To evaluate the importance that foreign nations gave to Sputnik as a signal of national ability, we can examine the information collected in the 1960s by Gabriel Almond, who had been head of the Enemy Information Section of the Office of War Information during the Second World War.50 He discussed a number of surveys that were conducted in November 1957, the month after the Sputnik launch. The surveys showed that 58 percent of those in the United Kingdom believed that the Soviet Union was ahead in scientific development, with only 20 percent believing the United States to be ahead; the ratios were 49 percent:11 percent in France, and 37 percent:23 percent in Italy.51 Only in West Germany did the United States maintain a perceived lead, with a ratio of 32 percent:36 percent. It is tempting to speculate that proximity to Communist East Germany (and more familiarity with Communist-sponsored science and technology) may have influenced the German perception of U.S. dominance. Unfortunately, similar surveys were not conducted prior to Sputnik. We can, however, confirm the impact of single-event space exploration signaling by looking at the surveys conducted in October 1958 after the launch of the first U.S. satellite Explorer 1. The change was dramatic. In the United Kingdom, the net shift was from a 38 percent margin in favor of the Soviet Union to a 13 percent margin in favor of the United States; in France, from 38 percent in favor of the Soviet Union to 14 percent in favor of the United States; in Italy, from 14 percent in favor of the Soviet Union to 3 percent in favor of the United States; and in West Germany, from 4 percent in favor of the United States to 21 percent in favor of the United States.52
Alliance preferences in the four countries also seem to have been affected. Another survey, conducted in May 1957 (before Sputnik), in November 1957, and in October 1958 asked, “At the present time, do you personally think that this country should be on the side of the West, on the side of the East, or on neither side?” Over the course of the period, the results were as follows: the change in the United Kingdom was a 4 percent net decrease in siding with “the West” and a 9 percent increase toward neutrality; in France, a 14 percent increase in neutrality and a 15 percent decrease in siding with “the West”; in Italy, a 10 percent increase in neutrality and a 7 percent increase in siding with “the East.” Over this period, there were obviously other contributing factors, and we must be careful not to read too much into Almond’s numbers. However, Almond’s averaging of the changes in the surveys shows a number of interesting patterns: there is very little change in opinion favorable to the United States; there is more change in opinion favorable to the Soviet Union; and there is an increase in neutral opinions and a decrease in “no opinions.”53 The signal seems to have changed perceptions significantly but not drastically, supporting the Eisenhower administration’s view that the perception of the United States by European allies would not be much affected.
The work of pioneering public opinion analyst Samuel Lubell also suggested that there was no immediate panic in the American public immediately after the Sputnik event.54 Most of those surveyed dismissed the satellite relatively easily and expressed sanguine opinions similar to those of Eisenhower. Relatively few people repeated the criticisms found in the newspapers. Rather than an immediate effect of the signal of Sputnik, it was the subsequent campaign of public criticism by Senator Lyndon B. Johnson that incited significant national apprehension about space achievements. This campaign was given added fuel by the failure on December 6, 1957, of the initial Vanguard launch, which had been intended to match the Soviet Sputnik achievement but instead exploded on the launching pad, with full television coverage for the American public. Concern about panic after the Vanguard failure was so great that the New York Stock Exchange suspended trading within five minutes of the failure at 11:50 A.M.55 The media christened the event “Oopsnik,” “Flopnik,” and “Kaputnik.”56 The dramatic failure of Vanguard was read as a signal that America lay exposed and could not muster the intellectual, financial, and technical resources to match Soviet achievements.
Within this context, several key committees and boards within the Eisenhower administration clearly saw Sputnik as a blow to American prestige, linking it to the damage inflicted on America’s international reputation by McCarthyism and the rise of the Soviet Bloc. Eisenhower himself, however, focused his public comments on the scientific and military aspects of the Soviet satellite, which he correctly judged to be modest.57 Prestige, in Eisenhower’s view, was not an important part of the equation. As Alston put it, “when the issue of prestige surfaced at all, it was usually as a signal for Eisenhower to explain . . . why money should not be spent on projects that presented their justification mainly in terms of prestige benefits.”58 Eisenhower, a war hero and the “liberator” of Europe, did not feel he needed to be concerned about illusory prestige and was instead worried that concerns over prestige were being generated in an attempt to extend the reach of what he would later call the military-industrial complex into the public treasury. Although this latter concern was legitimate, his dismissal of the psychological and perceptional importance of Sputnik meant that he left the door open for others to lay claim to the signaling value of spaceflight and to use it to their own political advantage.
Prominent members of Congress disagreed with Eisenhower and clearly saw space within a signaling competition context. Senator Lyndon Johnson was particularly critical of the Eisenhower administration’s handling of the situation. Johnson mounted the first significant campaign of public criticism after Sputnik, focusing on the loss of status in the eyes of the world and on what Sputnik signaled about American complacency. Other American politicians also began to cite prestige and competition as reasons to ramp up the allocation of resources for the space program, despite Eisenhower’s objections. As one member of the House Space Committee candidly asked NASA administrator T. Keith Glennan, “How much money would you need to get us on a program that would make us even with Russia . . . and probably leapfrog them . . . ? I want to be firstest with the mostest in space, and I just don’t want to wait for years. How much money do we need to do it?”59
Technical officers of the U.S. government also recognized the signaling importance of space exploration. Asked to testify on the matter at a congressional hearing, George V. Allen, the director of the U.S. Information Agency, conceded, “No matter what we feel about it or how we may want it to be, we are in a space race with the Soviet Union. . . . Public opinion in the United States as well as overseas is going to put up what the Russians have done against what we have done. Every time the Russians do something, it is going to be marked up on a sort of chart. We are in a contest. There is no doubt about that, and no matter what we want to do about it, we are in this race.” 60 Glennan, as Eisenhower’s science-focused NASA administrator, was reluctant in his support of the prestige motive but ultimately agreed that competition with the Soviet Union was “the principal factor which determines the pace at which we pursue our goals. . . . It is clear to me that, as of the present, the enhancement of national prestige in a divided world has been and continues to be uppermost in the minds of the majority of people who have bothered to think about the matter of competition in the space arena. And this principally because of the fear that the loss of prestige that we have experienced for a time somehow upsets our equanimity and probably means, in some vague way, that we are second-best in everything.” 61 It might seem that Glennan recognized that his job was to create the most clear and impressive signals possible. The signaling race was undeniable, and nonparticipation would send its own signals. For many of the key decision-makers in the U.S. government, it had become clear that this was not an option if they were to maintain the perception of global leadership.
Eventually, the combination of rhetoric and technological advances made even Eisenhower reluctantly recognize that the United States had to compete with the Soviet Union in the realm of space exploration. The Signal Communications by Orbiting Relay Equipment (SCORE) satellite became Eisenhower’s own “space-coup,” sending the first globally transmitted communication
from space, a tape-recorded 1958 Christmas message conveying to the entire planet “America’s wish for peace on earth and good will to men everywhere.” 62 This, along with the impact of the Lunik II (which carried Soviet hammer-and-sickle flags to the Moon) and Lunik III (which orbited it), seems to have convinced Eisenhower of the signaling role of space activities. Soviet braggadocio over their space achievements also helped to spur the president into action. Khrushchev belittled the satellites that the United States had launched, calling them mere “oranges”; the first U.S. satellite Explorer weighed only 14 kilograms, and SCORE weighed in at 68 kilograms, compared with the 83.6-kilogram Sputnik, the 508-kilogram Sputnik II carrying Soviet space dog Laika, and the 390-kilogram Lunik series. Khrushchev’s first official visit to the United States in 1959 happened to coincide with Lunik II’s Moon voyage, which prompted a backhanded compliment. At a farm in Iowa where he enjoyed his first-ever hotdog, he quipped to the media, “We have beaten you to the moon, but you have beaten us in sausage-making.” 63
In the same year, when Eisenhower gave explicit spending goals to NASA administrator T. Keith Glennan, he divided the spending into three areas: first was to see to the success of the military program, third was for an orderly scientific program, but second was to see that real advances were achieved so that “the U.S. does not have to be ashamed no matter what other countries do; this is where the super-booster is needed.” 64 Even Eisenhower, the small-government Republican, had accepted the importance of space visibility. The budget for space activities now began to increase significantly, from $331 million in 1959 to $964 million in 1961.65 While Eisenhower had belatedly and begrudgingly come to recognize the space exploration signal, Kennedy would warmly embrace it.
John F. Kennedy had a clear vision of the signaling value of space-related accomplishment, as evidenced from his first comments on the subject prior to his election as president. In a speech in the Senate, Kennedy noted:
If the Soviet Union was first in outer space, that is the most serious defeat the United States has suffered in many, many years. . . . Because we failed to recognize the impact that being first in outer space would have, the impression began to move around the world that the Soviet Union was on the march, that it had definite goals, that it knew how to accomplish them, that it was moving and that we were standing still. That is what we have to overcome, the psychological feeling in the world that the United States has reached maturity, that maybe our high noon has passed . . . and that now we are going into the long, slow afternoon.66
Kennedy focused specifically on the changes in international perception that Sputnik’s signal had induced. His comments also make clear his more-encompassing global view as compared with Eisenhower’s focus on Europe and the United States.
During Kennedy’s years in Congress, he had shown an acute consciousness of the new states and new national leaders emerging through the decolonization process—states and leaders that would have no automatic tendency to adopt the economic and political system exemplified by the United States. Kennedy had made trips to India and Indochina in 1951, had gained attention by criticizing French policy in Algeria, had strongly advocated for foreign aid, and was a leading domestic figure on the subject of “third world nationalism.” 67 He was alert to the battle for “hearts and minds” in these countries. In his speech in Congress on May 25, 1961, announcing the lunar program, he noted that these countries were “attempting to make a determination of which road they should take.” He laid out his meaning explicitly: “I think the fact that the Soviet Union was ahead first in space in the Fifties had a tremendous impact upon a good many people who were attempting to make a determination as to whether they could meet their economic problems without engaging in a Marxist form of government.” 68
At the end of the 1950s, the United States appeared to be losing ground rapidly against a rising tide of Communism. The Soviet grip on Eastern Europe was ever tighter, with the Hungarian Revolution being crushed in 1956 and the border between East and West Berlin being effectively closed in 1957. Communist movements had begun to take hold in America’s backyard of Latin America, with the CIA ousting a Communist government in Guatemala in 1954 and Castro seizing power in Cuba in 1959. The first U.S. troops were already being sent to Vietnam to train the South Vietnamese forces after the French were routed at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The 1956 Suez Crisis, and the rise of new nationalist movements in Africa, had led to concerns about Soviet efforts to court influence and fill political power vacuums on the African continent.
New strategic thinking was also coming to the fore among the American policy elite, which placed a much higher premium on how the United States was perceived in the world. Throughout the Eisenhower years, the president and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had espoused a military strategy based on “containment”—through NATO in Europe and a set of global alliances with anti-Soviet governments—along with a capacity for “massive retaliation” or “massive response.” In the years just prior to Kennedy’s presidency, however, the thinking had begun to shift. In 1957, the same year as Sputnik was launched, Henry Kissinger had published his first major book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy.69 The best-selling book was an expansion on an earlier article he had written in Foreign Affairs, entitled “Military Policy and the Defense of the ‘Grey Areas.’ ”70 He set out to address the dilemma of having to choose between nuclear Armageddon and “defeat without war,” and in doing so he elaborated the concept of flexible response. This included contemplating the possibility of limited nuclear war, but he also argued for a much wider arsenal of usable force and influence, including what has later come to be known as “soft power.” This shift in thinking meant that the issue of prestige and global reputation was increasingly perceived as having concrete strategic significance. This perception was further heightened by the emergence in 1961 of the so-called Non-Aligned Movement—founded by the leaders of Yugoslavia, India, Egypt, Indonesia, and Ghana—a group of countries where influence would have to be earned on a continuing basis as opposed to being taken for granted based on a predisposition toward the United States.
The status of America’s global reputation became one of the key issues of the presidential campaign in 1960 and an important point of differentiation between Kennedy and Nixon. Kennedy put strong relations with the new states in Asia, and a robust economy for the purpose of signaling the success of capitalism, at the forefront of his campaign. The link between America’s reputation and the new states in Asia was particularly prominent in the second and third televised presidential debates.71 Importantly, however, neither Kennedy nor his advisors drew a connection during the election campaign between a robust space program and impressing the Third World. Although public USIA reports had concluded that Soviet space achievements were creating a perception of Soviet technological leadership and eroding the U.S. image, this issue did not emerge significantly in the election. In the record of campaign speeches and appearances between August 1 and November 7, 1960, Kennedy made reference to space 54 times, 33 of which were as part of broader statements about being second, while prestige itself (unrelated to space) was mentioned more than 250 times.72 Even with Johnson, the space program champion, on the ticket as vice presidential candidate, space was apparently not considered a promising election issue. This was at least in part due to Nixon’s use of the American space program record to rebut Kennedy’s own points about America’s declining prestige, commenting, “In the spirit of Halloween, Mr. Kennedy promises you a treat, but in the end its just a trick. . . . This one is the claim that Soviet Russia is first and we are second in space exploration. Mr. Kennedy is wrong. The facts are that we have successfully launched 26 earth satellites, and 2 space probes, 13 satellites are still in orbit, 8 of which are still transmitting information. The Russians have launched only 6 satellites and 2 space probes and only 1 satellite is still in orbit and it is not transmitting.”73 Indeed, Nixon displayed both the more accurate information and the more enterprising posit
ion on space during the election. He laid out his policy in a speech in Cincinnati that proposed the development of nuclear-thermal propulsion, a space station in 1966–1967, circumlunar flights in 1966–1968, and human lunar landings in the early 1970s. He promised to be “second to no one in the long stride into space.”74 By contrast, Kennedy made no specific commitment to space policy goals, only to reversing the decline in American’s global reputation. In laying enormous stress on reputation as an overarching foreign policy goal, however, it is not surprising that Kennedy would take the decision to pursue the Apollo program in order to signal the reestablishment of U.S. leadership.
The Long Space Age Page 23