Operation Moonglow

by Teasel Muir-Harmony

  During this evening address to the nation, Eisenhower announced the creation of the new post of presidential science advisor and said that he had recruited MIT president James Killian to take the position. In his new role, Killian would establish the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) to act as an intermediary between the scientific community and the executive branch. He also took on the challenge of assessing alternatives for the organization of space research within the United States.70

  Eisenhower announced other initiatives that his administration was taking on, in hope of tempering public anxiety. He had given the head of the US missile program jurisdiction to oversee and coordinate missile programs within various branches of the military. This was an attempt to curb interservice rivalry. Eisenhower championed international scientific data exchange and advocated for a new scientific committee at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The State Department would appoint a new science advisor as well as science attachés at appropriate US embassies around the world.71

  Ultimately, the military significance of the Sputniks was minimal. They proved that the Soviet Union had rockets with more thrust than the United States, but this did not demonstrate that the Soviets had the immediate capability to accurately drop weapons on the United States. It did not mean that nuclear warheads atop ICBMs threatened Americans’ safety. In other areas of military preparedness—such as air power—the United States was still far ahead of the Soviet Union. And the scale of the United States’ arsenal was large enough that if the Soviet Union attacked, there would be mutually assured destruction. The two superpowers were still very much locked in the cold war combat freeze. But try as he might, Eisenhower could not calm the country’s nerves, especially when alarmist voices like Lyndon Johnson’s were proactively stoking fears.72

  Although it did not seem like US international prestige could sink lower after Sputnik II, it could. Before Sputnik, the Vanguard program was on schedule for a test launch later that year or in the beginning of 1958. In the initial stages of development, rocket launches often fail. Engineers in the program anticipated that they would successfully launch a satellite into orbit before the end of the IGY, but they did not assume a flawless first test launch. However, Sputnik pressure thrust what would have otherwise been a standard hardware test into a test of national technological capability. The Eisenhower administration sold the Vanguard Test Vehicle 3 (TV3) launch as America’s effort to put a satellite in orbit. International media attention turned to Cape Canaveral on December 4, 1957, but technical complications forced a delay.73

  Allen Dulles, frustrated by the level of publicity leading up to the delayed launch, told the NSC that the United States had become the “laughing-stock of the whole free world.”74 Dulles encouraged Eisenhower to consider a new policy that would make all future launches secret until after the spacecraft was successfully in orbit, to avoid further embarrassment.75 The blow to US prestige that followed the delay was nothing compared to what would occur on the day of the launch.

  On December 6, after reaching a height of only a few feet after takeoff, the main engine failed, and the vehicle crashed back on the pad and exploded. The small payload was tossed to the ground, still beeping. The front-page coverage in the London Daily Herald read, “Oh, What a Flopnik!”76 Johnson called the failure “one of the best publicized and most humiliating failures in our history.”77 Adding to this humiliation, members of the Soviet delegation to the United Nations offered the United States technical assistance as part of its program of aid to underdeveloped nations.78 The year 1958 would be a better one for US self-confidence than 1957, if only just slightly.

  3

  A SPACE PROGRAM FOR

  ALL HUMANKIND, 1958–1960

  Control of space means control of the world.

  —SENATOR LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON, JANUARY 7, 1958

  “We live in a political world,” observed Oliver Gale, “and no greater opportunity [than Sputnik] will ever be presented for a Democratic Congress to harass a Republican Administration, and everyone involved on either side knows.”1 As the special assistant to the secretary of defense, Gale coordinated interviews of Pentagon officials for the congressional hearing on national preparedness following Sputnik. Like the secretary of defense he served, Gale had taken on the position just a few days earlier. Both came to Washington from Procter and Gamble (P&G). Gale had been the head of public relations, and the new secretary of defense, Neil H. McElroy, had been the president. This expertise in PR likely served Gale more than he would have anticipated, as Washington—and the congressional hearings in particular—became the stage for political theater in the fall of 1957.2

  As Gale witnessed, Democratic leaders took full advantage of the moment. With their sights set on the next two elections, leaders of the Democratic Party welcomed the opportunity afforded by Sputnik to sway the electorate. In the 1950s, powerful southern Democrats had earned a reputation for blocking civil rights legislation. Just a month earlier, their efforts to limit the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 had threatened to rip apart the party. And as civil rights clashes erupted throughout the South, such as in Little Rock, the Democratic Party’s chances in the upcoming elections seemed in doubt.3 Racial segregation was an “issue that is not going to go away,” a former aide outlined in a memo passed on to Lyndon Johnson. To secure the 1958 and 1960 elections, Democrats had “to find another issue which is even more potent. Otherwise the Democratic future is bleak.” Sputnik might be their answer, he suggested.4

  Democratic leadership recognized that if space exploration was going to factor into the upcoming presidential election, there were political advantages to keeping the congressional hearing on national preparedness as bipartisan as possible. They believed that Johnson had the necessary “reservoir of goodwill and an aura of statesmanlike handling of defense problems from the early Preparedness Committee days,” which positioned him to take on the Sputnik challenge.5 Johnson took a nuanced, restrained approach, with an eye to his long-term political objectives. If treated evenhandedly, or at least with the appearance of fairness, the hearings could fashion him as not only the nation’s leading space policy expert but also the next Democratic presidential candidate. The stakes were high, and Johnson threw himself into the job knowing full well that his performance would affect his future in national politics. Before undertaking the congressional investigation, he assured Eisenhower in the Oval Office that there would be “no ‘guilty party’ in this inquiry except Joe Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev.” Eisenhower found Johnson’s guarantees convincing, later telling his personal secretary, “I think today he is being honest.”6

  Democratic leaders credited Eisenhower’s 1953 presidential election in part to the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee’s Korean War reports. Formed in 1950, the subcommittee became the primary oversight and investigative arm of the Senate Armed Services Committee. It produced a series of more than forty dramatic and sensational reports on the Korean War, which secured Johnson extensive press coverage but undercut the Truman administration. “The Democrats really weren’t very happy with it,” a Democratic senate staff member recalled.7 With Sputnik, Johnson used similar tactics as he had in the early 1950s, but this time he made sure to advance the Democratic Party’s interests, not the Republicans’. To bolster the staff already in place, he assembled a strong team of lawyers from New York and scientists from Harvard, Cal Tech, and Rice Institute (now Rice University). He choreographed and controlled elaborate publicity of the hearings, from television coverage to photograph sessions to interviews. Johnson courted the press, inviting some to dinner or to his Texas ranch. For the most influential journalists, he leaked news. And it was all done with speed.8 “Everything had to be done in a hurry,” recalled Eileen Galloway, a national defense analyst aiding Johnson and the committee. “If you were working for Lyndon Johnson, everything had to be done in a hurry… and we were working on it from morning to night.”9

  After a nearly six-hour Pe
ntagon briefing on US and Soviet space capability in early November 1957, Johnson publicly announced the upcoming congressional subcommittee hearings and told the press that the country needed “bold new thinking in defense and foreign policy.”10 The Soviet Union was ahead “period,” Johnson told members of the press in his Capitol Building office. If the United States wanted to take the lead in space, the country needed decisive, proactive action. But in his estimation, defense officials were not demonstrating the proper sense of urgency. Critiquing the administration, he stated that “timid minds will not produce bold programs.”11

  The congressional subcommittee hearings started on November 25. Much like a conductor, Johnson orchestrated everything. He introduced the expert witnesses, led the cross-examinations, and handled the press. Johnson’s aptitude for public relations shone through in his command over the meetings. Instead of starting with the national security threat of the Soviet satellite launch, he asked well-known scientists Edward Teller and Vannevar Bush, and rocket engineer and Disney star Wernher von Braun, for their testimony on the broader implications of Sputnik. Introducing the men in the public hearing, Johnson reminded those gathered that their remarks would give clarity to the significance and meaning of Sputnik. Teller talked about the future of outer space exploration having “amusing and amazing… consequences.” Like Johnson, he compared Sputnik to Pearl Harbor. Von Braun pushed for a human spaceflight program and the creation of a “national space agency.” As Johnson well knew, Teller, Bush, and von Braun not only shared their expertise; more importantly, they secured press coverage.12

  Next came the military experts. Even though McElroy was sworn into office as secretary of defense a mere five days after Sputnik orbited Earth, he came prepared for four hours of questioning by the committee. Driven and entrepreneurial from a young age, McElroy started out in the mailroom at Procter and Gamble and quickly rose through the ranks, becoming president of the company by age forty-four. He took more than a 90 percent pay cut when he accepted Eisenhower’s offer to become defense secretary earlier that week. McElroy impressed Johnson’s staff, ably handling the senators’ intensive probing of all areas of the nation’s defenses. And he would soon impress people throughout the country as he navigated reorganizing the Pentagon with the aim of ending interservice rivalries.13

  A major point of the questioning of McElroy and his staff focused on the Defense Department’s duplication of missile development. The Army was developing the Jupiter; the Air Force had the Thor, Atlas, and Titan; and the Navy was building the Polaris. Gale explained the tension between services and the apparent overlap in roles: “There is a feeling that the military of the future will be based heavily on missiles, and the Service which has the dominant role in missile assignments will be well on top.”14

  As biographer Robert Caro points out, although Johnson masterfully heightened the sense of urgency in the hearings, he did not demonstrate the feeling himself. After the initial news of Sputnik broke, he did not hurry back to Washington but instead stayed in Texas through October 16. After a two-day visit to Washington, he returned to Texas until the subcommittee briefing at the Pentagon in November. In total, he spent a mere six days in Washington in the six weeks following Sputnik’s launch. But those days he was in Washington, LBJ was busy crafting a specific scene of “national crisis.”15 “He was really like a dynamo at that time,” Galloway recounted.16 On Capitol Hill they joked, “Light a match behind Lyndon and he’d orbit.”17

  A new year did not bring new optimism for the American public. Early polls indicated that the country felt anxious at the beginning of 1958. Not only had the Soviet satellites shaken national confidence; Americans also worried about a worsening economy. In the fall, unemployment had risen, civil rights tensions intensified, and a sharp recession jolted the nation. Leaks from the NSC report “Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age,” often referred to as the Gaither Report, indicated that the United States was not prepared to defend against a Soviet nuclear attack, intensifying anxieties. Eisenhower rebuffed the report’s conclusions and rejected the price tag of the military buildup. And as if all of this was not enough, the cover of the January 6 issue of Time magazine featured a beaming Nikita Khrushchev holding up a model of Sputnik. The Soviet leader was dubbed 1957’s “Man of the Year.”18

  Johnson called a meeting of the Democratic Senate Caucus on January 7, 1958. It was no coincidence that Eisenhower’s State of the Union address was scheduled for two days later. As Johnson confided to Richard Russell, “I cannot overemphasize what I believe to be the importance of this meeting.”19 And he had George Reedy inform the press that this meeting would be Johnson’s “State of the Union address.”20 In highly partisan comments, Johnson criticized the Eisenhower administration’s New Look fiscal policy for putting the country in danger. He used the opportunity to draw the connection between the Democratic Party and a more robust space program. “Control of space means control of the world,” Johnson warned. “If, out in space, there is the ultimate position—from which total control of the earth may be exercised.” He continued, “From space, the masters of infinity would have the power to control the earth’s weather, to cause drought and flood, to change the tides and raise the levels of the sea, to divert the Gulf Stream and change temperate climates to frigid… our national goal and the goal of all free men must be to win and hold that position.”21 LBJ overstated the military urgency of the Sputnik moment. Although successful for Johnson politically and for garnering support for the US space program, his alarmist rhetoric had long-term consequences.

  Reedy identified one of the drawbacks of Johnson’s headline-generating performance during the hearings: “In retrospect some of the material should have been examined more carefully before being spread on the record in ex parte proceedings. One of the results was the public creation of a ‘missile gap’—a concept that we were hopelessly behind the Soviets in the possession of ICBMs.”22

  By the end of January 1958, the records of the congressional hearings filled more than two thousand pages. More than seventy witnesses had been called.23 The subcommittee’s unanimous report recommended a seventeen-point program, from technical developments to the creation of a new government agency. “We discovered some disturbing truths from those three months of hearings,” Johnson said.24 A memo pointedly summed up the threat facing America: “The reason the United States fell behind Russia in satellite development in the first place is because we neglected the relation between scientific achievement and international relations.”25

  On the last day of the month—January 31—the tide turned, and the United States successfully launched its first satellite, Explorer 1. The pencil-like payload contained a package of scientific instruments that collected data that led to the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts. The launch of Explorer 1 did not receive the widespread sensational coverage that Sputnik 1 had a few months earlier. Newspapers in Europe and Asia primarily focused on the impact of the cylindrical satellite on the US position in the upcoming summit talks on nuclear disarmament. In France and the United Kingdom, journalists predicted that the United States might change its policy toward the summit talks after the success of the launch, and in India commentary suggested that the United States could now act from a position of power and strength. The balance of power, according to most coverage, had returned to equilibrium. The press in Communist countries acknowledged the launch but downplayed its broader significance.26

  The day after the Explorer 1 launch, Saturday, February 1, was an extremely busy one at USIS posts around the world. USIS Germany’s dogged efforts reveal the scope and intensity of on-the-ground activities of US public diplomats. In Germany the USIA oversaw sixty-eight libraries and reading rooms, and nearly twenty USIS posts in the late 1950s.27 Each post created its own promotional campaign ahead of the launch. Staff reviewed their collection of scientific photographs and updated the captions for exhibits at Amerika Haeuser—American cultural meeting places—around Germany. They a
lso updated two films, Space Unlimited and Geophysical Year, so that more than sixty prints of the films could be distributed shortly after the launch. USIS Germany sent film kits to posts around Germany, each filled with a prepared lecture, articles, posters, leaflets, a chronological chart, and a picture layout of the major figures in space research.

  USIS staff in Bonn arrived at the embassy early on Saturday morning, prepared for a long day ahead. When President Eisenhower’s official proclamation arrived, the post immediately translated it into German and then sent it via teletype to each consulate, along with instructions for the Marine guards on duty to notify the public affairs officers (PAOs) as soon as they received the message. The PAOs at each post then distributed the translated announcement to newspapers throughout Germany by late afternoon on Saturday. The USIS post in Bonn also sent the president’s statement to the German wire service, all press correspondents stationed in Bonn, all foreign embassies, the Federal Press Office, the press offices of the four leading political parties in Germany, and the Bundestag and Bundesrat. By the end of the day, USIS Germany staff had produced 920 prints of 30 photographs, written 10 articles on American scientific progress, and distributed these to all the posts in Germany.28

  The German press incorporated much of the USIS Germany material into its coverage of Explorer 1. In Bremen, for example, forty-one papers carried nine hundred inches of USIS material as well as twelve pictures, reaching an audience of roughly three million people. In this way, US government staff not only amplified the news that America launched a satellite; they also framed the story. Major newspapers and magazines throughout Germany published articles that drew heavily from USIS material, and in some instances they directly reprinted USIS articles verbatim.29 The Voice of America distributed a radio report on Explorer 1 to all West German radio stations. Within a few days, Amerika Haeuser and the German-American Institute produced exhibits on the US space program that included posters, scientific books, photographs, and, at the Stuttgart Amerika Haus, a movable globe used to show the orbit of Explorer 1. A series of lectures by German scientists, including Dr. Julius Bartels and Richard E. Kutterer, complemented these exhibits.30 Similar programs were undertaken by hundreds of colleagues working at USIS posts and US embassies around the world, attempting to make the most of the United States’ first space shot.