Though missiles had been tested at the complex since the summer of 1950, December 4, 1957, was Cape Canaveral’s public unveiling, the first time most people had ever seen or heard of America’s gateway to the stars. What Cronkite and America did not see, however, was the condition of the Vanguard launch vehicle, which was out of range of network cameras. “The rocket looked unkempt, as if it had been hurried out of bed,” recalled the propulsion engineer Kurt Stehling. “It was only partly painted, frost covered its middle, and strips of black rubber wind spoilers dangled dispiritedly from its upper half.”
Thirty-mile-an-hour gusts lashed the rocket as the morning passed, a weather front moved in, and chilly journalists grew impatient. By late afternoon there was still no movement on the launchpad other than the howling wind. The reporters stomped their feet to ward away the cold and speculated as to the delay. A valve on the main booster’s liquid oxygen feed line had frozen shut, but this the press did not know. By dusk, impatience had given way to frustration and wagering on whether the mission would be scrubbed. Something had to be wrong. This was taking too long. Finally, at 10:30 PM, word reached reporters that the countdown had been aborted and would resume on Friday, December 6. The official reason for the postponement was wind. Cynics on Bird Watch Hill thought otherwise.
• • •
Though the American people were deprived of a launch on December 4, the fledgling ABC television network treated its viewers to another space spectacle that evening. Capitalizing on Vanguard mania, Walt Disney had scheduled the most ambitious and expensive installment of his “Man in Space” series to coincide with the launch date. As usual, Wernher von Braun hosted part of the show, titled “Mars and Beyond.” With Ernst Stuhlinger at his side, a slide rule in hand, his bright blue eyes flashing with almost hypnotic conviction, von Braun demonstrated how a spacecraft could reach the Red Planet. It couldn’t use conventional propellants, they informed viewers, because of the enormous amount of fuel required for the thirteen-month trip. “A small atomic reactor,” Stuhlinger said, pointing to the teardrop-shaped tip of a strange-looking model vehicle, “would turn silica oil into steam and drive turbines.” Like von Braun, Stuhlinger affected the efficiently no-nonsense appearance of what the Disney wardrobe department must have envisioned as the engineering look: pale blue dress shirt tucked into conservative gray slacks, no jacket, restrained tie. Slender and balding, with slightly pinched features, he seemed a suitably stern foil to the telegenically boyish von Braun, whose full head of hair, broad shoulders, and penetrating gaze were more befitting of a matinee idol than a mad scientist.
Mars must have seemed a long way off to those Americans who had sat by their radios and TV sets all day waiting for Vanguard to lift off. Yet von Braun sold the “electromagnetically-driven atomic spaceship” as if its flight was not only possible but inevitable. There was something mesmerizing about his infectious enthusiasm, his spare, purposeful movements, the scholarly self-confidence, even the paisley necktie. He had star quality.
If von Braun was at ease in the new medium of television, it was perhaps because his experience in narrating rocketry films dated back more than a decade. Disney viewers didn’t know about his wartime experiences, but the U.S. government had been well aware of how von Braun had gained some of his familiarity before the camera.
His audience, back in July 1943, had been considerably smaller, consisting of just four men: Third Reich armaments minister Albert Speer, Werhmacht missile chief Walter Dornberger, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, and Adolf Hitler. The screening had taken place at Hitler’s East Prussian bunker, Wolfsschanze, in the very same concrete-lined conference room where a year later the one-armed Count Claus von Stauffenberg would detonate a briefcase bomb in a failed attempt on the Führer’s life. Von Braun and Dornberger had come to the Wolf’s Lair to tout the V-2’s advances and to ensure that Hitler gave the missile a top-priority classification, which would guarantee the timely delivery of scarce supplies like sheet metal. Anticipating the Führer’s fondness for theatrics, von Braun had prepared visual aids: cutaway models and film that had been shot using several cameras simultaneously to capture the V-2’s flight from every dramatic vantage point. A great deal of effort had gone into the production, which had been filmed by a professional crew, using the newest color negatives. But then there was a great deal at stake. Hitler was far from sold on the V-2, which he had never seen in action. As an old artillery man, he tended to think of the missile as a giant cannon shell and clearly didn’t understand the new technology. And he had had one of his infamous “prophetic” dreams, in which the rocket had failed. That, more than anything, had soured him on V-2 production. But von Braun and Dornberger had several things going for them. The Luftwaffe was losing the air war, and it had become clear that Field Marshal Hermann Goring’s Junkers would not be able to bomb Britain into submission. If Hitler approved the V-2 as an alternative, it would open the floodgates for hundreds of millions of Reichsmarks in funding and would keep the other weapons programs under Speer’s supervision from snatching up valuable component parts. But first, the Führer needed to be sold on the merits of the missile.
After several anxious hours of waiting, the Führer arrived for the appointed interview, and the projector was finally set up. Von Braun and Dornberger quickly stubbed out their cigarettes—Hitler abhorred smoking—and the film started rolling. Von Braun provided running commentary, illustrating improvements on the V-2’s thrust, guidance mechanisms, and accuracy. This was his fourth encounter with the German leader, whom he had first met as a twenty-two-year-old engineer in 1934, shortly after Hitler’s National Socialists had seized power. At the time, von Braun and Dornberger, then a young army captain, had just begun the Wehrmacht’s embryonic missile program. It offered an intriguing loophole around the onerous restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles, which had barred any German buildup of conventional weapons. Missiles, as a completely new technology, had been not included in the list of banned armaments, and the German army had surreptitiously begun scouring amateur rocketry clubs for recruits. Few rocket enthusiasts had wanted to submit to military rigors, but even as a teenager von Braun had realized that only government agencies had the kind of financial resources to make his rocket dreams come true. He had signed on with Dornberger in 1932, the year before Hitler’s ascendancy, while he was still a university student. In 1934, Hitler “seemed a pretty dowdy type,” von Braun later recalled. But as the country’s new leader, he held the national purse strings. “Our main concern,” von Braun elaborated, “was how to get the most out of the Golden Calf.”
A decade later, the Führer was still not convinced that rockets were Nazi Germany’s salvation, despite the vast sums that had been spent on research and development. For von Braun, the July 1943 meeting was especially critical. The war was beginning to take its economic toll on the Third Reich. Money and materials were becoming scarce. Slave laborers were in short supply. Cuts would have to be made. And so with the stakes so high, he and Dornberger had carefully scripted their cinematographic pitch. Liftoff and flight footage had been seamlessly spliced so that the Führer could more easily envision formations of unstoppable rockets hurtling at five times the speed of sound toward defenseless enemy targets. The Führer’s questions had been anticipated and answers prepared in advance. Von Braun had dressed carefully for the occasion, making sure to wear his Nazi Party pin on the lapel of one of the somber suits he favored whenever meeting high officials. He had joined the party in 1937, not out of any great conviction for the Nazi cause but because it seemed like the right move for an ambitious young man dependent on state funding. Expediency, rather than ideology, had also apparently figured in his somewhat more reluctant decision in 1940 to accept Heinrich Himmler’s invitation of induction into the SS, the Nazi Party’s most fanatical killer corps. Von Braun had contemplated declining the offer. But he had been promoting rockets ever since he was sixteen—in department store booths, amateur newsletters, with the military—and he had
long learned that every good pitchman covered all the angles, took every advantage that presented itself. SS membership would stand him in good stead with Himmler, the second most powerful man in Germany.
Von Braun had also learned, like any seasoned salesman, when to back off and stay silent. The carefully edited images of the V-2 spoke for themselves. Hitler watched the launch footage, visibly fascinated. He had entered the conference room looking shockingly “unhealthy and hunched-over,” Dornberger later recalled, but at the earth-shaking sight of flames roaring from the charging missiles, the Fuhrer suddenly grew animated, more like his old, firebrand self. At one point, after an especially stirring shot, he leaped from his seat, gesticulating wildly, and demanded that immense ten-ton warheads be immediately placed on each V-2. “A strange, fanatical light flared up in Hitler’s eyes,” Dornberger recalled, terrified to have to explain that the V-2 could carry only a single ton of high explosives. “But what I want is annihilation, annihilating effect!” the Führer screamed.
Hitler was sold. Von Braun got his funding and a top-priority classification. Enough money would eventually be pumped into V-2 production to build the equivalent of sixteen thousand fighter planes that might have changed the course of the war or at least prolonged it. The development of a Nazi atomic bomb would also be curtailed to finance the manufacture of the costly V-2s, which, in the end, claimed a few thousand casualties and had minimal impact on Allied resistance. As Winston Churchill would note, von Braun had helped persuade Hitler to bet the Reich on the wrong weapon. But in 1943, he was awarded the Knight’s Cross and the honorary title of professor, Nazi Germany’s highest academic distinction. “The Führer was amazed at von Braun’s youth,” the historian Michael Neufeld observed, “and so impressed by his talent that he made a point of signing the document himself.” Himmler, intuitively attuned to Hitler’s wild flights of fancy, conferred the rank of SS major on the wunderkind whose rockets would surely win the war. “Von Braun,” Neufeld concluded, “essentially made a pact with the Devil.”
• • •
As fate would have it, the first American to debrief von Braun after the war was Richard Porter, the GE executive and future member of the Stewart Committee, who was then on loan to Army Ordnance due to his technical background. At that meeting in Germany, von Braun presented a twenty-page memorandum spelling out his potential value to the U.S. military and apparently left a lasting negative impression on Porter. Something about the way von Braun had seamlessly staged his own defection before the fighting had even ended, or perhaps the images of the corpses and skeletal slave laborers found at the young rocket chief’s subterranean V-2 factory, must have rubbed Porter the wrong way. (Von Braun’s biographer Erik Bergaust makes the point that Porter was instrumental in scuttling the army’s satellite bid in favor of Vanguard.) Homer Joe Stewart himself would later confess that some members of his commission might have been “prejudiced,” as the media alleged. But not, he would add, for commercial reasons. There could have simply been an unspoken sentiment that American scientists, rather than a group of ex-Nazis, should lead the country into the dawn of a new era.
• • •
Dawn broke calmly over Cape Canaveral on Friday, December 6, as reporters once more staked out their perches on Bird Watch Hill. They did not have to wait long this time. At 10:30 AM, the towering red and white gantry crane slowly pulled away from the launchpad, and a half hour later the sonorous blast of warning sirens filled the air. “T minus five minutes,” a distended voice echoed over the loudspeakers positioned throughout the proving ground.
The moment everyone had been waiting for at last was at hand. After two months of intolerable doubt, humiliation, and unaccustomed anxiety, America would finally salvage its pride and show those commies a thing or two about good old-fashioned Yankee ingenuity. Everything would be right after that; the United States of America would be back on track. “One minute,” the loudspeaker sounded. The whole country leaned forward, on the edge of its collective seat.
“Ten, nine, eight…,” the final countdown began, and at 11:44:59 AM a hoarse, howling whine slammed the Florida coast. Brilliant white flames shot out from under the rocket. Ice crumpled in jagged sheets from its upper stages as the whole booster shook with earth-jarring force. The roar of the engines increased to a piercing shriek, and the last of the umbilical cords dropped way. The rocket shuddered and strained against its moorings. It was moving! It was up, only a few feet, but it was gaining strength. And then Vanguard quivered, burst into flame, and languidly crumpled onto the launchpad, setting off a blast wave felt for miles. “Oh God! No! Look out! Duck!” the spectators suddenly screamed. Then, just as suddenly, there was silence.
11
GOLDSTONE HAS THE BIRD
John Foster Dulles could barely contain his anger. “What happened yesterday has made us the laughing stock of the free world,” he snarled, his face flushed.
Vice President Nixon and the other members of the National Security Council nodded bitterly. They had assembled on December 7 to discuss the fiasco at Cape Canaveral, to try somehow to put the humiliating debacle in a positive light. But so far no one had come up with any sort of silver lining to spin to the clamoring press.
“Mr. President,” Dulles continued, “I sincerely hope that in the future we do not announce the date, hour, and indeed very minute of any satellite launch until we know for certain it is successfully in orbit. All this negative publicity has had a terrible effect on our international standing.”
A plainer truth could not have been spoken. Confidence in the United States was plummeting abroad almost as dramatically as Eisenhower’s popularity was sinking at home. The slide was most pronounced in Western Europe, where polls conducted in Britain and France prior to Sputnik’s launch had shown that only 6 percent of respondents saw the Soviet Union as militarily superior to the United States. Now fully half of those surveyed viewed America as the weaker superpower, which did not bode well for Dulles’s plans to persuade NATO allies to accept intermediate-range rockets on their soil. He had hoped to pitch the ballistic missile deployment at an upcoming NATO conference in Paris, but Vanguard’s charred remains were proving a tough image to overcome. Instead of triumphantly circling the globe, America’s vaunted satellite lay ignominiously in a Florida swamp, where it had been flung during the explosion, and continued to emit its baleful beep until a frustrated reporter finally snapped, “Why doesn’t somebody go out there, find it, and kill it?”
This was hardly a resounding recommendation for nuclear-tipped IRBMs, and judging by the derisive reaction of the European press, Dulles faced a tough sell. “Oh, what a Flopnik,” the London Daily Herald laughed. “Spaetnik”—Latenik—the German dailies played off the word. Vanguard should have more aptly been called Rearguard, snickered the French. Kaputnik, Splatnik, Stallnik, Sputternik, Dudnik, Puffnik, Oopsnik, Goofnik, and every other conceivable permutation blared from domestic and international headlines aimed straight at the heart of America’s wounded pride. “This incident has no bearing on our programs for the development of intermediate range and intercontinental ballistic missiles, which are continuing to make fine progress,” the Pentagon immediately rebutted in a press release, stressing that no military hardware had been involved in the Vanguard mission. But the damage had been done. At the United Nations, Soviet delegates were coyly suggesting that the United States qualified for the technical assistance programs the USSR offered to developing countries. In Moscow, a dead-serious Khrushchev was threatening to target any NATO member accepting U.S. missiles with his own rockets, which, he added snidely, actually worked. “The Soviets are playing this for all its worth,” Dulles spat.
“I’m all for stopping such unfortunate publicity.” Eisenhower sighed. “But I’ve no idea how.”
The president glanced around the sparingly decorated conference room—a few old oil paintings, some ship models, lots of long faces—looking for suggestions. But his cabinet secretaries, the CIA director, the h
ead of the U.S. Information Agency, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff all appeared to be hiding behind a veil of cigarette and pipe smoke. Jim Hagerty, the White House press secretary who had prematurely released Vanguard’s launch date, was nowhere to be seen.
Ike was on his own, that much was clear. The brief reprieve he had been granted after his stroke was over. Hope had been dashed, Vanguard Fries had been stricken from the nation’s menus, replaced by Sputnik Cocktails—one part vodka, two parts sour grapes—and the vengeful media, having angrily crowned Vanguard “our worst humiliation since Custer’s last stand,” were searching for scapegoats. Already, the Glenn L. Martin Company, Vanguard’s general contractor, had been punished. Its stock had taken such a beating that it had been forced to suspend trading. Vanguard’s project manager, the affable John Hagen, had been equally assailed at a raucous press conference. “This program has had unprecedented publicity in the development stage, which is not usually the case,” he said as he tried to defend himself. “The fact that it was a test phase was lost sight of,” he added, deflecting culpability from his scientists to politicians, whom he refused to name. The Democrats had no such reservations, eagerly informing voters exactly where to place the blame. “It lies with the President of the United States,” Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson announced haughtily on NBC’s Meet the Press. The president’s lack of vision, obdurate penny-pinching, and baffling complacency, he groused, were directly responsible for the disaster in Cape Canaveral. “How long, how long oh God, will it take us to catch up with the Soviet Union’s two satellites?” wailed Lyndon Johnson, who had hastily reconvened his Preparedness hearings to capitalize on the national fury, and like Jackson he was going to point the finger at the Oval Office.
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