by Tom Wolfe
It took only seven minutes to reach the helicopter’s mother ship, the aircraft carrier Lake Champlain. The capsule swayed back and forth below the helicopter. It was very sunny. It was a perfect day in May out near Bermuda. The helicopter began descending to the flight deck of the carrier. Shepard looked down and he could see hundreds of faces. They were all looking up toward the helicopter. The entire crew of the ship seemed to be on the deck. Their faces were all turned up toward him in the sunlight. Hundreds of faces turned up in the sun. They covered the whole aft section of the deck. They were massed in between the moored airplanes. They were all looking up toward the helicopter and moving, surging toward the spot where the helicopter would come down. He could make out a whole force of masters-at-arms down there trying to hold them back behind the ropes. As the helicopter came close to the deck, he could see the faces more clearly, and they had that look. Hundreds of faces already had that glistening look.
XI.
The Unscrewable Pooch
Glenn and the others now watched from the sidelines as Al Shepard was hoisted out of their midst and installed as a national hero on the order of a Lindbergh. That was the way it looked. As soon as his technical debriefings had been completed, Shepard was flown straight from Grand Bahama Island to Washington. The next day the six also-rans joined him there. They stood by as President Kennedy gave Al the Distinguished Service Medal in a ceremony in the Rose Garden of the White House. Then they followed in his wake as Al sat up on the back of an open limousine waving to the crowds along Constitution Avenue. Tens of thousands of people had turned out to watch the motorcade, even though it had been arranged with barely twenty-four hours’ notice. They were screaming to Al, reaching out, crying, awash with awe and gratitude. It took the motorcade half an hour to travel the one mile from the White House to the Capitol. Al sometimes seemed to have transistors in his solar plexus. But not now; now he seemed truly moved. They adored him. He was on … the Pope’s balcony … Thirty minutes of it … The next day New York City gave Al a ticker-tape parade up Broadway. There was Al on the back ledge of the limousine, with all that paper snow and confetti coming down, just the way you used to see it in the Movietone News in the theaters. Al’s hometown, Derry, New Hampshire, which was not much more than a village, gave Al a parade, and it drew the biggest crowd the state had ever seen. Army, Navy, Marine, Air Force, and National Guard troops from all over New England marched down Main Street, and acrobatic teams of jet fighters flew overhead. The politicians thought New Hampshire was entering Metro Heaven and came close to renaming Derry “Space-town U.S.A.” before they got hold of themselves. In the town of Deerfield, Illinois, a new school was named for Al, overnight, just like that. Then Al started getting tons of greeting cards in the mail, cards saying “Congratulations to Alan Shepard, Our First Man in Space!” That was already printed on the cards, along with NASA’s address. All the buyers had to do was sign them and mail them. The card companies were cranking these things out. Al was that much of a hero.
Next to Gagarin’s orbital flight, Shepard’s little mortar lob to Bermuda, with its mere five minutes of weightlessness, was no great accomplishment. But that didn’t matter. The flight had unfolded like a drama, the first drama of single combat in American history. Shepard had been the tiny underdog, sitting on top of an American rocket—and our rockets always blow up—challenging the omnipotent Soviet Integral. The fact that the entire thing had been televised, starting a good two hours before the lift-off, had generated the most feverish suspense. And then he had gone through with it. He let them light the fuse. He hadn’t resigned. He hadn’t even panicked. He handled himself perfectly. He was as great a daredevil as Lindbergh, and he was purer: he did it all for his country. Here was a man … with the right stuff. No one spoke the phrase—but every man could feel the rays from that righteous aura and that primal force, the power of physical courage and manly honor.
Even Shorty Powers became famous. “The voice of Mercury Control,” he was called; that, and “the eighth astronaut.” Powers was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, a onetime bomber pilot, and all during Shepard’s flight he had come on the air from the flight control center at the Cape saying, “This is Mercury Control …” and reporting the astronaut’s progress with a baritone coolness of the combat pilot’s righteous sort, and people loved it. After the capsule splashed down, Powers had quoted, or seemed to have quoted, Shepard as saying everything was “A-Okay.” In fact, this was a Shorty Powers paraphrase borrowed from NASA engineers who used to say it during radio transmission tests because the sharper sound of A cut through the static better than O. Nevertheless, “A-Okay” became shorthand for Shepard’s triumph over the odds and for astronaut coolness under stress, and Shorty Powers was looked up to as the medium who communicated across the gulf between ordinary people and star voyagers with the right stuff.
Bob Gilruth’s status rose sharply, too. After a solid year of flak and grief, Gilruth had finally earned the eminence of riding in one of the limousines in Shepard’s triumphal motorcade through Washington. James E. Webb was sitting next to him, and they were looking out at the thousands of people who were smiling and crying and waving and cheering and taking pictures. “If it hadn’t worked,” said Webb, “they’d be asking for your head.” As it was, Gilruth and Mercury and NASA were, all at once, names that stood for American technological competence. (Our boys no longer botch it and our rockets don’t blow up.)
None of this was lost on the President. His opinion of NASA had now swung around 180 degrees. Webb was aware of that. Three weeks before, after Gagarin’s flight, when Kennedy had summoned Webb and Dryden to the White House, the President had been in a funk. He was convinced that the entire world was judging the United States and his leadership in terms of the space race with the Soviets. He was muttering, “If somebody can just tell me how to catch up. Let’s find somebody—anybody … There’s nothing more important.” He kept saying, “We’ve got to catch up.” Catching up became an obsession. Finally, Dryden told him that it looked hopeless to try to catch up with the mighty Integral in anything that involved flights in earth orbit. The one possibility was to start a program to put a man on the moon within the next ten years. It would require a crash effort on the scale of the Manhattan Project of the Second World War and would cost anywhere from twenty to forty billion dollars. Kennedy found the figure appalling. Less than a week later, of course, the Bay of Pigs debacle had occurred, and now his “new frontier” looked more like a retreat on all fronts. Shepard’s successful flight was the first hopeful note Kennedy had enjoyed since then. For the first time he had some confidence in NASA. And the tremendous public response to Shepard as the patriotic daredevil, challenging the Soviets in the heavens, gave Kennedy an inspiration.
One morning Kennedy asked Dryden, Webb, and Gilruth to come to the White House. They sat down in the Oval Office, and Kennedy said: “All over the world we’re judged by how well we do in space. Therefore, we’ve got to be first. That’s all there is to it.” After this buildup Gilruth figured Kennedy was going to tell them to cut the Redstone suborbital flights short and move straight to the series of orbital flights using the Atlas rocket. They were still considering six and possibly ten more suborbital flights, like Shepard’s, using the Redstone rocket. Gilruth had thought of moving straight to the orbital flights, although it was a daring proposition, given the problems they had been having on tests of the Mercury-Atlas system. So they were all absolutely startled when Kennedy said: “I want you to start on the moon program. I’m going to ask Congress for the money. I’m going to tell them you’re going to put a man on the moon by 1970.”
On May 25, twenty days after Shepard’s flight, Kennedy appeared before Congress to deliver a message on “urgent national needs.” This was, in fact, the beginning of his political comeback from the Bay of Pigs disaster. It was as if he were starting his administration over and delivering a new inaugural address.
“Now is the time to take longer strides,�
�� he said, “time for a great new American enterprise, time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth.” He said that the Russians, thanks to “their large rocket engines,” would continue to dominate the competition for some time, but that this should only make the United States step up its efforts. “For while we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last. We take an additional risk by making it in full view of the world; but as shown by the feat of Astronaut Shepard, this very risk enhances our stature when we are successful.” Then he said: “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”
Congress was not about to quibble over expenses. NASA was given a $1.7 billion budget for the next year, and that was merely the start. It was made clear that NASA could have practically as much as it wanted. Shepard’s flight had made quite a hit. An amazing period of “budgetless financing” began. It was astonishing. Suddenly money was in the air. Businessmen of all sorts were trying to bestow it directly upon Shepard. Within a few months Leo DeOrsey, who was still the boys’ unpaid business manager, had counted up half a million dollars’ worth of proposals from companies who wanted Shepard to endorse products. One congressman, Frank Boykin of Alabama, wanted the government to give Shepard a house. Shepard turned it all down, but it did make one stop and think.
If Smilin’ Al’s experience was any indication, then this astronaut business was becoming even more of a Fighter Jock Heaven than it had been in the first year of Project Mercury. Eisenhower had never paid much attention to the astronauts personally. He had looked upon them as military volunteers for an experiment, and that was that. But Kennedy now made them an integral part of his Administration and included them in its social as well as its official life.
The other fellows had gone along for Al’s trip to the White House, but the wives had remained at the Cape. When they flew back down to Patrick, the wives were out at the field to meet their plane. And they all had a single question: “What’s Jackie like?”
Jackie Kennedy’s exotic face and Sixth Floor Designer Collection clothes were in every magazine … They all had a curious sensation. In one corner of their souls they were still junior-level military officers & wives who saw people like Jackie Kennedy only on the pages of magazines and newspapers. And at the same time they were beginning to realize that they were part of the strange world where Those People, the people who do things and run things, actually exist.
“What’s Jackie like?”
Soon enough they would all meet her. They would go to private lunches at the White House, where there were so many servants there seemed to be one behind every chair. They played you like man-to-man basketball. Jack Kennedy was very warm toward the fellows. He courted them. That glistening look would come over his face from time to time. The business of manly honor cut through everything at last, and even the President would become merely another awed male in the presence of the right stuff. As for Jackie, she had a certain Southern smile, which she had perhaps picked up at Foxcroft School, in Virginia, and her quiet voice, which came through her teeth, as revealed by the smile. She barely moved her lower jaw when she talked. The words seemed to slip between her teeth like exceedingly small slippery pearls. Her excitement, if any, over the prospect of lunch with seven pilots and their fraus may not have been great. But she couldn’t have been kinder or more attentive. At one point she invited Rene Carpenter back for a private visit, and they talked like any two friends, about all sorts of things, including the problems of raising children in the modern age. One had only to think of any other seven pilots’ wives in a squadron … All of a sudden the Honorable Mrs. Astronaut existed on a plateau, upon the upper reaches of American protocol, where the perquisites included Jackie Kennedy.
And for the fellows, it was pure heaven. None of this altered the Edwards-style perfection of their lives. It merely added something new and marvelous to the ineffable contrasts of this astronaut business. Within hours after lunch at the White House or waterskiing in Hyannis Port you could be back at the Cape, back Drinking & Driving in that marvelous Low Rent rat-shack terrain, back in your Corvette spinning out on the shoulders of those hardtack Baptist roadways and pulling into the all-night diner for a little coffee to stabilize the system for the proficiency runs ahead. And if you had switched to your Ban-Lon shirts and your go-to-hell pants, they might not even recognize you in there, which would be all the better, and you could just sit there and drink coffee and have a couple of cigarettes and listen to the two policemen in the next booth with the Dawn Patrol radio sets in their pockets, and a little voice packed in static would be coming out of the radios saying, “Thirty-one, thirty-one [garble, garble] … man named Virgil Wiley refuses to return to his room at the Rio Banana,” and the policemen would look at each other as if to say, “Well, shit, is that anything to have to rise up from over a plate of french fries and death balls for?”—and then they’d sigh and start getting up and buckling on their gunbelts, and about the time they would head out the door, in would come the Hardiest Cracker, the Aboriginal Grit, an old guy drunk as a monkey and ricocheting off the doorframe and sliding in bowlegged over a counter stool and saying to the waitress: