The leadership styles of Eisenhower and Kennedy couldn’t have been more different. Ike, the strategizing general, was used to working out the details in private and releasing information on a need-to-know basis, without any fanfare. Always operating calmly and as silently as growing grass, the president eschewed soaring rhetoric aimed at gaining favorable press—or spreading doom. JFK, who had depended mainly on charisma in his political career, was frustrated that Eisenhower seemed uninterested in sharing the adventure of space with the American people. A close student of Winston Churchill, Kennedy believed that leadership was about galvanizing a slumbering public (via speeches, articles, and radio addresses) to achieve great things. “The President must tell us exactly where we stand today,” the senator from Massachusetts insisted, referring to the satellite program, “and where we go from here.”
The next day, the Associated Press account of Kennedy’s Topeka sermonette appeared in newspapers around the country. “The Massachusetts Democrat said this country had never stood in so critical a position in world affairs,” reported the AP. Fully engaging in the post-Sputnik crisis from his Kansas podium, JFK had thrown down the gauntlet, pressing for an urgent response. While Eisenhower had recently mocked the Democratic inclination to “go frantic” over the Sputniks, Kennedy was in essence pleading with Ike to “go frantic” for the good of the country. As Johnson pressed forward with his Senate investigation, Kennedy reiterated his Florida focus on the gap in science education, stating that “the race for advantage in the Cold War is . . . a race of education and research.”
Kennedy soon got a boost from Life magazine, which printed a long feature comparing American and Soviet performance at the high school level. The article focused on a Moscow school where the students bore down on demanding subjects such as physics and algebra six days a week, contrasting it with a Chicago school where goofing off was prevalent. By the end of the piece, readers were left surprised that American graduates could even operate a bicycle or sewing machine, much less launch a satellite or two into outer space. Staying on the technology deficit issue, JFK was an early proponent of the National Defense Education Act, which increased funding for what are now called STEM disciplines in schools and created the first federal student loan program.
Soon after the launch of Sputnik 2, Soviet premier Nikolai Bulganin was asked by the New York Times when his country would launch a third satellite. “It’s the Americans’ turn now,” he replied, devilishly yanking Eisenhower’s chain. “Let them send up their satellite.” Bulganin knew that the different U.S. armed services’ rocket programs were all struggling, including the one being run by von Braun.
Von Braun’s rocket team in Huntsville built the Jupiter-C as a payload-bearing army rocket suitable for putting a satellite in orbit. It was used instead as a nuclear-bomb-equipped ballistic missile, but it was not a particularly useful weapon. This missile took many features from the V-2, added an engine from the Navaho test missile, and incorporated some of the electronic components from other rocket test programs. Its first launch took place at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on August 20, 1953, and its capability as an IRBM was tested on May 16, 1958, when combat-ready troops first test-fired the rocket itself. The Jupiter-C was then deployed to U.S. units in Italy and Turkey and served until 1963.
The Eisenhower administration’s deployment of von Braun’s Jupiter missile destabilized the situation with the Soviet Union. It is not an uplifting story. One serious problem of Jupiter missiles was their range, necessitating that they be deployed near the border of the Soviet Union. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles argued that the placement of the IRBMs so close to the Soviet border invited attacks and therefore was a provocative act that destabilized the Cold War balance. Moreover, the technology was such that it took hours to ready the missiles for launch—they had to be deployed at aboveground launch complexes—and could be destroyed by a Soviet-trained sniper with a high-powered rifle. “It would have been better to dump them in the ocean,” Eisenhower complained, when the Jupiters were deployed to Europe, “instead of trying to dump them on our allies.”
If Eisenhower was dubious of the Jupiter’s worth as a missile, von Braun and his team were frustrated by the refusal to compete with the Soviets in satellite launches. He was truly befuddled by how Washington had downgraded the technology of tomorrow. Back on October 4, 1957, President Eisenhower had been at his farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, when he learned about Sputnik at 6:30 p.m., following a frustrating day of talks with Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, who was refusing to desegregate public schools in Little Rock. Ike regarded his decision to federalize the Arkansas National Guard in order to enforce the order far more important than Sputnik, and he tasked White House press secretary James Hagerty with communicating his feeling that the Soviet feat “did not come as a surprise” and that America wasn’t “in a race” with the Kremlin.
In a speech, Eisenhower credited the Soviet success to “all the German scientists” who had been captured at the end of World War II and taken east to Moscow and then beyond. This comment embarrassed von Braun. Still, the German rocket scientists now working for the Soviets had been given greater resources and opportunities behind the Iron Curtain than von Braun and his colleagues had in the United States. To von Braun, it was the height of irony.
In the middle of the Sputnik uproar, von Braun protested to Neil McElroy, who had replaced Charlie Wilson as secretary of defense, that the army’s satellite program wasn’t being supported with the urgency the historical moment demanded. “Vanguard will never make it,” von Braun said, railing against the navy effort. “We [the Army] have the hardware on the shelf. For God’s sake turn us loose and let us do something. We can put up the satellite in sixty days.” Major General John Medaris, von Braun’s supportive commander at the ABMA, quietly insisted on ninety days, and two weeks later, McElroy approved the Jupiter-C/Redstone rocket-testing plan. Those on the Huntsville team were the direct beneficiaries of Sputnik. Moving quickly, von Braun reserved a late-January launch date at the Cape Canaveral range and began frantic preparations.
By the time of the Sputnik launches, von Braun had grown in public acclaim. Not only had Collier’s magazine given him a chance to publish his vision of space exploration, but Walt Disney had provided the German-born engineer with a television platform for Sunday-night talks about the development of the Redstone and Jupiter rockets in Huntsville, and about the cosmos in general. Although his Nazi past still occasioned some resentment, it wasn’t a debilitating public liability. Indeed, von Braun, and his role in American life, had become an embodiment of West Germany reformed by the American way.
Projecting strength with a forceful voice and conniving eyes, von Braun exuded, as writer Norman Mailer put it, “a confusing aura of strength and vulnerability, of calm and agitation, cruelty and concern, phlegm and sensitivity.” From 1947 to 1957, von Braun’s rocketry prowess and space technology genius were celebrated as national educational assets on TV and in glossy magazines. After Sputnik, Kennedy and others viewed von Braun as the indispensable man in America’s fight against Soviet space dominance. When von Braun had first arrived in Huntsville, the army arsenal had a few handsome stone- and tile-faced office buildings and test laboratories, but not much more. The automobile showrooms and movie theaters in town were where the local excitement resided. But after Sputnik, cathedral-like buildings were erected, and at night the lights around the base gave the complex the feel of an aerospace fairyland.
In the year after Sputnik, von Braun adorned the covers of both Time and Life. Swooning reporters treated him as half rocket scientist, half charming and cultured poet/raconteur, imbued with a deep affinity for all things American. His originality, his commitment to rocketry, and his steady faith in going to the moon were considered priceless national assets. Fan mail poured into Huntsville after these publications, and women wrote von Braun mash notes. His aggressive belief that the United States could outperform the USSR in space made him a heroic figure i
n Cold War America. “I get about ten letters a day,” he told Life. “About half come from youngsters who want advice on how to become rocketeers. We tell them hit math and physics heavily. One lady wrote that God doesn’t want man to leave the Earth and was willing to bet me $10 we wouldn’t make it. I answered that as far as I knew, the Bible said nothing about space flight, but it was clearly against gambling.”
Not all the letters Time received were positive about von Braun’s service to U.S. missile development. There were taunts about his being a Nazi and having no moral conscience. “I cannot share the enthusiasm for Von Braun,” Samuel E. Lessere of Clearwater, Florida, wrote to the magazine. “All that can be said for him is that he’s willing to do for us what he was willing to do for Hitler.” Nowhere was anti–von Braun sentiment greater than in Soviet-dominated East Germany, where press reports excoriated him as a Nazi war criminal.
Invariably, whenever von Braun was forced to explain his work for the Third Reich, his stock defense was that just as the Wright brothers had signed a contract with the U.S. War Department during World War I, he had tied his kite to the German Army in World War II. But this defense wasn’t credible. Von Braun had mastered the simpleton act, claiming he had no idea how brutal Hitler was to Jews. “I wasn’t truly aware that atrocities were being committed in Germany against anyone,” he offered. “I knew that many prominent Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant leaders had been jailed for their opposition to the government. I also suspected from the fact that I had lost sight of my own Jewish friends, that many Jews had either fled the country or were held in concentration camps. But being jailed and being butchered are two different things.” Ultimately, hoping to cleanse his legacy in the last decade of his life, von Braun confessed that he was “ashamed of having been associated with a regime that was capable of such brutality.”
EVEN THOUGH THE fall of 1957 had been a busy time in America—the first meaningful civil rights bill since Reconstruction had been enacted in Congress; federal troops were sent into Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect nine black students entering its newly integrated Central High School; and the United States conducted its first underground nuclear test, code-named “Rainier,” in the Nevada desert—a consensus was emerging by Thanksgiving that the Sputniks had made a counterstatement U.S. satellite launch vitally urgent. After conferring with officials from the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), the White House announced that the navy’s Vanguard program would launch “small satellite spheres” by late in the year. The message, however, was somewhat garbled. The Vanguard team had actually been planning to launch test vehicles by the end of 1957, in anticipation of sending an actual satellite into orbit the following spring. With the added pressure to complete the package in December, a certain sense of anxiety set in at the NRL. Joe Siri, an MIT graduate in charge of Vanguard’s Theory and Analysis Office, developed a plan to use one of the army’s Jupiter-C rockets in combination with Vanguard satellite engineering. Technically sound but bureaucratically impossible, given the level of interservice rivalry among the navy, army, and air force rocket programs, the idea and its reception were emblematic of what one NRL official termed “those rather trying days” after Sputnik.
Senator Kennedy regarded the “mismanagement” of the country’s space research offices as a failure of Eisenhower’s leadership. In his Topeka speech, he rightfully condemned “the costly, harmful rivalries and jealousies between the three services and between various companies.” He despaired at seeing them “duplicating each other’s efforts, competing for funds, for personnel, for scientific facilities and brainpower and surreptitiously undercutting the other two to Congress and the press.” What Kennedy didn’t tell the audience was that both Sputnik and the American Vanguard (navy) satellite programs were the result of the international scientific effort known as the International Geophysical Year (IGY), which was planned, known to the public, and embraced by him.
Immediately after the news of Sputnik 2, the Department of Defense lost no time in acting on an earlier Eisenhower directive to fully authorize the army’s Redstone as an alternative to the navy’s Vanguard. During the first week of December 1957, the NRL hoped it would succeed with the scheduled launch of its Test Vehicle (TV-3) Vanguard rocket, with a small satellite on board. The navy got first crack at counterbalancing the Soviets’ space achievement, while the army waited in the wings.
The same week was a watershed for Senator Kennedy, who adorned the cover of Time as the “Man Out Front.” The profile inside the magazine invoked the familiar aspects of his legend—his heroics in the PT-109 incident, the athleticism of touch football games at the Kennedy compound on Cape Cod, his personal appeal to women, his firm anti-Soviet resolve, and his elegant wife Jackie’s appeal to everyone. Time acknowledged his “unannounced but unabashed run for the Democratic Party’s nomination for President in 1960.” According to the lore at Time, effusive pro-Kennedy letters poured in at a record-setting pace, from readers wholeheartedly embracing “the Democratic whiz kid of 1957.”
On Friday, December 6, Vanguard engineers, scientists, and officials convened at Cape Canaveral, midway between Jacksonville and Palm Beach along Florida’s east coast, for the first Vanguard launch. Used as a navy and air force aeronautic test site since 1949, Cape Canaveral, a twenty-mile-long marshland of sand, scrub, and seagrass, had in July 1950 seen the launch of a rocket called Bumper 8, a modified V-2. The launch site, known as the Long Range Proving Ground Base, was far enough away from heavily populated areas to protect citizens against engineering disaster, yet easily accessible from the larger barrier island, closer to the mainland, where test personnel were headquartered. The reason an East Coast location was desirable for U.S. rocket launches was simple physics: traveling eastward provided a projective boost from the Earth’s spin. In addition, if there were a mishap, the Atlantic Ocean could absorb a crash without killing civilians on the ground. Conversely, a West Coast location would either send rockets over populated areas or have to grapple with launching against Earth’s rotation. The southern Florida location put the launch site close to the equator. The tangential velocity of a point on the surface of the Earth is at its maximum at the equator, so to launch from there would start the flight just a little closer to orbit. Both the army and navy agreed that the key determining factor in choosing a location for a rocket launch site was its relation to the easiest way of reaching orbit. And all that Florida sunshine meant fewer bad weather delays.
Cape Canaveral was hunting and fishing country; the adjoining Banana River, actually a lagoon, was a wonderful place to catch largemouth bass and bream. Eventually, this marshland would become the headquarters for America’s first space port, a patch of thicket and brush into which the federal government would invest billions of dollars and around which aerospace industries would sprout like mushrooms. With the hot Atlantic breeze holding sway and no blazing metropolitan electric lights to disturb government-paid stargazers, this subtropical wilderness would be where the United States would try to reach the moon. But first the Americans needed to launch a satellite to match the Soviets’.
The NRL had already completed suborbital rocket tests at Cape Canaveral by the time the three-stage Vanguard TV-3 rocket was ready for its December 6 test. Seventy-two feet in height, the rocket would be propelled by two liquid-fueled sections (or stages), while the third stage, carrying a payload of one small satellite, would be propelled by solid fuel. As Robert Goddard had predicted back in the 1920s, much of the challenge in creating the rocket lay in managing the heat that was generated. The capacity to produce thrust in each stage was staggering, but the stages had to be kept separate.
Two months after Sputnik, a herd of news-hungry reporters was on hand at Cape Canaveral to cover the landmark Vanguard TV-3 event. Television cameras carried images nationwide on CBS and NBC, beginning a tradition of live coverage for rocket launches that would last into the 1970s. The countdown gave drama to the moment, with millions watching as the Vanguard TV-3 took off, rose four
feet into the air, and then sank back to Earth, the tons of fuel on board exploding into an expensive fireball. All that was left of America’s dream of an answer to Sputnik was the battered satellite, which had been thrown to the side when the rocket hit the ground, rolling around on the launchpad in a hissing cloud of black soot. It didn’t take long for the launch to be derided as “Kaputnik,” “Stayputnik,” and “Flopnik.”
To scientists working under normal circumstances, a test is a success whether it brings the desired result or not; if something is learned, the test is considered worthwhile. Much was learned from the TV-3, but with all the pressure to launch an American satellite, it was seen by the rest of the nation as a low point in the annals of U.S. ingenuity. Various explanations were offered for the failure. One possible culprit was the change of a key fuel-delivery system component from steel to aluminum, without the recommended temperature-resistant coating. Another was a possible fuel leak caused by workmen having climbed the fuel line as though it were a rope to tend to details out of their reach.
Senator John Kennedy didn’t comment on Flopnik. The day after the failed launch, he had his own problem to handle in the wake of the Time cover story, when Washington journalist Drew Pearson appeared on ABC News and asserted unequivocally that Kennedy had not written Profiles in Courage, the book for which he’d won a Pulitzer Prize earlier in 1957. The primary author, Pearson said, was Kennedy’s speechwriter, Ted Sorensen. “You know,” Pearson said on national television, in disparaging Kennedy’s actions, “some of his colleagues [in the Senate] say, ‘Jack, I wish you had a little less profile and more courage.’”
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