The first Soviet artificial satellite was launched on October 4, 1957, frightening many Americans into believing that they were losing the Cold War. On January 2, 1959, the Soviets launched Luna 1 (above), the first spacecraft to pass close to the moon, to Senator John F. Kennedy’s great consternation.
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While Sputnik was newsworthy and startled some Americans, the Soviet feat also generated enthusiasm for the prospects for the United States to launch a counter-satellite. Three days after Sputnik went up, social anthropologists Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metraux began to collect data gauging various American responses. They asked colleagues and friends around the United States to conduct surveys asking three open-ended questions among diverse age, gender, race, economic, and social groups:
What do you think about the satellite?
How do you explain Russia’s getting their satellite up first?
What do you think we can do to make up for it?
Between October 7 and October 18, Mead and Metraux collected 2,991 adults’ responses. Analyzed as a unit, these responses suggest the need for a revision to the shopworn idea of a post-Sputnik shock reverberating across America. An exceptionally small number said that the Soviet launch of Sputnik was an unexpected event; an even smaller number registered no knowledge of the launch. Of those who had scant knowledge, the rejoinder of one twenty-two-year-old woman from Austin, Texas, was characteristic: “It was a surprise to hear that the satellite was launched successfully. . . . I was skeptical that such a project would ever materialize. Now that it has, it shows that science is still progressing.” Another respondent, a forty-year-old Kentucky man, put it this way: “It’s been a scientific possibility for some time. . . . Russia had said she would launch it, so it did not come as a surprise.”
There were, however, humanitarian skeptics about Sputnik’s value to human civilization. Biologist Rachel Carson, whose 1951 nonfiction masterpiece, The Sea Around Us, had won the National Book Award, thought Sputnik was going to intensify Cold War tensions. With a cold and critical eye, she worried that humans would be poor stewards of space. “In the pre-Sputnik days, it was easy to dismiss so much as science-fiction fantasies,” she lamented to a friend. “Now the most farfetched schemes seem entirely possible of achievement. And man seems actually likely to take into his hands—ill-prepared as he is psychologically—many of the functions of ‘God.’”
Overall, it seems, the more frantic response to Sputnik that ensued was a politically constructed event aimed at specific political ends. Democrats piled onto the national security issue of losing the Cold War, stoking a paranoia that quickly edged toward panic. Just days after Sputnik appeared in the night sky, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington decried “a week of shame and danger,” as if World War III had just erupted. A hawkish liberal and anticommunist with the piercing eyes of a navy admiral, Jackson never hesitated to insist that Americans needed a far stronger military to beat the Soviets—a position that benefited aviation giant Boeing, which was then headquartered in his home state of Washington. Before long, other Democratic leaders joined Jackson, including Jack Kennedy, in hammering home the message that Sputnik was a devastating blow to America’s postwar global prestige as well as to homeland security.
Michigan governor G. Mennen Williams, a potential Democratic candidate for president in 1960, joined the criticism of Eisenhower with a satiric poem that mocked Ike’s penchant for golf:
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 fairways and on rough
The Kremlin knows it all,
We hope our golfer knows enough
To get us on the ball.
Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson became the most high-profile Democratic critic. The night Sputnik was launched, Johnson heard the news on CBS Radio while at his ranch along the Pedernales River in the Texas Hill Country. At once he knew that “a new era of history [had] dawned on the world.” In his memoirs, he reflected about what a frightening moment it was. “In the Open West you learn to live closely with the sky,” he wrote. “It is part of your life. But now, somehow, in some new way, the sky seemed almost alien. I also remember the profound shock of realizing that it might be possible for another nation to achieve technological superiority over this great country of ours.”
George Reedy, a high-powered Democratic strategist, wrote to LBJ on October 17, 1957, about how they could effectively use Sputnik to the party’s advantage: “The issue is one which, if properly handled, would blast the Republicans out of the water, unify the Democratic Party, and elect you as President. You should plan to plunge heavily into this one,” a gung-ho Reedy suggested. “As long as you stick to the facts and do not get partisan, you will not be out on any limb.” Reedy urged Johnson and other Democratic lawmakers to establish the legitimacy, breadth, and dynamism of Sputnik as a serious homeland security threat. Outlining ways in which that might be accomplished, Reedy noted the Democrats needed to generate a considerable public outcry:
Nevertheless, as the facts sink home, the American people are bound to become increasingly uneasy. It is unpleasant to feel that there is something floating around in the air which the Russians can put up and we can’t. The American people do not like to be “second best.” Furthermore, the various dopey stories about the Sputnik mapping the ground with infra-red rays and about the possibility of one flying overhead with a television camera are bound to have an effect. People will soon imagine some Russian sitting in Sputnik with a pair of binoculars and reading their mail over their shoulders. Folks will start getting together in the evening over a case of beer and some field glasses watching for Sputnik and ignoring their television. And when two or three of the satellites get into the ionosphere, what is now curiosity may turn into something close to panic.
As a political pro, Johnson knew at once that Reedy was right, that Sputnik presented a huge opportunity for the Democrats to score points. In one Texas stem-winder, he delivered a blistering attack on Eisenhower that tapped into the snowballing misapprehensions in the country. “The Roman Empire controlled the world because it could build roads,” he said. “Later—when men moved to the sea—the British Empire was dominant because it had ships. In the Air Age, we were powerful because we had airplanes. Now the Communists have established a foothold in outer space. It is not very reassuring to be told that next year we will put a better satellite into the air. Perhaps it will even have chrome trim and automatic windshield wipers. . . . Soon, the Russians will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses.”
Johnson’s alarmist reaction to Sputnik was heard loud and clear on Capitol Hill, and is frequently cited by Cold War scholars as the tipping point in the push to create a unified American space program. While the public had not been immediately afraid of the ramifications of Sputnik, by the time Johnson was done with them, they were. Eight years after the Soviets detonated an atomic weapon and China turned to communism, and four years after the bloody Korean War ended in what was essentially a stalemate, the United States was now lagging behind the Kremlin in space technology. For Johnson, it was too much losing to bear—in military power, in science and technology, and in global prestige. Each of the Soviet satellite’s 1,440 orbits (lasting twenty-two days) suddenly felt like a tether tying America down to lonely planet Earth while the USSR was soaring around space, gallantly reaching for the stars.
Amid the chorus calling Sputnik a national humiliation, President Eisenhower took the launch in stride. Acting just a little surprised, he noted that space had been around a long time, and it would continue to be. To the president, it didn’t matter who happened to be first to circle Earth with an artificial moon. Refusing to buy into the whole superpower paradigm and insisting that self-evident democratic virtues over communism needed no spin, he rejected the
idea that “prestige” was the defining motivation in U.S. foreign policy. But in truth, Eisenhower the politician realized that the Sputnik feat was unsettling. His own Joint Chiefs of Staff were demanding that space supremacy not be ceded without a full-bore fight. As Neil deGrasse Tyson would put it decades later in Space Chronicles, the launch of Sputnik “spooked” the United States into the space race.
Many national security analysts worried about Eisenhower’s perceived lassitude about Sputnik, but such criticism only dented the president’s personal popularity. Even if he were a little anemic and a trifle dull, he still owned the “I Like Ike” brand. And in truth, the U.S. satellite program in late 1957 was essentially on a par with or even more advanced than the Soviet one, but perception mattered mightily in the U.S. Cold War dynamic. Just as Harry Truman and the Democrats had gotten beaten up for not winning the Korean War quickly, Republicans were now being brutalized over Sputnik. With Eisenhower ineligible for another term, it gave potential candidates in the 1960 presidential election the chance to be perceived as tough anticommunists and to shed the intellectual, New Deal, pacifistic yoke of Adlai Stevenson’s 1956 campaign.
Stoking disaffection, Lyndon Johnson took deliberate action in the Senate. In concert with the powerful Richard Russell, a feisty Georgian who served on the Armed Services Committee, he opened an official investigation to gauge the reasons behind America’s allegedly lagging satellite program. By late November, Johnson was chairing a series of Senate hearings (officially an “Inquiry into Satellite and Missile Programs” but known in the press as the Johnson Hearings), seizing on the space gap as he eyed the 1960 nomination.
Jack Kennedy, also gearing up for 1960, made his first calibrated remarks about what he called “the age of Sputnik” on October 18, 1957, in a speech at the University of Florida, in Gainesville. Full of sarcasm, he mocked Eisenhower’s shrug of apathy about losing the space race, claiming that the president’s lackadaisical attitude was that the Soviets may have launched the first satellite, but the United States had the Edsel, Ford Motor Company’s “car of the future” for 1958, whose subsequent commercial flop made Kennedy’s jab even more biting in retrospect.
Surpassing the Soviets in satellite technology, JFK said, would require the federal government to act for the long term by funding a civilian space agency. Furthermore, schoolchildren needed to be better educated in such fields as engineering, physics, and mathematics. “It is rather difficult to reverse these trends,” Kennedy complained of the apparent lag in American technology, “when the teaching of the physical sciences and mathematics in our own secondary schools has declined; when about half of those with talent in these fields who graduate from high school are either unable [to go] or uninterested in going to college; and when, of the half who enter college, scarcely 40 percent graduate.” If U.S. schools didn’t toughen science standards, he worried, the space deficit with the USSR was only going to grow. Later, JFK escalated his criticism by warning that the United States was “losing the satellite and missile race because of complacent miscalculations, penny-pinching, budget cutbacks, incredibly confused mismanagement, and wasteful rivalries and jealousies.”
For the several hundred dedicated, high-level scientists and engineers toiling in America’s disparate and fractured space rocketry programs, the first Sputnik launch was deeply upsetting. When a British reporter informed von Braun about Sputnik, the U.S. Army engineer visibly winced, stung by the blow to his ego and to his adopted country’s prestige. A colleague saw von Braun at a social event that same October night; like Kennedy, von Braun despaired about the Soviet achievement and “started to talk as if he had suddenly been vaccinated with a Victrola needle.” Refusing to be good-tempered, he was devoid of amusement; in his driving urgency to unburden his feelings, his “words tumbled over one another.” If only “President Eisenhower would understand,” he lamented, “that the future of technology was in space!” It infuriated him even more that the outgoing Secretary of Defense Charlie Wilson, his nemesis, derided Sputnik as “a useless hunk of iron.” Sherman Adams, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, told the press that the United States wasn’t interested “in an outer space basketball game.”
Less than a month after the Sputnik 1 success, on November 3, the Soviets launched Sputnik 2, once again throwing the Americans into a panic. This time, the satellite carried the first living creature ever to orbit Earth: Laika, a dark beige mixed-breed dog, whose experience was monitored for vital data and whose image was beamed back to Earth via an onboard television camera. With a dog aboard, the media began calling Sputnik 2 “Muttnik” or “Poochnik.” Space buffs all across the planet looked upward hoping to see what novelist Jack Kerouac, from the lawn of his little cottage in Orlando, Florida, described as “a brown star racing northward.”
Laika immediately became the mascot of the entire Soviet nation, her image adorning commemorative buttons, plates, posters, and other souvenirs. The Soviets possessed the technology to send the brave mutt into space, starting with the power to lift a satellite weighing more than 1,100 pounds, but they lacked one notable aeronautical necessity: a proper means for reentry. Immobilized inside the rocket capsule, Laika died early in the mission from dehydration, overheating, and stress.
The sacrifice of Laika indicated that the Soviets were skipping steps in their research and experiments, ignoring reentry concerns in order to make a conspicuous step forward toward manned flight. The Soviet space dog had proved that a living creature could survive for a spell in a weightless environment, but by failing to bring Laika home alive, the USSR opened itself to accusations of brutality and callousness. Sputnik 2 was mocked by some as a dog coffin floating in space.
Still, for Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Sputnik 2’s 163-day voyage was yet another coup against the Americans, proving Soviet mastery of space technology and validating his strategy of prioritizing missiles over conventional weapons, itself a reversal of Stalin’s plans to build a massive Soviet navy. In January 1958, Time declared Khrushchev its 1957 “Man of the Year,” the cover photograph showing him holding a model of the Sputnik satellite in his hands. Strategically boastful in his success, Khrushchev bluffed that he had an arsenal of ICBMs at his disposal (though few were in fact operable) and that the USSR had “outstripped the leading capitalist country—the United States—in the field of scientific and technical progress.”
While Khrushchev crowed and Laika became a posthumous shoo-in for the Cold War Hall of Fame, Eisenhower was coming off as disconnected from the moment, not rattled at or worried over Laika, and seemingly uninterested in the Space Age technology that was rapidly changing today into the future. He had other concerns. Not only had the president been hospitalized for seven weeks after a 1955 heart attack, but he had also undergone intestinal surgery related to Crohn’s disease in 1956, so his health suggested to some that he might not be fully engaged or firmly in command. Facing a brave new tomorrow that Americans could see streaking through their nighttime sky, Eisenhower, with his low-key reaction to Sputnik, began to seem out of step.
Predictably, Sputnik 2 only amplified the storm of controversy surrounding America’s lagging position in space exploration. Nuclear weapons designer Edward Teller claimed that the United States had lost “a battle more important and greater than Pearl Harbor.” Racing against Lyndon Johnson to be the more ardent Cold Warrior, Jack Kennedy doubled down, lashing out even more forcefully against Eisenhower than he had in Gainesville. Dave Powers, his personal aide, recalled his boss resolving, after vying for the vice presidency in 1956, to become “a total politician,” and the record bears this out: Kennedy did noticeably shift into a higher anti-Soviet gear in late 1957 and 1958. He’d always been mindful of his own constituents and every potential voter beyond Massachusetts, but he hadn’t paid as much attention to the needs of the Democratic Party leadership or his colleagues. Now he transformed into a crisply professional senator who didn’t miss a photo op or, it seemed, make a wrong political move. His youth expla
ined the public nature of his evolution. Politicians who start in their forties have already been to finishing school in one way or another, but JFK was still growing up in the public eye. A late bloomer to start with, he had been a kid yet at thirty. Turning forty in 1957, however, he was very different, a mature and sophisticated Senate star.
Kennedy’s take-charge reaction to the Sputnik crisis was indicative of the total politician he had become. Initially, he gave no hard-and-fast answers on the space supremacy issue. Instead, he waited in the shadows of politicians such as Lyndon Johnson, Stuart Symington, and Henry Jackson, each of whom wanted to make it his national issue. Slowly and deliberately, Kennedy waited for the right time to take his own, even more aggressive stab at Eisenhower’s seeming distractedness, insouciance, and weak national security leadership. Scheduled to address a group in Topeka, Kansas, on November 8, five days after the launch of Sputnik 2, JFK co-opted the title of an Eisenhower speech scheduled for the very next night, “Science and Security.” It was the Massachusetts senator’s first address solely on the topic of space and what he called “the solemn consequences of Sputnik.”
With unusual vigor, Kennedy slammed Eisenhower in the five-star general’s home state in practically every sentence, complaining of dithering, complacency, and weak-mindedness on space technology and science education. Almost mechanically, he named the areas in which he thought Eisenhower had failed, including insufficient funding for satellites and a lack of focus that resulted in squabbling and a lack of cooperation among military services and private contractors, who were often conducting the same research and development; to JFK, this duplicative effort slowed America’s overall progress toward space. Buying entirely into the “space race” concept that the president rejected, Kennedy complained, “It is now apparent that we could have been first with the satellite, but failed to see any reason for doing so, failed to see the scientific, military and propaganda advantage it would give to the Soviets if they were first.”
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