ON ELECTION DAY 1952, Kennedy won a surprise victory in his Senate race even as Republican Dwight Eisenhower won the presidency. The sixty-two-year-old Eisenhower, whose great balding head and fine smile reassured voters of his natural leadership skills, would be the first Republican to occupy the White House in twenty years. A West Point graduate, “Ike” had the distinction of a meteoric rise, climbing over three short years from the rank of colonel in 1941 to that of five-star general, and Supreme Allied Commander, by 1944. After the war, Eisenhower served as army chief of staff from November 1945 until February 1948, then retired and moved into academia as the president of Columbia University. Still looking for his next role as he entered his sixties, he was courted by both political parties, with no less than James Roosevelt, son of Franklin and Eleanor, trying to entice him onto the Democratic presidential ticket. The Republicans won out, and though conservatives hoping to control the party had their doubts about him, Ike brought their party the White House—and they, along with the rest of the nation, waited to see just what kind of president he would turn out to be.
With Harry Truman leaving the presidency with an approval rating of under 30 percent, the Democrats also faced a void of leadership as the Eighty-Third Congress convened in January 1953. Their presidential candidate, Senator Adlai Stevenson, was liked and respected, but his defeat left room for hungrier and louder Democratic voices. Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, who became the Senate minority leader as Kennedy entered the upper house, was the prime example. Like Kennedy, Johnson had felt stifled in his earlier days in the House; moving on to the Senate in 1948, he thrived there. Even without seniority, Johnson managed to dominate through his mastery of policy and the legislative process. A born politician from Texas Hill Country, he could keep the endless minutiae of issues prioritized simultaneously with the nuances of his colleagues’ needs. Nobody in politics worked a telephone or Senate floor (and its back rooms) better than Johnson. And in person, using gesticulating hands and a surprisingly hard grip to his advantage, he came across as a force of nature.
Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota was the unabashed New Dealer among Senate Democrats at the time Kennedy arrived in the upper chamber. A doctrinaire liberal with strong ties to the labor movement, Humphrey had made his reputation at the 1948 Democratic National Convention with a rousing speech on civil rights, for which the Deep South never forgave him. Taking a Senate seat the following year, he championed lost causes and ruffled the feathers of more conservative Democrats. His colleague Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia recalled the time that Humphrey rose during a discussion of Senate committees “to demand the abolition of the Joint Committee on the Reduction of Nonessential Federal Expenditures as a nonessential expenditure.” It wasn’t as funny then as it sounds now; Humphrey’s constant questioning made enemies of many pork-hungry senators that day. By the time of Kennedy’s arrival, Humphrey had smoothed his ways and become known as a dogged legislator, someone not as manipulative as Johnson but with a fund of Minnesota decency that could bring him labor and farm support when it was needed.
Jack Kennedy avoided the rookie mistakes that Humphrey had made. After fumbling his opportunities by sidestepping House committee leadership roles from 1946 to 1952, he was more attentive and cooperative in his new Senate role, and felt revitalized working on a variety of bills and projects. Determined not to be confined to championing projects that would help only Massachusetts, he vocally supported the Saint Lawrence Seaway, disregarding his home state’s worry that connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic would hurt Boston’s seaport business. He also enjoyed the Senate’s clubbier, more elitist atmosphere, which harked back to his experiences in prep school and the Ivy League. Eloquence was expected, and so were manners. They weren’t always delivered, as in the case of the unpredictable Lyndon Johnson, but Kennedy could, without pretension, quote Milton’s poetry in his speeches and mention Roman philosophers, certain that he didn’t need to explain every reference to his colleagues. While he had always refused to insult audiences by simplifying his rhetoric in public, he seemed inspired to up his game in his speeches in the Senate. For Kennedy, the Senate was about power, and every member had a healthy measure of it. If he had come to the conclusion that the vast majority of representatives were irrelevant, he saw that every senator counted. Toward the end of his life, an old friend asked him what he would like to do after the presidency, and Kennedy replied that he’d like to be a senator or journalist once more.
Because Kennedy’s civil-defense advocacy fell flat, he needed a signature issue, and just months after Eisenhower was sworn in, he decided he had one. At issue, remarkably, was the war hero president’s disinclination to grow the military. After only six months in the White House, in July 1953, Eisenhower pulled America out of the Korean War, which had cost more than 34,000 American lives. Following what was later dubbed his “New Look” defense strategy, Eisenhower ordered a 25 percent reduction in military funding and demanded accountability from Pentagon planners who had for years slipped their massive pork plans past the accommodating Roosevelt and Truman. The commander who had masterminded D-day, the largest naval offensive operation in the history of the world, didn’t believe in maintaining a gargantuan standing army poised for limited Korea-like ground wars. Nor did Eisenhower trust an economy dependent on weapons production for prosperity. Eight years later, in his farewell address upon leaving the presidency, Eisenhower famously warned about the dangerous influence of what he called “the military-industrial complex.” Less well remembered is that Eisenhower started his presidency on this same note, with a plea to avoid what he called the “burden of arms. . . . Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
Eisenhower’s rollback of military funding perplexed Jack Kennedy, who complained that the president’s New Look, the name given to Ike’s national security and defense policy, lacked coherence. This brought Kennedy’s voice into the national debate, where his youthful dynamism stood in cosmopolitan contrast with Eisenhower’s steadier, Great Plains low-key style. But JFK’s barbs lacked bite and weren’t a mature public policy issue. For that, Kennedy kept jabbing and searching. On September 7, with the death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953 and the eventual choice of Nikita Khrushchev to become the new Soviet leader Kennedy seized the personal opportunity of this new Cold War dynamic. While Khrushchev won praise in some U.S. foreign policy circles for the de-Stalinization of the USSR, Kennedy railed against him endlessly. At the same time, he burnished his anticommunist credentials with surprisingly robust support for Senator Joseph McCarthy, who claimed that Communists had infiltrated the State Department, the CIA and the U.S. atomic weapons industry.
Although the Eisenhower administration was attempting to shrink the military overall, it supported air power, especially in its most modern incarnations. Because the United States had first-rate intercontinental bombers and had enjoyed indisputable air superiority in the Korean War, the air force had not prioritized development of ICBMs at a level comparable to that of the Soviets. But with the USSR testing a hydrogen bomb on August 12, 1953, and American scientists developing smaller, rocket-mountable nuclear devices, the air force had to catch up. Eisenhower, in his postpresidential memoir Waging Peace, criticized Truman for grossly deprioritizing long-range ballistic missile technology during his White House tenure. To put this into perspective: in Truman’s last year, defense spending appropriations for ballistic missiles was only $3 million; Eisenhower, by contrast, a few years later had jacked them up to $161 million.
On August 20, eight days after the Soviet hydrogen bomb test, the first of von Braun’s Redstone missile was test-fired by the army at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Developed over the previous three years by von Braun’s team at the OGMC, the Redstone would go on to be the workhorse of the army’s missile program. Von Braun, conditioned to the challenge of funding rocket research ever since his day
s with Hermann Oberth, believed he could advance his cause by framing U.S. ballistic missile development as necessary for competing with the Soviets. There were other great rocketeers in America (notably, the team assembled by Frank Malina at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from the 1930s to the 1950s), but they didn’t have an engineering wizard-cum–media maven like von Braun to promote their engineering feats.
Von Braun loved to boast publicly that the United States was destined to become a spacefaring nation. He wrote three articles for Collier’s in 1952 that envisioned launching humans to the moon and a wheel-shaped space station. These articles made a splash. Collier’s promoted von Braun as an anti-Soviet German engineer and debonair aristocrat who loved the United States. His prose was highly readable. In one article he coined the phrase “across the space frontier” in Collier’s. Armed with an accumulation of rocket engineering knowledge, he seized the attention of the magazine’s four million readers, but his space advocacy came with a stark warning that the United States must “immediately embark on a long-range development program” or lose out to the Soviet Union. In 1953 and 1954, von Braun wrote articles for Collier’s about satellites carrying monkeys and Mars exploration.
What von Braun understood was that in a democracy, where taxpayers footed the bill, space exploration would happen only with direct and unvarnished mass appeals for international prestige, beating Russia, and being first. His McCarthy-era thesis that the United States must “conquer” space had a Manifest Destiny feel. And his notion that an American-manned space station could be constructed with existing rocket techniques and that, in addition to its uses as a scientific observatory, it could also act as an orbital fortress, dominating Earth as an impregnable launching base for atomic missiles, was alarming. It was up to the United States, von Braun argued, to see that nobody else built one first. “You should know how advertising is everything in America,” he told a friend. “The way I’m talking will get people interested [in space exploration].”
Call him an ex-Nazi propagandist, P. T. Barnum–style marketer, or space visionary, but von Braun understood explicitly that space travel had to be couched in the spirit of American exceptionalism. This attitude went against President Eisenhower’s belief in holding down expenditures and allowing the private sector to play a large role in shrinking the size of Big Government. Von Braun’s saber rattling for the army about conquering the Soviets in space, however, was embraced by those anticommunist Democratic senators with presidential ambitions: Stuart Symington, Lyndon Johnson, and John F. Kennedy. And in 1954 the air force started developing a reconnaissance satellite program, which historians consider the first U.S. government–funded space program.
ON SEPTEMBER 12, 1953, Jack Kennedy married Jacqueline Bouvier in an elaborate wedding in Newport, Rhode Island. Proud to have descended from French aristocracy, Jackie, as she was called, once stated her ambition as being the “Overall Art Director of the Twentieth Century!” Her sense of fashion and culture leaned highbrow. She had grown up in a wealthy family with residences in Manhattan; East Hampton, Long Island; McLean, Virginia; and Newport. In 1947 she was voted Debutante of the Year at Vassar College. Many Brahmins joked that Jack Kennedy had clearly married up, that Jackie was the best thing ever to happen to the serial dater from Cape Cod. In October, the newlyweds were interviewed from their Boston apartment on Edward R. Murrow’s CBS show Person to Person, and were turned into Cold War–era celebrities.
While the Kennedys were on their honeymoon, a report that had been commissioned by the Truman administration nineteen months earlier was delivered to Eisenhower. Titled “The Present Status of the Satellite Problem” and prepared by Aristid V. Grosse, a physicist at Temple University who had worked on the Manhattan Project, the report relied heavily on interviews with von Braun and other Huntsville scientists, and laid out the certain propaganda boon that would accrue to the Soviets were they to launch a satellite before the United States. The last paragraph of the report read:
At the present time our engineering efforts in this field are limited in scope and distributed over various government agencies. It is recommended as a first step in solving the satellite problem that a small but effective committee be set up composed of our top engineers and scientists in the rocket field, with representatives of the Defense and State Departments. This Committee should report to the top levels of our government and should have for its use and evaluation, all data available to our government and industry on this subject. It should report in detail as to what steps should be taken to launch a satellite successfully into outer space and to estimate the cost and time required for such a development. It is felt that if such a committee were in existence and a definite decision taken by our government regarding the construction of a satellite, that it would fire the enthusiasm and imagination of our engineers and scientists and effectively increase our success in the whole field of rockets and guided missiles.
This Grosse report didn’t immediately jump-start the U.S. satellite program under Eisenhower. But the arguments it raised were reviewed with fresh eyes in 1954. CIA director Allen Dulles also understood that the United States needed to lead the world in satellite technology. A year after the Grosse report, Dulles wrote the Department of Defense that if the Soviets beat the United States in this field, it would be a major Cold War setback. “In addition to the cogent scientific arguments advanced in support of the development of Earth satellites,” Dulles said, “there is little doubt but what the nation that first successfully launches the Earth satellite, and thereby introduces the age of space travel, will gain incalculable international prestige and recognition. Our scientific community as well as the nation would gain invaluable respect and confidence should our country be the first to launch the satellite.”
IN THE SUMMER OF 1954, Kennedy was suffering chronic pain due to college football and war injuries, along with osteoporosis likely caused by steroid treatment for colitis and failing adrenal glands. Because of his Addison’s disease, back surgery was risky, with only a fifty-fifty chance of survival, but Jack chose to undergo the operation at a New York hospital that October. Ironically, when Lyndon Johnson suffered a heart attack on July 2, 1955, and was placed in a Washington-area hospital for seven weeks, Kennedy’s stature in the Senate rose considerably on the incorrect presumption that he was healthy and vigorous in comparison to the ailing Senate majority leader.
Speculation swirled that JFK might get the second spot on the Democrats’ 1956 presidential ticket. While the chances of defeating Eisenhower were scant (even though he’d suffered cardiac arrest in 1955), several prominent Democrats, including Johnson, chose to run for the top slot. After Adlai Stevenson won the nomination for the second time, Kennedy was among the few who sought to join the ticket, calculating that the VP slot would put him in the national limelight and position him for the top of the ticket in 1960, when the popular Eisenhower would no longer be eligible. JFK’s easy good looks and carefree smile made him an attractive guest on television, the exciting new medium for selling a candidate, even if he sometimes came off on the air as cautious and mechanical. After three ballots, Kennedy lost to Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, a loss that deprived Jack of his stepping-stone but proved he could be taken seriously at the presidential level. What handicapped Kennedy was his vote against an Eisenhower bill to bolster farm prices. “This was the first time in his political career that Jack Kennedy had tasted defeat,” historian Robert Caro wrote in The Passage of Power, “and it was apparent that he didn’t like the feeling at all. Yet not only his words but his demeanor, if resigned and disappointed, had been gracious—the demeanor of a young man dignified, even gallant, in defeat.”
After the Democratic ticket of Stevenson-Kefauver was defeated that November, Kennedy began preparing his run for the White House in 1960.
IN EARLY 1957, Senator Kennedy began publicly criticizing Eisenhower’s lagging missile buildup. Although Eisenhower had designated the air force’s Atlas ICBM program a top national pri
ority in 1954, JFK believed it was too little, too late. Full of von Braun–like “the Russians are coming” alarm, he contended that Ike had neglected to properly fund both missile and satellite research and development. While Lyndon Johnson had been making many of the same arguments since the Truman administration, his criticisms had been contained largely to government settings, leaving it to Kennedy to take the case to the public. JFK’s argument caught fire on August 26, 1957, when the Soviets announced that they’d successfully tested the first nuclear-tipped ICBM capable of reaching the United States within minutes.
Kennedy railed against lackluster administration policies that, he claimed, had led to Soviet domination in ICBM development. Having been raised in a family obsessed with winning at every level, he reduced the complexities of Cold War statesmanship to a simple contest. Who was the first to have something both wanted? Who had more of something both feared? Who was ahead? Who was behind? Kennedy outlined geopolitical strategic initiatives that would allow the United States to surpass the Soviets in military strength (especially in missiles) and, at the same time, he declared, encourage peace.
On June 11, two months before the Soviet ICBM test, at long last the U.S. Air Force had launched a liquid-fueled Atlas rocket. It stayed airborne for only twenty-four seconds before imploding into a curtain of fire—seemingly proving Kennedy’s contention that America was lagging behind the USSR in ICBM capability. But the setback didn’t worry Eisenhower much. The glitches and kinks would get worked out. And the United States, he knew, was doing exceedingly well with its solid-fueled missile programs such as the Minuteman, Polaris, and Skybolt.
Advancements in technology were proving helpful to the American effort. The silicon transistor, invented at Bell Laboratories in 1954, revolutionized the world of electronics and silicon became the fundamental component upon which all space computer technology rested. (Before the transistor was perfected, the NACA in Virginia hired women, many African American, to be “human computers” performing difficult calculations by hand.) It was the transistor that helped reduce the size of the computer. In 1946, a single computer with the power of a basic PC today would have been the size of an eighteen-wheel truck and would have needed the same amount of power as a medium-size town. The first silicon transistor in 1954 was about half an inch (gargantuan compared with today, when a cluster of transistors can comfortably fit on the head of a pin), and the first commercially marketed transistor radio, the Regency TR-1, went on the appliance store market for $49.99 in 1954. Visionary aerospace engineers understood long before the general public that the more transistors that engineers could squeeze into a chip, the more speed and power efficiency one could reap.
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