Fighting for Space

by Amy Shira Teitel

  “Doing what?”

  The pony farm was willing to hire her, Jerrie explained, providing she had her parents’ consent. Then she admitted that this truancy wasn’t her first.

  “Jerrie,” Harvey sighed as he loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top button on his shirt. “I think it’s good that you’ve had the opportunity to work with ponies and keep your own horse well fed and well sheltered. But I don’t think you plan to spend your life taking care of horses.”

  “It’s not a bad life,” she said.

  “Except that it’s not what you want.”

  Jerrie paused. Her father was right. “No,” she said simply.

  “I wish you could see the cockpits of some of the new planes on the base, Jerrie. Hundreds of gauges, switches, controls, dials. The pilots and engineers practically have to be mathematicians. People can’t just fly by the seat of their pants these days.”

  “Not much chance of my ever flying that kind of plane.” Jerrie remained despondent.

  “Now how can you tell, Jerrie? Just look at what’s happened to aviation since you were born. From barnstorming little grass-hoppers to B-24s. Just look at how many pilots we train here. Who knows what will happen when the war’s over?” But Jerrie still couldn’t see how English, history, or gym class was going to get her closer to a cockpit. “You learn a lot of other things, too, Jerrie,” her father continued. “Don’t kid yourself. Look, honey, this isn’t new to me—I went through the same thing myself.” He’d piqued her attention. “I ran away from school because there was so much going on outside that I just couldn’t stay in a high school classroom. But by the time I got out of the navy, I knew that I’d been wrong. Education isn’t junk. I had to go back, and I was still going to college to get my degree when your mother and I were married. For a while, it put me years behind. And I’m probably not through with school yet.”

  Jerrie paused. She had, of course, lived through her father’s struggle to qualify for flight status with the army all because he hadn’t finished school. Sitting there in the park, she realized he was right. She promised to try harder in school, but she wouldn’t give up her weekends at the airport. To finagle her way into the air, she joined the Flying Minutemen, an 80,000-person strong volunteer corps of civilian pilots who flew sentry missions on the borders, hunted lost planes in the mountains, and spotted forest fires. She couldn’t do any flying, but tagging along on flights and watching the controls was better than nothing.

  * * *

  As 1944 dawned, Jackie decided it was time to revisit the issue of militarization. The WASPs had proven their worth, and she hoped it would be enough to get them militarized the right way, as pilots under the Army Air Force rather than lumping them under the Women’s Army Corps. She had Hap’s support, which meant she just needed Congress to approve the idea. Representative John M. Costello of California introduced the bill, House Resolution 4219, on March 22. It stated that women would be militarized as part of the US Army but assigned to the US Army Air Force. The so-called Costello Bill went before Congress, falling to the House Committee on the Civil Service, led by Robert C. Ramspeck.

  Hap testified that America was experiencing a manpower shortage, the effect of which was considerably lessened by the WASPs. They were professional, experienced, and deserved the benefits of militarization, foremost among which was monetary. As civil servants, the WASPs’ pay was lower than their male counterparts’ and they still had to cover their travel expenses between bases, their food, their lodging, and some of their clothing. They didn’t have the six-figure insurance policies. The military didn’t arrange to get the bodies of WASPs killed in action home to their families, nor were funeral expenses covered. The total cost of the program by mid-1944 was not the $20 million12 some claimed but closer to $6 million.13 The WASPs cost the government far less than their male counterparts.

  Congress disagreed. Most politicians saw the WASP program as little more than a costly way to take jobs away from male pilots. Rumors swirled that the Army Air Force was so desperate for pilots that it was carrying out a large and expensive recruitment program, which Hap adamantly denied. If that was the case, he told the Ramspeck Committee, “then this Nation, insofar as manpower is concerned, is in worse position than any of our allies, and apparently any of our enemies.”

  While the Ramspeck Committee was debating the Costello Bill in Congress, government-funded civilian pilot training programs were cancelled. These programs that trained hopeful aviators for combat in exchange for their enrollment in the military meant that now, suddenly, thousands of men hoping to fly were subject to the draft as soldiers. Many complained to their congressmen, who put pressure on Hap to find roles for the newly minted aviators, but the commanding general of Army Air Forces didn’t change his position; Hap still argued that the WASPs were necessary to free men for combat roles even though America was suddenly flush with male pilots. Discussion over the bill thus turned from an issue of women pilots getting the benefits they’d earned to a discussion of women unfairly taking jobs away from men. Many congressmen argued that the WASPs’ militarization meant male pilots with upward of 2,000 flying hours would be stuck cleaning windshields for glamorous lady flyers with less than thirty hours in the air. The opposing voices and displaced pilots alike directed their outrage toward Jackie, suggesting she was using her vivacious wiles to sway Hap to giving her a vanity program. Toward the end of June, the Costello Bill was defeated by twenty votes.

  The bill’s failure forced the Army Air Force to review the entire WASP program, and by fall Hap had to admit its time was coming to an end. The reality was that the war was nearly won. America needed fewer pilots and certainly didn’t need women to free men up for combat missions. Though crestfallen, Jackie asked that the deactivation date be December 20 so the girls would have time to make it home for Christmas. She also asked that they be given certificates and cards outlining their military experience to help them get better jobs in the civilian market. AAF legislation still stipulated that all pilots be men, so there was no chance for any WASP to be hired by the service. Jackie was the exception, hired on as Hap’s consultant.

  In early October, nearly a thousand WASPs serving all around the country learned their fate. “Each of you has made an important contribution to your country at war and has aided immeasurably in establishing women’s place in aviation,” their form letter from Jackie read. “It has been a great honor to have been the Director of this program and a pleasure to have known most of you individually. My very best wishes for your future success and happiness.”

  Both Jackie and Hap were at the final WASP class graduation on December 7. “I am glad to be here today and talk with you young women who have been making aviation history,” Hap told the graduates. “You, and more than nine hundred of your sisters, have shown that you can fly wingtip to wingtip with your brothers. Frankly, I didn’t know in 1941 whether a slip of a young girl could fight the controls of a B-17 in the heavy weather they would naturally encounter in operational flying. It is on the record that women can fly as well as men. We will not again look upon a women’s flying organization as experimental. We will know that they can handle our fastest fighters, our heaviest bombers. On this last graduation day, I salute you and all WASPs. We of the AAF are proud of you; we will never forget our debt to you.”

  In her heart, Jackie knew her failure to have the WASPs militarized was the cause of the program’s cancellation. If she had swallowed her pride and let her girls fall under the WAC, they would be going home with military benefits, but instead, they were going home with nothing. The thought depressed her, made worse by public attacks on her character as she was blamed for the program’s cancellation. Publicly, Jackie put on a brave face and maintained the WASP program was cancelled because it had met its goal of leveraging women pilots in a time of war; after all, she had pitched the program as an experiment, knowing it was the only way to get women to fly with the military. As her final act as their leader, Jackie compiled a r
eport for Hap and let the numbers speak for themselves. Of the 25,000 women who had applied, 1,830 had been accepted, 1,074 had graduated, and only 142 had resigned or been let go. When the program was cancelled, just over 900 WASPs, including the sixteen women who had joined the original Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying command, were still serving. As a group, the women flew some 60 million miles. Thirty-eight women had died in the line of duty, which equated to the loss of one pilot for every 16,000 hours flown, a number comparable to male cadets.

  Jackie was presented with a Distinguished Service Medal for her work as head of the WASPs from her good friend Hap, but the dark cloud surrounding the deactivation lingered. For the first time since striking out in life as Jacqueline Cochran, she had failed. As the war in Europe drew to a close, she retreated to the Ranch with Floyd.

  12About $291,557,955 in 2019.

  13About $86,000,000 in 2019.

  Chapter 8

  After the War, 1945

  Jackie felt rudderless. She wanted to get back to flying, get back to her business, get back to something that could give her distance from the WASP deactivation issue. She settled on travel. She sought permission from the Civil Aeronautics Administration to fly her private Lodestar to France and England under the pretense of expanding her cosmetics business, but her application was denied. Floyd, knowing all this was a thinly veiled excuse to see postwar Europe with her own eyes, facilitated her trip. He bought the failing Liberty magazine and made his wife a war correspondent with an overseas assignment just to give her the journey she craved. Jackie knew she was an absolute phony, but figured other people were doing the exact same thing so she might as well enjoy herself.

  With an array of clothes, jewelry, and a large stock of whiskey in tow, Jackie visited her friends General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz and General Jimmy Doolittle on Guam before traveling on to Okinawa, Calcutta, New Delhi, Agra, and Karachi. She witnessed the surrender of Japanese general Tomoyuki Yamashita aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. She watched the Nazi war trials in Nuremberg and visited Hitler’s Berlin bunker where he had taken his own life. The articles she wrote were deemed unpublishable by her editor, little more than clumsy rehashings of press releases with no added perspective, but Floyd wasn’t about to fire his wife.

  When she returned from her European adventure in the spring of 1946, Jackie threw her energy into her cosmetics business. Floyd helped her buy the building at 10 West 56th Street in Manhattan as a new office space where she could also set up a retail store and build corporate culture with a large employee lounge.

  She also reconnected with her friend Randy Lovelace. Promoted to lieutenant colonel in the US Army, he was now chief of the aeromedical laboratory at Wright Field, where his staff of 225 doctors explored all known stresses affecting flyers. Like Jackie, Randy had been presented a Distinguished Flying Cross for his wartime work by Hap Arnold. Now thirty-eight and energized by his professional successes, he was considering moving his wife, Mary, and their children to Albuquerque so he could join his uncle Randy Lovelace I—whom everyone called Uncle Doc—at the family clinic. A family tragedy made Randy’s decision for him. His son Randy III developed polio and died on July 7. When the Lovelaces’ other son, Chuckie, contracted the same disease and was paralyzed, Jackie flew the whole family to the Warm Springs Foundation in Georgia, but the specialized clinic couldn’t help. After they lost their second son on August 13, Randy sought solace in his family. In Albuquerque, Randy became a partner in Uncle Doc’s clinic alongside a colleague, Dr. Edgar T. Lassetter. Before long, the trio decided to open a new clinic and research department, one Randy wanted to model on the Mayo Clinic, which had played such an influential role in his career.

  Their family hardships also brought the Lovelaces closer to Jackie and Floyd. Floyd, in particular, was struck by Randy’s kindness, thoughtfulness, and insatiable, almost infectious, curiosity. He saw Randy as someone who could catalyze change and inspire people into action by thinking critically about a problem and acting on what needed to be done. Floyd’s confidence in Randy was so complete that when he, Uncle Doc, and Edgar Lassetter launched the Lovelace Foundation as a medical research and development center, Floyd signed on as president and chairman of the board of trustees.

  As Jackie settled back into her peacetime life, demobilized troops were similarly returning home to find their postwar lives were very different. Politically, America was experiencing turbulence. President Roosevelt’s sudden death in April of 1945 thrust an unprepared Harry Truman into the most powerful office in a country poised to become a global leader as it negotiated its shifting relationship with the Soviet Union. Though allied against the spread of Nazism during the war, the United States and the Soviet Union were ideologically opposed. Soviet communism was a threat to American democracy, making the Soviet Union America’s next international adversary. All told, there was more than enough political activity to keep Jackie’s friend Lyndon Johnson busy in Washington. Newly reelected to Congress, his politics were defined by working toward American-Soviet cooperation.

  While politicians navigated the country’s future, Americans nationwide were keen to return to peacetime living and enjoy the financial boon brought by wartime production. After decades of disruption from the Depression and the war, family values took center stage in America’s collective psyche. Government advertising campaigns that had encouraged women to join the workforce during the war told women their new job was to take care of the men home from combat. Images of women wearing uniforms were replaced by images of women in dresses and heels taking care of their children while their husbands went off to work. Rosie the Riveter, the symbol of everything women could do, was redefined by her biology and told her priorities should be having and raising children. But the social landscape had changed, and this return to traditional roles didn’t resonate with newly empowered women. Some were unwilling to give up their work to return to the kitchen. Others, younger women who had never known an America where their gender didn’t have the vote, had grown up in a country that hadn’t placed limitations on what women could do. To some, this new model of womanhood defined by marriage and children was baffling.

  * * *

  The Cobb family moved back to Oklahoma after the war, this time to Oklahoma City, and right in time for Jerrie to begin her senior year of high school in the fall of 1946. Classen High, she was thrilled to discover, had a pilot on staff. Coach Conger was a licensed flight instructor who believed there was no reason that a responsible, intelligent, and alert teenager shouldn’t learn to fly. And so he consented to teach Jerrie in his Aeronca, a stubby-nosed “knocker” with two seats crammed side by side into its tiny fabric-covered fuselage.

  Lessons took place rain or shine. Though taller now, Jerrie still had to sit bolt upright to get a clear view out the little windshield. For a while, it was like flying with her father all over again. Coach Conger would take off and land, allowing Jerrie to fly while they were airborne. Then, one cold March day not long after her sixteenth birthday, Coach Conger turned to her after a flight. “Take her,” he said, “she’s all yours.” Without another word, he jumped out of the plane.

  Alone in a cockpit for the first time, Jerrie carefully taxied the plane into position at the end of the runway. The Aeronca’s 65-horsepower engine felt like the most powerful thing in the world, and the grass runway seemed to stretch on forever. She checked the wind’s heading with a nearby windsock and checked her compass, altimeter, engine speed gauge, and airspeed indicator on the instrument panel. Then she pushed the throttle forward and started to roll. She felt like her heart was beating in time with the engine as she bumped along the runway on three wheels, then two as the nose lifted up. At forty miles per hour, she eased the control stick back and felt the plane lift off the ground in a slow, steady climb. The engine’s roar settled into a hum as she leveled out. She circled the field once, then brought the Aeronca down for landing. Repeating the simple pattern two more times completed the requirement for a pilot’s fir
st solo flight.

  “You did just fine,” Coach Conger told her, smiling, as she taxied toward the barn at the end of the run. “I want you to keep right on doing what you’re doing.”

  * * *

  In the spring of 1947, Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower sat before the Senate Military Affairs Committee. The issue in question was a new bill, one that called for a national military establishment consisting of an independent army, navy, and air force managed by a secretary of national defense. The five-star army general who’d orchestrated the allied forces’ invasion of Europe with the Normandy landings—what Americans had come to know simply as D-Day—knew the future of America’s military power hinged on a coequal air force. In his testimony, Ike emphasized the importance and necessity of air power in America’s peacetime landscape. Hap Arnold also testified to the importance of aviation in future wars.

  On July 26, President Truman finally approved the National Security Act of 1947. Jackie was thrilled that the air force had finally become its own service branch, and was even more pleased when her friend General Carl A. “Tooey” Spaatz was named chief of staff and another friend, William Stuart Symington Jr., was appointed air force secretary.

  When Jackie paid a visit to Stuart Symington soon after in the fall of 1947, she found he wasn’t alone in his office. Chuck Yeager was there, too, the handsome, twenty-four-year-old pilot with a shock of dark hair whom Jackie knew by reputation. Chuck’s flight hadn’t been publicly announced yet, but aviation insiders had heard that weeks earlier, on October 14, 1947, Chuck had flown the rocket-powered Bell X-1 experimental aircraft faster than sound in level flight. He was the first person in history to break the so-called sound barrier. Jackie wasted no time introducing herself. “I’m Jackie Cochran,” she said, pumping his hand vigorously. “Great job, Captain Yeager. We’re all proud of you.” Keen to hear more about his flight, she immediately took him to lunch.