Red Moon Rising

10 OPERATION CONFIDENCE

“Soviets Orbit Second Artificial Moon; Communist Dog in Space,” screamed the headlines on the morning of Monday, November 4, 1957, as Americans awoke to another media riot and fresh rounds of recriminations.

“What next?” demanded the New York Herald Tribune incredulously. “A Man on the Moon?” “Moscow Mission to Mars in Near Future?” the Washington Star speculated, its editorial dripping with defeat and resignation. “Shoot the Moon, Ike,” urged the feistier Pittsburgh Press, suggesting defiantly that the White House blow the offending Soviet satellite to smithereens.

From his desk on the second story of the Old Senate Office Building, Lyndon Johnson surveyed the stack of alarmist articles, the barest hint of a smile creasing his craggy features. “Plunge heavily into this one,” advised an accompanying note from his aide George Reedy. But Johnson needed no exhortations from underlings to spot the opportunity he had been waiting for. For several weeks now he’d been sitting on the sidelines, gauging the political winds. The deals had been cut, and his rival, Stuart Symington, had been dispensed with. The only remaining question had been the timing, since Congress was not in session.

During the past month, Johnson had busily poisoned the well against Symington, who may have “looked most like a President,” in the opinion of the New York Times, but had proven no match for the master of the “Johnson Treatment.” The Democratic majority leader had not only wooed Richard Russell but also sweet-talked the ranking Republican members of the Armed Services Committee, Styles Bridges and Leverett Saltonstall. “Let’s not look for scapegoats,” he told them, “but let’s find out what’s wrong and let’s do what’s necessary to fix it.” Johnson conceded that Symington was the Senate’s leading expert on missiles, but he said mournfully that the Missourian was also out for blood, looking only to hold Air Power hearings that would be “too shrill” in tone, “too partisan” in nature. The Preparedness subcommittee, on the other hand, would be bipartisan and interested only in “solving the problems,” not apportioning blame. Never mind that the subcommittee was defunct and had not been used in years, while Symington’s investigative body was fully staffed and an ongoing concern. Johnson sealed the deal by promising Bridges and Saltonstall that they could help preside over the Preparedness inquest, knowing full well that the men were up for reelection in 1958.

The matter of the subcommittee had thus been settled. Johnson, however, had not rushed out and announced his intentions to hold Pre-paredness hearings. For all his reputation as a freewheeling horse trader, as a reckless and charmingly relentless rogue, he was an inherently cautious legislator, never putting himself out front of an issue unless the outcome was guaranteed. Like the lawyer who only asked questions for which he already knew the answer, Johnson only supported measures to which he’d already secured prior passage. He knew that challenging President Eisenhower on national security, no matter how subtly, was a risky proposition. But as Johnson scanned the hysterical articles on Sputnik II, the satellite’s specifications made him bolt upright. The thing was monstrous: a staggering 1,120 pounds, and well over three terrifying tons when the rocket casing to which it was welded was factored into the equation. Unlike its predecessor, this second Sputnik was almost as heavy as a hydrogen bomb—incontrovertible proof that the Soviet Union did in fact have the capability to hurl heavy nuclear warheads at the United States, despite Eisenhower’s dogged assurances to the contrary.

Johnson knew he now had his ammunition, the silver bullet he and Senator Russell had been waiting for to take on the popular president. “Sputnik II absolutely made the decision for them,” recalled his aide Glenn P. Wilson, “because it weighed so much more.”

The following day, Johnson and Russell called a press conference on the steps of the Pentagon. The members of the media, by then, had already worked themselves up into a speculative frenzy over Sputnik II’s passenger, the mix-breed terrier Laika, and her planetary laps. “The greatly increased size of the second Sputnik means that it was probably not fired by the same rocket system that launched the first one,” Time opined erroneously. “This is enough weight allowance to put a powerful atomic bomb on the moon,” the magazine added, also erroneously. The New York Times fared no better, wondering “whether the Soviet Union might be using some new form of rocket propellant unknown in the West” (which it was not) to generate so much lift. Analysts at the Pentagon and the CIA, meanwhile, feverishly revised their estimates of the Russian ICBM’s thrust from a too-low 500,000 pounds to a too-high 1.5 million pounds—still out of range of Time’s moon shot but more than enough to plunk a hydrogen bomb anywhere on earth.

Johnson and Russell whipped up the overeager press. Pronouncing themselves deeply “alarmed” at the briefing they had just received from the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the relative state of American missiles, they announced that an emergency session of the Preparedness subcommittee would be convened later that month. “As Chairman of the Committee, the Senate Democratic leader reported that it would cover such matters ‘as our record of consistent underestimation of the Soviet program, and the Government’s lack of willingness to take proper risks,’” the New York Times duly informed its readers.

The inquest the administration had feared was now official. “It’s a real circus act,” John Foster Dulles grumbled. Unfortunately, he added, “the weight of this thing” was deadly serious. Once more Nixon pleaded with Eisenhower to head Johnson off. The vice president had his own electoral future to think about, and he knew that Johnson was no fool. The Texas senator was certain to tarnish him with the same mud-flinging brush he was going to use to paint the entire cabinet as incompetent. But Ike wasn’t worried. The American people would see through the populism and demagoguery. “Johnson can keep his head in the stars if he wants,” the president replied. “I’m going to keep my feet on the ground.”

Nikita Khrushchev, meanwhile, was also doing his bit to stir up trouble for the White House. Sputnik II, he lectured world Communist leaders on the eve of the November 7 celebrations, “demonstrates that the USSR has outstripped the leading capitalist country—the United States—in the field of scientific and technological progress. The launching of the Sputniks undoubtedly also shows,” he added triumphantly, “a change in favor of the socialist states in the balance of forces with capitalist states.”

Pravda piled on, boasting that “the freed and conscientious labor of the people of the new socialist society makes the most daring dreams of mankind a reality,” while the vapid and decadent West wallowed in racial unrest and inequality. America had lost its place in the sun, seemed to be the message from Moscow, and the theme was quickly picked up by American pundits and politicians, who began to worry whether Pravda had a point. It was time, warned Senator Bridges, “to be less concerned with the depth of the pile on the new broadloom rug, and to be more prepared to shed blood, sweat and tears if this country and the free world are to survive.”

In the pages of the staunchly Republican New York Herald Tribune, the financier and statesman Bernard Baruch chastised America for its lack of resolve. “While we devote our industrial and technological might to producing new model automobiles and more gadgets,” he wrote, “the Soviet Union is conquering space. If America ever crashes, it will be in a two-tone convertible.”

“It’s time to stop worrying about tail-fins,” Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, said, continuing the automotive allegory and bemoaning the fact that American culture prized football players above scientists and talk show hosts over university professors. The New York Times editorial board agreed, warning, “We’ve become a little too self-satisfied, complacent, and luxury loving.”

America’s sense of self, already shaken by the first Sputnik, now foundered in the wake of its much larger, more sophisticated sibling. The Sputniks were “an intercontinental outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretension that the American way of life was a giltedged guarantee of national superiority,” suggested Clare Boothe Luce, the millionaire playwright, congresswoman, ambassador, and Republican fund-raiser, whose husband owned both Time and Life magazines. “We ourselves have made it an article of faith that the nation which builds the biggest bombs must be morally superior because it is materially superior,” she declared. “We need not be surprised today that Russia is making the same claim.” And yet, she continued, “we go on believing that our system can provide guns and butter. Yes, and Bibles too. But we query whether that means atom bombs and bombes glacees; SAC by General LeMay, and sack dresses by Christian Dior; lower taxes and higher rockets—all this and heaven too.”

The Eisenhower administration could not easily brush off the second, more introspective, wave of unease brought on by another Soviet triumph. The first Sputnik had made Americans afraid for their lives; Sputnik II made them question the American way of life. The country was losing faith in itself and in the administration, John Foster Dulles worried. “From the echoes of the satellite have come to me and others from many sections of the country a strong sentiment that the President alone can give the leadership which will restore a feeling of reasonable security and faith in the Administration,” one of his aides wrote in a memo that the secretary of state circulated to White House staff. “This leads on every side to the desirability of finding a suitable date, in the not too distant future, to make a strong fighting speech.”

Ike liked the idea. There was nothing wrong with America, he believed; it was the greatest, most powerful nation on earth. People had simply caught a case of the jitters and needed a little reassurance. Eisenhower decided to deliver a series of morale-boosting addresses modeled after Franklin Roosevelt’s famous Fireside Chats, what White House aides dubbed Operation Confidence, or “Chin Up” speeches, as they became known.

The first of the televised talks occurred on November 7, four days after Sputnik II, and on the same day that newspapers across the country carried another saber-rattling interview with Khrushchev. “The fact that we were able to launch the first Sputnik, and then, a month later, launch a second shows that we can launch ten, even twenty satellites tomorrow,” the Soviet leader boasted, neglecting to mention that Korolev had used up his last R-7. “The satellite is the intercontinental ballistic missile with a different warhead. We can change that warhead from a bomb to a scientific instrument,” he added, in case anyone missed the point.

In his speech that evening, Eisenhower issued his retort. “The United States can practically annihilate the war-making capabilities of any other nation,” he said, listing the country’s lethal arsenal of long-range bombers, fleets of submarines parked under the polar ice cap, and the powerful rockets of its own that were being developed. “We are well ahead of the Soviets in the nuclear field both in quantity and in quality,” Ike declared. “We intend to stay ahead.”

“Although the Soviets are quite likely ahead in some missile and special areas, and are obviously ahead of us in satellite development,” he conceded, “as of today, the overall strength of the Free World is distinctly greater than that of Communist countries.”

As the president spoke, the camera panned back, revealing first his Oval Office desk, where a small brass plaque displayed the motto GENTLE IN MANNER, STRONG IN DEED, and then a strange white triangular object on the carpet at his feet. It was a nose cone from one of Wernher von Braun’s Jupiter C test rockets, and Eisenhower informed viewers that it had been shot into outer space during successful missile reentry tests. This was evidence, he said, that America was forging ahead with its own space and rocket programs, and that the situation was well in hand. “It misses the whole point to say that we must now increase our expenditures on all kinds of military hardware and defense,” the president warned. “Certainly, we should feel a high sense of urgency. But this does not mean that we should mount our charger and try to ride off in all directions at once. We cannot on an unlimited scale have both what we must have and what we would like to have. We can have both a sound defense and the sound economy on which it rests—if we set our priorities and stick to them.”

The message was clear: America was safe and strong, and no panicked deluge of defense dollars should be expected from the White House anytime soon. Eisenhower did, however, offer one concession to the new post-Sputnik reality: “I am appointing Dr. James Killian, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as special assistant to the president for science and technology, a new post,” he said, outlining his major initiative to counter the Soviet threat.

Among the millions of viewers that evening who had expected to hear the announcement of some major American initiative, General Bruce Medaris watched the address with an equal mix of bewilderment and frustration. Killian—that was it? No new money? No crash programs? No special national priority designations? The general was flabbergasted. Killian, to be sure, was widely respected in the rocket community. As head of the Technology Capabilities Panel that had recommended fast-tracking missiles in 1954, he had been the driving force behind America’s belated efforts to compete with the Soviets. But the appointment of a lone academic whom the New York Times described as “somewhat cherubic” and “as disarmingly pleasant as a successful hotel manager,” hardly evened the score with two Sputniks. Besides, in his new role as a presidential adviser, Killian would not even be in charge of streamlining the various lagging missile efforts. That job was given to an oil company executive with no rocket expertise or technical background.

Damn it, Medaris cursed, pacing around the grand piano that dominated the living room of his ranch house on Squirrel Hill, an official Redstone Arsenal residence that overlooked the Officers’ Club, where he had taken Secretary McElroy on “Sputnik Night,” as October 4 was now known at ABMA.

Since then no order had come from the new defense secretary authorizing a satellite launch, and Medaris’s nerves were shot. He prayed nightly and slept fitfully, driving his Jaguar at breakneck speeds during the day to relieve the tension. But nothing helped. By early November, he could no longer hide his rogue operation from his immediate superior, Army R&D boss James Gavin. “Hang on tight, and I will support you,” Gavin had sympathetically urged. “I’m doing the best I can to get a decision.”

Gavin, like Medaris, had had enough of Pentagon politics. In fact, he was seriously contemplating quitting the army, following in the foot-steps of General Trevor Gardner, the Pentagon’s chief missile overseer, who had resigned that summer to protest Donald Quarles’s budget cuts. Gavin already had one foot out the door and didn’t have much to lose. He was only too happy to rattle some cages on his way out.

At least Medaris now had an accomplice, a coconspirator to watch his back. That gave him some hope. With the humiliation of another Sputnik, he had reasoned, there was no way the Eisenhower administration could continue sitting on the sidelines. Surely ABMA would get its shot now. But not only had the president made no such announcement during his “Chin Up” speech, he had not even mentioned that it was ABMA that had fired the nose cone he had paraded before viewers. “So far as the public could judge, a faceless and nameless group” had done it, Medaris fumed, complaining of the “bitter experience of total anonymity,” a state all too familiar to Sergei Korolev.

Medaris was not the only one at ABMA battling frustration. Von Braun was also complaining loudly, only he was doing it publicly, which was not helping the army’s case. Gavin’s boss, General Lemnitzer, made this clear in a telephone call to Medaris. “The time for talking has stopped,” he ordered. Von Braun’s outbursts were “causing concern in high places.”

The Disney star, in fact, was venting his opinions with such vitriol that the Pentagon had to intercede with the head of the Associated Press to censor some of his more biting remarks, trading the promise of some future scoop to have the comments killed. Sputnik, von Braun had railed, was “a tragic failure for the U.S.” Six good years had been irretrievably “lost,” he said, wasted while the Soviets had forged ahead with their missile programs. “The real tragedy of Sputnik’s victory is that this present situation was clearly foreseeable,” he lamented. Saddest of all, he added, was that America had apparently not learned its lesson, since it still wasn’t taking satellites or space seriously. “Our own work has been supported on a shoestring while the Soviet Union has emerged more powerful than ever before.”

Such inflammatory statements, Lemnitzer warned, “could be very damaging to what the President was trying to do.” Ike, after all, was publicly saying that there was no race with Russia and that “no competition in the space field” existed. It didn’t look good, then, if the country’s best-known rocket scientist went around shouting that there was such a contest, and that the United States was getting trounced. Shut von Braun up, Medaris was told, and the army will take care of the satellite mission.

Von Braun, though, was not alone in contradicting the official line coming out of the White House. As if the president didn’t have enough troubles, a national security panel that he himself had convened chose this inauspicious moment to deliver a devastating report that contravened almost everything he said during the November 7 address. Chaired by H. Rowan Gaither, the head of the Ford Foundation, the panel had conducted an exhaustive study for the National Security Council on the nation’s state of defense readiness. The upshot of its findings, which landed on Eisenhower’s desk only a few hours before he was to go on national television, was hardly optimistic. It recommended the urgent appropriation of an additional $40 billion—an amount equal to the entire military budget—to shore up America’s woefully inadequate defenses against possible Soviet missile attack.

The Gaither report detonated like a psychological bomb in the Oval Office. Sherman Adams worried Americans would find it “deeply shocking,” and counseled against releasing the study. John Foster Dulles was of the same mind, warning that making the document public would have “catastrophic results.” Moscow would perceive it as a sign of weakness, and the Democrats would have a field day undermining the president’s position. Already that scoundrel Lyndon Johnson had gotten wind of the report and wanted a copy for his upcoming congressional hearings.

Eisenhower adamantly refused, citing a little-used constitutional clause known as executive privilege. “Its disclosure would be inimical to the nation’s security,” he flatly told Senator Johnson, who for once found his vaunted powers of persuasion ineffective.

“It will be interesting to find out how long it can be kept secret,” Ike later observed at an NSC meeting during which Vice President Nixon argued against burying the study. It would leak anyway, he predicted, and the rumors and excerpts would be taken out of context by the media and would probably sound more frightening than the actual report.

Nixon was right. Snippets from the text began appearing in the press within days, though Chalmers Roberts of the Washington Post would break the most complete and alarming account of the study a few weeks later. “The still top-secret Gaither Report portrays a United States in the gravest danger in its history,” he wrote. “It pictures the nation moving in a frightening course to the status of a second-class power… and finds America’s long-term prospect one of cataclysmic peril in the face of rocketing Soviet military might…. Many of those who worked on the report were appalled and even frightened at what they discovered to be the state of American military posture in comparison with that of the Soviet Union.”

Not surprisingly, the Gaither report undid all of Ike’s attempts to restore calm and order with his Operation Confidence pep talks. “Arguing the Case for Being Panicky,” retorted the headline in Life magazine, in what was essentially a slap in the administration’s face. Once more, columnists howled that the president didn’t seem to appreciate the gravity of the situation. “Another tranquility pill,” one pundit scoffed at the November 7 national address. “It was by no means a blood, sweat and toil speech,” commented Eric Sevareid more charitably. “It contained little suggestion that sacrifices may be ahead, or that [Eisenhower] personally thinks they are necessary.” Editorials bristled with renewed indignation over the apparent complacency in the White House, which some now called the Tomb of the Well-Known Soldier. “Two Sputniks cannot sway Eisenhower,” griped the liberal-leaning New York Post. “The President’s answer in each instance is the same: we can’t do very much.”

Amid the barrage of criticism, Eisenhower’s approval rating plunged, sinking by 22 percentage points in barely six weeks, an unheard-of pace of decline in the modern presidency, where such erosions usually occur over far longer periods. “In a matter of a few months,” noted the historian Walter McDougall, “the rhetoric, the symbology of American politics had left Eisenhower completely behind.”

While Eisenhower tried to ignore accusations of falling behind, pressure mounted for him to act more forcefully and to spend more freely. Democrats called for the immediate construction of a national network of air raid shelters, as recommended by the Gaither report, at the horrifyingly high cost of $22.5 billion. Congressmen demanded an emergency infusion of $3 billion to jump-start America’s lagging missile efforts, while educational groups exploited the Sputnik panic to push bills that would revamp curriculums, with a focus on science and mathematics. A measure to inject $1 billion of federal funds into high schools was proposed. “The bill’s best bet,” one lobbyist slyly noted, “is that the Russians will shoot off something else.”

Massive university scholarship programs were proposed to bridge the alleged education gap with communism, and there were even suggestions that the federal government begin granting college loans to aspiring students. “Eisenhower was skeptical about the loans,” Killian recalled. “He doubted whether young people and their parents would be willing to go into debt for their education.”

The White House was also being bombarded with frantic calls for a complete overhaul of the Defense Department and military space organizations, leading to a dizzying array of acronyms competing for presidential attention. A new $100-million-a-year Astronautical Research and Development Agency, or ARDA, was proposed by the American Rocket Society, to coordinate scientific space projects. A rival plan by the Rocket and Satellite Research Panel was even more ambitious, calling for one billion dollars a year to be appropriated for a civilian body called the National Space Establishment (NSE), along the lines of NACA, the existing National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics. Not to be outdone, NACA created its own Special Committee on Space Technology, or SCST, to study the possibility of starting an even costlier space-oriented department, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA. Meanwhile, the Pentagon unveiled plans for a new Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, to conduct military space research and development programs.

All this was exactly what Eisenhower had feared, the panicked spending that would throw fiscal discipline completely out of whack. To the beleaguered president, it must have seemed as if everyone suddenly had a panacea to counter the Soviet space lead, and unfortunately every one of the miracle cures landing on his desk held the unappealing promise of being ruinously expensive. “Look,” Ike finally snapped, “I’d like to know what’s on the other side of the moon, too, but I won’t pay to find out this year.”

By this year, he meant the upcoming fiscal year. Treasury Secretary George Humphrey had prepared an austerity budget to weather an economic downturn that was worsening by the month, and he had warned the president that any increases in the already mounting deficit could spark “a depression that will curl your hair.” Though Humphrey had recently been replaced by Robert Anderson, the recessionary warnings coming out of the Treasury and Commerce departments had only grown more ominous. Unemployment was expected to jump by as much as 1.5 million in 1958, bringing the total number of out-of-work Americans to 5 million, the highest jobless count since 1940, and economic growth in the third quarter of 1957—after more than a decade of robust increases—had completely flatlined. This was hardly the time to be writing big checks, and Ike was not about to risk a lengthy recession simply to satisfy short-term space jitters.

He did, however, relent on pressures to speed the satellite programs, authorizing the minimal disbursement of $3.5 million (much of which Medaris had already spent) for ABMA to ready its Jupiter C for a space shot. Far from being overjoyed, Medaris hit the roof when he saw the official Pentagon directive. It did not instruct ABMA to proceed with a launch, only to “prepare” for one. “In effect there was no clear-cut authority to go ahead and put up a satellite,” he recalled. Vanguard still had the primary mission, and only if it failed in its scheduled December attempt would the White House then consider allowing ABMA to proceed. This was unacceptable, Medaris complained. “They are trying to delude Congress and the public into believing that we are cranking up for a launch.”

“Either give me a clear-cut order to launch or I quit,” the rebellious general cabled Gavin, declaring rather crudely that ABMA would not carry out its orders. “I’m afraid my language was pretty rough,” he recalled years later. But, like Gavin, he was at his wit’s end—fed up with the army, the politics, the ceaseless wrangling. He’d walked away from soldiering several times before in his eclectic career, and he had always returned to the military’s bosom because civilian life was just too dull. But he was tired of the nonsense, he was frustrated by the low pay that (coupled with his own extravagant tastes) perennially left him in debt, and he was losing his will to fight. More and more he’d been turning to prayers for guidance—Medaris had found religion during World War II—and taken to wondering if his was the right calling. (The religious rebirth, apparently, had not made him any less argumentative; his hard-headed outbursts had simply assumed “a fierce religious zeal” and a “pious belligerence,” according to Killian, who was no fan.)

Medaris was not the only one ready to throw in the towel. Von Braun also tendered his resignation. Already his brother Magnus had quit the army to work for Chrysler for twice the pay, and now von Braun was threatening to join him unless ABMA got a green light. Stuhlinger and several other top engineers added their names to the growing list of walking papers, and in Washington a minor panic ensued. The entire army missile program was about to resign, and something had to be done. ABMA, Quarles now decided, would have its shot. But only in January, and regardless of whether Vanguard was successful. For von Braun, that was enough. “Vanguard will never make it,” he declared with a certainty that bordered on arrogance.

By mid-November, it was no longer a secret that the navy’s quasicivilian bid to orbit a satellite was in serious trouble.

Despite the Pentagon’s determined assurances that “all test firings of Vanguard have met with success,” America’s answer to Sputnik was looking decidedly shaky. Vanguard’s launch vehicle—a modified three-stage Viking research rocket under the experimental designation Test Vehicle 2—had failed to lift off on five consecutive occasions between August and October because of mechanical malfunctions. Just about everything that could have cracked, leaked, broken, delaminated, depressurized, detached, smoked, sparked, or shorted out had done so with such maddening regularity that Dan Mazur, a frustrated Vanguard project manager and launch supervisor, begged the navy to stop sending him “garbage” instead of rockets.

Like a great many high-end concepts that looked good on paper, Vanguard was proving difficult to put into practice. When the project had first been pitched in 1955, it had won over the Pentagon’s satellite selection committee with its imaginative and elegant design and cutting-edge components such as an “almost developed” gimbaled General Electric main engine that swiveled on its own axis. This was a revolutionary departure from traditional steering methods, which employed fins or small side thrusters, and was only one of the many innovations the pencil-thin rocket promised to unveil. “For all practical purposes the Vanguard vehicle was new, new from stem to stern,” said Jim Bridger, a navy engineer. “More to the point, it was an awful high-state-of-the-art vehicle, especially the second stage rocket. In the nature of things, the business of developing the vehicle and getting the bugs out so it would work was fraught with difficulties.”

No one on the Stewart Committee, the panel Donald Quarles had convened to rule on the different satellite proposals, apparently foresaw the potential pitfalls of picking a blueprint on such a tight schedule. “It was either forgotten, or not understood, that the last ten percent of ‘almost developed’ missile hardware was the most difficult,” recalled Kurt Stehling, Vanguard’s propulsion chief. The fact that some members of the Stewart Committee simultaneously drew paychecks from the aerospace companies bidding on the Vanguard contract had also apparently been overlooked. Committee chairman Homer Joe Stewart, for instance, was a paid consultant for the Aerojet-General Corporation, which hoped to manufacture Vanguard’s second stage. Senior panel member Richard Porter worked for General Electric, which was building the “almost ready” main engine, while Secretary Quarles’s former company, Bell Labs, was a major subcontractor for the rocket’s upper stages.

The army’s more conservative proposal, on the other hand, had no potentially lucrative new contracts to offer. It relied almost entirely on existing, “off-the-shelf” technology, and essentially swapped a satellite for a warhead on an upgraded Redstone missile. In opting to go with an ambitious, unproven design, the committee also accepted at face value assertions from the Glenn L. Martin Company, Vanguard’s Baltimore-based general contractor, that there would be no cost overruns on the project’s overly optimistic $20 million price tag.

The problems started almost immediately. Martin had built Viking rockets for the navy since 1948, but because the Vanguard launch vehicle was entirely redesigned, a Viking in name only, everything effectively had to be done from scratch. Within two months of being awarded the contract, Martin, GE, and the other subcontractors began to complain and Vanguard’s budget was revised to $28.8 million. A month later, in October 1956, it was bumped up to $63 million. By March 1957, it had risen yet again, to $88 million, prompting the White House to debate canceling the project altogether. “I question very much whether it would have been authorized if the actual cost had been known,” Percival Brundage, the director of the Bureau of Budget, wrote to Eisenhower in April 1957. But “abandoning the project at mid-stage,” he added, would lead to the “unfortunate conclusion that the richest nation in the world could not afford to complete this scientific undertaking.”

Vanguard narrowly won a stay of execution, though the following month its cost further increased to $96 million. Fed up, Charlie Wilson pulled the plug on Pentagon financing, and another scramble for funding ensued, with the CIA and the National Science Foundation chipping in to bridge the gap. By the time Sputnik went aloft (for an estimated $50 million), Vanguard’s total taxpayer bill had crossed the $110 million threshold, and the meter was still running.

Throughout the spiraling cost overruns, the schedules for component parts slipped, and assembled test vehicles—the prototypes—were often delivered late and in such shoddy condition that Dan Mazur, the Vanguard project manager, demanded on one occasion that the entire rocket be sent back to Martin “piece by rotten piece.” There were moisture problems, poorly located pressure indicator lines, unsoldered wire connections, corroded and leaky fittings, and badly fitted plugs. The GE engine had to be returned because of “wholesale system contamination.” Dirt and metal filings were found in the fuel lines. Cracks appeared in the propellant tanks. Batteries failed. Rubber wind spoilers attached to the exterior rocket casing fell off. The gyroscopes were off-kilter, the hydraulic oil resource was plugged, and aluminum chips were found in the hydrogen peroxide gas-generating system.

Vanguard’s tribulations were not confined to cost and quality-control issues. Relations between the program’s government overseers and private contractors had grown so strained during the delays that at one point navy personnel were denied parking at the Martin lot in Baltimore. The acrimony resulted in what at times was an embarrassing lack of communication: “What! You want to put a ball in that rocket?” a Martin official exclaimed upon hearing that the configuration of Vanguard’s satellite had been changed from a cylinder to a sphere that required a new cradle. “Why the hell didn’t someone tell us this?”

When the International Geophysical Year opened in the summer of 1957, Vanguard was nowhere near ready. “We’re never going to make it in time,” Milt Rosen, the program’s intense second-in-command, despondently told his boss, John Hagen, the project’s overall coordinator. “Never mind,” said Hagen, a gentle, pipe-smoking astronomer who was famous for never once losing his temper during Vanguard’s developmental ordeals. “We are not in a race with the Russians.”

Hagen, however, felt sufficiently pressured to keep up with the IGY timetable that in August 1957 he agreed to try to launch a partial Vanguard prototype, Test Vehicle 2, even though it was “an unaccepted, incompletely developed vehicle.” His decision, he wrote in a stern memo to Martin executives, “violated sound principles of operation.” But, he conceded, “this is the only way to have at least some chance of maintaining the firing schedule.”

TV2 lived up to expectations, failing to lift off five times in a row. It finally got airborne on October 23, but with only one of its three stages operating. TV3, the final Vanguard prototype, was to be the first attempt at firing the entire system, including the troubled GE main engine, the still-experimental second-stage booster, and the third small cluster of rockets bearing the satellite. A far more daunting challenge than its predecessor, with many more moving parts, untested components, and opportunities for malfunction, the TV3 test-firing was supposed to have been conducted in secrecy. Vanguard’s formal IGY attempt wasn’t slated until midwinter 1958, with TV5, and then only if the TV3 and TV4 tests went off without a hitch. But after Sputnik, White House press secretary Jim Hagerty had prematurely pressed Vanguard into early service by publicly announcing TV3’s December launch date. The newspapers had pounced on the announcement, failing to make the technical distinction between a preliminary satellite test and an actual satellite launch, and TV3 was quickly billed as America’s official response to Sputnik.

The usually unflappable Hagen had reportedly cringed at the prospect of debuting an unfinished product in front of a worldwide audience. But the damage was done. The administration, whether out of panic or confusion, had placed the hopes of the entire free world on a booster that didn’t even inspire the confidence of its own designers.

Vanguard’s travails had not gone unnoticed by Lyndon Johnson’s investigators or by the press, which was in a wrathful mood after eating so much Soviet crow and looking for someone to blame. The navy’s wobbly satellite bid made a convenient target. “An astonishing piece of stupidity,” groused Time, disparaging the Pentagon’s decision to go with Vanguard. The syndicated columnist Drew Pearson intimated that the Stewart Committee had been “prejudiced” by conflicts of interest. Hadn’t Vanguard been hamstrung by the administration’s “penny-pinching,” the New York Herald Tribune asked Trevor Gardner—lobbing him a loaded question, since he had resigned his post as assistant secretary of defense in frustration over missile and satellite bottlenecks. Gardner agreed that “the funds estimated by Secretary Quarles were totally inadequate,” as was the “low-priority status” the program was accorded by the White House. “It is predictable that the project would consistently slip, and this was pointed out to the responsible Administration officials,” he added, “including Secretaries Quarles and Wilson.”

Engine Charlie Wilson, for his part, was waylaid by the television journalist Mike Wallace. “You clearly underestimated the importance of basic research. Why?” Wallace demanded.

“This satellite business wasn’t a military matter,” Wilson replied evasively. “It was in the hands of the scientists.” Besides, he airily continued, people are panicking over nothing. “They’re so cracked loose on Buck Rogers that they’re seeing space ships and flying saucers.”

“But Sputnik I and II exist!” an astonished Wallace fired back. “They are not flying saucers.”

The upshot of the assault on Vanguard was clear: the administration, and ultimately the president, would bear responsibility if the mission failed. Ike was being set up by the press as the fall guy. His poll numbers plummeting, his supporters growing increasingly impatient, the once immensely popular leader was no longer immune to personal attack. Journalists, hunting in a pack, had turned on him. “Implicit in all the criticism was that he was too old, too tired, too sick to run the country,” noted Eisenhower’s biographer Stephen Ambrose.

Unfortunately for the president, things were only going to get worse. The Preparedness hearings were set to start in less than a week, on November 25, and Lyndon Johnson seemed to have unearthed every single malcontent who ever graced any U.S. missile program. Rumors filtered back to the White House that Johnson was working around the clock, like a man possessed, to get ready for the inquest. To save time, he’d hired a crack team of Wall Street lawyers led by the trial attorney Ed Wiesl and his junior partner Cyrus Vance, and the two had set up shop at the Mayflower Hotel, where a phalanx of disgruntled officials crowded the lobby.

Johnson had also deputized a battery of congressional researchers for his inquisition. “He never asked the head of my organization whether I was available to do this,” recalled Eilene Galloway of the Legislative Reference Service. “He simply preempted me and took me over to his committee to work on this subject, and we were working on it from morning to night.”

Pounding up and down Senate stairs two at a time, Johnson raced from meeting to meeting, firing off instructions to out-of-breath staffers, who begged the senator to slow down. He had suffered a heart attack in 1955 only a few months before Ike and seemed to be charging headlong into another coronary. “He was really like a dynamo at that time. He was so energized,” Galloway remembered. “Everything had to be done in a hurry.”

The reason for the rush was that Johnson had not chosen the date of his inquest idly. “The timing was perfect because it grabbed all the attention and hit the public consciousness pre-holidays,” Reedy recalled. Johnson had not wanted the hearings “to get mixed up with Christmas” and had purposefully set them in the run-up to the Vanguard launch for maximum exposure. That had left scant time to prepare, line up the witnesses, prep them, and map out the strategy of attack.

As the calendar wound down, Ike braced wearily for the coming onslaught. “Crisis had become normalcy,” he confessed in his memoir, recalling the difficult months during the fall of 1957, the lowest point of his two terms in office.

The pressure on the aging president was taking its toll. To outside observers, it appeared that Eisenhower was losing his vitality. He began to mope and seemed distracted. The British historian Leonard Mosley observed, “His aides who sometimes caught him with a faraway look in his eyes soon learned that what he was thinking about was golf.”

But even that sole source of escape was becoming a political liability. In the past, Gallup polls had shown that most American voters did not mind Ike’s frequent weekday golf outings. To the contrary, his love of the fairways had reinforced his reassuring image as a cool and collected CEO, never too rattled to get in a few holes before lunch. But now, as his leadership was being questioned, the public was less forgiving, and Democrats were avidly painting the president as a modern-day Nero who golfed while America burned. Governor G. Mennen Williams of Michigan had gone so far as to compose an ode to the president’s crisisignoring pastime.

On Monday, November 25, 1957, the relentless pressures, personal attacks, and barrage of criticism finally got to Dwight D. Eisenhower. That morning, as Lyndon Johnson convened his dreaded Senate hearings with a vicious assault on his administration’s complacency, Ike repaired to his office to sign papers. “As I picked up a pen,” he later recalled, “I experienced a strange although not alarming sense of dizziness.” The words on the page in front of him suddenly became blurry. Then he dropped the pen and couldn’t pick it up. “I decided to get to my feet, and at once I found that I had to catch hold of my chair for stability.” Unable to stand, Ike called his secretary. “Then came another puzzling experience,” he continued. “I could not express what I wanted to say. Words, but not the ones I wanted, came to my tongue. It was impossible for me to express any coherent thought whatsoever.”

Eisenhower was rushed into bed, and a team of doctors was summoned. “The President has had a stroke,” Sherman Adams tersely told Vice President Nixon, summoning him to the White House. “This is a terribly, terribly difficult thing to handle,” he said, his tone suddenly more obsequious, once Nixon had arrived. “You may be President in twenty-four hours.”

The following day, however, the chief of staff’s frosty demeanor had returned, as the doctors had diagnosed the stroke as mild. The tough old soldier, it seemed, had demonstrated that he still had some fight left in him. Though his memory was still fuzzy, and his vision blurred, Ike stubbornly refused to go to the hospital and insisted on working from his bed. By Thursday, he had pronounced himself well enough to publicly attend Thanksgiving Day services and begin resuming his full duties. Adams once more resumed his treatment of Nixon as a pesky intruder—the surest sign that a semblance of normality was returning to the White House

As December dawned, and Eisenhower recuperated from what his spokesmen insisted was only “a minor brain spasm,” the country began counting the days to Vanguard’s long-awaited launch on Wednesday, December 4. With the promise of the president on the mend and a chance to even the score with the Soviets, hope once more entered the national discourse. For the first time since Sputnik Night, America was upbeat, almost giddy with anticipation. Newspapers prepared special Vanguard editions, restaurants served Vanguard burgers, and schools introduced children to the rudiments of rocketry. Sensing the rising tide of enthusiasm, Lyndon Johnson shrewdly recessed his hearings to give lawmakers and the public a chance to focus on Florida, where reporters were already filing anticipatory dispatches from the launch facilities at Cape Canaveral.

“The Vanguard tower was clear against a starry sky, two bright lights glaring at its base and a red beacon shining at its top,” the New York Times primed its readers on December 1, three days ahead of the scheduled launch. “From the beach, the Vanguard crane is one of a community of launching structures, some taller, some broader than others. But the Vanguard clearly has the next billing at the sprawling missile theater here,” whose audience, the newspaper noted, included correspondents “from as far away as Europe.”

On the morning of the fourth, a cool and windy Wednesday, it seemed as if every major media organization in America had descended on the large sand dune just outside the test firing range. Dubbed “Bird Watch Hill,” the windswept promontory crawled with television crews and sound trucks. Scaffolding and newsreel platforms sprouted from the sand, while radio reporters raced around, shielding their microphones from the steady breeze coming off the Atlantic. From the dune’s trampled crest, an unruly battalion of six hundred photographers trained their long-range telephoto lenses on launchpad 18A, where a slender, silvery rocket reflected the morning sun.

The moment everyone had been waiting for had come. All along Route A1A, traffic choked the soft shoulders: station wagons with wood-paneled doors, two-ton convertibles, Buicks with big tail fins. The low, square, air-conditioned motels that had been hastily built to cash in on the space craze—places with names like the Starlight, the Sea Missile, and Vanguard Inn—teemed with excited customers.

All over South Florida, eyes were fixed expectantly on the skies over the Long Range Proving Ground at Patrick Air Force Base, as Cape Canaveral was formally known. The rest of the country watched from living rooms, bars, and sidewalks outside stores selling RCA’s new color televisions. At network studios in New York, Walter Cronkite and his fellow broadcasters filled the airwaves with all manner of facts pertaining to the Vanguard satellite, the Viking launch vehicle that would carry it, and the Patrick Proving Ground from which it would lift off. Four species of poisonous snakes, viewers were informed, inhabited the 15,000-acre facility. The surrounding mangrove swamps and scrub palmetto forests were home to the nearly extinct dusky seaside sparrow. The base itself, a former naval station, had been turned over to the air force in 1949 and was ideally suited to launch satellites because, at twenty-eight degrees north of the equator, its location offered the easiest shot into space.

Though missiles had been tested at the complex since the summer of 1950, December 4, 1957, was Cape Canaveral’s public unveiling, the first time most people had ever seen or heard of America’s gateway to the stars. What Cronkite and America did not see, however, was the condition of the Vanguard launch vehicle, which was out of range of network cameras. “The rocket looked unkempt, as if it had been hurried out of bed,” recalled the propulsion engineer Kurt Stehling. “It was only partly painted, frost covered its middle, and strips of black rubber wind spoilers dangled dispiritedly from its upper half.”

Thirty-mile-an-hour gusts lashed the rocket as the morning passed, a weather front moved in, and chilly journalists grew impatient. By late afternoon there was still no movement on the launchpad other than the howling wind. The reporters stomped their feet to ward away the cold and speculated as to the delay. A valve on the main booster’s liquid oxygen feed line had frozen shut, but this the press did not know. By dusk, impatience had given way to frustration and wagering on whether the mission would be scrubbed. Something had to be wrong. This was taking too long. Finally, at 10:30 PM, word reached reporters that the countdown had been aborted and would resume on Friday, December 6. The official reason for the postponement was wind. Cynics on Bird Watch Hill thought otherwise.

Though the American people were deprived of a launch on December 4, the fledgling ABC television network treated its viewers to another space spectacle that evening. Capitalizing on Vanguard mania, Walt Disney had scheduled the most ambitious and expensive installment of his “Man in Space” series to coincide with the launch date. As usual, Wernher von Braun hosted part of the show, titled “Mars and Beyond.” With Ernst Stuhlinger at his side, a slide rule in hand, his bright blue eyes flashing with almost hypnotic conviction, von Braun demonstrated how a spacecraft could reach the Red Planet. It couldn’t use conventional propellants, they informed viewers, because of the enormous amount of fuel required for the thirteen-month trip. “A small atomic reactor,” Stuhlinger said, pointing to the teardrop-shaped tip of a strange-looking model vehicle, “would turn silica oil into steam and drive turbines.” Like von Braun, Stuhlinger affected the efficiently no-nonsense appearance of what the Disney wardrobe department must have envisioned as the engineering look: pale blue dress shirt tucked into conservative gray slacks, no jacket, restrained tie. Slender and balding, with slightly pinched features, he seemed a suitably stern foil to the telegenically boyish von Braun, whose full head of hair, broad shoulders, and penetrating gaze were more befitting of a matinee idol than a mad scientist.

Mars must have seemed a long way off to those Americans who had sat by their radios and TV sets all day waiting for Vanguard to lift off. Yet von Braun sold the “electromagnetically-driven atomic spaceship” as if its flight was not only possible but inevitable. There was something mesmerizing about his infectious enthusiasm, his spare, purposeful movements, the scholarly self-confidence, even the paisley necktie. He had star quality.

If von Braun was at ease in the new medium of television, it was perhaps because his experience in narrating rocketry films dated back more than a decade. Disney viewers didn’t know about his wartime experiences, but the U.S. government had been well aware of how von Braun had gained some of his familiarity before the camera.

His audience, back in July 1943, had been considerably smaller, consisting of just four men: Third Reich armaments minister Albert Speer, Werhmacht missile chief Walter Dornberger, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, and Adolf Hitler. The screening had taken place at Hitler’s East Prussian bunker, Wolfsschanze, in the very same concrete-lined conference room where a year later the one-armed Count Claus von Stauffenberg would detonate a briefcase bomb in a failed attempt on the Führer’s life. Von Braun and Dornberger had come to the Wolf’s Lair to tout the V-2’s advances and to ensure that Hitler gave the missile a top-priority classification, which would guarantee the timely delivery of scarce supplies like sheet metal. Anticipating the Führer’s fondness for theatrics, von Braun had prepared visual aids: cutaway models and film that had been shot using several cameras simultaneously to capture the V-2’s flight from every dramatic vantage point. A great deal of effort had gone into the production, which had been filmed by a professional crew, using the newest color negatives. But then there was a great deal at stake. Hitler was far from sold on the V-2, which he had never seen in action. As an old artillery man, he tended to think of the missile as a giant cannon shell and clearly didn’t understand the new technology. And he had had one of his infamous “prophetic” dreams, in which the rocket had failed. That, more than anything, had soured him on V-2 production. But von Braun and Dornberger had several things going for them. The Luftwaffe was losing the air war, and it had become clear that Field Marshal Hermann Goring’s Junkers would not be able to bomb Britain into submission. If Hitler approved the V-2 as an alternative, it would open the floodgates for hundreds of millions of Reichsmarks in funding and would keep the other weapons programs under Speer’s supervision from snatching up valuable component parts. But first, the Führer needed to be sold on the merits of the missile.

After several anxious hours of waiting, the Führer arrived for the appointed interview, and the projector was finally set up. Von Braun and Dornberger quickly stubbed out their cigarettes—Hitler abhorred smoking—and the film started rolling. Von Braun provided running commentary, illustrating improvements on the V-2’s thrust, guidance mechanisms, and accuracy. This was his fourth encounter with the German leader, whom he had first met as a twenty-two-year-old engineer in 1934, shortly after Hitler’s National Socialists had seized power. At the time, von Braun and Dornberger, then a young army captain, had just begun the Wehrmacht’s embryonic missile program. It offered an intriguing loophole around the onerous restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles, which had barred any German buildup of conventional weapons. Missiles, as a completely new technology, had been not included in the list of banned armaments, and the German army had surreptitiously begun scouring amateur rocketry clubs for recruits. Few rocket enthusiasts had wanted to submit to military rigors, but even as a teenager von Braun had realized that only government agencies had the kind of financial resources to make his rocket dreams come true. He had signed on with Dornberger in 1932, the year before Hitler’s ascendancy, while he was still a university student. In 1934, Hitler “seemed a pretty dowdy type,” von Braun later recalled. But as the country’s new leader, he held the national purse strings. “Our main concern,” von Braun elaborated, “was how to get the most out of the Golden Calf.”

A decade later, the Führer was still not convinced that rockets were Nazi Germany’s salvation, despite the vast sums that had been spent on research and development. For von Braun, the July 1943 meeting was especially critical. The war was beginning to take its economic toll on the Third Reich. Money and materials were becoming scarce. Slave laborers were in short supply. Cuts would have to be made. And so with the stakes so high, he and Dornberger had carefully scripted their cinematographic pitch. Liftoff and flight footage had been seamlessly spliced so that the Führer could more easily envision formations of unstoppable rockets hurtling at five times the speed of sound toward defenseless enemy targets. The Führer’s questions had been anticipated and answers prepared in advance. Von Braun had dressed carefully for the occasion, making sure to wear his Nazi Party pin on the lapel of one of the somber suits he favored whenever meeting high officials. He had joined the party in 1937, not out of any great conviction for the Nazi cause but because it seemed like the right move for an ambitious young man dependent on state funding. Expediency, rather than ideology, had also apparently figured in his somewhat more reluctant decision in 1940 to accept Heinrich Himmler’s invitation of induction into the SS, the Nazi Party’s most fanatical killer corps. Von Braun had contemplated declining the offer. But he had been promoting rockets ever since he was sixteen—in department store booths, amateur newsletters, with the military—and he had long learned that every good pitchman covered all the angles, took every advantage that presented itself. SS membership would stand him in good stead with Himmler, the second most powerful man in Germany.

Von Braun had also learned, like any seasoned salesman, when to back off and stay silent. The carefully edited images of the V-2 spoke for themselves. Hitler watched the launch footage, visibly fascinated. He had entered the conference room looking shockingly “unhealthy and hunched-over,” Dornberger later recalled, but at the earth-shaking sight of flames roaring from the charging missiles, the Fuhrer suddenly grew animated, more like his old, firebrand self. At one point, after an especially stirring shot, he leaped from his seat, gesticulating wildly, and demanded that immense ten-ton warheads be immediately placed on each V-2. “A strange, fanatical light flared up in Hitler’s eyes,” Dornberger recalled, terrified to have to explain that the V-2 could carry only a single ton of high explosives. “But what I want is annihilation, annihilating effect!” the Führer screamed.

Hitler was sold. Von Braun got his funding and a top-priority classification. Enough money would eventually be pumped into V-2 production to build the equivalent of sixteen thousand fighter planes that might have changed the course of the war or at least prolonged it. The development of a Nazi atomic bomb would also be curtailed to finance the manufacture of the costly V-2s, which, in the end, claimed a few thousand casualties and had minimal impact on Allied resistance. As Winston Churchill would note, von Braun had helped persuade Hitler to bet the Reich on the wrong weapon. But in 1943, he was awarded the Knight’s Cross and the honorary title of professor, Nazi Germany’s highest academic distinction. “The Führer was amazed at von Braun’s youth,” the historian Michael Neufeld observed, “and so impressed by his talent that he made a point of signing the document himself.” Himmler, intuitively attuned to Hitler’s wild flights of fancy, conferred the rank of SS major on the wunderkind whose rockets would surely win the war. “Von Braun,” Neufeld concluded, “essentially made a pact with the Devil.”

As fate would have it, the first American to debrief von Braun after the war was Richard Porter, the GE executive and future member of the Stewart Committee, who was then on loan to Army Ordnance due to his technical background. At that meeting in Germany, von Braun presented a twenty-page memorandum spelling out his potential value to the U.S. military and apparently left a lasting negative impression on Porter. Something about the way von Braun had seamlessly staged his own defection before the fighting had even ended, or perhaps the images of the corpses and skeletal slave laborers found at the young rocket chief’s subterranean V-2 factory, must have rubbed Porter the wrong way. (Von Braun’s biographer Erik Bergaust makes the point that Porter was instrumental in scuttling the army’s satellite bid in favor of Vanguard.) Homer Joe Stewart himself would later confess that some members of his commission might have been “prejudiced,” as the media alleged. But not, he would add, for commercial reasons. There could have simply been an unspoken sentiment that American scientists, rather than a group of ex-Nazis, should lead the country into the dawn of a new era.

Dawn broke calmly over Cape Canaveral on Friday, December 6, as reporters once more staked out their perches on Bird Watch Hill. They did not have to wait long this time. At 10:30 AM, the towering red and white gantry crane slowly pulled away from the launchpad, and a half hour later the sonorous blast of warning sirens filled the air. “T minus five minutes,” a distended voice echoed over the loudspeakers positioned throughout the proving ground.

The moment everyone had been waiting for at last was at hand. After two months of intolerable doubt, humiliation, and unaccustomed anxiety, America would finally salvage its pride and show those commies a thing or two about good old-fashioned Yankee ingenuity. Everything would be right after that; the United States of America would be back on track. “One minute,” the loudspeaker sounded. The whole country leaned forward, on the edge of its collective seat.

“Ten, nine, eight…,” the final countdown began, and at 11:44:59 AM a hoarse, howling whine slammed the Florida coast. Brilliant white flames shot out from under the rocket. Ice crumpled in jagged sheets from its upper stages as the whole booster shook with earth-jarring force. The roar of the engines increased to a piercing shriek, and the last of the umbilical cords dropped way. The rocket shuddered and strained against its moorings. It was moving! It was up, only a few feet, but it was gaining strength. And then Vanguard quivered, burst into flame, and languidly crumpled onto the launchpad, setting off a blast wave felt for miles. “Oh God! No! Look out! Duck!” the spectators suddenly screamed. Then, just as suddenly, there was silence.