The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

THE LITERARY WORK

A nonfiction narrative of space travel set in the United States from 1945 to 1963; published in 1979.

SYNOPSIS

The Right Stuff is a history of the early years of the U.S. space program. Starting with an account of the lives of military pilots and their wives, the book progresses to the selection of the first seven astronauts, their grueling training, their relationship with the press and public, and the Project Mercury flights themselves.

Events in History at the Time of the Narrative

The Narrative in Focus

For More Information

Tom Wolfe was born in 1931 in Richmond, Virginia. He decided to become a writer at the age of six in emulation of his father, an editor, whom he often saw writing at his desk. After graduating with a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale, Wolfe went to work as a journalist. In 1963, based on his research of a California customized car and hot rod show, Wolfe published “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” in Esquire magazine. The article was the first of many accounts by Wolfe covering the lifestyles of unconventional groups and public figures in contemporary culture. The Right Stuff is his seventh such book.

Events in History at the Time of the Narrative

NASA

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is a civilian agency of the U.S. federal government whose mission is to conduct research and develop operational programs in the areas of space exploration, satellites, and rocketry. Officially launched on October 1, 1958, NASA replaced the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA). NACA had been a relatively small organization, focusing primarily on research and cooperating closely with the military and other governmental agencies. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite, on October 4, 1957, a general panic over America’s perceived unpreparedness led to the creation of NASA, a far more powerful organization in which the resources of the various military branches were pooled together. Soon after its inception, in addition to taking over several research centers from NACA, NASA acquired the U.S. Army Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and, later, the Army Ballistic Missile Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. The best-known NASA facilities became the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center near Houston, Texas, from which the Apollo and other manned flights were coordinated, and Cape Canaveral midpoint on the Atlantic Coast of Florida, where the launches actually took place. Cape Canaveral was renamed Cape Kennedy in 1963 to honor President Kennedy after his assassination that year, but the original name was restored in 1973.

The space race

When the USSR launched its first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, there was tremendous political pressure in the United States to equal or exceed the accomplishments of the Soviets. This international competition became popularly known as the “space race.” A few months later, the U.S. launched their own satellite, Explorer 1, in early 1958. But this did little to diminish the sense of urgency among the American public to beat the Soviets in the space race. NASA embarked on Project Mercury, whose mission was to put a man in space as soon as possible—it was essentially a political endeavor. On April 12, 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, traveling in Vostok 1, became the first man to reach space. Nevertheless, when Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard and John Glenn successfully completed suborbital and orbital flights later that spring, American morale was given a tremendous boost, and the astronauts were embraced by the public as heroes of the struggle between the United States and Soviet Union for world leadership.

Even while Project Mercury held the attention of the nation, NASA and President Kennedy were focusing on a still greater goal—a lunar landing. After taking office in 1961, President Kennedy committed the United States to the goal of landing Americans on the moon and bringing them back safely to earth by the end of the decade. The resulting Apollo program was the largest scientific and technological undertaking in history. In the decade following Sputnik I, the United States and the USSR between them launched about fifty unmanned space probes to explore the moon. Meanwhile, manned space flight progressed steadily, with the Soviets maintaining a slim lead. In the first multipassenger flight, three Soviet cosmonauts were launched in a Voskhod spacecraft in October 1964. In March 1965, another Voskhod cosmonaut left the capsule to take the first “walk in space.” The first launch of the Gemini program, carrying two American astronauts, occurred a few days after the Soviet space-walk. The Apollo program, however, had become the primary focus at NASA, and the program finally realized its goal when Neil Armstrong and Edwin E. (“Buzz”) Aldrin, Jr. set foot on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969.

The Cold War

The Cold War is a term used to describe the mutual suspicion and shifting struggle for world leadership between the Western powers and the Communist bloc starting after World War II and lasting until the end of the 1980s. The global conflict had its roots in the ideological differences between communism and capitalist democracy. After the war, the West felt threatened by the continued expansionist policy of the Soviet Union; meanwhile, traditional Russian fear of incursions from the West also continued. The United States formulated a positive national policy to “contain” the spread of communism. In 1947 it initiated the European Recovery Program, also known as the Marshall Plan, which helped to restore economic stability and prosperity in Europe and thereby preempt any possible Soviet encroachment.

After the Soviets blockaded the western sectors of Berlin, Germany, in 1948, the United States reversed a policy of avoiding permanent alliances and in 1949 signed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) with eleven other nations. In turn, the communist countries would form an alliance of their own, the Warsaw Treaty Organization, in 1955. In 1949 communist leader Mao Zedong (Tse-tung) gained control of mainland China, and the following year communist forces from North Korea attacked South Korea, precipitating the Korean War.

Hopes for an end to the Cold War were raised when long-time Soviet leader Josef Stalin died in 1953 and was replaced by new premier Nikita Khrushchev. These hopes were dashed, however, by the launch of the Soviet artificial satellite Sputnik 1 in 1957, which introduced a new international competition in space exploration and missile capability. In 1961 East Germany erected the Berlin Wall to check the embarrassing flow of its citizens to the West. In 1962 U.S. intelligence discovered the presence of Soviet missile installations in Cuba, and a tense naval confrontation ensued, controlled by Kennedy and Khrushchev, before the Soviet premier finally called home his vessels at the last moment. Though the Cuban Missile Crisis was perhaps the most direct standoff between the two nations, tensions would remain high for decades and figure in many foreign policy decisions. The Cold War would not end, in fact, until the Soviet empire weakened and dissolved in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The New Journalism

The New Journalism is a form of nonfiction writing that combines traditional newspaper reportage with fictional techniques such as stream-of-consciousness, shifting points of view, extended dialogue, character description, and a strong sense of the writer’s presence. The term first caught on in the 1960s and 1970s as a label for the nonfiction work of writers such as Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Terry Southern, George Plimpton, and Truman Capote. Tom Wolfe has been identified as the quintessential New Journalist. “One working definition of the New Journalism is that it’s what Tom Wolfe writes. If not exactly the founder of the movement . . . Wolfe has for some years now been its major theorist and of course among its most visible practitioners” (Weber, p. 13). In 1973 Wolfe published an anthology of nonfiction entitled The New Journalism, in which he includes an essay of his own on the subject.

The Narrative in Focus

The contents

The Right Stuff opens with the gruesome death of U.S. Navy pilot Bud Jennings. What follows—the grim task of notifying the wife and the military funeral—are common rituals in the world of military aviation. Readers are then taken to Maryland’s Patuxent River Naval Air Station, the Navy’s prime test center. Now that the Korean War has ended, and with it the opportunities for combat flying, the best alternative (and the most dangerous) for daring young pilots is “flight test.” The reader soon discovers that one of the unwritten prerequisites for pilots and their wives who spend each day under the specter of imminent death is to not talk about it: “Like many other wives in Group 20 Jane wanted to talk about the whole situation, the incredible series of fatal accidents…. But somehow the unwritten protocol forbade discussions of this subject, which was the fear of death” (Wolfe, The Right Stuff, p. 15). Having the right stuff means keeping your fears to yourself, and if there is one man among all the others who represents toughness and coolness under pressure, it is Chuck Yeager.

JOHN F. KENNEDY AND THE SPACE RACE

President Kennedy (1961-1963) was a vocal supporter of space projects, as is evident in these pre-election remarks made in 1960: “Because we failed to recognize the impact that being first in outer space would have, the impression began to move around the world that the Soviet Union was on the march, that it had definite goals, that it knew how to accomplish them, that it was moving and we were standing still. That is what we have to overcome… . if the Soviets control space they can control Earth, as in past centuries the nation that controlled the seas has dominated the continents” (Kennedy in Baker, p. 81).

A West Virginia boy, Yeager joined the Army Air Force in 1941 at the age of eighteen and in 1943 flew planes over France and Germany. He is a tough young man, says The Right Stuff, but his most remarkable quality is his hollow, deadpan, Appalachian drawl, and his composed demeanor even in the direst of life-and-death situations. After the war Yeager worked as a test pilot at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, where he impressed his instructors with his stunt-flying and his utter fearlessness. He was then chosen to go to Muroc Field (later called Edwards Air Force Base) in California for the X-l project. The X-l project was the Army Air Force’s effort to reach the speed of Mach 1, thereby breaking the “sound barrier,” which at 40,000 feet in the air, where the temperature is at least 60 degrees below zero, is about 660 miles an hour. The speed of sound had become known as “the sound barrier” or “the sonic wall” because aircraft approaching that speed had started shaking uncontrollably and then disintegrated, which led some scientists to speculate that the g-forces (gravitational pressure) became infinite at Mach 1.

MANNED SPACE FLIGHT HIGHLIGHTS

When other pilots opt out of the test, Yeager eagerly steps in. Not being an engineer, he doesn’t believe such a “barrier” exists at all. And he is right. On October 14, 1947, Yeager flies the X-l aircraft through the sound barrier at 700 mph. As his speed approaches Mach 1, the aircraft shakes, after which a sonic boom reverberates over the desert floor and the aircraft smoothes out. As soon as Yeager lands, it is made clear that his accomplishment is to remain a military secret. The military does a very poor job of handling the press, though. Instead of releasing the story on their own terms, they insist on keeping it a secret long after word has dribbled out, and the result is that the story of Chuck Yeager’s record-breaking test flight leaks out gradually, undramatically, and inaccurately.

Plans are already under way for the X-15, an aircraft designed to achieve an altitude of 280,000 feet, just above fifty miles, which is generally considered the boundary where the atmosphere ends and “space” begins. Despite these plans, the launching of Sputnik I in October 1957 creates a sense of panic in the world of tactical weaponry, and an almost superstitious obsession with controlling the heavens. The urgency to put a man in space grows so great that there is no time to design the rockets necessary to send the X-series aircraft into space as planned. Instead a simpler task is chosen: put a man in a capsule atop a Redstone (70,000 pounds of thrust) or an Atlas (367,000 pounds) rocket and shoot him straight up until he reaches space. This new project, called Project Mercury, is given to the newly instituted National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

The next logical question, of course, is who will go? It is thought that the cream of the aviator crop, the test pilots, might not be interested because the Mercury capsule will be completely automated, which means that the astronaut will not be doing any actual flying. This situation is underscored by the fact that a monkey is going to be sent up in place of an astronaut for a test flight. Pilots refer to the program derisively as “spam in a can.” However, a large number of test pilots apply for the job anyway, and after a grueling selection process, seven men are chosen: L. Gordon Cooper, M. Scott Carpenter, Alan B. Shepard, Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Donald K. “Deke” Slayton, John H. Glenn, and Walter M. Schirra.

As soon as the astronauts are selected, they are presented to the press, and the nation goes wild. The astronauts are greeted as heroes, as a new breed of cold warrior. Meanwhile, back at Edwards Air Force Base, the “true brethren” still believe they, as test pilots, are at the top of the

heap. The astronauts’ mission is not as dangerous, nor does it demand as much skill, as missions that require the services of the very finest test pilots. But regardless of this insiders’ view, the astronauts command an extraordinary degree of public attention. Whereas test pilots receive little money, the seven astronauts have signed an exclusive deal with Life magazine and suddenly are able to buy large houses. They are given sports cars for free and treated like royalty by businessmen, politicians, and reporters. It is becoming apparent that the age of a whole new breed of hero, the astronaut, has arrived.

After a series of test flights, and an endless string of invasive medical tests in which the astronauts are treated like lab animals, Alan Shep-ard is chosen to make the first Mercury flight. His successful suborbital flight gives him a place in history as the first American in space, and he is greeted as a hero. Gus Grissom is next in line. His flight proceeds much the same as Shepard’s, except that he exits early during the sea rescue and the capsule sinks. The third Mercury mission sends John Glenn into the earth’s orbit. This is considered a still greater achievement, and Glenn is embraced by the nation with a desperate warmth and gratitude that no astronaut has ever received since, including the other members of Mercury team that followed.

For the duration of the space flights, it is unclear who is under more pressure, the man trapped in a tiny capsule up in space, or his wife. The media, hungry for the human interest angle, descend upon the wives in their living rooms with ferocious intensity. Although the wives enjoy many of the benefits of their husbands’ new status as national heroes, they also pay a heavy price for it, especially during those horrific hours spent waiting helplessly for their husbands’ return while being hounded by the press.

“The right stuff.”

The essence of Wolfe’s book is not the record of military flight tests or NASA’s space program in itself. As the author himself explains in his 1983 foreword, it is about “what makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous roman candle . . . and wait for someone to light the fuse . . . which is to say, courage” (The Right Stuff, p. ii). But even that word is too simple. After all, the book points out, any fool can throw away his own life.

The idea here . . . seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment—and then to go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day, even if the series should prove infinite—and, ultimately, in its best expression, do so in a cause that means something to thousands, to a people, a nation, to humanity, to God.

(The Right Stuff, p. 24)

There are some other curious aspects to this elusive quality of “the right stuff.” For example, it is never spoken of directly; it is simply understood. Indeed, it was Wolfe’s curiosity at the reticent responses of the pilots to his questions about their courage that drove him to write the book in the first place. One of the things that makes “the right stuff difficult to identify is that there is no single litmus test. Instead there is an endless series of tests. Having the right stuff means having the will to constantly prove it. Those with the right stuff are set apart as gifted and unique. “A man either had it or he didn’t! There was no such thing as having most of it” (The Right Stuff, p. 29). How does death figure into it? After all, a military test pilot always runs the risk that their next flight will be their last. The answer, simple and somewhat shocking, is that if one dies, that is evidence that he did not have the right stuff.

It seems that almost anyone, for any reason, can be dismissed for lacking the right stuff. A person who is too tall to be admitted to the elite group, or who has fallen arches, lacks the right stuff. A person who suffers from claustrophobia and is assigned to fly jet transports lacks it. Only those who are assigned to fighter squadrons—the “fighter jocks,” as they call one another—are in the fraternity. The right stuff is about courage, about manhood, about stoicism. In these respects, it resembles the traditional warrior codes of various cultures throughout history. Yet it is also about luck, about being the right height, about not having an irregular heartbeat or corrective lenses or any other physical imperfection. Men with the right stuff exhibit peripherally and even morally dubious behavior, such as drinking, womanizing, and driving fast cars. In the air, fighter jocks who have the right stuff engage in the dangerous practice of mock dogfighting—that is, a reckless type of vying between planes to best each other in the air. Though officially forbidden, dogfighting is in fact a kind of necessary test of manhood for each and every aviator coming up through the ranks. If something goes wrong and the pilot has to bail out, he has a ready explanation for his superiors: “I don’t know what happened, sir. I was pulling up after a target run, and it just flamed out on me” (The Right Stuff, p. 31).

Sources

Tom Wolfe may be America’s preeminent documenter of American subcultures, and his style depends heavily on meticulously observed physical details, slang, and personal habits. Like any good journalist, Wolfe spent a great deal of time talking with the pilots, their families, technicians, journalists, and a host of other figures who participated in or had information on his subject.

In his 1983 foreword to the book, Wolfe points out that the fashion among writers in Europe and the United States after the First World War was to portray war as “inherently monstrous, and those who waged it—namely, military officers—were looked upon as brutes and philistines” (The Right Stuff, p. i). Primary among the culprits promoting this view were, he claimed, great works of literature: Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (also covered in Literature and Its Times), Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s The Journey to the End of the Night, and Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejh. According to Wolfe, the only sympathetic military character one sees in such books is the enlisted man, the man who is little more than a pawn in the great struggle for power, and thus a ready symbol for all victims of war. What’s missing from these books, Wolfe argues, is “the old fashioned tale of prowess and heroism (The Right Stuff, p. i).” The Right Stuff can therefore be viewed as an effort to alert an otherwise oblivious literary world to the fact that not only do heroes still exist, but they exist right under our noses, in the cockpits of our aircraft and in the capsules of our rockets. Wolfe’s book is the result of his effort to understand why men were willing to risk their lives to become heroes “in an era literary people had long since characterized as the age of the antihero” (The Right Stuff, p. ii).

Reaction

Tom Wolfe is no stranger to controversy. His unusual style and strong opinions always seem to elicit emphatic critical response, both positive and negative. The Right Stuff is generally considered to be his most widely respected book. Wolfe’s journalistic style, however, was attacked by some:

Tom Wolfe does not have a likable persona, and The Right Stuff is not a likable book… . Wolfe’s book is not a history; it is far too thin in dates, facts and source citations to serve any such purpose. It is a work of literature which must stand or fall as a coherent text.

(Powers in Mooney, p. 1382)

Most reviewers, however, lauded the book for its thoroughness and its unusual approach: “[This] is Tom Wolfe at his very best, better in fact than he’s been before. [The book] is technically accurate, learned, cheeky, risky, touching, tough, compassionate, nostalgic, worshipful, jingoistic—it is superb” (Williamson in Mooney, p. 1382).

For More Information

Baker, David. The History of Manned Space Flight. New York: Crown, 1982.

Mooney, Martha T., ed. Book Review Digest. Vol. 75. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1980.

Weber, Ronald, ed. The Reporter as Artist: A Look at the New Journalism Controversy. New York: Hastings House, 1974.

Weisberger, Bernard A. Cold War Cold Peace; The United States and Russia since 1945. New York: American Heritage, 1984.

Wolfe, Tom. The New Journalism. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.

Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979.