Red Moon Rising

by Matthew Brzezinski

  In time, Lady Bird Johnson began extending invitations for the lonely, workaholic Georgian to join the Johnsons for Sunday brunches and holiday meals, and by 1957 a special bond had been forged between the two senators. That relationship would now come in handy.

  As rival Democrats battled over who could ring the alarm bells loudest, the orchestrated histrionics had their desired effect. Public reaction to Sputnik quickly shifted from blasé to terror-stricken. Everywhere around the country, people flocked to rooftops and held midnight vigils on their front lawns, hoping to catch a glimpse of the ominous orb whose signal was being blamed for a rash of mysterious garage door openings. (The Washington Post speculated that these were the result of interference from coded messages to Soviet spies.) Local radio stations fueled the paranoia by broadcasting Sputnik’s expected over-pass times, and it was not unusual to have entire blocks of people gazing anxiously skyward at 3:00 AM. Eventually, some 4 percent of the U.S. population would report seeing Sputnik with their own eyes. (What most actually saw was the one-hundred-foot-long R-7 rocket casing that Korolev had craftily outfitted with reflective prisms. It trailed some 600 miles behind the twenty-two-inch satellite, which could be viewed only with optical devices more sophisticated than the binoculars used by the average American.)

  Throughout the ruckus, Eisenhower remained resolutely silent. If the administration stayed calm, he was certain, the furor would pass. People would see that the sky was not falling in on their heads and would return to their normal routines. “Business as usual” was the message the White House chose to project. “We can’t always go changing our program in reaction to everything the Russians do,” Eisenhower told his cabinet. But as two, three, and then four days passed without any public comment from the president, the press grew irritable and impatient. Everyone else, it seemed, had pronounced on the subject of Sputnik; where did Ike stand? Was America really in danger? Did the Soviets in fact possess the ultimate weapon of mass destruction? Where was the leadership? Newspapers, especially in the South, which was still seething over Little Rock, demanded to know. “Ike Plays Golf, Hears the News,” grumbled the Birmingham News, while the Nashville Tennessean ran a cartoon of the president dismissing Sputnik from the putting green.

  Privately, Eisenhower’s aides were anything but dismissive, and there was growing concern that Ike’s purposeful silence was backfiring. “This was a place where Eisenhower went wrong,” his loyal staff secretary General Andrew J. Goodpaster conceded decades later. “His expression was that this was nothing we didn’t foresee or know about, but the American people until that moment had not realized the vulnerability that had now developed. That they could be reached by long range rockets, which could be nuclear armed. And our country, for the first time, was exposed to that kind of danger. And so, where he brushed it off as something that we had foreseen, it really created great anxiety, almost panic within the United States.”

  Eisenhower’s background as a professional soldier may have been partly responsible for his empathy deficit. As a military man, the president was accustomed to calculating casualties and collateral damage. From his experiences in World War II, he knew that in modern combat there was no longer any such thing as noncombatants; the United States had long targeted Russian cities, and it was not that shocking that the Soviet Union did the same. As a seasoned field commander, Eisenhower also knew that the ICBM, as a weapon, was still in its infancy, much like the airplane before World War I, and that years would pass before it became a real threat that could alter the balance of power.

  The president and the military men who served in his immediate circle were not attuned to the psychological effects of Sputnik as a symbol of nuclear Armageddon. “I can’t understand,” Eisenhower told Good-paster, “why the American people have got so worked up over this thing. It’s certainly not going to drop on their heads.”

  Others in the administration, however, were better equipped to appreciate the national trauma. Vice President Nixon, as a career politician with limited military experience, instinctively grasped that Sputnik could not be shrugged off lightly as a “stunt.” It was a mistake, he argued privately (and later in his memoirs), not to acknowledge it as a serious affront to American supremacy; and he would be the first senior administration official to say so publicly, during a speech in San Francisco on October 15. The White House press secretary Jim Hagerty was also deeply worried by the media onslaught Sputnik had generated. His boss was taking a lot of flak and needed to devise a strategy to disarm his critics. Especially troublesome was the negative publicity being stirred up by an Associated Press story that the army had been prevented from launching a satellite in 1956. The leak apparently infuriated Eisenhower and was the subject of a damage-control session he held with his military and science advisers at 8:30 AM on Tuesday, October 8. Donald Quarles took the brunt of Eisenhower’s anger. “There was no doubt,” Quarles admitted, “that the Redstone, had it been used, could have placed a satellite in orbit many months ago,” but he was quick to spread the blame, adding that “the [Pentagon] Science Advisory Committee had felt that it was better to have the earth satellite proceed separately from military development. One reason was to stress the peaceful character of the effort.”

  Ike was not pleased. “When this information reaches the Congress,” he observed, frowning, “they are bound to ask questions.”

  Eisenhower may have come to politics late in life, but he was hardly naive enough to hope that the Democrats would not try to pin the blame on him. And Quarles, as Charlie Wilson’s unenthusiastic point man on satellites, had been the ranking administration official responsible for turning down Medaris’s repeated requests to convert the Redstone-based Jupiter C into a launch vehicle. The deputy defense secretary, though, tried to put a positive spin on the potential public relations disaster. “The Russians,” he said in a feeble attempt to make the news seem welcoming, “have in fact done us a good turn, unintentionally, in establishing the concept of freedom of international space.”

  Eisenhower knew he could not tell the American people that there was a silver lining to the Soviet breakthrough—that the United States would be able to phase out the secret U-2 overflights and spy on the USSR from space without violating international laws. Still, he had to say something to mollify the public, and at Hagerty’s urging he finally agreed to hold a press conference the next day.

  • • •

  When Eisenhower walked into conference room 474 of the Old Executive Office Building at precisely 10:31 AM on Wednesday, October 9, he was greeted by one of the most hostile press corps the president had ever faced. Hagerty, anticipating angry questions about why the army had not been permitted to use a loaded orbital stage during the Jupiter C trials, had prepared a two-page statement that was distributed shortly before the president’s arrival. “The rocketry employed by our Naval Research Laboratory for launching our Vanguard,” it explained, “has been deliberately separated from our ballistic missile efforts in order, first, to accent the scientific purposes of the satellite and, second, to avoid interference with top priority missile programs. Merging of this scientific effort with military programs could have produced an orbiting United States satellite before now, but to the detriment of scientific goals and military progress. Our satellite program,” the statement concluded, “has never been conducted as a race with other countries.”

  The White House press corps was not pleased. “Mr. President,” demanded Merriman Smith of United Press International, “Russia has launched an earth satellite. They also claim to have had a successful firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile, none of which this country has. I ask you sir, what are you going do about it?”

  Eisenhower was not accustomed to this sort of treatment, and he appeared surprised by the ferocity of the question. Photographs show him scowling, eyebrows arched, leaning across the microphone, pale in a dark tie and charcoal three-piece suit. The president had always enjoyed a friendly and jocular relationship with the men an
d women who covered him, and often played a game of making his press conferences as obtuse and unintelligible as possible to avoid delicate topics. This time, though, the assembled journalists were in no mood for meandering answers.

  Eisenhower delivered a lengthy response to Smith’s question that reiterated America’s intention to put up a satellite as part of its IGY efforts but offered little concrete evidence of a new plan of action or any juicy sound bites. Charles von Freed of CBS was not satisfied. “Mr. President,” he said, “Khrushchev claims we are now entering a period when conventional planes, bombers and fighters will be confined to museums because they are outmoded by the missiles which Russia claims she has perfected. Khrushchev’s remarks would seem to indicate he wants us to believe our Strategic Air Command is now outmoded. Do you believe that SAC is outmoded?”

  “No,” Eisenhower shot back emphatically. The process, he explained, would be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and would take twenty years.

  May Craig of the Portland Press Herald kept up the pressure. “Mr. President, you have spoken of the scientific aspects of the satellite. Do you think it has immense significance in surveillance of other countries?”

  “Not at this time,” Eisenhower obfuscated, not mentioning that just the day before he had grilled Donald Quarles on the progress of the air force’s lagging space reconnaissance program. “I think that period is a long ways off when you consider that even now, and apparently they have, the Russians, under a dictatorial society, where they have some of the finest scientists in the world, who have for many years been working on it, apparently from what they say they have put one small ball in the air.”

  This was the sound bite that everyone had been waiting for. Eisenhower’s dismissive “one small ball” would grace hundreds of headlines in the next day’s newspapers, reinforcing the impression that the president of the United States was at a loss as to why his nation was so traumatized. Pleased, the reporters pressed on. “Mr. President,” the Chicago Tribune correspondent queried, smelling blood, “considering what we know about Russia’s progress in the field of missiles, are you satisfied with our own progress in that field, or do you feel there have been unnecessary delays in our development of missiles?”

  This was precisely the type of loaded question that Richard Nixon had predicted during the NSC meeting two years before, when he had argued with Quarles that the administration had to be seen as doing everything in its power to move forward with the new weapons systems. Eisenhower had not attended that meeting, and now he seemed hesitant. “I can’t say there has been unnecessary delay. I know that from time to time I came here and got into the thing earnestly,” the president started to say, but then abruptly changed tack. “We have done everything I can think of… I can say this: I wish we were further ahead and knew more as to the accuracy and to the erosion and to the heat resistant qualities of metals and all the other things we have to know about. I wish we knew more about it at this moment.”

  “Is it a correct interpretation of what you said about your satisfaction with the missile program as separate from the satellite program,” the Washington Post reporter followed up, “that you have no plans to take any steps to combine the various government units which are involved in this program and which give certainly the public appearance of a great deal of service rivalry, with some reason to feel that this is why we seem to be lagging behind the Soviets?”

  “First of all, I didn’t say I was satisfied,” Eisenhower replied testily. “I said I don’t know what we could have done better.”

  More probing questions followed in the same cutthroat vein. Why did Charlie Wilson, the day before, on his last day in office, say he doubted the Soviet Union had an ICBM? Did the sudden cancellation of a state visit by Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov have anything to with Sputnik? Was it true that the army was being prevented from launching a satellite immediately? Would the United States launch a satellite as heavy as Sputnik?

  Finally, NBC’s Hazel Markel cut to the chase: “Mr. President, in light of the great faith which the American people have in your military knowledge and leadership, are you saying at this time that with the Russian satellite whirling about the world, you are not more concerned nor overly concerned about our nation’s security?”

  Eisenhower’s measured response delved into the difficulties of missile accuracy and the still relatively primitive state of guidance systems. But the details were lost on the journalists. His answer would be pared down on the evening news to a single flippant sentence fragment: “Not one iota.”

  • • •

  If the president’s news conference had been intended to pacify the press, it had the opposite effect. Instead of reassuring the public with his trademark calm and commanding demeanor, Ike’s performance was judged to have been too remote, too divorced from the anxiety sweeping the nation. “A fumbling apologia,” snipped one critic. “A Crisis in Leadership,” declared Time, noting that American voters wanted a strong leader, unfazed by crisis. But they also needed someone to understand and address their fears. By dismissing Sputnik as “a small ball” without military implications, the man Americans trusted most to defend them seemed oblivious to the danger that millions now saw lurking in the night sky. Ike was correct that in itself the Soviet satellite posed no danger, but he failed to acknowledge that it represented a potential threat. Instead of projecting confidence, he was accused of being out of touch with reality, asleep at the wheel. The president must “be in some kind of partial retirement,” complained the hugely influential syndicated columnist Walter Lippmann. “He is not leading the country,” said the usually supportive New York Times columnist Arthur Krock. The Washington Evening Star was even less charitable, comparing Eisenhower’s subdued reaction to that of someone under the effects of mind-numbing sedatives. Only the conservative US News & World Report rallied behind the president, calling his refusal to be cowed “courageous statesmanship.”

  In Congress, delighted Democrats heaped scorn on the administration’s refusal to recognize or respond to the Soviet challenge. They accused Eisenhower of “penny-pinching” on missiles, of “complacency” on satellites, “lack of vision” on both, and “incredible stupidity,” in general. Republican lawmakers, sensing the shifting tide in public opinion, toned down their defense of the White House and prepared to weather the storm. As a Republican congressman confessed, “No greater opportunity will ever be present for a Democratic Congress to harass a Republican administration, and everyone involved on either side knows it.”

  No one on Capitol Hill was more keenly aware of this than Lyndon Johnson. His chief strategist, a wily former wire-service reporter by the name of George Reedy, penned out the possibilities. “The issue of [Sputnik], if properly handled,” Reedy wrote in a sweeping memo, “would blast the Republicans out of the water, unify the Democratic Party, and elect you President.” Sputnik, he added, was just the ticket the Democrats needed to supplant integration as the major campaign issue in the upcoming midterm and presidential campaigns. The disgrace of Little Rock and the continued opposition by Dixiecrats to integration were threatening to split the party and were likely to prove costly at the polls. Sputnik, argued Reedy, presented a unique opportunity “to find another issue, which is even more potent. Otherwise the Democratic future is bleak.”

  National security was that issue, and now Johnson began maneuvering to place himself at its center, to batter Eisenhower, and to elbow Symington aside. Johnson was no stranger to matters of defense. He had first vaulted to national prominence during the 1950 hearings by the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Preparedness, which had investigated America’s missteps early in the Korean conflict. That inquest had established the Texan as a man to watch, who skillfully deflected Republican criticism of President Truman. That Truman himself had ridden the chairmanship of the very same subcommittee during World War II to the vice presidential nomination and ultimately to the presidency had not been lost on Johnson, who now, seven years later, bega
n lobbying his mentor Richard Russell to convene Preparedness hearings instead of holding an Air Power inquest.

  Johnson started working his legislative magic, calling in favors and swapping promises. Hushed conferences were held in corridors and cloakrooms; telephone calls were placed to the right people. Elbows were squeezed; shoulders were patted. Winks and nods were exchanged on the Senate floor, as deals were brokered over power breakfasts and intimate dinners at the Mayflower Hotel. It was the famous Johnson Treatment, and no one could withstand it for long. “Its velocity was breathtaking,” in the description of Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. “Its tone could be supplication, accusation, cajolery, exuberance, scorn, tears, complaint, the hint of threat. He moved in close, his face a scant millimeter from his target, his eyes widening and narrowing, his eyebrows rising and falling. From his pockets poured clippings, memos, and statistics. Mimicry, humor, and the genius analogy made ‘The Treatment’ an almost hypnotic experience and rendered the target stunned and helpless.”