Red Moon Rising

by Matthew Brzezinski

  After only a few days’ rest at his beloved Gettysburg farm—just enough time to regain what he described as 95 percent of his speech and motor skills—Ike had been thrust into yet another maelstrom. Now the Democrats were insinuating that Eisenhower no longer had the strength and vitality to lead the nation and that he should step down. “There were open and widespread suggestions that the President resign,” Time magazine reported in its December 9 issue, noting that NATO leaders were “shaken to the point of dismay” to learn that he might not be able to attend the big Paris summit in mid-December. “It is the whole free world that is sick in bed with Ike, waiting for his recovery,” a French newspaper commented.

  What very few people realized, outside of the president’s most trusted circle of advisers, was that Eisenhower was asking himself the very same thing. “In my mind was the question of my future fitness to meet the rigorous demands of the Presidency,” he later confessed. “The test that I now set for myself was that of going through with my plan of proceeding to Paris.” The Paris conference was a week away, the first ever meeting of all the NATO heads of state, rather than the customary gathering of defense and foreign ministers, and the largest gathering of Western leaders in Europe since the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. It was hugely important not only because of the proposed deployment of American nuclear missiles on the European continent but also because the United States needed to restore the shattered confidence of its anxious allies. Ike had to attend, not only for himself but for the good of the nation as well. “If I could carry out this program successfully and without noticeable damage to myself,” he vowed, “then I could continue my duties. If I felt the results to be less than satisfactory, then I would resign.”

  Nixon and Dulles had not been privy to the president’s private pledge. They were not his confidants, like the ferociously loyal Sherman Adams or General Goodpaster, and while the vice president had yet again earned praise for the way he had handled himself during Eisenhower’s incapacitation by not appearing too eager to fill his shoes, his low profile was partly calculated. Nixon was purposefully distancing himself from the president because he had no intention of going down with Ike’s sinking ship. If the president dreamed of golf and retiring to Gettysburg, that was fine, even understandable. But Nixon was still only forty-four years old, and he had his own future to think about. He had paid his dues, and he had suffered untold slights and humiliation, all so he could one day sit at Ike’s desk. And now these blasted missiles were threatening to drag him down too. Slowly, imperceptibly at first, and then demonstratively, the vice president began inching away from his stricken running mate. (The move would inspire a running joke: Martians land in Washington and approach the vice president. Take us to your leader, the aliens demand. “I can’t,” Nixon demurs. “I hardly know the man.”)

  Nixon was not the only administration official wondering whether the leader of the world had lost confidence in himself. “This man is not what he was,” Adams confided to James Killian, in a rare moment of doubt. The change was dramatic. Only a day earlier the president had seemed on the road to recovery, determined to prove to the country and to himself that he could lick “this cerebral thing.” Everyone in the White House had noticed a new energy, a spring in Ike’s step, a fighting spirit reminiscent of his first-term buoyancy. That rekindled vigor was now gone. It was as if Vanguard had sucked all the wind out of his sails. Looking around the room at his ambitious vice president, the powerful Dulles brothers, Secretary McElroy, and the assembled NSC staff, Eisenhower must have indeed seemed a shadow of his former self. Once the supreme commander of the greatest fighting force ever assembled, he was now frail and exhausted, an old man presiding uncertainly over a jittery country. If there was a low point, a single, most downcast occasion in Ike’s long career in public service, this was almost certainly it.

  After a few seconds of uncomfortable silence, Donald Quarles hesitantly cleared his throat. Since he had appointed the Stewart Committee and had ultimately chosen Vanguard, this was his mess. “I think, Mr. President, that in a sense, we were hoisted by our own petard yesterday,” he said, launching into another one of his impassioned justifications and rationalizations. The United States had committed itself to share all data from Vanguard with the IGY, he said, and had included the launch date so that scientists in other countries could have their ground stations ready to receive signals from the orbiting satellite. (What he conveniently failed to mention was that the December 6 test flight had never been intended as an official IGY launch.) “I’m not trying to make excuses for what happened yesterday, Mr. President,” he added, “I’m just trying to explain why we are obligated to publicly announce launches.”

  “Do we have to do this in the future?” interrupted John Foster Dulles, whose “irritation” was clearly recorded in the minutes. “The Soviets kept their launches secret, why couldn’t we?”

  The unfortunate Quarles, who had recommended that Eisenhower downplay Sputnik just prior to his disastrous October 9 press conference, and then compounded the error by overestimating Vanguard’s chances of success, would find little respite from the hot seat in the coming weeks. Again he tried to explain that the United States had formally committed itself to conduct satellite research as a purely peaceful, scientific pursuit, with complete openness. “It would involve fundamentally changing our policy,” he stammered.

  “Well, maybe we should change our policy,” Dulles shot back. “Yesterday was a disaster for the United States.”

  • • •

  While America plunged into a national funk and Vice President Nixon scrambled for high ground, the man responsible for all the turmoil lay exhausted in a sanatorium in southern Russia. Sergei Korolev’s fragile health had finally caught up with him. During the marathon preparations for Sputnik II’s rushed launch, he had taxed his delicate system to the breaking point and had collapsed shortly after completing his mission. He was rushed to Moscow’s most exclusive hospital, one reserved for ranking party officials, where the Soviet Union’s leading heart specialists were summoned to his bedside. The Chief Designer was diagnosed with arrhythmia, coupled with “over-fatigue,” and the doctors prescribed thirty days of bed rest. Khrushchev himself issued the directive, since Korolev had a penchant for ignoring his physicians’ advice.

  Despite the order to stay off his feet, Korolev had no intention of remaining idle. Kislovodsk, the spa he chose for his enforced recuperation, had been popularized a century earlier by the poet Aleksandr Pushkin and frequented by the czarist aristocracy for the medicinal powers of its warm sulfuric springs. Nestled between the Caspian and Black seas at the foot of the snowcapped Caucasus, it was the burial site of Friedrich Tsander, Korolev’s first real mentor and the man who had opened his eyes to the possibility of space travel in the late 1920s.

  With his customary zeal, Korolev had turned the peaceful sanatorium into a bustling base from which to launch a region-wide search for Tsander’s grave. Local officials, clerical administrators, archaeologists, and even experts from Moscow were summoned, cajoled, threatened, berated, and rewarded until every cemetery in the area had been scoured and the rocket pioneer’s final resting place at last found. There, Korolev ordered a monument erected in homage to the visionary who had planted the seed for the Sputniks.

  In Moscow, meanwhile, Valentin Glushko and some of the Chief Designer’s other envious detractors were taking advantage of his absence to sow seeds of doubt about the R-7 within the Kremlin and the military. For all of Sputnik II’s political and propaganda achievements, the mission had not been a technical success. Pravda and its wire-service sibling, TASS, had made much of Sputnik II’s living payload, regaling readers both at home and abroad with tales of the mixed-breed terrier Laika, hurtling through space 1,000 miles above the earth’s surface at a speed of 17,600 miles per hour. Telemetry readings, the public had been told, had shown that her heart rate had jumped dramatically during liftoff, to 260 beats per minute, but she had settled down, enjoying he
r gelatinized treats as she paved the way for human interplanetary travel in her climate-controlled capsule. In fact Laika had died shortly after launch, when both the heat shields and the cooling systems had failed, and she had suffered a horrific fate akin to being slow-roasted alive in a convection oven. The tragedy would be kept secret until after the collapse of communism, but within the Soviet scientific community it cast grave doubt on Korolev’s plans to send human beings into space.

  Similarly, the Soviet press had gone to great lengths to publicize Sputnik II’s other significant contribution to scientific exploration, its onboard meters that would map the radiation belts that were believed to surround the earth. To better impress the West with its technological prowess, Moscow released astonishingly detailed descriptions of the devices, and yet after the launch no major announcement of glorious discoveries had been heralded by Moscow. The truth of the matter was that Sputnik II had been such a rush job that half the systems on the satellite had malfunctioned. It had performed its political mission, but not much else.

  The military, especially, had been unimpressed. The more Marshal Nedelin grew familiar with the slow-loading R-7, the less he wanted it for his Strategic Rocket Forces. Glushko had long been whispering in his ear that the rival R-16 would be better suited for warfare, and in the Chief Designer’s absence Nedelin had finally taken the matter to Khrushchev.

  “Tell me, Sergei Pavlovich,” the Soviet leader confronted Korolev upon his return to Moscow, “isn’t there some way we can put your rocket at a constant readiness, so that it can be fired at a moment’s notice in the event of a crisis?”

  “No,” Korolev conceded. But he reacted furiously to suggestions that his missile used the wrong propellant. Cryogenic oxidizers like liquid oxygen, he told Khrushchev, were much safer than the highly toxic and inherently unstable acid mixes proposed by Yangel and Glushko, which he called “the devil’s venom.” The Chief Designer stubbornly dug in his heels, and he switched the topic to space, his favored distractive ploy, igniting the first secretary’s imagination with tales of the 5,000-pound Sputnik III he wanted to launch in the new year; the lunar probes he would send shortly thereafter; and the manned space missions that would follow. Beguiled by visions of political glory, Khrushchev momentarily forgot the fuel issues and in a burst of enthusiasm begged his star scientist “to deliver,” in Korolev’s words, “the Soviet Coat of Arms to the Moon.”

  But Nedelin and the military would not let the matter rest. The word was spread that the Chief Designer had lost his bearing, had become too wrapped up in space, and had lost all sense of priority. “Korolev works for TASS,” making newspaper headlines, the Red Army chieftains grumbled, whereas “Yangel works for us.” They decided to throw their support behind the rival designer. Nedelin would arrange another audience with Khrushchev, this time with Glushko alone.

  • • •

  As the Soviet military plotted its revolt against Sergei Korolev, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency was feverishly preparing to leap into space. ABMA had shed the requisite crocodile tears for Vanguard’s fiery demise, making the expected public statements of support and sympathy, but privately there had been widespread relief in Huntsville that the competition had failed.

  Things were finally looking up at ABMA, whose fortunes seemed inversely related to the White House’s woes. In addition to finally getting its satellite shot, ABMA had just received a huge boost from the intense pressure brought by Lyndon Johnson’s hearings. Johnson, on November 27, had called McElroy and Quarles to appear before his subcommittee. Expecting a politically charged tongue-lashing, the secretary of defense began his testimony by throwing Johnson a bone in the hope that he might deflect accusations that Charlie Wilson’s missile cuts had put America in danger. “Before you begin your questioning, I have a brief statement to make,” McElroy said. “We have been undertaking during the past few days an intensive re-assessment of our position,” vis-á-vis Wilson’s directive to eliminate duplicate Army and Air Force IRBMs. “We are today authorizing the placing into production of both the Jupiter and Thor missiles.”

  Privately, McElroy was less than thrilled with the concession. “The chief reason” for salvaging the Jupiter, he said, was “to stiffen the confidence and allay the concern of our people.”

  A similarly preemptive tactic was used to co-opt Medaris’s potentially damaging testimony. Johnson obligingly played along with the ploy, which took some of the sting out of his hearings, but just as important allowed him to share in the credit for shoring up America’s missile program. The army, a smiling and decidedly more docile Medaris informed the subcommittee, “was being authorized to proceed on a ‘top-priority’ basis with the development of a solid-fuel missile,” the Pershing, a storable, next-generation rocket that could be launched on a moment’s notice.

  All of Huntsville rejoiced at the twin coups. Not only was Jupiter officially and irrevocably saved but ABMA, at long last, had a new assignment. It wasn’t going to be disbanded, its staff wasn’t going to be snatched up by the rapacious air force, and von Braun’s designers weren’t going to be limited to any more idiotic 200-mile-range rules. “With feelings much different from those that had had my head bowed and my spirit beaten a year before,” a rejuvenated Medaris now set about pressing his advantage and capitalizing on ABMA’s rising prospects.

  If von Braun were to launch his satellite without a hitch, ABMA would be ideally positioned to take the lead in America’s space effort. The door to the heavens had been flung open, and space was now a legitimate political destination. In Congress, Senators Albert Gore of Tennessee and Clinton Anderson of New Mexico had introduced bills to place all space programs under the Atomic Energy Commission. At the White House, Vice President Nixon was said to be especially receptive to proposals for creating a single national space agency. It was clear that the Russians had one and intended to send a man into orbit, so despite Eisenhower’s misgivings the administration needed to plan ahead. Medaris wasn’t going to let an opportunity like this slip by. He ordered von Braun, whose sole brush with space to date was the nose cone Eisenhower had displayed during his pep talks, to devise a comprehensive road map for America’s future cosmic conquests. Von Braun’s $21 billion blueprint, cumbersomely titled “Proposal for a National Integrated Missile and Space Vehicle Development Program,” envisioned orbiting an astronaut in 1962 and putting a man on the moon by 1970. The plan hinged, naturally, on ABMA’s central participation.

  Medaris was equally anxious to explore opportunities in the potentially lucrative new field of spy satellites, which, like space, was now also wide open. Since the air force had shown so little enthusiasm for developing its WS-117L reconnaissance satellite platform, there was an opening to grab the mandate for the army. General Bernard Schriever, Medaris’s archrival at the air force’s missile command, was too busy trying to get the Thor and Atlas operational, while shuttling “like a yo-yo,” in his own words, between congressional appearances and his West Coast offices. He might not even have time for satellites, Medaris reasoned. But after a few discreet inquiries, ABMA’s liaison officer at Schriever’s Los Angeles headquarters “found the door completely shut.” The air force, all of a sudden, had developed a proprietary interest in the WS-117L. “Sputnik woke us up,” Schriever later conceded, and he wasn’t sharing any information with his rival. Medaris responded in the petty spirit of interservice rivalry: “So I also closed the door and told our people to give the Air Force no information on our satellite plans.” It was juvenile and “preposterous,” he admitted in retrospect, but he couldn’t help himself.

  Unbeknownst to Medaris, there was a reason for the newfound secrecy; a third party also coveted the WS-117L: the CIA. Richard Bissell had been eyeing the project ever since he had started searching for a replacement for the U-2. He had helped fund Vanguard from his slush fund and tried to covertly buy the Itek Corporation, an optical research laboratory in Boston, which was working on recoverable cameras that could operate from outer sp
ace. In the summer of 1957, Bissell, Edwin Land, and James Killian had begun hatching a scheme with Schriever for the CIA to assume direct control over spy satellites, as it had done with spy planes. Schriever was amenable because his missiles would be used to launch the CIA satellites, and he could still play a significant role in the operation. The idea was brought to General Goodpaster at the White House, who had not thought the timing right to approach the president with the plan. After the launch of Sputnik I, Eisenhower himself broached the topic and asked for a briefing on reconnaissance satellite developments.

  The problem with the WS-117L was that it relied on video image transmission, a technology that was still embryonic and would not be perfected for many years. Land and Killian were proposing an interim solution: cameras similar to those used on the U-2 would be launched by a two-stage Thor into orbit, where they would snap shots of Soviet targets and jettison canisters of film. The negatives, in heat-resistant containers, would fall back to earth at predetermined locations and deploy parachutes that could be recovered in midflight. Momentum for the proposal grew in November, as Sputnik II increased the sense of urgency that the WS-117L needed to be fast-tracked, and that the air force’s bureaucracy simply moved too slowly for the job. The Vanguard fiasco finally gave the CIA the opening it needed. In the stunned aftermath of the explosion, Allen Dulles, Jim Killian, and Neil McElroy quickly convinced Eisenhower to secretly promote the reconnaissance satellite to a “national security objective of the highest order,” a prerequisite for Bissell’s friendly CIA takeover.