The Right Stuff
Page 44
The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. The mantle of Cold Warrior of the Heavens had been placed on their shoulders one April day in 1959 without their asking for it or having anything to do with it or even knowing it. And now it would be taken away, without their knowing that, either, and because of nothing they ever did or desired. John Glenn had made up his mind to run for the Senate in Ohio in 1964. He could not have foreseen that the voters of Ohio would no longer regard him as a man with a protector’s aura. But at least he would be remembered. It would have been still more impossible for his confreres to realize that the day might come when Americans would hear their names and say, “Oh, yes—now, which one was he?”
Also by Tom Wolfe
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
The Pump House Gang
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
The Painted Word
Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine
In Our Time
From Bauhaus to Our House
The Bonfire of the Vanities
A Man in Full
Hooking Up
I Am Charlotte Simmons
Tom Wolfe is the author of a dozen books, among them such contemporary classics as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The Bonfire of the Vanities, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. He lives in New York City.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The writing of this book would have been impossible without the personal recollections of many people, pilots and non-pilots, who were intimately involved in the beginning of the era of manned rocket flight in America. I wish there were some way to thank them properly for their generosity and for the time and effort it took them to review events that go back twenty years or more in some cases.
The NASA history office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston was unfailingly helpful, especially in giving me access to transcriptions of the post-flight debriefings of the astronauts. I should mention in particular NASA historian James M. Grimwood, the author, with his colleagues, Loyd S. Swenson, Jr., and Charles C. Alexander, of This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury. Other books I would like to acknowledge are Always Another Dawn, by A. Scott Crossfield with Clay Blair, Jr.; Starfall, by Betty Grissom and Henry Still; Across the High Frontier, by Charles E. Yeager and William Lundgren; The Lonely Sky, by William Bridgeman and Jacqueline Hazard; X–15 Diary, by Richard Tregaskis; and We Seven, by the seven Mercury astronauts.
The names of four figures appearing briefly in the narrative have been changed: Bud and Loretta Jennings, Mitch Johnson, and Gladys Loring.
THE RIGHT STUFF. Copyright © 1979 by Tom Wolfe. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010.
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First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux