Rickenbacker's luck: An American life

Edward Vernon Rickenbacker, “Ace of Aces” and the most decorated pilot of World War I was a larger-than-life American hero. Captain Eddie spent nearly his entire career with automobiles or airplanes: ‘All my life engines have spoken to me.” Rickenbacker was by turns an auto mechanic, a racing car driver (setting a world record of 134 mph in a Blitzen Benz at Daytona), a World War I air ace (his first victories were against “the flying circus” led by German ace Richthofen), an auto manufacturer (General Motors helped drive him to bankruptcy by calling his 4-wheel brakes unsafe, brakes now standard on all American cars), owner of the Indianapolis Speedway (where he raced regularly), and head of Eastern Air Lines (so successful under his leadership that Rickenbacker petitioned the Civil Aeronautics Board for a 10 percent fare reduction. which was refused). War hero, self-made man, business tycoon, pioneer in automobiles and aviation. Rickenbacker was also confidential adviser to FDR’s War Secretary, Henry Stimson.

Miraculously a survivor of one air disaster over land, Rickenbacker in his fifties barely survived a second, spending 23 days adrift on a small raft in the Pacific drinking rain water and catching fish. By his own count, Eddie Rickenbacker cheated death 135 times before dying at 82.

Rickenbacker’s Luck is the life of an American wonder whose successes came in fields developed in the twentieth century but whose philosophy seemed to many a carry-over from the nineteenth. Captain Eddie’s forthrightness, his simplicity; his invincibility, his staunch fight for his beliefs are qualities that belong to an archetypal American figure. The story of his life, spanning the years 1890 to 1973, is also the story of America growing up in the twentieth century. This child of the machine age drove in the daredevil days of pre-World War1 automobile racing; a half-century later he bought the first jet planes for commercial air travel and implemented air shuttle service between major northeastern cities. The most decorated fighter pilot in World War I, he could not understand the nature of war fifty years later, when America was torn apart by the Indochina conflict.