by Tom Wolfe
Gus had flown a hundred missions in combat in Korea and had won the Distinguished Flying Cross, after breaking formation to chase away a MiG-15 that was about to jump one of his outfit’s reconnaissance planes, although somehow, during that great duck shoot over Korea, to his regret, he had never succeeded in downing an enemy plane. After the war he had done all-weather testing of fighter planes at Wright-Patterson and was highly thought of there. So far he had not reached the big league, which was being prime pilot for testing a new fighter, preferably at Edwards. But Gus had every confidence in himself; which is to say, he was a typical fighter jock heading up the pyramid. He already sensed that winning out in the competition for Project Mercury was a tremendous achievement for him, even if it remained to be seen just how far this advanced a man up the ziggurat.
There was just one odd thing about the situation. Last night, at Langley Field, near Newport News, Virginia, Gus had met the other six pilots who had won out. Two of the Air Force pilots were from Edwards. That was to be expected; Edwards was the big league. But one of them, Gordon Cooper, was a man Gus had known at Wright-Pat at one point, and Cooper was not in Fighter Ops at Edwards. The very hottest pilots at Edwards, of course, were in the rocket-plane projects, the X-series. The best line-test pilots were in Fighter Ops as prime pilots in the testing of aircraft such as the Century series of jet fighters. That was what the other Edwards pilot, Deke Slayton, had been involved in. But Cooper—Cooper had graduated from Test Pilot School and was officially a test pilot, but he had been involved mainly in engineering. Not only that, there was this fellow from the Navy, Scott Carpenter. He seemed to be a likable sort—but he had never been in a fighter squadron. He had been flying multi-engine propeller planes and had only two hundred hours in jets. What did this say about the business of being selected as a Mercury astronaut?
Finally, the NASA people were shooing the photographers away from the table, and the head of NASA, a man with big smooth jowls named T. Keith Glennan, got up and said: “Ladies and gentlemen, today we are introducing to you and to the world these seven men who have been selected to begin training for orbital space flight. These men, the nation’s Project Mercury astronauts, are here after a long and perhaps unprecedented series of evaluations which told our medical consultants and scientists of their superb adaptability to their upcoming flight.”
And it was probably noticed by no one other than the seven pilots themselves that he mentioned only their adaptability. He had nothing to say, not a word, about their prowess or standing as pilots.
“It is my pleasure,” said Glennan, “to introduce to you—and I consider it a very real honor, gentlemen—Malcolm S. Carpenter, Leroy G. Cooper, John H. Glenn, Jr., Virgil I. Grissom, Walter M. Schirra, Jr., Alan B. Shepard, Jr., and Donald K. Slayton … the nation’s Mercury Astronauts!”
With that, applause erupted, applause of the most fervent sort, amazing applause. Reporters rose to their feet, applauding as if they had come for no other reason. Smiles of weepy and grateful sympathy washed across their faces. They gulped, they cheered, as if this were one of the most inspiring moments of their lives. Even some of the photographers straightened up from out of their beggar’s crouches and let their cameras dangle from their straps, so that they could use their hands for clapping.
But for what?
Once the reporters and photographers got hold of themselves again, men from NASA, the Air Force, and the Navy got up and testified to how terrifically the seven of them had done on all the tests at Lovelace and Wright-Patterson—yet not one word was uttered about any ability or experience they might have had as pilots. The tone of the thing, the angle, didn’t improve with the questions from the reporters. The first reporter who raised his hand wanted to know from each of them whether his wife and children had “had anything to say about this.”
Wife and children?
Most of them, Gus included, dealt with this question in typical military-pilot fashion. Which is to say, they managed to get out something brief, obvious, abstract, and above all safe and impersonal. But when it becomes the turn of the guy sitting on Gus’s left, John Glenn, the only Marine in the group—it’s hard to believe. This guy starts turning on the charm! He has a regular little speech on the subject.
“I don’t think any of us could really go on with something like this,” he says, “if we didn’t have pretty good backing at home, really. My wife’s attitude toward this has been the same as it has been all along through my flying. If it is what I want to do, she is behind it, and the kids are, too, a hundred percent.”
What the hell was he talking about? I don’t think any of us could really go on with something like this …. What possible difference could a wife’s attitude make about an opportunity for a giant step up the great ziggurat? What was with this guy? It kept on in that fashion. Some reporter gets up and asks them all to tell about their religious affiliations (religious affiliations?)—and Glenn tees off again.
“I am a Presbyterian,” he says, “a Protestant Presbyterian, and I take my religion very seriously, as a matter of fact.” He starts telling them about all the Sunday schools he has taught at and the church boards he has served on and all the church work that he and his wife and his children have done. “I was brought up believing that you are placed on earth here more or less with sort of a fifty-fifty proposition, and this is what I still believe. We are placed here with certain talents and capabilities. It is up to each of us to use those talents and capabilities as best you can. If you do that, I think there is a power greater than any of us that will place the opportunities in our way, and if we use our talents properly, we will be living the kind of life we should live.”
Jesus Christ—share it, brother. You can see the boys cutting glances from either end of the table up at this flying churchman Gus is sitting next to. They’re seated in alphabetical order, with Scott Carpenter at one end and Deke Slayton at the other and Glenn in the middle. What can anybody say as a follow-up to this man and his speeches about the Wife and the Children and the Family and Sunday School and God? What can you do, say that as a matter of fact you can get along just as well without any of them as long as they’ll let you fly? That didn’t seem very prudent. (Turn on the halo—and lie!) You could see these pilots struggling to put up enough chips to stay in the God & Family game with this pious Marine named Glenn.
When it was Gus’s turn, he said: “I consider myself religious. I am a Protestant and belong to the Church of Christ. I am not real active in church, as Mr. Glenn is”—Mister Glenn, he calls him—“but I consider myself a good Christian still.” Deke Slayton says: “As far as my religious faith is concerned, I am a Lutheran, and I go to church periodically.” One of the Navy pilots, Alan Shepard, says: “I am not a member of any church. I attend the Christian Science Church regularly.” And so it went. It was a struggle.
God … Family … the only thing that Glenn hadn’t wrapped them all up in was Country, and so he took care of that, too. He gave a nice little speech that started with Orville and Wilbur Wright standing on a hill at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, tossing a coin to see which one would take the first airplane flight, and then he tied that in with the first space flight. “I think we are very fortunate,” he said, “that we have, should we say, been blessed with the talents that have been picked for something like this.” (No one had said a word about talents, however.) “I think we would be most remiss in our duty,” he went on, “if we didn’t make the fullest use of our talents in volunteering for something that is as important as this is to our country and to the world in general right now. This can mean an awful lot to this country, of course.”
This guy had the halo turned on at all times! Glenn had all the verbal skills that Gus lacked, and yet he didn’t seem glib or smooth about it. He looked like a balding and slightly tougher version of the cutest-looking freckle-faced country boy you ever saw. He had a snub nose, light-hazel eyes, reddish-blond hair, a terrific smile, and thousands of freckles. He had the sunniest face
in ten counties. He was also one of the best-known pilots in the Marines. He had flown in combat in both the Second World War and the Korean War and had won many medals, including five DFCs, and two years ago, in 1957, he had made the first coast-to-coast non-stop supersonic flight. On the basis of that accomplishment, he had been invited onto a TV show, Name That Tune, with a child singer, Eddie Hodges, as his partner, and he had beamed the freckled smile on TV and just charmed the hell out of everybody. The two of them were on the show several weeks.
Well … hell … maybe he was sincere, after all. God knew that for any pilot to get involved in that much Sunday school and that many church boards and good works, he’d have to be a true believer and a half. Perhaps he even meant it about Wife & Family … which would make him an even rarer breed of fighter pilot. If anybody asked Gus—like right now—if he were religious, a family man, and a patriot, he would say yes, he was religious, and yes, he was a family man, and yes, he was a patriot. But the firmest conviction of the three was about being a patriot. When Gus said he would gladly ride a Mercury rocket for the sake of his country, he meant it. Alan Shepard said the same thing and there was not the slightest doubt that he meant it. And there was no doubt that Glenn meant it, no matter how he went on about it. That was one of the inexpressible things about being a military flying officer. You meant it! You were among the few who had “the uncritical willingness to face danger”! There was an exhilaration to this that few civilians could possibly comprehend! No, Gus was a patriot, and he had his hundred combat missions and his DFC to attest to that simple, beautiful fact. Now, as for being a family man … aw, hell … he meant to be a family man, but somehow his career, or something, always got in the way. He and his wife, Betty, had gotten married as soon as they finished high school in Mitchell. Right from the very first he found himself in situations where he became separated from her. He didn’t plan it that way, but it kept happening. Right after they got married, he was due to start his freshman year at Purdue, and so he went off to Purdue to find some place for them to live. Well … somehow the only place he could find was a basement room. She said that was okay, she didn’t mind, they’d live in a basement room. He said, well, the problem was, he was going to have to share the room with another guy—it was the only way he could afford it—so he would get back to Mitchell as often as he could, on weekends. So that was the way they started out, with him on the campus at Purdue and Betty living with her parents in Mitchell. Military flying was hard on home life, too. Gus graduated and started his Air Force training at Randolph Field in Texas. Betty was pregnant, and he was in training and was making only $100 a month anyway, and so why didn’t she stay in Seymour, Indiana, with her sister Mary Lou, and Gus would visit her when he could. The only trouble was, he couldn’t visit her very often, it being so expensive to travel from Texas to Indiana. When Betty gave birth to their first child, Scott, Gus was at an important part in his flight training and couldn’t get to Indiana for that, either. He gets on the phone and says to her: “Well, you tell me what you really want me to do” … and she says, “Well, I guess you ought not to interrupt your training.” In fact, he didn’t quite manage to see his first child until six months later. Now, that sort of thing could happen in the service, because a fellow could get sent overseas at a moment’s notice. But he, Gus, hadn’t been sent anywhere except down the road to Arizona, to Williams Air Force Base, for advanced training. At the time … well, it just seemed damned hard to get all the way from the Southwestern U.S.A. to Indiana when you were in the thick of flight training. Then the Air Force did send him overseas, to Korea, and Betty went back to Indiana again. Korea! He loved it! He liked combat missions so much that when he completed a hundred missions, he volunteered for twenty-five more. He wanted to stay there! But the bastards made him come back. Somehow he and Betty managed to get by through all this. He gruffed a lot of Hoosier gus gruffisms at her and she gruffed some back at him. They didn’t get in many fights. Most weekends he could manage it, he would fly cross-country, piling up flight time. But how different was he from the other pilots at this table, if the truth were known—except for this unbelievable Marine, Glenn, who was sitting here next to him painting some goddamned amazing picture of the Perfect Pilot wrapped up in a cocoon of Home & Hearth and God & Flag!
Neither he nor any of the others set about altering that picture, however. At first it was hard to figure out what was happening. Glenn could have never gone off on these fantastic outside loops of his if it were not for the fact that practically every question had to do with families and faith and motivation and patriotism and so on. There had not been a single question about their achievements or experience as pilots. Then one of the reporters gets up and says:
“Could I ask for a show of hands of how many are confident that they will come back from outer space?”
Gus and the others started looking down the table at each other, and then they all started hoisting their hands in the air. It really made you feel like an idiot, raising your hand this way. If you didn’t think you were “coming back,” then you would really have to be a fool or a nut to have volunteered at all. As the seven of them looked at each other sitting there with their hands up in the air like schoolchildren, they began grinning in embarrassment, and then the heart of the matter dawned on them. This question about “coming back” was nothing other than an euphemistic way of asking: Aren’t you afraid you’re going to die? That was the question these people had been circling around the whole time. That was what they really wanted to know, all these wide-eyed reporters and their grunting crawling beggar photographers. They didn’t care whether the seven Mercury astronauts were pilots or not. Infantrymen or acrobats would have done just as well. The main thing was: they had volunteered to sit on top of the rockets—which always blew up! They were brave lads who had volunteered for a suicide mission! They were kamikazes going forth to vie with the Russians! And all the questions about wives and children and faith and God and motivation and the Flag … they were really questions about widows and orphans … and how a warrior talks himself into going on a mission in which he is bound to die.
And this man, John Glenn, had given them an answer as sentimental as the question itself, and Gus and the rest had gone along with it. Henceforth, they would be served up inside the biggest slice of Mom’s Pie you could imagine. And it had all happened in just about an hour. The seven of them sat there like fools with their hands hung up in the air, grinning with embarrassment. But that was all right; they would get over the embarrassment soon enough. Glenn, one couldn’t help noticing, had both hands up in the air.
By the next morning the seven Mercury astronauts were national heroes. It happened just like that. Even though so far they had done nothing more than show up for a press conference, they were known as the seven bravest men in America. They woke up to find astonishing acclaim all over the press. There it was, in the more sophisticated columns as well as in the tabloids and on television. Even James Reston of The New York Times had been so profoundly moved by the press conference and the sight of the seven brave men that his heart, he confessed, now beat a little faster. “What made them so exciting,” he wrote, “was not that they said anything new but that they said all the old things with such fierce convictions … They spoke of ‘duty’ and ‘faith’ and ‘country’ like Walt Whitman’s pioneers … This is a pretty cynical town, but nobody went away from these young men scoffing at their courage and idealism.” Manly courage, the right stuff—the Halo Effect, with Deacon Glenn leading the hallelujah chorus, had practically wiped the man out. If Gus and some of the others had been worried that they weren’t being regarded as hot pilots, their worries were over when they saw the press coverage. Without exception, the newspapers and wire services picked out the highlights of their careers and carefully massed them to create a single blaze of glory. This took true journalistic skill. It meant citing a great deal from John Glenn’s career, his combat flying in two wars, his five Distinguished Flying Crosses with e
ighteen clusters, and his recent speed record, plus the combat that Gus and Wally Schirra had seen in Korea and the medals they had won, one DFC apiece, and the bombing missions Slayton had flown in the Second World War and a bit about the jet fighters he had helped test at Edwards and the ones Shepard had tested at Pax River—and going easy on the subject of Scott Carpenter and Gordon Cooper, who had not flown in combat (Shepard had not, either) or done any extraordinary testing. John Glenn came out of it as tops among seven very fair-haired boys. He had the hottest record as a pilot, he was the most quotable, the most photogenic, and the lone Marine. But all seven, collectively, emerged in a golden haze as the seven finest pilots and bravest men in the United States. A blazing aura was upon them all.
It was as if the press in America, for all its vaunted independence, were a great colonial animal, an animal made up of countless clustered organisms responding to a single nervous system. In the late 1950’s (as in the late 1970’s) the animal seemed determined that in all matters of national importance the proper emotion, the seemly sentiment, the fitting moral tone should be established and should prevail; and all information that muddied the tone and weakened the feeling should simply be thrown down the memory hole. In a later period this impulse of the animal would take the form of blazing indignation about corruption, abuses of power, and even minor ethical lapses, among public officials; here, in April of 1959, it took the form of a blazing patriotic passion for the seven test pilots who had volunteered to go into space. In either case, the animal’s fundamental concern remained the same: the public, the populace, the citizenry, must be provided with the correct feelings! One might regard this animal as the consummate hypocritical Victorian gent. Sentiments that one scarcely gives a second thought to in one’s private life are nevertheless insisted upon in all public utterances. (And this grave gent lives on in excellent health.)
