Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff

There was no doubt whatsoever that Glenn meant every word of it. When he got his back up, he was formidable. He was not to be trifled with. In his eyes burned four centuries of Dissenting Protestant fervor, nailed down by two million laps that his legs had pounded around the BOQ driveway.

But there was more than one hard customer in the room. Staring straight back at Glenn, volt for volt, was Al Shepard. The others, Glenn included, understood Shepard least of all, because there seemed to be two Al Shepards, and no one ever knew for sure which one he was dealing with. Back home at Langley you saw one Alan Shepard, the utterly, and if necessary, icily correct career Navy officer. Shepard's father, Colonel Alan Shepard, Sr., was an impressive figure whom few people cared to challenge. Shepard was always a good son. The colonel sent him to private schools, and in due course he followed the colonel's model of a military career, graduated from the Naval Academy, and became a pilot; and although he had never served in combat, he was considered one of the Navy's best test pilots, drawing important assignments in testing the F3H, the F8U, the F4D Skyray, the F11F Tigercat, the F2H3 Banshee, and the F5D Skylancer, including the tricky business of proving out some of these monsters in their first landings on the then-new angled carrier decks. He was regarded as a topnotch Navy aviator, tough, quick-witted, and a leader. He had married a good-looking woman of great charm and poise—"a real lady," people always said—named Louise Brewer. She was a Christian Scientist. Shepard was from New Hampshire, and in New England the Christian Scientists had considerable social cachet, since they were on the average the wealthiest church members in the United States and had an intellectual tradition somewhat similar to the Unitarians'. Although this side of Christian Scientist life was not generally known in America, it was not lost upon the Navy, where the brass traditionally kept tabs on religious affiliations. Being an Academy man was the most important thing, but belonging to a socially correct Protestant denomination was the next best thing. The Episcopal Church ranked first, unofficially, throughout the military (both Schirra and Carpenter were Episcopalians). Well, the Christian Scientists, although smaller in numbers, were even tonier. Such were the general contours of the correct life of Commander Shepard, the icy career officer. But inside his locker he kept… Smilin' Al of the Cape! In point of fact, Shepard himself had never joined the Christian Scientist Church or even come close to it. In his secret heart he was probably stone atheist. At the original press conference he had rather adroitly finessed the point by saving that he belonged to no church but attended the Christian Science Church regularly. Somehow the impression was left that Shepard was a Christian Scientist who had done everything but sign on the dotted line. (The press, the ever-proper Gent, was happy enough to see it that way.) As long as he was at home, however, Shepard could have passed for a model Christian Scientist husband, had he chosen to. He did go to church with Louise regularly. He did not drink, smoke, swear, or let his lips—his eyes and lips were his most pronounced features—spread into a warm and winning fighter jock grin when a pretty girl came by.

No, he didn't flash that famous Smilin' Al Shepard look until he stepped out of his airplane Away from Home—and most especially at the Cape. Then Al looked like a different human being, as if he had removed his ice mask. He would come out of the airplane with his eyes dancing. A great goomba-goomba grin would take over his face. You halfway expected to see him start snapping his fingers, because everything about him seemed to be asking the question: "Where's the action?" If he then stepped into his Corvette—well, then, there you had it: the picture of the perfect Fighter Jock Away from Home.

But now, in this room at the Konakai Hotel, it was the Icy Commander who stared back at Glenn. Commander Al, the colonel's son, knew how to put on all the armor of military correctness, in the stern old-fashioned way. He informed Glenn that he was way out of line. He told him not to try to foist his view of morality on anybody else in the group. In the succeeding weeks the Glenn position and the Fighter Jock position began to form, with various hands adding their own amendments. As for the Fighter Jock position: The seven of them had volunteered to do a job and they were devoting long hours of training to prepare for it and were doing many things above and beyond the strict call of duty, such as the morale tours of the factories, and forgoing flight pay and vacations and any semblance of an orderly family life—and that therefore what one did with what little time he had to himself was his own business, so long as he used good sense.

Shepard had struck the tone of the by-the-book commander. He sounded as utterly convinced and correct in his own fashion as Glenn did in his. Commander Al was capable of a rather formal rhetoric in discussions of this sort, complete with a little litotes.

There was no reason why one should have an aversion to the company of women, so long as one's acquaintanceships did not impair one's performance in the program or reflect adversely upon it.

John Glenn, however, was buying none of that. He stared back at Smilin' Al of the Cape and the Icy Commander, both of them, with John Calvin's own eyes. As time went by, the Glenn position became: Look, whether we like it or not, we're public figures. Whether we deserve it or not, people look up to us. So we have a terrific responsibility. It's not enough not to get caught. It's not even enough to know to your own satisfaction that you've done nothing wrong. We've got to be like Caesar's wife. We've got to be above even the appearance of doing wrong.

It went on like that, with neither giving an inch. That line about "Caesar's wife" would not be forgotten. Everybody knew there was something to what the fellow was saying… Nevertheless… Could you believe it? Could you believe that the day would come when, you would actually see a pilot, an equal among equals, give his comrades a little sermon about keeping their hands clean and their peckers stowed? Where did he get off setting himself above them this way, and what was his real game?

Glenn knew he was making no friends with this approach. Yet there were key moments in a military career when a man had to assume leadership. That was the essence of leadership caliber, and surely that fact would be appreciated-—if not by the pilots themselves, then surely by… others who would hear about it. The competition for the first flight was not a popularity contest among the troops, after all. Bob Gilruth and his deputies in the Space Task Group would make the choice. Glenn had never been afraid to alienate his peers when he knew he was right; perhaps this, too, had always impressed his superiors—and he had never been left behind. His faith in what was right was part of his righteous stuff.

Glenn had one great ally among the other six, and that was Scott Carpenter. Carpenter looked up to him and backed him in the debate. Wally Schirra and Gordon Cooper tended to back Shepard, arguing that when you were on duty you should be a model of correctness, but that when you were off duty your personal life was your own lookout. Schirra was finding Glenn more and more irritating. Who the hell did he think he was? After a while, they barely spoke to each other unless the job forced them to.

Grissom and Slayton somewhat dourly sided with Glenn on this particular point. Since he was making such a federal case out of it, they would acknowledge the soundness of his logic. But this didn't mean they idolized him any more than Schirra or Shepard did. A basic division was building up in the group. It was the other five against the pious fair-haired boy and his sidekick, Carpenter. Some of them seemed to derive some satisfaction from lumping Carpenter with Glenn. What was Carpenter even doing here! They couldn't get over the fact that Scott and his wife, Rene, had flamboyant cushions on the floor of their living room and they actually sat there while Scott played the guitar and Rene sang. The fact that she had a trained voice made no difference. It was beatnik stuff. Not only that, Carpenter was a great pal of the doctors. He and Glenn were both like that. They went out of their way to cooperate with the Life Sciences people, too.