Soon after The Right Stuff was published, I read it in a state of constant stunned awe at its Electric Kool-Aid Acid prose, of course, but also in deep admiration for the acuity with which it made sense of an extraordinary moment in American history. This seemed very odd to me: Shouldn't The First American in Space be a title of great honor? It was only years later, when I read Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, that I came to understand the complex national pathologies - the multi-front competition with the Soviet Union, the problem of knowing who your celebrated gladiators might be as long as your war stays Cold - that had produced the idolization of Glenn and the (comparative) marginalization of Shepard.
I am sure that that was a painful discovery, but once I learned the name Alan Shepard I treasured it, in part because he spelled his first name just as I spelled mine, and in part because hardly anyone else seemed to know who he was. I knew this for some years, and cannot now remember when I discovered that John Glenn was not even the first American in space, much less the first human. This much I did know: whichever John was the astronaut, he was the first man in space.
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