Eddie Rickenbacker: An American Hero in the Twentieth Century
2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: 93; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/4486327
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)Military and Defense Studies
ResumoEddie Rickenbacker (1890–1973) first won fame as a race car driver, a calling that landed him a chauffeur's job on Gen. John J. Pershing's American Expeditionary Force (aef) staff. In 1917 he negotiated a transfer to the Army Air Service, learned to fly, and excelled as a pursuit pilot, despite a corneal injury that limited his vision. After the war, he capitalized on his reputation as America's ace of aces to make a career in commercial aviation, becoming head of Eastern Airlines. No-frills Eastern was America's most profitable carrier in the late 1930s and early 1940s, thanks to Ricken-backer's determination to minimize costs. In this, at least, he was ahead of his time. Secretary of War Henry Stimson dispatched Rickenbacker on several fact-finding trips during World War II. During one mission his plane ditched in the Pacific; he and the crew spent three famished weeks adrift in open rafts. This ordeal came on the heels of a 1941 airliner crash that maimed Rickenbacker so badly he was hospitalized for four months. W. David Lewis's thesis is that these horrors broke the man or at least made him erratic and embittered. By the time he was eased out at Eastern in 1963, he was an alcoholic tyrant who raged at assistants and launched into diatribes so reactionary that even veterans walked out on him. The hero had become a crank. Had he disappeared in the Pacific, Lewis shrewdly observes, he would have entered history as another Amelia Earhart. Survival is not always the best career move.
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