  The movie tonight was alright.. it took too long to get going, but maybe that was just me. In response to Ms. Clark's questions...... Perhaps the reason that Cooper couldn't say Yeager, is that at that stage in America, we wanted to see leaders and such on TV, not someone who wants to take his time explaining about some other guy's abilities. The news people were wanting him to hurry with his explaination, and perhaps it was faster to just say himself. Also, another answer could be, that he was scared that if he didn't show confidence in his own abilities as a pilot, NASA would have chosen the guy he suggested.
If the nation sees an astronaut reccommend that he is not the best pilot, they would be upset that he is flying a space craft their tax dollars went into creating; they would want someone who is ready to go into space. I think that the main point of this film was to show that during the Cold War, personal victories boosted the nation's morale.
For a very large portion of the nation, breaking the sound barrier meant nothing or little to them. Yet the media played this off as some great event. While sending 1 person into space was a landmark event for the US, it became more and more dramatized each time... everytime a new astronaut went up, they "pushed the envelope farther than before. " But each time they orbited the earth a few more times than before, it was made out to be an enormous event. This surprised me, because if I was living back then, I don't think I'd care if someone went two more times around the Earth than the person before him.
I think the directors were trying to show that maybe some events during the Cold War were made out to be bigger than they actually were. I felt that they were successful in this (unless my analysis is wrong). They showed how dramatized these events were.... Wooo Getting kinda late... i should be shuffling off to bed like an hour ago... ~Mat "Ralph" Keksi signing off 
