It was generally assumed in those early days that the object was sending back signals in cipher, and CIA cryptographers worked in shifts to break the code. A man who could enlighten them happened to be right there in Washington; he was General Anatoly Arkadievich Blagonravov, chief of the three-man delegation Moscow had sent to the IGY conference. There was no code, the general said. The designers had put the beeps in to track the sputnik and reassure themselves that the satellite was still out there. There was nothing in the steel ball except the transmitter and the batteries. The power of the signal was one watt—just about enough for a conversation between hams in Australia and the United States’. In about three weeks the batteries would be exhausted, Blagonravov said, and the beeping would stop. A likely story, Americans snorted. Who could trust a Russian general? There was something fishy about those signals. “Many believe that the whole story has not been told,” Time noted darkly. The CIA had better get to the bottom of it, the man on the street muttered, or the U.S. taxpayer would know the reason why.
***
Sputnik I dealt the coup de grace to Ford’s fading Edsel, which had been introduced to the public the month before, and which was now widely regarded as a discredited symbol of the tinny baubles Americans must thrust aside. There were other scapegoats. The administration was one. It was M. Robert Bendiner who suggested that until now the Republican idea of a scientist had been a man who tore and compared cigarettes on television. Public education was another conspicuous target and did, in fact, have much to answer for. American parents were angered to learn that while their children were being taught “life adjustment,” Russian education had been acquiring a reputation for being tough and competitive, ruthlessly winnowing out mediocrities beginning in the fourth grade and awarding to outstanding students the laurels which, in the United States, were reserved for athletes and baton-twirling, tail-twitching cheerleaders.
Parental wrath would grow with the publication of John Gunther’s Inside Russia Today, then in galleys. Gunther reported that “In the schools which prepare for college, the Soviet child must absorb in ten years what an American child gets in twelve—perhaps more.” Russian pupils, he said, went to school six hours a day, six days a week, attending classes 213 days a year as against 180 in the United States, and in the last two years of schooling four hours of homework were assigned each day. Gunther continued:
…the main emphasis is on science and technology, for both boys and girls, and herein lies the greatest challenge to our system. In addition to ten solid years of mathematics, every child must take four years of chemistry, five of physics, six of biology. By contrast, only about half of American high schools have any physics, and only 64 percent have any chemistry. An American authority told me that the average Soviet boy or girl graduating from the tenth grade (our twelfth) has a better scientific education—particularly in mathematics—than most American college graduates!
Emphasis on science came early in Soviet schools; pupils began studying optics and quantum theory in grade school. By the mid-1950s the USSR was graduating twice as many scientists and engineers as the United States, and in a sixty-four-page report the National Science Foundation estimated that 14 percent of all Soviet scientists were allowed to pursue basic research—that is, inquiries which may or may not have practical significance. Such work often seems pointless at the time, but it is the restless search for answers by the laboratory man with insatiable curiosity which makes possible the technological miracles of the next generation. Thomas Edison could not have developed the incandescent lamp without Henry Cavendish and Michael Faraday; the atomic bomb became a reality because in 1905 Albert Einstein had published an obscure volume setting forth the proposition, then wholly inapplicable, that energy is encompassed in every bit of matter; and the H-bomb was created by men who had been studying the stars. Charles E. Wilson thought basic research ridiculous. As Secretary of Defense he had once mocked it as finding out “what makes grass green and fried potatoes brown,” a remark scientists now remembered and quoted bitterly. The number of Americans in long-range studies was fractional, and the funds allotted to them—about 450 million dollars a year—represented only one-tenth of one percent of the national income.
Now scientists were beginning to speak up. Norbert Wiener had something to say about science and society. Wiener blamed the tight lid government had clamped on research, beginning with radar and the Manhattan Project. The consequence, he said, was that the individual scientist was often not only unaware of the vast problem he was dealing with, but even worse, that his scientific inquisitiveness was frequently discouraged. Physicists pointed out that the Soviets had an 8.3-billion electron-volt particle accelerator (atom smasher), better than America’s best, the University of California’s betatron, and UCLA’s Joseph Kaplan, the U.S. IGY chairman, said, “In oceanography, meteorology, and upper-atmosphere physics, the indications are that they are certainly as good as we are.”
Edward Teller also spoke up. Though still a pariah among most of his fellow physicists, Teller remained a brilliant and prescient scholar. His Pentagon friends pointed out that in last April’s issue of Air Force magazine, six months before the first beep, he had gloomily written: “Ten years ago there was no question where the best scientists in the world could be found—here in the U.S…. Ten years from now the best scientists in the world will be found in Russia.” In the Soviet Union, he had pointed out, science was almost a religion; its ablest men were singled out and treated as a privileged class while their underpaid American colleagues lacked status in their society and could offer few incentives to bright protégés. His appeal for respect for the dignity of scientific inquiry was well taken. The number of cartoons about mad scientists dropped sharply. There were also fewer jokes about them. And it was extraordinary how quickly the word egghead dropped out of the language.
For some time Walter Lippmann had been urging his countrymen to consecrate themselves to a national purpose. Few had grasped what he had in mind, but now they knew: the national purpose was to rescue education and, with it, America’s next generation. Suddenly Rudolf Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read—and What You Can Do About It, which had come out in 1955 without making much of a dent, was on everyone’s bestseller list. Hardly anyone had a good word for schools as they were except people like Dr. Ruth Strang of Teachers College, Columbia, and she and TC were in disgrace. Social critics’ heaviest guns trained on just such educators, or, as they were derisively christened, “educationists.” Chancellor Lawrence A. Klimpton of the University of Chicago explained how the Strangs and the William Heard Kilpatricks had distorted and misrepresented the ideas of John Dewey. Dewey had held that thinking begins in an interest, or a concern. But this had been twisted into an insistence that teachers must amuse, or entertain, pupils.
Herbert Hoover said that the Communists “are turning out twice or possibly three times as many” scientists “as the U.S.” He scorned the “too prevalent high-school system of allowing a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old kid to choose most of his studies.” That same week another distinguished engineer from whom more would be heard on this score observed in Detroit that one root of the trouble lay in the “misconception of the worth” of the American high school. “We have always overvalued it,” said Rear Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the man responsible for America’s atomic submarines. “It comes out,” he continued, “that we have many more children in high school and in college than [Europeans] have in secondary schools and universities, and this makes us proud. But all these comparisons are meaningless because the European secondary school graduate has learned more than most of our college graduates. As to the high school diploma,” he added heavily, “the less said about it the better.”
Even resolute Republicans were uneasy. Clare Boothe Luce, in other ways a steadfast defender of the status quo during the Eisenhower years, found complacency on this issue impossible. She called the sputnik’s beep an “outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretensions that the Amer
ican way of life is a gilt-edge guarantee of our national superiority.” Her husband was also troubled by heretical thoughts. “Turning to Washington for reassurance,” Time said nervously, “the U.S. saw administrative confusion, sensed a crisis in leadership and demanded action.” The stock market tobogganed dizzily downward that week, and with Russia’s man-made moon flashing across the skies all America seemed depressed. A contagion of black humor cropped up—proposals to change Project Vanguard’s name to Project Rearguard and a story about a Washington reporter who called the U.S. Space Agency, asked how the program was going, and was asked by the girl on the phone, “Sir, are you calling for information or with information?”
Sputnik I’s beeps died away in the last week of October, as General Blagonravov had predicted. It was still there and could be tracked, but at least you couldn’t hear it any more. Then, just as Americans had begun to catch their breath, Sputnik II went up on November 3. In some ways it was a more breathtaking achievement than its predecessor. The new satellite weighed 1,120.29 pounds—making it six times as heavy as Sputnik I—and its orbit carried it 1,056 miles away from the earth. “The unfathomed natural processes going on in the cosmos,” Moscow radio proclaimed, “will now become more understandable to man.” It was true; American scientists were envious. A space vehicle that large would house a maze of instruments radioing back data on cosmic rays, solar radiation above the atmosphere, atmospheric temperature and composition, the danger of meteors, the earth’s gravitation, its magnetic field, its electric charge, and the cloud patterns of its weather. The Russians had another surprise. There was a little dog of the laika breed aboard, strapped with contrivances which would provide other information about the ability of fauna to survive in space.
It was another luckless day for administration image makers. Ideally news of the event should have found the leaders of the government at their desks furiously striving to catch up. As it happened, Eisenhower was just returning from a West Point class of ’15 reunion and homecoming football game, while a Big Ten game had taken Charlie Wilson’s successor, the new Secretary of Defense, Neil McElroy, to Columbus.
The United States was in an uproar. The presence of the dog in Sputnik II clearly meant that eventually the Russians intended to put a man on the moon. Most people in the U.S. were determined to beat them there, and they were becoming impatient with the composure of their President. Time said: “The storm showed promise of being the most serious that Dwight Eisenhower had ever faced.” A headline in the Pittsburgh Press begged: SHOOT THE MOON, IKE.
***
Ike wasn’t going to do it. He refused to be stampeded. Unlike the three Presidents who followed him in the White House, he had grave doubts about the wisdom of investing the national resources in space exploration. He was General Eisenhower now, pondering what he saw as a military threat. He knew he was falling in public esteem. To Gallup’s question, “Do you approve of the way Eisenhower is handling his job as President?” only 57 percent now answered affirmatively. Previously the figure had rarely dropped below 71 percent. The present decline was greatest in the South, where it had dropped from 72 percent the previous January to an all-time low of 36 percent.2 No President enjoys an erosion of popularity, and Ike valued public esteem more than most. But on matters of national security he was the expert, and he had regarded rocketry from the first as a military matter. He suspected his opinion was shared in the Kremlin, and from mid-October on he was certain of it, largely thanks to a remarkable interview with Nikita Khrushchev by James Reston of the New York Times.
The first secretary of the Soviet Communist party was in an expansive mood. Elated by the triumphs of his scientists, he boasted that the space satellites were only the beginning of Russia’s rocket wonders. “When we announced the successful launching of an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile,” he gloated, “some American statesmen did not believe us. Now that we have successfully launched an earth satellite, only technically ignorant people can doubt this. The U.S. does not have an intercontinental ballistic missile; otherwise it would also have easily launched an earth satellite of its own.” The West, he said, might as well scrap its B-52s and abandon its airfields: “If you study our latest proposals you will no longer find any mention of control posts at airfields3…. It is useless to create control posts to watch obsolete airplanes.” In another interview that same week with two visiting British M.P.s he said even more vividly: “Bombers are obsolete. You might as well throw them on the fire. You cannot send human flesh and blood to fight things like that.” A few days later the Russians announced that they had successfully tested a new hydrogen warhead for a guided missile. To General Eisenhower there could be but one interpretation of all this. The skeptics of Russian advances in rocketry had been wrong. Khrushchev had to be believed now. Manned bombers might not yet be obsolete, but they were becoming obsolete. The Soviet Union had in fact developed the dreaded ICBM. The touch of one button in Moscow and Washington would vanish.
The danger then confronting the United States is evident in retrospect:
June 5, 1957 An Army Jupiter travels over 1,500 miles from Cape Canaveral, the first successful flight of an intermediate range weapon (IRBM) for the United States.
August 26, 1957 The USSR reports that it has successfully tested a multistage ICBM.
November 28, 1958 An American Atlas completes a 6,325-mile flight from Cape Canaveral to Ascension Island, the first full-range flight for a U.S. ICBM.
Thus Soviet rocketry held a clear lead for fifteen perilous months. The U.S., to be sure, was hardly defenseless. Despite Khrushchev’s jeers at bombers, at every hour of the day and night the vigilant Strategic Air Command had fleets of B-52 jets in the air in a state of readiness with nuclear warheads on board, and the Jupiter IRBMs, poised on NATO bases ringing the Soviet Union, were a powerful deterrent to Russian aggression. Nevertheless, the fact remained that America had fallen behind in the vital ICBM race and would remain there for well over a year.
In the seclusion of the presidential mansion, Ike was very different these days from the cool-headed, almost tranquil chief executive who exasperated the White House press corps. “Although Eisenhower maintained an official air of serenity,” Sherman Adams later wrote, “he was privately as concerned as everybody else in the country by the jump ahead that the Russians had made in scientific enterprise.” Even before the ascent of Sputnik II he had ordered McElroy, sworn in only the day before, to undertake an immediate, urgent review of the country’s missile program, and when Emmet John Hughes suggested to him that popular concern could be an advantage, winning support for new programs, the President quickly replied, “Oh, absolutely. Anything that will get us out of this complacency—and make this next Congress realize how serious things are—that’s all to the good.”
His problem was more complicated than that. If he had revealed the real stakes in this contest with the Russians, Congress and the people would not only have lost their complacency, they might very well have lost their perspective, or even their minds. The previous spring the President had asked H. Rowan Gaither Jr., then chairman of the board of the Ford Foundation, to evaluate the nation’s state of defense readiness with the cooperation and guidance of the National Security Council. The results were submitted in November, just after Sputnik II went into orbit. They were so shocking that the President decided to suppress them. The Gaither Report endorsed a proposal for a nationwide nuclear bomb shelter program. The shelter plan was financially impossible, Ike concluded, and he saw no point in publication of a text which would merely terrify the people without offering any hope of a solution.
He believed a solution could be found, however. The answer was to draw ahead, or at least abreast, of the Soviet missile achievements. As he saw it, that was the task before the country, not exploits in outer space. It was as great a challenge as any President had ever faced, and because of it he had no difficulty in keeping his eyes off the stars, though not many in the country, or even in his own administration
, could resist the fascination of space travel. Knowland couldn’t; Ike had to tell him curtly that he had no intention of being “pushed into an all-out effort in every one of these glamour performances without any idea of their eventual cost.” The President’s determination to keep all rocket programs in the Defense Department, at least for the present, was also challenged, by Vice President Nixon and President James R. Killian of MIT, whom Ike appointed special assistant to the President for science and technology on November 7. Eisenhower said to both that the mechanics of launching space rockets and long-range missiles were virtually the same; a costly duplication of effort made no sense to him. Killian was doubtful, and Nixon, supporting Killian, argued that America’s image abroad would be more favorable if the peaceful aspects of space exploration were handled by an agency without ties to the country’s military establishment. The President, less concerned with image than with survival, replied that he would rather have “one good Redstone nuclear-armed missile than a rocket that could hit the moon.” He added pungently, “We have no enemies on the moon.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 119