The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

What finally got to Yeager, however, was the Ed Dwight case. It had been early this year that Yeager got word from the brass that the President, John F. Kennedy, was determined that NASA have at least one Negro astronaut in their lineup. The whole process was to take place organically, however, as if in the natural order of things. Kennedy was leaning on the Defense Department, Defense was leaning on the Air Force brass, and they tossed the potato to Yeager. The pilot who had been singled out was an Air Force captain named Ed Dwight. He was to go through ARPS and be selected by NASA. The clouds developed soon enough. Dwight was enrolled in the basic flight test course along with twenty-five other candidates. Only the top eleven students could enter ARPS’s six-month space-flight course, which had limited facilities, and Dwight did not rank among the top eleven. Yeager

This storyline about Ed Dwight is dropped.