Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff

Henry Luce gave a dinner for them at the Tower Suite, the restaurant at the top of the Time-Life Building. After dinner on the spur of the moment, the whole bunch of them went to see a play, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying , which was a big hit at the time. John and Annie and the children, all of the other fellows and their wives and children, plus the bodyguards and some NASA people and some Time-Life people, quite an entourage—and all of it arranged at the last minute. The start of the play was held up for them. People in the audience gave up their seats, so the astronauts and their party could have the best seats in the house, a whole bloc. Just like that they gave up their seats. When John and the others walked into the theater, everybody else was already seated, because by now the play was a good thirty minutes late starting—and the audience rose and cheered until John sat down. Then a member of the cast came out in front of the curtain and welcomed them and congratulated John and praised the fellows as great human beings and humbly hoped that the little diversion about to be offered would please them. "And now the play will commence!"

Then the lights went down and the curtain went up, and you had to be pretty dense not to realize what this was: a command performance! Royal treatment, point for point, right down the line, and they were the royal families. And it didn't stop there. They had rewritten some of the lines, rewritten them in an hour or so—to make the jokes contain references to space and John's flight and putting a man on the moon and so on. When they left the theater, there were still other people outside, waiting, hundreds more people, waiting in the cold, and they started yelling in those horrible twisted rat-gray New York street voices, but everything they said, even the wisecracks, was full of warmth and admiration. Christ, if they owned even New York, even this free port, this Hong Kong, this Polish corridor—what was not theirs now in America?

Somehow, extraordinary as it was, it was… right! The way it should be! The unutterable aura of the right stuff had been brought onto the terrain where things were happening ! Perhaps that was what New York existed for, to celebrate those who had it , whatever it was, and there was nothing like the right stuff, for all responded to it, and all wanted to be near it and to feel the sizzle and to blink in the light.

Oh, it was a primitive and profound thing! Only pilots truly had it, but the entire world responded, and no one knew its name!

Not long after that, Kennedy brought the seven astronauts to the White House for a smaller, more personal visit. Kennedy's father was there, Joseph Kennedy. The old man had had a stroke, and half his body was paralyzed, and he was sitting in a wheelchair. The President took the seven astronauts in to meet his father, and the first one he introduced him to was John. John Glenn!—the first American to orbit the earth and challenge the Russians in the heavens. The old man, Joe Kennedy, reaches up with his one good hand to shake hands with John, and suddenly he starts crying. But the thing is, only half his face is crying, because of the stroke. One half of his face isn't moving a muscle. It's set, absolutely impassive. But the other half—well, it's blubbering, that's the word for it. His eyebrow is curling down over his eye, the way it does when you're really bawling, and the tears are streaming out of the crevice where his eyebrow and his eye and his nose come together, and one of his nostrils is quivering and his lips are writhing and contorting on that side, and his chin is all pulled up and pitted and trembling—but just on the one side! The other side is just staring at John, as if he saw right through him, as if he were just another Marine colonel whose career had somehow led him briefly into the White House.

The President would lean down and put his arm around the old man's shoulders and say: "Now, now, Dad, it's all right, it's okay." But Joe Kennedy was still crying when they left the room.

Obviously if the man hadn't had a stroke, he wouldn't have burst out crying. Until his stroke he had been a bear. Nevertheless, the emotion was there, and it would have been there whether he had had a stroke or not. That was what the sight of John Glenn did to Americans at that time. It primed them for the tears. And those tears ran like a river all over America. It was an extraordinary thing, being the sort of mortal who brought tears to other men's eyes.

July 4 was not the time of year for anyone to be introduced to Houston, Texas, although just what the right time would be was hard to say. For eight months Houston was an unbelievably torrid effluvial sump with a mass of mushy asphalt, known as Downtown, set in the middle. Then for two months, starting in November, the most amazing winds came sweeping down from Canada, as if down a pipe, and the humid torpor turned into a wet chill. The remaining two months were the moderate ones, although not exactly what you would call spring. The clouds closed in like a lid, and the oil refineries over by Galveston Bay saturated the air, the nose, the lungs, the heart, and the soul with the gassy smell of oil funk. There were bays, canals, lakes, lagoons, bayous everywhere, all of them so greasy and toxic that if you trailed your hand in the water off the back of your rowboat you would lose a knuckle. The fishermen used to like to tell the weekenders: "Don't smoke out there or you'll set the bay on fire." All the poisonous snakes known to North America were in residence there: rattlers, copperheads, cottonmouths, and corals.

No, there was no best time to be introduced to Houston, Texas, but July 4 was the worst. And it was on July 4, 1962, that the seven Mercury astronauts moved to Houston. For the prodigious effort that Kennedy's moon program would require, NASA was building a Manned Spacecraft Center on a thousand acres of cattle pasture south of Houston near Clear Lake, which was not a lake but an inlet and was about as clear as the eyeballs of a poisoned bass. The astronauts, Gilruth, most of the Langley and the Cape personnel would move to Houston, although the Cape would continue to be the launching center. The small scale and modest appearance of Langley and the Cape had somehow been perfect for the hell-for-leather mas alla phase that Project Mercury had just been through. They all knew Houston would be bigger. The rest they could never have guessed.

They stepped out of the airplane at the Houston airport and started gulping in the molten air. It was 96 degrees. Not that it mattered particularly; they had been assured that their entry into Houston would be easygoing and casual, Texas-style. There would be a zippy little motorcade through Downtown, just to give the good folks a look-see… and then there would be a cocktail party with a few prominent local figures, during which they could let their hair down and knock back a couple of long cool ones, or whatever, and relax.

Waiting there at the airport is a lineup of convertibles, one for each astronaut and his family with his name on a big paper banner taped to the side. So off they go in a motorcade, all seven of them and their wives and children, except for Jo Schirra, who was still at Langley recovering from some minor surgery. Pretty soon they're moving through the streets of Houston at a good clip, and it seems painless enough, but then all seven cars head down a ramp, into the bowels of an arena called the Houston Coliseum.

A bone-splitting chill hits them. They shudder and shake their heads. They are down inside some vast underground parking lot. The place is air-conditioned Houston-style, which is to say, within an inch of your life. There is a whole army of frozen people waiting down there in the gloaming, endless rows of marching bands in uniform, standing there like ice sculpture, politicians waiting in yet more convertibles, too cold to open their mouths, police men, firemen, National Guard troops, stiff and still as lead, and more bands. Then they turn right around and head out of the underground parking lot, up the ramp, and back out into the blast of sunlight, a hundred degrees of heat, and the asphalt, which was lying there heaving and rippling in the caloric waves. All at once they are at the head of a big parade through the streets of Houston. Well, not quite in the lead. In the lead convertible now is a Texas congressman, a rubicund fellow named Albert P. Thomas, an influential member of the House Appropriations Committee, waving a ten-gallon hat, as if to say, "Look what I brought you!"