“Maybe a minute,” Korolev replied.
Khrushchev whistled appreciatively. Bulganin stroked his goatee. That meant the R-7 could reach the United States in less than half an hour. Even if the radar stations the Americans had built in Norway, Turkey, and Iran picked up the launch, they would not have enough time to react, to scramble the Strategic Air Command or evacuate their cities. The R-7 really could make all the difference, change the entire security dynamic—if it worked. And that would not be known until later that year, when testing could begin.
“Why is the rocket tapered in the middle?” Molotov asked, interrupting Khrushchev’s train of thought. The R-7 had a slightly hourglass-like shape because the four big boosters strapped around the central core flared out like a skirt. Korolev began to explain that the narrow midriff was necessary for the strapped-on engines to attach and jettison properly, but Khrushchev snapped impatiently: “Why do you ask such stupid questions? You don’t understand anything about these technical matters. Leave them to the experts.”
Molotov shrank back at the public rebuke but said nothing. There was a time when Khrushchev would never have dared to humiliate him so openly, when Khrushchev had fawned over him and genuinely admired him. But now the upstart was putting on airs, interfering in foreign affairs—even though he had never traveled abroad until after Stalin’s death. Once, when they had been coconspirators, Khrushchev had known his place. But now he was becoming impossible, an expert on everything. Behind his back Molotov called Khrushchev a “smalltime cattle dealer. Without a doubt a man of little culture. A cattle trader. A man who sells livestock.” Khrushchev, on the other hand, derided the old diplomat as a geriatric Stalinist relic. “Their relations had become tense,” Sergei Khrushchev recalled, “especially after the secret speech.”
Like Kaganovich, Molotov had been vehemently opposed to Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization program. For the foreign minister, there were external considerations. Fear of Stalin had been the glue that cemented the Eastern Bloc. After his death, rumblings of discontent had begun to ripple throughout the captive states of central Europe, particularly in Poland and Hungary. In Yugoslavia, Marshal Josip Broz Tito had become downright disrespectful, and Molotov had been furious that Khrushchev had not punished him. It set a bad precedent to be seen as so soft. And now that Khrushchev had denounced Stalin’s reign of terror, the Poles and Hungarians might also grow bolder. Khrushchev’s speech could be taken as a sign of weakness throughout the Soviet dominions, a reflection of waning resolve, a cue to rise up. Khrushchev, the novice, didn’t understand any of these things; he had no comprehension of the forces he might have unleashed. His pigheaded ignorance could bring down the whole empire.
Molotov, of course, said none of this publicly. He was too seasoned a Kremlin intriguer to make that mistake. Publicly he recanted his opposition to appeasing Tito, saying, “I consider the Presidium has correctly pointed out the error of my position,” and joined Kaganovich in praising Khrushchev on his insightful initiatives. “Comrade Khrushchev carries out his work… intensively, steadfastly, actively and enterprisingly, as befits a Leninist Bolshevik,” he had said only a few months earlier. But privately, Kaganovich and Molotov were already whispering in Bulganin’s malevolent ear. Now was not yet the time. Like the butcher Beria before him, the cattle salesman would get his comeuppance soon enough. With luck he might not even live to see the R-7 fly.
• • •
“I would like you to know about still another project,” Korolev said quickly, as the Presidium delegation was about to leave. For the first time a hint of hesitation had crept into the Chief Designer’s normally self-confident tone, and his words had gushed out in a torrent of pent-up anxiety.
Korolev “led us to a stand occupying a modest place in the corner,” Sergei Khrushchev recalled. “A model of some kind of apparatus lay on the stand. It looked unusual, to put it mildly. A flying machine should have a smooth surface, flowing shapes and clean-cut angles. But this one had some type of rods protruding on all sides and paneling swollen by projections.”
What is it? the Presidium members asked. A satellite, said Korolev. He paused for effect, gauging his guests’ reaction. There was none. Instead, they stared blankly at the meaningless object. Korolev must have sensed the disinterest, for he launched into an impassioned speech. From time immemorial, he said, growing animated and uncharacteristically emotional, man has dreamed of escaping the bonds of gravity, of breaking free of the earth’s atmosphere and exploring the cosmos. Until now the dream of the space pioneers—and here Korolev spoke glowingly of the nineteenth-century Russian rocket visionary Konstantin Tsiolkowsky—had belonged to the realm of theory or science fiction because no man-made object could generate sufficient velocity to break the gravity barrier. The R-7, though, was almost fast enough. With a little tinkering and a few minor adjustments, it could make that age-old dream possible.
Once again, Korolev paused and looked at his guests. The Presidium members seemed unmoved. So what? their expressionless faces seemed to say. What did any of this have to do with the development of an intercontinental ballistic missile that could keep the Soviet Union safe from American attack? How could the two even compare in national importance? Korolev was wasting their time with this romantic nonsense. The Chief Designer had been getting this sort of blasé reaction for two years now, ever since his proposal for a satellite project had begun wending its way slowly up the Soviet bureaucracy from one skeptical committee to the next. Decrees had been signed advocating the “artificial moon” as far back as May 1954, but without a champion on the Presidium to lend weight to the resolutions they were just pieces of paper. “You needed the constant support of power,” Sergei Khrushchev explained of the way things worked in the dictatorship of the proletariat. “Everyone needed to know that you could pick up the phone and dial the First Secretary’s four-digit extension number directly if there was an obstacle. Otherwise you would fail.”
Korolev must have sensed that he was losing his audience, and his one chance to get Khrushchev or one of the others to personally sign off on his pet project. He quickly changed tack. The Americans, he said casually, were in the advanced stages of developing a similar satellite. This was a slight exaggeration, but the Presidium didn’t need to know that. The United States, Korolev continued his pitch, had been working on a satellite for some years. He was certain, though, that he could beat them to space. It would be a significant scientific victory, he added, not to mention a serious defeat for the capitalists. Bulganin and Molotov looked at the model satellite with renewed interest. The shadow of a smile formed under Kaganovich’s dark mustache.
Korolev’s ploy had not been subtle, but it had its desired effect. He decided to press his advantage: “The Americans have taken a wrong turn. They are developing a special rocket and spending millions. We only have to remove the thermonuclear warhead and put a satellite in its place. And that’s all.”
Sergei Khrushchev recalled his father staring long and hard at the satellite model, mulling over Korolev’s request. “It seemed as if he was still debating the matter,” he observed. Part of the problem was that other than the prestige of being first in orbit, the satellite didn’t appear to have much of a purpose. Korolev had spoken of scientific readings and radio signals, but the men of the Presidium failed to see the point. They were not alone. Only a few hundred people on the entire planet in 1956 grasped the true potential and significance of a satellite, and several of them happened to work in surveillance at the CIA. For the leaders of the Soviet Union, dreams of distant space conquests risked becoming costly distractions from the immediate and earthly concerns of the cold war.
Minutes passed, and Korolev once again assured his masters that launching a satellite would in no way interfere with the development of the ICBM since it could only occur once the R-7 was fully operational anyway. Khrushchev seemed to weigh this. The ICBM was unquestionably the Soviet Union’s overriding priority. But the prospect of thumbing his nose at
the arrogant Americans also had a certain undeniable appeal.
Okay, he finally relented. “If the main task doesn’t suffer, do it.”
2
JET POWER
Five thousand miles from Moscow—beyond bomber range—the Alabama sky brimmed a slate blue. To the west rose the Appalachian foothills, rolling like a brown carpet of dead leaves. The Tennessee River ran south, also brown and undulating, a giant corn snake weaving through the fallow cotton fields. To the east stood Huntsville, ancient Confederate battleground and the new home of the U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency.
The plane was coming in from the north, from Washington, whence the money and decisions flowed. Major General John Bruce Medaris stood on the tarmac, scanning the wintry horizon, searching for the contrail that would announce the impending arrival of the secretary of defense. Pacing at the edge of the runway, Medaris flicked his riding crop impatiently. A memento from his days serving with General George S. Patton, the swagger stick, along with his slender mustache, hazel eyes, and vaguely piratical air, lent Medaris a remarkable resemblance to Errol Flynn. This he knew, for he was vain, and his vanity, with its attending indiscretions, had already cost him one marriage—and very nearly another.
Dashing was the term the newspapers used to describe him. Belligerent, abrasive, and “a troublemaker who was hard to handle” were a few of the other, less flattering descriptions of Medaris, who would bluntly reply that “politeness is nice but takes too damn much time.” There was no middle ground with the fifty-three-year-old general. “You either loved him or hated his guts,” in the words of one subordinate. Those who served under Medaris tended to fall into the former category. Those he answered to in the Pentagon were usually in the latter.
And now they were coming on an inspection tour, these politicians and pencil pushers who were the perennial scourge of field officers. As a career Ordnance man, Medaris did not storm beaches, but he supplied the munitions for those who did. During World War II, he had moved thirty thousand vehicles for General Patton in the North African and Sicilian campaigns, and he had equipped General Omar Bradley’s entire First Army Group for the D-Day invasion. These were impressive logistical feats, but not the stuff of glory that made the newsreels. Still, Medaris managed to win a medal for bravery at Omaha Beach, in addition to numerous other combat citations and awards, and in spirit he identified more with the hard-charging fighting men of old than with the cautious new breed of technocrats taking over the military. Unfortunately for his career, this shared affinity included a disdain for authority and an enduring allergy to regulations.
It wasn’t that Medaris didn’t respect rules. But like Douglas MacArthur and Patton, he simply didn’t think they applied to him, as the Huntsville military police had discovered a few weeks earlier when he roared into his new command in a Jaguar and dressed in golf attire. “Didn’t you see the speed limit sign back there?” the startled MPs demanded.
“What did it say?”
“Forty-five miles an hour and you were going sixty.”
“Son, I’m General Medaris and the speed limit is now sixty.”
It was in this characteristically rebellious manner that Medaris assumed command of the newly created Army Ballistic Missile Agency on February 1, 1956. ABMA had just been founded by administrative fiat in what was essentially a bureaucratic counteroffensive by the army to keep the burgeoning air force in check. The old Army Air Corps, once an insignificant asterisk in the army’s accounting ledgers, had become an unstoppable juggernaut since gaining its independence as a separate service in 1947. In the nuclear age, bombers, not tanks, kept America safe, and it was pilots, not grunts, who were the darlings of politicians and policy makers. John Foster Dulles’s strategic deterrent so strongly favored the young air force that it now swallowed forty-six cents of every military dollar. Its manpower now nearly equaled that of the army, whose budget and personnel had shrunk by half, and air force assets in 1956 exceeded those of the fifty-five largest U.S. civilian corporations combined.
The army was thus fighting a rearguard action to stay relevant in the rapidly shifting military pecking order. The humiliating infantry debacles of the Korean War had not helped its cause, and missiles offered the West Pointers one of the few new areas with potential for expanding their role. Rockets, after all, were natural extensions of artillery. The air force, however, had different ideas, making the case that missiles were nothing more than delivery systems, effectively unmanned bombers, and thus ought to be assigned to the Strategic Air Command. Not to be left out of the squabbling, the navy quickly developed its own distinct missile doctrine and leaped into the fray as well.
An all-out rocket war had erupted among the three services, and it was into this internecine conflict that Medaris was thrust as the army’s point man. Ironically, the very same character traits that rubbed his superiors the wrong way had recommended him for the post. “You are aggressive. Some would say to a fault,” he had been told on winning the ABMA job, hardly a customary endorsement. But right now the army needed someone with his particular talents for this difficult mission.
Medaris reflected on his new assignment as he waited for the big military transport bearing the secretary of defense to arrive from Washington. His own plane, a four-seat Aero Commander, sat at the other end of the tarmac, and in the spirit of interservice rivalry he preferred to pilot it himself rather than trust his fortunes to the air force.
There had been little time to prepare for this important visit, and in the few weeks afforded to him, Medaris had done what he could to whip the month-old missile agency and its dilapidated buildings into shape. ABMA’s headquarters had been hived off the 40,000-acre Redstone Arsenal, a neglected World War II munitions and chemical weapons plant that did not enjoy “a great reputation at that point,” in Medaris’s own words. Black skull-and-bones contamination warning signs still hung from rusted barbed-wire fences strung around the skeletal remains of abandoned chemical depots. Squat, circular storage bunkers dotted the landscape like concrete igloos. The cavernous old assembly lines and the cracked and grimy windowpanes gave off an air of postindustrial misery.
ABMA’s fortunes seemed nearly as grim as the headquarters the army had given it. But it did have one ace in the hole: Wernher von Braun and the brain trust behind the V-2, the greatest team of rocket scientists on earth. Medaris’s first order of business had been to cordon off von Braun’s research facilities from the rest of the ramshackle base, bypassing procedure with a scribbled note on the back of an envelope that read “You are authorized to procure and install fencing.” This was typical of Medaris and decidedly not the way the Army Quartermaster’s Office did things, yet another reason he had been denied promotion from colonel to brigadier general on three consecutive occasions during the war, despite endorsements from Bradley, Patton, and Eisenhower himself. Corner-cutting got timely results for the frontline generals, but it left a lot of noses out of joint back in Washington, where they preferred their paperwork duly filled out in triplicate.
With only a few weeks to prepare for the secretary of defense’s inspection tour, Medaris hadn’t had time for bureaucratic niceties. He’d ordered the buildings scrubbed and the grounds swept. ABMA’s 1,700 civilian scientists had been issued strict instructions to tuck in their shirttails and assume a more military posture. Special flags and insignias had been designed and distributed to impress guests and instill esprit de corps, and MPs in parade uniforms, each man at least six feet tall, had been posted outside doors, elevators, and anywhere else a VIP delegation might venture. Medaris had even refurbished an old plantation log house as a hospitality center to make the secretary’s stay more pleasant.
Just about the only thing he had not anticipated was how his well-laid plans would backfire.
• • •
Of all the corporate titans who made up President Eisenhower’s “cabinet of millionaires,” none was bigger than Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson. White-haired and blue-eyed, with a b
ulldog’s bulky frame, the Ohio native had run General Motors with an iron fist since 1941, overseeing its huge defense production during the war and its ambitious retooling efforts afterward to put a car in every American driveway. Under his folksy and forceful stewardship, GM had become a symbol of America’s awesome industrial might. Of the 7,920,000 automobiles sold by Detroit in 1955, a 2-million-vehicle increase over 1954, more than half had been built by GM. It was Wilson, a workaholic who usually slept just three hours a night, who had given America the V-8 engine and had fueled the country’s passion for size and speed. He had pioneered the monthly car payment plans that made financing the preferred method of purchasing automobiles, and he had tamed the unions by negotiating productivity and cost-of-living escalator clauses that ensured labor peace for decades.
Wilson’s skillful planning and execution had made General Motors the biggest company in the world, and he himself had come to personify the new class of American executives democratizing boardrooms across the country. They were midwesterners by and large, from small towns and state colleges, who didn’t have Brahmin pedigrees or suites at the opera. Plain-spoken and plain-clothed, they vacationed on the Great Lakes rather than in the south of France and collected hunting rifles instead of antique rugs. Wit, and hard work, not family connections, had gotten them to the top, and the elite East Coast establishment had had no choice but to make room for them. The self-made tycoons were hailed as examples of the new American meritocracy.
For all his success in the private sector, Engine Charlie—thus nicknamed to distinguish him from Charles “Electric Charlie” Wilson, the former General Electric chairman who had run President Harry S. Truman’s Office of Defense Mobilization—was not a natural fit as a public servant. Congress took an immediate dislike to him when it emerged during his confirmation hearings that he planned on keeping his GM stock while serving as defense secretary. The government post, he felt, already entailed a significant financial sacrifice in that his salary was diminishing from $566,200 to $22,500. There was no reason to surrender his shareholdings as well. Asked if this might pose a conflict of interest, since GM was one of the Pentagon’s largest contractors, Wilson had haughtily replied that he could not conceive of a situation where he would rule against the company anyway because for years he thought “what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice-versa.”
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