The Right Stuff

  Being a good Presbyterian, John Glenn knew that praying in public was no violation of the faith. The faith even encouraged it; it set a salubrious example for the public. Nor did John Glenn feel the slightest discomfort because now, in post-World War II America, virtue was out of style. Sometimes he seemed to enjoy shocking people with his clean living. Even when he was no more than nine years old, he had been the kind of boy who would halt a football game to read the riot act to some other nine-year-old who said “Goddamn it” or “Aw shit” when a play didn’t go right. This was an unusual gesture even where he grew up, which was New Concord, Ohio, but not so extraordinary as it might have been a lot of other places. New Concord was a sort of town, once common in America, whose peculiar origins have tended to disappear in the collective amnesia as tout le monde strives to be urbane. Which is to say, it began as a religious community. A hundred years ago any man in New Concord with ambitions that reached as high as feed-store proprietor or better joined the Presbyterian Church, and some of the awesome voltage of live Presbyterianism still existed when Glenn was growing up in the 1920’s and 1930’s. His father was a fireman for the B&O Railroad and a good churchgoing man and his mother was a hardworking churchgoing woman, and Glenn went to Sunday school and church and sat through hundreds of interminable Presbyterian prayers, and the church and the faith and the clean living served him well. There was no contradiction whatsoever between the Presbyterian faith and ambition, even soaring ambition, even ambition grand enough to suit the invisible ego of the fighter jock. A good Presbyterian demonstrated his election by the Lord and the heavenly hosts through his success in this life. In a way, Presbyterianism was tailor-made for people who intended to make it in this world, as well as on the Plains of Heaven; which was a good thing, because John Glenn, with his sunny round freckled country-boy face, was as ambitious as any pilot who had ever hauled his happy burden of self-esteem up the pyramid.

  So Glenn went pounding around the driveway of the BOQ of Langley Air Force Base in his sweatsuit, doing his roadwork, and he frankly didn’t care if most of the others didn’t like it. The running was good for him on several levels. At thirty-seven he was the oldest of the fellows, and there was a little more pressure on him to demonstrate that he was in good condition. Besides that, he had a tendency to put on weight. From the waist up he was of only average size and musculature and, in fact, had surprisingly small hands. But his legs were huge, real kegs, muscular and fleshy at the same time, and he tended to pack on weight in the thighs. He was pushing 185 when he was selected for this thing, and he could well afford to get down to 170 or even less. As for living in the BOQ … why not? He and his wife, Annie, had bought their house in Arlington because the children would be in excellent public schools there. Why transplant them again when he would be on the road half the time and probably wouldn’t see them except on weekends, anyway?

  If it looked to the others as if he were living a monastic life … that wouldn’t hurt too much … Competition was competition, and there was no use pretending it didn’t exist. He already had an advantage over the other six because of his Marine flying record and the way he tended to dominate the publicity. He was ready to give a 110 percent on all fronts. If they wanted four hours of unsupervised exercise per week—well, give them eight or twelve. Other people could think what they wanted; he happened to be completely sincere in the way he was going about this thing.

  The goal in Project Mercury, as in every important new flight project, was to be the pilot assigned to make the first flight. In flight test that meant your superiors looked upon you as the man who had the right stuff to challenge the unknowns. In Project Mercury the first flight would also be the most historic flight. They had been told that the first flight would be suborbital. There might be as many as ten or eleven suborbital flights, going to an altitude of about one hundred miles, fifty miles above the commonly accepted boundary line between the earth’s atmosphere and space. These flights would not go into orbit, because the rocket they would be using, the Redstone, could not generate enough power to take a capsule to orbital speed, which would be about 18,000 miles per hour. The capsule would go up and come down in a big arc, like an artillery shell’s. As it came over the top of the arc, the astronaut would experience about five minutes of weightlessness. These suborbital flights were scheduled to begin in mid-1960, and all seven pilots would get a crack at them.

  Other men would no doubt go farther into space, into earth orbit and beyond. But they, in turn, would be chosen from the first men to fly suborbitally; so the first astronaut would be the one the world remembered. When a man realized something like that, there was no use being shy about the opportunity he had. Glenn had not gotten this far in his career by standing still in a saintly fashion and waiting for his halo to be noticed. When he reached Korea, flying strafing and bombing missions in support of Marine ground troops, he realized that the biggest accolade was being assigned to Air Force fighter squadrons, on loan (like Schirra), for air-to-air combat up at the Yalu River. So he had gone after that assignment and had gotten it and had shot down three MiGs during the last few days of the war. As soon as the war ended, he realized that flight test was the hot new arena and had gone straight to his superiors and asked to be assigned to the Navy’s Patuxent River Test Pilot School, and they sent him there. He had been in flight test barely three years when he dreamed up the F8U transcontinental run. He dreamed it up himself, as a major in the Marines! Although everyone knew it was possible, no one had ever made a sustained coast-to-coast flight at an average speed of greater than Mach 1. Glenn developed the whole scheme, the aerial rendezvous with three different AJ1 refueling tankers, the way he would dive down to 22,000 feet to meet them, the whole thing. He pulled it off on July 16, 1957, flying from Los Angeles to Floyd Bennett Field in New York, in three hours and twenty-three minutes. The word was that there were some test pilots who were put out because he got the assignment. They seemed to think they had done the major test work on the F8U, and so forth and so on. But it was his idea! He got it launched! If he hadn’t put himself forward, it wouldn’t have happened at all. Last year, 1958, it was obvious to him that all the services were working on the problems of manned space flight. There was no Project Mercury yet, and no one knew who would be running the show when a manned program began. All he knew was that it was not likely to be the Marines but he wanted to play a part in it. So he had himself assigned to the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics. He volunteered for runs on the Navy’s human centrifuge machine at Johnsville, Pennsylvania, exploring the high g-forces associated with rocket flight. By March of this year, 1959, just a month before the seven of them were selected as astronauts, he had been at the McDonnell Aircraft plant in St. Louis as a representative of the Bureau of Aeronautics on a NASA Mockup Review Board, reviewing progress of the manufacture of the Mercury capsule. He didn’t know just how the seven of them were selected … but obviously all that hadn’t hurt his chances.

  And now the ante had been raised once more, and he was after nothing short of being the first man to go into space. NASA would have to beat the Russians to it, of course, for him or any other American to be first. But that was one of the things that made it exhilarating, exhilarating enough even to endure this sweaty pounding over a salty pine-tag circular driveway in Tidewater, Virginia. There was the same sort of esprit—usually called patriotism but better described as joie de combat —that had existed during the Second World War and, among pilots (and practically no one else), during the Korean War. Project Mercury was officially a civilian undertaking. But it struck Glenn as being like a new branch of the armed services. All seven of them were still in the military, drawing military pay, even though they wore civilian clothes. There was a warlike urgency and priority about the whole enterprise. And in this new branch of the military no one outranked you. It was almost too good to be true.

  On the organization chart the seven of them had superiors. They reported to Robert Gilruth, the head of the new Space Task Group,
who was a subordinate of Hugh Dryden, the deputy administrator of NASA. Gilruth was a superb engineer and a fine man; he had literally written the book on the handling characteristics of aircraft, the first scientific treatise on the subject, “Requirements for Satisfactory Flying Qualities of Airplanes,” NACA Report No. 755, 1937, which had become a classic. He was a big, bald, shy man with a reedy voice. Most recently he had been head of the NACA Pilotless Aircraft Research Division, which had experimented with unmanned rockets. Gilruth was not used to marching the troops and certainly not a group of ambitious pilots. He was no Vince Lombardi. He was a genius among engineers, but he was not the type to take seven colossal stars who were suddenly the most famous pilots in America and mold them into Bob Gilruth’s Astroteam.

  They were so famous, so revered, so lavishly fussed and worried over at all times that they were without peers in this new branch of the military. Everywhere they went in their travels people stopped what they were doing and gave them a certain look of awe and sympathy. Sympathy … because our rockets all blow up. It was a nice, friendly, warm look, all right, and yet it was strange. It was a sort of glistening smile with tears and joy suffusing it; both tears and joy. In fact, it was an ancient look, from the primordial past, never seen in America before. It was the smile of homage and astonishment—at such bravery!—that had been given to single-combat warriors, in advance, on account, before the fact, since time was.

  Well … Glenn was ready; he was ready for election; he was ready to be the first to go into the heavens when that debt of homage and honor and glistening faces came due.

  One of the people who beamed that look at them with a sincere devotion was a Washington lawyer named Leo DeOrsey. Walter Bonney, the NASA public affairs officer who had run the press conference, had seen the frenzy of publicity building up around the seven men and concluded that they needed some expert help in their new role as celebrities. He approached DeOrsey. DeOrsey was a tax lawyer. Harry Truman had once considered making him head of the Internal Revenue Service. He had represented many show-business celebrities, including President Eisenhower’s friend Arthur Godfrey. So the seven of them wound up having dinner with DeOrsey in a private room at the Columbia Country Club outside of Washington. DeOrsey was an affable gentleman with a little round pot belly. He had terrific clothes. He put on a long face and related how he had been approached by Bonney. He said he was willing to represent them.

  “I insist on only two conditions,” he said.

  Glenn thought to himself, “Well, here it comes.”

  “One,” said DeOrsey, “I will accept no fee. Two, I will not be reimbursed for expenses.”

  He kept the grave look on his face for a moment. And then he smiled. There were no catches and no angles. He was obviously sincere. He thought they were terrific and felt tickled pink to be involved with them at all. He couldn’t do enough for them. And that was the way it went with Leo DeOrsey from that evening onward. He couldn’t have been straighter or more generous.

  DeOrsey proposed that the book and magazine rights to their personal stories be put up for sale to the highest bidder. Bonney was sure the President and NASA would allow it, because several military men had made such an arrangement since the Second World War, most notably Eisenhower himself. The selling point for NASA would be that if the seven of them sold exclusive rights to one organization, then they would have a natural shield against the endless requests and intrusions by the rest of the press and would be better able to concentrate on their training.

  Sure enough, NASA approved the idea, the White House approved it, and DeOrsey started getting in touch with magazines, setting $500,000 as the floor for bids. The one solid offer—$500,000—came from Life, and DeOrsey closed the deal. Life had an excellent precedent for the decision. Few people remembered, but The New York Times had bought the rights to Charles Lindbergh’s personal story before his famous transatlantic flight in 1927. It worked out splendidly for both parties. Having bought an exclusive, the Times devoted its first five pages to Lindbergh the day after his flight and the first sixteen the day after he returned from Paris, and all other major newspapers tried their best to keep up. In return for Life’s exclusive rights to their personal stories and their wives’, the astronauts would share the $500,000 evenly; the sum amounted to just under $24,000 a year for each man over the three years Project Mercury was scheduled to run, about $70,000 in all.

  For junior officers with wives and children, used to struggling along on $5,500 to $8,000 a year in base pay, plus another $2,000 in housing and subsistence allowances and perhaps $1,750 in extra flight pay, the sum was barely even imaginable at first. It wasn’t real. They wouldn’t see any of it for months, in any case … Nevertheless, the goodies were the goodies. A career military officer denied himself and his family many things … with the understanding that when the goodies came along, they would be accepted and shared. It was part of the unwritten contract. The Life deal even provided them with foolproof protection against the possibility that their personal stories might become all-too-personal. Although written by Life, the stories would appear in the first person under their own by-lines … “by Gus Grissom” … “by Betty Grissom” … and they would have the right to eliminate any material they objected to. NASA, moreover, would have the same right. So there was nothing to keep the boys from continuing to come across as what they had looked like at the first press conference: seven patriotic God-fearing small-town Protestant family men with excellent backing on the home front.

  Here in the summer of 1959 that was fine with Life and with the rest of the press, for that matter. Americans seemed to be deriving profound satisfaction from the fact that the astronauts turned the conventional notions of Glamour upside down. It was assumed—and the Genteel Beast kept underlining the point—that the seven astronauts were the greatest pilots and bravest men in America precisely because of the wholesome circumstances of their backgrounds: small towns, Protestant values, strong families, the simple life. Henry Luce, Life’s founder and boss of bosses, had not played a major role, other than parting with the money, in making the astronaut deal, but eventually he came to look upon them as his boys. Luce was a great Presbyterian, and the Mercury astronauts looked like seven incarnations of Presbyterianism. This was no rural-American miracle, however. It was John Glenn who had set the moral tone of the Astronaut at the first press conference. The others had diplomatically kept their mouths shut ever since. From the Luces and Restons on down, the Press, that ever-seemly Victorian Gent, saw the astronauts as seven slices of the same pie, and it was mom’s pie, John Glenn’s mom’s pie, from the sturdy villages of the American heartland. The Gent thought he was looking at seven John Glenns.

  Among the seven instant heroes John Glenn’s light shone brightest. Probably the least conspicuous, using that same measure, was Gordon Cooper. Cooper was a thin, apparently guileless soul, handsome in a down-home manner. He was from Shawnee, Oklahoma. He had a real Oklahoma drawl. He was also the youngest of the seven, being thirty-two years old. He had never flown in combat, nor had his test work at Edwards been of the sort that attracted much notice. Scott Carpenter was no further up the great ziggurat of flying, of course, but Carpenter was not at all reluctant to talk about his own relative lack of experience in jets, and so on. What seemed to annoy some of the boys was that none of the foregoing, obvious as it surely was, fazed Gordon Cooper in the slightest.

  Two people who sometimes seemed to get impatient with Cooper were his Air Force comrades Gus Grissom and Deke Slayton. Grissom and Slayton had become great pals practically from the day they were selected as astronauts. They were from out of the same grim clay. Slayton was raised on a farm in western Wisconsin, up near the town of Sparta and the Elroy Sparta State Park Trail. He was taller than Grissom, more rugged, rather handsome, in fact, and quite intelligent, once you penetrated the tundra. When the subject was flying, his expression lit up, and he radiated confidence and had all the wit and charm and insights you could ask for. In other
situations, however, he had Grissom’s lack of patience for party manners and small talk and Grissom’s way of lapsing into impenetrable blank stares, as if some grim wintertime north-country Lutheran cloud of Original Sin were passing in front of his face. Deke had started flying in the Second World War, when the Air Force was still part of the Army. In the Army one was continually around people who spoke Army Creole, a language in which there were about ten nouns, five verbs, and one adjective, or participle, or whatever it was called. There always seemed to be a couple of good buddies from Valdosta or Oilville or some place sitting around saying: