Red Moon Rising

by Matthew Brzezinski

  This famous quote would set the tone for Wilson’s contentious relationship with the press, which delighted in reporting that Engine Charlie suffered from terminal “foot-in-mouth disease,” an affliction stemming from an excess of confidence and wealth. Blunt to the point of profanity, Wilson had no reservations about expressing his views. Congress was a “dung hill”; Democrats were “kennel dogs” that yelped helplessly while waiting to be fed; the National Guard was a “draft-dodging” refuge for cowards that needed to be disbanded; basic research and development was a wasteful scientific boondoggle since it was pointless to “worry about what makes the grass green or why fried potatoes turn brown.” His pronouncements on subjects as far ranging as civil rights and agriculture astounded the press and often drove the mild-mannered Eisenhower crazy. “Damn it, how in the hell did a man as shallow as Charlie Wilson ever get to be head of General Motors?” Ike once exploded.

  But the president stuck by his outspoken defense chief because military spending was out of control and Engine Charlie, for all his lack of tact, was a ruthless cost cutter. “In his field, he is a competent man,” Eisenhower wrote in his diary, shortly after appointing Wilson. Engine Charlie reciprocated by firing forty thousand Pentagon civilian employees in his first few weeks on the job, and by 1956 he had slashed $11 billion from bloated defense budgets. Despite the cuts, military spending still ate up more than half the federal budget, threatening Ike’s Great Equation: the delicate balance between a strong economy and a “sufficient” fighting force to best guarantee national security. Engine Charlie’s ongoing brief was to locate more fat that could be trimmed, and his rough chopping guidelines were outlined in the New Look Defense Policy—National Security Council document NSC 162/2—that established where America got the biggest bang for its defense buck. Nuclear and bomber programs were inviolate under the New Look doctrine, which rested almost entirely on the buildup of Secretary of State Dulles’s “massive retaliatory capabilities.” The air force’s Strategic Air Command, as the primary instrument of the nuclear deterrent, was off-limits. Everything else in the military kitty was subject to cutbacks, as General Medaris was about to discover.

  • • •

  Bruce Medaris and Charlie Wilson, by all measures, should have gotten along famously. Both hailed from Ohio, from similarly hardscrabble small industrial towns. They were both practicing Episcopalians, with equally dim views of big government and bureaucracy. Each spoke his mind freely, to his own self-detriment, and Wilson was an abrasive match for Medaris. The two even shared an automotive background. Medaris had worked for the General Motors Export Corporation in South America and had owned a car dealership in Cincinnati before opting for a military career. (He sold Chryslers, but Engine Charlie didn’t need to know about that.)

  With so much common ground, and ample stores of the salted nuts the defense secretary was said to adore, Medaris thought ABMA well prepared for the inspection tour. And the visit started out promisingly enough. Arriving in Huntsville, Wilson was accompanied by the secretaries of the army and navy, and by General James Gavin, the chief of Army Research and Development, along with several other two- and three-star generals. No air force officials were present in the delegation, owing to the archrivalry that had sprung up as a result of the New Look doctrine, though both ABMA and the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division in Los Angeles had recently exchanged liaison officers—“ambassadors to unfriendly nations,” as Medaris wryly described the envoys.

  Wilson asked few questions as he toured ABMA facilities at the Redstone Arsenal, viewing the metallurgical and chemical laboratories in buildings 111 and 112; the new static firing stands, where rocket engines were strapped to twin towers and fired at full blast; and the supersonic wind tunnels. Everything had been built for less than $40 million, and Medaris was proud of what von Braun had achieved on a shoestring budget. Inside the main production plant, a hangar where rockets were assembled, von Braun himself showed off the latest batch of his Redstones, America’s biggest operational missiles.

  Work on the Redstones had begun under the Truman administration, when another automotive industry giant, K. T. Keller, simultaneously served as chairman of the board of the Chrysler Corporation and the Defense Department’s director of the Office for Guided Missiles. The Redstone was a heavy-lift tactical missile capable of flinging a 3,500-pound nuclear warhead 200 miles downrange. Essentially a more powerful and advanced version of the V-2, it incorporated a slew of innovations such as the expanded use of lightweight aluminum alloys, transistors, signal-activated flight steering, and a Rocketdyne engine with 50 percent more thrust. Thirty-seven of the rockets had been built: sixteen in-house at Huntsville and the rest outsourced to Chrysler to “speed production.”

  Chrysler was also slated to be the prime assembly contractor on the Redstone’s successor, the 1,500-mile-range Jupiter missile. Jupiter was the army’s bold gamble, the reason ABMA had been created and Medaris dispatched to Huntsville. The air force was already developing a nearly identical midrange missile, the Thor, and had been given sole jurisdiction over the intercontinental arena, with the proposed Atlas ICBM. The programs, fortunately for Medaris, were still in their infancy because America had entered the missile sweepstakes so late in the game. The Pentagon brass had felt no need to rush ahead with expensive big rockets because of America’s overwhelming advantage in bombers and the overseas bases that placed the Soviet Union within easy reach. As Eisenhower himself noted, the United States already had the proven capacity “to inflict very great, even decisive, damage” on Russia. “The guided missile is, therefore, merely another, or auxiliary, method of delivering the kind of destruction” that Washington already possessed. Besides, Eisenhower argued, he wanted no part in a costly new arms race that would only raise the destructive stakes and plunge the treasury into further debt. “The world in arms is not spending money alone,” he had said in 1953, in what was probably the most eloquent speech of his entire presidency.

  It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than sixty cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of sixty thousand population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete highway.

  With 42,000 miles to pave in the massive Interstate Highway System he was proposing, Ike had no interest in trading missiles for schools or bridges, and with little strategic or political incentive to hurry, the air force had spent a mere $14 million developing its ICBM by 1954. Missiles might have languished on the back burner had it not been for the frightening intelligence reports that began trickling in from Moscow the following year. A panel of leading technology experts at the Office of Defense Mobilization led by James Killian, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, issued a dire warning that unless the United States made immediate and significant strides in missile development, it risked falling hopelessly behind the Soviet Union. The Killian report raised enough alarm that the Eisenhower administration increased missile spending to $550 million in 1955, which still represented a marginal 1 percent of the military budget. That figure was doubled to $1.2 billion in 1956, but that was still far below the $7.5 billion earmarked for beefing up the bomber fleet that year, and was a source of contention within the administration.

  Did the accelerated spending “go far enough”? asked Vice President Richard Nixon at a September 8, 1955, meeting of the National Security Council, during which increased missile development was discussed. There could be political repercussions, the vice president worried, if the administration was not seen as doing everything in its power to close the Soviet lead.

  “For my conservative blood, it’s enough,” said Assistant Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles, who also served as secretary of the air force. Quarles was Wilson’s closest confidant and protégé, his principal hatchet man. Diminutive, icy, and unfailingly polite, famous for subsisting on seemingly
nothing more than cup after cup of steaming hot water, Quarles could afford to cut off the vice president. Nixon was in no position to argue, since Eisenhower had still not decided whether he would ask him to stay on for the 1956 reelection campaign. For close to a year, the young vice president would suffer in limbo, as Ike pointedly refused to rule on his fate, dodging reporters’ questions with a humiliating persistency.

  Nixon had largely been brought on board the Republican ticket in 1952 because of his youth; just thirty-nine years old, with jet-black hair and a jutting jaw, he projected a vigorous and combative air that counterbalanced Ike’s gentle and grandfatherly pate. He had been the youngest member of the Senate, and his selection as Ike’s running mate had inspired another youthful legislator, Representative John F. Kennedy, to write a congratulatory note: “I was always convinced that you would move ahead to the top—but I never thought it would come this quickly.” Nixon’s rise had indeed been meteoric. But perhaps because of the generation gap, he had never hit it off with Eisenhower, who worried about “his lack of maturity.”

  “You’re my boy,” the president had exclaimed cheerily upon their first meeting, thus setting the patronizing tone of their unequal union.

  With his future uncertain, Nixon bit his tongue as Quarles explained that “the manned aircraft was superior to the ICBM, both in terms of accuracy and weight of destructive force,” and said nothing when the assistant secretary closed the discussion by warning that he was opposed “to providing any stronger basis than already existed for individuals… who wanted another billion or so” for missile programs. Quarles understood his brief, even if the impetuous vice president apparently didn’t. The administration was supposed to slash spending, not encourage it.

  Medaris, of course, had not been privy to any of this but was surprised at how uncharacteristically quiet Wilson had been throughout the inspection tour. It was not until the delegation returned to the renovated guesthouse that Engine Charlie grew genuinely animated. “Mr. Wilson started to ask some odd questions,” Medaris recalled. “What did it cost to paint those logs so that they would look so pretty?” the defense secretary wanted to know. “He then began asking all sorts of questions about the cost of the quarters, how much money we had put into them, and so on,” Medaris said.

  Within days of Wilson’s return to Washington, Medaris found himself on the receiving end of a series of increasingly persistent queries from the Comptroller’s Office at the Pentagon about the farmhouse expenditure.

  And so, while Nikita Khrushchev was throwing all his available resources into building the world’s first ICBM, the army’s top missile commander was kept busy filling out financial spreadsheets in order to prove that the renovation of ABMA’s guesthouse would provide taxpayers with a 9 percent return on investment over the comparative cost of renting hotel rooms for visiting dignitaries. For Medaris, “it was the first of many shocks to come.”

  • • •

  While Medaris fended off Wilson’s accountants, more bad news for ABMA brewed in Washington. Alarming stories began appearing in the American press of an allegedly huge ramp-up of Soviet heavy bomber production. The USSR, it seemed, was building a fleet of long-range Bisons and Bears at a dramatic rate and would soon be able to launch a first strike against the United States. It was not clear where the media were getting their anonymously sourced information, but the army naturally suspected the air force. The Democrats in Congress, however, were taking the warnings seriously.

  Nineteen fifty-six was, after all, an election year, and any chance to attack Eisenhower for being soft on national security was not to be passed up. Despite his soaring approval ratings, which hovered around 70 percent, the president was vulnerable. He had suffered a heart attack while on vacation in Colorado the previous September, two weeks after the missile meeting in which Nixon had been overruled, and the administration had plunged into turmoil during his lengthy convalescence. Ike’s fiercely protective gatekeepers, led by his chief of staff, Sherman Adams (the “Abominable No-Go Man,” as he was referred to by jealous colleagues around the White House), restricted all access to the recovering leader. Nixon was not permitted to see him and, in a further blow to his already precarious position, was completely bypassed in the temporary succession of presidential duties. John Foster Dulles, it was decided, would speak for the administration during Eisenhower’s incapacitation; the vice president was judged too unseasoned for such an important role. When Nixon did finally see the president, it was only to be told that he should consider taking a lesser cabinet position to get executive experience.

  If Nixon chafed at the demotion, he did so gracefully and privately, maintaining a publicly supportive face that earned praise from Ike’s inner circle. Eisenhower, though, continued to have misgivings, not only about the competence of his inexperienced vice president but also about his own ability to withstand a grueling reelection campaign and a second four-year term. For four months Ike debated whether to run again, and his memoirs and diaries are filled with the wrenching anguish of that difficult decision. He had never sought high office in the first place and was one of the few American leaders who had never truly aspired to be president. Twice, he had turned down the Republican Party’s entreaties to enter the political fray, and in 1952 a write-in campaign had been started without his participation. Sherman Adams, then the governor of New Hampshire, entered Ike’s name in his state’s primary, and New York governor Thomas Dewey started an Eisenhower-for-president nomination campaign without the candidate. In the end, duty, honor, and a sense of obligation had finally persuaded the war hero to run in 1952, and he had done so with a reluctance that voters perceived as genuine patriotism. Ike’s charm was that he was not a career politician but a professional soldier conscripted to serve his country one more time. And now, felled by illness and the creep of old age, when he would much rather retire to his beloved farm in Gettysburg and play golf, he was being asked to do it again. On February 27, 1956—the very day Korolev pitched Khrushchev the idea of using the new ICBM to launch a satellite—Eisenhower, with the utmost reluctance, publicly announced his intention to seek a second term. He did not name Nixon as his running mate, however, telling reporters, “I will never answer another question on this subject until after August,” the date of the Republican National Convention in San Francisco.

  The Democrats seized on this uncertainty and ambivalence, this chink in the president’s otherwise formidable political armor. “Every piece of scientific evidence that we have indicates that a Republican victory would mean that Richard Nixon would probably be President within the next four years,” said Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic challenger, in an effort to scare voters.

  National security was another way of chipping away at Ike’s popularity. After all, Eisenhower had ended the twenty-year Republican White House drought in 1952 by lambasting Truman’s weak defense record and promising to keep the country safe from the perfidious threat of global communism. Now he could be hoisted by his own petard. With the coming presidential polls firmly in mind, Democratic senators duly convened “Air Power” hearings on April 16, 1956, to look into the politically promising prospect of what journalists had dubbed the “bomber gap.”

  Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri gaveled open the hearings. Unlike Eisenhower, Symington did harbor presidential aspirations. Tall, and handsome (“an ex-playboy,” Time informed its readers), the freshman senator had first garnered national attention in 1954 by taking on Senator Joseph McCarthy, the rabble-rousing Red-baiter whose communist witch hunts had ruined thousands of lives and pitched the United States into a frenzy of right-wing paranoia. “You said something about being afraid,” Symington declared, staring down McCarthy during televised hearings. “Let me tell you, Senator, that I’m not afraid of you. I will meet you anytime, anywhere.”

  The showdown had marked the fifty-three-year-old Symington as a rising star within the Democratic ranks, perhaps too new on the political scene to win the party’s 1956 nomination but a
serious contender for 1960. “He is a formidable-looking figure,” Time noted approvingly, “sprawling in his red leather chair, a spectacular executive when transacting business over the telephone. He is abrasive with foot-dragging underlings. He incessantly chomps gum.”

  Symington, a Yale graduate and the wealthy scion of a patrician political dynasty from New Hampshire, had served as the first secretary of the air force under Truman. For him, the Air Power hearings were not merely a cynical vehicle for self-promotion. He had a genuine and sentimental attachment to the service he had helped found. “We feel, with deep conviction, that the destiny of the United States rests on the continued development of our Air Force,” he declared. “The question of whether we shall have adequate American air power may be, in short, the question of survival.”

  Thus prepped, the senators then heard from a parade of air force and intelligence officials who each offered flimsy but frightening testimony about Soviet heavy bomber production forecasts. By late 1958, they warned, the USSR would have four hundred Bisons and three hundred Bears capable of striking the American heartland. The armada could disrupt the balance of power and lead to a situation where the Soviet Union could actually overtake the United States in intercontinental bomber capabilities. General LeMay, the star witness, reminded congressional leaders that manned strategic bombers were still the weapon of choice: “We believe that in the future the situation will remain the same as it has in the past, and that is that a bomber force well-equipped, determined, well-trained, will penetrate any defense system that can be devised.”