Red Moon Rising

by Matthew Brzezinski

The same lackadaisical attitude plagued the navy’s quasi-civilian entry into the International Geophysical Year’s scientific satellite competition. Vanguard, as the project was known, had been chosen by Quarles over von Braun’s army proposal, sparking a furious rearguard campaign by Medaris to have the decision reversed. The navy’s effort was mired in technical difficulties, hopelessly underfunded, and badly behind schedule. The four-stage Jupiter C test rocket, on the other hand, was already reaching near-orbital velocity in its trials and could easily escape gravity if it were allowed to use a live fourth stage, instead of the dummy weighted with sand that the Pentagon ordered.

  Alas, after the Nickerson scandal, ABMA had few friends in the administration. Not only were Medaris’s pleas gruffly rebuffed, but Engine Charlie spitefully ordered the general to personally inspect every Jupiter C launch to make sure the uppermost stage was a dud so that von Braun did not launch a satellite “by accident.”

  With the army sidelined, the navy bogged down with crippling delays, and the air force generally uninterested, Bissell was in despair. “I knew our national effort to put any kind of a satellite into orbit was lagging badly,” he recalled. “Given my keen personal desire to implement a successor to the U-2 program, I approached Allen Dulles and urged him to take action. He gave me permission to meet with Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles to inform him that the CIA was interested in accelerating the development of a satellite. Perhaps threatened by my approach, the Pentagon added a modest sum of money to the Navy’s budget to speed up its work, on the grounds that its satellite was the most promising of the candidates for an early flight. Unfortunately, the additional funds accomplished little.”

  There was another reason why Bissell began pushing Quarles, who had just been promoted from assistant secretary to deputy secretary of defense, to start taking the IGY satellite effort more seriously. A legal question was nagging CIA attorneys, one that threatened to scuttle the future of any orbiting surveillance system: Who had the territorial rights to outer space? Did sovereign airspace extend beyond the stratosphere? There was no legal precedent for a satellite circumnavigating the globe, snapping photographs of foreign countries. Would it violate international law, like the U-2?

  The sooner a satellite was sent into orbit, the quicker a precedent would be set that would govern the legality of all future launches. In that regard, a purely scientific satellite, such as the Naval Research Center’s entry into the civilian IGY competition, was the perfect foil for establishing the open, international nature of outer space that would make extraterrestrial spying lawful.

  Legal issues aside, there was also the question of national prestige. One of the CIA’s principal tasks was to engage the Soviet Union in psychological warfare, and Bissell worried that if the Communists were first in space, they would score a significant victory over the capitalist democracies of the West in the battle for the hearts and minds of the developing, postcolonial Third World.

  Bissell was not the only one concerned about the propaganda value of a Soviet space milestone. The nuclear physicist I. I. Rabi, a future Nobel laureate, wrote to Eisenhower pleading for greater resources for the American IGY satellite “in view of the competition we might face” from Soviet science. “It was unfortunate,” recalled James Killian, the author of the initial capabilities report recommending increasing both missile and reconnaissance spending, “that this advice did not produce any significant undertakings by Eisenhower.”

  Wernher von Braun, for his part, bypassed the reluctant administration altogether, taking his calls for greater action directly to what he thought might be a more sympathetic audience: the Democratic Congress. Employing the same tactic that Korolev had used to such effect on Khrushchev, he warned a Senate subcommittee that the Soviet Union was in the advanced stages of developing a satellite. But far from taking the bait, Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana almost burst out laughing. “Ellender said that we must be out of our minds,” recalled General James M. Gavin. “He had just come from a visit to the Soviet Union, and after seeing the ancient automobiles, and very few of them on the streets, was convinced we were entirely wrong.”

  “The Soviets,” the senator scoffed, “couldn’t possibly launch a satellite.”

  And yet, after the R-7’s successful test flight, the official Soviet press became uncharacteristically voluble on the subject of satellites. Sergei Korolev himself made a rare public appearance on September 17 to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Konstantin Tsiolkowsky, Russia’s first rocket scientist and space visionary. Speaking in the ornate Hall of Columns in Moscow, Korolev told a packed house of the Soviet Union’s most senior academics of the R-7’s triumph and promised that “in the nearest future, the USSR will send a satellite into space.” The speech was reprinted in the following day’s edition of Pravda under the pseudonym S. Sergiev. Pravda also ran a story by Dr. A. N. Nesmeyanov, the president of the USSR Academy of Sciences, which boasted, “The creation and launching of the Soviet artificial satellite for scientific purposes during the International Geophysical Year will play an exceptional role in unifying the efforts of scientists of various countries in the struggle to conquer the forces of nature.”

  Radio magazine in Moscow went a step farther, providing detailed instructions for amateur radio enthusiasts to receive the frequencies on which the future Soviet satellite would broadcast. Another trade publication, Astronomer’s Circular, advised its readers, “The Astronomical Council of the USSR Academy of Sciences requests all astronomical organizations, all astronomers of the Soviet Union, and all members of the All-Union Astronomical and Geodetic Society to participate actively in preparations for the visual observation of artificial satellites.”

  The message from Moscow was loud and clear: a Soviet satellite would soon be orbiting the earth, and ordinary citizens would be able to see and hear it.

  The warning signals did not fall completely on deaf ears in America. The New York Times started researching a story about an impending Soviet launch. The RAND Corporation also carefully clipped all the Soviet press briefs and forwarded them to the Pentagon with an appended note concluding that the Soviets must be serious. But in Washington, no one had time for talk of satellites. The country was in the throes of a looming crisis that had begun with the opening of the school year and was quickly escalating into a major challenge to President Eisenhower’s authority.

  • • •

  Like Khrushchev during the R-7’s string of failures, Dwight Eisenhower was preoccupied in the waning weeks of September 1957 by unfolding events that had nothing to do with rockets or the conquest of space, and everything to do with cleaning up a political mess that was largely of his own making.

  The trouble had started with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which invalidated the “separate but equal” racial guidelines that had governed segregated schools. The decision had sparked a political rebellion in the heavily Democratic South, where nineteen senators and seventy-seven congressmen issued a defiant proclamation in March 1956, condemning the Court and its ruling. Only Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee and Lyndon Baines Johnson, the majority leader from Texas, had refused to add their signatures to the “Southern Manifesto.”

  At the White House, Vice President Nixon had reacted furiously to this paean to segregation, advocating a strong response. There were not only constitutional issues at stake, but moral implications as well, and Nixon believed the administration could not stand idly by while the South thumbed its nose at the Supreme Court. Ike’s inner circle, though, had different concerns. The 1956 election was just around the corner, and Eisenhower had been making considerable inroads with voters in the South. The time was not right to rock the boat. Already Nixon’s more liberal stance on civil rights was causing problems in the South, and while Ike decided in the end not to drop him from the ticket, tension remained between the president and the vice president. The Democrats focused their ire on Nixon rather than on the popular Ei
senhower. “It was hard not to feel that I was being set up,” Nixon later reflected, noting his “disillusionment with the way Eisenhower was handling the affair.”

  The election confirmed both Eisenhower’s high standing with the electorate and Nixon’s lowly position in the administration’s hierarchy. Ike clobbered Stevenson, but the Democrats easily carried both Houses, a sign that the vote had been more about Ike’s personality than a partisan endorsement of the Republicans. Following the landslide victory, Eisenhower sent Nixon a belated note that must have only added to the vice president’s growing sense of resentment. “Dear Dick,” the president wrote in late December, well over a month after the election. “I find that while I have thanked what seems to be thousands of people from Maine to California for their help in the political campaign, I have never expressed my appreciation to you.”

  The new year brought renewed calls for action on civil rights, as African-American leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. developed larger followings. Nixon lobbied hard for the White House to introduce legislation that would update the nation’s ineffectual civil rights laws and in the process drive a wedge between the Democratic Party’s more liberal northern wing and the reactionary factions in the South. But once more Eisenhower wavered, thinking the time not right, and the initiative languished. Into this void stepped Lyndon Baines Johnson.

  Like Symington, Johnson was maneuvering for the 1960 presidential nomination and searching for politically promising causes. As majority leader, LBJ outranked Symington and was a far more seasoned and skilled legislator. But while the media hailed Symington as patrician and formidable, Johnson was dismissed as preening and pompous. Symington was the blue-blooded Yale man; Johnson, the graduate of a provincial Texas teacher’s college with the uncouth manners of a shady oil tycoon. “He flashes gold cuff links, fiddles with the gold band of his gold wristwatch, toys with a tiny gold pill box, tinkers with a gold desk ornament,” Time magazine noted with evident distaste. “His LBJ brand appears everywhere, on his shirts, his handkerchiefs, his personal jewelry, in his wife’s initials, in his daughters’ initials…. Lyndon Johnson would rather be caught dead than in a suit costing less than $200.”

  Symington was portrayed by the press as polished and statesmanlike, a leader immersed in the grave concerns of national security. Johnson, on the other hand, served hamburger patties shaped like the state of Texas at his Johnson City ranch, urging guests to “eat the panhandle first.” Hardly presidential material.

  Despite his outlandish public image, Johnson’s position on civil rights was relatively moderate. And it was through this violently divisive issue that he saw a chance to make his mark.

  The 1957 Civil Rights Act that he almost single-handedly wheeled through a reluctant Congress was at once a testament to his immense talents as a backroom negotiator and one of the most cynical compromises in modern American politics. “I’m going to have to bring up the nigger bill again,” Johnson would privately apologize to southern senators, all the while pushing and cajoling them to give ground. They did, but they also extracted many concessions that watered down the spirit and letter of the proposed law. The final version served only to encourage southern Democrats to redouble their efforts to fight integration.

  Throughout the process Eisenhower had sat conspicuously silent. On the few occasions when he weighed in on race relations, his statements were sufficiently contradictory and middle-of-the-road that each side simply chose to hear what it wanted to hear. Privately, he expressed his feelings more clearly. “Southern whites,” he told Chief Justice Earl Warren, “are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school with some big overgrown Negro.”

  Many southern Democrats saw Eisenhower’s hedging as further license to defy the Supreme Court. “What he had not done was provide leadership, either moral or political,” remarked the Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose. “What he wanted—for the problem to go away—he could not have.”

  On September 4, 1957, the problem exploded. In Little Rock, Arkansas, nine black students attempted to register for classes at the all-white Central High School. A seething white mob forced them to retreat and nearly lynched one of the nine, fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford. Governor Orval E. Faubus sided with the mob and called out the National Guard to prevent the black teens from registering.

  Ike refused to dignify the situation by getting involved and made a determined show of sticking to his routine by going forward with a scheduled vacation to Newport, Rhode Island. Two weeks later, Eisenhower was still playing golf in Newport, trying to maintain a public facade of leisurely unconcern, while Governor Faubus brazenly continued to defy the highest law of the land. Finally, on September 20, the president summoned the rebellious governor to Newport to plead with him to follow a federal court injunction not to interfere with Little Rock’s integration. “I got the impression at the time,” Faubus later said of the meeting, “that he was attempting to recall just what he was supposed to say to me, as if he were trying to remember instructions on a subject on which he was not completely assured in his own mind.”

  Faubus made a vague, and as it turned out short-lived, promise to stand down, and on September 23, the nine black students were spirited into Central High School under police guard through a side door, as the crowd outside chanted, “Two, four, six, eight, we ain’t gonna integrate.”

  With tensions rising, and the threat of violence increasing, the nine black students were summoned to the principal’s office. A few were quietly crying but sat numbly, tugging nervously at the plaid skirts and pressed trousers their parents had purchased for the new school year. They were all excellent students, chosen by the NAACP to break Little Rock’s color barrier because of their good grades and character. They watched as worried-looking officials streamed in and out of the principal’s office. From down one of the halls came the sound of glass crashing.

  From inside the principal’s office, the students could hear the alarmed officials through the partially opened door. “We’re trapped,” said one frantic voice. “Good Lord, you’re right,” said another. “We may have to let them have one of the kids so we can distract them long enough to get the others out.”

  “Let one of those kids hang?” shouted another voice. “How’s that gonna look? Niggers or not, they’re children, and we got a job to do.”

  Soon, the door to the principal’s office was flung open, and a tall, dark-haired man addressed the huddled teenagers. “I’m Gene Smith, Assistant Chief of the Little Rock Police Department,” he said in a calm, kind tone. His had been the voice urging that all the children be saved. “It’s time for you to leave today,” he announced, leading them to an underground garage. “Come with me.”

  Little Rock’s experiment with school integration had lasted less than three hours. “The colored children [were] removed to their homes for safety purposes,” Mayor Woodrow W. Mann informed Eisenhower in an urgent telegram. “The mob that gathered was no spontaneous assembly. It was agitated, aroused, and assembled by a concerted plan… [which] leads to the inevitable conclusion that Governor Faubus was cognizant of what was going to take place.”

  Eisenhower was furious at Faubus’s duplicitous double-cross. As the journalist David Halberstam later observed, “A man who had been a five-star general did not look kindly on frontal challenges by junior officers. After vacillating for so long, he came down hard, seeing the issue not as a question of integration as much as one of insurrection.”

  That same afternoon, the president ordered one thousand paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock. It was the first time since Reconstruction that federal troops were deployed in the South. “Troops not to enforce integration but to prevent opposition to an order of a court,” Eisenhower noted to himself on his personal stationery, along with doodles of an airplane, sundry checkmarks, scribbles, and several illegible musings.

  By early October, the situation had been bro
ught under control. But the resolution came at a high price for Eisenhower. “A weak President who fiddled along ineffectually until a personal affront drives him to unexpectedly drastic action” was how the former secretary of state Dean Acheson described Eisenhower in a letter to Harry Truman. “A Little Rock with Moscow,” Acheson added, “and SAC in the place of the paratroopers could blow us all apart.”

  The Democrats, like Acheson, saw that Little Rock had badly dented Eisenhower’s seemingly invulnerable image as a strong and decisive leader. What they didn’t realize was that an even greater crisis of confidence loomed just days away. And as Acheson had feared, this time it would be the Russians who would test Eisenhower’s mettle.

  7

  A SIMPLE SATELLITE

  There was only one problem with Sergei Korolev’s satellite plan. The R-7 State Commission, the government body that oversaw missile testing, wasn’t buying it.

  One after another, Korolev fixed the commission members with long, livid looks. Fools, his eyes blazed, you stupid, shortsighted fools. Thirteen hard and hostile faces returned his angry gaze. From behind the thick stacks of telemetry readings and mission reports in front of each representative, a few smug and barely concealed smirks swirled amid the cigarette smoke and steaming glasses of sweet tea. For once, their satisfied expressions seemed to say, the arrogant Chief Designer wouldn’t get his way. This time, he wasn’t going to steamroll over anyone.

  The meeting had not gone as Korolev had hoped. It had started cordially enough, with a postmortem of the successful August 21 launch. Glushko, Pilyugin, Kuznetsov, and the other bureau heads had delivered reports on how their engines, valves, and guidance and gyroscopic systems had performed during the maiden flight, and all had been found satisfactory. The critical failure of the warhead shield on reentry had been discussed without any of the rancor that had plagued the disastrous summer trials, and recommendations had been made for further investigations ahead of the next scheduled attempt on September 7. All the heartache, health problems, and bad blood seemed to have been forgotten, now that the rocket had worked, and everyone basked in its collective glory. Glushko and Korolev had even exchanged supportive glances as the list of systems successes had been read off. It was only when the Chief Designer rose to speak that the convivial atmosphere abruptly changed. “I suggest we begin preparations to launch the artificial satellite,” he said to stunned silence. “I mean to use the primitive satellite PS-1,” he added, referring to the Russian acronym for Simple Satellite Number One, the scaled-down substitute for the original 2,700-pound Object OD-1 that the Soviet Union had intended to enter into the IGY competition before discovering that Glushko’s engines wouldn’t be able to lift such a heavy payload. The smaller satellite, Korolev went on, was ready and could be launched in October with minimal alterations.