His wisdom is apparent to a generation accustomed to nuclear weapons housed in hardened silos, Polaris submarines, and fail-safe mechanisms—all the horrid realities of the future from which Ike flinched but which he nevertheless faced. ICBMs, which the Russians had, and the inferior IRBMs, which America had, had not yet found their way into the language. Even the sophisticated had not come to terms with the implications of joining H-bomb warheads to unmanned missiles capable of traversing oceans and continents at speeds even greater than Sputnik I’s 18,000 mph. All that was beyond the mind of the average American in 1957. A paragraph in the October 28 Time gives some idea of the innocence of the well-informed then. It was headed “What About Armed Satellites?” and it might have been written by Jules Verne:
Many imaginative military planners have dreamed of satellite fortresses armed with nuclear missiles to shoot at the earth below. All space vehicles must be lightly built to conserve weight. They would therefore be vulnerable, and since they are forced to move on predictable orbits, they should not be too hard to shoot down. One suggested method of dealing with a hostile satellite is to shoot a modest rocket into its orbit, but moving in the opposite direction. The warhead would burst and fill the orbit with millions of small particles. Any one of these, hitting the satellite with twice its orbital speed (36,000 mph) would have the effect of a meteor, punching a hole and sending a blast of flame and shock into its interior.
That was in 1957, with a Soviet projectile in orbit and fresh information about the phenomenon accumulating hourly. Another five months would pass before Time reported: “A word coming more and more into Pentagon usage is ‘overkill’—a blunt but descriptive term implying a power to destroy a military target many times more than necessary.” By then the country was learning fast. But when Eisenhower had taken office the very theory of guided missiles had been almost as remote as the atomic bomb concept when Einstein’s famous letter reached FDR’s desk in October 1939. During the eight years after V-J Day government spending on long-range ballistic missile projects had averaged less than a million dollars a year. In 1954 American physicists advised Washington that they now believed they could design a hydrogen warhead small enough to be carried in the nose of a missile. The administration then gave the green light to ballistic missile development. But the United States was already behind—the Russians had decided to push on with missile research without knowing whether one would ever be capable of carrying a warhead—and the lag grew greater after a fateful recommendation of the U.S. IGY committee.
In 1954 Wernher von Braun, the Nazi V-2 scientist who was to become a naturalized U.S. citizen the following year, had persuaded the Army and the Navy to share in a joint venture under his leadership. Von Braun planned to soup up the Army’s tested Redstone missile with booster rockets and send a tiny (five-pound) satellite into orbit. The endeavor was christened Project Orbiter. It was coming along nicely until October of that year, when an International Geophysical Year panel meeting in Rome proposed earth satellite launchings during the IGY—from July 1957 to December 1958. The Americans on the panel agreed. They recommended that the United States undertake a satellite project as part of the country’s IGY contribution. The White House consented. At the same time certain administration policy makers insisted that any appearance of using an IGY undertaking for military purposes must be avoided. Their reasoning was the same as that set forth three years later by Killian and Nixon; neutral governments might misunderstand and become offended. It made sense to the National Security Council, which thereupon separated satellite research from military ballistic work. This decision, ending von Braun’s Project Orbiter, was reached in mid-1955, when, as it happened, up in Dearborn the Ford Motor Company was deciding to produce the starcrossed Edsel.
After Sputnik I went up, I. M. Levitt, director of Philadelphia’s Fels Planetarium, called the separation of the rocketeers and the missilemen an “astonishing piece of stupidity.” Army projectile engineers echoed him. In 1955 progress on their Jupiter IRBM had been sufficiently advanced for it to launch a satellite; in September 1956 a modified Jupiter-C reached a height of 650 miles, higher than Sputnik I’s orbit, and sailed on for a distance of 3,500 miles. There was no appeal from the National Security Council, however. Orbiter’s rocket men were transferred to Project Vanguard, its successor. Vanguard was then assigned to the Navy on the ground that the Navy’s Vikings and Aerobees represented greater advances in high-altitude missile research than similar enterprises in the other services. There Vanguard had languished. As a first step under the new management, Director John P. Hagen, the Canadian astronomer now at the helm, announced his intention of launching a 20-pound satellite—one-eighth the weight of Sputnik I—late in 1954. But then there were snags, delays, postponements. Hagen issued a revised schedule, under which the first 21 1/2-pound satellite would go up in the spring of 1958, provided the 27,000-pound thrust of its Viking launcher worked perfectly. Hagen and his colleagues were still working on this when Soviet scientists began hurtling Red moons across the skies.
In Eisenhower’s mind the distinction between scientific inquiry and military necessity continued to be sharply defined, and he drew it in his first press conference after the launching of Sputnik I. Vanguard was a scholarly undertaking, he said, “merely an engagement on our part to put up a vehicle of this kind.” It was all very well in its way; if the ambitions for it were realized, mankind’s knowledge would be enriched with information about “temperatures, radiation, ionization, pressures.” But it had nothing to do with any race to the moon, and he didn’t know where that idea had started, and he wished someone would tell him.
The launching of the sputnik, Ike said, was something else again. It meant Soviet possession “of a very powerful thrust in their rocketry, and that is important.” Unfortunately the figures he had received up to now were militarily meaningless: “I don’t know anything about their accuracy, and until you know something about their accuracy, you know nothing at all about their usefulness in warfare.” He acknowledged that he was deeply concerned: “I wish we were farther ahead and knew more as to accuracy and to the erosion and to the heat-resistant qualities of metals, and all the other things we have to know about. I wish we knew more about it at this moment.”
It was Russian weaponry, he explained, that was the source of his anxiety. The administration had spent $110 million on its satellite project and would spend more. All the same, missile research and development would continue to have priority over it. Almost disdainfully he said: “So far as the satellite itself is concerned, that does not raise my apprehensions, not one iota.”
Over at the Vanguard offices, Dr. Hagen and his staff appeared to be equally tranquil. They acknowledged some obstacles, some disappointments, but that was always the way of things on the drawing boards and in the labs. Nodding and puffing thoughtfully on his pipe, the soft-spoken Hagen conceded that his launching vehicle was still undergoing tests, but neither he nor his colleagues admitted to any sense of failure. They had promised to put a satellite in orbit before IGY’s end, and that was over a year away. Time, they gently reminded journalists, has little meaning in basic research.
fau-bus (faw-bus), v.i.; FAUBUSED, FAUBUSING. 1. To commit an error of enormous magnitude through malice and ignorance. 2. To make a serious error, to commit a fault through stupidity or mental confusion. Syn. Blunder, err, bollix.
Thus Jack Mabley of the Chicago Daily News proposed, in October 1957, that the name of Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus be added to the language. The suggestion never caught on, partly because Faubus’s period of notoriety, though great, was brief, and also because under it all he was really quite colorless. If Faubus had not existed it would not have been necessary to invent him. All over the South white politicians were campaigning against the Supreme Court’s three-year-old decision striking down the concept of separate but equal education. In Alabama alone four gubernatorial candidates were pledging unyielding opposition to school integration, one of them vowing
he would go to jail for segregation and another going one better by swearing that he would die for it. The difference between them and Faubus was that he was already in office and therefore able to attract and hold national attention by official action. In that tumultuous fall he moved in counterpoint with the momentous developments at Cape Canaveral and in outer space, his parochialism juxtaposed against their promises of glory.
There was never any doubt about Faubus’s motives. In Arkansas he faced an uphill fight for reelection. The state had a strong tradition against a third-term governor, and his popularity was waning; he had offended liberal constituents by approving rate increases for utilities and railroads and disillusioned others by raising taxes. His strategy was to build a new base in red-neck, racist eastern Arkansas. On August 20, 1957, he made his first move, calling on Deputy Attorney General William Rogers in Washington to ask what the government would do to prevent violence when Little Rock schools opened in September. This was the first time anyone had intimated that violence might come to Little Rock. All the signs indicated that integration would proceed smoothly. On the initiative of Mayor Woodrow W. Mann the city had worked out a model seven-year integration program, carefully picking black pupils likely to do well. Startled by Faubus’s question, Rogers replied that local disorders were usually handled by local police.
To be certain that federal officials were still abreast of developments there, the deputy attorney general sent the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division to Little Rock. The official, himself a native of Arkansas, explained to Faubus how federal injunctions could pinion conspirators. He asked the governor why he expected trouble. Faubus’s answer was evasive; his evidence, he said, was “too vague and indefinite to be of any use to a law-enforcement agency.” Back in Washington, the official reported that he believed the governor intended to play racial politics with schoolchildren.
Faubus’s next step confirmed him. On August 29 the governor asked a state court to block the city’s integration schedule on the ground that it would lead to bloodshed. The local judge gave him his injunction and was promptly overruled by U.S. District Judge Ronald Davies. The board of education proceeded with its integration arrangements. They were modest enough; nine black pupils were to be enrolled with the two thousand whites in Little Rock’s Central High School. There were still no signs of unrest, but to be safe Mayor Mann and his 175-man police force worked out tactics for controlling possible demonstrations.
It was a waste of time. The governor had no intention of consulting the mayor. His plan was rather to call out the National Guard and order it to stop the nine Negro children from registering. Getting wind of this on September 1, Arkansas’s most famous citizen, Winthrop Rockefeller, hurried to the statehouse and for two hours begged Faubus not to do it. The governor refused. He said, “I’m sorry, but I’m already committed. I’m going to run for a third term, and if I don’t do this, Jim Johnson and Bruce Bennett”—racists who would oppose him in the primary—“will tear me to shreds.” At 9 P.M. on September 2, the evening before schools would reopen, National Guardsmen carrying M-1s with fixed bayonets set up a perimeter defense around Central High while their leader, a major general in the Air National Guard, set up his command post in the principal’s office. An hour later Faubus appeared on Little Rock’s KTHV-TV and announced that he had called out the militia “to maintain or restore the peace and good order of this community.” The city, he said, was on the brink of riot: “the evidence of discord, anger, and resentment has come to me from so many sources as to become a deluge!”
Little Rock was astonished. The mayor said, “There was no indication whatever. We had no reason to believe there would be violence.” The governor had said that the city’s stores were running out of knives (sold “mostly to Negro youths”), but an FBI check of 100 stores revealed that the sale of knives and guns was below normal. The only weapons in sight were those of the National Guard. There had been every reason to believe that the capital of the state would follow the pattern of three other Arkansas communities—Fort Smith, Ozark, and Van Buren—which were quietly integrating that same day. Now the nine black youngsters, arriving at Central High in a group, were turned away by National Guardsmen who said, “Governor Faubus has placed this school off limits to Negroes.” One fifteen-year-old black girl tested the perimeter. The Guardsmen raised their rifles against her, and as she retreated a spectator called out, “Go home, you burr head”; then the white-haired wife of a teacher shielded the child and led her to a bus stop. That was the extent of Faubus’s “violence,” and Judge Davies denied a new petition for further delay of integration.
At the judge’s request, fifty FBI agents had roamed Little Rock, looking once more for signs of racial tension. Their 500-page report disclosed not a shred of evidence to support the claim that the peace was threatened. Accordingly, Davies summoned the governor to appear in court September 20 and show cause why he should not be enjoined from interfering with the school board’s program. Faubus had retired to the salmon-pink gubernatorial mansion and ringed it with Guardsmen, but a U.S. marshal easily penetrated this screen and handed him the summons on the executive lawn. For the first time the governor looked worried. He wired President Eisenhower, complaining that he was being investigated by federal agents, that his telephone was being tapped, and that he had learned of a scheme to take him “into custody, by force.” He asked for a presidential assurance of “understanding and cooperation.” Eisenhower replied, “The only assurance I can give you is that the federal constitution will be upheld by me by every legal means at my command.”
Representative Brooks Hays, Little Rock’s congressman, thought Eisenhower and Faubus ought to sit down together and talk things over. It was arranged; on September 14, the eleventh day of the crisis, they met at the summer White House in Newport, Rhode Island. Sherman Adams’s impression of Faubus was that “he would not be unreasonable or difficult to deal with,” and Eisenhower thought Faubus seemed confused about the course he should take. Both were wrong. The governor continued to stonewall, and the situation was unchanged six days later when Judge Davies called from his bench, “Civil case no. 3113 on a Motion for preliminary injunction.” He was handling the hearing like any other, but it was historic. The governor of a state was being brought to justice in a federal court.
Faubus himself was not there. Ever since calling out the National Guard he had dodged questions about his evidence of violence by promising to produce it in open court, but the evidence wasn’t there, either. In place of it were three Arkansas lawyers representing him. They filed motions asking first that Davies disqualify himself because of personal bias, and second that charges against the governor be dismissed here because they should be heard by a three-judge court. Davies quietly overruled them. Speaking from notes, their chief counsel then said, “The position of the respondent, Governor Faubus, and his military officers must be firm, unequivocal, unalterable: that the governor of the state of Arkansas cannot and will not concede that the United States in this court or anywhere else can question his discretion and judgment.”
The attorney asked if he and his colleagues might be excused from the hearings, the judge nodded, and they walked out. The governor’s defense had rested without summoning a witness. His argument was that federal courts had no jurisdiction over him in Arkansas. That issue had been raised in 1861 and presumably settled in 1865.
The U.S. attorney had planned to call nearly two hundred witnesses. Now eight were enough. They included the mayor, the police chief, and the superintendent of schools. All testified to the city’s racial peace. Summing up the evidence afterward, the judge said it showed that the school board’s integration program had been “thwarted by the governor of Arkansas by the use of National Guard troops,” adding, “It is equally demonstrable from the testimony here today that there would have been no violence in carrying out the plan of integration.” He thereupon issued orders that Faubus and the National Guard were to stop their interfere
nce. Asked to comment, Faubus scrawled a statement for reporters. He noted that his attorneys had not been present, omitting the fact that they had left on his instructions. He declared: “Now comes the crucifixion. There will be no cross-examination, no evidence presented for the other [his own] side. So now, by the use of carefully selected witnesses, the Justice Department’s case can be continued. The results are a foregone conclusion.” That night he issued a milder statement, attacking Davies’s “unwarranted action” but saying that he would comply with the court order until its “certain reversal on appeal.” The militia was withdrawn from Central High, and as the troops marched away Faubus and his wife Alta left Little Rock for a Southern Governors’ Conference in Sea Island, Georgia. On the way they stopped to see a Georgia-Texas football game in Atlanta. Afterward a fellow governor told the press, “He’s really lapping up the glory. There were 33,000 people at the game, and every time they cheered a play, Faubus got up and bowed.”
That evening he was the cynosure of all eyes in the Silver Room of Sea Island’s Cloister Hotel, signing autographs, drinking bourbon and Seven-Up, and dancing. His partners included Mrs. James Karam, who was accompanying the governor’s party. Her husband had been unable to make the trip. “Jimmy the Flash” Karam, as he was known in Little Rock, was one of the governor’s closest friends. A former football player and professional strikebreaker, Karam was now head of the Arkansas State Athletic Commission. As such he had intimate knowledge of the world of locker rooms, sparring partners, and bullyboys. That was what was keeping him home. He had a special assignment from the governor, and it began at daybreak the following morning. While the Faubuses and his wife lay asleep in Sea Island recovering from the festivities in the Silver Room, Karam was deploying a force of husky young men outside Central High, whispering here, nodding there, and ducking in and out of a filling station phone booth.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 120