Young Magnus Kolff tried not to show his disappointment at having twice been denied permission to attend the music camp at Interlochen. He compensated by being the best trumpeter in northern Alabama, and his parents were delighted when he was invited to play in several different orchestras and even to try out for the summer band at the University of Alabama-but when Dieter discovered that this was a marching band, a football band with emphasis on funny gyrations and exercises which emphasized not music but the spelling out of A-L-A-B-A-M-A, he put his foot down: “Music has nothing to do with football. You can’t go.”
The university, still hoping to get the boy, invited the whole Kolff family to Birmingham to see one of the less-important football games, Alabama versus Tennessee, and during the first half of his first American contest Dieter did get excited by the drill-like precision of the teams, but what happened at half-time killed both the event and any chance young Magnus had to play with that band.
“What we offer next,” the band leader announced in a [341] voice tilled with pride and excitement, “is nothing less than a musical tribute to three great composers, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and George Gershwin.” Dieter had never heard of the last, but he was fascinated by what the band might do to honor the first two masters.
“Da-da-da-tah,” the band played, offering about ten bars of the Fifth Symphony. Then, without piano, they played twenty bars of a Tchaikovsky piano concerto, after which they played one minute of Rhapsody in Blue, with eight clarinets doing a respectable job of indicating the piano part. The entire tribute to three fine composers required one minute and twenty-three seconds, after which the band returned to its marching maneuvers.
“You cannot become part of that insult to Ludwig van Beethoven,” Dieter said firmly when the family returned to Huntsville, but he was soon to discover what peer pressure could be in American life. His son’s teachers, his band instructor and the school principal climbed Monte Sano to plead with Dieter to allow the boy to attend the university music camp.
“To march with that band, on an autumn afternoon, “ when Alabama is playing Auburn,” said the principal, his voice quavering, “is one of the finest experiences a boy can have.”
“They don’t play music,” Dieter said stubbornly.
“But, Mr. Kolff,” the principal said gently, “we hear that your part of the arsenal may be closed down. Your family may have to leave here. It would be important to Magnus when he moves to another school-if he could say with pride, ‘I played at the Alabama-Auburn game.’ ”
With a stubbornness born of ten generations of farmers determined not to succumb to improper blandishments, ,Dieter resisted the entreaties of his son and the boy’s uneducated allies, including the faculty members and the school principal. “You will not march about some silly field,” he said in German. “Please, Poppa,” came the plea in English. “All the other boys do it.”
Dieter sought to divert his son’s attention by borrowing a seductive catalogue of the G. C. Conn Band Instrument Company of Elkhart, Indiana, and showing Magnus the glittering photographs in color of a real silvery trumpet, saying, “Look at this, Magnus. On this you can play real music, and we’ll send away for it.” But Magnus replied, [342] almost scornfully, “If I join the big band, they give nee free the next size better over on this page.”
Dieter was now fifty-one, gray-haired, his narrow face betraying his apprehension about the future of rocketry under NASA domination, his eyes deep-set and still glowing with the ambition which had dominated the years of his imaginative and constructive life: he still wanted to build the great rockets that would carry payloads to the stars. What kind of instruments were in the payload he would leave to others: NASA, the Army, some new science agency, anyone. His job, and one which he felt only Von Braun and he could discharge, had been simply to build the vehicle, and now he was being forestalled.
“Hell,” he told his wife in German. “They’re strangling us.” He was not eating well, and one night at the table he came close to tears. “Two hundred miles Mr. Very-Bright-Charley Wilson limits us to. Liesl, in 1943 we were throwing the A-4 two hundred miles. So many years later and we’re back where we started.” Grimly he reminded her that the only significant triumph the Americans had known had come from his Juno rocket and its Explorer payload. “And this is the thanks we get.”
When a dignitary from Washington came to define the new restrictions, the Germans were assembled to hear the distressing news, and it turned out to be much worse than the rumors. Any project of even superficial interest was to be taken out of Alabama and positioned at one of the NASA centers, but the really significant efforts which might alter the thinking of the world, like Dieter Kolff’s potential rockets, were to be scrapped entirely. The Army at Redstone was not to be limited to two hundred miles; it was to be gutted and put back on the ground, where it ought to be.
The scientists and engineers were so stunned by this obvious miscarriage of intelligence that they made no protest during the meeting, but that night when the leaders gathered at Kolff’s for a wake, angry resentments were voiced and men in their sixties asked, “Where will we go? How will we find work?”
Others were more preoccupied with the fallacious strategy of such a decision, and one man said angrily, “No wonder the Russians are ahead of us. It might be better [343] if they dominate the field. Teach the Americans some sense.”
But Dieter could not permit such thinking. “Don’t ever say that! You’d already left Peenemünde before the final days. Each morning rumors as to what the Russian armies were doing to the population ... how soon they would reach us. I can tell you, it was a terrible time.”
“But in Russia they encourage men like us to do our work. We have proof of that,” and he pointed toward the sky.
“Don’t say that!” Dieter repeated. “Not one of us here would rather be in Russia, and you know it.”
“I would rather be working on something sensible,” the man said, and all agreed, but what that something could possibly be under the new rules, no one could guess.
Not even General Funkhauser, when he flew in from California to hire the services of four Germans needed for special work Allied Aviation was doing, could be hopeful. “We’ve been told the Army can’t afford to keep this base now that its major mission has been proscribed. And each of the other services has its own plans. No one will touch this place, but an office will be opened to see if we can find jobs in other parts of the country for you Germans.” One thing was certain: like Adam and Eve before them, the Kolffs would go into exile from the lovely Eden they had created atop Monte Sano. “They can rename it Monte Insano,” Dieter growled.
Packing had actually begun, when an extraordinary occurrence in the White House saved them. It had nothing to do with Huntsville, Alabama, or even the space program; it dealt with shame and remorse.
Never in recent American history had there been any action more despicable than that of President Eisenhower when confronted by the rabble-rousing of Senator Joe McCarthy, for at the height of his campaign of vilification McCarthy had found it expedient to accuse General George Marshall not only of stupidity and ineptness, but of treason. It was a time of inflamed passions, and the senator’s wild charges gained such currency that the reputation of one of America’s finest patriots was dragged in the slime.
Those who knew the three men-Eisenhower, Marshall and McCarthy-expected the President to spring to [344] Marshall’s defense, and for a very valid reason: Marshall had been Eisenhower’s superior, had vaulted him into command of the Allied forces, and had supported him unquestioningly at every crisis. If ever one man owed another a debt, it was Eisenhower.
But when the attack came on his old leader, an attack without a shred of substantiating evidence, Eisenhower scurried for cover; not only did he refrain from springing to the defense of Marshall, he also excised from speeches already typed any favorable references to a man who had been the architect of his, Eisenhower’s, glory. It was a shameful period in pres
idential history, and when critics later pointed out his pusillanimous behavior, Eisenhower must have winced.
He did have a defense: the crucial problem of the nation at that time had been how to muzzle the Senator from Wisconsin before he wrecked the Union, and almost any tactic that would remove him from public life was defensible. Eisenhower’s problem was McCarthy, not Marshall. The latter was expendable, so the President had turned his back upon his mentor and his friend.
Now, in 1959, with Marshall and McCarthy both dead, President Eisenhower wished to make amends, and when he learned that the Army base at Huntsville was about to be phased out, it occurred to him that if NASA could use this once-productive base, it might appropriately be renamed in honor of the old friend he had treated so shabbily. Dieter Kolff was among the experts summoned to the White House, and in impassioned, heavily accented language he defended the work he and the other Germans had been doing there:
“Mr. President, your honor, believe me that the Germans who were captured by Russia in 1945 were just as brilliant as Dr. von Braun here or workmen like these. If we here in America are on the verge of building rockets which will carry men to Mars or the Moon, I am sure that our cousins in Russia are capable of the same accomplishment. [He pronounced his words as Chermuns, Rrroshia, verteh and aggomplishment, which gave his statement an added, almost scientific, weight.] Please, Mr. President, put this great installation to some fruitful use.”
[345] Such pleas, repeated many times, satisfied Eisenhower that the rocket site could be adapted to service in the new age of space, and forthwith he directed that it be christened The George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, and on the day the transfer was completed-with a speech to remind the locals that General Marshall had been a powerful soldier, a fine Secretary of State, the creator of the Marshall Plan, which had helped save Europe, and a winner of the Nobel Prize-Dieter and his engineers perfected their plans for the gigantic rocket which they had named Saturn I, suspecting that there would be many improved versions later: Saturns II, III, and who could predict how many more.
A few months later they rigged their first Saturn to a test stand, tying it down so that it could not soar into the air, and with some trepidation, ignited the first of the monster engines. The mighty roar of America’s entry into the space age could be heard across state lines; the earth was scorched; the imprisoned power was terrifying as it shook all of Huntsville; and as the liquid fuels burned away, challenging the Sun in their power, Dieter Kolff stood with his hands folded over his chest, as if in prayer, and his eyes were moist.
The long perilous journey from a farm village near Munich to the Russian front to Peenemünde to El Paso to Huntsville to Cape Canaveral to the stars was back on track.
That night young Magnus, sensing his father’s euphoria, broached for the umpteenth time the possibility of his playing trumpet in the University of Alabama marching band, but to his dismay his joyous father showed no inclination to surrender. “Son, never use Beethoven in a poor way.” Dieter, however, was pleased, sometime later, when the best orchestra in the area, a pitiful thing by German standards, asked Magnus to play with them and offered him the use of one of the finest Conn instruments. As the leader said when he talked with Dieter, “Your son is the best trumpeter in Alabama.”
“When little NACA exploded into gigantic NASA the effect ran the conservative, penny-pinching engineers who had been running Langley was so drastic that it was almost amusing. Men had to expand their vision a thousandfold [346] overnight, and experts who had been pondering problems hundred miles into space were now encouraged to visualize operations occurring two billion miles away.
A new breed of managers appeared, too, men alerted to the necessity for good public relations, so that when secrecy and hesitancy once prevailed, with NACA engineers terrified of even uttering a theory before it could be proved, the NASA men delighted in throwing up into the wind of publicity the wildest statements to titillate the general public. One such imported expert, former edition of a newspaper, studied the rosters of all the branches taken over by NASA and saw to his dismay that only a few of the practical engineers who had perfected the marvels of this age possessed doctorates, and he was quite blunt when he faced the management with his data:
There is no major agency in this nation with as few men with doctorates as NASA. It’s a disgrace, and it places you at a severe disadvantage when you testify before Congress or in public. If I can issue a press release which says that Dr. Stanhope of NASA predicts this or that, it gets attention. If I have to rely on Claude C. Stanhope, who holds this or that position and, for God’s sake, isn’t even a professor, I get no hearing at all.
Watch carefully what the Army and Air Force do. It’s all General this or Doctor that. Navy plays the game better than anybody. They’re lousy with Doctors. Now take my advice. You get yourself some Doctors who can go before Congress and win us some appropriations.
A committee reviewed the entire personnel of the new agency and winnowed the possible candidates into two groups. The first were those younger men who had already demonstrated outstanding intellectual capabilities in getting their master’s degrees in various good engineering schools and who could be relied upon to handle the advanced work for a doctorate. High on this list was Stanley Mott: B.S., Georgia Tech; M.S., Louisiana State; IQ 159; lifetime grade average, 3.89.
“We’ve talked with the men at Cal Tech,” the older man in charge of the program, Doctor Rush, informed Mott [347] when the latter came to Washington, “and they tell us that their program normally takes three years.”
“Beyond the master’s!” Mott gasped.
“This is the top school in the nation, maybe the world. They don’t throw doctorates around.”
“I don’t want to drop out for three years. In that time we could be on Saturn.”
“That’s what we said. We showed them your record. The nine research papers you’ve already done-on the upper atmosphere, ablation, bringing a blunt-nosed body back through the friction belt-satisfied them that you’re well beyond the average doctorate level right now.”
“Did they listen?” Desperately Mott wanted to spend a year at Cal Tech, for in his advanced work at Langley and Wallops Island, and especially during his studies of ablation in California, he had seen that much of the really powerful thinking being done in these intriguing fields stemmed from this small, tight, distinguished center of learning in Pasadena. To share in this high intellection, to stand beside these brilliant men as they wrestled with the most arcane new concepts, would be a privilege, and he would undergo any hardship or embarrassment to get such an assignment. He would even plead for a chance.
“The difficulty is,” the personnel man said, “that what we want you to specialize in is the most arduous field they have, celestial mechanics, what holds the universe together and makes it run.” He stopped to allow this startling assignment to sink in, but as soon as he heard the phrase celestial mechanics Mott’s heart skipped a series of beats, for this was precisely the field in which in his spare time he had been educating himself. It seemed to him that this was the highest external field of knowledge to which a man could aspire; internally there was gene structure, of equal import and about to reveal secrets just as noble as those of the outer universe, but his mind had always soared outward, so it was inevitable that he would be preoccupied with the mechanics of the universe.
To be allowed to grapple with those secrets! To be one of the handful who comprehended the structure of a galaxy or the behavior of atoms at the outer edges of space!
“I’d volunteer to spend the three years for that,” he said quietly.
“Maybe there’s no need.”
[348] “Oh, but I’d like to try!”
“We’ve had substantial discussions with them ... emergency and all that ... national interest ... and they’re willing to make a concession. If you work hard and are able to maintain the level of studies you’ve already done with us ...”
“I will.”
He was a learned man, one of the best in his field, forty-one years old, but he was pleading like a Boy Scout who wanted to attend summer camp. “I can work; you know.”
“They say that perhaps you could handle the material in two years.”
“Oh!” Mott had nothing else to say. He was being offered a belated chance to catch up with the most advanced thinking of his age, and all that was asked of him was that he apply himself. When the personnel man waited for an answer, Mott mumbled, “they’ll have to redefine the word.”
“What?”
Mott laughed, the hearty guffaw of a man released from tension. “I said that when I get through, they’ll have to redefine the verb work.”
Rachel was enchanted by the news that her husband was going to get his doctorate; she had often felt that he was far more learned than most men who had the degree but her brief time at NACA had demonstrated how even a good man could find himself at a disadvantage because he lacked the doctorate. The two boys were delighted at the prospect of living in California and studied maps to see how far Cal Tech was from the beach; they were disappointed.
Real disappointment, however, was voiced by Rachel’s mother, Mrs. Saltonstall Lindquist, in Worcester, Massachusetts. It was the custom in American social circles for women who were divorced, but who preferred keeping the family name of the former husband, to use as their first name not their given name, Mary or Esther, but their own family name. To refer to one’s self as Mrs. Armstrong Cheney was much more polished than to appear in the social columns as Mrs. Mary Cheney.
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