Red Moon Rising

by Matthew Brzezinski

The Eisenhower administration could not easily brush off the second, more introspective, wave of unease brought on by another Soviet triumph. The first Sputnik had made Americans afraid for their lives; Sputnik II made them question the American way of life. The country was losing faith in itself and in the administration, John Foster Dulles worried. “From the echoes of the satellite have come to me and others from many sections of the country a strong sentiment that the President alone can give the leadership which will restore a feeling of reasonable security and faith in the Administration,” one of his aides wrote in a memo that the secretary of state circulated to White House staff. “This leads on every side to the desirability of finding a suitable date, in the not too distant future, to make a strong fighting speech.”

  Ike liked the idea. There was nothing wrong with America, he believed; it was the greatest, most powerful nation on earth. People had simply caught a case of the jitters and needed a little reassurance. Eisenhower decided to deliver a series of morale-boosting addresses modeled after Franklin Roosevelt’s famous Fireside Chats, what White House aides dubbed Operation Confidence, or “Chin Up” speeches, as they became known.

  The first of the televised talks occurred on November 7, four days after Sputnik II, and on the same day that newspapers across the country carried another saber-rattling interview with Khrushchev. “The fact that we were able to launch the first Sputnik, and then, a month later, launch a second shows that we can launch ten, even twenty satellites tomorrow,” the Soviet leader boasted, neglecting to mention that Korolev had used up his last R-7. “The satellite is the intercontinental ballistic missile with a different warhead. We can change that warhead from a bomb to a scientific instrument,” he added, in case anyone missed the point.

  In his speech that evening, Eisenhower issued his retort. “The United States can practically annihilate the war-making capabilities of any other nation,” he said, listing the country’s lethal arsenal of long-range bombers, fleets of submarines parked under the polar ice cap, and the powerful rockets of its own that were being developed. “We are well ahead of the Soviets in the nuclear field both in quantity and in quality,” Ike declared. “We intend to stay ahead.”

  “Although the Soviets are quite likely ahead in some missile and special areas, and are obviously ahead of us in satellite development,” he conceded, “as of today, the overall strength of the Free World is distinctly greater than that of Communist countries.”

  As the president spoke, the camera panned back, revealing first his Oval Office desk, where a small brass plaque displayed the motto GENTLE IN MANNER, STRONG IN DEED, and then a strange white triangular object on the carpet at his feet. It was a nose cone from one of Wernher von Braun’s Jupiter C test rockets, and Eisenhower informed viewers that it had been shot into outer space during successful missile reentry tests. This was evidence, he said, that America was forging ahead with its own space and rocket programs, and that the situation was well in hand. “It misses the whole point to say that we must now increase our expenditures on all kinds of military hardware and defense,” the president warned. “Certainly, we should feel a high sense of urgency. But this does not mean that we should mount our charger and try to ride off in all directions at once. We cannot on an unlimited scale have both what we must have and what we would like to have. We can have both a sound defense and the sound economy on which it rests—if we set our priorities and stick to them.”

  The message was clear: America was safe and strong, and no panicked deluge of defense dollars should be expected from the White House anytime soon. Eisenhower did, however, offer one concession to the new post-Sputnik reality: “I am appointing Dr. James Killian, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as special assistant to the president for science and technology, a new post,” he said, outlining his major initiative to counter the Soviet threat.

  • • •

  Among the millions of viewers that evening who had expected to hear the announcement of some major American initiative, General Bruce Medaris watched the address with an equal mix of bewilderment and frustration. Killian—that was it? No new money? No crash programs? No special national priority designations? The general was flabbergasted. Killian, to be sure, was widely respected in the rocket community. As head of the Technology Capabilities Panel that had recommended fast-tracking missiles in 1954, he had been the driving force behind America’s belated efforts to compete with the Soviets. But the appointment of a lone academic whom the New York Times described as “somewhat cherubic” and “as disarmingly pleasant as a successful hotel manager,” hardly evened the score with two Sputniks. Besides, in his new role as a presidential adviser, Killian would not even be in charge of streamlining the various lagging missile efforts. That job was given to an oil company executive with no rocket expertise or technical background.

  Damn it, Medaris cursed, pacing around the grand piano that dominated the living room of his ranch house on Squirrel Hill, an official Redstone Arsenal residence that overlooked the Officers’ Club, where he had taken Secretary McElroy on “Sputnik Night,” as October 4 was now known at ABMA.

  Since then no order had come from the new defense secretary authorizing a satellite launch, and Medaris’s nerves were shot. He prayed nightly and slept fitfully, driving his Jaguar at breakneck speeds during the day to relieve the tension. But nothing helped. By early November, he could no longer hide his rogue operation from his immediate superior, Army R&D boss James Gavin. “Hang on tight, and I will support you,” Gavin had sympathetically urged. “I’m doing the best I can to get a decision.”

  Gavin, like Medaris, had had enough of Pentagon politics. In fact, he was seriously contemplating quitting the army, following in the foot-steps of General Trevor Gardner, the Pentagon’s chief missile overseer, who had resigned that summer to protest Donald Quarles’s budget cuts. Gavin already had one foot out the door and didn’t have much to lose. He was only too happy to rattle some cages on his way out.

  At least Medaris now had an accomplice, a coconspirator to watch his back. That gave him some hope. With the humiliation of another Sputnik, he had reasoned, there was no way the Eisenhower administration could continue sitting on the sidelines. Surely ABMA would get its shot now. But not only had the president made no such announcement during his “Chin Up” speech, he had not even mentioned that it was ABMA that had fired the nose cone he had paraded before viewers. “So far as the public could judge, a faceless and nameless group” had done it, Medaris fumed, complaining of the “bitter experience of total anonymity,” a state all too familiar to Sergei Korolev.

  Medaris was not the only one at ABMA battling frustration. Von Braun was also complaining loudly, only he was doing it publicly, which was not helping the army’s case. Gavin’s boss, General Lemnitzer, made this clear in a telephone call to Medaris. “The time for talking has stopped,” he ordered. Von Braun’s outbursts were “causing concern in high places.”

  The Disney star, in fact, was venting his opinions with such vitriol that the Pentagon had to intercede with the head of the Associated Press to censor some of his more biting remarks, trading the promise of some future scoop to have the comments killed. Sputnik, von Braun had railed, was “a tragic failure for the U.S.” Six good years had been irretrievably “lost,” he said, wasted while the Soviets had forged ahead with their missile programs. “The real tragedy of Sputnik’s victory is that this present situation was clearly foreseeable,” he lamented. Saddest of all, he added, was that America had apparently not learned its lesson, since it still wasn’t taking satellites or space seriously. “Our own work has been supported on a shoestring while the Soviet Union has emerged more powerful than ever before.”

  Such inflammatory statements, Lemnitzer warned, “could be very damaging to what the President was trying to do.” Ike, after all, was publicly saying that there was no race with Russia and that “no competition in the space field” existed. It didn’t look good, then, if the country’s best-known r
ocket scientist went around shouting that there was such a contest, and that the United States was getting trounced. Shut von Braun up, Medaris was told, and the army will take care of the satellite mission.

  Von Braun, though, was not alone in contradicting the official line coming out of the White House. As if the president didn’t have enough troubles, a national security panel that he himself had convened chose this inauspicious moment to deliver a devastating report that contravened almost everything he said during the November 7 address. Chaired by H. Rowan Gaither, the head of the Ford Foundation, the panel had conducted an exhaustive study for the National Security Council on the nation’s state of defense readiness. The upshot of its findings, which landed on Eisenhower’s desk only a few hours before he was to go on national television, was hardly optimistic. It recommended the urgent appropriation of an additional $40 billion—an amount equal to the entire military budget—to shore up America’s woefully inadequate defenses against possible Soviet missile attack.

  The Gaither report detonated like a psychological bomb in the Oval Office. Sherman Adams worried Americans would find it “deeply shocking,” and counseled against releasing the study. John Foster Dulles was of the same mind, warning that making the document public would have “catastrophic results.” Moscow would perceive it as a sign of weakness, and the Democrats would have a field day undermining the president’s position. Already that scoundrel Lyndon Johnson had gotten wind of the report and wanted a copy for his upcoming congressional hearings.

  Eisenhower adamantly refused, citing a little-used constitutional clause known as executive privilege. “Its disclosure would be inimical to the nation’s security,” he flatly told Senator Johnson, who for once found his vaunted powers of persuasion ineffective.

  “It will be interesting to find out how long it can be kept secret,” Ike later observed at an NSC meeting during which Vice President Nixon argued against burying the study. It would leak anyway, he predicted, and the rumors and excerpts would be taken out of context by the media and would probably sound more frightening than the actual report.

  Nixon was right. Snippets from the text began appearing in the press within days, though Chalmers Roberts of the Washington Post would break the most complete and alarming account of the study a few weeks later. “The still top-secret Gaither Report portrays a United States in the gravest danger in its history,” he wrote. “It pictures the nation moving in a frightening course to the status of a second-class power… and finds America’s long-term prospect one of cataclysmic peril in the face of rocketing Soviet military might…. Many of those who worked on the report were appalled and even frightened at what they discovered to be the state of American military posture in comparison with that of the Soviet Union.”

  Not surprisingly, the Gaither report undid all of Ike’s attempts to restore calm and order with his Operation Confidence pep talks. “Arguing the Case for Being Panicky,” retorted the headline in Life magazine, in what was essentially a slap in the administration’s face. Once more, columnists howled that the president didn’t seem to appreciate the gravity of the situation. “Another tranquility pill,” one pundit scoffed at the November 7 national address. “It was by no means a blood, sweat and toil speech,” commented Eric Sevareid more charitably. “It contained little suggestion that sacrifices may be ahead, or that [Eisenhower] personally thinks they are necessary.” Editorials bristled with renewed indignation over the apparent complacency in the White House, which some now called the Tomb of the Well-Known Soldier. “Two Sputniks cannot sway Eisenhower,” griped the liberal-leaning New York Post. “The President’s answer in each instance is the same: we can’t do very much.”

  Amid the barrage of criticism, Eisenhower’s approval rating plunged, sinking by 22 percentage points in barely six weeks, an unheard-of pace of decline in the modern presidency, where such erosions usually occur over far longer periods. “In a matter of a few months,” noted the historian Walter McDougall, “the rhetoric, the symbology of American politics had left Eisenhower completely behind.”

  • • •

  While Eisenhower tried to ignore accusations of falling behind, pressure mounted for him to act more forcefully and to spend more freely. Democrats called for the immediate construction of a national network of air raid shelters, as recommended by the Gaither report, at the horrifyingly high cost of $22.5 billion. Congressmen demanded an emergency infusion of $3 billion to jump-start America’s lagging missile efforts, while educational groups exploited the Sputnik panic to push bills that would revamp curriculums, with a focus on science and mathematics. A measure to inject $1 billion of federal funds into high schools was proposed. “The bill’s best bet,” one lobbyist slyly noted, “is that the Russians will shoot off something else.”

  Massive university scholarship programs were proposed to bridge the alleged education gap with communism, and there were even suggestions that the federal government begin granting college loans to aspiring students. “Eisenhower was skeptical about the loans,” Killian recalled. “He doubted whether young people and their parents would be willing to go into debt for their education.”

  The White House was also being bombarded with frantic calls for a complete overhaul of the Defense Department and military space organizations, leading to a dizzying array of acronyms competing for presidential attention. A new $100-million-a-year Astronautical Research and Development Agency, or ARDA, was proposed by the American Rocket Society, to coordinate scientific space projects. A rival plan by the Rocket and Satellite Research Panel was even more ambitious, calling for one billion dollars a year to be appropriated for a civilian body called the National Space Establishment (NSE), along the lines of NACA, the existing National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics. Not to be outdone, NACA created its own Special Committee on Space Technology, or SCST, to study the possibility of starting an even costlier space-oriented department, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA. Meanwhile, the Pentagon unveiled plans for a new Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, to conduct military space research and development programs.

  All this was exactly what Eisenhower had feared, the panicked spending that would throw fiscal discipline completely out of whack. To the beleaguered president, it must have seemed as if everyone suddenly had a panacea to counter the Soviet space lead, and unfortunately every one of the miracle cures landing on his desk held the unappealing promise of being ruinously expensive. “Look,” Ike finally snapped, “I’d like to know what’s on the other side of the moon, too, but I won’t pay to find out this year.”

  By this year, he meant the upcoming fiscal year. Treasury Secretary George Humphrey had prepared an austerity budget to weather an economic downturn that was worsening by the month, and he had warned the president that any increases in the already mounting deficit could spark “a depression that will curl your hair.” Though Humphrey had recently been replaced by Robert Anderson, the recessionary warnings coming out of the Treasury and Commerce departments had only grown more ominous. Unemployment was expected to jump by as much as 1.5 million in 1958, bringing the total number of out-of-work Americans to 5 million, the highest jobless count since 1940, and economic growth in the third quarter of 1957—after more than a decade of robust increases—had completely flatlined. This was hardly the time to be writing big checks, and Ike was not about to risk a lengthy recession simply to satisfy short-term space jitters.

  He did, however, relent on pressures to speed the satellite programs, authorizing the minimal disbursement of $3.5 million (much of which Medaris had already spent) for ABMA to ready its Jupiter C for a space shot. Far from being overjoyed, Medaris hit the roof when he saw the official Pentagon directive. It did not instruct ABMA to proceed with a launch, only to “prepare” for one. “In effect there was no clear-cut authority to go ahead and put up a satellite,” he recalled. Vanguard still had the primary mission, and only if it failed in its scheduled December attempt would the White House then consider
allowing ABMA to proceed. This was unacceptable, Medaris complained. “They are trying to delude Congress and the public into believing that we are cranking up for a launch.”

  “Either give me a clear-cut order to launch or I quit,” the rebellious general cabled Gavin, declaring rather crudely that ABMA would not carry out its orders. “I’m afraid my language was pretty rough,” he recalled years later. But, like Gavin, he was at his wit’s end—fed up with the army, the politics, the ceaseless wrangling. He’d walked away from soldiering several times before in his eclectic career, and he had always returned to the military’s bosom because civilian life was just too dull. But he was tired of the nonsense, he was frustrated by the low pay that (coupled with his own extravagant tastes) perennially left him in debt, and he was losing his will to fight. More and more he’d been turning to prayers for guidance—Medaris had found religion during World War II—and taken to wondering if his was the right calling. (The religious rebirth, apparently, had not made him any less argumentative; his hard-headed outbursts had simply assumed “a fierce religious zeal” and a “pious belligerence,” according to Killian, who was no fan.)

  Medaris was not the only one ready to throw in the towel. Von Braun also tendered his resignation. Already his brother Magnus had quit the army to work for Chrysler for twice the pay, and now von Braun was threatening to join him unless ABMA got a green light. Stuhlinger and several other top engineers added their names to the growing list of walking papers, and in Washington a minor panic ensued. The entire army missile program was about to resign, and something had to be done. ABMA, Quarles now decided, would have its shot. But only in January, and regardless of whether Vanguard was successful. For von Braun, that was enough. “Vanguard will never make it,” he declared with a certainty that bordered on arrogance.

  • • •

  By mid-November, it was no longer a secret that the navy’s quasicivilian bid to orbit a satellite was in serious trouble.