In addition to offering nuclear missiles to European allies, Eisenhower beefed up defense spending. Over the New Year holiday he closeted himself with his advisers at Gettysburg and hammered out the details of the 1959 budget proposal to Congress. He decided to ask Congress for immediate passage of a supplemental spending package of $1.3 billion to accelerate missile production and improve early-warning radar systems. He also asked for a $40 billion defense budget—about $1.5 billion larger than the previous year. Overall his budget request was $74 billion, a substantial increase from the previous year and the largest peacetime budget in U.S. history to that time. After years of fighting the upward trend of government spending, Ike admitted the need to plow more money into defense.
Congress wanted more than spending, though: it clamored for leadership. Given Eisenhower’s recent stroke, congressional critics worried about his capacity to lead. “The president himself, after five years of apparent immunity to attack, is now on the hot seat,” one Washington Post writer claimed. “In the words of the politically sacrilegious, his halo has slipped.” The Democratic speaker of the house, Sam Rayburn, opined that Ike had “not shown enough urgency”; he needed to respond to a nation that had been “disturbed and humiliated” by Sputnik. “We are in a struggle for survival,” he insisted.34
Eisenhower knew what the critics were saying, and he planned to answer them in his State of the Union address, scheduled for January 9, 1958. Commentators believed the speech would be “one of the most important of his career.” Just after noon on the big day, Ike and Mamie left the White House in a huge Chrysler Imperial, itself a tribute to the rocket age, with its enormous tailfins, rocket-like fenders over each headlight, and tailights formed to look like aircraft gun sights. They drove down Independence Avenue to the south entrance of the Capitol. Mamie, in a natty gray wool suit, mink stole, and blue pillbox hat, proceeded into the Executive Gallery of the House chamber, receiving a thunderous ovation. Eisenhower waited in Speaker Rayburn’s office until he was beckoned to the floor of the House. Doorkeeper William “Fishbait” Miller announced the arrival of the president, and the members erupted in hearty applause.35
During his relatively short speech, Eisenhower delivered what had been lacking so far since the October 4 Sputnik launch: a clear sense of direction for the country in the new missile age. He finally admitted that Americans had been spooked by Sputnik and demanded a response. He proposed a series of “imperative” actions to fix the problems that the Sputnik crisis had revealed. He wanted a reorganized Defense Department to halt the crippling interservice rivalries that had slowed missile progress. He wanted an immediate infusion of cash to improve radar capability, bomber dispersal, missile production, nuclear submarines, and mobile conventional forces. He wanted to help America’s allies by lowering barriers to trade and by sharing nuclear secrets so they could better defend themselves. And he wanted major federal investment in scientific education.
Such actions would ensure that America’s military and scientific power, already strong, would never lapse. Such a program would require “sacrifice”—a word he used throughout the speech. The people must know that to counter the Soviet Union’s “total cold war” against America, they would have to toil and strive with common purpose. “The world is waiting to see,” he declared, “how wisely and decisively a free representative government will now act.”36
The speech reflected Eisenhower’s belief that while arms were certainly expensive and might have seemed wasteful, they provided the foundation for order in a disordered world. He asked Americans to accept the basic unpleasant fact about the cold war: To deter war, America must prepare for it. And that meant investing in science, technology, and education as well as arms manufacturing. For Eisenhower, the purpose of such a titanic effort was not war but peace—an armed and anxious peace, but peace nonetheless. Here lay the basic national security principles of the Age of Eisenhower.
Critics hailed the speech as a success. It was “forceful and incisive in content, spirited and vigorous in delivery,” wrote speechwriter Emmet Hughes. Sam Rayburn called it “the strongest, I think, the president has delivered to the Congress.” The Washington Post described it as among the best speeches of his presidency. “The President Shows His Stuff,” was the Los Angeles Times headline. It also mattered that Ike looked so good. Arthur Krock wrote in the New York Times that the speech swept away any lingering doubts about the president’s physical vigor. This was no “semi-invalid but a man who seemed to be in excellent physical condition. . . . The sense of relief as to his condition was tangible on the floor and in the galleries.”37
Perhaps even greater relief flooded across the land on January 31, 1958, when at long last the United States successfully put its own satellite into orbit. Belying his breezy assertion that there was no satellite “race,” Eisenhower wanted an American craft in orbit immediately and pressed his scientists to get it done. He no doubt regretted his decision of 1955 to downgrade satellite research, but now he wanted results. When the navy’s Vanguard rocket blew up on the launchpad in mid-December, Von Braun’s army team in Huntsville saw its chance. They adapted a Jupiter-C rocket with an extra booster stage and strapped on a 30-pound pod of instruments that included a small radio transmitter. They called the satellite Explorer, and on the night of January 31 they successfully shot it into space from Cape Canaveral.
The president received word while at the Augusta golf club. “I sure feel a lot better now,” he happily sighed on hearing the news. As he put it in his memoirs, “A long and difficult period had ended.” Americans cheered this welcome sign of a comeback in the space race. Officials in the nation’s capital issued happy statements, and down in Huntsville, Alabama, where the Jupiter-C was made, townsfolk rushed into the streets in celebration. One citizen carried a hastily daubed placard reading “Move Over Sputnik: Space Is Ours!”38
VI
As he plotted his post-Sputnik strategy, Eisenhower benefited from the guidance of James Killian and the President’s Science Advisory Committee. The men who joined PSAC came from leading universities, and many had records of extensive wartime and public service. This group of technocrats offered Eisenhower well-informed judgments about science and technology that he could not find among the military, and they applied cutting-edge research to matters of national security. Killian saw PSAC as “a voice of sense and moderation” in the midst of the Sputnik panic. The scientists came to admire Eisenhower enormously. Killian described Eisenhower’s deep interest and his “extraordinary capacity to evoke the best from those around him.” He was “exceptionally responsive to innovative ideas.” Eisenhower in turn felt deeply devoted to the men he called “my scientists.” He told Killian much later, “This bunch of scientists was one of the few groups that I encountered in Washington who seemed to be there to help the country and not help themselves.”39
With PSAC, Eisenhower pressed on with a series of crucial administrative actions. On January 27 he announced a major federal commitment to scientific education. The idea that American schools and universities had fallen behind the Soviets in the fields of engineering, math, and physics had been suggested to him by his science advisers in their first meeting after the Sputnik launch. Edwin Land, the genius behind the U-2 plane, spoke to the president eloquently about the failures of American scientific education. The Soviets, he said, “regard science both as an essential tool and as a way of life. They are teaching their young people to enjoy science.” The president must inspire the country to embrace scientific inquiry rather than material pursuits.40
Eisenhower became a great enthusiast of science education, and in January 1958 he described an ambitious plan to overhaul science teaching, train a new generation of science teachers, provide scholarships and graduate fellowships for work in scientific fields, and promote the study of foreign languages. He wanted to make science a prominent part of American life. He saw his plan as an emergency program to enhance the nation’s security; it was going to cost $1 bil
lion over four years—a huge investment. Congress, under the glare of the Sputnik crisis, fell in line behind the proposal, and in September 1958 Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) into law.41
Eisenhower also embraced the idea that the country needed a federal agency to lead nonmilitary research on space, and on April 2 he proposed the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA). The idea grew in part from Eisenhower’s conclusion that to leave space exploration in the hands of the military would stifle innovation and encourage more fighting among the services over money. Most of his scientific advisers agreed, urging him to commit resources to space exploration as a matter of human curiosity rather than warfare. And the best way to attract leading minds to work on space was to separate it from purely military projects. In remarkably rapid fashion Congress passed legislation creating NASA, and Eisenhower signed the bill on July 29, 1958.42
Eager to suppress the persistent interservice rivalry inside the defense establishment that had slowed missile development, Eisenhower on April 3 submitted to Congress a plan to strengthen the powers of the secretary of defense over the individual military services. The plan would allow the secretary to channel funds directly into key programs—a change from the usual practice, in which each service went to Congress separately and sought money for itself. After a summer’s worth of negotiations, Congress passed, and Eisenhower signed, the Defense Reorganization Act of 1958. It allowed greater concentration of authority in the hands of the secretary over the individual service chiefs and also approved the creation of a new director of defense research and engineering—the “missile czar” that Congress had called for. Defense Secretary McElroy gave the job to Herbert York, a nuclear physicist and Manhattan Project veteran who was running the Lawrence Livermore facility in California.43
These three major legislative moves—the NDEA, NASA, and Defense Reorganization Act—marked an extraordinary period of activity for the president and Congress, and they all responded directly to the challenge of Sputnik. Combined with his beefed-up defense budget, these actions revealed a shift away from the small-government Republicanism that Eisenhower cherished. The missile race, and for that matter the cold war, required robust military-industrial-scientific collaboration on a nationwide scale, the sort of thing that only the federal government could direct. As the leading historian of the Space Age has said, Eisenhower had to discard “the old verities about limited government, local initiative, balanced budgets, and individualism. The United States had to respond in kind to Soviet technocracy.”44
Some of the actions Ike took were invisible to the public. On February 10, 1958, just two weeks after the successful launch of the Explorer satellite, James Killian and Edwin Land brought Eisenhower a proposal for yet another technological marvel. Ever since the U-2 aircraft had begun to fly missions over the Soviet Union in search of photographic intelligence, Eisenhower had been anxious to avoid violations of Soviet airspace. With the success of Explorer, Killian and Land now envisioned a replacement for the spy plane: a satellite that could take photographs and then jettison a recoverable capsule with the film inside. The satellite could be designed to emit no signals so that it would be “completely covert,” and either aircraft or naval vessels would recover the dropped film. Because of the scale and complexity of the satellite program, it would need the cooperation of the air force, the CIA, and a new office in the Defense Department created on February 7, 1958, called the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Eisenhower applauded the plan but insisted on absolute secrecy. “Only a handful of people should know about it,” he ordered.45
In mid-April Eisenhower orally approved what became known as the Corona Project, which planned to use Thor rockets to put camera-equipped satellites into orbit above the USSR, Eastern Europe, and China. It was a long hard road to success: the first 12 Corona satellites malfunctioned. But on August 19, 1960, a Corona satellite that had passed over the communist bloc successfully dropped its payload of film to Earth by parachute, where a waiting air force C-119 snatched it out of the sky using a long grappling hook extending from its fuselage. Six days later Allen Dulles and Eisenhower stared at photographs of the Soviet Union taken from space. “This one satellite mission,” said the secret CIA history of the program, “yielded photo coverage of a greater area than the total produced by all of the U-2 missions over the Soviet Union.” For the next decade the United States used the top-secret Corona satellites to take detailed photographs of virtually every corner of the globe.46
By the summer of 1958 Eisenhower had established his post-Sputnik strategy for the space race: he accelerated the ongoing missile programs and channeled $4 billion more into the defense budget; he brought leading scientists into a close working partnership with the White House; he strengthened the powers of the Pentagon to control interservice squabbling; he intensified work on a secret reconnaissance satellite; and he signed key pieces of legislation that reshaped the role of the federal government in space exploration and science education. In doing these things he framed outer space as a new frontier of cold war rivalry, requiring the United States “to be strong and bold in space technology” in order to “enhance the prestige of the United States among the peoples of the world.” Above all, in these years he set in motion a great national effort to construct and deploy a sophisticated missile capability with truly awesome destructive power, such that by 1961 the United States could wipe out most of the human beings in the Soviet Union in an instant.47
These patterns of action look clear to us now. But in the atmosphere of panic and accusation that Sputnik had triggered, Eisenhower’s steady policy response to the Soviet missile challenge did not look so clear. And that left an opening for his critics to exploit.
VII
On the morning of July 30, 1958, readers of the Washington Post might have choked on their breakfast cereal when they came to Joseph Alsop’s column titled “The Gap.” Alsop, one of the most well-connected journalists in the capital, claimed to have seen classified materials proving that up through 1963 the United States would be vulnerable to a massive Soviet missile attack. In the coming five years, he claimed, “the American government will flaccidly permit the Kremlin to gain an almost unchallengeable superiority in nuclear striking power.” The USSR was racing to put hundreds of ICBMs into action, Alsop asserted, while “our missile programs are pitiable.” According to Alsop, the Soviets would have 100 ICBMs ready in 1959 and “should reach an output of 500 per year in 1960.” They would have no less than “1,000 ICBMs in place against our seventy by the end of 1961” and as many as “2,000 ICBMs against our 130” by the end of 1963. How did Alsop know about the Soviet missile program? Very likely someone had leaked to him the contents of Allen Dulles’s alarming December 1957 Special National Intelligence Report (SNIE 11-10-57), though Alsop inflated even those dubious figures for maximum effect.48
Two days later Alsop threw another grenade in a column called “Untruths on Defense,” a piece bristling with outrage and high dudgeon. Alsop alleged that “the Eisenhower administration is guilty of gross untruth concerning the national defense of the United States.” The president had been “consciously misleading” the people about the state of the nation’s defenses. Between 1960 and 1963 the Soviets could strike the United States at will using numerous rockets the likes of which the United States did not possess. “Massive orders for hardware must be placed immediately,” he demanded. “The last chance to save ourselves is slipping through our hands.” Alsop kept up this barrage all week; on August 3 he declared that the Eisenhower administration deliberately sought “to permit the Kremlin to gain an overwhelming nuclear striking power in the next five years.” Once the Soviets achieved that superiority, Alsop warned, they would use it. “Any man who is not intoxicated by official self-delusion must at least expect the Kremlin to threaten to strike the first blow.”49
Alsop did not limit himself to attacking Ike’s nuclear strategy. At the conclusion of this flurry of venomous colum
ns in the first week of August, he went after the president himself. The leitmotif: Ike was washed up. “Anyone whose private Eisenhower image is the vigorously striding, easily smiling, richly self-confident Eisenhower of the past is bound to be a little shocked by the Eisenhower of today.” These columns marked the start of the 1960 presidential campaign and contained within them the chief lines of attack that John Kennedy would direct against the legacy of Ike: a failing and aging president had allowed America’s enemies to prosper, and only youth, vigor, and boldness could save the country from a fatal slippage.50
Alsop’s attacks had been previewed in the spring and summer, when congressional critics, most notably Senators Symington and Johnson, had badgered the administration about its lackluster response to Sputnik. Symington, a presidential aspirant, lambasted Ike in a heated speech on the Senate floor in late May 1958, denouncing his “ostrich-like state of complacency.” In a familiar line of attack, he said, “Our government continues to place soft living and budgetary considerations ahead of national security.” The Democrats kept up this drumbeat throughout the summer, as Johnson criticized Ike for spending too little on missiles. The president lacks “a feeling of grim urgency,” Johnson insisted and told Defense Secretary McElroy he was “disappointed” at the response to the Sputnik challenge.51
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