Mecosta, Mich.

The morning after Russell Kirk died in 1994, John Engler visited the Kirk family in rural Michigan. He was not only a governor who wanted to pay his respects to one of his state’s most notable writers and thinkers, but also a longtime friend who had represented the Kirks’ district in Lansing as a state legislator. “What are you going to do?” he asked Annette, a widow at the age of 54. She hadn’t made any plans for her future, but she blurted out an answer: “I want to stay here.”

This fall, conservatives are celebrating Kirk’s legacy with everything from Russell Kirk Day in his birthplace of Plymouth, Mich., to symposia and conferences at think tanks in Washington, D.C., at Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina, and elsewhere. On November 13, National Review Institute will host its own “Kirk at 100” panel discussion in New York City, honoring a man who was a National Review columnist for the magazine’s first 25 years, after William F. Buckley Jr. personally recruited him for the job.

Yet Kirk is nowhere more alive than he is in Mecosta, where Annette has turned the Russell Kirk Center into a vibrant outpost of conservatism. “We’re all about the ‘permanent things’ here,” she says, referring to a term invented by T. S. Eliot and embraced by Russell to describe the rules and ideas that sustain civilization. She keeps on proving the truth of something Buckley said long ago: “There can’t ever have been a case in which a widow emerged more competent to carry on her husband’s work than Annette Kirk.”

The 78-year-old Annette Courtemanche Kirk has earned a reputation for fast-talking conversation and boundless energy — and on the day I visited her in August, she hosted me nonstop for eight hours and seemed ready for more, even as we bid farewell. If she never had met her husband, she probably would have become at least a footnote in conservative-movement history anyway: In 1960, she was one of the few women to attend a meeting of young conservatives at Buckley’s home in Sharon, Conn. They produced the Sharon Statement, a 400-word declaration of principles that animated activists as they started to rally around Barry Goldwater and his presidential aspirations. “I typed it up,” she says.

Annette knew of Russell be­fore she encountered him. In 1953 he had published The Conservative Mind, his most influential book. “Every conservative was reading it,” she says. At a time when many liberals claimed that there was no such thing as a conservative intellectual legacy in U.S. politics, Kirk aimed to show otherwise, with an idiosyncratic history of an Anglo-American tradition whose story started with Edmund Burke and continued through the likes of John Adams, John Marshall, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. It inspired a generation of young conservatives, many of whom had taken to calling themselves “individualists.” Kirk arguably gave conservatives their name.

Annette and Russell met at a conference in 1960. She was a college student and they sat together at lunch. “He was charming and shy,” she says. “But soon I learned that we were kindred spirits.” They exchanged letters and visits. Finally, they married in 1964. On the way to the airport for their honeymoon on Michigan’s Beaver Island, they traveled in a Rolls-Royce Phantom II hearse. It bore a “Goldwater for Presi­dent” bumper sticker. “We believed in the same things,” says Annette.

Russell rejected a comfortable career in academia, preferring instead to live in Mecosta, a remote town where his ancestors had built a country home. Today, it’s a quirky Italianate structure, with red-brick walls, a tower-like entryway, and a cupola. On the inside, spacious rooms integrate items salvaged from an old church. Kirk usually worked down the street, in a building that he had converted into an office and library. He continued to write books, including The Roots of American Order and a well-received biography of Eliot. In addition to his column for National Re­view, he penned five columns per week for a newspaper syndicate. He also wrote fiction, including ghost stories and The Old House of Fear, a Gothic novel that was his best-selling book. These projects brought in a little money, but the Kirks never were wealthy — and Russell earned most of his income from speaking fees and temporary teaching assignments.

As Russell scribbled away, often through the night, Annette managed their home, which she and Russell filled with four daughters. The Kirks became famous for their hospitality, taking in refugees from Eastern Europe, Ethiopia, and Vietnam. The Kirks also welcomed hundreds of scholars and thousands of students. That’s how I met them in 1990, at a weekend seminar for college students on the thought of Burke. Russell expounded on the importance of tradition and signed my copy of The Conservative Mind; Annette tended to our food and accommodations, impressing everyone with her warmth and generosity. If Russell was the reason people wanted to visit Piety Hill, Annette often was the reason they wanted to return.

Russell’s death put a stop to his productivity, but not to Annette’s. In 1995 she founded the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal and kept on encouraging visitors to come. Although nobody has kept precise numbers, Jeffrey O. Nelson, who married a Kirk daughter and is now the vice chairman of the center, estimates that since the 1970s more than 5,600 students have attended programs at Piety Hill and about 400 scholars have lived there in residence. They can take advantage of a 12,000-volume library and stay in one of several cottages.

Ryan Streeter first heard about Piety Hill from Mike Pence, back when the vice president was an Indiana radio talk-show host who had not yet won his first political office. “I was just a college student,” Streeter says. “He called Annette and told her about me, which led to an invitation to visit with other students for three days.” That was in 1993. Five years later, Streeter, who is now the director of domestic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, was struggling to write his doctoral dissertation. So he arranged to spend the fall in Mecosta as one of the Kirk Center’s resident fellows. “I was completely unplugged,” he says. “It was the perfect setting for a scholarly endeavor.” Today alumni work all over, even at the Uni­versity of Moscow.

In addition to the programs, Annette has kept Russell’s work in print. “I want to make sure that people still have access to what he wrote,” she says. She cooperated with Bradley J. Birzer on his definitive biography of Kirk, re­leased in 2015. She invited James E. Person Jr. to edit a volume of his correspondence, which she keeps in an archival room. This led to the publication earlier this year of Imaginative Conservatism: The Letters of Russell Kirk. She also has promoted translations. Recently Kirk’s books have appeared in several languages, including Japanese and Portuguese (for a Brazilian im­print). This year, a new edition of The Conservative Mind has sold more than 4,500 copies in South Korea. Annette says that Chinese and Turkish editions are in the works, too. The center also publishes the University Bookman, a magazine founded by Kirk in 1960 and continuing today as an online publication edited by Gerald J. Russello, plus Studies in Burke and His Time, an aca­demic journal. Future projects could include e-books and audiobooks and a collection of Kirk’s newspaper columns. “There’s so much more we can do,” she says.

It’s now possible to visit Piety Hill vicariously, via a website that shows views of the house and grounds from a drone camera. Yet students continue to seek an authentic experience, making their pilgrimages to the home. This school year, Annette expects to entertain groups from Hillsdale College, Hope College, and the University of Louisville. Those who wait a year may see something new: In 2019, the state of Michigan will pay its own tribute to Kirk’s life and legacy by placing a roadside historical marker near the house.

Russell Kirk may be history, but be­cause of Annette, he’s also got a future.

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South Bend, Ind.

‘Have you ever walked into a church and thought that it looks like a movie theater — something more secular than sacred?” asks the architect Duncan G. Stroik. He’s talking about the churches built over the last 50 or 60 years, ones that have followed the utilitarian commandments of modernism. “That’s what we’re rebelling against,” says Stroik. “A church shouldn’t be a mere ‘worship space,’ but rather a sermon in stone.”

Pope John Paul II would have understood what he means. In 1999, he visited Rome’s Church of San Mattia, built in the 1960s with the concrete-bunker aesthetic that once was trendy but now looks cramped and ugly. The pope condemned what he saw with words both understated and sweeping: “There is little sense of the sacred in the new churches.”

Stroik has made it his mission to fix this problem. He seeks to restore sacred architecture, reviving classical forms that fell from favor during the second half of the 20th century and still haven’t recovered. He publishes widely, teaches students, and, perhaps most important, designs and constructs churches across the United States. If you’ve ever gazed on a church of recent vintage and sighed, “They just don’t make ’em like they used to,” then Stroik is your man. He does make them like they used to, and although he’s not a celebrity “starchitect” with the name recognition of a Frank Gehry or an I. M. Pei, his ideas are catching on among people who appreciate beautiful buildings.

The 56-year-old Stroik was born in Philadelphia but grew up mostly in Reston, Va., the son of a State Depart­ment architect who liked to live in old houses and talk about their virtues. This background seems to have set Duncan’s course: “I always wanted to be an architect,” he says. Today, he exudes his profession, right down to the bow tie that he usually wears. “Architects like them because traditionally we’re leaning over drafting tables,” he says. “They don’t get in the way.” Stroik uses computers, but he also does plenty of work the old-fashioned way, by hand on slanted desks.

Stroik attended the University of Virginia, with its campus designed by a Founding Father. “Thomas Jefferson was my first hero,” he says. “He built in the classical tradition at a high level.” In the shadow of Monticello, Stroik majored in architecture. He went on to Yale, where he earned his master’s degree. Next he worked for Allan Greenberg, an architect who has strived to keep classicism alive in the face of modernism’s maw. Then the University of Notre Dame came calling: It wanted to reinvigorate its school of architecture by hiring classicists. Stroik signed up in 1990 and has served on the faculty ever since.

During his first year at Notre Dame, Stroik asked students to participate in a weekend competition. Their assignment was to sketch churches — something Stroik himself had not done before, even though he was a regular churchgoer as well as an admirer of great churches. “Their work was atrocious,” he says. “I decided that I’d have to do something about it. Graduates of the architecture school at Notre Dame should know how to design churches.”

Stroik also sensed a magnificent opportunity. “The greatest building in all societies is the temple,” he says. “They are the greatest buildings in the world.” They’re monumental, enjoying prominent locations, good materials, and high purposes. Great architects, Stroik thought, should aspire to build them. Yet churches were out of fashion with a rampant secularism that had infected everything, including schools of architecture. “The best churches bring out un-modern ideas,” he says. “They remind us of God’s perfection and holiness and make us feel humble.” And so they have no place on “the naked public square” — an architectural metaphor devised by the Catholic intellectual Richard John Neuhaus to illustrate the broader problem of ejecting faith from public life.

Stroik’s architectural firm really is on the public square in downtown South Bend. It occupies the top floor of the twelve-story Tower Building, right be­side a big county courthouse. Stroik’s earliest jobs were home renovations and other small projects. He also designed a few churches, though none were built. Then he secured his first religious commission: a Catholic chapel with seating for 50 in the wing of a large house in Omaha, Neb. Soon after, a parish in Walton, Ky., contacted him for advice on a new building. This led to the construction of All Saints Church, finished in 2003. A brick-and-stone structure that can hold 600 worshipers beneath its barrel-vaulted ceiling, it sits on a hilltop and features a stocky bell tower that catches the eye from a distance.

It wound up catching a lot of eyes. “That was my breakthrough project,” says Stroik, who went on to take a series of jobs that earned him a national reputation. He designed and built the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in La Crosse, Wis., and the Thomas Aquinas College Chapel in Santa Paula, Calif. He also oversaw major renovations to churches in Connecticut, Minnesota, Missouri, South Dakota, and Texas. On August 7 of this year, he attended the dedication of his latest work, the Chapel of the Holy Cross at Jesuit High School in Tampa. Its simple exterior of red brick masks an octagonal interior, with warm yellow walls, original artwork, and hand-carved marble, plus seating for 900. The next building he’ll complete, in 2019, will be his biggest yet: Christ Chapel at Hillsdale College, with room for 1,400 people.

Each of these buildings strikes a blow against modernist architecture, an industrial-era movement whose central principle was perhaps best summarized by Frank Lloyd Wright’s mentor, Louis Sullivan, who famously said, “Form follows function.” That’s a good rule of thumb for a fast-food joint with drive-through service in the parking lot of a strip mall. To Stroik, however, it leaves little room for beauty or humanity, creating challenges for everyone from urban residents who want livable environments to church­goers who hope for transcendent surroundings. “The modernists are iconoclasts,” he says. “They reject figures and ornaments and even people in favor of glass and steel.” The modernists’ greatest offense, he believes, is to have scarred cities and towns with buildings that mean nothing and inspire nobody.

They’ve achieved this by turning away from reliable traditions that suggest how buildings ought to look. A church, says Stroik, should display verticality, length, and harmonic proportions — not the modernist preference for horizontality, proximity, and unbalanced ratios. Stroik especially scorns fan-shaped churches that feel more like assembly halls than sacred spaces. “Emphasis should fall on the altar and tabernacle, not on the pastor or the congregation,” he says. “A good church is figurative. It reflects us, imitates us. It has a top, a bottom, and a middle. Doors and windows are like facial features. The moldings are like body parts.”

The stakes are high. “We’re losing Christians like crazy,” says Stroik, referring to the rapid growth of the religious “nones,” a category that includes atheists, agnostics, and the unaffiliated and makes up nearly a quarter of the U.S. population, according to the Pew Research Center. Stroik believes that architecture can serve as an unconventional tool of conversion. He points to a 2016 survey of young Christians in Britain, sponsored by the Hope Revo­lu­­tion Partnership. Asked to identify their reasons for becoming Christian, almost half cited the most obvious influence: their families. Yet 13 percent also mentioned “visiting a church building,” an experience that produced better results than more conventional approaches to evangelization such as youth groups (11 percent), youth services (8 percent), and youth camps (4 percent). For Stroik, the lesson is clear: “When buildings are likeable, you’re promoting the faith.”

Everyone benefits, even the poor with their pressing problems and special claims on Christian charity. “We need to feed the poor, but we also need to think about churches as places for spiritual feeding,” says Stroik. “A beautiful church is for the poor as much as it’s for anybody. In fact, it might even be more important for them because they have fewer chances to visit beautiful buildings.”

The biggest stumbling block may be money: It costs a lot to erect a grand church. Stroik knows this: “It’s hard and expensive and takes time. Beauty isn’t fast and it isn’t cheap.” Yet the payoff can last a long time. “We still marvel at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome,” he says. “In Italy, almost every town has an old church that’s worth visiting. That’s not true in America. When was the last time you went out of your way to see a piece of contemporary religious artwork or architecture?” The real question, he insists, is this: “Can we afford not to build beautiful churches?” The failure to invest in architecture puzzles and frustrates him: “We’ve never been wealthier than today, and yet we’re building the cheapest churches in history.”

Fears about cost, in fact, may be overblown. When the people at Tampa’s Jesuit High School first contacted Stroik about their chapel, they thought they wanted only to renovate. “They assumed that a new building would be too expensive,” he says. “But I made a case for it, drawing a design and providing a cost estimate — and when they saw that the price wasn’t prohibitive, that’s what they chose to do.” The old chapel came down and a new one went up in its place.

Finishing a project such as the one in Tampa doesn’t bring relief, says Stroik. Instead, it makes him sad: “The work is great. You get to know the place and the people. You solve problems together. Then you’re done, and you don’t go back.”

That’s not strictly true. Like any good architect, Stroik checks up on his creations from time to time. He also shows them to potential clients. Yet the regular visits do cease. The result of his work, though, is something as close to permanence as human hands can make: a church that will outlast its builders and offer a sense of uplift for generations unborn.

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Ripley, W.Va.

On the Fourth of July, as Patrick Morrisey marched down Main Street with supporters who waved red-white-and-blue placards for his Senate campaign, someone on a porch shouted at him: “New Jersey!” It was a putdown — an accusation that Morrisey doesn’t deserve a place in West Virginia’s public life because he grew up somewhere else. The winner of two statewide elections for attorney general, Morrisey heard the remark, smiled, and waved. Then he continued to move along the parade route, in an event that the town of Ripley (population 3,231) calls “America’s Largest Small Town Independence Celebration.” President George W. Bush came here in 2002, on the first Independence Day after 9/11, and each year it attracts politicians from around the state, including Morrisey’s opponent in this fall’s general election: Democratic senator Joe Manchin, who walked a few hundred yards ahead of him.

Manchin appears to lead in the polls, too. He holds a seven-point advantage over Morrisey among likely voters, according to the latest survey, conducted by Monmouth University (which, coincidentally, is located in New Jersey). Morrisey may be the underdog, but he’s likely to catch up and turn his race into one of the most watched Senate contests of 2018, as Republicans try to defend their slim majority in the chamber by gaining a seat now held by a Democrat in deepest Trump country. On July 3, in fact, President Trump traveled to a resort in West Virginia to deliver a speech in conjunction with “A Military Tribute at the Greenbrier,” a golf tournament. There, he praised Morrisey as “a tough, strong guy” who “loves the people of West Virginia.” The next day in Ripley, Morrisey wore a blue shirt and a red hat, both featuring the tribute tournament’s logo — and talked, with everybody who wanted to hear, about seeing the president.

“I’m an accidental West Virginian,” says the 50-year-old Morrisey, a Brooklyn native who moved to New Jersey as a kid and attended Rutgers University all the way through law school. In 2000, he ran for Congress in New Jersey but finished a distant fourth in the GOP primary. “That was a tough business,” he says. “It made me more humble.” He migrated down to Washington, D.C., anyway, working on a House committee and then as a lobbyist. In 2006, he moved to Harpers Ferry, W.Va. For capital commuters, that’s a long slog. To beat the traffic, he often left his house before sunrise. Morrisey says he wanted to live there because of the area’s history and natural beauty. “Politics was really the furthest thing from my mind,” he says.

Yet he benefited from good timing, as West Virginia was in the throes of a political transformation. For most of the 20th century, it was one of the country’s most heavily unionized and solidly Democratic states. By 2000, it hadn’t voted for a Republican in an open presidential race since it had favored Herbert Hoover more than 70 years earlier. George W. Bush, however, sensed an opportunity. He thought that the state’s culturally conservative voters, annoyed by regulatory attacks on the coal industry, would turn against Al Gore, the Democratic presidential nominee, who sought to make environmentalism his party’s central organizing principle. Bush courted the state and snatched its five electoral votes. Without them, he would have lost the general election and the Florida recount wouldn’t have mattered. Over the next several election cycles, Republicans became increasingly competitive in West Virginia, taking near-complete control of the state’s politics during the presidency of Barack Obama, another Democrat whose energy policies discouraged coal production.

Morrisey became a key figure in the realignment. “When Obama got elected in 2008, something changed,” he says, referring to the attitudes of West Virginians as well as his own ambitions. Although he was still new to the state and lived in its extreme northeast corner, he believed he fit right in: “I always thought that the Republicans were the party of the working man because their policies inspired work.” In 2012, he ran for attorney general against Darrell McGraw, a Democrat whose nickname was “the eternal general” because he had held the job for two decades. Morrisey prevailed with 51 percent of the vote. Four years later, he coasted to reelection.

As attorney general, Morrisey has made his mark by suing the federal government, over and over again. “We took on fights that nobody else was taking on,” he says. “But we had the authority and duty to act.” Morrisey sued the Department of Health and Human Services over Obamacare (and lost). He sued the Drug Enforcement Administration over opioids (pending). And he sued the Environmental Protection Agency repeatedly, scoring a big win in 2016 when the Supreme Court halted the Obama administration’s plans to limit carbon emissions. “It was trying to put an end to coal mining,” he says. “That goes to the very soul of our state. We saved thousands of jobs and stopped an unbelievable power grab.”

This ruling — a surprise, because the Court is often reluctant to block federal regulations — shined a spotlight on Morrisey’s work. Six months into his second term as attorney general, he announced his run for the Senate. This spring, the Republican primary drew unexpected attention, thanks largely to the antics of another candidate: Don Blankenship, a former coal-company executive who spent a year in prison for violating mine-safety rules. In a monotone television ad, Blankenship berated Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, mentioning his “China family” and dubbing him “Cocaine Mitch.” The lines referred to his wife, the Taiwan-born secretary of transportation, Elaine Chao, and an outlandish claim about her family’s business connections. Egged on by journalists who savored a controversial GOP candidate, Blankenship briefly worried Republicans that in a three-way race, he might split mainstream voters and swipe the nomination. Trump got involved, tweeting that West Virginians should support either Morrisey or congressman Evan Jenkins. In the May 8 primary, Morrisey finished first with 35 percent of the vote. Blankenship came in third with 20 percent but nevertheless was the subject of headlines around the country. To many in the media, the story was “Blankenship loses” rather than “Morrisey wins.”

Today, Morrisey shrugs off the weird theatrics of the primary, preferring to focus on the next election, in November. “West Virginia needs a conservative fighter,” he says. “Right now, as an attorney general, I can sue when regulations are unlawful. In the Senate, I can go after stupid ones as well. I want to tear down the excesses of the administrative state.” He’s quick to mention that he’s pro-life and pro-gun, both popular causes in his state. He supported the recent tax cuts. He also speaks with candor about the farm bill, now before Congress. Although about 15 percent of West Virginians use food stamps, he believes the federal government should expand the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s work requirements.

He refuses to take a sharp position on Trump’s metal tariffs and the emerging trade wars. “It’s important to step back for a minute,” he says. “This president is trying to look out for the best interests of the American people and trying to gain a little negotiating leverage. That’s not a bad thing.”

At least some of this hesitation comes from a reluctance to criticize the president, who may be more popular in West Virginia than he is in any other state. In 2016, Trump carried it by a whopping 42 points. During his 18 months in the White House, he has visited the state five times, compared with Obama’s three visits in eight years. Morrisey’s unwillingness also suggests that in the scrambled politics of the Trump era, the usual rules of midterm elections, in which the president’s party suffers a blow in legislative races, may not apply in West Virginia. “The dynamic is different here,” says Morrisey. “The ‘Trump card’ could be the difference in the race. If he comes out to campaign, he’ll generate enthusiasm and turnout.” It’s easy to imagine a Trump rally in which the president leads a chant of “Joe’s gotta go!” — a refrain that Morrisey urges on voters at every opportunity.

Joe Manchin, of course, won’t go down easily. Since 2000, as other Democrats have fallen in West Virginia, he has won five statewide elections, all by healthy margins. He’s the rare Democrat who is essentially pro-life and pro-gun, though Morrisey points to a few discrepancies, such as Manchin’s approval of spending bills that fund Planned Parenthood and his sponsorship of legislation to expand background checks for gun sales. Manchin has supported many parts of Trump’s agenda, from trade protectionism to cabinet and judicial appointments, including the confirmation of Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch. In June, he even said he regrets his vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and may back Trump’s reelection in 2020. Morrisey thinks this is nonsense: “He’ll say the right things and vote the right way until the election.”

When Morrisey talks about his fondness for Harpers Ferry, the town that originally drew him to his new home state, he observes that during the Civil War it changed hands between the North and the South seven times. That’s how his Senate race may go: a back-and-forth battle whose result remains unclear until the very end. Ultimately, the election could come down to a simple matter of whether voters want to stick with an old friend, in an expression of small-“c” conservatism, or prefer a Jersey boy who seeks to continue West Virginia’s new birth of politics.

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‘To become a good pilot and remain one, never forget that an airplane is like a rattlesnake,” wrote Eddie Rickenbacker to his son in 1951. “You must keep your mind and eye on it constantly or it will bite you when you least expect it, which could prove fatal.”

He would have known: Rickenbacker was America’s deadliest fighter pilot in World War I. A century ago — on April 29, 1918 — he shot down his first plane. A month later, he downed his fifth, the mark of an “ace.” By the time he was done, shortly before the November 11 armistice, Rickenbacker was the country’s “ace of aces,” having recorded 26 kills, a record that would stand until the next world war. “When he fought,” remembered Reed Chambers, his friend and fellow ace, “he called for maximum performance and drove the plane until it nearly fell apart. Most of the pilots he killed never knew what hit them. Out of the sun, a quick burst, and gone. That was Rickenbacker.”

Aerial prowess made him a household name. Rickenbacker was the country’s most famous flyer between the Wright brothers’ taking to the air at Kitty Hawk in 1903 and Charles Lindbergh’s traversing of the ocean in 1927. He was certainly a celebrated figure for the rest of his life.

Youthful accomplishment can be a curse as much as a blessing. Think of Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby: “one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax.” Rickenbacker was 27 when he soared above the trenches, and so he was perhaps a bit more seasoned than his fictional contemporary. At any rate, he never languished. “I’ll fight like a wildcat!” was his constant refrain. He went on to become a pioneer in the aviation industry as well as a supporter of the nascent conservative movement. He was even a member of the extended family of National Review: His son, William F. Rickenbacker, was a senior editor at the magazine in the 1960s. Everybody called him “Bill,” but he sometimes signed his initials “WFR,” in a play on “WFB,” i.e., his boss, William F. Buckley Jr.

Born to Swiss immigrants in Columbus, Ohio, in 1890, Eddie grew up poor. When his father died in an altercation, Eddie quit school and went to work, eventually finding a job in a garage. At the dawn of the automotive era, he enjoyed mechanics and fell in love with the emerging daredevil sport of racing. By 1916, when he took part in the Indianapolis 500 for the fourth time, he was driving vehicles whose speeds could touch 100 mph. He also had Americanized the spelling of his last name, going from “Rickenbacher” to “Rickenbacker” (swapping the “h” for a “k”). This was a response to rising anti-German sentiment in the United States as war broke out in Europe.

Then he looked upward. As the call went out for war pilots, Rickenbacker and other drivers jumped at the chance to sit in the open cockpits of rickety biplanes. The transition from track to sky was natural. As Rickenbacker put it: “Mature men of proven and swift reflexes developed at high speeds in competitive racing — what flyers they would make!” They possessed a quality that Tom Wolfe would make famous: “The right stuff was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life,” wrote Wolfe. “No, the idea (as all pilots understood) was that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back at the last yawning moment.” Wolfe told the tale of test pilots who became astronauts, but he might as well have been describing Rickenbacker and his fellow flyers.

Fighter jocks may have a reputation for reckless bravado, but the secret of Rickenbacker’s success was an almost clinical approach to combat. He likened battle in the air to “scientific murder” and understood the importance of cool calculation. “The experienced fighting pilot does not take unnecessary risks,” he wrote shortly after the war. “His business is to shoot down enemy planes, not to get shot down. His trained eye and hand and judgment are as much part of his armament as his machine gun, and a fifty-fifty chance is the worst he will take or should take.” Biographer John F. Ross calls this approach an example of “the early, effective use of applied risk management, decades before its universal adoption in American business.”

After the war, Rickenbacker started his own motor company, featuring the first cars with four-wheel brakes, but it went bankrupt in 1927. Then he bought the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where he once had raced, rebuilding the track and leading it through the lean years of the Depression. He also took over a maker of engine components for airplanes. General Motors tapped him to run an aviation company with air routes and mail contracts — and in 1934, he flew a DC-1 loaded with mail from coast to coast in a little more than 13 hours, setting a new transcontinental flight record.

Around this time, however, the Roosevelt administration canceled all private mail contracts, turning the job over to inexperienced Army pilots. Rickenbacker, who had voted for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was furious. He spoke out against the decision and in favor of free enterprise. Almost immediately, Army pilots died in crashes as they tried to deliver the mail. Eventually the mail contracts returned to the private sector, and in 1938 Rickenbacker bought GM’s subsidiary. He turned it into Eastern Air Lines, a major U.S. airline for the next half century. He also must have been good to work for: An administrative aide stayed by his side for 50 years.

On the 23rd anniversary of Armistice Day, less than a month before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Rickenbacker wrote to his son, then a boy: “It hardly seems possible that we are involved in another [world war], and in spite of the conditions we have got to make the best of everything.” (The letter appears in From Father to Son, an epistolary collection that Bill Rickenbacker published in 1970.) Less than a year later, Rickenbacker embarked on a tour of air bases on the islands of the Pacific Ocean. His B-17 flew off course, and the pilot ditched it in a remote area. Rickenbacker and seven others escaped in life rafts.

It made for a harrowing story — Rickenbacker wrote a book about it — but on special occasions he recounted a particular episode. In 1948, after his son Bill had doubted the existence of God, Rickenbacker wrote to him about what he called “the Power Above,” a term he deployed on several occasions. “On the raft on the Pacific, we had two men on board who were atheists,” he wrote. After their rescue, in Samoa, one of the men asked Rickenbacker to take him to a chapel. It was the first time he’d ever attended a church service. As the man continued to recover at Walter Reed Hospital, he wrote to Rickenbacker: “Not only did you save a man, but you saved a lost soul.”

In the same letter to Bill, Rickenbacker tried to extend the lesson: “Take your life and ours. Surely, there was a Power Above that brought us together and thus made possible a happier and fuller life for Mother and myself and, we hope, a happy, pleasant, comfortable, long, and useful life for you.” Those two sentences, reported Bill, were “the only reference I know of where Dad speaks of having adopted his children.” (Bill, who described his crisis of faith as a “temporary aberration,” had an older brother.)

Rickenbacker remained active in business until 1965, and also became more comfortable talking about politics. “We are now living in a garrison state,” he warned in 1951. “We are going to get taxes on top of taxes, resulting in a lower and lower standard of living as time goes on. With those taxes will come controls on top of controls, which means the loss of more and more of those liberties we cherish so dearly.” A decade later, as he sided with Barry Goldwater’s effort to reshape the Republican party, he called on conservatives to “take individual freedom as their battle cry and resist the encroachment of federal power.”

When Rickenbacker died in 1973, Bill wrote his obituary for National Review: “Once, for the sake of the historical record, he counted up the number of times he had escaped death.” There were plenty of close calls — on racetracks, in the skies, afloat on the Pacific — as well as at least one joke. Rickenbacker included his 50th wedding anniversary on the list. Death’s 136th attempt finally got him, shortly after a Fourth of July parade in Miami, his last public appearance. He died vacationing with his wife in Zurich, near the farms where his parents had been born.

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‘Place a penny on the middle of one of your tables,” says the narrator of an odd little novel. “Look down upon it. It will appear a circle.” As you lower your eye to the edge of the table, the penny becomes an oval. Finally, when your eye is level with the table, right on its rim, the penny is but a line.

Originally featured here on The Wall Street Journal

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