A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  43.

  NO TIME FOR FAMILY

  Schriever found a house for his family in a neighborhood in Santa Monica with the Roman Catholic schools that Dora wanted. There were three Schriever offspring now. Brett Arnold, their son and firstborn, was a fifteen-year-old high school student when his father took command of the Western Development Division on August 2, 1954. Their second child, Dodie Elizabeth, who had arrived in June 1941, in time to be bundled off to California on that earlier trip when Schriever had spent a year studying for his master’s degree in aeronautical engineering at Stanford University in Palo Alto, was a thirteen-year-old in junior high. Another daughter and the last of Dora and Bennie’s children, Barbara Alice, who had been born in June 1949, was just five.

  The family had grown accustomed to seeing a great deal of Schriever while he was stationed at the Pentagon and they lived in Alexandria. Although he might work late, as he often did, he came home at night. On weekends, there was the Belle Haven Country Club, where he played golf, but Dora and the children had the pleasure of the swimming pool and tennis courts. And periodically he would take leave. Dora and the children would climb into the car, the luggage would go into the trunk, and with Bennie at the wheel they would set off for a visit with General and Mrs. Brett, who had retired to Winter Park, a suburb of Orlando in central Florida. All of this ended with the move to California and Bennie’s new responsibilities. When he was home he was preoccupied and he was away as much as he was at home, shuttling between Los Angeles and Washington and Baltimore or off on trips like the one to Patrick Air Force Base to start planning for the missile test range on Cape Canaveral.

  As soon as the conference at Patrick was over, he left for a two-day tour of the Bahamas to try to get some idea of the tracking system they would need to establish in order to monitor the flight of the mock warheads over the Caribbean and into the South Atlantic after the missiles had been launched from the Cape. The islands were still a British colony then, but London had already given the Air Force permission to set up some tracking stations there for test firings of the Snark and earlier missiles. Although his relationship with Dora began to come under strain from his lack of attention to her and the family, Bennie was energized by this relentless quick-step regime of shuttlecock travel, decisions under pressure, and a workload that seemed to be forever expanding. This was the mission for which, it seemed, he had spent his life preparing himself, and now he was living it. He was ruthless at keeping himself organized and he prevented himself from becoming exhausted by a trick he had of suddenly putting aside whatever he was doing in an office or on a plane and going off on a catnap.

  44.

  GETTING TO IKE

  Even prior to the confrontation with Talbott and the additional complication it had raised with the policy to disperse military industries, Gardner and Schriever had decided they had to make an end run around the Air Force and Department of Defense bureaucracies. They were going to have to do what Gardner had said all along would be necessary. They had to reach President Eisenhower and convince him to underwrite the project with his personal support. Despite the advances Schriever and Ramo and their teams had made, they were not moving nearly fast enough to meet Gardner’s June 1958 deadline for a “Ph.D. type” capability of two launching sites and four operational missiles, let alone his major deterrent of twenty launching sites and a stockpile of one hundred missiles by June 1960. Dealing with the Department of Defense and Air Force bureaucracies meant navigating an obstacle course. Bennie had his staff count up the number of agencies or offices from which, depending on the nature of the request, they had to seek prior approval. The total came to forty-two. Merely to obtain an air-conditioning unit to protect a computer the Ramo-Wooldridge team was purchasing from the Southern California heat became a hassle.

  AN IMMIGRANT BOY

  Elizabeth Milch, Schriever’s mother, as a young woman in New York not long before she met his father, Adolph Schriever. She had left Germany as a teenager to work for a German family who owned a pharmacy in lower Manhattan and moved back to Germany after marrying Adolph. COURTESY OF BARBARA SCHRIEVER ALLAN

  The street-corner building in Bremen, Germany, where, in one of the apartments above the shop, Bernard Adolph Schriever was born on September 14, 1910. COURTESY OF BARBARA SCHRIEVER ALLAN

  Adolph Schriever, in his engineer officer’s uniform on board the North German Lloyd Company’s passenger liner George Washington. During a cruise in 1914, the ship was trapped in New York Harbor by the outbreak of the First World War that August. The United States was then neutral, but Britain’s Royal Navy waited outside the harbor to seize German ships. COURTESY OF BARBARA SCHRIEVER ALLAN

  A strong woman who would not wait for the war to end to be reunited with her husband: Elizabeth Milch Schriever with her two sons, six-year-old Bernard (left) and four-year-old Gerhard (middle). Holland remained neutral throughout the war, so they boarded the Dutch liner Noordam at Rotterdam in January 1917, just a little more than two months before a U.S. declaration of war against Germany would have blocked their coming. CCOURTESY OF BARBARA SCHRIEVER ALLAN

  TEXAS AND THE ARMY AIR CORPS

  Pluck and enterprise: “The Oaks,” the soft drink and homemade ham sandwich stand, erected under the shading branches of a grove of venerable live oak trees next to the twelfth green of the Brackenridge Park Golf Course in San Antonio, which Elizabeth Schriever established to support herself and her two boys. A sandwich cost fifteen cents and a glass of lemonade a nickel. COURTESY OF JONI JAMES SCHRIEVER

  “Champ Gets Hot,” boasted a headline in one San Antonio newspaper: Bennie Schriever in 1931 as a senior at Texas A&M, playing a long shot while stylishly attired in the plus fours and two-tone golf shoes of the era. That year he won the Texas state junior amateur championship and the San Antonio city championship for the first of two times. Schriever’s prowess at golf not only would give him great pleasure but would also be a valuable asset in his military career. COURTESY OF JONI JAMES SCHRIEVER

  Shiny boots and riding breeches: Schriever, in his senior year at Texas A&M, in the spit-and-polish uniform of an officer cadet in the horse-drawn field artillery. He would later joke that he chose airplanes because his legs were too long for the stirrups. COURTESY OF GENERAL BERNARD SCHRIEVER

  Reaching for the sky: Bennie in the open cockpit of a trainer aircraft at Flying School at Randolph and Kelly Fields near San Antonio in 1932 or 1933. The washout rate was more than 50 percent, but he survived and received his wings and a second lieutenant’s commission in the Air Corps Reserve on June 29, 1933. COURTESY OF GENERAL BERNARD SCHRIEVER

  A white scarf, goggles, and a leather helmet, the romantic regalia of the early 1930s, the open-cockpit era, when Schriever was a young pilot. “The gals sure liked it,” he said. “It was better than owning a convertible.” COURTESY OF JONI JAMES SCHRIEVER

  The future General of the Air Force: Schriever’s idol, Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold, then a lieutenant colonel, about to take off in a Boeing P-12 biplane fighter with a load of mail during the air mail catastrophe of 1934. Arnold was commander of the operation’s Western Region, with Salt Lake City as his headquarters. Schriever was one of his pilots. ARMY AIR CORPS PHOTO COURTESY OF GENERAL BERNARD SCHRIEVER

  ENGAGED

  Bennie with his prize: Dora Brett and Bernard Schriever aboard a ship traveling from the Panama Canal Zone to San Francisco in August 1937, he to head for Seattle to begin flying for Northwest Airlines, she to proceed on to Washington, where they were to be wed at Hap Arnold’s home on January 3, 1938. “Wonderful trip,” Dora wrote in her scrapbook. COURTESY OF BARBARA SCHRIEVER ALLAN

  AT WAR IN THE PACIFIC

  The daring of the young: Major Bernard Schriever and Major John “Jack” Dougherty, back at their home base in northeastern Australia after their wild “dive-bombing” attack in a B-17 on Japanese shipping in Rabaul Harbor on New Britain Island on the night of September 23, 1942. COURTESY OF GENERAL BERNARD SCHRIEVER

  Ke
eping ’em flying, New Guinea, 1943: Schriever, as chief of maintenance and engineering for General George Kenney’s Fifth Air Force, supervising the repair of an engine. Schriever’s honesty and efficiency won over Kenney’s irascible deputy for combat operations, Brigadier General Ennis “Ennis the Menace” Whitehead. ARMY AIR CORPS PHOTO COURTESY OF GENERAL BERNARD SCHRIEVER

  A wartime reunion: Bennie and Gerhard (right), who had acquired the nickname “Gerry” in his boyhood, visiting their mother in San Antonio during Bennie’s brief trip home in the fall of 1943. Both were lieutenant colonels by then, Gerry commanding an engineering unit at Tinker Field in Oklahoma. Behind is the little white house on Terry Court in which they grew up. COURTESY OF JONI JAMES SCHRIEVER

  BUILDING THE UNSTOPPABLE

  Where it all began: the Schoolhouse, the vacant Roman Catholic boys’ school in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood, as it was when Schriever and his band of rocket pioneers began secretly assembling there in July 1954 to launch the project to build the intercontinental ballistic missile. The former chapel, the small structure in the middle with stained-glass windows depicting the saints, was the site of their briefing room. U.S. AIR FORCE PHOTO COURTESY OF THE SPACE AND MISSILE SYSTEMS CENTER

  “The wild Welshman”: Trevor Gardner, the brash, brave visionary to whom Schriever first turned to get the enterprise started. COURTESY OF TREVOR GARDNER, JR.

  Gardner, left, being briefed on another of his secret high-technology projects. Looking over Gardner’s shoulder is his then assistant, Lieutenant Colonel Vincent “Vince” Ford, dubbed “the Gray Ghost” by Schriever’s staff because of his capacity for behind-the-curtain maneuvering. His talent for it was crucial in arranging the White House briefing that won Eisenhower’s backing for the missile program. The briefer is unidentified. COURTESY OF GENERAL BERNARD SCHRIEVER

  A future cardinal of the military-industrial complex: Simon Ramo, center, who would rise to become the R in TRW, Inc., conferring with Schriever. On the right is Dr. Louis Dunn, Ramo’s deputy for the missile effort. Both Schriever and Gardner knew Ramo was indispensable for assembling the array of engineering and scientific talent needed to overcome the technological obstacles. COURTESY OF GENERAL BERNARD SCHRIEVER

  Cold War forgiveness: John von Neumann (right), a Jewish exile from Hitler’s Europe, conferring with Wernher von Braun, a former SS officer, Nazi Party member, and the führer’s V-2 missile man, during a visit to the Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. A mathematician and mathematical physicist with a mind second only to Albert Einstein’s, von Neumann headed the scientific advisory committee for the ICBM and lent the project his prestige. JOHN VON NEUMANN PAPERS, MANUSCRIPT DIVISION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  The heartlessness of an early end: Seven months after immensely impressing Eisenhower at the July 28, 1955, White House briefing on the missile project, “Johnny” von Neumann had been driven to a wheelchair by the ravages of his cancer. Ike awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1956. “I wish I could be around long enough to deserve this honor,” Johnny said to the president. He died approximately a year later, on February 8, 1957, at the age of fifty-three. WHITE HOUSE PHOTO, JOHN VON NEUMANN PAPERS, MANUSCRIPT DIVISION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  A powerful opponent: Curtis LeMay, the formidable bomber leader who created the Strategic Air Command and directed it for nearly nine years, was a relentless foe of the ICBM program. Nicknamed “the Cigar” for the stogie he had perpetually in hand or clenched between his teeth, LeMay mocked the first of Schriever’s ICBMs, the Atlas, as “a fucking firecracker.” COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE U.S. AIR FORCE

  An essential ally: General Thomas “Tommy” Power (right) gives a souvenir handshake to Technical Sergeant Anderson in December 1957 at the “Thor Show” Major Jamie Wallace staged in Los Angeles, under the guise of a Development Engineering Inspection, to promote the Air Force’s intermediate-range ballistic missile. Initially alarmed by Schriever while heading the Air Force Research and Development Command, Power, who succeeded LeMay as commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command, was won over and became a staunch supporter. U.S. AIR FORCE PHOTO COURTESY OF JAMIE WALLACE

  Going public in style: Schriever makes the cover of Time, then the nation’s leading newsmagazine, in April 1957. TIME MAGAZINE

  Bennie in his element: testing missiles at Cape Canaveral in 1958. U.S. AIR FORCE PHOTO COURTESY OF JONI JAMES SCHRIEVER

  The younger brother who betrayed: the Los Alamos identification badge of Theodore Hall, the Harvard physics prodigy who, along with Klaus Fuchs, was one of the Soviet Union’s two important spies at the atomic bomb laboratory. Hall apparently did not bother to have the mistake in the spelling of his first name corrected. COURTESY OF LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY

  The guru of rockets: Lieutenant Colonel Edward Hall, the rocketry genius who devised Minuteman, the missile that crowned the mission to deter the Soviets from any attempt at a surprise attack. U.S. AIR FORCE PHOTO COURTESY OF SHEILA HALL

  All systems go: the first successful training launch of an Atlas D-model ICBM by a Strategic Air Command crew at Vandenberg Air Force Base, on April 22, 1960. The missile is raised from its protective concrete shelter, fueled, and fired into space. U.S. AIR FORCE PHOTO

  Try and try again to put a spy in the sky: After the thirteenth attempt, Lieutenant Colonel Charles “Moose” Mathison presents the first capsule retrieved from a would-be photoreconnaissance satellite, Discoverer XIII, which had been flung into orbit around the earth, to a jubilant Schriever and General Thomas White, chief of staff of the Air Force, at Andrews Air Force Base, August 13, 1960. LOCKHEED MISSILES AND SPACE DIVISION PHOTO COURTESY OF GENERAL BERNARD SCHRIEVER

  Fulfillment: Bennie Schriever with four stars amid his missiles, circa 1962. HISTORY OFFICE, U.S. AIR FORCE SPACE COMMAND

  BEFORE RETIREMENT

  The Schriever family at Barbara’s “sweet sixteen” birthday party at Andrews Air Force Base on June 11, 1965. Left to right: Brett, an Air Force navigator, with his captain’s bars; Barbara; General Schriever; Dora; Dodie; and Dodie’s pilot husband, Theodore Moeller, then also a captain. U.S. AIR FORCE PHOTO COURTESY OF BARBARA SCHRIEVER ALLAN

  A LAST SALUTE

  The Generals of the Air Force salute Schriever’s coffin on July 12, 2005, as it is carried up the slope of a knoll at Arlington National Cemetery to rest, as he wished, near Hap Arnold. He was buried with the honors due a chief of staff. U.S. AIR FORCE PHOTO COURTESY OF JONI JAMES SCHRIEVER

  HAPPINESS IN THE EVENING

  The Schriever luck holds: Joni James and Bernard Schriever on honeymoon in southern France after their wedding, which took place on October 5, 1997. COURTESY OF JONI JAMES SCHRIEVER

  Having been awarded the Air Force’s highest development priority was fine, but it turned out that this did not absolve them from competing against other high-priority projects for funds. Their overall budget for each fiscal year also had to be approved by, in turn, the budget committees of the ARDC and the Air Matériel Command, and then by the Air Staff, the Air Force Budget Advisory Committee, the Air Force Council, the secretary of the Air Force, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Bureau of the Budget. What they needed was a streamlined decision-making process, their own separate budget, and a designation of the highest national—not just Air Force or Department of Defense—priority, which would enable them to override everything else. Only Eisenhower could give them these privileges. The question was, how were they to get to him?

  It was a task made for Vincent Thaddeus Ford, a man to whom duplicity was second nature, an adept backdoor operative whom Schriever’s staff was to nickname “the Gray Ghost.” He was an odd, neurotic man. He had been born in Winstead, Connecticut, in 1907 and grown up there until, in his mid-high-school years, his father had developed chronic chest problems of colds and pneumonia and been warned by a doctor that if he wanted to live, he had better move to a warmer and dryer climate. The family had shifted to the community of Alhambra in Southern C
alifornia southeast of Los Angeles, where Vince had completed high school and studied engineering for two years at UCLA. To support himself, he also worked part-time as a meteorologist for one of the original airlines, Western, which had a contract to fly the mail. He got to know a number of the pilots and discovered that they were all college graduates, some from prestigious schools like Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley, who had taken up flying for the sheer love of it. One pilot, he recalled, always tossed in his bag of golf clubs along with the mail sack so that he could play at stopovers.