And yet they had virtually nothing to say about the human dimensions of the episode. In perspective that silence is deafening. The voice of the American Negro was still unheard. The word southerner meant white southerner. There was no term for the South’s blacks, and U.S. newspapers there and elsewhere seldom carried day-by-day news about them. The true meaning of the Howard Johnson episode was that a victim of racial discrimination had to be a cabinet member in a foreign country before the country’s conscience was stirred, and even then it regretted not the wrong done, but the damage to America’s image.
Black adults, bred to passivity, accepting the system because for so long there had been no alternative, turned inward as they always had, transmuting what should have been righteous anger into despair. For every American Negro who felt elation when the 101st Airborne triumphed in Arkansas there were dozens who feared—justifiably—the rage of aroused whites; who read of Judge Aaron and knew that there, but for the grace of God, went they. But their children reacted differently. Coming after the Montgomery bus boycott and the Supreme Court decisions outlawing discrimination, the confrontation at Central High confirmed the hope that the stereotypes of the past might be broken. It was in this sense, in the fall of 1957, that Little Rock left a profound impression on such young blacks as Stokely Carmichael, who was sixteen; Cassius Clay, fifteen; H. Rap Brown, thirteen; and Angela Davis, twelve.
***
In the first fortnight of November those who thought it their duty to cheer up America examined the bleak clouds that had been gathering, and in search of silver linings concentrated on repairing the havoc that had been wreaked upon U.S. morale by the sputniks. Von Braun told the press that the United States could launch a satellite with equipment already available. To the surprise of everyone, including those who had been working on it, Secretary McElroy announced that Vanguard was back on schedule. Emissaries from Time, dispatched to take soundings in 33 cities, found stout hearts in the president of the Kansas City Stock Yards Company, a Florida congressman, a group of bankers in Lincoln Nebraska, and a Los Angeles sales engineer (“Six weeks ago I’d walk into an aircraft plant and it would look as if everybody from the chief engineer to the draftsmen was taking a coffee break at once. When I made my rounds this week, the recreation rooms were empty. Everybody was working.”)
“Upward” was the inspirational title of a Reader’s Digest article by Beirne Lay Jr., who suggested that “a Supreme Being” was America’s silent ally in the space quest. By then the administration was responding to aroused public opinion. Rocket crews worked feverishly at Cape Canaveral, and at Nixon’s urging the President reluctantly agreed that he must do something more to brighten the country’s mood. After his appointment of Killian as special assistant for science and technology (to Ike’s annoyance the press changed this to “missile czar”) he named a Pentagon coordinator to crack down on interservice rivalries. Then he decided to deliver a series of five presidential TV talks. Much was expected of these, and the first went well. In it he displayed the four-foot nose cone of a retrieved Jupiter. He explained: “One difficult obstacle on the way to producing a long-range weapon is that of bringing a missile back from outer space without its burning up like a meteor…. This one here in my office is the nose cone of an experimental missile. It has been hundreds of miles into outer space and back. Here it is, completely intact.” It was his conviction, he said, that “as of today the overall military strength of the free world is distinctly greater than that of the Communist countries.” ICBMs were on their way. Meantime SAC’s B-52 jet bombers stood vigil.
The mail response was encouraging. His second chat was equally successful, and he set to work on a draft of the third, to be telecast from Cleveland. It was slow going; he had a lot on his mind. The seasonal load of the Presidency is always at its heaviest between Labor Day and Christmas. On December 16 he was scheduled to preside over a NATO meeting in Paris. Before then he had to complete his legislative program for the coming year and explain it to the congressional leadership. The massive federal budget for the coming fiscal year demanded presidential attention, the new State of the Union address would be due in January, and it now appeared that the country was entering a major recession.
Still, restoring the nation’s self-confidence was the most urgent issue before the President, and he was determined to complete the remaining TV talks. He didn’t do it. On November 25, 1957, for the third time in twenty-six months the President of the United States was in bed, prostrate, unable to meet the simplest of his obligations. Dr. Snyder diagnosed his illness as a “vascular spasm.” To the rest of the country it was a stroke.
***
That Monday before Thanksgiving, awaiting the arrival of Morocco’s King Mohammed V on a state visit, the President had stood bareheaded in a raw autumn wind at Washington National Airport. Back in his White House office, Ike said he felt a chill coming on. He was afraid he might be catching the flu. It was graver than that. Dictating to Ann Whitman, his secretary, he was dismayed to find that the words wouldn’t come. Near tears, she went to Sherman Adams. “The President has gone back to the house,” she said. “He tried to tell me something but he couldn’t express himself. Something seemed to have happened to him all of a sudden. And just now he gave up and went home. I can’t imagine what’s wrong with him.”
In the presidential apartment upstairs, Adams found the President in pajamas. Snyder, on his way, had telephoned instructions for his patient to go to bed. Eisenhower smiled at his assistant. He said, “I suppose you are dis—” He couldn’t finish it. Hesitating, he stammered: “…talking about the dinner tonight.” Frustrated and angry over his inability to talk about plans for entertaining the African king, he struggled to say, “There’s nothing the matter with me! I am perfectly all right!” But plainly he was having trouble forming words. As he continued to falter, he repeatedly came out with a word or syllable that had no relation to the word that was in his mind. In dismay Mrs. Eisenhower said to Adams, “We can’t let him go down there in this condition.” Adams agreed. He told the President that Nixon could take his place at the dinner. Ike shook his head violently. He managed to say, “If I cannot attend to my duties, I am simply going to give up this job. Now that is all there is to it.”
Then the doctor arrived. On hearing a single word from Eisenhower—“international,” which came out “internatt-nl”—Snyder reached his diagnosis. Ike’s stroke had affected the speech center of the brain. He was suffering from aphasia, an impairment of the power to use words as symbols of ideas. It was impossible to say whether the lesion would heal, and if it did, how quickly. The doctor called Walter Reed and Adams called Nixon, who agreed to preside at the banquet. For the time being nothing was said to the press. Hagerty was in Paris advancing the NATO trip. When word of the President’s illness reached him there, he wept.
But it was not an occasion for grief after all. Eisenhower’s recovery was both speedy and miraculous. His improvement was noted in a matter of hours. Even as a Hagerty assistant briefed reporters on the findings of four neurological specialists (“an occlusion” accompanied by “slight difficulty in speaking”), the President was back in the White House watching Wyatt Earp on television. The next morning he awoke at 7:40 A.M., showered, and made his own breakfast. He painted awhile, picking up where he had left off on a portrait of Britain’s Princess Anne. Feeling much better, he received his aides and the Moroccan king, worked on state papers for a half-hour, and signed or initialed a dozen of them. On Thursday, Thanksgiving, he went to church and shrugged off the helping hand of the pastor. In the Mansion he carved a forty-pound Thanksgiving turkey. Then, with Snyder as their house guest, the Eisenhowers drove to the Gettysburg farm. Saturday they watched the Army-Navy game. With Snyder’s approval, Ike planned to return to a full schedule on Monday and preside over a cabinet meeting. The doctor told the press, “The President’s progress continues to be excellent.”
At Cape Canaveral, Vanguard scientists looked forward to g
iving the convalescing President’s spirits a boost by putting an American sputnik in orbit on December 6. Everything seemed ready that Friday morning. The tall, three-stage, black-and-silver Navy Test Vehicle 3, or TV-3, stood in a spider-web gantry. Sunlight sparkled on a rime of frost crystals from its liquid oxygen fuel. TV-3 had been hurried along on orders from Washington; it was expected to throw into outer space a U.S. satellite the size of a small bowling ball—not much, to be sure, but a symbol of fine workmanship and American determination to enter and then win the space race. To reap a propaganda harvest the administration had made certain that the entire world knew what was coming. Although the Martin rocket had never been tested before, its performance was expected to be flawless. Pentagon PR men had kept 127 American and foreign journalists posted on latest developments, including details on the countdown, usually highly classified information. U.S. READY TO FIRE SATELLITE, said a New York Times head. The Pittsburgh Sun-Telegram predicted: MOON—MINUTES TO GO. The Associated Press distributed an advance story to member papers for release the moment the satellite went into orbit. In a thousand press rooms it was in type, ready to go:
Cape Canaveral, December 6 (AP)—The radio-signalling baby moon circling the earth is the U.S.’s reply to Russia that it too can stake a claim to the space frontier.
After several postponements because of valve leaks, Cape Canaveral hoisted the red ball signifying that Vanguard blast-off was imminent. Observation planes—two old World War II B-17s and a new Cessna—took off and rose swiftly to gain altitude. They looked down on a multitude of spectators. None were allowed within three miles of the launching pad, but enormous crowds were watching from the barriers there. Children had been dismissed from schools throughout Florida’s Canaveral peninsula; factories and offices had let their workers out; the streets, yards, and public beaches were dense with anticipative Americans awaiting the historic event.
At 10:42 A.M. the gantry was wheeled away; it was wheeled back fifty minutes later and then at last rolled away for good. The last cable connecting TV-3 to the disconnect pole dropped away at 1:44. Within seconds the first whiffs of white-hot vapor emerged from the rocket’s base. In Washington the voice of Vanguard’s deputy director, J. Paul Walsh, could be heard over an open phone. He called: “Zero!… Fire!… First ignition!…”
The massive rocket stirred and rose cumbersomely from the pad a foot, then two feet, then three. At that point, two seconds after launch time, it appeared to stand motionless, fixed in space. Suddenly Walsh cried, “Explosion!” A long orange flame spurted from beneath the doomed rocket, shot downward, and then surged upward in a billowing sheet of fire that enveloped TV-3’s right side. Overhead one of the B-17 pilots was shouting: “There it goes! There is an explosion! Black smoke is now over the entire area—We do not see the rocket that is carrying our satellite—The rocket may not have gotten off—There is a very large black smoke cloud—a very large black area around the location that the explosion occurred.”
The smoke was caused by streams of water and carbon dioxide from automatic extinguishers. As it drifted away the rocket’s nose cone could be seen leaning against the disconnect pole. Here and there fires continued to burn. The charred and mutilated tail jutted into the pad. One part of the assembly was intact: the coconut-sized satellite had been thrown clear and lay on the ground, sending steady signals on its assigned frequency, 108 megacycles.
It was a public relations disaster. The scientists protested in vain that this had only been a test. Having summoned the world’s attention in anticipation of its applause, the United States now had to endure its scorn and derision. Grinning Russians at the U.N. advised Americans to apply for Soviet technical assistance to backward nations. In London a calypso balladeer sang over the BBC, “Oh, from America comes the thought/Their own little Sputnik won’t go off,” and the wits of five continents rechristened TV-3 the flopnik, sputternik, goofnik, dudnik, oopsnik, puffnik, stallnik, and kaputnik. Lyndon Johnson wailed in the Senate, “How long, how long, oh God, how long will it take us to catch up with Russia’s two satellites?” Confronting a gloomy press conference in Washington, Vanguard’s Dr. Hagen had a one-word comment: “Nuts.” Editorial writers sought a new scapegoat—they settled on the public relations men, who joined the progressive educators in disgrace—and a professor in Pittsburgh said, “It’s our worst humiliation since Custer’s last stand.”
In the age of instant communications the debacle seemed to be worse than it was. The fallen rocket wasn’t the only one in the U.S. arsenal. Within a month, as soon as Cape Canaveral’s launch pad could be repaired, the Navy would be ready for another satellite shot. The very week of the TV-3 fiasco the Air Force successfully retested Thor and Atlas missiles, and by March the Army would have eight Jupiter-Cs ready for the space program, each of them larger and more dependable than the Vanguard. The President had ordered the Jupiters withheld from civilian scientists because of military testing’s absolute priority, but now he rescinded that order. Soon the people would forget the shame of December 6. The politicians would not forget, however. To them the risk of another such public roasting was unthinkable. From this point forward a succession of administrations would be committed to staying in the space race until it was won. No excuse for dropping out would be acceptable. Other calls upon the nation’s resources, whatever their urgency—and by the late 1960s the need for some of them would be desperate—would have to wait until the Stars and Stripes had been firmly planted on the moon.
Portrait of an American
THE EDSEL
Conceived in 1948, the car was meant to solve a problem, not to become one. Satisfied Ford owners who grew more prosperous were ignoring the firm’s Mercurys and trading up instead to Buicks, Pontiacs, and Oldsmobiles. “We have been growing customers for General Motors,” said a Ford executive. Six years later company planners began investing a quarter-billion dollars on a new medium-price ($2,400 to $4,000) automobile. They knew they had to sell at least 200,000 in the first year to make money, but they were confident they could do it.
Lacking a name, they called it the E-Car, the E standing for “Experimental.” Nothing was spared in its development. The mid-1950s were the salad days of motivational research, and among the advisers to the E-Car’s stylists was the Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research, which appraised the “personalities” of other medium-priced cars, concluding, among other things, that the Buick was the wife of a professional man and the Mercury was sexy. After poring over this data, one of the Dearborn executives wrote: “The most advantageous personality for the E-Car might Well be THE SMART CAR FOR THE YOUNGER EXECUTIVE OR PROFESSIONAL FAMILY ON ITS WAY UP,” and added in explanation, “On Its Way Up: ‘The E-Car has faith in you, son; we’ll help you make it!’”
On August 15, 1955, the corporation’s general staff, headed by Henry Ford II and Ernest R. Breech, witnessed the unveiling of a full-size clay model of the car, with tinfoil substituted for aluminum and chrome. They applauded. The stock market was booming that summer, and so was the medium-price market. Times seemed propitious for the E-Car. It already had the external features which were to become famous: the flaring gull-wing tail and the pinched-in oval radiator grille. Inside, it was to be what one designer called “the epitome of the push-button era.”
After the motivational people had turned up 6,000 possible names, all of them alphabetized and cross-referenced, Breech christened it the Edsel, after Henry II’s father, on a hunch. E-Day was set for September 4, 1957. On E minus 51 the first Edsels began rolling off assembly lines, but only a few people, all carefully screened, were allowed to see them. A tremendous aura of mystery was created by the car’s promoters. Ads showed it as a blur, or as a shapeless hulk beneath canvas. Edsel buildings were fitted with special locks that could be changed in fifteen minutes should a key fall into the hands of Chrysler or General Motors spies. In July word was leaked that a model had been conveyed in a closed truck to Hollywood, where Cascade Pictures photographed it
in a locked studio while armed guards patrolled outside. (“We took all the precautions we take for our AEC films,” a Cascade spokesman said.) Ford’s test track was encircled by barbed wire and camouflaged sentry boxes. In Dearborn telescopes kept watch on nearby roofs and hills for any competitors’ agents who might be lurking there.
Business Week called the launching of the Edsel the most expensive such venture in the history of commerce. The stakes were enormous. Ford’s Edsel division had its own plant, with 800 executives and 15,000 workers; 60 highly paid copywriters were turning out advertising copy, and nearly 1,200 auto dealers across the nation had surrendered profitable franchises for other makes to sell Edsels. They would become rich if it proved popular—and would lose their shirts if it failed.
In the last week of August Ford spent $90,000 on a three-day press conference at which 250 newsmen were shown the four main Edsel lines, which would be available in eighteen models. The affair was not an unqualified success. Daredevil drivers at the wheels of souped-up Edsels scared the daylights out of the reporters, and the music stands of a band hired for the occasion bore, in memory of Glenn Miller, the initials GM. These matters were slight but ominous. The new car appeared to be unlucky. Still, the public’s curiosity was undoubtedly aroused. By the weekend that followed E-Day, almost three million people had entered dealers’ showrooms to see what all the fuss was about. On E-Day itself, over 6,500 had bought Edsels. Dearborn was elated. If just one in fifteen of the remainder signed up, the car would finish its first year in the black.
It didn’t happen. For one thing, the golden age of the medium-price car had begun to wane. In July the stock market had broken sharply, signaling the onset of the 1957–58 recession; Automotive News reported that dealers were experiencing the second worst season for sales in the history of the industry. More important, on E plus 30—October 4, 1957, a date which will live in infamy at the Ford Motor Company—the Russians sent their first sputnik into orbit. Styles Bridges’s thundering rhetoric in the Senate was typical of the American reaction: “The time has clearly come to be less concerned about the depth of pile on the new broadloom rug or the height of the tailfin on the new car and to be more prepared to shed blood, sweat, and tears.” In this new climate of opinion Business Week called Dearborn’s latest spawn “a nightmare.” Consumer Reports said it represented “the many excesses” with which Detroit was “repulsing more and more potential car buyers,” and Time wrote that it was “a classic case of the wrong car for the wrong market at the wrong time” and “a prime example of the limitations of market research, with its ‘depth interviews’ and ‘motivational’ mumbo-jumbo.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 122
