But the Gaither Report had its own controversial backstory, one that would remain classified for decades. In the spring of 1957, seven months before Sputnik was launched, President Eisenhower asked his National Security advisors to put together a team that could answer one question: how to protect the American people in an all-out nuclear war. A RAND Corporation co-founder, the venture capitalist H. Rowan Gaither, was chosen to chair the new presidential research committee. Making up the body of the panel were officials from NORAD (North American Air Defense Command), the Strategic Air Command, the office of the secretary of defense, the Federal Civil Defense Administration, the Weapons Systems Engineering Group, and the CIA. There were representatives from the defense contracting industry, including Livermore, Sandia, Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed, Hughes, and RAND. The corporate advisors on the panel were from Shell Oil, IBM, Bell Telephone, New York Life Insurance, and Chase Manhattan Bank.
In the resulting top secret Gaither Report, officially titled “Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age,” the defense contractors, industrialists, and defense scientists concluded that there was no way to protect U.S. citizens in the event of a nuclear war. Instead, the panel advised the president to focus on building up the U.S. arsenal of nuclear weapons. The most menacing threat came from the Soviet ICBMs, they said. The individuals who calculated the exactitude of the Soviet missile threat were Herb York, scientific director at the Livermore laboratory, and Jerome Wiesner, a presidential science advisor and MIT engineering professor.
No figure mattered more. The Soviets had just successfully launched their first long-range missile from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in what is now Kazakhstan, all the way across Siberia—a distance of three thousand miles. To determine how many ICBMs the USSR could produce in the immediate future, York and Wiesner set up shop inside the Executive Office Building, next door to the White House, in the summer of 1957 and got to work doing calculations.
“The issue was both real and hot,” York later recalled. “We took the best data there were on the Soviet rocket development program, combined them with what we could learn about the availability of factory floor space [in Russia] needed for such an enterprise, and concluded that they [the Soviets] would produce thousands [of ICBMs] in the next few years.”
One Castle Bravo–size bomb dropped on Washington, D.C., would take out the Eastern Seaboard in a single strike. York and Wiesner’s ICBM analysis indicated that the Soviets wanted to be able to strike America a thousandfold. The information was shocking and alarming. If the Soviets were trying to produce a thousand ICBMs in only a few years, clearly there was only one rational conclusion to draw. The Soviet Union was preparing for total nuclear war.
It would take years to learn that the number York and Wiesner submitted to the Gaither Report was nothing more than a wild guess. In the summer of 1957 the Soviets had a total of four ICBMs built, and in the “next few years” they would build roughly one hundred more. This was a far cry from the thousands of missiles York and Wiesner said the Soviets would be producing in the next few years.
“The estimate was quite wrong,” York conceded thirty years later. In defense of his error, York said, “The problem was simple enough. I knew only a little about the Soviet missile development program and nothing about the Soviet industry. In making this estimate, I was thus combing two dubious analytical procedures: worst-case analysis and mirror imaging.” How could such an egregious error have happened, York was asked? “My alibi is that I was new to the subject and that, like the rest of the panel, I was an easy victim of the extreme degree of secrecy that the Russians have always used to conceal what they are doing.” York also pointed out that no one on the Gaither Report panel questioned his and Wiesner’s math. “I don’t remember [the others] arguing with our views,” York said.
When President Eisenhower received his copy of the Gaither Report on November 7, 1957, the timing could not have been worse. The Sputnik launch had taken place a mere month before. Eisenhower disagreed with the findings of the report. He had much better intelligence, from the CIA, but it was highly classified and no one but a small group of individuals knew about it. CIA pilot Hervey Stockman had flown a classified mission over the Soviet Union in a U-2 spy plane the year before. Stockman returned from his dangerous mission with thousands of photographs of Soviet Russia, the first ever (this was before the Corona satellite program), showing that the Russians were not preparing for total war. There was only one person on the Gaither panel who had knowledge of this information, and that was CIA deputy director Richard Bissell. It was Bissell who was in charge of the U-2 program, which he ran out of a secret base called Area 51, in Nevada. No one else on the Gaither panel had a need to know about the top secret U-2 program and the multiple missions it had been flying over the Soviet Union. All the Gaither panel had to go by was what York and Wiesner told them, in error, about Soviet ICBMs.
After President Eisenhower rejected most of the findings of the panel, someone leaked the top secret report to the press. It was York and Wiesner’s findings about the missile threat that the public focused on, which was what caused the Sputnik panic to escalate into hysteria. Eisenhower responded by creating the President’s Science Advisory Committee to advise him on what to do next. Among those chosen was Herb York, the youngest member of the group. It remains a mystery whether or not the president knew that York was responsible for the most consequential error in the Gaither Report. York soon left Livermore for Washington, D.C. He would remain there for the rest of the Eisenhower presidency.
With the narrative of Soviet aggression spinning out of control, the president authorized Secretary of Defense McElroy to proceed with a bold new plan. McElroy was a master of public relations. A thirty-two-year veteran of Procter & Gamble, McElroy is considered the father of brand management. He began as a door-to-door soap salesman and worked his way up through management. In the mid-1950s, P&G had four major soap brands—Ivory, Joy, Tide, and Oxydol. Sales were lagging until McElroy came up with the concept of promoting competition among in-house brands and targeting specific audiences to advertise to. It was McElroy’s idea to run soap ads on daytime television, when many American housewives watched TV. By 1957, P&G soap sales had risen to $1 billion a year, and McElroy would be credited with inventing the concept of the soap opera. “Soap operas sell lots of soap,” he famously said. Now McElroy was the U.S. secretary of defense. He took office with a clear vision. “I conceive the role of the Secretary of Defense to be that of captain of President Eisenhower’s defense team,” he said. His first job as captain was to counter the threat of any future Soviet scientific surprise.
On November 20, 1957, just five weeks after assuming office, Secretary McElroy went to Capitol Hill with a bold idea. He proposed the creation of a new agency inside the Pentagon, called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA. This agency would be in charge of the nation’s most technologically advanced military projects being researched and developed for national defense, including everything that would be flown in outer space.
“What we have in mind for that agency,” McElroy told lawmakers, was an entity that would handle “all satellite and space research and development projects” but also have “a function that extends beyond the immediate foreseeable weapons systems of the current or near future.” McElroy was looking far ahead. America needed an agency that could visualize the nation’s needs before those needs yet existed, he said. An agency that could research and develop “the vast weapons systems of the future.”
Congress liked the idea, and McElroy was encouraged to proceed. The military services, however, were adamantly opposed. The Army, Air Force, and Navy were unwilling to give up control of the research and development that was going on inside their individual services, most notably in the vast new frontier that was space. McElroy called the most senior military leaders into his office in the E-Ring of the Pentagon to discuss how best to handle “the new dimension of outer space.”
In separate meetings, Army,
Air Force, and Navy commanders each insisted that outer space was their service’s domain. To the Army, the moon was simply “the high ground,” and therefore part of its domain. Air Force generals, claiming that space was “just a little higher up” than the area they already controlled, tried to get Secretary McElroy interested in their plans for “creating a new Aerospace Force.” The admirals and vice admirals of the U.S. Navy argued that “outer space over the oceans” was a natural extension of the “underwater, surface and air regime in which [the Navy] operated” and should therefore be considered the Navy’s domain. General Bernard Schriever of the U.S. Air Force told the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee that he wanted to state on record his “strong negative against ARPA.”
The Atomic Energy Commission had its own idea about this new agency McElroy was proposing. Ever seeking more power and control, the Atomic Energy Commission lobbied to remove authority over outer space from the Defense Department entirely and have it placed under AEC jurisdiction. The AEC chairman had a bill introduced in Congress to establish an “Outer Space Division.” Defense contractors also lobbied hard against McElroy’s idea for a new agency. Many feared that their established relations with individual military services would be in jeopardy. Ernest Lawrence of Livermore rushed to the Pentagon to meet personally with Defense Secretary McElroy and present his alternative idea to ARPA. Accompanying Lawrence was Charles Thomas, the president of Monsanto Chemical Company, a nuclear defense contractor that would be vilified during the Vietnam War for producing the herbicide Agent Orange, and made notorious in the 1990s for being the first agrochemical company to genetically modify food crops. Lawrence and Thomas met with McElroy in his private office and shared their idea “to adopt some radical new measures… to meet the Sputnik challenge and cope better with problems of science and technology in the Defense Establishment.” They proposed that McElroy allow the two of them to create and administer a new government agency, classified top secret and modeled after the Manhattan Project. The meeting lasted several hours before McElroy rejected the two defense contractors’ idea as “infeasible in peacetime.” Lawrence had a second suggestion. If this new agency was to work, it would need a brilliant scientist at the helm. Someone who understood how the military and industry could put America’s best scientists to work solving problems of national defense. The perfect person, said Lawrence, was Herb York. McElroy promised to give the suggestion some thought.
McElroy had one last hurdle to overcome, involving colleagues just one floor away at the Pentagon. The Joint Chiefs of Staff hated the idea of an Advanced Research Projects Agency and registered a formal nonconcurrence on December 7, 1957. But the attack against ARPA by the military services was bound to fail. “The fact that they didn’t want an ARPA is one reason [Eisenhower] did,” said Admiral John E. Clark, an early ARPA employee.
President Eisenhower was fed up with the interservice rivalries. Having commanded the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War II, he held deep convictions regarding the value of unity among the military services. As president, he had been a crusader against the excessive waste of resources that came from service duplication. “The Army and Air Force ‘race’ to build almost duplicate CRBMs [Continental Range Ballistic Missiles] incensed him,” wrote presidential historian Sherman Adams.
On January 7, 1958, President Eisenhower sent a memorandum to Congress authorizing $10 million in the 1958 fiscal year “for expenses necessary for the Advanced Research Projects Agency, including acquisition and construction of such research, development and test facilities, and equipment, as may be authorized by the Secretary of Defense, to remain available until expended.”
In his State of the Union message two nights later, Eisenhower announced to the nation the creation of this new agency. “Some of the important new weapons which technology has produced do not fit into any existing service pattern,” Eisenhower explained. These new weapons should “cut across all services, involve all services, and transcend all services, at every stage from development to operation.” The rapid technological advances and the revolutionary new weapons this technology was producing created a threat as revolutionary to warfare as the invention of the airplane, Eisenhower said. But instead of working together, the services had succumbed to petty “jurisdictional disputes” that “bewilder and confuse the public and create the impression that service differences are damaging the national interest.” This was why ARPA had been created, Eisenhower said, in “recognition of the need for single control in some of our most advanced development projects.”
That the president would publicly admonish the services outraged top officials, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “So the Agency was controversial even before it was formed,” wrote Lawrence P. Gise, ARPA’s first administrator, in an unpublished history of the agency’s origins. “Beset by enemies internally, subjected to critical pressures externally, and starting from scratch in a novel area of endeavor, ARPA was a tumultuous and exciting place to be.”
It was the second week of February 1958, and Washington, D.C., was blanketed in snow. A severe blizzard had wreaked havoc on the nation’s capital. Subzero wind chills and five-foot snow drifts paralyzed traffic. On Monday morning, the Eisenhower administration advised all nonessential government workers to stay home. Herb York received a telephone call at his house. It was the personal secretary to Neil McElroy, asking York to come to the Pentagon right away for a meeting with the secretary of defense, alone. Never mind the storm, York recalled. He was determined to get to the Pentagon.
Herb York was in a remarkable position. If he did not have time to reflect on this now, he would pay homage to his humble background later in life. Here he was, living in Washington, D.C., and advising the president of the United States on scientific matters, when he had been the first person in his family to attend college. York’s father was a New York Central Railroad baggage man. His grandfather made caskets for a living; his specialty was lining a customer’s permanent resting place with satin bows and carved velvet trim. Herb York had been born of humble means but had a brilliant mind and plenty of ambition. To think he was only thirty-six years old.
“From the earliest times,” York recalled, “I remember [my father] saying he did not want his son to be a railroad man. He made it clear that that meant I should go to college, even though he knew little about what that actually entailed.” York followed his father’s advice, spending most of his free time at the Watertown, New York, public library reading newspapers, books, and science magazines. He attended the University of Rochester on a scholarship and excelled in the field he chose for himself, physics. Like many other top university physics graduates of his generation, York was recruited into the Manhattan Project during the war. In the spring of 1943 he traveled by bus to faraway Berkeley, California, where, as circumstance would have it, he was assigned to work under Ernest O. Lawrence. During the war, York helped produce uranium in Lawrence’s cyclotron, material that would eventually make its way into the core of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. After the war York returned to Berkeley to get his Ph.D. During his doctoral research, he co-discovered the neutron pi meson, which elevated him to elite status among nuclear scientists. In 1952 York became chief scientist at Livermore. Now, during the February 1958 nor’easter, Herb York wondered what lay ahead.
“I made my way with difficulty across the river to the Pentagon and did a lot of walking in deep snow,” York recalled. He had tried to hail a taxi, but there were none around. The parking lot at the Pentagon was almost empty. But the man he had come to see, Secretary of Defense McElroy, was in his office, busy at work. York had a feeling he was being considered for the position of chief scientist at ARPA. Because of the snowstorm, he would benefit, he said, from having an “unhurried, hour-long, one-on-one conversation that I could not have had with the secretary on an ordinary, busy day.”
After the meeting York went home and McElroy weighed his options. There was one other contender for the positi
on of ARPA chief scientist, and that was Wernher von Braun. Von Braun and his team had just launched America’s first successful satellite, Explorer I, and as far as the public was concerned, von Braun’s star was on the rise. But Army intelligence had information on von Braun that the rest of the world most definitely did not, namely, that he had been an officer with the Nazi paramilitary organization the SS during the war and that he was implicated in the deaths of thousands of slave laborers forced to build the V-2 rocket, in an underground labor-concentration camp called Nordhausen, in Nazi Germany.
While McElroy weighed his options for scientific director, new information came to light. Von Braun was nothing if not entitled, and in his discussions regarding the new position, he insisted that were he to transfer his services over to the Pentagon, a sizable group of his German rocket scientist colleagues would have to accompany him there. Army intelligence had classified dossiers on each of von Braun’s 113 German colleagues. They were all part of Operation Paperclip, the secret intelligence program that had brought Nazi scientists to America after the war. Many of von Braun’s rocket team members had been ardent Nazis, members of ultra-nationalistic paramilitary organizations, including the SS and the SA.
“For a while Wernher von Braun appeared to have the job but to get him it was necessary to take his 10–15 man package of [German] associates and that was not acceptable,” wrote ARPA administrator J. Robert Loftis in a declassified report. Secretary McElroy offered Herb York the job. York accepted. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, he said.
York moved into his office in the Pentagon the following month, in March 1958. He would remain on the president’s scientific advisory board. On the wall of York’s new office he hung a large framed photograph of the moon. Next to it he hung an empty frame. When people visited they would ask, why the empty frame? York told them he would leave the frame empty until it could be filled with a photograph of the backside of the moon, taken from a spacecraft to be developed by ARPA. This new agency Herb York was in charge of at the Pentagon would be capable of phenomenal things.
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