A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  Von Neumann walked in an unusual sort of toed-in fashion, but there was no lack of dignity in the slightly stout man in the three-piece suit who made his way forward to the podium. He did not mount it. Instead, he took his stance a few feet directly in front of the president and, looking out over his audience, began to speak. He held no notes in his hands. Everything he had to say had been set out with precision in his mind. He had no intimation that on this, one of the most eventful days of his life, he had less than nineteen months in which to live, that a cancer was coursing through his body. He would not learn of it until the following month. But at the moment there was nothing else he could be doing that could give him more contentment. He had arrived finally and fully in his adopted land. He was addressing the most august body in the nation and speaking as the nation’s preeminent scientist in matters of nuclear weaponry. His political patron, the financier Lewis Strauss, Eisenhower’s appointee as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, was sitting in that audience, pleased that he had made Johnny the first foreign-born member of the commission. And everything he had to say would be credible, precisely because he spoke with the gravitas of a scientist whose judgment on these esoteric but utterly important matters had been proven correct again and again over the years.

  Johnny now took his audience on a journey into the relationship between weight and yield in hydrogen bombs and the nuclear engineering processes through which these were achieved, on the speed of reentry vehicles—the missile warheads—plunging from space through the atmosphere to carry the bomb to its target on earth, on the latitude to dispense with pinpoint accuracy in the missile because the radius of destruction to be expected from a one-megaton thermonuclear explosion, equal to eighty Hiroshima bombs, was so great. Von Neumann had a knack for making nuclear intricacies comprehensible to laymen and it did not desert him on this morning before the NSC. Bennie’s staff out in California had helped by providing him with a chart showing the Atlas as it had been reconfigured into a lighter, more easily transportable ICBM with the one-megaton warhead. Another chart illustrated the flight of the rocket from the flame of its launch to the release of the warhead and the warhead’s trajectory through space and then down onto its target. Von Neumann interspersed his technical exegesis with some of the grim phrases that were never far from his mind: “nuclear blackmail” if the Russians got the ICBM first, “no known defense against it,” and a fact Gardner might have used to telling effect but had somehow overlooked, only “fifteen minutes’ warning” of incoming missiles. (Given the limitations of the American radar system in 1955, Soviet missiles would not be detected until they had reached their apogee halfway through their flight.) Ford, who was again watching the faces, was convinced that von Neumann had lost no one. Indeed, Ford thought, he had “knocked the ball out of the park.”

  Gardner was on his feet once more striding for the podium the moment von Neumann finished speaking.

  “Thanks, Johnny,” he said, and then turned to Eisenhower. “Mr. President, General Schriever will now give you a quick rundown on how we are set up to run this thing. Bennie,” he said, glancing toward Schriever, who was up and moving. It was already five minutes after 11:00 A.M. Von Neumann had talked far longer than he was supposed to do, long enough to already put them twenty minutes over the half hour they had been allotted in all and Schriever was just beginning. Yet there seemed to be no restlessness, no desire on the part of anyone to leave, certainly not the president, who was all attention.

  It did not hurt, in this carefully crafted effort to impress Eisenhower, that Bernard Schriever was without a doubt the handsomest general in the United States Air Force. A New York Times reporter would later compare his appearance to that of James “Jimmy” Stewart, the “Slim Jim” Hollywood actor of the period who inevitably played the hero in Westerns and other screen dramas in which he starred. At forty-four, there was still not a wisp of gray in the dark curly hair combed up in a wave above his forehead. The blue eyes looked ahead confidently, the mouth and chin were firm. The litheness of his six-foot, three-inch frame was accentuated by the long, tailored uniform jacket and immaculately pressed trousers in the light tan that officers then wore in summer. The silver wings with the star in the middle encircled by the wreath of a command pilot and the rows of ribbons representing his Purple Heart and Distinguished Service Medal and his other medals and awards for the victorious campaigns in the Pacific were pinned above the left breast pocket. He wore two stars on his shoulder lapels now. On Power’s recommendation, he had been promoted to major general seven months earlier. The ever careful Schriever did have notes from which to speak. He placed them on the lectern, his fingers curled around its edge, as he turned to the president, acknowledged the rest of his audience with a sweeping glance, and began.

  “My job out in Inglewood,” he said, after recapitulating in a couple of sentences Gardner’s and von Neumann’s remarks, “is to make sure … that the United States will have an operational ICBM in the quickest time technology will allow.” Then he paused, smiled at Eisenhower, and adroitly plumbed the president’s patience. He said he realized they had exceeded their allotment, that he would keep what he had to say as brief as possible, but they also had the eight-minute film of Hall’s engine firings to show at the end. Did the president still wish to see it? Everyone in the room understood the gesture. Schriever was deliberately giving Eisenhower an opportunity to cut off or shorten the briefing then and there.

  The president did not accept it. He nodded at Schriever to continue and the nod signaled that time was no longer a problem, that Schriever could take whatever time he needed to make his own points.

  In describing the organization of the project and what was occurring out in California, Bennie cleverly attributed everything that was being done to the Tea Pot Committee and its recommendations. Furthermore, to capitalize on the credibility of von Neumann and the other distinguished scientists, like Kistiakowsky, who had served on it, he always referred to the group as the Von Neumann Committee. The ploy also enabled him to get around at least partially Dillon Anderson’s stricture on not attempting to “sell” or “pressure” Eisenhower. When he described the “radical reorganization” that entailed integrating the Ramo-Wooldridge group into his WDD command and the requirement, once the program got moving, as it now was, for “increased financial support and high project priority,” he invariably cited the Von Neumann Committee and its report. He spoke of an imperative need for “the operation of the new group [to] be relieved of excessive, detailed regulation by existing government agencies,” meaning streamlined management, as another conclusion drawn from the Von Neumann Committee’s findings. Schriever occasionally broke the seriousness of his talk with light detail. “Our first field office, Mr. President,” he said, smiling and turning toward Eisenhower, and Vice President Nixon and Secretary of State Dulles, who were sitting on each side of the president, “was an abandoned parochial grammar school in Inglewood, California.” Eisenhower nodded once more and gave Bennie a light smile in return.

  But the breaks for humor were few as Bennie drove home repeatedly the utter seriousness of the challenge. “Today we are not at war,” he said, “at least not in the conventional sense, and yet the importance and urgency of this project requires the same dedication and competence and all-out effort one would expect to find in wartime.” He forged on, explaining the abstruse, to laymen, management technique of concurrency he and Ramo had adopted “in the interest of compressing time—our most critical commodity.” It was “simply … the development, testing, and perfecting of all major components simultaneously … at the right time all [of] this will come together, flow inward, converging finally at a central point in San Diego where it will be assembled to produce the final product—the ICBM.”

  He told the president of the plan to develop a second ICBM (it was to be called Titan) as a hedge in case the Atlas did not fulfill expectations. A fresh chart placed on the easel laid out for Eisenhower the proposed test launch schedule
at the Air Force’s Eastern Test Range at Cape Canaveral. He replaced it with yet another chart estimating how much this investment in rocketry was going to cost the United States, from $150 million in the current fiscal year to $538 million in Fiscal Year 1958. (As might have been expected, given the pressure Schriever and Gardner must have felt not to frighten the economy-minded Eisenhower, all of the future estimates turned out to be far below actual costs.) As Schriever concluded his presentation, Eisenhower was no longer sitting back relaxed in his commodious armchair. He had shifted forward and was sitting up straight, intent on what Bennie was saying. Boatman rolled the film and the briefing climaxed in the roar and flame of the engine firings.

  “Thank you, General Schriever,” Eisenhower said warmly when the film had ended. He turned in his chair to von Neumann and Gardner, who were seated along the far wall. “And my thanks also to you, Dr. von Neumann, and Mr. Gardner. This has been most impressive, most impressive!” he said. “There is no question this weapon will have a profound impact on all aspects of human life, not only in the United States but in every corner of the globe—military, sociological, political.” He turned all the way back, searching down the rows of chairs behind him. “Where’s Radford—is he here today?” Eisenhower asked, seeking his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president spotted the admiral almost as soon as he inquired. “Radford, let’s war game this—these long-range missiles—what they will do to the force structure. Do it right away. Let me know what answers you come up with.” He leaned over to say something to Vice President Nixon, then rose from his chair, smiled, and said, “Thank you once again, General Schriever, Dr. von Neumann, Mr. Gardner.” He gave another of his quick nods to recognize everyone else in the rows of seats who rose simultaneously in respect, then walked out of the Broadcast Room alone.

  The half-hour ration of the president’s time had stretched on into an hour and thirty-five minutes. Gardner, von Neumann, and Schriever “had done the job,” Ford thought. “We had introduced the President and the National Security Council to the nuclear missile age.” Virtually everyone stopped on the way out to thank Schriever, von Neumann, and Gardner, who had gathered in front of the podium. Twining was among them. He told Bennie how well he had done. Ford had spotted the older general sitting amongst other members of the Joint Chiefs with a satisfied “That’s my boy” smile on his face as Eisenhower had complimented Schriever. Nixon and CIA chief Allen Dulles lingered. “Why haven’t we started this sooner? What’s been the holdup?” the vice president said, tapping the palm of his left hand with the stiffened fingers of his right in a gesture of emphasis that was peculiar to Nixon. Schriever took on the answer and explained once more why, until the thermonuclear breakthrough and the imminence of a relatively light hydrogen bomb warhead, nothing practical had been possible. In Nixon and his concern they clearly had won an advocate at the top of the administration. Allen Dulles then asked what Ford called “cops and robbers” questions. Despite Gardner’s opening statement to the gathering that the Russians were “going full out,” Ford noted that none of the three men could provide detailed factual answers to Dulles’s questions “mostly because of what our intelligence people didn’t know about Soviet missile progress” (emphasis in the original text of Ford’s memoir).

  Eisenhower may have been personally won over, but the bureaucratic struggle wasn’t at an end. At 3:00 that afternoon Gardner, von Neumann, and Schriever repeated their briefing to the NSC Planning Board. It would be up to the Planning Board to submit an NSC action directive for the president to sign, and in the wording of the directive would lie the key to what action ensued. Schriever recorded the reaction of the board members in his diary. He noted that William Yandell Elliott, the Harvard professor who represented the Office of Defense Mobilization on the board and who had been so helpful in getting the ICBM on the NSC agenda in the first place, was still “a friend in court.” And because of Wilson’s opposition, the Pentagon representative, Brigadier General Charles Bonesteel, the defense secretary’s military aide, was still “reasonably negative.” Again by custom the Pentagon, as the department concerned, had the privilege of drafting the directive. Its draft was an exercise in sophistry. The proposed directive for the president to sign proclaimed the ICBM “a program of the highest priority,” and then fizzled into language that would entail nothing more than what was already being done. But as the maneuvering walked its slow pace on through August, others with clout in the administration saw the gambit and moved to negate it. The most important was Richard Nixon, who, with Eisenhower away on a trout-fishing vacation in Colorado, chaired a September 8 meeting of the full NSC that would decide the issue. He invited von Neumann to the meeting to lend a hand and Johnny waded in with more unnerving talk of nuclear blackmail and only fifteen minutes’ warning of incoming Soviet missiles.

  NSC Action No. 1433, the presidential directive that emerged and that Eisenhower signed on September 13, 1955, in offices he and his staff had taken over as a Summer White House at Lowry Air Force Base, near Denver, stated that “there would be the gravest repercussions on the national security and on the cohesion of the free world” if the Soviet Union acquired an ICBM before the United States did. The president was therefore designating the ICBM project “a research and development program of the highest priority above all others.” He ordered the secretary of defense to build it with “maximum urgency.” The plotters had won none too soon. Ten days later Eisenhower suffered his first heart attack. It would be two months before he was able to preside over a gathering on the scale of the July 28 missile briefing, and that was a cabinet meeting under controlled circumstances at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland.

  47.

  NO MORE NITPICKING

  Those words, “highest priority above all others” and “maximum urgency,” were what Gardner and Schriever had been scheming and hoping for so long. They lost no time seizing the momentum a president’s pronouncements could release. With forty-two potential naysayers in their path, Bennie and his staff at WDD in California had been driven to distraction by the hurdles races they constantly had to run to get anything accomplished. One day at the Pentagon, Schriever had grown so exasperated with an Air Force functionary called the deputy assistant secretary for logistics that his habitual self-control had shattered like a glass hitting the floor. “You son of a bitch,” he had abruptly shouted at the man, “you are holding up the whole goddamn program.” His surprise loss of temper had intimidated the bureaucrat and won the argument for him on this occasion, but obviously one could not do business like this on an everyday basis and survive.

  In late August, Schriever had begun to document precisely how this bureaucratic octopus held the ICBM project in its tentacles. Bennie had his staff draw up a dozen flip charts listing the multitude of offices and agencies involved and illustrating, with lines going here and there in a bewildering, crisscrossing maze, how many had to be contacted to approve what and how long the tortured process was taking. When they were completed, Schriever dubbed them his “spaghetti charts,” and headed off to Washington to brief Gardner. As he went through one chart after another even Gardner, who had heard so often from Schriever of what an incredible tangle they were encountering, was astonished. “Let’s go down and see Quarles,” he said as soon as Schriever was done, taking him by the arm and marching to Quarles’s office. The secretary was about to leave for a meeting, but Gardner was insistent. “Don, you’ve got to listen to this,” he said. With Quarles standing behind his desk, Bennie propped his charts up on an armchair in front and repeated his briefing, this time to Quarles’s astonishment. “Is that really what you have to do?” he asked Schriever. Assured that it was, Quarles said, “Well, we’ve got to do something about this.” Turning to Gardner, he said, “Trev, you set up a study effort and come up with some recommendations on how to do it.” With this license in his pocket, Gardner proceeded to settle the argument once and for all.

  On the same day, September 13, 1955,
that Eisenhower signed the NSC directive with the magic words, Gardner named a civilian official to head such a study who was both a supporter of the ICBM enterprise and familiar with the obstacles it was encountering. His name was Hyde Gillette and he was the deputy for budget and program management in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Financial Management. Gillette formed a twenty-five-member committee and allowed Gardner and Schriever to select its members and to seed it with their own people. Schriever, Ramo, and Ford were members, along with ten of Schriever’s officers from WDD. Gillette divided the committee into seven panels to cover all aspects. It met both in Washington and out at WDD. Within five weeks, the work was done. Gardner swiftly approved the committee’s report and sent it to Wilson’s office on October 21, 1955.