Red Moon Rising

by Matthew Brzezinski

  Throughout all the frenzied speculation, Medaris and von Braun kept hammering away at McElroy, who must have felt as if he were being baptized by fire. “Missile number 27 proved our capabilities,” Medaris pressed, referring to the Jupiter C shot that had reached approximately the same altitude as Sputnik was currently circling overhead. “It would have gone into orbit without question if we had used a loaded fourth stage. The hardware is in hand, and so the amount of money needed to make the effort is very small,” Medaris said, continuing his hard sell. “I believe we have a 99% probability of success.”

  Give us $12.7 million and the go-ahead, Medaris pleaded. “We felt like football players begging to be allowed to get off the bench and go into the game to restore some measure of the Free World’s damaged pride,” he recalled later.

  Sputnik, as Medaris and von Braun had almost immediately grasped, was ABMA’s ticket out of the doldrums, an opportunity to be seized. Surely the administration would have no choice but to respond to the Soviet challenge, and ABMA was the nation’s best bet to even the score. “When you get back to Washington, and all hell breaks loose,” von Braun told the secretary in one last sales pitch as McElroy was boarding his plane the next morning, “tell them we’ve got the hardware down here to put up a satellite any time.”

  Medaris, in fact, had already ordered von Braun to secretly start preparing for launch. He was so confident that the political fallout from Sputnik would spur the White House to action that he had skipped waiting for the green light. What the maverick general did not realize, however, was that his commander in chief would have decidedly different ideas.

  • • •

  The debacle in Little Rock had shaken Dwight Eisenhower. For the first time in his presidency, a majority of the American people—64 percent, according to a Gallup survey—had disapproved of the way he had handled a crisis. His trademark calm and restraint had abandoned him in the wake of Governor Faubus’s impudence, and many voters felt he had overreacted by sending troops to Arkansas. Not surprisingly, the polls skewed most unfavorably in the South.

  While the immediate crisis was over (though paratroopers remained posted outside Central High School), Faubus was apparently still weighing heavily on the president’s mind when he returned from his three-week vacation in Newport in the waning days of September. “Dear Dick,” he wrote Nixon on October 2, extending an olive branch to the marginalized vice president, whose calls for a more forceful stand on integration he had long ignored. “I had been hoping to play golf this afternoon…. If you already have a game, please don’t think of changing your plans because mine are necessarily uncertain because of the stupidity and duplicity of one called Faubus.”

  Nixon, as it turned out, did not have a golf game planned for the middle of the workweek and jumped at the rare opportunity to join his usually distant boss for a 1:00 PM tee time at the Burning Tree Country Club. The two had hardly seen each other over the past several months, owing to Eisenhower’s extended vacations and Sherman Adams’s tight control over entry to the Oval Office. Only John Foster Dulles had unfettered access to the president. Nixon, like everyone else, had to go through the chief of staff. The restrictions grated. “Sherman Adams was cold, blunt, abrasive, at times even rude,” Nixon vented in his memoir. The vice president was increasingly clashing with Adams, since he was trying to carve out a more meaningful role for himself in Eisenhower’s second term, especially in the realm of foreign policy. He was now a likely front-runner for the 1960 Republican presidential nomination, and he needed to raise his profile. Maybe he could persuade Ike to send him on some state visit.

  But the president didn’t seem interested in talking shop. “Golf in Newport was enjoyable,” he remarked amiably. “I got to the point where I was hitting the ball as long as I ever did.” His putting, however, Eisenhower complained, had suffered “a corresponding slump.”

  Eisenhower’s insouciance was partly an act. The president was tired and worn down by a summer of squabbling with Stuart Symington and the other Democrats in Congress over defense spending, and he was increasingly worried by some troubling numbers coming out of the Commerce Department. The economic boom he had inherited during his first term, when more than one million families a year were moving up into the middle class in what Fortune magazine called “an economy of abundance,” appeared to be faltering. Unemployment figures for August were showing a sharp rise. The real estate and stock markets had cooled considerably. Consumer confidence indicators were down. And tax revenues were coming in at a disappointing $72 billion, $4 billion below projections. Prosperity and fiscal prudence were pillars of the administration’s platform, and Eisenhower, at Charlie Wilson’s suggestion, had ordered sweeping military cuts in July in an effort to trim half a billion dollars from the $3.5 billion monthly defense bill. Already the Democrats were howling that his policies favored the rich while putting the country at risk. “What the hell good is it to be the richest man in the graveyard?” Symington had snapped. And now Ike faced the agonizing possibility of a looming recession to further complicate his budget balancing act.

  “The developments of this year,” he wrote in a diary entry on September 13, 1957, a week before Little Rock, “have long since proved to me that I made one grave mistake in my calculations as what a second term would mean to me in the way of a continuous toll upon my strength, patience, and sense of humor. I had expected… to be free of the many preoccupations that were so time consuming and wearing in the first term. The opposite is the case. The demands that I ‘do something’ seem to grow.”

  At nearly sixty-seven years of age, with a heart attack and stomach surgery on his recent medical record, Ike simply didn’t have the stamina he had once had. And so, on Friday, October 4, he decided to take a break and spend a recuperative four-day weekend at his beloved farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

  With its prizewinning herd of Black Angus beef cattle and historic battlefields, the putting green he had installed just outside his patio doors, and the reassuring scent of his wife Mamie’s rhubarb pies wafting out of the kitchen, Eisenhower cherished the farm above all his other possessions. He never took more than a skeletal staff to intrude on his privacy at Gettysburg, and that is perhaps one reason why there is no record from any White House aides as to how the president reacted when told that night that the Soviet Union had launched a satellite. What is known, according to the space historian Paul Dickson, is that the next morning the president of the United States played golf for the fifth time that week.

  In Eisenhower’s absence, it was John Foster Dulles who drafted the official White House response to Sputnik. The launch was “an event of considerable technical and scientific importance,” Dulles allowed in an October 5 statement. “However, that importance should not be exaggerated. What has happened involves no basic discovery and the value of a satellite to mankind will for a long time be highly problematical. The Germans had made a major advance in the field and the results of their efforts were largely taken over by the Russians when they took the German assets, human and material.”

  The gist of the press release was clear. Sputnik, as far as the White House was concerned, was not a big deal. If anything, it was a feat of Nazi engineering, not Soviet know-how—never mind that the Germans in question were beavering away in Huntsville, not Moscow. The tone thus set, administration officials lined up to spin the news. Sputnik was “without military significance,” said the White House aide Maxwell Rabb. “A neat technical trick,” shrugged Charlie Wilson. “A silly bauble,” scoffed Eisenhower’s adviser Clarence Randall. Sputnik did not come as the least bit of a surprise, Press Secretary Jim Hagerty assured the world. America was not interested in getting caught up “in an outer space basketball game,” Sherman Adams announced. The satellite was a useless “hunk of iron that almost anyone could launch,” growled Admiral Rawson Bennett, Vanguard’s commanding officer.

  Loyal Republican lawmakers added their voices to the chorus of skepticism. Sputnik was nothing more th
an “a propaganda stunt,” said Senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin. It was like a “canary that jumps on the eagle’s back,” declared Representative James Fulton of Pennsylvania, apparently insinuating that the Soviets were hitchhiking off American technology.

  But much as the administration tried to downplay the significance of the Communist breakthrough, the media decided differently. Sputnik was a big story—a very big, shocking, scary story. “Listen now for the sound that will forever more separate the old from the new,” intoned NBC, broadcasting Sputnik’s beep on Saturday, October 5. “Soviet Fires Earth Satellite into Space,” the New York Times trumpeted in the sort of six-column-wide headline usually reserved for declarations of war. “Sphere Tracked in Four Crossings over U.S.”

  From the journalistic perspective, Sputnik had everything going for it: a historic milestone of human evolution, the element of surprise, the sting of defeat, and frightening ramifications as CBS’s Eric Sevareid somberly informed viewers in his October 6 telecast.

  Here in the capital responsible men think and talk of little but the metal spheroid that now looms larger in the eye of the mind than the planet it circles around. Men are divided in their feelings between those who rejoice and those who worry. In the first group are the scientists, mostly, in raptures that the nascent, god-like instinct of Homo sapiens has driven him from his primordial mud to break, at last, the bound of his earth. Those who are worrying tonight know that the spirit of man has many parts: and part of his spirit is not in space; it has not even reached the foothills. And so broken men still lie in Budapest hospitals because a form of ancient tyranny finds free thought a menace; and in mid-American cities bodies and hearts bear bruises because this part of the human spirit still fears and hates what is different, even in color. The wisest of men does not know tonight whether man in his radiance or man in his darkness will possess the spinning ball.

  America had been bested on the international stage, and editors across the land now salivated at the prospect of finding someone to blame for the sluggishness and complacency of the U.S. satellite program. The administration’s underwhelmed response smacked of sour grapes and made it an appealing target for the nationwide editorial witch hunt. Nothing, after all, sold newspapers like the old-fashioned whiff of incompetence and scandal.

  Sputnik contained one final element that no ambitious newsman could resist: fear. The missile that had lofted Sputnik into space had also shattered America’s sense of invulnerability. For the first time geography had ceased to be a barrier, and the U.S. mainland lay exposed to enemy fire. In that respect, Russia’s rockets were infinitely more frightening than the Japanese bombers that had attacked Pearl Harbor sixteen years before. It was not distant naval bases on Pacific islands that they targeted, but the impregnable heartland itself: Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, places that had never before needed to worry about foreign aggression. Despite White House assurances to the contrary, satellites and ballistic missiles were inherently linked. The story, therefore, was ultimately about the security—or newfound insecurity—of the American people, as Sevareid made plainly clear: “If the intercontinental missile is, indeed, the ultimate, the final weapon of warfare,” he ended his broadcast ominously, “then at the present rate, Russia will soon come to a period during which she can stand astride the world, its military master.”

  The warning was echoed by thousands of media outlets, big and small, conservative and liberal, in radio and television, magazines and newspapers. Sputnik was “a great national emergency,” declared Max Ascoli of the Reporter. A “grave defeat,” lamented the staunchly Republican New York Herald Tribune. US News & World Report likened it to the splitting of the atom. The editors of Life made comparisons to the shots fired at Lexington and Concord and urged Americans “to respond as the Minutemen had done then.” Sputnik was “a technological Pearl Harbor,” fretted Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb. The sphere’s “chilling beeps,” echoed Time, were a signal that “in vital sectors of the technology race, the US may have well lost its precious lead.”

  A strange sense of disconnection gripped the public discourse. The more the administration told Americans not to worry, the louder the media beat their doomsday drums. Editors seemed obsessed with the Soviet satellite, and pretty soon so was the general population, which had initially greeted the launch with mild to complete disinterest. “The reaction here indicates massive indifference,” a Newsweek correspondent had reported from Boston on October 5. “There is a vague feeling that we have stepped into a new era, but people aren’t discussing it the way they are football or the Asiatic flu,” another Newsweek reporter wired from Denver. In Milwaukee, it was the ballistic trajectories of the Braves’ pitching staff in Game 2 of the World Series against the Yankees that preoccupied most people, not the short news brief on page 3 of the Sentinel devoted to the Soviet satellite. According to a spot poll conducted on October 5 by the Opinion Research Corporation, only 13 percent of Americans saw Sputnik as a sign that America had fallen dangerously behind the Soviet Union. One reason so few people were worried, recalled the Columbia University pollster Samuel Lubell, was an overwhelming sense of confidence in Eisenhower’s leadership. “When I asked what this country should do, the reply would fairly often be: ‘The President will do all that needs to be done,’” Lubell noted. “Or, a typical answer would be: ‘He’s taking action now.’ Or ‘I’d leave that to the President. He ought to know.’”

  Within days the media barrage changed the public mood dramatically. People began holding nightly vigils to try to spot the passing satellite; they tuned their radios to its frequencies; and they grew anxious. Yet for the Democrats in Congress, Sputnik was simply too good an opportunity to let slip. The Little Rock crisis had left Eisenhower vulnerable, and the economy was weakening. The Soviet Union had handed the United States a setback that could be whipped up into a full-blown indictment of the administration.

  As the most vocal critic of Eisenhower’s “deplorable” military cuts, Symington took the lead, rallying his fellow Democratic hawks Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington and Richard Russell of Georgia, the powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The launch was proof, Symington said, “of growing Communist superiority in the all-important missile field.” The administration’s “penury” had let America’s technological lead slip away and had placed the nation in grave danger.

  “I have been warning about this growing danger for a long time,” Symington added, “because the future of the United States may well be at stake.” He asked Russell to convene hearings immediately so that “the American people [can] learn the truth.”

  Naturally, Symington volunteered to lead the investigation, as he had during the bomber gap. Both Russell and Jackson had been around Washington long enough to know that he had ulterior motives, but they were only too happy to oblige their handsome and ambitious young colleague. He had credibility, and the New York Times had praised his poise and his “dignified bearing that conveys an impression of statesmanship.”

  Jackson enthusiastically took up the cause, calling for “a National Week of Shame and Danger.” Sputnik, he said, was “a devastating blow to the prestige of the United States.” Russell weighed in as well. “We now know beyond a doubt,” he warned on October 5, “that the Russians have the ultimate weapon—a long-range missile capable of delivering atomic and hydrogen explosives across continents and oceans. If this now known superiority over the United States develops into supremacy, the position of the free world will be critical. At the same time we continue to learn of the missile accomplishments of the possible enemy. For fiscal reasons this Government, in turn, continues to cut back and slow down its own missile program.”

  But Symington was not the only ambitious politician looking to capitalize on the Communist feat. Lyndon Johnson had been at his Texas ranch on the night of October 4, when news of the Soviet satellite had reached him. Like Eisenhower, he loved his rural retreat and “liked nothing better than to
careen over the hills in his convertible Lincoln Continental, shooting bucks from the front seat,” in the words of Johnson’s biographer Randall B. Woods. On Sputnik night he had been entertaining guests at his deer tower, an air-conditioned, glass-enclosed, forty-foot-high hunting blind, complete with a dining room and a staff of black waiters. It sat at the wooded edge of a meadow and was flanked by banks of powerful spotlights that Johnson would switch on, blinding his prey for an easy shot. But that night, he had laid down his rifle and drinks and stared at the sky. “I’ll be dammed,” he swore, “if I sleep by the light of a Red Moon.”

  He would also be damned if he was going to let Symington grab the spotlight. He was the majority leader, the most powerful legislator in the land, and if he ever hoped to be taken seriously as a presidential contender he needed to weigh in on the crisis. “Soon they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses,” cried Johnson, who until then had never expressed particular interest in either missile technology or space, adding his own calls for “a full and exhaustive inquiry” into the sorry state of national defense.

  Johnson rushed back to Washington and began plotting. His first order of business was to head off Symington, and his first call was to Richard Russell, the man who would decide which Armed Services subcommittee would hold the Sputnik hearings. Russell was Johnson’s ace in the hole. The quiet and courtly senator from Georgia was a model of old-fashioned southern gentility and probably the most powerful Democrat in Washington—“the undisputed leader of the Senate’s inner Club,” in the words of the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. Johnson, from the first day he set foot in the Senate, recognized Russell’s immense influence and systematically sought to curry his approval. Always addressing him respectfully, without any of the jocular familiarity he reserved for other lawmakers, Johnson bombarded Russell with polite notes and queries that made it clear he valued his opinions. He took care to be on hand on Saturdays and late evenings, when Russell, a bachelor with no outside social life, was alone in the empty Senate. “I made sure that there was always one companion, one Senator, who worked as long as and as hard as he, and that was me,” Johnson later recalled. Johnson also made a point of getting himself appointed to Russell’s Armed Services Committee to cement the burgeoning relationship. “I knew there was only one way to see Russell everyday,” he explained, “and that was to get a seat on his committee.”