Fighting for Space
Page 36
Looking around the secluded beach, she briefly thought she could happily live out her days in a hut, a hermit hidden away from society on this beautiful island. She had loved this island since she and Jack had shared their first kiss in the surf all those years ago. Thinking of Jack, she realized that when she had wanted to slow down and he had told her she would miss flying too much, he had been right. She was a pilot, and she needed to fly.
Slowly, like it had happened during the international air race all those years ago, Jerrie realized she was starting to make plans. Long before taking the Lovelace medical tests, she’d nursed a secret ambition of working as a missionary pilot. She’d always been deeply religious, so combining her love of flying with her love of God felt natural. If she could get a plane, she thought, she could start learning to navigate through the Amazonian jungle, learn how to live in this new world, and create a new life for herself. She began to see a very happy new chapter of her life just over the horizon.
* * *
On the morning of May 11, 1964, Jackie sat in the cockpit of the F-104G Super Starfighter thirty-five thousand feet in the air. The Lockheed-built cutting-edge supersonic fighter plane had never been flown by a woman, so Jackie had gotten herself hired as a Lockheed test pilot so she could use it to break her own 15–25-kilometer straight course record; she was determined to protect her status as the fastest woman on Earth as long as she could. Chuck Yeager had reprised his role as her teacher, much to the chagrin of the young male pilots fresh from the military. At fifty-eight, they grumbled, she was little more than an “old dame” trying to do their jobs. She’d won them over with picnics of home-cooked fried chicken, and once she got in the air, they were forced to admit that she could outfly all of them.
From her perch high above the ground, Jackie stared down the barrel of an invisible rectangular tunnel 300 feet tall, a quarter of a mile wide, and twenty miles long, a bounding box set by radar and ground instruments monitoring her speed and position. Her goal was to fly through that box without touching a single invisible wall. If she did, her speed record would be invalidated. It was a kind of precision flying some of the young men couldn’t do; her decades of pushing the limits of speed in the air gave her the experience she needed to respond to things happening in fractions of seconds. Eyes glued to her instruments, she followed the precise direction of the space-positioning officer watching from the ground, guiding her through the corridor. She flew straight, level, and fast through that tunnel on two subsequent passes. Below her on the ground, two sonic booms shook the earth.
A week later, her records had been checked and validated. She’d averaged 1,429.297 miles per hour, smashing her old record and reaching a new top speed for women of Mach 2.2, a little over twice the speed of sound. “Successful businesswoman, happy housewife, confidante of presidents, royalty, and military leaders,” Lockheed’s press bureau described her, “Miss Cochran continues as the reigning feminine flier of the world.”
28About $148,000 in 2019.
Epilogue
Somewhere in the Amazon, Christmas 1971
Seventeen-year-old Juliane Koepcke looked up at the canopy of the Amazonian jungle overhead. It took a moment before she remembered the turbulence that had shaken LANSA Flight 508, remembered her mother panicking next to her, and the whistling sound of wind rushing past her as she fell to Earth, hanging upside-down still strapped to her seat. As the scenes came flooding back to her, Juliane realized she couldn’t hear anything but the sounds of the jungle. The horrifying realization dawned on her: she was the only survivor of the plane crash. She also knew the jungle could be as dangerous as what she had just endured. Rather than wait for help to find her, Juliane grabbed a bag of candy from the wreckage and set off, ignoring the pain of a broken collarbone and severely injured knee.
Ten days later, Juliane woke to the sound of male voices. Woodcutters had stumbled on her sleeping spot. Their shock at finding a young woman alone in the jungle doubled when she told them what had happened. The men took her to their village, where they gave her rudimentary care, but Juliane was grateful all the same. At some point while she was resting, an American pilot named Jerrie Cobb arrived. Jerrie offered to take Juliane to a nearby missionary site where she could be treated by proper doctors and have a safer place to rest. Juliane consented to go with Jerrie; nervous though she was about flying again so soon, she knew she needed better medical attention.
Boarding Jerrie’s plane that afternoon, Juliane’s anxiety hit a peak. Jerrie turned to her and offered what she thought were calming words: she assured Juliane that she was “the first woman in the world to be trained as an astronaut,” so flying with her was akin to “flying in the arms of an angel.”
Juliane, scared and eager to get back on the ground, didn’t give this oddly self-aggrandizing statement a second thought.
Like an international game of broken telephone, the true account of Juliane’s rescue was distorted by the time the story reached North America. Reports said that Jerrie had located LANSA Flight 508 on her own, that she’d recovered Juliane directly from the wreckage before transporting her to a missionary clinic in Yarinacocha, Peru. It was the latest in a growing list of exploits reaching the United States about Jerrie’s activities in South America. In the late 1960s, she’d gained a reputation as a pilot willing to fly through dangerous situations to bring necessary medical aid to those in trouble in the Amazonas. She’d even located tribes thought lost. Increasingly seen as a humanitarian and hero, Jerrie gained fans in the United States, among them US Air Force Lieutenant Edwin J. Kirschner, who put her name forward to the Harmon Trophy committee for the 1971 award.
Floyd was alone at the Indio Ranch when he received a pile of mail Jackie sent home from the hospital in Albuquerque; the Lovelace Clinic remained her preferred medical facility even after Randy and his wife died in a plane crash in 1965. Jackie hadn’t asked Floyd to reply or otherwise do anything with the correspondence. Rather, she just wanted to have it at home for when she returned. Nevertheless, Floyd sifted through the pile to make sure there was nothing pressing and stopped when he came across a note from General Jimmy Doolittle. It was addressed to the Harmon Advisory Committee members, of which Jackie was one, and included the list of possible recipients for the 1971 award. Floyd was familiar with the Harmon Trophy since Jackie had won it seven times, and he also knew how his wife felt about Jerrie’s nomination. Feeling compelled to give his wife a voice, he took it upon himself to write to his friend Jimmy.
“I know what Jackie had in mind about Jerrie Cobb and she did not wish to commit it to a paper that would be generally passed around,” Floyd’s letter began. He relayed that Jackie didn’t really know what kind of work Jerrie had been up to in the jungle, and though it was certainly courageous of her to rescue a survivor, it wasn’t remarkable. But her issues were more complex than that.
“Miss Cobb’s attitude and actions several years ago in connection with her posing as a woman astronaut, accepted or about to be accepted as such, Jackie thought were thoroughly unjustified, thoroughly uncalled for and harmful in effect to women pilots.” Jackie, Floyd continued, knew the real story, and writing on his wife’s behalf, he finally relayed the truth about the Lovelace testing. “Miss Cobb on her own application went to the Lovelace Clinic and asked to be given the same medical tests.” He explained that she failed, and even though medical tests were but a small part of the qualifications to fly in space, she was so determined she returned months later, at Randy’s invitation and after undergoing a fitness regimen, to retake the tests. This time she passed. Months later, Randy mentioned her results as a matter of interest in his presentation in Sweden, and this subsequently “broke into the press and in the course of time was quite blown up to the point where a great number of people thought Miss Cobb had been accepted for the astronaut program.” It was Jackie, in an attempt to bring order to this would-be program, who funded the other women’s testing and was working on getting them all to Pensacola for the se
cond set of tests as a group for the sake of determining whether women would be fit for spaceflight; she knew representation mattered even though America wasn’t ready for women astronauts at the time. But somehow Jerrie got there first and did the Pensacola tests herself, after which point “whoever was in charge of this work in Washington called the whole thing off for all the women in view of the poor showing that Miss Cobb made of these further tests.”
Noting Jackie’s opinions on the matter, the Harmon Trophy committee members ultimately agreed that Jerrie’s flying activities were more than enough to earn her the award. Furthermore, in reading the letters she sent home and reports about her work, her rescue of Juliane was just one example of her hazardous job of flying as a relief pilot through the Amazonian jungle. Jerrie traveled to Washington for the luncheon on September 20, 1973, at the International Club, where President Nixon presented her with the Harmon Trophy.
Jerrie was happily settled in her dual-country life by the time she won her first and only Harmon Trophy. From her small bungalow in Florida, she could fly from her own airstrip to South America where her work as a relief and missionary pilot continued funded by the not-for-profit Jerrie Cobb Foundation. Flitting between North and South America, she was never out of the news for long. In 1981, someone nominated her for the Nobel Peace Prize, bringing her a momentary surge of popularity. In 1983, after Sally Ride became the first American woman in space, Jerrie was in the news again, this time as the “foiled astronaut.” In 1995, a Dateline segment on the Lovelace women brought the story to a new generation. For this retelling, producer Jim Cross gave the women the moniker “the Mercury 13” as a play on NASA’s Mercury 7, but failed to mention that Jerri Sloan had dropped out of the Pensacola testing, and positioned Jackie as the villain who kept them grounded. The segment also explained that NASA had run the tests because it was curious about women’s fitness, effectively cementing in the public’s psyche the mistaken idea that they were indeed trained as part of an official program.
In 1998, when NASA announced that a now seventy-seven-year-old John Glenn had a spot on the space shuttle crew of STS-95 as a mission specialist, Jerrie reignited her thirty-five-year-old quest of fighting for a mission in space. She returned to the United States as fired up as she had been in 1962. At sixty-seven, she still wanted to fly in space and figured if NASA was sending John up to gather data on one senior citizen, surely two data points—one male and one female—would be even more valuable for the agency.
Jerrie was back making headlines. For months, the public bombarded NASA with letters and petitions urging it to let Jerrie fly. Letters came from the National Women’s History Project, the American Association of University Women of California, and congressmen including Republicans James M. Inhofe and Don Nickles of Oklahoma and Democrats Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein of California. Jerrie’s campaign got all the way to the White House. First Lady Hillary Clinton took a stand in Jerrie’s defense and even got her a meeting with NASA Administrator Dan Goldin about a possible flight. The media fell in love with her all over again, and the narrative this time was for NASA to right its decades-old wrong. But it didn’t work. Whatever press coverage she got, Jerrie wasn’t a national hero; no one flying in space was on the same level of John’s return to orbit. Even when NASA briefly considered opening seats to passengers on shuttle flights, it never offered her the commanding role she’d coveted since the idea first got in her head in the fall of 1959. Her spaceflight dream, she felt, died a second time.
Jerrie did, however, see the first woman fill that role. On July 23, 1999, thirty-seven years and five days after the congressional hearing, Jerrie watched Eileen Collins, the second woman in the country to graduate from a test pilot school, launch as the first female mission commander.
Jerrie became increasingly reclusive in the years after Eileen’s flight. Except for a handful of interviews for articles or books about her life as an “almost astronaut,” she lived her days out in near-obscurity until her death in 2019.
Jackie never saw an American woman fly in space.
By the time Jerrie was awarded the Harmon Trophy, Jackie’s own flying days were over. Two years earlier she’d decided it was time to add a new class of records to her impressive résumé. She wanted to fly a helicopter, specifically a new Lockheed design that promised to break records. No one expressed any dismay over this ambition; everyone in the flying world knew that if any senior citizen was going to break a flight record, it would be Jackie. To teach her to fly this new aircraft, a friend had brought a Lockheed model to the Ranch for private lessons. Everything was fine until the end of her first solo flight. She brought the helicopter down hard, bouncing up and crashing hard enough to break the landing gear right off. In her whole flying career, it was the first time she’d ever suffered a medical issue in flight. She’d started having seizures.
Seizures were the latest in an ongoing list of medical problems. She’d had ongoing issues with persistent abdominal adhesions after her teenage appendectomy, eye surgery to regain her depth perception, and foot surgery in England. At the Paris Air Show in 1971, she’d been struck with chest pains she assumed were symptomatic of pneumonia. In 1972, she’d suffered a severe heart attack. Over the years, she’d miscarried the two children that she and Floyd would have loved to raise. By and large, she kept the severity of her illnesses from Floyd; his arthritis had become so crippling over the years that he couldn’t even shake hands to close a deal anymore, and she never wanted to add to his worries when she knew deep down that she was fine. But her own health was getting so bad she couldn’t pretend everything was fine.
One night, after suffering another seizure, Jackie decided it was time to go to the Lovelace Clinic. Seeing his wife off into the car with their driver, Floyd pleaded with her in a whisper, “Oh, Jackie, don’t die and leave me.”
She suffered three more seizures on the trip to Albuquerque. When she got there, doctors found the source of the problem was her heart. Her pulse had been dipping so low the loss of blood to her brain was causing the seizures. The solution was a pacemaker.
Talking about flying and even looking at airplanes became painful. Adding to her anguish, the life she had grown accustomed to with Floyd was also coming to an end. Floyd had lost a fair amount of money to some bad business deals, and Bruce Odlum, his son from his marriage to Hortense, was taxing their already strained financial resources with bad business deals of his own. In the late 1960s, Floyd and Jackie were forced to sell their Manhattan home and retire full-time to the Ranch, where they kept up appearances and entertained as many famous friends as ever. Ike Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson held a tête-à-tête there in 1968, and Ike even moved into one of the guesthouses to write his memoir. But now the Ranch was the only asset they had left, and they had no choice but to sell it. Bruce managed the sale so poorly he took his own life rather than face the debt he’d accrued. Floyd and Jackie were left with barely enough money to move into a small house across the street from their former compound.
When Floyd died in 1976, he’d named Jackie and Chuck Yeager co-executors of his estate. As he helped Jackie sort through all of Floyd’s papers and financial records, Chuck found an envelope sealed with a quarter set in wax. It was the letter that Jackie had given Floyd before their marriage forty years earlier, the one she’d told him contained the true story of her past.
“Do you want to open this?” Chuck asked.
“No,” Jackie replied.
“Is there any reason to keep this letter around?”
She didn’t say anything. Chuck burned the still-sealed letter.
Jackie’s health declined rapidly after that, and her mood took an irreversible turn. The woman who had always gotten her way couldn’t keep aging at bay. Even when heart and kidney failure left her so swollen and uncomfortable she had to sleep upright in a chair, she drank heavily and made sure visitors knew what trophies she’d won.
In a final act, she organized her own burial down to the simple flat
headstone in a small Indio cemetery. In the process, she had the headstones marking her family’s graves in DeFuniak Springs replaced, except for Robert Jr.’s; that one she left black with age.
Right up until her death in 1980, Bessie Pittman remained Jacqueline Cochran’s secret.
Appendix
Eisenhower Presidential Library
Eisenhower Presidential Library
Eisenhower Presidential Library
Eisenhower Presidential Library
Eisenhower Presidential Library
Eisenhower Presidential Library
Eisenhower Presidential Library
Eisenhower Presidential Library
Eisenhower Presidential Library
Eisenhower Presidential Library
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