The airlines originally hired nurses to serve as flight attendants, but by the postwar era, trained health-care workers were long gone and the airlines were looking for attractive, unmarried young women whose main duty would be to serve drinks and meals.

NPR: Excerpt: 'When Everything Changed'

President Obama and his allies insist that that law - which is incessantly and incorrectly called "Don't Ask, Don't Tell, " the nickname for a Clinton-era Defense Department regulation that was intended to undermine the statute by allowing gays to serve as long as they kept their sexual preferences a secret - is a throw-back to an by-gone era.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Politicizing the Pentagon