Red Moon Rising

by Matthew Brzezinski

  The plan was set in motion over the next few weeks. “Our first goal was to put the genie back in the bottle,” Bissell recalled. The air force photoreconnaissance program had received far too much publicity; the New York Times had written about it in front-page stories, and Johnson’s subcommittee had discussed it in open sessions. The project would have to be canceled, and with as much fanfare as possible. They would pick a slow news day over the next few months for the Pentagon to make the announcement. Cost overruns, technical difficulties, or some other excuse would be invented. Outside of a few top generals like Schriever, not even the air force would be told the real reason. The program would be restarted on the sly under a new code name. “I had to invent an elaborate cover explanation,” Bissell recalled. Finances and procurement would be handled through bogus departments and fictitious front companies in much the same vein as the U-2. “We also had to have a plausible cover story for that part of the project that couldn’t be hidden from the public,” Bissell said. The frequent launches from Cape Canaveral would be explained by an IGY-inspired civilian research program that would build genuine research satellites and produce reports and studies. They would call it Discover, which had a peaceful, scientific ring. Its real code name would be Corona, after the typewriter on which Bissell outlined the takeover scheme. It would be the most ambitious, secretive, and costly operation in CIA history. If all went well, that is.

  • • •

  Richard Bissell and Bruce Medaris were not the only ones to find a silver lining in Vanguard’s implosion. The catastrophe was also serving Lyndon Johnson well, as it presented fiery evidence of American missile missteps and focused public attention on the Preparedness hearings.

  Never one to pass up a media opportunity, Johnson played the disaster for all it was worth. John Hagen, the soft-spoken Vanguard program director, was hauled in as a witness and bludgeoned until he confessed that funding shortages had contributed to his rocket’s less than spectacular debut. Johnson then set his sights on military missile programs, which he claimed suffered from the same penury, exposing America to the terrifying might of Soviet rockets. “Some awful needles were stuck into this thing,” George Reedy chuckled apologetically decades later. “I can still remember the hearing when we left with a distinct impression that the Soviets outnumbered us by a factor of fifteen to one. We were giving them credit for maybe 1,500 missiles and we were only supposed to have thirty.”

  Thus a new gap, “a missile gap,” was born from the ashes of Vanguard. “We will be walking a very tight wire with our lives for the next five years,” a senior executive from General Dynamics testified, explaining how the late start in developing the Atlas ICBM his company was building meant that for the foreseeable future the United States would have to rely on planes to defend itself against the Soviet Union’s virtually indestructible new missiles.

  The administration, it went without saying, was responsible for the strategic imbalance that now imperiled the nation. For all his bipartisan pledges—his noble talk of there being no Republicans or Democrats after Sputnik, only Americans—Johnson had effectively put Eisenhower’s entire government on trial. The indictment was all the more devastating because it was subtle. Johnson studiously avoided histrionics and tended to chide gently, more the reproachful schoolteacher than the vengeful prosecutor. “There are too many people in government who have the right to say no,” he admonished. “Too few who have authority to say yes, and even less who dare to do so.” Johnson never directly pointed the finger at the White House. That was left to others—supposedly impartial scientists, who decried Eisenhower’s “false economies” and wrongheaded policies, or friendly journalists, who railed against the grave dangers the country faced as a result. “At the Pentagon they shudder when they speak of the ‘gap,’” reported the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop in one of their more alarming dispatches from the hearings. “They shudder because in these years, the American government will flaccidly permit the Kremlin to gain an almost unchallenged superiority in the nuclear striking power that was once our specialty.”

  Few readers could have missed the implication. Ike was “flaccid,” rolling over for the Russians. Johnson, on the other hand, stood strong and tall, seeking truth and security at a time when America, as Harper’s magazine metaphorically put it, was “a leaky ship, with a committee on the bridge and a crippled captain sending occasional whispers up the speaking tube from his sick bay.”

  In his pursuit of publicity—and perhaps even in pursuit of truth and security—Johnson was relentless, shuffling the attending representatives of the press like a circus master. Photographers would be ushered into one chamber, shots snapped, then hustled out to make room for the reporters. “Speaking so fast that no one could take a word-by-word account,” observed the historian Robert A. Caro, “he would rip through a briefing on a committee session, pant that he was ten minutes late for a luncheon speech he had to make. ‘The statements will be up in a minute anyway,’ burst out of the room to give the television interviewers time for ‘just three’ questions, then flaring up when a fourth was asked—‘I told you, just three,’” he would add, before running down the hall with a dozen reporters in tow.

  Grabbing the next day’s newspapers, Johnson would scream, shout, cheer, sob, curse, and vow vengeance, depending on how his heroics had been portrayed. Then he would call a press conference and start all over again. “Control of space means control of the world,” he would warn, posing dramatically for the cameras. “From space the masters of infinity would have the power to control the earth’s weather, to cause drought and flood, to change the tides and raise the levels of the sea, to divert the Gulf Stream and change the temperature climates to frigid.” Nothing short of planetary domination hung in the balance of “this ultimate position,” Johnson railed against America’s seeming inability to achieve orbit. “Our national goal and the goal of all free men must be to hold that position.”

  “Light a match behind Lyndon and he’ll orbit,” cynical journalists joked about the senator’s harried pace. But the public was not so jaded. America was watching and listening, and Lyndon Baines Johnson was making sense.

  • • •

  The one nugget of information the Johnson subcommittee could not mine from its witnesses was when the United States would attempt to orbit another satellite. “Soon” was all Medaris would say when pressed in his testimony on January 7, 1958.

  “I am not going to ask you about the precise date,” Cyrus Vance persisted, seeking to pry a more exact answer out of the general. “I am thankful for that, Sir,” Medaris replied, not taking the bait. To the launch crew at Cape Canaveral, he wired the following instructions the next day: “Do not admit to the presence of the vehicle. Shroud upper stages with canvas and move to the pad not later than 6:30 A.M.”—that is, under the cover of darkness—“Identify the vehicle as a Redstone. Great care should be taken concerning the movements of key personnel from the agency in your vicinity. They will be flown directly by special plane. Any violation of this decoy plan will be dealt with severely.”

  To his own staff at ABMA headquarters, Medaris issued similar injunctions against discussing any aspect of the pending launch, even with their wives. “I desire it well understood that the individual who violates instructions will be handled severely,” he reiterated. The lessons of Vanguard had been well learned. There would be no advance notice this time. It wasn’t just the press that Medaris was worried about. The last thing he needed was a herd of self-aggrandizing politicians descending on Huntsville and the firing range in Florida. Not only would they be a distraction, bringing down hordes of pesky journalists and putting unnecessary pressure on his whole team, but their mere presence could also inadvertently scuttle a launch. “Personal observation had convinced me that the chances of success on any important firing effort were in inverse proportion to the number of VIPs present,” Medaris later explained. With half of Washington looking over their shoulders, ABMA’s launch crew would be r
eluctant to scrap or postpone a shoot because of inclement weather or minor technical glitches, which could prove disastrous. Medaris knew that “there was every human tendency to decide in marginal cases to go ahead and accept the risk rather than disappoint the visitors.”

  Medaris was not going to allow that to happen. The VIPs would remain in Washington and would be kept in the dark like everyone else. Only a few people in the Pentagon and at the National Security Council were told that liftoff was scheduled for Wednesday, January 29. To further mask its activities, ABMA began referring to the satellite booster in all official communications simply by its serial designation: Missile Number 29. Missile 29 was one of the original Jupiter Cs that Medaris had quietly diverted during the 1956 reentry tests “for more spectacular future purposes,” as he had hopefully put it. Taken out of cold storage, the test missile had been completely disassembled in late November. It consisted of four stages. The main stage was an elongated Redstone. Eleven scaled-down Sergeant rockets formed the second stage. Three Sergeant motors formed the third stage, while the satellite would be embedded into the final Sergeant rocket in the fourth stage. Von Braun’s team had worked day and night throughout December to reconfigure the four-stage carrier. A new fuel, hydyne, had replaced alcohol to increase thrust from 75,000 to 83,000 pounds, and the turbo pumps had been upgraded to work longer, extending the Redstone’s burning time from 121 to 155 seconds. The entire forward section, which housed the upper stages, had also been modified to accommodate a special “spinning bucket” that spun on its axis, creating a gyroscope that would keep the cluster of smaller top-stage rockets in perfect equilibrium. An improved inertial guidance system was installed, as were a series of tiny directional air-jet nozzles that would keep the uppermost stages perfectly aligned with the earth at the point of orbit. Everything was tested and retested until von Braun pronounced himself satisfied. “Ship it to Florida,” he declared on December 20. “It will do the job.”

  One final modification was made to the Jupiter C booster after its arrival at Cape Canaveral in the belly of a specially configured C-124 cargo plane: its name was changed to Juno. The rechristening was ordered by the Pentagon to deemphasize Missile Number 29’s military and Germanic origins. The Jupiter C’s main stage, after all, was a direct descendant of the V-2, and it was said that some folks in Washington wanted the lineage obscured—and a female name would accomplish this task quite nicely. Medaris, however, suspected baser motivations. “It became quite obvious that every effort would be made at the national level to suppress the Army’s participation in this enterprise,” he worried, “and to credit the whole business to the scientific personnel controlling the IGY effort.”

  Juno did have civilian components. Its uppermost stages had been designed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, and JPL had also made the eighteen-pound satellite, which was fitted into the crown of a slender six-foot-long Sergeant rocket that would ignite for six and half seconds just prior to orbit. The satellite, in fact, had been secretly built several years ago, when JPL’s director, William H. Pickering, had conspired with Medaris to circumvent Washington’s decision to go with Vanguard. Without authorization, they had proceeded with work on an army satellite on the sly, “just in case” Vanguard failed. “We bootlegged the whole job,” Pickering later admitted. “When we finished we locked up the satellite in a cabinet so it wouldn’t be found.”

  That earlier act of insubordination proved not only prescient but also hugely time-saving, as the contraband satellite was taken out of hiding and put directly into the rocket. Like the first Sputnik, it contained two tiny radio transmitters to relay data to ground stations. A miniaturized Geiger counter to measure cosmic radiation was added by James Van Allen, the renowned astrophysicist from the University of Iowa, who in 1950 had first proposed holding the IGY in 1957. Van Allen had originally designed his radiation metering device for Vanguard, but he “thought it would be wise to prepare it in such a way that it would fit Vanguard as well as Jupiter C so that [he] would be prepared in either case.”

  Though Juno’s civilian contributions were not insignificant, it became abundantly clear to Medaris from the wrangling over the classified press releases that were being prepared ahead of the launch that JPL and the IGY committee would get a disproportionate share of the postorbital credit. “Almost every reference to Army-developed hardware was stricken from these documents,” Medaris fumed, “in a rather dishonest attempt to make our first space triumph look like a civilian effort.”

  A myth was being born: that the conquest of space had been driven by man’s insatiable appetite for exploration, rather than by the arms race. Even the satellite’s new name, Explorer, bore witness to the elaborate PR campaign quietly being prepared in Washington.

  Of course none of this information would ever be released to the public if the launch failed. If the launch failed, it would be the army’s fault, and ABMA would go back to making weapons of mass destruction. “This is our biggest challenge,” Medaris confided to his wife in a rare moment of doubt. “We’ve waited a long while for recognition and now we must make good on our promises…. I’m praying for help.”

  • • •

  Few public figures in Washington could have used as much help as Dwight Eisenhower in January 1958. His approval ratings had fallen another eight points after the Vanguard debacle, bringing the precipitous slide to a total of thirty percentage points in a little over four months, and the beleaguered former general was still not himself, uncertain if he could carry out his duties. But on a positive note, the trip to Paris had gone surprisingly well. The British and the Italians had agreed in principle to accept Thor intermediate-range missiles as part of NATO’s defense shield, though now the United States would also have to find a home for the additional Jupiters it had agreed to produce to satisfy Lyndon Johnson’s subcommittee. More important, Ike had impressed his hosts with a combative attitude that belied his weakened medical condition. He was once again the war hero of old that the Europeans remembered.

  But somewhere over the Atlantic, the president once more lost his fighting spirit. When he returned to Washington and appeared with John Foster Dulles at a televised press conference to report on the NATO summit, he seemed listless and deflated. Dulles did almost all the talking, while Ike, at times, looked completely detached and uninterested as his secretary of state droned on. After observing the joint television appearance, Harry Truman quipped that he had been “just about as thoroughly bored with Mr. Dulles as the President was.” The press pounced with renewed calls for Eisenhower’s resignation. Time did its bit to further deflate the sinking American leader. “The symbols of 1957 were two pale, clear streaks of light that slashed across the world’s night skies and a Vanguard rocket toppling into a roiling mass of flame on a Florida beach,” it noted in its year-in-review issue. “On any score 1957 was a year of retreat and disarray for the West. In 1957, under the orbits of a horned sphere and a half-ton tomb for a dead dog, the world’s balance of power lurched and swung toward the free world’s enemies. Unquestionably, in the deadly give and take of the cold war, the high score of the year belongs to Russia. And, unquestionably, the Man of the Year was Russia’s stubby and bald, garrulous and brilliant ruler: Nikita Khrushchev.”

  As the American press hailed Khrushchev’s ascent with grudgingly glowing cover stories, Eisenhower was quietly conferring with his attorney general to “make some specific arrangements” for the vice president to succeed him in the event of further incapacitation. He was also preparing a highly unusual State of the Union address in which he would concede that 1957 had been “no ordinary” year. “I decided to confine the annual message—probably for the first time in history—to just two subjects,” he said, “the strength of our nation: particularly its scientific and military strength, and the pursuit of peace.”

  The State of the Union would be one last “Chin Up” talk, using the biggest stage afforded to an American leader to try to put
the nation’s plight in perspective. He would stress the country’s considerable resources, talents, and relative merits, and he would outline specific plans to shore up what he considered minor education and defense shortcomings. He would rally the troops, as he had done on D-Day and at the Battle of Bulge. And he would try to steal Lyndon Johnson’s thunder in doing so.

  But America was in no mood to listen to its old soldier. The public did not want to be placated with soothing words. Words were empty. What America wanted was action, the sort of call to arms that the flamboyant senator from Texas was advocating. A low point had been reached where no amount of reassuring would restore the country’s shattered confidence, either in itself or in its commander in chief. Only a successful satellite would make things right again. The only question was which satellite: the army’s or the navy’s?

  • • •

  Vanguard’s TV3 might have died a very public death, but the $110 million program behind it was still very much alive. The administration simply had too much invested in Vanguard, in terms of both financial and political capital, to pull the plug just because of one highly publicized failure. In the new spirit of discretion demanded by John Foster Dulles, launch dates were now classified. But otherwise, the six-vehicle program remained unchanged. It still enjoyed priority over ABMA’s Explorer satellite, and on Thursday, January 23, it was given one last shot to beat the army into space.

  The rival teams eyed each other warily at the increasingly crowded Cape. From their vantage point at launchpad 18A, the Vanguard crew watched anxiously as von Braun and his rocket team began setting up shop at launch complex 26A, a few hundred yards away. “We could see the Army preparations on their launch pad not too far from us,” recalled the Vanguard propulsion engineer Kurt Stehling. Like his competitors, Stehling had been born in Germany. But rather than work for the Nazis, his family had fled to Canada, and he later emigrated to the United States to pursue his space dreams. Now, as he looked over his shoulder at the elongated Redstone being erected nearby, he bitterly reflected how the army’s “warhorse” rocket held an unfair advantage over his “skittish thoroughbred” because its “progenitor was built in Germany” at a cost of thousands of lives. But then justice and morality had no place on the launchpad; science was blind that way.