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thing as the F9F-8 existed, of course, because there had been a Second World War, which rescued a commercially faltering U.S. aircraft industry with government contracts. The contracts paid for the building of a third of a million aircraft, increasing the industry’s annual output by 13,500 percent while generating breathtaking technological advances and profits.
    The F9F-8 existed, too, because there followed a Cold War, which again rescued a commercially faltering U.S. aircraft industry with, again, government contracts. The F9F-8 existed because America had been made to believe that there must forever after be a great and dominant aircraft industry subsidized by the nation’s citizenry. America was informed of this as early as the waning months of 1947, when President Truman’s Air Policy Commission summoned 150 men to give their testimony, virtually all of these men warriors, politicians, or industrialists with much to gain from an aviation boom. The men were in remarkable agreement about what was finally said in the commission report, titled
Survival in the Air Age.
It said that “This country, if it is to have even relative security, must be ready for … a possible World War III.” It said that this World War III would be won or lost in the air. It said that a massive air armada therefore should be purchased by the U.S. government over the next four years. This view drew enthusiastic praise from
The Wall Street Journal
and from
Businessweek
and
Fortune
magazines. For anyone else worried such spending might ruin the economy with inflation,
Survival
offered this answer: “Self-preservation comes ahead of the economy.”
    In other words, if what was good for GM was good for America, here was a different formulation for a different industry, a formulation we would hear over and over again for the nexthalf century. What was good for the aircraft industry was essential for the very survival of Americans. The making of flying machines was not to be seen as any mere business. It was to be imagined as a project of the nation’s collective will.
    Though Truman hadn’t near the money to do all that
Survival
urged, in the spring of 1948 he did increase Pentagon aircraft spending 60 percent. And in 1950 when the Korean War provided a handy harbinger of World War III, the aircraft industry swung into robust revival. From 1947 to 1951, the aircraft workforce nearly doubled; by 1957, it had doubled again to nearly a million, well eclipsing the auto industry. Steeply increasing, too, was the money spent for aircraft research and development, with nine out of ten dollars donated by the U.S. taxpayer. The more complex flying weapons became, the more their makers spoke the new language of technicalese, so that by the mid-1950s the aircraft business was a sign of workforces to come, a manufacturing industry in which blue collars were a declining minority. To look down on the design bays of companies like the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation was to view acres of white shirts, bright young men bent over row upon row of drafting boards as they cleaned up shapes for World War III, shapes like the F9F-8 Cougar.
    T o be a twenty-three-year-old naval aviator in 1956, then, meant having the good fortune to be handed the keys to what the richest nation in the world, its resources mobilized for war, had made its number one technological priority—the jet airplane.
    It was all the better fortune that this was a moment when there was no “hot” war to fight. And so, over the Chocolate Mountains of California’s southern desert, my father would pepper full of holes a polyester banner towed by a comrade, and over the Philippine Islands he would turn his guns on sea-washed rocks, occasionally scaring the fisherfolk. The four 20-millimeter cannons of the F9F-8 Cougar were toys: “Target practice was fun,a game,” remembers my father. Yet he could feel part of a swashbuckling tradition because he was flying with war heroes like Jerry