Operation Moonglow

by Teasel Muir-Harmony

  2

  SPUTNIK AND THE POLITICS

  OF SPACEFLIGHT, 1957

  The satellite symbolizes an intellectual attainment that may dominate the period immediately ahead as the most powerful single instrument of national policy.

  —LLOYD V. BERKNER, 1958

  Before the sun had risen in Arkansas on September 4, 1957, a handful of men and women had already assembled in front of Central High School in Little Rock. A massive neo-Gothic brick building, Central High was called “America’s Most Beautiful High School” when it first opened in 1927. Since then, only white students had been allowed to pass through its halls. That morning a hundred state militia troops were also at the school, some sitting on the edge of the sidewalk with their rifles lying nearby. By 8:00 a.m., a crowd of four hundred had gathered. When a fifteen-year-old African American student approached the school, the crowd closed in, jeering and yelling at her as the troops pushed them back. Eight other African American students followed. Although a federal district court had ordered their admission as part of a larger effort to desegregate schools after the US Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, the state militia denied each student entry. The images of troops and the angry mob not only appeared in national papers; they made the front pages of newspapers around the world, from the Times of India to the South China Morning Post to the Egyptian Gazette. The foreign press’s focus on the crisis in Little Rock was so acute that US newspapers began covering the foreign press’s coverage.1

  Struggles over desegregation throughout America in the 1950s were not only a domestic issue. As the decolonization movement gained ground throughout Africa, with Ghana achieving independence earlier that spring, the issue of US racial oppression took on even more potency in international affairs. Dispatches from US embassies reported on the broader adverse impact of Little Rock on the status of American democracy abroad. A US consul in Mozambique observed that “our moral standing has been very considerably damaged and… any pretension of an American to advise any European Government on African affairs… would be hypocrisy.” The Soviet Union leveraged Little Rock in a vast campaign of anti-American propaganda as part of a larger effort to sway global political alliance toward the Eastern Bloc.2

  President Eisenhower sent federal troops to Arkansas, and the USIA developed programs to offset the negative image of the United States. Although the USIA dealt with problems of school desegregation head-on in its programming, Little Rock became a damaging reference point for international perceptions of American race relations. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles recognized that this battle was hurting “the influence of the United States abroad.”3 The unfavorable image of the United States following Little Rock and other battles of school desegregation was compounded by widespread admonishing of the savage behavior of US soldiers in Asia that summer and continued criticism of US nuclear testing. In the fall of 1957 American prestige was in need of a boost, but what it got instead on October 4 was a deep blow to national self-confidence and a sharp challenge to Americans’ shared belief in the technological and scientific superiority of their nation.4

  Exactly one month after nine students were blocked entry into Central High School in Little Rock, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, from Kazakhstan. It was a Friday. By the time the news broke in the United States, President Eisenhower had already left Washington for a weekend of golfing in Gettysburg. Americans around the country were at home watching the premiere of Leave It to Beaver, unaware that the space race would soon begin. In the second-floor ballroom of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, fifty scientists gathered at a reception in honor of the International Geophysical Year (IGY), the largest scientific research program attempted in history. Shortly before 6:00 p.m., Walter Sullivan, a New York Times science reporter attending the event, received a telephone call from his Washington bureau chief. After taking the call, he whispered to an American IGY committee member simply “It’s up.”5

  They immediately shared the news with Lloyd Berkner, the ionospheric scientist who was one of the originators of the idea for the IGY in April 1950 and a “supreme optimist.”6 Berkner clinked a glass to silence the room for attention. “I wish to make an announcement,” he said. “I’ve just been informed by the New York Times that a Russian satellite is in orbit at an elevation of 900 kilometers. I wish to congratulate our Soviet colleagues on their achievement.” Cheers rang out among the scientists, and vodka started flowing. Just like Khrushchev’s Kiev dinner party, a shortwave radio was set up to play Sputnik’s “beep-beep-beep” for guests. The Soviet scientist Anatoli Blagonrov, after listening with some surprise, confirmed “that is the voice.… I recognize it.”7

  Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson had just finished a barbeque dinner with friends at his Texas ranch when he heard the news. With his wife, Lady Bird, and their close friends, he took a walk along the Pedernales River, an evening stroll that had become customary after Johnson’s heart attack two years earlier. As they walked, the party looked up, hoping to catch a glimpse of the small satellite streaking across the Hill Country sky. The symbolic weight of the small Soviet satellite hit Johnson immediately, making him feel “uneasy and apprehensive.” As he later recalled, “In the open West, you learn to live with the sky. It is part of your life. But now, somehow, in some new way, the sky seemed almost alien.”8 When Johnson returned to his ranch, his living-room telephone rang. It was Richard Russell, a Democratic senator from Georgia whose long history of legislative victories had earned him the reputation of the “South’s greatest general since Robert E. Lee.” Always the master strategist, Russell was calling Johnson about leading a Senate investigation into the launch. Not only was Johnson well versed in the issue of national security preparedness; the Texan recognized a political opportunity when he saw one.9

  Late that evening, White House Press Secretary James Hagerty assured the press that this news did not catch the administration off guard. There was no “space race,” he explained. Sputnik “was of great scientific interest,” not a national security threat. Unfortunately for the Eisenhower administration, the press did not toe this line.10 Over the coming days the historic significance of Sputnik came into focus. Within the United States, news of Sputnik overshadowed all the other breaking stories, even the civil rights battles in Little Rock. The next morning, as Eisenhower played golf for the fifth time that week, Americans were growing increasingly concerned about the broader implications of the small satellite.11

  Both the domestic and the foreign press covered Sputnik in depth, making it the major story of the year. Most Western European newspapers devoted their front pages to coverage of Sputnik—and its broader geopolitical implications—for almost a full week. As the USIA reported, “Virtually all of this content centered around three main themes—the scientific achievement that ‘sputnik’ represented, the implications of the Soviet ‘first’ in the battle for the minds of men, and the political and military significance for the West of the recent Soviet advances in missile rocketry.”12 The international press commented that Sputnik won a major propaganda victory for the Soviet Union, especially within the developing world, the emerging focal point of the cold war psychological battlefield.13

  The international public’s awareness of Sputnik “was almost universal,” according to the USIA. In remote towns and sparsely populated areas, people had heard that the satellite was traveling overhead. Even schoolchildren in the United Kingdom parodied Perry Como’s “Catch a Falling Star,” singing, “Catch a falling Sputnik,/Put it in a basket,/Send it to the U.S.A./ They’ll be glad to have it,/Very glad to have it,/And never let it get away.”14 An American living in Brazil heard what became a common joke during the fall of 1957: “When Sputnik goes around the globe it goes, ‘beep-beep, beep-beep’ everywhere, except when it goes over the United States. Then it goes, ‘ha-ha, ha-ha.’”15

  For Khrushchev, Sputnik fit squarely within his larger geopolitical strategy of signaling strategic parity with the Unite
d States, his cold war rival. Two years earlier he had ordered ten bombers to fly repeatedly over Red Square, with the sole purpose of giving the impression of a “bomber gap” between the US and the USSR.16 In August 1957 Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union had ICBMs that could reach “any part of the globe,” even though the USSR would not achieve this capability until the 1960s. After Sputnik, he exclaimed that the Soviet Union “outstripped the leading capitalist country—the United States—in the field of scientific and technical progress.”17 And when the United States eventually launched a satellite, he crowed, “It’s the United States which is now intent on catching up with the Soviet Union.”18

  The political, social, and cultural implications of the Soviet satellite did not just fall into place on their own. And it was not just Soviet officials who saw the political opportunities afforded by Sputnik. Within Washington, some seized on the “Sputnik moment,” spotting an opening for challenging the current Republican administration. “No sooner had Sputnik’s first beep-beep been heard—via the press—than the nation’s legislators leaped forward like heavy drinkers hearing a cork pop,” as a Department of Defense official put it.19 Politicians within the United States and around the world took an active hand in molding the meaning and impact of Sputnik, with consequences that would stretch into the 1960s and into today.

  Johnson, the most vocal and strident of the group, almost immediately publicly called for a congressional investigation of American space and missile capability, as Russell had advised him to do on the evening of October 4. Senate aide George Reedy urged the ever-aspirant Texas senator to “plan to plunge heavily into this one,” and he put the matter frankly: “If properly handled… [Sputnik] would blast the Republicans out of the water, unify the Democratic party, and elect you President.” Over the next few months, Johnson would use the investigation to establish himself as the congressional space expert and, more importantly, as a stepping-stone to the presidential nomination.20

  While Eisenhower would attempt to soothe the fears of a worried nation, Johnson raised them. Likening Sputnik to Pearl Harbor and the Alamo in public speeches again and again, Johnson declared that “history does not reward the people who win the battles, but the people who win the war.” Sputnik, LBJ warned, was “perhaps the greatest [threat] that our country has ever known.” He called on his fellow Americans to meet that challenge. The Space Age had begun. It was time for the United States to reclaim the lead.21

  LBJ’s connections between Sputnik and Pearl Harbor or the Alamo were not simply attempts to interpret the significance of the satellite; they were also about making it significant. He carefully selected these analogies, rejecting his aide’s suggestion that he frame it as “a call to action instead of a summons to a siesta,” a regurgitation of his earlier Korean War critique. No, instead, he would link Sputnik to something grander, “a disaster… comparable to Pearl Harbor.” Sputnik was “an even greater challenge than Pearl Harbor,” he stressed on another occasion.22

  How we think of the “Sputnik moment” today, how we draw on the idea that Sputnik shocked the nation out of complacency and into action in contemporary political calls to innovate, has direct lineage to LBJ’s and others’ politicking. This politicking is a critical piece of the story that not only illuminates the contingency of the “Sputnik moment” but also tells us how and why spaceflight assumed the national priority status it did by 1961.23

  It would be a busy fall in Washington: “one prolonged nightmare,” as one journalist put it. “Any number of people—from the Pentagon, from State, and from the Hill—were dashing in and out of the president’s office. Each new visitor had a longer face than the one before.”24 Each day of the president’s schedule was filled with meetings related to the Soviet satellite the week after the launch.25 Early on Tuesday, on a mild but overcast fall morning in Washington, Eisenhower assembled Quarles, Waterman, and other top officials. The day before, Under Secretary of Defense Quarles had submitted a report to the president outlining the Soviet satellite launch as well as the status of the US space program. Eisenhower expressed concern. The report suggested that the Army’s Redstone rocket could have launched a satellite months earlier, beating the Soviets into space. Quarles explained the decision and efforts to disassociate the American space program from military development. Not only would this approach underscore the peaceful intentions of the United States; it would also limit foreign scientists’ access to information about US military rocket technology. Changing the course of action now—turning the American satellite efforts into a “crash program”—could cause tension within the Pentagon. Quarles pointed out the good news: “The Russians have in fact done us a good turn, unintentionally, in establishing the concept of freedom of international space.”26

  Later that afternoon, Eisenhower asked Detlev Bronk, president of the National Academy of Sciences, for help. He was preparing his statement for the press conference the following day, and he wanted to make sure he was setting the right tone. Eisenhower did not want to “belittle the Russian accomplishment,” but he also wanted “to allay hysteria and alarm.” After one or two revisions, Bronk found the statement accurate and ready for distribution.27

  On October 9, while Sputnik passed over the Indian Ocean, 245 news correspondents packed the pressroom to hear the president’s remarks. In response to question after question during the thirty-two-minute-long news conference, Eisenhower contrasted US and Soviet approaches to spaceflight. The US satellite would contribute to scientific knowledge and collect more scientific data than the Soviet Sputnik. For the United States it was not a matter of national security but science, he stressed.28 But journalists were not convinced. The president “seeks to calm fears,” but to no avail, a reporter commented. Instead of featuring Eisenhower’s carefully crafted lines, journalists included statements such as “And I don’t know what we could have done more” and “I didn’t say I was satisfied,” portraying a bewildered and unprepared leader. When the news conference ended, Sputnik had already made its way over Kodiak, Alaska.29

  The next day, Thursday, October 10, 1957, just shy of a week after Sputnik’s launch, the NSC had much to discuss. For Eisenhower, the NSC offered vital governing guidance: his Cabinet was a useful sounding board, but it was the NSC that he looked to for policy making. Unlike his predecessor, Harry Truman, Eisenhower scheduled weekly meetings of the NSC, presided over almost every meeting, and expanded its membership. Each Thursday morning CIA Director Allen Dulles would begin the meeting with a twenty-minute intelligence briefing. By noon, after moving through the agenda efficiently, the council adjourned.30

  Dulles led off the 339th meeting of the NSC by briefing the room on the Soviet satellite launch. He came from a long line of statesmen, with three secretaries of state in his family: his grandfather, his uncle, and his brother, John Foster Dulles, who served alongside Allen in the Eisenhower administration. The CIA’s covert offensive operations had increased during the Truman administration, but it was under Dulles’s guardianship that it swelled, becoming a major global player in foreign sabotage, subversion, coups d’état, covert propaganda, economic warfare, and assassinations, among other interventionist activities. Extroverted and charming, sporting a mustache and with a tobacco pipe often in hand, Dulles heightened and refined covert psychological warfare in the 1950s, making it central to US statecraft.31

  Dulles described the launch and path of the small satellite and explained that it had not surprised the intelligence community. They were expecting that the Soviet Union might launch a satellite by November 1957, just a month past the real schedule. At that point the CIA still did not know if Sputnik was sending encoded messages. When he turned to an assessment of the world reaction to Sputnik, Dulles explained that “Khrushchev had moved all his propaganda guns into place.” Sputnik, alongside the announcement of ICBM testing and a large-scale hydrogen bomb test, made up a trilogy of Soviet propaganda moves, in the CIA’s estimation.32

  In Dulles’s view, t
he Soviets aimed this propaganda demonstration at audiences in underdeveloped countries, especially in the Middle East, as part of an effort to relate “scientific accomplishments to the effectiveness of the Communist social system.” The international impact of the small satellite was “very wide and deep,” Dulles concluded after reviewing reactions in each region of the world to the assembled group.33

  Quarles spoke next. He acknowledged that much of what he could say about the satellite would already be well-known to everyone gathered in the room. Eisenhower replied that this was true and that he had started feeling “numb on the subject of the earth satellite.” Although it had been just under one week since the news of Sputnik broke, Eisenhower thought public reaction had grown out of hand. Quarles reviewed the history of US satellite development, then updated the group on the progress of Project Vanguard, the Navy’s satellite program. Vanguard was a science program, Quarles stressed. The US, he guaranteed the council, had long recognized the propaganda implications of being first in space, but it prioritized science and establishing the principle of freedom of outer space. “In this respect,” he pointed out, “the Soviets have now proved very helpful.” By October 10, Sputnik had orbited over almost every nation on Earth.