mysterious orb is still lodged there. The meaning of the event, miraculous, breathtaking as it was, would not have been lost on Verne, whose own three moon voyagers were greeted with “indescribable enthusiasm” at their return—indeed, “To see them first, and then to hear them, such was the universal longing.”
It was lost on Americans. In general they received the miracle as though it were a sort of affront to them, a great national embarrassment. The same people who, less than a decade earlier, had given all that heart and soul had to offer to their first men in space, now turned their backs on the whole enterprise. Why? There was the chilling, if familiar, sound of retreat in the explanation that made the rounds: Americans could hardly be expected to find science and its heroes tolerable, let alone inspiring, while their technology was engaged in the destruction of Southeast Asia; or, worse, proving altogether useless in the great battle against poverty and oppression here at home. A country, in other words, with something to apologize for.
If the language has changed somewhat, the idea itself still has as much currency as it had ten years ago. Yet in light of the universally favorable response Tom Wolfe’s new book has gotten—it is hailed on all sides as the first, the long-overdue, the necessary celebration of the original round of American astronauts—one might be tempted to believe otherwise. Over the years Tom Wolfe has set his original mind to caustic descriptions of people who have done much to nurse along American self-denigration. He started with The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby in 1965, and continues today in the short pieces and drawings that adorn the pages of Harper’s magazine. In the process he has produced some of the most brilliant social criticism to see print, and allied himself with the defenders of this country.
The Right Stuff is about the “space race,” from its inception during the height of the cold war in 1957 to its denouement in 1963 when the bloodless struggle with the Soviets simmered down; it is about the characters chosen by NASA to participate in the space program: the chimpanzee who went up first, the men who followed after him, their wives; and it is about the Air Force pilots—and one in particular—whose experimental jet flights beyond the sound barrier were the precursors of space travel. Wolfe’s formidable literary virtues are at work in this book, providing every bit of the graceful language that is always his strong suit, and, better, rendering a portrait of true old-fashioned American heroism.
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Throughout the late 40’s and early 50’s, men were busy at Air Force bases all over the country, inching their way up a “dizzying progression of steps and ledges, a ziggurat . . . and the idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff. . . .” The pilot with the right stuff was the one who could literally flirt with death in his plane, day after day, and keep going after more, until he actually could not live without it. “Manliness, manhood, manly courage . . . there was something ancient, primordial, irresistible about the challenge of this stuff.” At the top of the ziggurat stood Edwards Air Force Base in California, and it was at the top because a pilot named Chuck Yaeger was quartered there.
During World War II Yaeger had been the personification of bravery in combat. In 1943, at the age of twenty, this non-com Army Air Force flight officer had taken his pure, calm, unflinching imperturbability—a legacy of the Appalachian region from which he hailed—into air battle with the Germans, and done his country more than proud. For example:
On October 12, 1944, Yaeger took on and shot down five German fighter planes in succession. On November 6, flying a propeller-driven P-51 Mustang, he shot down one of the new jet fighters the Germans had developed . . . and damaged two more, and on November 20 he shot down four FW-190’s. . . . By the end of the war he had thirteen-and-a-half kills. He was twenty-two years old.
In 1947 Yaeger was selected to go to Edwards (then called Muroc) to try to fly a newly developed rocket-powered plane, the X-l, at the speed of sound. It was believed that that speed was an absolute, a barrier, probably unreachable and certainly unsurpassable. The flyers who had tried it before had either disintegrated with their planes or returned to earth to tell of the complete loss of mechanical control, and of pitching and buffeting so fierce that “listeners got a picture of a man in ballroom pumps skidding across a sheet of ice, pursued by bears.” Yaeger took on the job coolly, and at his regular Army captain’s pay, because it was there, and because he did not believe the barrier really existed. He got into the X-l with two broken ribs (two days earlier he had fallen, drunk, from a horse, and hidden the fact from everyone, lest he be disqualified from this flight), took it past the sound barrier, and returned, as unruffled as ever.
This was only the first of countless experiments with the limits of courage that Yaeger would perform at Edwards, and it established him, for every ambitious flyer in the country, as the “most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff,” the man to be emulated above all others, to be imitated in every gesture, including his “poker-hollow West Virginia drawl.”
So Edwards became the place where the best of America’s Air Force flyers desperately wanted to—and usually did—end up. And after the manner of Yaeger they pursued the right stuff on the quiet, without publicity—indeed, spurning it—carrying on wildly in the air with F-86’s, F-100’s, X-l’s, X-15’s, and equally wildly on the ground with fantastic amounts of alcohol and a lot of drunken, reckless driving. They daily experienced “the edge of space, where the stars and the moon came out at noon . . . an atmosphere so thin that the ordinary laws of aerodynamics no longer applied and a plane could skid into a flat spin like a cereal box on a waxed Formica counter and then start tumbling, not spinning and not diving, but tumbling, end over end like a brick”; and, often enough, they knew the thrill of emerging intact from such a tumble. A pilot’s greatest fear in fact was a fear of being “left behind”—of finding himself one day, for whatever reason, unable to go up—and most would rather have died than experience that.
But the right stuff was something that went entirely unmentioned. No one ever talked about his own bravery or the bravery of others. If a pilot went down,
the unspoken message was: Too bad! There was a man with the right stuff. There was no national mourning in such cases, of course. Nobody outside of Edwards knew the man’s name. If he were well liked he might get one of those dusty stretches of road named for him on the base . . . But none of that mattered!—not at Edwards—not in the Brotherhood.
These pilots only cared for their extraordinary, death-defying flights to the edge, wishing, ultimately, to be able to carry on with them “in a cause that means something to thousands, to a people, a nation, to humanity, to God.” As for the nature of the stuff itself, it was clear to them that outsiders could not understand it.
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When the Soviets sent Sputnik I into orbit around the earth in October 1957, Yaeger et al. were hardly impressed. Space travel had already been acknowledged to be the next, obvious step for the Air Force, and the pilots had begun their training for it, preparing themselves to handle more and more sophisticated jet rockets. Compared with what they had done, and certainly with what they were about to do, in manned flights, this event seemed to them hardly worth bothering about.
But Sputnik struck terror into the hearts of politicians and newsmen. The Russians had successfully developed a hydrogen bomb four years earlier; with the launching of the satellite, they now asserted an unexpected measure of superiority. It took all of about two weeks for panic, and excitement, to infect the entire nation, and the race for dominance—for survival—was on. In one single blow, the Soviets had given us the space race, and as they continued to beat us time after time into the ozone, it became the general view that American superiority must be reestablished by the creation of the first manned space mission.
The Air Force program, however, was still in the planning stages, and would not be able to meet the deadline now imposed. So the government put the space race into the hands of the recently formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration—which was prepared to forfeit perfection for the sake of haste—and NASA devised the idea of putting a man inside a capsule and shooting the capsule into space on top of a rocket. Instructions came from President Eisenhower to pick prospective astronauts from among the military pilots already on duty, for “their records were immediately available, they already had security clearances, and they could be ordered to Washington at a moment’s notice.” As for actual piloting, it would not be called for: “The specifications were that they be under five feet eleven and no older than thirty-nine and that they be graduates of test-pilot schools, with at least 1,500 hours of flying time and experience in jets, and that they have bachelor’s degrees ‘or the equivalent.’”
The right stuff did not seem to be a qualification, and members of the Brotherhood shrugged their shoulders with disdain at the project. In no time, however, it was bewilderment they were feeling. Following the presidential fiat, NASA had gone directly to the flying ziggurat and picked the prospective astronauts from its lower levels. Suddenly, men who had not quite attained the full measure of the right stuff were taking on, in the eyes of the American public, “the archaic mantles of the single-combat warriors of a long-since forgotten age”; suddenly, the people of this country, never having been privy to the way things worked in the flying fraternity, were switching the rules around, and turning these somewhat lesser beings into heroes of dramatic proportions. Americans had no dearer wish than to “fawn over them, bathe in their magical aura, feel the radiation of their righteous stuff, salute them, wish upon them the smile of God . . . and do their bit in bestowing honor upon them before the fact . . . before they got up on top of the rockets to face the Russians, death, flames, and fragmentation.”
NASA had based its choices not on how much bravery and resourcefulness these men possessed, but rather on their ability to withstand an arduous—and humiliating—battery of medical and psychological examinations. In fact, the process had eliminated the most daring of the lot, and the list, narrowed down to the necessary seven—Al Shepard, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, Wally Schirra, and Deke Clayton—actually contained one or two who had not done even minimally extraordinary flight testing. Though some of them had grumbled (privately) through the medical ordeal, all seven had been willing to be treated like laboratory animals. Worse, the knowledge that “The astronaut would not be expected to do anything; he had only to be able to take it,” did not seem to bother them.
And they were going public: at endless rounds of press conferences, meetings with Congressmen, factory dedications, the seven made their appearances; with John Glenn at the helm, unabashedly invoking God, family, and country (“when he was no more than nine years old, he had been the kind of boy who would halt a football game to read the riot act to some other nine-year-old who said ‘Goddamn it’ or ‘Aw shit,’ when a play didn’t go right”), they found themselves not just submitting to, but actively participating in these things. Furthermore, Life magazine had contracted for the exclusive rights to their stories, and article after article was coming out, portraying each one and his family as creatures of perfection (Life even airbrushed away their skin blemishes). Not even the knowledge that the first run into space had been made by Ham, an “operantly conditioned, aerospatially desensitized” chimpanzee, mitigated the adulation. When Al Shepard got his turn to be the first man in space, in May 1961, it mattered not at all to the nation waiting breathlessly down below that he was up there doing much the same things that Ham had done; or that every one of the remaining five (Deke Clayton was grounded because of a heart problem), with some variations, followed similar procedures. Ticker-tape parades, White House receptions, Distinguished Service Medals, the sight of grown men weeping—this and much more was their reward.
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Thus Tom Wolfe on the astronauts. Reviewers of this book, while offering its author indisputably well-deserved praise, have consistently—and with good reason—neglected to come to terms with its real point. And that is that far from being a celebration of the astronauts, The Right Stuff is as denigrating a portrait of them as may ever have been rendered. Wolfe would have us believe that the honor that was lavished on the astronauts, both before and after the fact, was undeserved. The right stuff, a most desirable and enviable quality, was possessed by the test pilots, not by the astronauts. He does grant in passing, near the end of the book, that Gordon Cooper’s flight, the last of the original round, “had shown they could handle it in the classic way, out on the edge.” But the tale of Cooper’s flight ends with an account of his being forced to reenter the earth’s atmosphere manually, after the loss of automatic controls. As this rather tension-filled episode closes, the ubiquitous and marvelous Yaeger reappears to steal the scene, in a horrifying rendition of his near death in a jet crash. By comparison, Cooper’s peril seems a meager business. Such deliberate contrasting of astronaut to test pilot marks the book from beginning to end. Astronaut does not benefit from the contrast.
Nor is the invidious comparison restricted to the narration of events. In characterization, too, Wolfe chooses one side over the other. Yaeger, particularly, is alive, and though somewhat remote, exciting. He is a person one has met before in literature, and more often at the movies, a tough, hard, brave man, a man of the frontier. The astronauts, on the other hand, if they do not all seem as buffoonish as John Glenn (“the Presbyterian version of a monk. . . . A saint, maybe; or an ascetic; or maybe just the village scone crusher”), are little more than flat caricatures. Wolfe’s derision of Glenn is especially telling. For Glenn, of all the seven, is the one who would best have fit the frontiersman bill. Having shot down his fair share of MiG’s during the Korean war, he returned home to volunteer his services as test pilot par excellence. At the Navy’s Patuxent River Test Pilot School he “dreamed up the F8U transcontinental run. . . . [N]o one had ever made a sustained coast-to-coast flight at an average speed of greater than Mach I [the speed of sound]. . . . He pulled it off on July 16, 1957, flying from Los Angeles to Floyd Bennett Field, near New York, in three hours and twenty-three minutes.” Any substantive difference between Glenn and the rest of the Brotherhood escapes the eye; and yet Wolfe derides him, and attributes his efforts and his accomplishments to mere opportunism.
Why, then, the choice of test pilot over astronaut? Superficially, it seems to have been made out of fastidiousness. That is, Wolfe does not seem to like the loud and frequently corny proclamations (here, again, John Glenn is the greatest culprit) made by the astronauts about the ideals of their country; and he seems to like as little the thrill it gave their countrymen. Such overt expression of patriotic sentiment appears to offend the sensibilities, particularly when compared with the taciturn heroism of the lonely, frontier-breaking test pilots.
Underlying the choice is the suggestion that only certain of the notions that have been of value to America may be espoused straightforwardly. These are the old-fashioned things like drinking and driving hard and the private pursuit of manliness. In other words, the essentially apolitical things represented by the test pilots. The astronauts, by contrast, were warriors against an ideological enemy, they were soldiers of the cold war, representatives of a country in active opposition to a political foe. In his derision of the soldiers who participated in it, Wolfe seems to wish to strike at the battle itself. This is the deep fault of his book, and it explains why it has received high praise from people not ordinarily notable for their love of things American. Faced with a choice, Tom Wolfe resurrected the tradition of calling the astronauts bad names, and in so doing capitulated to the inexorable idea of America as a country with something to apologize for.
