Part IThe Story
Eight Hours and Ten Minutes
At three in the morning on September 3, 1938, a Seversky monoplane rolled down the runway at the Union Air Terminal in Burbank, California, and climbed east into the dark. Its pilot was Jacqueline Cochran, then thirty-two, the only woman in a field of ten entered in that year's Bendix Trophy Race, a free-for-all dash from Los Angeles to Cleveland. The airplane had been built for her by the Seversky Aircraft Corporation and ferried out to California by Alexander de Seversky himself only two days before.
Somewhere over the Rockies the engine began to starve. Cochran later described what happened: she had plenty of fuel, but it was not reaching the engine, and switching tanks did nothing. By kicking the rudder and rocking the wings she dislodged the problem, then found that the engine would keep running if she flew with one wing held low. She crossed the rest of the continent that way, at altitude, breathing through an oxygen mask, without stopping for fuel.
She reached Cleveland in 8 hours, 10 minutes and 31.4 seconds, an average of just under 250 miles per hour. She was the third pilot to leave Burbank and the first to arrive. The prize was $12,500. After a short refueling stop she took off again and flew on to the New York area, setting a west-to-east transcontinental speed record on the way. The New York Times put her win on its front page the next day, under a headline noting that she had beaten nine men.
Six years earlier she had never been in the pilot's seat of an airplane. By the time she died she held more speed, distance and altitude records than any other pilot. In between she built a cosmetics company, created and ran the first large program that put American women in the cockpits of military aircraft, and became the first woman to fly faster than sound. She also spent much of her life hiding where she came from.
By the Numbers
Jacqueline Cochran in Figures
8h 10mWinning time, 1938 Bendix Trophy Race, Burbank to Cleveland
25,000+Women who applied to the WASP program she directed
1,074WASP pilots who earned their wings, 1943–1944
38WASP pilots killed in training or on duty
55,253 ftAltitude record in horizontal flight, Northrop T-38, 1961
1,429 mph25-kilometer speed record, Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, 1964
Sawdust Road
She was born Bessie Lee Pittman in the Florida Panhandle, most likely in 1906. Pensacola and DeFuniak Springs have both been given as her birthplace. She was the youngest of five children of Ira Pittman, a millwright who moved from one sawmill town to the next, and his wife Mary. The census found the family in Pine Barren, Florida, in 1910 and in Paxton in 1920. They were poor, as sawmill families were, but not destitute.
The story she told as an adult was darker. She said she was an orphan raised by foster parents in desperate poverty, and that she did not know her real name or her birth date. The Eisenhower Presidential Library, which holds her papers, records that she said she had been told the Pittmans were not her real parents. Researchers who have gone through the census and family records since her death have found no evidence of adoption. She stayed in touch with the Pittmans, provided for them over the years, and moved some of them to her ranch in California, where they were told to describe themselves as her adopted family. The public version held until after she died.
Around 1920, when she was about fourteen, she married Robert Cochran, a man more than twice her age. Their son, Robert Jr., was born soon afterward and died in 1925, at about four, from burns after playing with matches. The marriage ended. She kept her married surname, began calling herself Jacqueline, and went to work in beauty shops, with a period, by her own account, of nursing training in Montgomery, Alabama.
The childhood she chose to describe later was a place she called Sawdust Road. The name appears in her 1954 autobiography, The Stars at Noon, in a passage about why flying had taken hold of her so quickly.
— Jacqueline Cochran, The Stars at Noon, 1954Whatever I am is elemental and the beginnings of it all have their roots in Sawdust Road. I might have been born in a hovel, but I determined to travel with the wind and stars.
Whether or not the details were true, the story did work for her. It turned a hairdresser from the Panhandle into a self-made legend, and it gave every later success a starting point low enough to make it look like a climb.
A Bet on Long Island
She arrived in New York in 1929 and, by her account, found work at the Antoine salon inside Saks Fifth Avenue. The 1930 census lists her as an unemployed lodger in upper Manhattan, and one local newspaper in 1932 described her as a model rather than a beautician, so even this part of the story has soft edges.
What is firm is that in 1932 she met Floyd Bostwick Odlum. He was fourteen years older, married, and one of the richest men in the country, having made a fortune through the Atlas Corporation in the 1920s and 1930s by buying and reorganizing troubled companies. He would later control or run, among other businesses, RKO and the aircraft maker Consolidated Vultee. The two began a relationship that stayed out of public view until his divorce. They married in 1936 and stayed together until his death in 1976.
Cochran told Odlum she wanted to sell cosmetics on the road. He told her that to cover enough territory she would need to fly. In the summer of 1932 she enrolled at the Roosevelt Aviation School at Roosevelt Field on Long Island. A course of twenty hours of instruction cost $495, and, according to the account in Aviation History, Odlum bet her the fee that she could not get a license in six weeks. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported on July 27, 1932, that a new student named Jacqueline Cochran had signed up for the private pilot's course, had logged three hours of dual instruction, and had wagered a friend she would have her license within three weeks.
She did. By her own telling, her engine quit on her first solo and she glided back to the field. By 1934 she held a commercial license and was learning to fly on instruments. Lessons that had begun as a sales tool had become her main occupation.
Wings to Beauty
The business came next. In 1935 she set up J. C. Laboratories in Roselle, New Jersey, and opened beauty salons in Chicago, followed by others in Lake Forest, Illinois, and at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. The salons focused on permanent waves, one of the few beauty services that sold well through the Depression. In 1937 she launched a full line of cosmetics under the name Wings to Beauty.
The name was the strategy. Cochran was building a reputation as a racing pilot at the same moment she was trying to get her lipstick into department stores, and each helped sell the other. Newspapers that would never have written about a new face cream wrote about a woman flying in the Bendix race, and the stories mentioned her company. By 1938 the line was stocked at B. Altman in New York, Garfinkel's in Washington and department stores in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Akron and Rochester. Manufacturing moved to Newark in 1939, and the offices moved to Rockefeller Center in 1940.
She paid attention to details that a pilot would notice. She wanted compact, spill-proof packaging she could carry in a cockpit, and the company developed a small click-together plastic tube holding several products, later sold as the Perk-Up Stick. In 1940 she introduced Chromablend, a foundation cream mixed on the spot to match a customer's complexion.
After the war the company grew by acquisition as well as by new products. It bought a mansion on West 56th Street for its headquarters in 1945, incorporated as Jacqueline Cochran, Inc. in 1947, and in 1949 acquired the American distribution rights to Nina Ricci perfumes. The same year it launched Flowing Velvet, a moisturizing lotion that became its best seller and spawned a whole range. The Associated Press named her its Woman of the Year in Business in 1953 and 1954. In 1965 she sold the company to Shulton, the maker of Old Spice.
Cochran was not the only woman building a beauty business in those years. Estée Lauder founded her company in 1946. What set Cochran apart was that her brand rested on something no advertising agency could have invented: a public record of risk that anyone could read in the newspapers.
Learning to Race
Her racing career began with a failure. In 1934 she entered the MacRobertson Air Race from England to Australia, one of three women in the field, flying a Granville Gee Bee R-6H called Q.E.D. with a co-pilot. The aircraft had flap problems, and after a damaging landing at Bucharest she withdrew.
In 1935, after women had been barred from the Bendix the year before, she and Amelia Earhart both started from Burbank. Cochran took off in fog at 4:22 a.m. in a Northrop Gamma, snagged her radio antenna on a fence, and fought a vibrating engine over the mountains. Approaching the Grand Canyon at dawn, with thunderstorms ahead and few places to land, she turned back. She did not race in 1936, the year Louise Thaden became the first woman to win the Bendix. In 1937 she finished third.
The same summer she began setting records. On July 26, 1937, flying a Beechcraft D17W Staggerwing, she set a United States women's national speed record of 203.895 miles per hour over a 1,000-kilometer course from Burbank to the Golden Gate Bridge and back. She set several other national and world women's records that year. On April 4, 1938, Eleanor Roosevelt presented her with the Harmon Trophy as the outstanding woman flier of 1937. Then came the 1938 Bendix win, which made her the most famous woman pilot in the country after Earhart's disappearance the previous year.
She had become close to Earhart. The two had worked together to open the Bendix to women, and Earhart spent several days at Cochran's ranch in California before leaving on her final flight in 1937. Cochran won the Harmon Trophy again for 1938, the same year Howard Hughes won the men's award for his round-the-world flight, and again for 1939.
A Bomber to Prestwick
In September 1939, as war began in Europe, Cochran wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt suggesting that qualified women pilots could take over noncombat flying in the Army Air Corps and free men for combat. Nothing came of it at first. She kept working the idea through other channels, and early in 1941 Lieutenant Colonel Robert Olds, who was organizing the Air Corps Ferrying Command, asked her to find out how many women pilots there were in the country and what experience they had. She went through Civil Aeronautics Administration records and built the list herself.
The idea that tied her name to the war came, by one account, at a lunch with Clayton Knight, who was recruiting American pilots for the Atlantic Ferry Organization. Britain needed American-built bombers delivered across the ocean. Knight suggested she fly one herself to dramatize the need.
The male ferry pilots objected. About fifty of them held a meeting to discuss the problem; Odlum attended to argue her case. Some said the flight was a publicity stunt, some that it was too dangerous for a woman, some that women would take their jobs. The compromise was that she would fly as first officer. She could take the controls once the aircraft was in the air, but her captain, Grafton Carlisle, would make the takeoffs and landings, officially because of concern that she lacked the strength for the heavy hand brake.
On June 17, 1941, Cochran, Carlisle and a radio operator left Montreal in a Lockheed Hudson Mk. V bound for Britain. After an overnight stop at Gander, Newfoundland, they crossed the North Atlantic in a little over eleven hours. Before dawn, tracer fire rose toward them from somewhere below; Carlisle fired a recognition flare, and the shooting stopped. They landed at Prestwick, Scotland, on June 19. She was the first woman to pilot a bomber across the Atlantic.
In Britain she saw women of the Air Transport Auxiliary ferrying military aircraft around the country. Back home, she described what she had seen to President Roosevelt at lunch at Hyde Park, which opened doors at the War Department. General Henry "Hap" Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, told her that the United States was not ready for a women's ferrying program. He suggested she take a group of American women to fly for the ATA instead, as a test, and promised no decision would be made while she was away. Using her lists, she invited seventy-six of the most qualified women she could find. Twenty-five passed the tests and went to Britain in 1942, where they ferried Spitfires, Hurricanes and bombers.
Director of Women Pilots
While Cochran was in England, the Army changed its mind without her. On September 10, 1942, the Army Air Forces announced the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron under Nancy Harkness Love, a highly experienced pilot whose husband's work in Washington had introduced her to the officers who approved her plan. Love's plan was smaller than Cochran's: a squad of already-experienced women, hired as civilians, to ferry aircraft from factories to bases.
Cochran came home immediately and went to see Arnold. Within days he made her director of women's flying training, responsible for turning women with less experience into pilots who could fly the Army way. The first class of the Women's Flying Training Detachment began in Houston on November 16, 1942. Training later moved to Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas.
For most of a year the country had two women's flying organizations with different standards and different bosses. Cochran pushed hard for a single one under a single director. Colonel William Tunner of the Ferrying Division objected, but Arnold sided with Cochran. On August 5, 1943, the two groups were merged into the Women Airforce Service Pilots, the WASP, with Cochran as director and Love in charge of its ferrying work.
The numbers show both the demand and the standard. More than 25,000 women applied. About 1,830 were accepted, and 1,074 completed training and earned their wings. They went through essentially the same course as male cadets, apart from gunnery and most aerobatics: about 560 hours of ground school and 210 hours of flying. WASP pilots flew more than 60 million miles. They ferried aircraft from factories, towed targets for live anti-aircraft practice, flew simulated strafing runs, tested repaired aircraft and instructed male cadets. Records later compiled at Texas Woman's University put the count at seventy-seven aircraft types and about 12,000 ferrying operations. Thirty-eight WASP died, eleven in training and twenty-seven on duty.
Cochran ran the program with Army discipline and argued with anyone who tried to put it under someone else. When officials suggested folding the WASP into the Women's Army Corps under Oveta Culp Hobby, who was not a pilot, Cochran refused. She wanted her pilots commissioned directly into the Army Air Forces, with her at their head.
Grounded
By 1944 the war had turned, and fewer American pilots were being lost in combat than expected. The Army had a surplus of male pilots, and civilian flight instructors whose training schools were closing lobbied against the women. Newspaper columnists attacked the program, and one suggested that Arnold had been swayed by Cochran personally. On June 21, 1944, the House of Representatives voted down HR 4219, the bill to give the WASP military status, by 188 votes to 169.
Cochran had pushed the question to a head, in effect telling Arnold that the women should either be commissioned or the program ended. It was ended. Arnold ordered the WASP disbanded by December 20, 1944. The last class graduated on December 7, two weeks before the closure. Because the WASP were civil servants, families had paid to bring home the bodies of the women who died, and the survivors went home without veterans' benefits.
A month before the disbandment, speaking to the National Aviation Conference in Oklahoma City, Cochran went further than the Army ever had.
— Jacqueline Cochran, remarks to the National Aviation Conference, Oklahoma City, 1944I have not the slightest doubt but that these WASPs could have gone, if that were necessary, into combat work, fearlessly and effectively, just as Russian women have done.
In 1945 she received the Distinguished Service Medal, announced by the War Department as the first awarded to a woman civilian. The citation credited her with directing the planning and administration of all women pilot activities of the Army Air Forces. Recognition for the pilots themselves took much longer. In 1948 the Air Force allowed former WASP to join its reserve, and Cochran was commissioned a lieutenant colonel. Only in 1977 did Congress pass a law treating WASP service as active duty for veterans' benefits.
Politics and the Ranch
When the WASP closed, Cochran went abroad as a correspondent for Liberty magazine. She was in the Philippines for the surrender of General Tomoyuki Yamashita, traveled in Japan soon after its surrender, and attended part of the Nuremberg trials. Then she came home, rebuilt her company, went back to air racing, and lobbied the Air Force on behalf of former WASP.
Her base was a ranch near Indio in the Coachella Valley, and it became a meeting place for pilots, generals and politicians. She and Odlum became close to Dwight Eisenhower. In February 1952 they helped sponsor a rally at Madison Square Garden urging him to run for president. The rally was filmed, and Cochran flew the film to France to show it to Eisenhower at his headquarters there. His library describes the rally as a major factor in persuading him to run. After leaving office he often stayed at the ranch and wrote parts of his memoirs there.
In 1956 she ran for Congress herself, in California's 29th district, which covered Riverside and Imperial counties. She beat five men for the Republican nomination and then lost the general election to the Democrat Dalip Singh Saund by about 3,300 votes, 48.5 percent to 51.5 percent. Saund became the first Asian American elected to Congress. Cochran never ran for office again.
Through the Sound Barrier
In 1952, in her late forties, Cochran decided to take the women's world speed record from the French pilot Jacqueline Auriol. She asked to borrow a North American F-86 Sabre from the U.S. Air Force and was refused. Through Canadian contacts she arranged instead to borrow the only Canadair Sabre Mk. 3, a Canadian-built version of the fighter. Canadair sent a support team of sixteen people to California.
Her chief encouragement came from Chuck Yeager, who had first flown faster than sound in 1947 and who remained her friend for the rest of her life. On May 18, 1953, over Rogers Dry Lake, she set a 100-kilometer world speed record at an average of about 652 miles per hour. During the run the Sabre went past the speed of sound, with Yeager flying beside her. She was the first woman to do it. In June she set a 15-kilometer closed-course record of about 670 miles per hour. She and Yeager both received Harmon trophies for 1953, presented by Eisenhower.
Air Force regulations kept her from flying while on reserve duty, but through Odlum's connections in the aircraft industry she kept getting access to new jets as a civilian. From 1958 to 1961 she served as president of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, the body that certifies world aviation records, the only woman to hold the post. In 1961, as a consultant to Northrop, she flew a T-38 Talon supersonic trainer to a series of speed, distance and altitude records, including a height of 55,253 feet in horizontal flight. In April 1962 she flew a Lockheed JetStar from New Orleans to Bonn, becoming the first woman to fly a jet across the Atlantic and setting sixty-nine intercity and distance records on the trip. In May and June 1964, in an F-104 Starfighter, she set three world speed records, the fastest at 1,429.297 miles per hour over a 25-kilometer course, more than twice the speed of sound.
Mercury 13
The most disputed chapter of her life came as women tried to follow her into space. In 1960 and 1961, Dr. William Randolph Lovelace II, a friend of Cochran and Odlum and a member of NASA's life sciences committee, put a group of women pilots through the same medical tests used to select the Mercury astronauts. Thirteen passed the first phase. The effort was private, not a NASA program, and Cochran and Odlum helped pay for it.
Her support cooled. She wrote to officials in the Navy and at NASA questioning whether the program was being run properly, and further phases of testing were delayed and then cancelled. In July 1962, a House subcommittee held hearings on whether women were being unfairly excluded from the astronaut corps. John Glenn and Scott Carpenter testified against admitting women. Cochran testified that the space race was urgent and that the country should not slow its program to include women at that stage. NASA's requirement that astronauts be military jet test pilots, a job then closed to women, stood.
Historians of the episode have often concluded that she did not want to be displaced as the country's most prominent woman in flight. She presented her objections as questions of timing and proper process. Either way, the effect was to end the only serious American test of women astronauts for a generation. It was of a piece with other positions she took late in life. In 1974 she testified to Congress against admitting women to the Air Force Academy and said she opposed women serving in combat, positions that sat awkwardly with her Oklahoma City speech thirty years before.
The Last Records
By the late 1960s her health was failing. The Air Force promoted her to colonel in the reserve in 1969, and she retired in 1970. In 1971 heart disease forced her to stop flying. She and Odlum sold their ranch in 1973 and lived quietly in Indio. He died in 1976. She died at home on August 9, 1980, and was buried in the Coachella Valley.
Her aviation papers and records went to the Eisenhower Library, which holds about 250,000 items. The airport at Thermal, where she had flown for decades, was renamed Jacqueline Cochran Regional Airport. In 1996 the Postal Service issued a stamp showing her in front of a Bendix pylon, and she is honored at the Air Force Academy, the institution she had not wanted women to attend.
The contradictions are part of the record. She invented a harder childhood than she had and quietly supported the family she said was not hers. She built a program that proved women could fly anything the Army owned, and later helped close the door on women astronauts. She was an outsider who spent her life working the inside of Washington. What is not in dispute is the flying. Over three decades she flew an extraordinary range of aircraft, from a Gee Bee racer to a Mach 2 fighter, and set records in almost all of them.
The title of her first memoir came from what she saw at the top of those climbs.
— Jacqueline Cochran, The Stars at Noon, 1954Earthbound souls know only the underside of the atmosphere in which they live … but go higher — above the dust and water vapor — and the sky turns dark until one can see the stars at noon.
Part IIThe Playbook
Cochran's career ran on a small number of repeated moves. She paired a business with a public feat so that each advertised the other. She gathered data before she asked for anything. She took on demonstrations that others would not, accepted the terms that let her do them, and fought hard over who would control the result. Her failures, especially over the WASP and Mercury 13, came from the same traits turned the wrong way. The principles below are drawn from both.
The principles
- 1.Make the product and the proof the same thing.
- 2.Use the side venture to fund the main one.
- 3.Build the list before you make the ask.
- 4.Volunteer for the demonstration nobody else wants.
- 5.Accept the compromise that gets you in the seat.
- 6.Run the experiment somewhere it is already working.
- 7.Insist on one organization and one standard.
- 8.Force the decision instead of drifting.
- 9.Borrow what you cannot buy.
- 10.Know when to turn back.
- 11.Watch what your own position does to your judgment.
Principle 1
Make the product and the proof the same thing.
Cochran called her cosmetics Wings to Beauty because the flying was the advertisement. A race win or a speed record put her name in the newspapers, and the newspapers mentioned her company. No beauty rival could buy that coverage, because it came from genuine risk that readers could see.
This is a form of costly signalling. A claim backed by visible risk and effort is more believable than one backed by money alone. The flying also shaped the products: compact, spill-proof packaging came from a pilot's needs, not a marketing brief.
Tactic: Find the public achievement that proves what your product claims, and tie the two together so closely that coverage of one is coverage of the other.
Principle 2
Use the side venture to fund the main one.
The lessons began as a way to sell cosmetics across more territory, and the cosmetics company became the steady base that let her keep flying. Odlum's money helped at the start. Over time the business gave her independence and a reason to be in the public eye between races.
Most people with two interests treat one as a hobby. Cochran ran both as serious enterprises and let the cash, contacts and credibility move back and forth between them. The business also gave her standing in rooms where a pilot alone might not have been heard.
Tactic: If your main ambition cannot pay for itself yet, build a second enterprise that can, and design it so its success feeds the first.
Principle 3
Build the list before you make the ask.
When Robert Olds asked how many women pilots there were in the United States, Cochran went through Civil Aeronautics Administration records and produced names, flying hours and skills. That list became the recruiting base for the women she took to Britain and, later, a foundation for the WASP.
A proposal with a roster attached is much harder to dismiss than a proposal with an argument. Having the data ready also let her move fast when Arnold changed his mind.
Tactic: Before you ask for a program, assemble the evidence that the people or resources to run it already exist, with names and numbers.
Principle 4
Volunteer for the demonstration nobody else wants.
The Hudson flight to Prestwick was dangerous, unpopular with the men who flew the route, and open to the charge of being a stunt. Cochran took it anyway, because a single well-publicized crossing would do more for the idea of women ferry pilots than any number of letters.
Demonstrations work because they convert an argument into a fact. After June 1941 no one could say a woman could not fly a bomber across the Atlantic. The flight also gave her a credential for every later meeting at the War Department.
Tactic: When an idea is stuck in debate, look for the single visible act that would settle the question, and be willing to be the one who does it.
Principle 5
Accept the compromise that gets you in the seat.
The ferry organization would let her fly the Hudson only as first officer, with Carlisle handling takeoffs and landings. She disliked the arrangement and accepted it. The history books still record her as the first woman to fly a bomber across the Atlantic.
Insisting on full terms would likely have meant no flight at all. By taking the partial role she got the result that mattered and the leverage for bigger requests later.
Tactic: Separate the terms that decide whether the thing happens from the terms that only affect your pride, and give ground on the second kind.
Principle 6
Run the experiment somewhere it is already working.
When Arnold would not start a women's ferrying program in the United States, the Air Transport Auxiliary in Britain was already using women pilots. Cochran took twenty-five American women there. Their service became the trial the Army Air Forces had not been willing to run at home.
Borrowing a working environment removes the hardest part of any pilot program, which is getting permission to try. It also produces evidence from real operations, which carries more weight than a plan.
Tactic: If your organization will not approve a trial, find a partner that already does what you propose and place your people there to gather proof.
Principle 7
Insist on one organization and one standard.
For most of a year American women pilots were split between Love's ferrying squadron and Cochran's training detachment, with different entry requirements and chains of command. Cochran argued for a single body with a single director and a single training standard, and in August 1943 Arnold agreed.
Her motives included her own control, and her rivals said so. But the merger also gave the WASP one voice in Washington and one set of qualifications that could be compared directly with those of male cadets. That comparison was the strongest case the women had.
Tactic: When parallel teams are doing the same work to different standards, push to unify them under one measure, even at the cost of friction with colleagues.
Principle 8
Force the decision instead of drifting.
By 1944 Cochran was pressing Arnold either to commission the WASP into the Army Air Forces or to end the program. The House voted against militarization, and Arnold ended it. The gamble failed.
It is still a lesson worth taking in both directions. Forcing a decision gave the women a clear answer instead of a slow erosion, and it put the question of their status on the record, where later advocates could pick it up. It also showed the risk and reward of an ultimatum: when the other side has alternatives, the answer may be no.
Tactic: Before you demand a yes-or-no decision, estimate honestly what happens if the answer is no, and be ready to live with it.
Principle 9
Borrow what you cannot buy.
The U.S. Air Force refused to lend her a Sabre. She found the one Canadair Sabre Mk. 3 in existence and persuaded the Canadian government and the manufacturer to lend it, along with a support team. In 1961 she flew Northrop's T-38 to a string of records as a consultant to the company.
Access to equipment, not skill, was often the limit on what a civilian pilot could do. Cochran treated every refusal as a question of which other door to try, and she used her husband's industry contacts and her own reputation to find one.
Tactic: When the obvious owner of a resource says no, list every other party that has it or something like it, and make the arrangement worth their while.
Principle 10
Know when to turn back.
Her first two big races ended with withdrawals: at Bucharest in 1934 and over Arizona in 1935, when a vibrating engine and storms ahead made continuing a poor bet. She came back and won in 1938.
A record for boldness is only useful if you are alive to build on it. Cochran's willingness to quit a race she could not finish safely is part of why she could keep racing for decades.
Tactic: Decide in advance the conditions under which you will abandon an attempt, and when they arrive, act on them without arguing with yourself.
Principle 11
Watch what your own position does to your judgment.
Cochran helped fund the women astronaut tests and then helped stall them. She said her concerns were about timing and proper process. Many historians have concluded that she did not want to be displaced as the leading woman in flight. The truth may be a mixture, but the outcome was that a program she could have championed ended with her help.
People who have fought hardest to open a door can become its most anxious guardians once they are through it. Her later testimony against women at the Air Force Academy fits the same pattern.
Tactic: When a newcomer threatens to overtake your place in a field, write down your objections and ask whether you would raise them if the newcomer were a stranger to you.
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Part IIIMaxims
- A good origin story is an asset and a debt. It builds a legend quickly, but someone will eventually check the census.
- Publicity is cheapest when it is earned. A newspaper that ignores an advertisement will cover a race win.
- Numbers open doors that opinions cannot. A roster of qualified names made her proposal hard to refuse.
- Firsts are permanent. The details of a compromise fade; the record of who went first stays.
- Control of an organization is worth fighting for, but not at any price. Her fight to run the WASP helped build it and helped isolate it.
- Losing a vote is not the same as losing the argument. The WASP were disbanded in 1944 and recognized as veterans in 1977.
- Friendships with the powerful compound. Arnold, Eisenhower and Yeager each opened something for her that no application could.
- The hard part of a record is often the paperwork, the aircraft and the permission. The flying is the last step.
- Contradictions do not cancel achievements. A person can open a field and later stand in its doorway.
In Their Own Words
Speed has always been an important factor in my life. I don't mean just the speed of an airplane, but the speed of accomplishment.— Jackie Cochran
I might have been born in a hovel, but I determined to travel with the wind and the stars.— Jackie Cochran
The women pilots were a weapon waiting to be used.— Jackie Cochran
I have found adventure in flying, in world travel, in business, and even close at hand... Adventure is a state of mind and spirit.— Jackie Cochran
The desire to reach for the sky runs very deep in the human psyche.— Jackie Cochran
To live without risk for me would have been tantamount to death.— Jackie Cochran
I wanted to be first. I wanted to be better than anybody else.— Jackie Cochran
There's no such thing as a natural-born pilot. Whatever my aptitudes or talents, becoming a proficient pilot was hard work, really a lifetime's learning experience.— Jackie Cochran
I learned early that there is nothing new under the sun. What is new is the approach, the courageous willingness to take risks.— Jackie Cochran
I believe that you have to want something so badly that you're willing to give up everything else for it.— Jackie Cochran
Flying might not be all plain sailing, but the fun of it is worth the price.— Jackie Cochran
I have never asked for special consideration because I am a woman. I have asked only that I be judged by my ability to do the job.— Jackie Cochran
The fundamental principle of human action, the law, that is to psychology what the law of gravitation is to physics... is the tendency to seek pleasure and avoid pain.— Jackie Cochran
In business, as in flying, preparation and knowledge give you the edge you need to succeed.— Jackie Cochran
I've always believed that if you want something badly enough, you can make it happen through determination and hard work.— Jackie Cochran
Success isn't just about what you accomplish in your life, it's about what you inspire others to do.— Jackie Cochran
Further reading
- Jackie Cochran: An Autobiography by Jacqueline Cochran
