installed SS general Hans Kammler: Sellier, A History of the Dora Camp, p. 103; and Heinrich Himmler, “Orders to Hans Kammler Concerning Construction Work for the V2 Missile Program,” http://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/documents/4279-orders-to-hans-kammler?q=heinrich+himmler.
This rocket landed near: Kenneth Lipartito and Orville Butler, A History of the Kennedy Space Center (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), p. 33.
launch two V-2s at London: Norman Longmate, Hitler’s Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (London: Hutchinson, 1985), p. x.
“There wasn’t a mark”: Clare Heal, “The Day Hitler’s Silent Killer Came Falling on Chiswick,” (London) Express, September 7, 2014.
“Von Braun was completely devastated”: Quoted in Neufeld, Von Braun, p. 184.
“When the first V-2 hit London”: Ibid., p. 185.
“With a satisfied eye he witnessed”: Pierre Boulle, The Bridge over the River Kwai (New York: Presidio Press, 1982), p. 96.
“Once the rockets are up”: Tom Lehrer, “Wernher von Braun,” Album/CD That Was the Year That Was (Reprise/Warner), recorded in San Francisco, July 1965. http://www.protestsonglyrics.net/Humorous_Songs/Wernher-Von-Braun.phtml.
“his new missiles until November 8”: Winston Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 6: Triumph and Tragedy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), p. 47.
“V-2 type rocket appears to be”: Robert Goddard, The Papers of Robert H. Goddard (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), 9:1548.
the V-2 had been copied directly: Frank H. Winter, “Did the Germans Learn from Goddard? An Examination of Whether the Rocketry of R. H. Goddard Influenced German Pre–World War II Missile Development,” History of Rocketry and Astronautics (San Diego: American Astronautical Society, 2016), pp. 106–11.
almost 700 V-2s per month: Walter A. McDougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1985), p. 42.
“but its role in history”: Potter, The Earth Gazers, p. 115.
“We despise the French”: Quoted in Ordway III and Sharpe, The Rocket Team, p. 274.
“I think you’re nuts”: Dickson, Sputnik, p. 59.
Toftoy had U.S. Army troops race: McDougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth, p. 44.
“We defeated Nazi armies”: Quoted in G. A. Tokady, “Soviet Rocket Technology,” Technology and Culture 4 (Fall 1963): 523.
plenty of machine and rocket: Eugene Reichl, Project Mercury (Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 2016), p. 4.
“Imagine . . . finding”: Lindbergh quoted in Winston Groom, The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2013), pp. 437–38.
shipped to the Annapolis Experiment Station: Milton Lehman, This High Man: The Life of Robert H. Goddard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1963), p. 387.
agreement “was a sham”: McDougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth, pp. 44–45.
“Dropping the bombs”: Harry S. Truman to James L. Cate, December 6, 1952. Truman Papers, President’s Secretary’s File (Atomic Bomb), Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, Missouri.
“A screaming comes across the sky”: Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Penguin, 1973), p. 3.
Considered wards of the army: Ward, Dr. Space, p. 63.
dubbed himself a POP: Ibid.
“The GIs sized me up”: Wernher von Braun, “Why I Chose America,” American Magazine, July 1952.
the Soviets would appropriate: Doran Baker, “The University, Electrical Engineering and Space Travel,” Paper 77, no. 75, in USU Faculty Honor Lectures (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1979).
But some of the imported Germans were sent back: Brian Crim, Our Germans: Operation Paperclip and the National Security State (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).
Arthur Rudolph, a close colleague: Dennis Piszkiewicz, The Nazi Rocketeers: Dreams of Space and Crimes of War (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2007), p. 225.
Hubertus Strughold: Colin A. Ross, The CIA Doctors (Richardson, TX: Manitou Communications, 2006).
he managed to design his first trajectories: Ward, Dr. Space, p. 65.
“If we may assume”: Quoted in Sean Kalic, U.S. Presidents and the Militarization of Space, 1946–1967 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012), pp. 17–18.
“fresh-faced, charming young war hero”: David Nasaw, The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy (New York: Penguin, 2012), p. 603. See also “Articles: by John F. Kennedy in the Hearst Newspapers, 1945,” Kennedy Library, www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKPOF-129-003.aspx.
“Jack Kennedy was the only pol in Boston”: Quoted in John T. Shaw, JFK in the Senate: Pathway to the Presidency (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 26.
the performance of President Truman: Gary A. Donaldson, Truman Defeats Dewey (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015), p. 6.
Democrats scrambled: Donald R. McCoy, “Harry S. Truman: Personality, Politics, and Presidency,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 12, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 223.
“I told them that Soviet Russia today”: John F. Kennedy, “The Time Has Come: Radio Speech on Russia,” October 1946, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Pre-Presidential Papers, Kennedy Library.
“The war made us get serious”: Quoted in Doyle, PT 109, p. xiii.
“What we do now will”: John F. Kennedy, congressional campaign radio broadcast, 1946, quoted in John F. Kennedy in His Own Words, ed. Eric Freedman and Edward Hoffman (New York: Citadel Press, 2005), p. 140.
“It seems to be a law of nature”: Potter, The Earth Gazers, p. 144; Ward, Dr. Space, p. 68.
5: SPOOKED INTO THE SPACE RACE
Having spent a third of a trillion: Harry S. Truman, “Speech to Congress, March 12, 1947,” in Debating the Origins of the Cold War: American and Russian Perspectives, ed. Ralph B. Levering, Vladimir O. Pechatnov, Verena Botzenhart-Viehe, and C. Earl Edmondson (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), p. 83.
“an almost impenetrable veil of secrecy”: Arthur C. Clarke, The Making of a Moon (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), pp. 18–19.
technological leaps: Boris Chertok, Rockets and People, ed. Asif A. Siddiqi, vol. 3: Hot Days of the Cold War (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2009), p. 284.
“no ballistic missiles worth mentioning”: Mieczkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment, p. 40.
a new National Military Establishment: “About the Department of Defense,” U.S. Department of Defense, www.defense.gov/About/.
Major General Curtis LeMay: “General Curtis Emerson LeMay,” U.S. Air Force, http://www.af.mil/About-Us/Biographies/Display/Article/106462/general-curtis-emerson-lemay/.
“Whose imagination is not fired”: RAND Corporation, Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship (SM-11827), May 2, 1946, www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/special_memoranda/2006/SM11827part1.pdf.
rocket ultimately named the Viking: Mike Gruntman, Blazing the Trail: The Early History of Spacecraft and Rocketry (Reston, VA: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2004), p. 216.
“The U.S. Navy wanted no part”: Baker, “The University, Electrical Engineering and Space Travel.”
The U.S. Army was continuing: Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich, pp. 270–71.
Electronic navigation and anti-icing: Winston Groom, The Aviators, 434.
“one of the laziest men”: Quoted in Robert Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), p. 29.
“the most important thing in history”: James Mahaffey, Atomic Awakening: A New Look at the Future History of Nuclear Power (New York: Pegasus, 2009), pp. viii–ix.
stripping this authority from the military: Clark Clifford, Counsel to the President (New York: Anchor, 1992), p. 277.
the USSR lagged behind: Mieczkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment, p. 13.
a thrust yield of at least eight hundred thousand p
ounds: Erik Bergaust, Rocket City U.S.A. (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 14.
Soviet Union had detonated: Robert C. Albright, “Grave Senate Hears Soviet A-bomb News,” Washington Post, September 24, 1949, p. 1.
“months and even years”: United Press, “Indifference to Civil Defense Cited,” Washington Post, October 10, 1949, p. 11.
“onrushing tide of communism”: John F. Kennedy, John Fitzgerald Kennedy: A Compilation of Statements and Speeches Made During His Service in the United States Senate and House of Representatives (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1964), pp. 41–42.
“I never had the feeling”: Quoted in Shaw, JFK in the Senate, p. 26.
“current emotional heat wave”: Genevieve Reynolds, “Capitol Has Own Heat Wave, Attributed to John Kennedy,” Washington Post, May 22, 1949, p. 57.
“I knew Jack”: John D. Lane, oral history interviews, October 12 and December 6, 2006, Senate Historical Office, no. 2, p. 49, https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/OralHistory_LaneJohn.pdf (hereafter “Lane oral history interviews”).
Addison’s disease: Richard Lacayo, “How Sick Was J.F.K.?” Time, November 24, 2002, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,393754,00.html.
“Sometimes you read that [Jack] was a reluctant figure”: Quoted in Thomas Oliphant and Curtis Wilke, The Road to Camelot: Inside JFK’s Five-Year Campaign (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017), p. 8.
“at a tempo for peace”: Quoted in Ward, Dr. Space, p. 74.
being “too fantastic”: Halberstam, The Fifties, pp. 607–8.
“McMahon was home ill”: Lane oral history interviews, no. 2, p. 54.
“the hardest campaigner”: Quoted in Caro, The Passage of Power, p. 30.
“Kennedy told me later”: Lane oral history interviews, no. 1, p. 29.
courted by both political parties: Robert H. Ferrell, “Eisenhower Was a Democrat,” Kansas History 13, no. 3 (Autumn 1990): 135.
“to demand the abolition”: Robert C. Byrd, The Senate 1789–1989: Addresses on the History of the United States Senate (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1988), 1:606.
Saint Lawrence Seaway: Caro, The Passage of Power, 30.
a senator or journalist: Paul B. Fay, recorded interview with James A. Oesterle, November 11, 1970, p. 214, John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program, Kennedy Library.
“Every gun that is made”: Dwight Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace” speech, April 16, 1953, https://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/all_about_ike/speeches/chance_for_peace.pdf.
Eisenhower, in his postpresidential memoir: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 1956–1961; The White House Years (New York: Doubleday, 1965), pp. 207–9.
To put this into perspective: Mieczkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment, p. 40.
the Redstone would go on: Eugene M. Emme, Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1915–1960 (Columbus, OH: BiblioGov, 2012), p. 72.
“You should know how advertising”: Potter, The Earth Gazers, pp. 146–47.
“At the present time our engineering efforts”: Quoted in Roger D. Launius, The U.S. Space Program and American Society (Carlisle, MA: Discovery Enterprises, 1998), p. 16.
“In addition to the cogent scientific arguments”: Alan Dulles to Charles Erwin Wilson, January 29, 1955, CIA Library Reading Room, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0006513734.pdf.
Kennedy’s stature in the Senate: Oliphant and Wilke, The Road to Camelot, p. 2.
“This was the first time”: Caro, The Passage of Power, p. 50.
Soviet domination in ICBM development: Philip Nash, “Bear Any Burden? John F. Kennedy and Nuclear Weapons,” in Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy Since 1945, ed. John Lewis Gaddis et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 122.
Sixty-seven countries: Manu Saadia, “Is America Facing Another Sputnik Moment?” New Yorker, October 4, 2017.
“specifically ordered to forget”: “Space: Reach for the Stars,” Time, February 17, 1958, pp. 21–25.
6: SPUTNIK REVOLUTION
“Senator and Mrs. Kennedy”: Wernher von Braun, recorded interview by Walter D. Sohier and Eugene M. Emme, March 31, 1964, p. 1, John F. Kennedy Oral History Program, Kennedy Library.
“the accident occurred with an obsolescent type”: Ibid.
“The senator pointed at the close relationship”: Ibid., p. 2.
“I would raise a question”: Ibid.
“When I published my first space novel”: Neil McAleer, Arthur C. Clarke: An Authorized Biography (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1992), p. 215.
“The cost of continuing”: S. Everett Gleason, “Discussion at the 329th Meeting of the National Security Council, Wednesday, July 3, 1957,” NSC Records, DDE Presidential Papers, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas, July 5, 1957, p. 2.
the night of October 4, 1957: Dickson, Sputnik, p. 1.
Kremlin confirmed the stunning report: William J. Jorden, “Soviets Fire Earth Satellite into Space: 560 Miles High,” New York Times, October 5, 1957, p. 1.
three boldface lines: Ibid.
American Radio Relay League: Dickson, Sputnik, p. 13.
“second in importance”: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 5.
While Sputnik was newsworthy: Responses of twenty-two-year-old female and forty-year-old white male, File 87: Correspondence, Rhoda Metraux Papers, Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington, DC.
“In the pre-Sputnik days”: Rachel Carson to Dorothy Freeman, February 1, 1958, in Rachel Carson: Silent Spring and Other Writings on the Environment, ed. Sandra Steingraber (New York: Library of America, 2018), p. 374.
“Oh Little Sputnik”: Quoted in Burrows, This New Ocean, p. 192.
“In the Open West”: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963–69 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 272.
George Reedy, a high-powered Democratic strategist: George E. Reedy to Lyndon B. Johnson, October 17, 1957, Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, Texas.
“The Roman Empire controlled”: Ibid., pp. 275–76.
he rejected the idea: Craig Ryan, Sonic Wind: The Story of John Paul Stapp and How a Renegade Doctor Became the Fastest Man on Earth (New York: Liveright, 2015), p. 257.
the launch of Sputnik “spooked”: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), p. 5.
an official investigation to gauge: Kevin J. Fernlund, Lyndon B. Johnson and Modern America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009), p. 151.
“the age of Sputnik”: “Blue Key Banquet” (speech), University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, October 18, 1957, item JFKSEN-0898-018, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Pre-Presidential Papers, Senate Files: Speeches and the Press, Speech Files: 1953–1960, Kennedy Library.
“losing the satellite and missile race”: Christopher A. Preble, “Who Ever Believed in the ‘Missile Gap’? John F. Kennedy and the Politics of National Security,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 33, no. 4 (2003): 801–26.
British reporter informed von Braun: Neufeld, Von Braun, p. 311.
“suddenly been vaccinated”: Ibid., pp. 311–12.
“words tumbled over one another”: Thomas M. Coffey, Iron Eagle: The Turbulent Life of General Curtis LeMay (New York: Crown, 1986), p. 349.
“useless hunk” . . . “basketball game”: Wilson and Adams quoted in Halberstam, The Fifties, pp. 624–25.
“a brown star racing northward”: Bob Kealing, Kerouac in Florida: Where the Road Ends (Arbiter Press, 2011), p. 30.
a weightless environment: Dr. David Whitehouse, “First Dog in Space Died Within Hours,” BBC News, October 28, 2002.
“outstripped the leading capitalist country”: William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), p. 378.
“a battle more important”: Robert A. Divine, The Sputnik Challenge: Eisenhower’s Respo
nse to the Soviet State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. xv–xvi.
“a total politician”: Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David F. Powers, with Joe McCarthy, “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye”: Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), pp. 127–28.
“the solemn consequences”: “Kansas Democratic Club Banquet” (speech), Topeka, Kansas, November 6, 1957, item JFKSEN-0898-027, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Pre-Presidential Papers, Senate Files: Speeches and the Press, Speech Files: 1953–1960, Kennedy Library.
“It is now apparent”: Ibid.
“stood in so critical a position”: Associated Press, “Kennedy Assails U.S. Missile Lag,” New York Times, November 7, 1959, p. 16.
“go frantic”: Dwight Eisenhower, President’s New Conference, March 26, 1958, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas (hereafter “Eisenhower Library”).
“the race for advantage”: Hal Willard, “Kennedy Calls for Federal School Aid,” Washington Post, October 11, 1957, p. 1.
comparing American and Soviet performance: “Crisis in Education,” Life, March 24, 1958, p. 26.
“It’s the Americans’ turn”: “U.S. Turn Now, Bulganin Says,” New York Times, November 12, 1957, p. 27.
“It would have been better”: Philip Nash, The Other Missiles of October: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Jupiters, 1957–1963 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), p. 3.
“in a race” with the Kremlin: “John Foster Dulles to James C. Hagerty, October 8, 1957: ‘Draft Statements on the Soviet Satellite,’” October 5, 1957, John Foster Dulles Papers, Eisenhower Library, https://history.nasa.gov/sputnik/15.html. See also Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White House Years, vol. 2: Waging Peace: 1956–1961 (New York: Doubleday, 1965).
“Vanguard will never make it”: Quoted in Neufeld, Von Braun, p. 312.
reserved a late-January launch date: “Reach for the Stars,” Time, February 17, 1958, http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,862899-7,00.html.
“a confusing aura”: Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), p. 70.
von Braun adorned the covers: Time, February 17, 1958; Life, November 18, 1957.
“I cannot share”: “Letters,” Time, March 3, 1958, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,893837,00.html.
American Moonshot Page 53
