Red Moon Rising

by Matthew Brzezinski

  Despite the Pentagon’s determined assurances that “all test firings of Vanguard have met with success,” America’s answer to Sputnik was looking decidedly shaky. Vanguard’s launch vehicle—a modified three-stage Viking research rocket under the experimental designation Test Vehicle 2—had failed to lift off on five consecutive occasions between August and October because of mechanical malfunctions. Just about everything that could have cracked, leaked, broken, delaminated, depressurized, detached, smoked, sparked, or shorted out had done so with such maddening regularity that Dan Mazur, a frustrated Vanguard project manager and launch supervisor, begged the navy to stop sending him “garbage” instead of rockets.

  Like a great many high-end concepts that looked good on paper, Vanguard was proving difficult to put into practice. When the project had first been pitched in 1955, it had won over the Pentagon’s satellite selection committee with its imaginative and elegant design and cutting-edge components such as an “almost developed” gimbaled General Electric main engine that swiveled on its own axis. This was a revolutionary departure from traditional steering methods, which employed fins or small side thrusters, and was only one of the many innovations the pencil-thin rocket promised to unveil. “For all practical purposes the Vanguard vehicle was new, new from stem to stern,” said Jim Bridger, a navy engineer. “More to the point, it was an awful high-state-of-the-art vehicle, especially the second stage rocket. In the nature of things, the business of developing the vehicle and getting the bugs out so it would work was fraught with difficulties.”

  No one on the Stewart Committee, the panel Donald Quarles had convened to rule on the different satellite proposals, apparently foresaw the potential pitfalls of picking a blueprint on such a tight schedule. “It was either forgotten, or not understood, that the last ten percent of ‘almost developed’ missile hardware was the most difficult,” recalled Kurt Stehling, Vanguard’s propulsion chief. The fact that some members of the Stewart Committee simultaneously drew paychecks from the aerospace companies bidding on the Vanguard contract had also apparently been overlooked. Committee chairman Homer Joe Stewart, for instance, was a paid consultant for the Aerojet-General Corporation, which hoped to manufacture Vanguard’s second stage. Senior panel member Richard Porter worked for General Electric, which was building the “almost ready” main engine, while Secretary Quarles’s former company, Bell Labs, was a major subcontractor for the rocket’s upper stages.

  The army’s more conservative proposal, on the other hand, had no potentially lucrative new contracts to offer. It relied almost entirely on existing, “off-the-shelf” technology, and essentially swapped a satellite for a warhead on an upgraded Redstone missile. In opting to go with an ambitious, unproven design, the committee also accepted at face value assertions from the Glenn L. Martin Company, Vanguard’s Baltimore-based general contractor, that there would be no cost overruns on the project’s overly optimistic $20 million price tag.

  The problems started almost immediately. Martin had built Viking rockets for the navy since 1948, but because the Vanguard launch vehicle was entirely redesigned, a Viking in name only, everything effectively had to be done from scratch. Within two months of being awarded the contract, Martin, GE, and the other subcontractors began to complain and Vanguard’s budget was revised to $28.8 million. A month later, in October 1956, it was bumped up to $63 million. By March 1957, it had risen yet again, to $88 million, prompting the White House to debate canceling the project altogether. “I question very much whether it would have been authorized if the actual cost had been known,” Percival Brundage, the director of the Bureau of Budget, wrote to Eisenhower in April 1957. But “abandoning the project at mid-stage,” he added, would lead to the “unfortunate conclusion that the richest nation in the world could not afford to complete this scientific undertaking.”

  Vanguard narrowly won a stay of execution, though the following month its cost further increased to $96 million. Fed up, Charlie Wilson pulled the plug on Pentagon financing, and another scramble for funding ensued, with the CIA and the National Science Foundation chipping in to bridge the gap. By the time Sputnik went aloft (for an estimated $50 million), Vanguard’s total taxpayer bill had crossed the $110 million threshold, and the meter was still running.

  Throughout the spiraling cost overruns, the schedules for component parts slipped, and assembled test vehicles—the prototypes—were often delivered late and in such shoddy condition that Dan Mazur, the Vanguard project manager, demanded on one occasion that the entire rocket be sent back to Martin “piece by rotten piece.” There were moisture problems, poorly located pressure indicator lines, unsoldered wire connections, corroded and leaky fittings, and badly fitted plugs. The GE engine had to be returned because of “wholesale system contamination.” Dirt and metal filings were found in the fuel lines. Cracks appeared in the propellant tanks. Batteries failed. Rubber wind spoilers attached to the exterior rocket casing fell off. The gyroscopes were off-kilter, the hydraulic oil resource was plugged, and aluminum chips were found in the hydrogen peroxide gas-generating system.

  Vanguard’s tribulations were not confined to cost and quality-control issues. Relations between the program’s government overseers and private contractors had grown so strained during the delays that at one point navy personnel were denied parking at the Martin lot in Baltimore. The acrimony resulted in what at times was an embarrassing lack of communication: “What! You want to put a ball in that rocket?” a Martin official exclaimed upon hearing that the configuration of Vanguard’s satellite had been changed from a cylinder to a sphere that required a new cradle. “Why the hell didn’t someone tell us this?”

  When the International Geophysical Year opened in the summer of 1957, Vanguard was nowhere near ready. “We’re never going to make it in time,” Milt Rosen, the program’s intense second-in-command, despondently told his boss, John Hagen, the project’s overall coordinator. “Never mind,” said Hagen, a gentle, pipe-smoking astronomer who was famous for never once losing his temper during Vanguard’s developmental ordeals. “We are not in a race with the Russians.”

  Hagen, however, felt sufficiently pressured to keep up with the IGY timetable that in August 1957 he agreed to try to launch a partial Vanguard prototype, Test Vehicle 2, even though it was “an unaccepted, incompletely developed vehicle.” His decision, he wrote in a stern memo to Martin executives, “violated sound principles of operation.” But, he conceded, “this is the only way to have at least some chance of maintaining the firing schedule.”

  TV2 lived up to expectations, failing to lift off five times in a row. It finally got airborne on October 23, but with only one of its three stages operating. TV3, the final Vanguard prototype, was to be the first attempt at firing the entire system, including the troubled GE main engine, the still-experimental second-stage booster, and the third small cluster of rockets bearing the satellite. A far more daunting challenge than its predecessor, with many more moving parts, untested components, and opportunities for malfunction, the TV3 test-firing was supposed to have been conducted in secrecy. Vanguard’s formal IGY attempt wasn’t slated until midwinter 1958, with TV5, and then only if the TV3 and TV4 tests went off without a hitch. But after Sputnik, White House press secretary Jim Hagerty had prematurely pressed Vanguard into early service by publicly announcing TV3’s December launch date. The newspapers had pounced on the announcement, failing to make the technical distinction between a preliminary satellite test and an actual satellite launch, and TV3 was quickly billed as America’s official response to Sputnik.

  The usually unflappable Hagen had reportedly cringed at the prospect of debuting an unfinished product in front of a worldwide audience. But the damage was done. The administration, whether out of panic or confusion, had placed the hopes of the entire free world on a booster that didn’t even inspire the confidence of its own designers.

  • • •

  Vanguard’s travails had not gone unnoticed by Lyndon Johnson’s investigators or b
y the press, which was in a wrathful mood after eating so much Soviet crow and looking for someone to blame. The navy’s wobbly satellite bid made a convenient target. “An astonishing piece of stupidity,” groused Time, disparaging the Pentagon’s decision to go with Vanguard. The syndicated columnist Drew Pearson intimated that the Stewart Committee had been “prejudiced” by conflicts of interest. Hadn’t Vanguard been hamstrung by the administration’s “penny-pinching,” the New York Herald Tribune asked Trevor Gardner—lobbing him a loaded question, since he had resigned his post as assistant secretary of defense in frustration over missile and satellite bottlenecks. Gardner agreed that “the funds estimated by Secretary Quarles were totally inadequate,” as was the “low-priority status” the program was accorded by the White House. “It is predictable that the project would consistently slip, and this was pointed out to the responsible Administration officials,” he added, “including Secretaries Quarles and Wilson.”

  Engine Charlie Wilson, for his part, was waylaid by the television journalist Mike Wallace. “You clearly underestimated the importance of basic research. Why?” Wallace demanded.

  “This satellite business wasn’t a military matter,” Wilson replied evasively. “It was in the hands of the scientists.” Besides, he airily continued, people are panicking over nothing. “They’re so cracked loose on Buck Rogers that they’re seeing space ships and flying saucers.”

  “But Sputnik I and II exist!” an astonished Wallace fired back. “They are not flying saucers.”

  The upshot of the assault on Vanguard was clear: the administration, and ultimately the president, would bear responsibility if the mission failed. Ike was being set up by the press as the fall guy. His poll numbers plummeting, his supporters growing increasingly impatient, the once immensely popular leader was no longer immune to personal attack. Journalists, hunting in a pack, had turned on him. “Implicit in all the criticism was that he was too old, too tired, too sick to run the country,” noted Eisenhower’s biographer Stephen Ambrose.

  Unfortunately for the president, things were only going to get worse. The Preparedness hearings were set to start in less than a week, on November 25, and Lyndon Johnson seemed to have unearthed every single malcontent who ever graced any U.S. missile program. Rumors filtered back to the White House that Johnson was working around the clock, like a man possessed, to get ready for the inquest. To save time, he’d hired a crack team of Wall Street lawyers led by the trial attorney Ed Wiesl and his junior partner Cyrus Vance, and the two had set up shop at the Mayflower Hotel, where a phalanx of disgruntled officials crowded the lobby.

  Johnson had also deputized a battery of congressional researchers for his inquisition. “He never asked the head of my organization whether I was available to do this,” recalled Eilene Galloway of the Legislative Reference Service. “He simply preempted me and took me over to his committee to work on this subject, and we were working on it from morning to night.”

  Pounding up and down Senate stairs two at a time, Johnson raced from meeting to meeting, firing off instructions to out-of-breath staffers, who begged the senator to slow down. He had suffered a heart attack in 1955 only a few months before Ike and seemed to be charging headlong into another coronary. “He was really like a dynamo at that time. He was so energized,” Galloway remembered. “Everything had to be done in a hurry.”

  The reason for the rush was that Johnson had not chosen the date of his inquest idly. “The timing was perfect because it grabbed all the attention and hit the public consciousness pre-holidays,” Reedy recalled. Johnson had not wanted the hearings “to get mixed up with Christmas” and had purposefully set them in the run-up to the Vanguard launch for maximum exposure. That had left scant time to prepare, line up the witnesses, prep them, and map out the strategy of attack.

  As the calendar wound down, Ike braced wearily for the coming onslaught. “Crisis had become normalcy,” he confessed in his memoir, recalling the difficult months during the fall of 1957, the lowest point of his two terms in office.

  The pressure on the aging president was taking its toll. To outside observers, it appeared that Eisenhower was losing his vitality. He began to mope and seemed distracted. The British historian Leonard Mosley observed, “His aides who sometimes caught him with a faraway look in his eyes soon learned that what he was thinking about was golf.”

  But even that sole source of escape was becoming a political liability. In the past, Gallup polls had shown that most American voters did not mind Ike’s frequent weekday golf outings. To the contrary, his love of the fairways had reinforced his reassuring image as a cool and collected CEO, never too rattled to get in a few holes before lunch. But now, as his leadership was being questioned, the public was less forgiving, and Democrats were avidly painting the president as a modern-day Nero who golfed while America burned. Governor G. Mennen Williams of Michigan had gone so far as to compose an ode to the president’s crisisignoring pastime.

  Oh little Sputnik, flying high

  With made-in-Moscow beep,

  You tell the world it’s a Commie sky

  and Uncle Sam’s asleep.

  You say on fairway and on rough

  The Kremlin knows it all,

  We hope our golfer knows enough

  To get us on the ball.

  On Monday, November 25, 1957, the relentless pressures, personal attacks, and barrage of criticism finally got to Dwight D. Eisenhower. That morning, as Lyndon Johnson convened his dreaded Senate hearings with a vicious assault on his administration’s complacency, Ike repaired to his office to sign papers. “As I picked up a pen,” he later recalled, “I experienced a strange although not alarming sense of dizziness.” The words on the page in front of him suddenly became blurry. Then he dropped the pen and couldn’t pick it up. “I decided to get to my feet, and at once I found that I had to catch hold of my chair for stability.” Unable to stand, Ike called his secretary. “Then came another puzzling experience,” he continued. “I could not express what I wanted to say. Words, but not the ones I wanted, came to my tongue. It was impossible for me to express any coherent thought whatsoever.”

  Eisenhower was rushed into bed, and a team of doctors was summoned. “The President has had a stroke,” Sherman Adams tersely told Vice President Nixon, summoning him to the White House. “This is a terribly, terribly difficult thing to handle,” he said, his tone suddenly more obsequious, once Nixon had arrived. “You may be President in twenty-four hours.”

  The following day, however, the chief of staff’s frosty demeanor had returned, as the doctors had diagnosed the stroke as mild. The tough old soldier, it seemed, had demonstrated that he still had some fight left in him. Though his memory was still fuzzy, and his vision blurred, Ike stubbornly refused to go to the hospital and insisted on working from his bed. By Thursday, he had pronounced himself well enough to publicly attend Thanksgiving Day services and begin resuming his full duties. Adams once more resumed his treatment of Nixon as a pesky intruder—the surest sign that a semblance of normality was returning to the White House

  • • •

  As December dawned, and Eisenhower recuperated from what his spokesmen insisted was only “a minor brain spasm,” the country began counting the days to Vanguard’s long-awaited launch on Wednesday, December 4. With the promise of the president on the mend and a chance to even the score with the Soviets, hope once more entered the national discourse. For the first time since Sputnik Night, America was upbeat, almost giddy with anticipation. Newspapers prepared special Vanguard editions, restaurants served Vanguard burgers, and schools introduced children to the rudiments of rocketry. Sensing the rising tide of enthusiasm, Lyndon Johnson shrewdly recessed his hearings to give lawmakers and the public a chance to focus on Florida, where reporters were already filing anticipatory dispatches from the launch facilities at Cape Canaveral.

  “The Vanguard tower was clear against a starry sky, two bright lights glaring at its base and a red beacon shining at its top,” t
he New York Times primed its readers on December 1, three days ahead of the scheduled launch. “From the beach, the Vanguard crane is one of a community of launching structures, some taller, some broader than others. But the Vanguard clearly has the next billing at the sprawling missile theater here,” whose audience, the newspaper noted, included correspondents “from as far away as Europe.”

  On the morning of the fourth, a cool and windy Wednesday, it seemed as if every major media organization in America had descended on the large sand dune just outside the test firing range. Dubbed “Bird Watch Hill,” the windswept promontory crawled with television crews and sound trucks. Scaffolding and newsreel platforms sprouted from the sand, while radio reporters raced around, shielding their microphones from the steady breeze coming off the Atlantic. From the dune’s trampled crest, an unruly battalion of six hundred photographers trained their long-range telephoto lenses on launchpad 18A, where a slender, silvery rocket reflected the morning sun.

  The moment everyone had been waiting for had come. All along Route A1A, traffic choked the soft shoulders: station wagons with wood-paneled doors, two-ton convertibles, Buicks with big tail fins. The low, square, air-conditioned motels that had been hastily built to cash in on the space craze—places with names like the Starlight, the Sea Missile, and Vanguard Inn—teemed with excited customers.

  All over South Florida, eyes were fixed expectantly on the skies over the Long Range Proving Ground at Patrick Air Force Base, as Cape Canaveral was formally known. The rest of the country watched from living rooms, bars, and sidewalks outside stores selling RCA’s new color televisions. At network studios in New York, Walter Cronkite and his fellow broadcasters filled the airwaves with all manner of facts pertaining to the Vanguard satellite, the Viking launch vehicle that would carry it, and the Patrick Proving Ground from which it would lift off. Four species of poisonous snakes, viewers were informed, inhabited the 15,000-acre facility. The surrounding mangrove swamps and scrub palmetto forests were home to the nearly extinct dusky seaside sparrow. The base itself, a former naval station, had been turned over to the air force in 1949 and was ideally suited to launch satellites because, at twenty-eight degrees north of the equator, its location offered the easiest shot into space.