Red Moon Rising

8 BY THE LIGHT OF A RED MOON

General Bruce Medaris greeted October 4, 1957, with the giddy anticipation of someone expecting a new lease on life. The day, he felt sure, would mark a turning point for his besieged Army Ballistic Missile Agency—perhaps even offer a reprieve for his own troubled military career.

The source of this uncharacteristic optimism was the scheduled arrival that Friday morning of yet another high-ranking delegation from Washington. This time, though, Defense Secretary Charles Wilson would not be among the visiting brass, quibbling about the guest cottages. Wilson’s reign of terror was over.

Engine Charlie—the man who had sidelined ABMA and tried to put it out of the missile and satellite business, a man so hated in Huntsville that some rocket scientists had once burned his effigy in Courthouse Square—was quitting. Whether Colonel Nickerson’s whistle-blowing scandal and allegations of corporate cronyism had influenced his decision to return to Detroit to devote himself to automotive and charity work, Medaris did not know. Nor did he care. All that mattered was that his nemesis would be out of office by October 8. “We could not shed a single tear over Mr. Wilson’s departure,” Medaris later reminisced. “It was our strong feeling that his tenure had been characterized, to put it charitably, by a complete lack of imagination.”

All of Huntsville, apparently, was of the same mind. The town had more than doubled in size since von Braun and his German engineers had moved into their brick ramblers in new suburbs with nicknames like “Sour Kraut Hill,” and Huntsville’s fate was now inextricably linked to ABMA and its high-tech marvels. The jobs of five thousand skilled workers and much of the local economy had hung in limbo since Wilson’s November 1956 edict had effectively robbed the army of the big missile brief, and the uncertainty had devastated morale and depressed the once-booming real estate market. Huntsville, which had dubbed itself “Rocket City, USA,” was learning the harsh reality of the military-industrial complex: with the stroke of a pen in Washington, entire communities could be wiped out as quickly as they were created.

To keep his company town afloat and his rocket team intact, Medaris had waged increasingly inventive bureaucratic guerrilla campaigns that were beginning to take their toll on his standing with the power brokers at the Pentagon. The embarrassing disclosures of alleged favoritism at the Nickerson court-martial had won the Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missile program a temporary stay of execution; ABMA could continue doing limited research on the missile while the Pentagon decided whether to cancel the project entirely. Unfortunately, ABMA had few friends at the defense secretary’s office, and the army IRBM was still on Charlie Wilson’s chopping block.

Medaris’s tireless lobbying to land a role for the army in satellites was also becoming an irritant. He had loudly and repeatedly questioned the selection of an inexperienced civilian team to launch the navy’s Vanguard satellite, the official U.S. entry in the IGY competition, and hinted darkly at conspiracies in high places. He had also pushed his boss, James Gavin, a hard-nosed former paratrooper in charge of Army Research and Development, to lodge formal but futile appeals with Quarles and Wilson on ABMA’s behalf.

Like Korolev, Medaris had simply refused to take no for an answer, and like the Chief Designer, he had not been above using a little subterfuge. The similarities were not that surprising, given that the two men had been raised in almost identical circumstances by strong-willed, single women who had challenged the chauvinism of their times. Medaris’s mother had also divorced young and left her son with her parents while she pursued a career, eventually becoming the comptroller of a midsize manufacturing company and one of the most senior female executives in Ohio. It was in his grandmother’s home that Medaris first displayed his resistance to authority, “timing his comings and goings so that Grandmother LeSourd didn’t ask hard questions.” From his industrious mother, Jessie, he learned the value of entrepreneurship, taking a part-time job at the age of eleven sorting mail at the local railway station. By twelve, he was driving a cab on weekends (driver’s licenses were not yet required in Ohio), and at fourteen he was working full-time as a uniformed conductor on the Springfield Street Railway System on the 3:30-to-midnight shift. By the time the stock market collapsed in 1929, Medaris had accumulated over one hundred thousand dollars in his trading account. Left with sixty-nine dollars after the crash, he bought himself a new suit and started all over again.

Medaris was no stranger to adversity, and he was not a quitter. Regardless of what the Pentagon said, he would not abandon his satellite quest. And so, with Gavin’s tacit compliance, he had “bootlegged” the Jupiter C. Ostensibly an experimental vehicle to develop a new form of ablative nose cone whose heat shield peeled off in layers, the C in reality was a souped-up Redstone whose added upper stages were suspiciously similar to the army’s rejected satellite booster design. “We must make it perfectly clear,” Medaris instructed von Braun and his staff, “that we did not carry forward a program which we had been denied, that the work was carried on because that was the best way to make a reentry missile and the two happened to fit together.” Justified by the need to simulate the speed, friction, and trajectory of big nuclear-tipped missiles on atmospheric reentry, the Jupiter C’s ulterior purpose was to keep ABMA unofficially in the satellite sweepstakes, since the navy was stumbling badly. Vanguard was so behind schedule and over budget that Eisenhower had considered canceling it, while the Jupiter C had set U.S. altitude and distance records, soaring 662 miles high over a 3,335-mile arc. Even so, Medaris had been unable to gain any traction with Wilson in repeated pleas to at least consider designating the army as a backup for the navy satellite effort. “In various languages our fingers were slapped and we were told to mind our own business,” he recalled. “Rightly or wrongly, we were convinced that during Wilson’s regime the Army had consistently been pushed aside.”

ABMA had gotten a raw deal under Engine Charlie. But now his replacement, Neil H. McElroy, was coming to Huntsville. Medaris hoped to get a fairer hearing from the new secretary-designate, who was by all accounts a fair and forward-thinking man. At fifty-three, he was almost exactly Medaris’s age, and a fellow Ohioan to boot. Like Medaris, he had a reputation for speaking his mind, and he had a mid-westerner’s impatience with Washington’s insular ways. McElroy, in fact, had accepted Eisenhower’s invitation to join his cabinet only on the condition that he serve no more than two years. Any longer, he argued, and he would risk succumbing to the temptations of political power.

Medaris felt certain he could reason with such a man, a son of small-town schoolteachers, a full-scholarship Harvard graduate. “Our whole organization was thoroughly fired up,” he recalled. “We hoped that with a fresh and uncommitted mind, [McElroy] would grasp the significance of our story. We were determined to give him our frank feelings, backed by facts and figures, as to our record for delivering what we promised, when we promised, and for the money originally stated.”

If Medaris had one reservation about McElroy, it was that he was yet another moneyed representative of big business, the president of the household goods giant Procter & Gamble. But at least he wasn’t from the incestuous defense establishment, intent on feathering his company’s nest with government contracts. In any event, Medaris would have the incoming secretary in Huntsville for a full twenty-four hours to bend his ear and make his case before the Washington hyenas got to him.

By the time McElroy’s plane touched down at the Redstone Arsenal airstrip at noon on October 4, General Gavin had already been working on the secretary-designate during the flight, priming him for Medaris’s pitch. The hard sell, though, was to take place that evening at the Officers’ Club, over dinner and drinks and an outpouring of southern hospitality at a reception in McElroy’s honor.

Wilbur Brucker, the secretary of the army, and General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, the army chief of staff, were in attendance, as were Huntsville’s eager-to-please town fathers. Will Halsey, one of the community leaders, remembered the room being “so heavy with top brass that it seemed like two-star generals were serving drinks to three-star generals.”

As the cocktails were being poured and the secretary’s favor curried, ABMA’s public relations officer, Gordon Harris, abruptly burst into the bar. Clearly agitated, the young officer rudely interrupted McElroy and grabbed Medaris. “General,” he stammered, too loudly for discretion, “it has been announced over the radio that the Russians have put up a successful satellite!”

For a moment, the room was deathly quiet, so that only the soft sound of background music could be heard. “It’s broadcasting signals on a common frequency,” Harris went on, as hushed murmurs began rippling through the gathering. “At least one of our local ‘hams’ [amateur radio operators] has been listening to it.”

Then dozens of voices erupted in a spontaneous outburst of anger and pent-up frustration. “General Gavin was visibly shaken, and understandably so,” an aide to Secretary Brucker later recalled. Gavin, only days earlier, had tried to persuade Wilson one last time to take the Jupiter C as a backup for the problem-plagued Vanguard. Now he cursed Engine Charlie’s lack of foresight.

“Damn bastards” was all Medaris said, and it was unclear whether he was referring to the Soviets or his own government overseers. Whichever the case, he was stunned. How could the Russians have done it? It was impossible. Only the week before, he had laughed when Ernst Stuhlinger, one of von Braun’s top engineers, had pleaded for him to approach Quarles because he was “convinced” that the Soviets were planning a launch. “Now look,” Medaris had replied, “don’t get tense. You know how complicated it is to build and launch a satellite. Those people will never be able to do it. Go back to your laboratory and relax.”

Medaris had always presumed that he was in a race with the air force and the navy, not with the USSR. Like most Americans, he thought the Russians were boors: primitive, simple, crude. How could they pull off something like this? Medaris, for once, was speechless. Yet in underestimating the Soviet Union’s technical potential, he had made the same mistake as Senator Ellender and all the others who had laughed at Moscow’s crummy cars and shoes. What Medaris, like most Americans, failed to understand was that conditions that made communism wholly unsuited as a producer of quality consumer goods made it an ideal system for promoting major scientific breakthroughs. The state could never compete with private businesses making sneakers, tennis racquets, or transistor radios. But no corporation could muster the vast resources, strict discipline, and unlimited patience that were required of huge scientific undertakings like the Manhattan Project, or the creation of a satellite-bearing ICBM. Stuhlinger and von Braun, as veterans of the state-run V-2 program, understood this and knew that science thrived under totalitarian regimes, even if free speech and commerce did not.

Medaris had never grasped the dichotomy, and now, as the shock settled in, he didn’t look the least bit relaxed. But it was the usually unflappable von Braun who appeared most emotional. “Von Braun started to talk as if he had suddenly been vaccinated by a Victrola needle,” Medaris later recalled. “In his driving urgency to unburden his feelings, the words tumbled over one another.”

“We knew they would do it!” von Braun exclaimed, his Teutonic Texas twang rising to a fevered pitch. “We could have done it two years ago,” he cursed, launching into the story of how Wilson had been so suspicious that the army might “accidentally” launch a satellite ahead of the navy, igniting an interservice war, that he had ordered Medaris to personally inspect the Jupiter C booster to ensure that the top stage was a dud. (The precaution, as it turned out, had been unnecessary. “There was no chance of an unauthorized attempt,” Stuhlinger later recalled. “We had our orders, and von Braun was very strict about following orders.”)

Office politics had denied von Braun his lifelong dream. Unlike Korolev, he had been obsessed with the conquest of space since early childhood. He had sold his soul—first to the Werhmacht, then to the Nazis, and finally to the U.S. Army—to pursue his quest. He had endured Hitler, Himmler, five long years of purgatory in the hot Texas sun. All so that he could pursue his dream. And now, because of some idiotic bureaucratic imperatives, someone else had beaten him to it. Von Braun very nearly exploded with anger and frustration. “For God’s sake cut us loose and let us do something,” he implored McElroy. “We have the hardware on the shelf.”

Medaris must have swallowed hard. In his overexcited state, von Braun had let it slip that ABMA had quietly diverted two Jupiter C rockets from the nose cone testing program and put them in cold storage in anticipation of the navy not delivering Vanguard. A lot of people had been complicit in the scheme, but the unauthorized misplacement of millions of dollars of Pentagon property was not something one necessarily wanted to spring on the secretary of defense before he was even sworn in. (“It was imprudent to admit we had retained those rockets,” Medaris would later confess to congressional investigators.) Mc-Elroy, though, made no comment, perhaps because von Braun did not pause for breath. “Vanguard will fail,” he went on, with a certainty that verged on arrogance. “We can put up a satellite in sixty days, Mr. Mc-Elroy. Just give us the green light and sixty days.”

“Ninety days,” Medaris quickly interjected. Two months was pushing it. Von Braun, though, kept repeating his original figure. “Just sixty days.”

“No, Wernher.” Medaris finally pulled rank. “Ninety days.”

But McElroy was in no position to make any spot decisions. He still had to be confirmed by the Senate, which was controlled by the Democrats, who were likely to develop a sudden and intense interest in the subject of space.

Reports on the Soviet satellite now began trickling out on the radio and television at the Officers’ Club. Harris, the harried PR officer, announced that ABMA’s communications team had also captured its signal. “It beeped derisively over our heads,” he said. Western news agencies in Moscow had by now hastily translated the official TASS press release, which included technical details of the orbiting craft. The Soviets were referring to it as Iskustvenniy Sputnik Zemli, or Artificial Satellite of the Earth. American broadcasts were simply calling it Sputnik, the generic Russian term for satellite. ABMA’s scientists now clustered around Harris, bombarding him with questions. What were Sputnik’s parameters? What was its orbit? How big was it? When word spread that it weighed 184 pounds, people shook their heads in disbelief. Must be a mistake, they said. Someone must have misplaced a decimal point. Vanguard’s satellite payload was only 3.5 pounds because the navy’s slim booster produced a mere 27,000 pounds of thrust. Even von Braun had never proposed anything larger than 17 pounds as the payload for his 78,000-pound-thrust Jupiter C. How could the Soviets put up a satellite ten times heavier? Plainly the media had got it wrong. But if the press reports were accurate, the military implications of a missile powerful enough to orbit such a weighty cargo were frightening. It would have to generate hundreds of thousands of pounds of thrust, possibly as much as half a million, some of the scientists ventured. (Not even their wildest guesses, however, approximated the R-7’s 1.1 million pounds of lift.)

Throughout all the frenzied speculation, Medaris and von Braun kept hammering away at McElroy, who must have felt as if he were being baptized by fire. “Missile number 27 proved our capabilities,” Medaris pressed, referring to the Jupiter C shot that had reached approximately the same altitude as Sputnik was currently circling overhead. “It would have gone into orbit without question if we had used a loaded fourth stage. The hardware is in hand, and so the amount of money needed to make the effort is very small,” Medaris said, continuing his hard sell. “I believe we have a 99% probability of success.”

Give us $12.7 million and the go-ahead, Medaris pleaded. “We felt like football players begging to be allowed to get off the bench and go into the game to restore some measure of the Free World’s damaged pride,” he recalled later.

Sputnik, as Medaris and von Braun had almost immediately grasped, was ABMA’s ticket out of the doldrums, an opportunity to be seized. Surely the administration would have no choice but to respond to the Soviet challenge, and ABMA was the nation’s best bet to even the score. “When you get back to Washington, and all hell breaks loose,” von Braun told the secretary in one last sales pitch as McElroy was boarding his plane the next morning, “tell them we’ve got the hardware down here to put up a satellite any time.”

Medaris, in fact, had already ordered von Braun to secretly start preparing for launch. He was so confident that the political fallout from Sputnik would spur the White House to action that he had skipped waiting for the green light. What the maverick general did not realize, however, was that his commander in chief would have decidedly different ideas.

The debacle in Little Rock had shaken Dwight Eisenhower. For the first time in his presidency, a majority of the American people—64 percent, according to a Gallup survey—had disapproved of the way he had handled a crisis. His trademark calm and restraint had abandoned him in the wake of Governor Faubus’s impudence, and many voters felt he had overreacted by sending troops to Arkansas. Not surprisingly, the polls skewed most unfavorably in the South.

While the immediate crisis was over (though paratroopers remained posted outside Central High School), Faubus was apparently still weighing heavily on the president’s mind when he returned from his three-week vacation in Newport in the waning days of September. “Dear Dick,” he wrote Nixon on October 2, extending an olive branch to the marginalized vice president, whose calls for a more forceful stand on integration he had long ignored. “I had been hoping to play golf this afternoon…. If you already have a game, please don’t think of changing your plans because mine are necessarily uncertain because of the stupidity and duplicity of one called Faubus.”

Nixon, as it turned out, did not have a golf game planned for the middle of the workweek and jumped at the rare opportunity to join his usually distant boss for a 1:00 PM tee time at the Burning Tree Country Club. The two had hardly seen each other over the past several months, owing to Eisenhower’s extended vacations and Sherman Adams’s tight control over entry to the Oval Office. Only John Foster Dulles had unfettered access to the president. Nixon, like everyone else, had to go through the chief of staff. The restrictions grated. “Sherman Adams was cold, blunt, abrasive, at times even rude,” Nixon vented in his memoir. The vice president was increasingly clashing with Adams, since he was trying to carve out a more meaningful role for himself in Eisenhower’s second term, especially in the realm of foreign policy. He was now a likely front-runner for the 1960 Republican presidential nomination, and he needed to raise his profile. Maybe he could persuade Ike to send him on some state visit.

But the president didn’t seem interested in talking shop. “Golf in Newport was enjoyable,” he remarked amiably. “I got to the point where I was hitting the ball as long as I ever did.” His putting, however, Eisenhower complained, had suffered “a corresponding slump.”

Eisenhower’s insouciance was partly an act. The president was tired and worn down by a summer of squabbling with Stuart Symington and the other Democrats in Congress over defense spending, and he was increasingly worried by some troubling numbers coming out of the Commerce Department. The economic boom he had inherited during his first term, when more than one million families a year were moving up into the middle class in what Fortune magazine called “an economy of abundance,” appeared to be faltering. Unemployment figures for August were showing a sharp rise. The real estate and stock markets had cooled considerably. Consumer confidence indicators were down. And tax revenues were coming in at a disappointing $72 billion, $4 billion below projections. Prosperity and fiscal prudence were pillars of the administration’s platform, and Eisenhower, at Charlie Wilson’s suggestion, had ordered sweeping military cuts in July in an effort to trim half a billion dollars from the $3.5 billion monthly defense bill. Already the Democrats were howling that his policies favored the rich while putting the country at risk. “What the hell good is it to be the richest man in the graveyard?” Symington had snapped. And now Ike faced the agonizing possibility of a looming recession to further complicate his budget balancing act.

“The developments of this year,” he wrote in a diary entry on September 13, 1957, a week before Little Rock, “have long since proved to me that I made one grave mistake in my calculations as what a second term would mean to me in the way of a continuous toll upon my strength, patience, and sense of humor. I had expected… to be free of the many preoccupations that were so time consuming and wearing in the first term. The opposite is the case. The demands that I ‘do something’ seem to grow.”

At nearly sixty-seven years of age, with a heart attack and stomach surgery on his recent medical record, Ike simply didn’t have the stamina he had once had. And so, on Friday, October 4, he decided to take a break and spend a recuperative four-day weekend at his beloved farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

With its prizewinning herd of Black Angus beef cattle and historic battlefields, the putting green he had installed just outside his patio doors, and the reassuring scent of his wife Mamie’s rhubarb pies wafting out of the kitchen, Eisenhower cherished the farm above all his other possessions. He never took more than a skeletal staff to intrude on his privacy at Gettysburg, and that is perhaps one reason why there is no record from any White House aides as to how the president reacted when told that night that the Soviet Union had launched a satellite. What is known, according to the space historian Paul Dickson, is that the next morning the president of the United States played golf for the fifth time that week.

In Eisenhower’s absence, it was John Foster Dulles who drafted the official White House response to Sputnik. The launch was “an event of considerable technical and scientific importance,” Dulles allowed in an October 5 statement. “However, that importance should not be exaggerated. What has happened involves no basic discovery and the value of a satellite to mankind will for a long time be highly problematical. The Germans had made a major advance in the field and the results of their efforts were largely taken over by the Russians when they took the German assets, human and material.”

The gist of the press release was clear. Sputnik, as far as the White House was concerned, was not a big deal. If anything, it was a feat of Nazi engineering, not Soviet know-how—never mind that the Germans in question were beavering away in Huntsville, not Moscow. The tone thus set, administration officials lined up to spin the news. Sputnik was “without military significance,” said the White House aide Maxwell Rabb. “A neat technical trick,” shrugged Charlie Wilson. “A silly bauble,” scoffed Eisenhower’s adviser Clarence Randall. Sputnik did not come as the least bit of a surprise, Press Secretary Jim Hagerty assured the world. America was not interested in getting caught up “in an outer space basketball game,” Sherman Adams announced. The satellite was a useless “hunk of iron that almost anyone could launch,” growled Admiral Rawson Bennett, Vanguard’s commanding officer.

Loyal Republican lawmakers added their voices to the chorus of skepticism. Sputnik was nothing more than “a propaganda stunt,” said Senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin. It was like a “canary that jumps on the eagle’s back,” declared Representative James Fulton of Pennsylvania, apparently insinuating that the Soviets were hitchhiking off American technology.

But much as the administration tried to downplay the significance of the Communist breakthrough, the media decided differently. Sputnik was a big story—a very big, shocking, scary story. “Listen now for the sound that will forever more separate the old from the new,” intoned NBC, broadcasting Sputnik’s beep on Saturday, October 5. “Soviet Fires Earth Satellite into Space,” the New York Times trumpeted in the sort of six-column-wide headline usually reserved for declarations of war. “Sphere Tracked in Four Crossings over U.S.”

From the journalistic perspective, Sputnik had everything going for it: a historic milestone of human evolution, the element of surprise, the sting of defeat, and frightening ramifications as CBS’s Eric Sevareid somberly informed viewers in his October 6 telecast.

America had been bested on the international stage, and editors across the land now salivated at the prospect of finding someone to blame for the sluggishness and complacency of the U.S. satellite program. The administration’s underwhelmed response smacked of sour grapes and made it an appealing target for the nationwide editorial witch hunt. Nothing, after all, sold newspapers like the old-fashioned whiff of incompetence and scandal.

Sputnik contained one final element that no ambitious newsman could resist: fear. The missile that had lofted Sputnik into space had also shattered America’s sense of invulnerability. For the first time geography had ceased to be a barrier, and the U.S. mainland lay exposed to enemy fire. In that respect, Russia’s rockets were infinitely more frightening than the Japanese bombers that had attacked Pearl Harbor sixteen years before. It was not distant naval bases on Pacific islands that they targeted, but the impregnable heartland itself: Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, places that had never before needed to worry about foreign aggression. Despite White House assurances to the contrary, satellites and ballistic missiles were inherently linked. The story, therefore, was ultimately about the security—or newfound insecurity—of the American people, as Sevareid made plainly clear: “If the intercontinental missile is, indeed, the ultimate, the final weapon of warfare,” he ended his broadcast ominously, “then at the present rate, Russia will soon come to a period during which she can stand astride the world, its military master.”

The warning was echoed by thousands of media outlets, big and small, conservative and liberal, in radio and television, magazines and newspapers. Sputnik was “a great national emergency,” declared Max Ascoli of the Reporter. A “grave defeat,” lamented the staunchly Republican New York Herald Tribune. US News & World Report likened it to the splitting of the atom. The editors of Life made comparisons to the shots fired at Lexington and Concord and urged Americans “to respond as the Minutemen had done then.” Sputnik was “a technological Pearl Harbor,” fretted Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb. The sphere’s “chilling beeps,” echoed Time, were a signal that “in vital sectors of the technology race, the US may have well lost its precious lead.”

A strange sense of disconnection gripped the public discourse. The more the administration told Americans not to worry, the louder the media beat their doomsday drums. Editors seemed obsessed with the Soviet satellite, and pretty soon so was the general population, which had initially greeted the launch with mild to complete disinterest. “The reaction here indicates massive indifference,” a Newsweek correspondent had reported from Boston on October 5. “There is a vague feeling that we have stepped into a new era, but people aren’t discussing it the way they are football or the Asiatic flu,” another Newsweek reporter wired from Denver. In Milwaukee, it was the ballistic trajectories of the Braves’ pitching staff in Game 2 of the World Series against the Yankees that preoccupied most people, not the short news brief on page 3 of the Sentinel devoted to the Soviet satellite. According to a spot poll conducted on October 5 by the Opinion Research Corporation, only 13 percent of Americans saw Sputnik as a sign that America had fallen dangerously behind the Soviet Union. One reason so few people were worried, recalled the Columbia University pollster Samuel Lubell, was an overwhelming sense of confidence in Eisenhower’s leadership. “When I asked what this country should do, the reply would fairly often be: ‘The President will do all that needs to be done,’” Lubell noted. “Or, a typical answer would be: ‘He’s taking action now.’ Or ‘I’d leave that to the President. He ought to know.’”

Within days the media barrage changed the public mood dramatically. People began holding nightly vigils to try to spot the passing satellite; they tuned their radios to its frequencies; and they grew anxious. Yet for the Democrats in Congress, Sputnik was simply too good an opportunity to let slip. The Little Rock crisis had left Eisenhower vulnerable, and the economy was weakening. The Soviet Union had handed the United States a setback that could be whipped up into a full-blown indictment of the administration.

As the most vocal critic of Eisenhower’s “deplorable” military cuts, Symington took the lead, rallying his fellow Democratic hawks Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington and Richard Russell of Georgia, the powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The launch was proof, Symington said, “of growing Communist superiority in the all-important missile field.” The administration’s “penury” had let America’s technological lead slip away and had placed the nation in grave danger.

“I have been warning about this growing danger for a long time,” Symington added, “because the future of the United States may well be at stake.” He asked Russell to convene hearings immediately so that “the American people [can] learn the truth.”

Naturally, Symington volunteered to lead the investigation, as he had during the bomber gap. Both Russell and Jackson had been around Washington long enough to know that he had ulterior motives, but they were only too happy to oblige their handsome and ambitious young colleague. He had credibility, and the New York Times had praised his poise and his “dignified bearing that conveys an impression of statesmanship.”

Jackson enthusiastically took up the cause, calling for “a National Week of Shame and Danger.” Sputnik, he said, was “a devastating blow to the prestige of the United States.” Russell weighed in as well. “We now know beyond a doubt,” he warned on October 5, “that the Russians have the ultimate weapon—a long-range missile capable of delivering atomic and hydrogen explosives across continents and oceans. If this now known superiority over the United States develops into supremacy, the position of the free world will be critical. At the same time we continue to learn of the missile accomplishments of the possible enemy. For fiscal reasons this Government, in turn, continues to cut back and slow down its own missile program.”

But Symington was not the only ambitious politician looking to capitalize on the Communist feat. Lyndon Johnson had been at his Texas ranch on the night of October 4, when news of the Soviet satellite had reached him. Like Eisenhower, he loved his rural retreat and “liked nothing better than to careen over the hills in his convertible Lincoln Continental, shooting bucks from the front seat,” in the words of Johnson’s biographer Randall B. Woods. On Sputnik night he had been entertaining guests at his deer tower, an air-conditioned, glass-enclosed, forty-foot-high hunting blind, complete with a dining room and a staff of black waiters. It sat at the wooded edge of a meadow and was flanked by banks of powerful spotlights that Johnson would switch on, blinding his prey for an easy shot. But that night, he had laid down his rifle and drinks and stared at the sky. “I’ll be dammed,” he swore, “if I sleep by the light of a Red Moon.”

He would also be damned if he was going to let Symington grab the spotlight. He was the majority leader, the most powerful legislator in the land, and if he ever hoped to be taken seriously as a presidential contender he needed to weigh in on the crisis. “Soon they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses,” cried Johnson, who until then had never expressed particular interest in either missile technology or space, adding his own calls for “a full and exhaustive inquiry” into the sorry state of national defense.

Johnson rushed back to Washington and began plotting. His first order of business was to head off Symington, and his first call was to Richard Russell, the man who would decide which Armed Services subcommittee would hold the Sputnik hearings. Russell was Johnson’s ace in the hole. The quiet and courtly senator from Georgia was a model of old-fashioned southern gentility and probably the most powerful Democrat in Washington—“the undisputed leader of the Senate’s inner Club,” in the words of the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. Johnson, from the first day he set foot in the Senate, recognized Russell’s immense influence and systematically sought to curry his approval. Always addressing him respectfully, without any of the jocular familiarity he reserved for other lawmakers, Johnson bombarded Russell with polite notes and queries that made it clear he valued his opinions. He took care to be on hand on Saturdays and late evenings, when Russell, a bachelor with no outside social life, was alone in the empty Senate. “I made sure that there was always one companion, one Senator, who worked as long as and as hard as he, and that was me,” Johnson later recalled. Johnson also made a point of getting himself appointed to Russell’s Armed Services Committee to cement the burgeoning relationship. “I knew there was only one way to see Russell everyday,” he explained, “and that was to get a seat on his committee.”

In time, Lady Bird Johnson began extending invitations for the lonely, workaholic Georgian to join the Johnsons for Sunday brunches and holiday meals, and by 1957 a special bond had been forged between the two senators. That relationship would now come in handy.

As rival Democrats battled over who could ring the alarm bells loudest, the orchestrated histrionics had their desired effect. Public reaction to Sputnik quickly shifted from blasé to terror-stricken. Everywhere around the country, people flocked to rooftops and held midnight vigils on their front lawns, hoping to catch a glimpse of the ominous orb whose signal was being blamed for a rash of mysterious garage door openings. (The Washington Post speculated that these were the result of interference from coded messages to Soviet spies.) Local radio stations fueled the paranoia by broadcasting Sputnik’s expected over-pass times, and it was not unusual to have entire blocks of people gazing anxiously skyward at 3:00 AM. Eventually, some 4 percent of the U.S. population would report seeing Sputnik with their own eyes. (What most actually saw was the one-hundred-foot-long R-7 rocket casing that Korolev had craftily outfitted with reflective prisms. It trailed some 600 miles behind the twenty-two-inch satellite, which could be viewed only with optical devices more sophisticated than the binoculars used by the average American.)

Throughout the ruckus, Eisenhower remained resolutely silent. If the administration stayed calm, he was certain, the furor would pass. People would see that the sky was not falling in on their heads and would return to their normal routines. “Business as usual” was the message the White House chose to project. “We can’t always go changing our program in reaction to everything the Russians do,” Eisenhower told his cabinet. But as two, three, and then four days passed without any public comment from the president, the press grew irritable and impatient. Everyone else, it seemed, had pronounced on the subject of Sputnik; where did Ike stand? Was America really in danger? Did the Soviets in fact possess the ultimate weapon of mass destruction? Where was the leadership? Newspapers, especially in the South, which was still seething over Little Rock, demanded to know. “Ike Plays Golf, Hears the News,” grumbled the Birmingham News, while the Nashville Tennessean ran a cartoon of the president dismissing Sputnik from the putting green.

Privately, Eisenhower’s aides were anything but dismissive, and there was growing concern that Ike’s purposeful silence was backfiring. “This was a place where Eisenhower went wrong,” his loyal staff secretary General Andrew J. Goodpaster conceded decades later. “His expression was that this was nothing we didn’t foresee or know about, but the American people until that moment had not realized the vulnerability that had now developed. That they could be reached by long range rockets, which could be nuclear armed. And our country, for the first time, was exposed to that kind of danger. And so, where he brushed it off as something that we had foreseen, it really created great anxiety, almost panic within the United States.”

Eisenhower’s background as a professional soldier may have been partly responsible for his empathy deficit. As a military man, the president was accustomed to calculating casualties and collateral damage. From his experiences in World War II, he knew that in modern combat there was no longer any such thing as noncombatants; the United States had long targeted Russian cities, and it was not that shocking that the Soviet Union did the same. As a seasoned field commander, Eisenhower also knew that the ICBM, as a weapon, was still in its infancy, much like the airplane before World War I, and that years would pass before it became a real threat that could alter the balance of power.

The president and the military men who served in his immediate circle were not attuned to the psychological effects of Sputnik as a symbol of nuclear Armageddon. “I can’t understand,” Eisenhower told Good-paster, “why the American people have got so worked up over this thing. It’s certainly not going to drop on their heads.”

Others in the administration, however, were better equipped to appreciate the national trauma. Vice President Nixon, as a career politician with limited military experience, instinctively grasped that Sputnik could not be shrugged off lightly as a “stunt.” It was a mistake, he argued privately (and later in his memoirs), not to acknowledge it as a serious affront to American supremacy; and he would be the first senior administration official to say so publicly, during a speech in San Francisco on October 15. The White House press secretary Jim Hagerty was also deeply worried by the media onslaught Sputnik had generated. His boss was taking a lot of flak and needed to devise a strategy to disarm his critics. Especially troublesome was the negative publicity being stirred up by an Associated Press story that the army had been prevented from launching a satellite in 1956. The leak apparently infuriated Eisenhower and was the subject of a damage-control session he held with his military and science advisers at 8:30 AM on Tuesday, October 8. Donald Quarles took the brunt of Eisenhower’s anger. “There was no doubt,” Quarles admitted, “that the Redstone, had it been used, could have placed a satellite in orbit many months ago,” but he was quick to spread the blame, adding that “the [Pentagon] Science Advisory Committee had felt that it was better to have the earth satellite proceed separately from military development. One reason was to stress the peaceful character of the effort.”

Ike was not pleased. “When this information reaches the Congress,” he observed, frowning, “they are bound to ask questions.”

Eisenhower may have come to politics late in life, but he was hardly naive enough to hope that the Democrats would not try to pin the blame on him. And Quarles, as Charlie Wilson’s unenthusiastic point man on satellites, had been the ranking administration official responsible for turning down Medaris’s repeated requests to convert the Redstone-based Jupiter C into a launch vehicle. The deputy defense secretary, though, tried to put a positive spin on the potential public relations disaster. “The Russians,” he said in a feeble attempt to make the news seem welcoming, “have in fact done us a good turn, unintentionally, in establishing the concept of freedom of international space.”

Eisenhower knew he could not tell the American people that there was a silver lining to the Soviet breakthrough—that the United States would be able to phase out the secret U-2 overflights and spy on the USSR from space without violating international laws. Still, he had to say something to mollify the public, and at Hagerty’s urging he finally agreed to hold a press conference the next day.

When Eisenhower walked into conference room 474 of the Old Executive Office Building at precisely 10:31 AM on Wednesday, October 9, he was greeted by one of the most hostile press corps the president had ever faced. Hagerty, anticipating angry questions about why the army had not been permitted to use a loaded orbital stage during the Jupiter C trials, had prepared a two-page statement that was distributed shortly before the president’s arrival. “The rocketry employed by our Naval Research Laboratory for launching our Vanguard,” it explained, “has been deliberately separated from our ballistic missile efforts in order, first, to accent the scientific purposes of the satellite and, second, to avoid interference with top priority missile programs. Merging of this scientific effort with military programs could have produced an orbiting United States satellite before now, but to the detriment of scientific goals and military progress. Our satellite program,” the statement concluded, “has never been conducted as a race with other countries.”

The White House press corps was not pleased. “Mr. President,” demanded Merriman Smith of United Press International, “Russia has launched an earth satellite. They also claim to have had a successful firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile, none of which this country has. I ask you sir, what are you going do about it?”

Eisenhower was not accustomed to this sort of treatment, and he appeared surprised by the ferocity of the question. Photographs show him scowling, eyebrows arched, leaning across the microphone, pale in a dark tie and charcoal three-piece suit. The president had always enjoyed a friendly and jocular relationship with the men and women who covered him, and often played a game of making his press conferences as obtuse and unintelligible as possible to avoid delicate topics. This time, though, the assembled journalists were in no mood for meandering answers.

Eisenhower delivered a lengthy response to Smith’s question that reiterated America’s intention to put up a satellite as part of its IGY efforts but offered little concrete evidence of a new plan of action or any juicy sound bites. Charles von Freed of CBS was not satisfied. “Mr. President,” he said, “Khrushchev claims we are now entering a period when conventional planes, bombers and fighters will be confined to museums because they are outmoded by the missiles which Russia claims she has perfected. Khrushchev’s remarks would seem to indicate he wants us to believe our Strategic Air Command is now outmoded. Do you believe that SAC is outmoded?”

“No,” Eisenhower shot back emphatically. The process, he explained, would be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and would take twenty years.

May Craig of the Portland Press Herald kept up the pressure. “Mr. President, you have spoken of the scientific aspects of the satellite. Do you think it has immense significance in surveillance of other countries?”

“Not at this time,” Eisenhower obfuscated, not mentioning that just the day before he had grilled Donald Quarles on the progress of the air force’s lagging space reconnaissance program. “I think that period is a long ways off when you consider that even now, and apparently they have, the Russians, under a dictatorial society, where they have some of the finest scientists in the world, who have for many years been working on it, apparently from what they say they have put one small ball in the air.”

This was the sound bite that everyone had been waiting for. Eisenhower’s dismissive “one small ball” would grace hundreds of headlines in the next day’s newspapers, reinforcing the impression that the president of the United States was at a loss as to why his nation was so traumatized. Pleased, the reporters pressed on. “Mr. President,” the Chicago Tribune correspondent queried, smelling blood, “considering what we know about Russia’s progress in the field of missiles, are you satisfied with our own progress in that field, or do you feel there have been unnecessary delays in our development of missiles?”

This was precisely the type of loaded question that Richard Nixon had predicted during the NSC meeting two years before, when he had argued with Quarles that the administration had to be seen as doing everything in its power to move forward with the new weapons systems. Eisenhower had not attended that meeting, and now he seemed hesitant. “I can’t say there has been unnecessary delay. I know that from time to time I came here and got into the thing earnestly,” the president started to say, but then abruptly changed tack. “We have done everything I can think of… I can say this: I wish we were further ahead and knew more as to the accuracy and to the erosion and to the heat resistant qualities of metals and all the other things we have to know about. I wish we knew more about it at this moment.”

“Is it a correct interpretation of what you said about your satisfaction with the missile program as separate from the satellite program,” the Washington Post reporter followed up, “that you have no plans to take any steps to combine the various government units which are involved in this program and which give certainly the public appearance of a great deal of service rivalry, with some reason to feel that this is why we seem to be lagging behind the Soviets?”

“First of all, I didn’t say I was satisfied,” Eisenhower replied testily. “I said I don’t know what we could have done better.”

More probing questions followed in the same cutthroat vein. Why did Charlie Wilson, the day before, on his last day in office, say he doubted the Soviet Union had an ICBM? Did the sudden cancellation of a state visit by Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov have anything to with Sputnik? Was it true that the army was being prevented from launching a satellite immediately? Would the United States launch a satellite as heavy as Sputnik?

Finally, NBC’s Hazel Markel cut to the chase: “Mr. President, in light of the great faith which the American people have in your military knowledge and leadership, are you saying at this time that with the Russian satellite whirling about the world, you are not more concerned nor overly concerned about our nation’s security?”

Eisenhower’s measured response delved into the difficulties of missile accuracy and the still relatively primitive state of guidance systems. But the details were lost on the journalists. His answer would be pared down on the evening news to a single flippant sentence fragment: “Not one iota.”

If the president’s news conference had been intended to pacify the press, it had the opposite effect. Instead of reassuring the public with his trademark calm and commanding demeanor, Ike’s performance was judged to have been too remote, too divorced from the anxiety sweeping the nation. “A fumbling apologia,” snipped one critic. “A Crisis in Leadership,” declared Time, noting that American voters wanted a strong leader, unfazed by crisis. But they also needed someone to understand and address their fears. By dismissing Sputnik as “a small ball” without military implications, the man Americans trusted most to defend them seemed oblivious to the danger that millions now saw lurking in the night sky. Ike was correct that in itself the Soviet satellite posed no danger, but he failed to acknowledge that it represented a potential threat. Instead of projecting confidence, he was accused of being out of touch with reality, asleep at the wheel. The president must “be in some kind of partial retirement,” complained the hugely influential syndicated columnist Walter Lippmann. “He is not leading the country,” said the usually supportive New York Times columnist Arthur Krock. The Washington Evening Star was even less charitable, comparing Eisenhower’s subdued reaction to that of someone under the effects of mind-numbing sedatives. Only the conservative US News & World Report rallied behind the president, calling his refusal to be cowed “courageous statesmanship.”

In Congress, delighted Democrats heaped scorn on the administration’s refusal to recognize or respond to the Soviet challenge. They accused Eisenhower of “penny-pinching” on missiles, of “complacency” on satellites, “lack of vision” on both, and “incredible stupidity,” in general. Republican lawmakers, sensing the shifting tide in public opinion, toned down their defense of the White House and prepared to weather the storm. As a Republican congressman confessed, “No greater opportunity will ever be present for a Democratic Congress to harass a Republican administration, and everyone involved on either side knows it.”

No one on Capitol Hill was more keenly aware of this than Lyndon Johnson. His chief strategist, a wily former wire-service reporter by the name of George Reedy, penned out the possibilities. “The issue of [Sputnik], if properly handled,” Reedy wrote in a sweeping memo, “would blast the Republicans out of the water, unify the Democratic Party, and elect you President.” Sputnik, he added, was just the ticket the Democrats needed to supplant integration as the major campaign issue in the upcoming midterm and presidential campaigns. The disgrace of Little Rock and the continued opposition by Dixiecrats to integration were threatening to split the party and were likely to prove costly at the polls. Sputnik, argued Reedy, presented a unique opportunity “to find another issue, which is even more potent. Otherwise the Democratic future is bleak.”

National security was that issue, and now Johnson began maneuvering to place himself at its center, to batter Eisenhower, and to elbow Symington aside. Johnson was no stranger to matters of defense. He had first vaulted to national prominence during the 1950 hearings by the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Preparedness, which had investigated America’s missteps early in the Korean conflict. That inquest had established the Texan as a man to watch, who skillfully deflected Republican criticism of President Truman. That Truman himself had ridden the chairmanship of the very same subcommittee during World War II to the vice presidential nomination and ultimately to the presidency had not been lost on Johnson, who now, seven years later, began lobbying his mentor Richard Russell to convene Preparedness hearings instead of holding an Air Power inquest.

Johnson started working his legislative magic, calling in favors and swapping promises. Hushed conferences were held in corridors and cloakrooms; telephone calls were placed to the right people. Elbows were squeezed; shoulders were patted. Winks and nods were exchanged on the Senate floor, as deals were brokered over power breakfasts and intimate dinners at the Mayflower Hotel. It was the famous Johnson Treatment, and no one could withstand it for long. “Its velocity was breathtaking,” in the description of Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. “Its tone could be supplication, accusation, cajolery, exuberance, scorn, tears, complaint, the hint of threat. He moved in close, his face a scant millimeter from his target, his eyes widening and narrowing, his eyebrows rising and falling. From his pockets poured clippings, memos, and statistics. Mimicry, humor, and the genius analogy made ‘The Treatment’ an almost hypnotic experience and rendered the target stunned and helpless.”

The majority leader had no rivals when it came to bending the Senate to his will. Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota called Johnson’s elaborately scripted seductions an art form, “making cowboy love.” And Russell now found himself at the receiving end of Johnson’s persistent affections. Johnson argued that as the chairman of the Preparedness subcommittee, he would be best positioned to steer the national discourse away from unpopular Democratic positions on civil rights. Symington, he argued, was interested only in a hysterical witch hunt. He, on the other hand, would take the high road, adopt a more tactful approach that on the surface appeared bipartisan and patriotic, but which would be just as devastating.

At the White House, an alarmed Vice President Nixon was keeping tabs on the scheming Texan, the man he well knew was lining up to challenge him in 1960. Go to Congress, he urged Ike, to defuse the situation. Disarm Johnson and Symington by offering concessions that will knock the wind out of their sails. Bring the Senate into the conversation before it tries to bring you down, he counseled, knowing that it was his political future that could suffer most in the long run. But Ike, who had a stubborn streak that belied his gentle, outwardly docile nature, declined. He would maintain a posture of business-as-usual and would not dignify the uproar by pandering to a bunch of self-serving lawmakers.

At an emergency session of the National Security Council on Thursday, October 10, Nixon once more advocated a stronger response. The session was opened by Allen Dulles, who outlined Sputnik’s far-reaching implications. “We do not, as of yet, know if the satellite is sending out encoded messages,” he said. “Furthermore, we must expect additional launchings.”

Dulles had warned Eisenhower in late September that a Soviet launch was imminent, and he and Nixon had proposed going public with the information to lessen the potential shock. Their suggestion had been rejected, and now Dulles listed the consequences. “Khrushchev has moved all his propaganda guns in place,” he said. Sputnik was merely “one of a trilogy” of public relations coups. “The other two being the announcement of the successful testing of an ICBM, and the recent test of a large scale hydrogen bomb at Novaya Zemlya. Incidentally,” he added, the Soviets had just exploded another big H-bomb “late last night.”

The close timing of the three feats, Dulles noted, was having “a very wide and deep impact” abroad. The Chinese, he said, were treating Sputnik as proof of Soviet military and technological supremacy over the United States. Similar statements were coming out of Egypt and other countries in the Middle East, and Moscow was giving “the theme maximum play” with its Eastern European satellite states. Even America’s Western European allies, Dulles reported, were rattled, and confidence in NATO, particularly in France, had taken a psychological hit. All in all, the situation on the foreign policy front was “pretty somber.”

Eisenhower interrupted at one point to inquire about Sputnik’s weight: Was it really so heavy? he asked, saying he had heard that “someone here had gotten a decimal point out of place.” Unfortunately, he was assured, it was indeed 184 pounds.

The floor was then turned over to Quarles, who once more launched into an impassioned defense of why the government had chosen to separate the IGY project from ballistic missile programs to pave the way for spy satellites. “In this respect,” Quarles reiterated his point from Tuesday’s meeting, “the Soviets have now proved very helpful. Their satellite has over-flown practically every nation, and thus far there have been no protests.”

Two things stood out about the Sputnik launch, Quarles reluctantly conceded. First, it was “clear evidence that the Soviets possess a competence in long-range rocket and auxiliary fields which is more advanced than we had credited them with.” And second, the outer space reconnaissance implications of the launch were “of very great significance.”

Both conclusions contradicted Ike’s public statements. But they must have rung loud and clear for Allen Dulles, for already Richard Bissell had approached him with the idea of quietly stealing the spy satellite mandate away from Quarles and the air force, as they had done with the U-2.

The conversation turned to Vanguard’s progress and then returned to the political fallout from Sputnik. Arthur Larson, Eisenhower’s chief speechwriter, cleared his throat hesitantly, as if he had something unpleasant on his mind. “I wonder if our plans for the next great breakthrough are adequate,” he finally said, referring to the decision not to change the IGY plans or to get ABMA involved in the satellite race. “If we lose repeatedly to the Russians as we have lost with the earth satellite, the accumulated damage will be tremendous. We should accordingly plan, ourselves, to achieve the next big breakthrough first, a manned satellite,” he suggested, “or getting to the moon.”

Nixon rallied behind Larson. The vice president was among the few administration figures “who seemed to grasp the new symbolism,” in the words of the historian Walter McDougall, and once more he advocated announcing immediate increases in both missile and space spending. “The country will support it,” he said. But Eisenhower cut the discussion short. Everyone around the table, he warned, would soon be called to testify before congressional committees. There could be no dissension in the ranks. Everyone had “to stand firmly” behind the decision to stay with the current course.

“In short,” concluded the president, “we should answer queries by stating that we have a plan—a good plan—and we are going to stick to it.”

Plan? fumed Medaris. What plan? He and von Braun had been following the developments in Washington with increasing fury and apprehension. The political storm that von Braun had predicted had indeed materialized. But the administration’s response was a far cry from what Medaris had anticipated when he ordered ABMA to begin satellite preparations without authorization. The official go-ahead had never come, and as the days passed without word from Washington, it was becoming increasingly clear that he had jumped the gun.

Jim Hagerty, meanwhile, apparently also jumped the gun, announcing that the Vanguard program would launch “a small satellite sphere” in December, before sending up a fully instrumented scientific payload in March 1958. The dates were according to the original IGY schedule. But the December launch had been intended as a quiet dress rehearsal to check Vanguard’s booster and upper stages, which had never been fired in tandem before and still bore the technical designation “experimental vehicle” to denote their untested status. The press secretary, however, had made the date of the test public, guaranteeing that the whole world would be watching what was never meant to be anything more than a trial run. The dress rehearsal had effectively become opening night. “We who could coldly appraise the odds of Vanguard were frankly scared to death,” Medaris recalled, somewhat insincerely. Virtually every new rocket system failed on its first attempt, as both Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev could attest from bitter experience. That was why inaugural flights were kept quiet. Only after the kinks were ironed out were successes reported to the general public. Thanks to the White House, however, Vanguard would debut on a national stage, live, in front of television cameras. It was a recipe for disaster, Medaris believed. “How far out on a limb could our poor country get?” he said.

For his part, Medaris was also getting “far, far out on a limb” with his rogue satellite preparations. For the first few days it had been easy to hide the unauthorized expenditures, but as one week turned into two, and then two weeks became three, the costs were mounting, and it was becoming impossible to bury the paperwork. Von Braun’s team had even started eating into the newly reinstated overtime budgets. (The administration, fearing the coming congressional inquests, had quietly rescinded its ban on overtime for missile projects.) Medaris was putting his own career on the line. “I had neither money nor authority, yet work was still going on,” he later confessed. “By the end of the month, I was really sweating, and beginning to wake up in the middle of the night talking to myself.”

As October edged toward November, pushing Medaris farther out on his limb, only two things could happen, he felt increasingly certain. Either Vanguard would fail, in which case the government would have no choice but to turn to ABMA as its last resort. Or he was going to face a full court-martial, a dishonorable discharge, and possibly prison. It never occurred to him that Nikita Khrushchev might provide a third option.