The Age of Eisenhower

by William I Hitchcock

  These had been troubling times for Eisenhower. His son John later wrote that the “fall of 1957 and early part of 1958 constituted probably the lowest point” in his father’s presidency. The crisis in the South, the shock of Sputnik, the failing economy, and now another health scare. Eisenhower had faced serious crises before, from Indochina and Taiwan to Hungary and Suez, as well as Little Rock. But the Sputnik crisis was different from these, for it struck at the fundamental claim of his administration that it was possible to wage the cold war in a patient, disciplined, and fiscally sensible manner. Sputnik opened the door to sharp criticism: Had America been sleeping while the Soviets stole a march in the missile race? Had the warrior-statesman failed to keep the nation prepared? Eisenhower’s answers to these pointed questions would define the rest of his presidency.18

  III

  That Sputnik became a major and enduring political crisis for Eisenhower had everything to do with Lyndon Johnson. On November 25, 1957, the same day that Eisenhower suffered his stroke, Johnson began his promised congressional hearings into the alleged failings of the U.S. missile program. Johnson had emerged in 1957 as Eisenhower’s chief political antagonist, gutting his civil rights bill and controlling the Senate and the Washington press corps with enormous skill. With the president incapacitated, the energetic and forceful Texan sought to take center stage. Sputnik offered him an opportunity to keep his name in the headlines by leading a well-publicized investigation into the American failure to beat the Soviets into space. From late November through early January his Preparedness Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee called in hundreds of scientists, military leaders, and government officials to explain why America had fallen behind and what must be done to catch up to the USSR. Although Johnson theatrically stressed his desire to keep politics out of the hearings and promised not to “wander up any blind alleys of partisanship,” his committee brought out into the open a number of critical facts that made Ike look bad and lent support to the perennial theme of a dangerously disengaged chief executive.19

  The subcommittee’s first witness was Edward Teller, the controversial Hungarian-born scientist who designed the hydrogen bomb. Teller had been a leading critic of J. Robert Oppenheimer and was loathed by many in the intellectual and scientific world. But he spoke his mind, as Johnson expected, and delivered a stern rebuke to the idea, recently mooted by Eisenhower, that Sputnik posed no military threat. “It has great military significance,” Teller countered, because it showed how advanced the Soviets were in rocket propulsion, guidance systems, and fuel technology. The matter was simple: if the Soviets controlled space, they could control the Earth. In a spellbinding two-hour performance to a packed hearing room, Teller detailed the many ways that Soviet science had left the Americans behind and profoundly vulnerable.20

  Others concurred. Vannevar Bush, the leading science and engineering administrator during the Second World War and now at MIT, stressed the huge advances the Soviets had made. “We have been complacent and we have been smug,” he sternly insisted. The persistence of interservice rivalry slowed advances, he said, and the nation had paid insufficient attention to scientific education. All this had to change if the United States was to survive. Gen. James Doolittle, who had helped reorganize the CIA in 1954, suggested the Defense Department be overhauled to strengthen the secretary of defense and impose order on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We must develop a sense of urgency,” he demanded. Lt. Gen. James Gavin, army deputy chief of staff for research and development, insisted the Soviets were ahead of the United States in almost every area of weapons and technology. And Wernher von Braun, the man who directed the Nazi V-2 program and who had been designing missiles for the army since the end of the war, gave shocking testimony about the bureaucratic tangles and lack of steady funding that had slowed missile research. Von Braun said the army could have launched a satellite in 1956, but the Pentagon halted his efforts. And so the hearings went, painting the picture of a defense establishment that was badly organized, led by a weak secretary of defense, slowed by endless committees, tangled in red tape, underfunded, and beset by interservice rivalry.21

  Worse was yet to come, for the most significant and damaging testimony given to Johnson’s committee came from a leading member of the administration—none other than Allen Dulles. On November 26, the second day of the hearings, the CIA chief, accompanied by Herbert Scoville, the assistant director for scientific research, gave the committee a top-secret briefing about Soviet military and technological capabilities. Dulles informed the senators that since the Sputnik launch, his agency’s analysts had grown increasingly worried about the pace of Soviet missile production. There did indeed seem to be a missile gap opening up between the two superpowers. And the danger was growing.

  Many historians have claimed that Eisenhower never worried much about the alleged missile gap because he had available to him the top-secret photographs taken by the U-2 spy plane that showed a tiny and unimpressive Soviet missile program. This oft-repeated assertion is misleading. In fact the 13 U-2 flights the CIA conducted over the USSR between June and October 1957 provided no comfort at all. These overflights reaped a bonanza of information, capturing pictures of the Soviet missile testing facilities at Kapustin Yar, near Astrakhan, as well as the nuclear weapons research site at Semipalatinsk in northeast Kazakhstan. The flights also discovered an intercontinental ballistic missile site at Tyuratam in southern Kazakhstan, from which Sputnik would soon be launched. The U-2 photographs taken in the month before Sputnik revealed a large and growing Soviet nuclear weapons and missile testing program. Exactly how far the Soviet Union’s new rockets could travel, how many it planned to build, how accurate they were—all that remained unknown. But the liftoff of the R-7 rocket on October 4, with the Sputnik satellite on board, confirmed Americans’ worst fears. The Soviets clearly did have an ICBM and were trying to build more.22

  The U-2 flights provided priceless information, yet because of the extreme risk of the illegal overflights—Ike believed a shoot-down of a U-2 might well trigger a war—he did not persevere with them. From mid-October 1957 until December 1959, a period of more than two years, he approved only two flights into Soviet airspace. The U-2 was all but grounded. Instead of illegal overflights, CIA analysts had to rely on a second means to observe Soviet rocketry. In early 1955 the United States had deployed a sophisticated radar system in eastern Turkey to monitor tests of Soviet missiles. This testing data, far from reassuring the Americans, showed the astonishing frequency of Soviet missile tests—nearly 300 between 1953 and 1957—and the approximate range and altitude of the missiles the Soviets were developing. Although most of the missiles they tested were short- or intermediate-range, it was clear they were trying to achieve long-range ICBM capability. CIA analysts combined the radar data, the U-2 photographs, and their analysis of the rocket that carried Sputnik into orbit, and concluded that they had underestimated Soviet missile capabilities.23

  This explains why, when Allen Dulles went before the Preparedness Subcommittee on November 26, he presented such an arresting account of Soviet missile progress—even more dire than the report he had given to the NSC just a few weeks earlier. The USSR, the CIA now claimed, would have an operational ICBM big enough to carry a one-ton nuclear warhead some 5,000 miles as early as 1958—a year sooner than predicted by the Gaither Report. If present trends continued, it could have 100 ICBMs by the middle of 1959 and 500 by the middle of 1960. This information, though classified, was a bombshell. Putting all his authority and credibility on the line, Dulles told a handful of senators that the Soviets were about to take a dangerous lead in the missile race.24

  Dulles wrote these alarming new figures into a revised intelligence estimate on Soviet missile capabilities, given to the NSC on December 17, 1957. Labeled SNIE 11-10-57, this document asserted that the Soviet ICBM program had “an extremely high priority” and was even running on a “crash basis.” In the midst of the Sputnik crisis and the Johnson hearings, these
initial predictions of an imminent wave of new Soviet ICBMs directly contradicted Eisenhower’s public reassurances. Dulles knew exactly what he was doing: a dire report about a Soviet lead in the missile race would prompt congressional outcry and lead to increased dollars for the CIA’s espionage capabilities. Dulles therefore gave Johnson and his fellow committee member Stuart Symington a magnificent opportunity to use the still-raw intelligence the CIA had gathered to damage the Eisenhower administration. By the end of the hearings, a bleak picture had emerged: the scientists, the military experts, the engineers, and especially the top intelligence analysts now asserted that America faced mortal danger and that if the nation did not respond immediately, the Soviet Union would turn its mastery of science into domination of the world.25

  IV

  Were things that bad? Was America truly vulnerable? Ike did not think so, and his confidence derived less from his limited knowledge of the Soviet missile program than from his detailed knowledge of the vast American one. Contrary to the claims of his critics, Eisenhower had been pushing hard to prod the Defense Department to develop a new arsenal of nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. Although he had done a poor job of informing the public and shaping the narrative, by the end of 1958 the United States stood on the threshold of a dramatic breakthrough in the missile and space race.

  After World War II, America’s missile program evolved slowly, taking a backseat to the development of the Strategic Air Command’s fleet of long-range bombers, which remained the chief delivery system of America’s nuclear deterrent. Still, missile research quietly went ahead, leavened by the knowledge and experience of German scientists like Wernher von Braun, whose V-2 rocket served as a prototype for the U.S. Army’s first ballistic missile, the Redstone. By September 1956 Von Braun’s team had developed a rocket called Jupiter-C, an intermediate-range missile that had the potential, its designers believed, to place a satellite in orbit.26

  But they did not get the chance to prove their claim before the USSR put Sputnik into space. The reason for this missed opportunity was simple: Eisenhower had decided in 1955 to make the construction of an intercontinental ballistic missile the overriding priority of the U.S. missile program. He sidetracked satellite research into Project Vanguard, a second-tier program run by the navy. This decision followed the recommendation of the February 1955 Killian Panel, which declared long-range rockets vital to sustain the effectiveness of American deterrence. In late July 1955 Eisenhower received a briefing by air force missile engineers, who insisted that the rapidly shrinking size and weight of thermonuclear weapons combined with increasingly powerful rockets had brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the edge of a new era of missile technology in which the Great Powers could strike devastating and unstoppable blows at one another. After a summer of debate the National Security Council determined that beating the Soviets to the ICBM was “a matter of great urgency” and that building the long-range missile was “a program of the highest priority above all others.”27

  Under direct presidential pressure, missile research made rapid progress. The Department of Defense gave the air force the green light to build two ICBM systems, the Atlas and the Titan. Once operational, each of these behemoths would be able to carry warheads with the explosive power of 1.4 megatons and 4 megatons, respectively, over a distance of 5,500 miles. (By comparison, all the bombs used in World War II amounted to approximately 3 megatons.) A single one of these missiles could obliterate a large city in a flash. The air force planned to have the Atlas missiles operational by 1959 and the Titans by 1960.

  ICBMs alone were insufficient, however. The Pentagon also wanted intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs), designed for deployment in Europe as a counterweight to Soviet pressure on America’s NATO allies. At the end of 1955 the Defense Department had added an IRBM program to its high-priority list and divided up the spoils across the services. The air force got funds to proceed with a land-based IRBM called Thor; the army would move ahead with Jupiter; and the navy would develop a sea-based IRBM called Polaris, for use on ships and submarines. Despite the obvious risks of overlapping efforts and interservice rivalries, Eisenhower was determined to press ahead with all of these rocket designs. To his advisers he said “he was absolutely determined not to tolerate any fooling with this thing. We had simply got to achieve such missiles as promptly as possible, if only because of the enormous psychological and political significance of ballistic missiles.”28

  Not since the Manhattan Project of World War II had the United States invested such effort in the production of a weapon system, and the cost was enormous. Spending on the IRBM and ICBM programs together jumped from $161 million in 1955 to $515 million in 1956 and $1.3 billion in 1957. These rockets, built in conjunction with private industry, created an immense web of military procurement. For the Atlas rocket, the Convair Corporation of San Diego built the frame, General Electric built the guidance systems, the Rocketdyne division of North American Aviation built the engines, and Burroughs Corporation of St. Louis built its computers. The Glenn L. Martin Company built the Titan missile, using guidance systems provided by Bell Telephone, engines built by Aerojet, and computers built by Remington Rand. In all, the Atlas, Titan, and Thor projects involved 18 principal contractors, 200 subcontractors, and 200,000 parts suppliers. The major contractors alone employed some 70,000 people. The missile race fueled the dramatic expansion of the military-industrial complex.

  Despite the enormous complexity of these missiles and the engineering challenges they presented, American scientists made rapid progress. In September 1956 Von Braun’s Redstone missile, Jupiter-C, fired a test rocket a distance of 3,355 miles. In 1957 the Thor missile went through eight flight tests and by October 1957 had proven it could fly on target over 2,000 miles. In June the air force started tests of the Atlas ICBM in a rush to make it operational. Meanwhile the army developed various short-range nuclear-tipped missiles with endearing, folksy names such as Corporal, Little John, Honest John, and Davy Crockett. And the navy pushed ahead with innovative plans for Polaris, a solid-fuel missile (actually built by Lockheed) that promised greater stability on oceangoing vessels than the liquid-fueled IRBMs. The Polaris program started development in late 1956; less than four years later, on July 20, 1960, the submarine USS George Washington launched a Polaris missile while submerged—a breakthrough of enormous strategic significance.

  Plenty of missteps dogged the missile program. On December 6, 1957, America’s first attempt to launch a satellite ended in disaster. At Cape Canaveral, in front of a crowd of media and onlookers, a Vanguard rocket shuddered, rose two feet in the air, then exploded in a fireball. The failure dealt “a stunning new blow to American prestige,” the Los Angeles Times concluded. Lyndon Johnson called it “one of the best publicized and most humiliating failures in our history.” Wags renamed Vanguard “Sputternik.”29

  The engineers learned from their mistakes, as scientists do. On December 17 the air force launched the first fully successful test flight of an American ICBM, the Atlas. Just when Sputnik triggered an avalanche of criticism, Defense Secretary Neil McElroy, who had replaced Charles Wilson in the fall, told Eisenhower that December 1957 had been the “most active and successful month to date in the ballistic missile flight test program.” Within two years—by the end of 1959—squadrons of Atlas missiles, each 100 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, stood as silent sentinels across the American landscape, ready for liftoff. The still more powerful Titan missile would be available for use by 1960, and a second-generation solid-fuel missile called Minuteman was being rushed into production. Missile bases sprang up in North and South Dakota, Montana, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, California, Texas—eventually 19 states in all. Meanwhile the construction of the signature long-range bombers of the cold war, the B-47 and the B-52, proceeded at breakneck speed; hundreds of these monstrous aircraft were kept in the sky 24 hours a day, armed with nuclear weapons and ready to fly to Moscow on the president’
s order.30

  Eisenhower pushed forward this huge expansion of the U.S. nuclear deterrent because he had come to accept a basic paradox of the cold war: that the only way to avoid using weapons of mass destruction was to build more of them. He did not do this only as a result of the Sputnik crisis. These projects had been in the works for years. By the time Sputnik had made its first trip around the Earth in October 1957, the United States was well on its way to building the strategic “triad”—a three-pronged deterrent of bombers and land-based and submarine-based ballistic missiles—that defined America’s nuclear arsenal for the entire cold war. The accusation of complacency or smugness thrown at Eisenhower bore no relation to the facts. The nation stood on the threshold of breakthroughs in every conceivable kind of strategic weapon and rocket technology. Perhaps the Americans were slightly behind the Soviets in missile research; perhaps not. As of late 1957 nobody knew for certain. But Eisenhower did know this: in the race to build the next generation of nuclear weapons, the United States planned to win.31

  V

  Eisenhower’s response to the Sputnik crisis encompassed more than missile construction. In fact he moved decisively on three fronts—diplomatic, institutional, and political—to take control of the problem. In mid-December 1957 he took a much-publicized trip to meet with the heads of state of the NATO countries. It was only three weeks since his stroke, but he knew the world needed to see a vigorous president in command. And he himself viewed the trip as a personal test: he feared that he might end up like Woodrow Wilson, whose severe stroke in late 1919 had left him incapacitated and irrelevant. “I was going to make sure it would not happen in my case,” he later wrote.32

  Eisenhower arrived in Paris on a cold, gray day but found the Parisians in a warm and welcoming mood: his route from the airport was lined with cheering onlookers who seemed to have forgotten the bitter dispute over Suez just a year earlier. Ike and John Foster Dulles—still recovering from his recent surgery—brought with them what they considered an enormously valuable gift. The United States proposed to construct in Europe a stockpile of atomic weapons, held in joint custody between the Americans and Europeans, and the United States would agree to transfer some of its new Thor and Jupiter IRBMs to Europe. These weapons would show America’s determination to defend its allies from Soviet nuclear blackmail. The countries hosting such missiles would share with NATO’s supreme commander (always an American) any decision about their use. Sending IRBMs to Europe seemed a sensible way to balance the Soviet lead in the missile race. While explaining to the press his enthusiasm for nuclear proliferation, Dulles asked why the Soviets should be allowed to threaten Europe with nuclear weapons while the Europeans could defend themselves only with “weapons from the pre-atomic age.” The more nukes on the doorstep of the USSR, the better, as far as Dulles was concerned.33