The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

The book is The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. It was first published in 1979 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I read the Vintage Wolfe paperback edition by Vintage Books. I read it in May of 2025. 

The “right stuff” is by design hard to define. The best way I’ve been able to understand it is gravitas. It’s manly bravery. It’s standing up when others are falling down. It’s perseverance, dedication and integrity. It’s being a serious man. Wolfe likens it to God’s elect. A people set apart and chosen. 

“His [John Glenn] faith in what was right was part of his righteous stuff.” (p163)

It’s essentially righteousness but in a “worldly accomplishments” sense. Not in a spiritual sense but still important. That’s what the title means. All the first astronauts had the right stuff. 

This was a book club book. Chandler Hutton nominated it and it won by vote. I’m glad he suggested it. It’s been my favorite book so far in the book club.  

Wolfe has great admiration for the Mercury Project astronauts. The first American astronauts. He’s commenting on earned elitism and the exclusivity of excellence. The Mercury Project astronauts were the best of the best. They had the right stuff. They were qualified above and beyond their peers. Wolfe describes it as climbing up a ziggurat with a fear of getting left behind. 

Being a select few gave them a tremendous amount of power. They were gods among mortals. The uniqueness of their experience gave them this worshipful quality. They’d gone further out than any other person. They’ve seen and felt things no one else could. They had an expertise all their own. 

Wolfe is a fantastic writer and does a great job explaining the astronomical status and the pitfalls that can come from being in such an exclusive club as the Mercury Project astronauts were. They were seen as gods but they were truly still human. They failed and made mistakes. They were unduly forgiven for very serious flaws. Wolfe handles this nuance masterfully. 

It’s clear Wolfe admires the astronauts and if he has any message to the reader it’s that we should strive for this level of excellence in our own way. 

That was my main takeaway. This edition I read had a forward by astronaut Scott Kelly. He tells about how he was a failing freshman in college and randomly picked up The Right Stuff and it changed his life and he decided he wanted to become an astronaut. This kind of story is really disheartening for me because I’ve never had an experience like that, or rather, I’ve had too many experiences like that where I had an idea of what I want to be when I grow up but then changed it again and again. I changed my major four times in college. I have a friend who said he went to the dentist when he was five and saw the dentist in his white lab coat and decided, WHEN HE WAS FIVE, that he wanted to be a dentist and never changed his mind. That makes me sick. I’m inclined not to believe these stories. It’s too much like a scene in a movie. When is life ever that fucking clear? Or maybe it’s just me. I don’t have the right stuff or even the right enough stuff to follow through on a goal. But I want to. That has to count for something. 

This book made me think about the fighter pilots I’ve known in my life. They have the right stuff. Confident and competent in anything they do. Maybe there’s a certain level of delusion these guys have, like they can’t fail. Are they living in denial? Is that what it takes? Is delusional denial part of the right stuff? 

I knew nothing about Tom Wolfe’s writing. I just knew he wore white suits all the time. I’d never read any of his work but I am definitely a fan now. I want to read all of his other works. 

It got a little confusing keeping track of all the types of planes they flew. Some of the technical details about the rockets were lost on me as well. Altitudes and speeds meant nothing. But Wolfe does a great job of guiding the reader through that. 

I learned a lot about aviation and the space program. It’s extremely fascinating. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have the level of clout as one of the first astronauts. Pioneers. Risking their lives for the sake of truly new exploration. That prospect of navigating uncharted territory wasn’t even possible since the days of Columbus. It’s even more unique than Columbus’s expeditions because boats had been around for centuries before he searched for new worlds. People had sailed in ships for lifetimes. No one had ever ridden a rocket to the completely unknown environment of space. They had no idea what to expect. They didn’t even know how it would affect the human body. True pioneers of a unique caliber. To be able to walk into a room and all the heads turn to you. I aspire to that gravitas to whatever degree I can achieve it. 

I’d highly recommend this to men in order to understand gravitas. It’s good to see examples of men with the right stuff. We should all be aspiring to be serious men who are admired by our peers for the right reasons. Tom Wolfe is such a great writer, everyone should read his work.  

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Quotations

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In 1982 I was on my way to flunking out of school, with no particular ambition but to party with my friends. I was in line at the campus store one day when the cover of The Right Stuff caught my eye I picked up the book while I waited for the line to move forward, and by the time I reached the cash register I was so engrossed I paid for the book and took it back to my dorm. By the next day, I had finished it and had found my life’s ambition: (xii)

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But somehow the unwritten protocol forbade discussions of this subject, which was the fear of death. (p13)

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well, it obviously involved bravery. But it was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life.

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,

Nor was there a test to show whether or not a pilot had this righteous quality.

one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff and could move higher and higher and even—ultimately, God willing, one day—that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men’s eyes, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself. (p21)

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He sits there in the classes staring at sheets of paper with cataracts of sheer human mortification over his eyes while the rest steal looks at him… this man reduced to an ant, this untouchable, this poor sonofabitch. And in what test had he been found wanting? Why, it seemed to be nothing less than manhood itself. Naturally, this was never mentioned, either. Yet there it was. Manliness, manhood, manly courage… there was something ancient, primordial, irresistible about the challenge of this stuff, no matter what a sophisticated and rational age one might think he lived in. (p25)

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Occasionally a man would look coldly at the binary problem he was now confronting every day-Right Stuff/Death-and decide it wasn’t worth it and voluntarily shift over to transports or reconnaissance or whatever. And his comrades would wonder, for a day or so, what evil virus had invaded his soul… as they left him behind. (p29-30)

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a young fighter jock was like the preacher in Moby Dick who climbs up into the pulpit on a rope ladder and then pulls the ladder up behind him; except the pilot could not use the words necessary to express the vital lessons. Civilian life, and even home and hearth, now seemed not only far away but far below; back down many levels of the pyramid of the right stuff. (p30)

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If anybody asked Gus-like right now-if he were religious, a family man, and a patriot, he would say yes, he was religious, and yes, he was a family man, and yes, he was a patriot. But the firmest conviction of the three was about being a patriot. (p108-109)

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Single combat had been common throughout the world in the pre-Christian era and endured in some places through the Middle Ages. In single combat the mightiest soldier of one army would fight the mightiest soldier of the other army as a substitute for a pitched battle between the entire forces. In some cases the combat would pit small teams of warriors against one another. Single combat was not seen as a humanitarian substitute for wholesale slaughter until late in its history. That was a Christian reinterpretation of the practice. Originally it had a magical meaning. (p114)

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A good Presbyterian demonstrated his election by the Lord and the heavenly hosts through his success in this life. (p125)

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Naturally, there would be times when a military man would be sent far from home, perhaps for extended periods, and he might find it necessary to satisfy his healthy manly urges on these far-off terrains. There was even the implication that such urges were a good sign of a fighting man’s virility. So the wife and the military itself would avert their eyes and stand mute so long as the officer caused no scandal and did nothing to shake the solidity of his marriage and his family. (p158)

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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. (p162)

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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.

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. (p162-163)

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For a test pilot the right stuff in the prayer department was not “Please, God, don’t let me blow up.” No, the supplication at such a moment was “Please, dear God, don’t let me fuck up.’ (p231)

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If the heat shield came off, then he would fry. If they didn’t want him-the pilot!—to know all this, then it meant they were afraid he might panic. And if he didn’t even need to know the whole pattern-just the pieces, so he could follow orders then he wasn’t really a pilot! The whole sequence of logic clicked through Glenn’s mind faster than he could have put it into words, even if he had dared utter it all at that moment. He was being treated like a passenger—a redundant component, a backup engineer, a boiler-room attendant—in an automatic system!-like someone who did not have that rare and unutterably righteous stuff!-as if the right stuff itself did not even matter! (p318-319)

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He was the Presbyterian Pilot addressing the world. He said some things that nobody else in the world could have gotten away with, even in 1962. He said, “I still get a lump in my throat when I see the American flag passing by.” But he pulled it off!

I want you to meet my wife, Annie … Annie .. the Rock!” Well, that did it. That turned on the waterworks. Senators and representatives were trying to clap and reach for their handkerchiefs at the same time.

A couple of them said, “Amen!” They said it out loud; it just came popping out of their good hardtack cracker evangelical dissenting Protestant hearts as the Presbyterian Pilot lifted up his eyes and his hand to the Rock and the eternal Mother of us all • • • (p325)

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They knew it had to do with the presence, the aura, the radiation of the right stuff, the same vital force of manhood that had made millions vibrate and resonate thirty-five years before to Lindbergh-except that in this case it was heightened by Cold War patriotism, (p327)

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It would have simplified matters tremendously if NASA had given everybody formal rankings and had done with it. That way people such as Webb would have known where they actually stood. (p372)