Air University Review, March-April 1981

The Right Stuff: Embarrassed Hero Worship

This is not the first time Tom Wolfe has described ‘‘the right stuff." A number of years ago he published a piece entitled "The Last American Hero" about Junior Johnson, a stockcar race driver in North Carolina. Johnson was admired by the good old boys and girls, not only for his racing victories but also for his driving in "the whiskey business." Both required risk-taking, and both proved that Johnson was a possessor of the sort of physical courage that is a primary component of the right stuff. In fact, moonshining, because of its illegality, may have been the more significant of the two activities. Wolfe calls Junior Johnson the "last" American hero, apparently because there is nothing particularly heroic about him in the old-fashioned sense. He is no paragon of virtue, and there is nothing chivalric about his treatment of women. All he shares with the heroes of romance is his willingness to face danger and risk his life.

The Right Stuff is a celebration of some other latter-day American heroes, the test pilots of the 1950s, especially those who became the Project Mercury astronauts.* Like Junior Johnson, the pilots who tested the century series, and later the X-series, were risk-takers, men who found meaning in life by "pushing the outside of the envelope," by "hanging their hides out over the edge." But of course the pilots could not be in the air all of the time, and they found off-duty activities to complement their dangerous profession in the manner that moonshining complemented Junior Johnson’s. Owning and driving a fast sports car and showing up punctually for beer call at the Officers’ Club thus became two more components of the right stuff.

*Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979, $12.95), 436 pages.

John Glenn did neither. In fact, in his unabashed patriotism and religious devotion and (worse yet) his embarrassingly public declarations on those subjects, he was something of an anachronism. Unlike the others, Glenn performed more than the required amount of physical exercise, something which, as Wolfe observes, fighter jocks as a breed avoid, preferring instead to abuse their bodies horribly by heavy drinking and going without sleep just to prove they can still perform like champions. Instead of a sports car, Glenn owned an old Peugeot and while stationed at Langley AFB, Virginia, drove it home to Arlington on the weekends to be with his family. Most true brothers of the right stuff would never admit that wife and children had such importance in their lives. The Right Stuff is really just an updated version of the code of American masculinity, previously described in such classics as The Red Badge of Courage and A Farewell to Arms. The protagonists of Stephen Crane’s and Ernest Hemingway’s stories who abide by the code know that it is forbidden to talk about such subjects as honor and heroism. John Glenn violated the code by actually speaking forbidden words—words such as God, Honor, and Country. There was no doubt, however, that Glenn was a possessor of the right stuff; his was just the Presbyterian variety. For although he was not selected for the first flight, he proved his election to sainthood, as Wolfe puts it, by being selected for the first orbital flight and becoming the one most fawned upon by the press and most lionized by the public.

The other astronauts found themselves having to play the role that John Glenn had created. Aside from their death-defying profession, they were ordinary men who had heroism thrust upon them by a press and public whose patriotic fervor was a reaction to the Cold War. Behind the scenes they were cheating on their wives, getting drunk, angling for the first flight, trying to get enough money to move into a nice neighborhood, and grousing about the way they were being treated. By letting us see the human comedy behind the scenes, Wolfe deflates our heroes and emphasizes the irrationality of the apocalyptic panic that we indulged in when the Russians put a satellite into space before we did.

One characteristic shared by all "the boys" is the Pilot Ego. In fact, says Wolfe, they would not have minded, once a year, "a little adulation on the order of the Pope’s." Consequently, the glory heaped on John Glenn was difficult for the others to accept. To think that Glenn, who substituted the Protestant ethic for the "holy coordinates" of Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving (Wolfe’s ironic upper case), should achieve such a triumph! Wolfe savors the irony fully, for it is the sort of thing typical of the Mercury Program and, indeed, of service life in general. For example, one irony that the astronauts were acutely aware of, but which the rest of the world seems to have missed entirely, was the fact that they were not going to do any flying; the flights would be programmed. They were mere passengers, riding, they noted, in a capsule, not a ship. In fact, as Chuck Yeager pointed out to them, a monkey was going to make the first flight! They were going to be "lab rabbits." That truth was repeatedly brought home, beginning with the humiliations they suffered during their physical and psychological testing and continuing into the operational phase. Even on the day of the first launch, while the world was kept waiting for four hours because of cloud cover at the Cape, Alan B. Shepard, America’s first astronaut, found himself begging for permission to go to the bathroom. Having expected the flight to last only fifteen minutes, the designer of the spacesuit had not provided a means for him to void his bladder. By the end of the four-hour wait Shepard was in agony. Finally, after much consultation, the flight controller allowed Shepard, pilot and superhero, to urinate into his suit.

Tom Wolfe has been matched only by Joseph Heller in his ability to capture the ironies of life in the armed forces. "If you can’t take a joke, how come you’re in the Air Force?" That is the sort of remark a fellow is likely to hear when, after three years in a missile silo in North Dakota, he is reassigned to Thule, Greenland, or when, with a wife just about to complete her ninth month, he gets 24-hour notice that he is going on a 90-day TDY to Okinawa.

Wolfe finds much about the experience of being a pilot amusing and misses no opportunity to poke fun. For example, in the wake of the hysteria following Sputnik, President Eisenhower decided that the astronaut candidates would be selected from among the military test pilots. Those who met NASA’s requirements were ordered to Washington to be given the opportunity to volunteer. The project and the orders were Top Secret, so the men were ordered to report to the Pentagon "disguised as civilians." This proved impossible. Aside from such undisguisable physical characteristics as crewcuts, suntans, and "the unmistakable cocky rolling gait of fighter jocks," thc 35 pilots assembled were all wearing the same clothes—"pathetic-looking civilian suits" that cost about a fourth as much as their wristwatches.

The pilot’s fancy wristwatch, with, according to Wolfe, "dials for recording everything short of the sound of enemy guns," is one of the telling details that ensure that The Right Stuff will be enjoyed by members and former members of the Air Force. We recognize immediately Wolfe’s description of the watches "as practically fraternal insignia among the pilots." The expensive, complicated watch is as much a part of a pilot’s gear as his sunglasses. I would like to ask Wolfe, though, if he still finds pilots or military men in general as easy to spot in their civvies as he did in 1959. It seems to me that, partly because they are better paid and partly because they have grown more sophisticated about such things, military men no longer look so out of place in civilian clothes.

For all the delight that Wolfe takes in describing the trappings and rituals of the men with the right stuff, he does not denigrate their achievements in the history of aviation. One comes to realize that the satirical tone only barely conceals his admiration for them—an admiration verging on hero worship. He points out, for example, how fickle we have been in awarding them fame. Chuck Yeager waited a long time before he was recognized as the first man to break the speed of sound, and it only came about in connection with an inaccurate movie. Such records, however, are not what this book is about. For Wolfe, the fact that these men were facing death everyday is enough to make them heroes. He contrasts Pete Conrad, a Princeton graduate, with other members of the Class of ‘53. Conrad went to work everyday knowing that the mortality rate of test pilots was 23 percent and frequently found himself attending funerals for fellow flyers. The greatest mortality risk his Princeton classmates faced, says Wolfe, was "choking on a chunk of Chateaubriand." During one 36-week period at Edwards AFB, California, 62 pilots were killed. One need only read Wolfe’s account of Yeager’s unsuccessful attempt to take the NF-104 up to 115,000 feet. After reaching an altitude of over 100,000 feet, Yeager lost control of the plane and was eventually forced to eject. Even though the experiment was a failure, Wolfe manages through a virtuosic display of New Journalistic techniques to make the reader understand the courage and intelligence required to come out of such an experience alive.

In fact, Wolfe’s mockery is directed not so much at the men themselves as it is at their image—an image created by the press in reaction to the national panic following Sputnik. Wolfe makes clear the ludicrousness of the panic, particularly among politicians and the press "and other technological illiterates with influence." In such places as Congress and the New York Times, our race to catch up with the Soviets took on the dimensions of "Armageddon, the final and decisive battle of the forces of good and evil." This does not sound like the same New York Times that provoked the ire of Spiro Agnew. In fact, the press comes in for at least as much satire as the pilots do. Of the unanimously sycophantic reaction of the press to the astronauts, Wolfe says, it seemed as if the press "were a great colonial animal. . . made up of countless clustered organisms responding to a single nervous system." In "matters of national importance," the press was determined to establish (and the ironic italics are Wolfe’s) "the proper emotion, the seemly sentiment, the fitting feelings." The press, says Wolfe, was a Genteel Beast, "the consummate hypocritical Victorian gent," simply getting rid of "all information that muddied the tone and weakened the feeling." As Wolfe sees it, the press has not changed in the intervening years. These days it presents a unified front on the subject of official corruption, setting the properly indignant tone.

Tom Wolfe is one journalistic organism who has succeeded in separating himself, for the most part, from the Genteel Beast. Or has he? In reading his work it often seems that nothing is sacred, that, like ‘‘Saturday Night Live’’ or National Lampoon, his purpose is amusement, no matter at whose expense. Nevertheless, a serious message does emerge from The Right Stuff, and it might be one well worth heeding in these days when politicians and the press are telling us that, as a result of pressure from the oil cartels, the imprisoning of Americans in Iran, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the proper emotion (italics mine) is jingoism. Commentators have remarked that the nation is returning to the mood of the 1950s. We Americans have a tendency to overreact, to regard everything as a crisis. The danger of developing a war mentality is that this time it may not lead to the moon.

Captain John M. Thomson (B.A., Memphis State University; M.A., University of Minnesota) is an instructor of English, United States Air Force Academy, and faculty sponsor for ICARUS, magazine of cadet creativity at the Air Force Academy.

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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