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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