A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  Purchasing the time in which the Soviet Union could self-destruct was not the only accomplishment of Schriever and those he led. Their ICBMs became more than weapons, they became vehicles that opened the exploration of space. John Glenn, the first American to circle the earth in February 1962 in NASA’s Mercury program, was lofted on an Atlas rocket and orbited and returned to earth in a modification of the same Mark 2 hydrogen bomb reentry vehicle used on Thor. The technology that applied to bringing a bomb back into the atmosphere without burning the bomb up made it possible to do the same with a man. The second-generation Titan ICBM, Titan II, was the lifting horse in Gemini, NASA’s 1965 follow-on program in its progress to the moon. With a booster stage thrust of 430,000 pounds, this ICBM was able to hoist into orbit a spacecraft large enough for two men to perfect the rendezvous and docking operations in space that were a necessary precursor to the moon voyage. The venture that had been forced to rely on Simon Ramo to round up the technogical expertise needed because the American aircraft industry was an aerospace desert in the mid-1950s generated a vast aerospace industry that would carry the United States into the twenty-first century as the world’s sole superpower. The question became not the quantity and quality of American military power, but whether the leaders of the United States would wield it wisely or foolishly, as the war in Iraq would so aptly illustrate.

  Schriever was unable to obtain control of the space photoreconnaissance system for the Air Force after Discoverer succeeded and became the covert Corona. Again on the advice of Killian and Kistiakowsky, as well as that of Edwin Land, Eisenhower established a new ultra-clandestine office to jointly manage reconnaissance satellites with the CIA. Under President Kennedy, it was named the National Reconnaissance Office and kept so hush-hush that its very existence was secret. The NRO dwelt within the Air Force, was chiefly manned by Air Force personnel, and its head was the undersecretary of the Air Force, but it was not of the Air Force. The undersecretary reported directly to the secretary of defense on NRO matters and Air Force officers assigned to the NRO were forbidden to discuss anything they did with outsiders. The only Air Force officer who could be briefed on its activities was the chief of staff, and he could not tell anyone beneath him what he learned.

  Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s and then Johnson’s secretary of defense, also canceled the manned space programs Schriever initiated. Manned space missions remained the sole prerogative of NASA. But the ICBM endeavor had led the Air Force to invest too much in the infrastructure of space operations at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg and to educate too many officers in guidance and astronautical engineering to suppress the impetus to use space. And by the 1970s enough officers who were disciples of Schriever were attaining senior positions of influence to propel space operations forward. Whole families of satellites came into being. Weather satellites were sent aloft, initially to avoid wasting reconnaissance satellite film by attempting to photograph targets in the Soviet Union when they were obscured by cloud cover, then for general prediction of weather to assist military operations. Communications satellites, free of the interference caused by weather and other factors within earth’s atmosphere, began sailing in space to provide command and control of ground forces, naval vessels, and aircraft. Intelligence satellites were developed that not only transmitted photographs but also eavesdropped on hostile communications. Midas, an early warning infrared satellite system first envisioned under the WS-117L program, circled the earth in a series known by the innocuous title Defense Support Program (DSP). The sensors on the satellites would be able to detect the flame of a Soviet missile the moment it was fired. (During the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf over Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait the sensors picked up heat from the firing of one of his medium-range Scud ballistic missiles as soon as it was launched. The missile’s course could then be quickly triangulated and people in the target area warned to take shelter.) The coming of Global Positioning System satellites has been an enormous boon to navigation and the accuracy of weapons. Whether it is a Tomahawk cruise missile fired over a 1,500-mile course or a 2,000-pound bomb dropped from a fighter-bomber overhead, a weapon can be guided either spot-on or to within one meter of the target, hardly a difference given the ensuing blast. As one of Schriever’s professional descendants, Major General Franklin “Judd” Blaisdell, who began his career as a Minuteman missileer and rose to become the Air Force’s director of space operations and integration, put it this way: “Space is the ultimate high ground.”

  These military satellite systems inevitably evolved into like systems for civilian use in communications, navigation, television broadcasting, and other fruitful purposes. The communications satellites, relaying voice, data, and televised images throughout the world, made globalization possible. By 2007 approximately 6,600 satellites of all types, military and civilian, had been sent up over the years. Of these, 850 to 920 were in active use in 2007, 568 for communications. The most common orbit is along the line of the equator about 22,000 miles above the earth. It is called geosynchronous because the satellites are given an orbital speed synchronized with the rotation of the earth. Viewed from earth, they appear to be motionless. The satellites are, in effect, parked in space at a point where they can most efficiently fulfill their function. So much that Schriever and his comrades pioneered would be taken for granted and go unremarked in daily life. For example, most people who slide their credit card into the electronic reader on a gas pump or an automated teller machine have no idea their card’s validity is being checked via space, because it is cheaper to rent access to a satellite than to a phone line. And they assume, correctly, that if they have a GPS instrument in their car, they won’t get lost anymore.

  EPILOGUE:

  THE SCHRIEVER

  LUCK

  79.

  JOHNNY VON NEUMANN FINDS FAITH BUT NOT PEACE

  The cruelty of John von Neumann’s fate deprived him of seeing the fulfillment of his work. His left shoulder became painful in the summer of 1955 and that August he went to see an orthopedic surgeon at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. As a commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission, he was entitled to government medical care. The surgeon X-rayed the shoulder and discovered what he described to von Neumann as a “giant cell” tumor. The tumor was probably benign, the doctor said, but surgery soon afterward revealed otherwise. Worse, the tumor itself was not the primary source of the malignancy. He had testicular cancer. The disease there had metastasized and the cancer was spreading throughout his system. At first, he continued going to his AEC office as usual, but it soon became apparent that this was no longer possible. He and his wife, Klari, disposed of their house in Georgetown and moved to an apartment at the Woodner, only a fifteen-minute drive to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, where he went regularly for treatment and therapy. Their marriage had been a difficult one. She was given to depression and resentment over his neglect of her as a result of an obsession with his work and his absentmindedness and they had had ferocious rows. Yet once he became ill, she treated him with nothing but tenderness. The treatments did not help. His condition grew steadily worse. Cancer medicine was in its infancy in the mid-1950s. In April 1956, he entered Walter Reed as a full-time patient, never to emerge again, except by ambulance in a wheelchair, until his death.

  Vince Ford was assigned to watch over von Neumann and to be of what assistance he could to Klari. He was immensely kind and caring to both. That February, with Johnny already mostly bedridden at home, Ford arranged through Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the AEC, for Eisenhower to award von Neumann the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He had to accept the honor in a wheelchair in the Oval Office, the president bending over to pin the medal on the lapel of his suit jacket, but it is evident from the smile on his face caught by the White House photographer that he was pleased. “I wish I could be around long enough to deserve this honor,” he said to the president. Eisenhower attempted to ignore the finality. “You will be with us a long time,” he replied. “We need you.�
� At Ford’s suggestion, Strauss also saw to it that the AEC presented von Neumann with the prized Enrico Fermi Award. Von Neumann tried to stay game. Out of respect and affection for him, his colleagues on the ICBM Scientific Advisory Committee held one of their meetings at Walter Reed, so that Johnny could still chair it. Then he passed the chairmanship to Clark Millikan of Caltech, but had himself driven by ambulance to the Pentagon where he attended meetings in his wheelchair until he was too weak to do even that. Again out of a unique respect, Millikan kept the word “acting” before his title of chairman until Johnny was gone.

  The confrontation with eternity forced von Neumann to answer finally the question that had pursued him for so many years: was he a Christian or a Jew? He decided he wanted to be a Christian. He asked Ford, who was a Catholic, to find a priest who could instruct him in the Roman faith, warning Vince he needed one who was sufficiently intellectual to be compatible. Ford located the right man at the Benedictine priory in Washington, a scholarly priest named Anselm Strittmatter. He and von Neumann had long conversations and when Father Strittmatter concluded that von Neumann was ready, Johnny affirmed his faith, confessed, and received Communion. There was no need for him to be baptized, because he had already received that sacrament back in 1935 when his daughter, Marina, was baptized.

  Von Neumann’s new faith brought him little consolation. He was frightened to die. The doctors would not sedate him heavily until the final months and he was in pain and had terrible nightmares. His screams and shouts disturbed the other patients on the ward. Ford went to Strauss once more and through his influence von Neumann was moved to a private suite on Walter Reed’s third floor, the same suite in which General John “Black Jack” Pershing, commander-in-chief of the American forces in France during the First World War and subsequent chief of staff of the Army, had spent his last years. The security people became concerned that his outbursts might reveal secrets to Soviet spies. The special phone installed in the suite to connect him with the AEC was disconnected. The other phones were monitored and the doctors, nurses, and corpsmen assigned to care for him were vetted for reliability.

  No one could know for certain, but from fragments of what von Neumann said in his agony, it appeared that his nightmares did not arise from any Roman Catholic vision of the fires of Hell or Purgatory. Rather, they seemed to be provoked by the realization that his extraordinary mind, which he valued so much, was going to cease to exist. Death was cheating him out of the years of achievement that should have been opening before him. He seemed to fear as well that what he had accomplished would not outlive him, that he would become a forgotten man.

  He died on February 8, 1957, at the age of fifty-three, after Father Strittmatter, who subsequently said a funeral mass for him in the Walter Reed chapel, had given him the last rites of the Church. Von Neumann had asked to be buried at Princeton, where the Institute for Advanced Study had been his home for so long. The bishop of Trenton refused him burial in consecrated ground there because he was a divorced man, despite the fact that it was his first wife, Mariette Kovesi, who had divorced him. The von Neumanns had previously purchased a family plot in a nondenominational cemetery at Princeton and on a clear, cold morning he was laid in it beside his mother and Klari’s father, Charles Dan, who had committed suicide in despair after his exile from Hungary in 1939. Several of his former colleagues at the institute came to the burial, including Robert Oppenheimer in his trademark porkpie hat, grateful for von Neumann’s valiant defense of him against the unjust charges of disloyalty. Six years later, Klari was buried next to her Johnny. She had remarried and the new marriage seemed a comfortable arrangement, but one evening in November 1963, after a cocktail party in La Jolla, California, she walked into the sea.

  As the decades passed, von Neumann was sometimes forgotten when he should not have been. In 2005, Thomas Schelling, a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, and Robert Aumann, also an emeritus professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, received a Nobel Prize for their achievements in applying game theory to the deterrence of nuclear war, labor negotiations, and other conflict situations. A lengthy article in The Washington Post reporting the award neglected to mention that von Neumann was the inventor of game theory. In general, he retained a modest if shrunken fame. A postage stamp was struck in his honor in 2005. The New Columbia Encyclopedia and similar reference works carried short entries citing his invention of game theory and his work in quantum theory (also referred to as quantum mechanics) and in the development of high-speed electronic computers. The references usually do not mention his role in the building of the rockets and the consequences that flowed from their creation. The Air Force did not forget. In 1997, he was posthumously given the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Award and named to the Hall of Fame at Space Command Headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base at Colorado Springs.

  80.

  “THE SLOWEST OLD TREV HAS EVER GONE IN A CADILLAC”

  The Roman candle that was Trevor Gardner flared out before he could help guide to fruition the extraordinary enterprise he had done so much to initiate. In February 1956, just as the building of the Atlas was gathering momentum, he resigned as assistant secretary of the Air Force for research and development. His resentment at the administration’s economies had been growing for some time. He also felt betrayed by Wilson’s acquiescence in Eisenhower’s decision at the end of 1955 to assign the IRBM joint priority with the ICBM. Gardner was convinced that the lesser intermediate-range missile would drain the resources needed to create the big one that the nation had to have to survive. Matters came to a head in the winter of 1955–56 when Gardner demanded increases in Air Force research and development funding. He drew up a new budget and got Twining, who was still chief of staff, White, then vice chief, and others in the Air Force hierarchy, along with Jimmy Doolittle, to sign off on it with him. Quarles rejected it as “juvenile” in view of the stringencies mandated by Eisenhower. Gardner told Quarles the official budget “would simply guarantee us the second best Air Force in the future” and said he was going to resign.

  He went to see von Neumann in his apartment at the Woodner and told him that he could no longer work with Quarles. By now the two men had become comrades in a common endeavor. The day Eisenhower pinned the Presidential Medal of Freedom on von Neumann, he telephoned Gardner afterward and said, “Today, I received your medal.” Von Neumann received Gardner in his wheelchair. He did his best to dissuade his impetuous friend from quitting. Gardner’s best hope to influence events over the long haul lay from within government, von Neumann argued. Once he dropped out of the administration, his influence would depart with him. “One does not leave a position of strength if one wishes to win the campaign,” von Neumann said. “And your position of strength is crucial to winning.” Gardner listened and, to the sorrow of his friend, remained adamant. There was a last-minute meeting with Wilson aboard his yacht off Miami, where he was vacationing. Wilson also wanted Gardner to stay, but he would not concede Gardner’s price of an increase in research and development. And so Gardner submitted his formal letter of resignation on February 10, 1956. Events were to prove how right von Neumann’s admonition was that they were engaged in a marathon, not a sprint. Twenty months later Sputnik I’s beep, beep, beep from space as it circled the earth broke the padlocks on the budget coffers.

  As so often behind the curtain in human dramas, there was more to Gardner’s resignation than policy disagreements. His personality was disintegrating. His drinking, always heavy, had grown much heavier. The alcohol and the womanizing to which he was prone were destroying his marriage. (It ended in divorce in 1958 and his wife, the former Helen Aldridge, committed suicide afterward.) Vince Ford noted sadly how erratic his judgment had become. With the resignation, Ford later said, Gardner “had just shot himself down in flames by his own hand.” He returned to Pasadena to rebuild Hycon, his electronics firm there. Simultaneously, he began publishing a series of articles in Life, Look, and a semiofficial Air Forc
e magazine contending that because of confusion, bungling, and false economies at the top of the Pentagon, the United States was losing the missile race to the Soviets. “With every tick of the clock, the Soviet Union is moving closer to … knocking this country out. Intercontinental air power and missiles are the new double-edged sword of destruction, hanging by a hair over us all,” Gardner wrote in one article. If the Russians obtained ICBMs first, and Gardner predicted that the Soviets might well have them by 1960, “Pearl Harbor could seem like child’s play.” The articles were the catalyst for the subsequent missile gap fright. Schriever tried to convince him that things were not that dire, that despite its problems the ICBM project was essentially on course. Gardner would not heed him. The articles made the task of rebuilding his business more difficult because they brought retaliation in the form of military contracts he should have been given but was denied. Luckily for Gardner, the retaliation was not severe enough to drive him out of business. His security clearance was suspended for a time as well, purportedly because of the drinking but probably also as a backhand for the articles. Then Gardner got ahold of himself. He stopped drinking. He did not go to Alcoholics Anonymous or any other organization that helps addicts. He just stopped cold. “Do you have any coffee?” he would ask one of the waiters during cocktails after a meeting in Washington or elsewhere. Schriever kidded Gardner about his unaccustomed teetotaling. “Since you’ve been drinking that stuff, you’re no damn fun anymore,” he would say with a glance at Gardner’s cup full of coffee and smile. His business began recovering and a month after his divorce he married a Swedish woman, Carie Bjurling, whom he had met and apparently been courting during the divorce proceedings. With her, he started a new family. Schriever and Ford encouraged him to get back into government service. After Kennedy’s election in 1960, he served on a pre inaugural space commission chaired by Jerome Wiesner and the following year on an Air Force space commission convened by Schriever. But he was barred from any position of substance. The problem was not that he had been a Republican. Schriever and Ford went to Wiesner, who was appointed Kennedy’s special assistant for science and technology, and others within the new administration, urging that Gardner’s talents not be wasted. The answer was always the same: “He’s too controversial.”