Where Sally Rode and Where She Didn’t

Even though I’d half forgotten that Sally Ride existed, her death last week came as a shock. She was just sixty-one. That’s way too young, especially for someone who, like all astronauts, is assumed to be a paragon of health and who, having survived the rigors of space flight, possesses a kind of honorary immortality.

Dr. Sally K. Ride’s Times obit was full of reminders that she had led a full and useful life in the decades since 1983 and 1984, when she was the first American woman (and the youngest American of any gender, by the way) to soar beyond the atmosphere. She became a professor of physics and the director of the California Space Institute at U.C. San Diego. She wrote six science books for children and spent twenty years quietly campaigning to get kids, especially girls, excited about science and technology. She was the only person to serve on both Presidential commissions that investigated fatal shuttle disasters, of the Challenger, in 1986, and the Columbia, in 2003.

On the Challenger panel, she behaved honorably toward the witness Roger Boisjoly, an engineer sent to Coventry for revealing that he had warned the higher-ups about the faulty O-rings that caused the explosion. “After his testimony,” noted the Times’s obituarist, Denise Grady, “Dr. Ride, who was known to be reserved and reticent, publicly hugged him. She was the only panelist to offer him support. Mr. Boisjoly, who died in January, said her gesture had helped sustain him during a troubled time.”

What Dr. Ride did not do, though, was what I, for one, had hoped she would do: rocket into political orbit, as John Glenn (D-Ohio) and Harrison Schmitt (R-New Mexico) did so successfully. The reason she didn’t, I suspect, was also the reason she was not only “reserved and reticent” but was also—the Times obit again—“known for guarding her privacy” and was described by a friend (who said, “I had to interrogate her to find out what was happening in her personal life”) as “elusive and enigmatic, protective of her emotions.”

We’ll get to that reason in a moment. But first, a fantasy. May I quote myself?

In a “Washington Diarist” column for the July 11, 1983, issue of The New Republic, shortly after Sally Ride’s first ride, I wrote as follows, in a transport of heroine worship:

Here’s this week’s prediction: the belle of the 1997 Inaugural Ball will be the President of the United States herself, Sally K. Ride.

Possibly you are wondering how I know that Dr. Ride, as The New York Times calls her (thus avoiding having to call her Miss Ride, which is no good because she’s married, or Mrs. Ride, which is no good because if she’s Mrs. anybody she’s Mrs. Hawley, or Ms. Ride, which is no good because the Times stupidly refuses to employ this useful honorific), is a Democrat. The answer is that I deduced it. I have been studying the details of her life story in People, and though there is nothing directly about her politics, there are certain clues. She started college at Swarthmore, which points in a pretty clear direction, don’t you think? Even after she transferred to Stanford (which she did because Stanford has a better tennis team, not because Stanford has the Hoover Institution), she studied not only physics but also English (“because Shakespeare intrigued her,” writes People). According to People, Sally’s mother, Joyce Ride, devotes her spare time to “serving as a counsellor at the women’s county jail,” a dead giveaway that she has a bleeding heart. Mom is also something of a feminist, apparently. I happened to see a film clip on TV of Mrs. Ride watching Dr. Ride take off, and as the shuttle blasted her baby into the sky she cried, “Thank God for Gloria Steinem!”

But the most telling piece of evidence is the Lou Reed song, which, unaccountably, is not even mentioned in the People article. In 1974 Lou Reed wrote and recorded a song entitled “Ride Sally Ride,” which was released on an album called “Sally Can’t Ride.” Since Lou Reed had never heard of Sally K. Ride, the song must be considered prophecy. Admittedly, “Ride Sally Ride” does have some ambiguous lyrics (for example, “Ride Sally ride / Because if you don’t you’ll get a contusion”), but its chorus—“Oooh, isn’t it nice / When your heart is made out of ice”—is plainly a reference to the laconic astronaut’s cool that Sally would come to have. Maybe the other clues don’t prove anything, but can anyone seriously contend that Lou Reed would write a prophetic song about a Republican?

After a digression into a now forgotten, then current mini-scandal left over from the 1980 election—“it turns out that Mr. Reagan prepared for his debate with Mr. Carter the same way Mr. Carter did, by reading Mr. Carter’s briefing materials”—I got back to the subject at hand.

No such shenanigans, I hope, will trouble the 1996 campaign. Deceptively youthful-looking at forty-seven (so the feature writers will describe her), Sally Ride will zoom from one wildly enthusiastic rally to another, often taking the controls of her own campaign plane. She will be the ultimate Atari Democrat. When it comes time to debate before the cameras, she will need no stolen debate book to get the better of her Republican opponent, who, if present trends continue, will be Marie Osmond. Naturally, Dr. Ride will win. And will President Ride then run for reëlection? How should I know? But I will say this: it would be as wonderfully appropriate for Sally Ride, space traveler, to be reinaugurated in the year 2001 as it would be horribly appropriate for Ronald Reagan, master of the telescreen, to be reëlected in the year 1984.

Granted, some of the predictions were a bit off. The Marie Osmond call, for example—wrong year, wrong Mormon. But I do think it might have all come true if not for what the Times obit did not, as I say, explicitly mention, but did allude to, ever so subtly, in paragraph forty-two:

Dr. Ride married a fellow astronaut, Steven Hawley, in 1982. They decorated their master bedroom with a large photograph of astronauts on the moon. They divorced in 1987. Dr. Ride is survived by her partner of 27 years, Tam O’Shaughnessy; her mother, Joyce; and her sister, Ms. Scott, who is known as Bear.

No word on what Dr. Ride and Tam O’Shaughnessy decorated their master bedroom with. Indeed, one had to look elsewhere—Andrew Sullivan’s hourly Dish, for example, or our own Amy Davidson’s Daily Comment—even to learn whether “Tam” is a boy’s name or (as is evidently less common) a girl’s.

I doubt that “reticence,” etc., explains why Dr. Ride never became Senator Ride, Governor Ride, or President Ride. (A cool, rather professorial, hyper-rational demeanor, we have learned, is not necessarily a bar to political success.) At one point, after all, Sally Ride was the most famous woman in America. She was articulate, attractive, public-spirited, gutsy, and confident in her public skin. Nor do I think it was really a lack of interest in politics or public policy that held her back. And what a marvellous name!

In Amy’s Comment, she asks whether Sally Ride was right to have been afraid that her position at NASA would be blighted and, later, that the books she co-wrote with her “partner” would be ignored if her lesbianism became a matter of wide public knowledge. My guess is that the answer is yes. But I don’t have to guess about how being “out” would have affected any political career she might have contemplated in the nineteen-eighties or nineties or even most of the aughts: above the level of city alderperson or state legislator in certain precincts of California or Massachusetts, not too helpfully.

Photograph: NASA