Red Moon Rising

by Matthew Brzezinski

  The majority leader had no rivals when it came to bending the Senate to his will. Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota called Johnson’s elaborately scripted seductions an art form, “making cowboy love.” And Russell now found himself at the receiving end of Johnson’s persistent affections. Johnson argued that as the chairman of the Preparedness subcommittee, he would be best positioned to steer the national discourse away from unpopular Democratic positions on civil rights. Symington, he argued, was interested only in a hysterical witch hunt. He, on the other hand, would take the high road, adopt a more tactful approach that on the surface appeared bipartisan and patriotic, but which would be just as devastating.

  At the White House, an alarmed Vice President Nixon was keeping tabs on the scheming Texan, the man he well knew was lining up to challenge him in 1960. Go to Congress, he urged Ike, to defuse the situation. Disarm Johnson and Symington by offering concessions that will knock the wind out of their sails. Bring the Senate into the conversation before it tries to bring you down, he counseled, knowing that it was his political future that could suffer most in the long run. But Ike, who had a stubborn streak that belied his gentle, outwardly docile nature, declined. He would maintain a posture of business-as-usual and would not dignify the uproar by pandering to a bunch of self-serving lawmakers.

  At an emergency session of the National Security Council on Thursday, October 10, Nixon once more advocated a stronger response. The session was opened by Allen Dulles, who outlined Sputnik’s far-reaching implications. “We do not, as of yet, know if the satellite is sending out encoded messages,” he said. “Furthermore, we must expect additional launchings.”

  Dulles had warned Eisenhower in late September that a Soviet launch was imminent, and he and Nixon had proposed going public with the information to lessen the potential shock. Their suggestion had been rejected, and now Dulles listed the consequences. “Khrushchev has moved all his propaganda guns in place,” he said. Sputnik was merely “one of a trilogy” of public relations coups. “The other two being the announcement of the successful testing of an ICBM, and the recent test of a large scale hydrogen bomb at Novaya Zemlya. Incidentally,” he added, the Soviets had just exploded another big H-bomb “late last night.”

  The close timing of the three feats, Dulles noted, was having “a very wide and deep impact” abroad. The Chinese, he said, were treating Sputnik as proof of Soviet military and technological supremacy over the United States. Similar statements were coming out of Egypt and other countries in the Middle East, and Moscow was giving “the theme maximum play” with its Eastern European satellite states. Even America’s Western European allies, Dulles reported, were rattled, and confidence in NATO, particularly in France, had taken a psychological hit. All in all, the situation on the foreign policy front was “pretty somber.”

  Eisenhower interrupted at one point to inquire about Sputnik’s weight: Was it really so heavy? he asked, saying he had heard that “someone here had gotten a decimal point out of place.” Unfortunately, he was assured, it was indeed 184 pounds.

  The floor was then turned over to Quarles, who once more launched into an impassioned defense of why the government had chosen to separate the IGY project from ballistic missile programs to pave the way for spy satellites. “In this respect,” Quarles reiterated his point from Tuesday’s meeting, “the Soviets have now proved very helpful. Their satellite has over-flown practically every nation, and thus far there have been no protests.”

  Two things stood out about the Sputnik launch, Quarles reluctantly conceded. First, it was “clear evidence that the Soviets possess a competence in long-range rocket and auxiliary fields which is more advanced than we had credited them with.” And second, the outer space reconnaissance implications of the launch were “of very great significance.”

  Both conclusions contradicted Ike’s public statements. But they must have rung loud and clear for Allen Dulles, for already Richard Bissell had approached him with the idea of quietly stealing the spy satellite mandate away from Quarles and the air force, as they had done with the U-2.

  The conversation turned to Vanguard’s progress and then returned to the political fallout from Sputnik. Arthur Larson, Eisenhower’s chief speechwriter, cleared his throat hesitantly, as if he had something unpleasant on his mind. “I wonder if our plans for the next great breakthrough are adequate,” he finally said, referring to the decision not to change the IGY plans or to get ABMA involved in the satellite race. “If we lose repeatedly to the Russians as we have lost with the earth satellite, the accumulated damage will be tremendous. We should accordingly plan, ourselves, to achieve the next big breakthrough first, a manned satellite,” he suggested, “or getting to the moon.”

  Nixon rallied behind Larson. The vice president was among the few administration figures “who seemed to grasp the new symbolism,” in the words of the historian Walter McDougall, and once more he advocated announcing immediate increases in both missile and space spending. “The country will support it,” he said. But Eisenhower cut the discussion short. Everyone around the table, he warned, would soon be called to testify before congressional committees. There could be no dissension in the ranks. Everyone had “to stand firmly” behind the decision to stay with the current course.

  “In short,” concluded the president, “we should answer queries by stating that we have a plan—a good plan—and we are going to stick to it.”

  • • •

  Plan? fumed Medaris. What plan? He and von Braun had been following the developments in Washington with increasing fury and apprehension. The political storm that von Braun had predicted had indeed materialized. But the administration’s response was a far cry from what Medaris had anticipated when he ordered ABMA to begin satellite preparations without authorization. The official go-ahead had never come, and as the days passed without word from Washington, it was becoming increasingly clear that he had jumped the gun.

  Jim Hagerty, meanwhile, apparently also jumped the gun, announcing that the Vanguard program would launch “a small satellite sphere” in December, before sending up a fully instrumented scientific payload in March 1958. The dates were according to the original IGY schedule. But the December launch had been intended as a quiet dress rehearsal to check Vanguard’s booster and upper stages, which had never been fired in tandem before and still bore the technical designation “experimental vehicle” to denote their untested status. The press secretary, however, had made the date of the test public, guaranteeing that the whole world would be watching what was never meant to be anything more than a trial run. The dress rehearsal had effectively become opening night. “We who could coldly appraise the odds of Vanguard were frankly scared to death,” Medaris recalled, somewhat insincerely. Virtually every new rocket system failed on its first attempt, as both Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev could attest from bitter experience. That was why inaugural flights were kept quiet. Only after the kinks were ironed out were successes reported to the general public. Thanks to the White House, however, Vanguard would debut on a national stage, live, in front of television cameras. It was a recipe for disaster, Medaris believed. “How far out on a limb could our poor country get?” he said.

  For his part, Medaris was also getting “far, far out on a limb” with his rogue satellite preparations. For the first few days it had been easy to hide the unauthorized expenditures, but as one week turned into two, and then two weeks became three, the costs were mounting, and it was becoming impossible to bury the paperwork. Von Braun’s team had even started eating into the newly reinstated overtime budgets. (The administration, fearing the coming congressional inquests, had quietly rescinded its ban on overtime for missile projects.) Medaris was putting his own career on the line. “I had neither money nor authority, yet work was still going on,” he later confessed. “By the end of the month, I was really sweating, and beginning to wake up in the middle of the night talking to myself.”

  As October edged toward November, pushing Medaris
farther out on his limb, only two things could happen, he felt increasingly certain. Either Vanguard would fail, in which case the government would have no choice but to turn to ABMA as its last resort. Or he was going to face a full court-martial, a dishonorable discharge, and possibly prison. It never occurred to him that Nikita Khrushchev might provide a third option.

  9

  SOMETHING FOR THE HOLIDAYS

  Dwight Eisenhower wasn’t the only one caught off guard by Sputnik. Nikita Khrushchev had also initially underestimated its hefty political payload.

  Before October 4, Khrushchev had been only partly paying attention to the proceedings at Tyura-Tam. “Just another Korolev launch,” he later conceded, recalling that an aide had needed to remind him that the Chief Designer, in a fit of paranoia, had moved up the date by two days. Since the R-7 had already proved itself on two successful trials, there was no longer any great sense of urgency as to the rocket’s viability. Its temporary incarnation as a space launcher, while intriguing from a scientific and competitive point of view, was not critical to the missile’s main mission as a weapon. The stakes, therefore, were not so high, at least as far as the first secretary was concerned.

  Khrushchev also had some pressing earthly problems to contend with. Like Korolev, he had fallen prey to paranoia and fear of rivals, both real and imaginary. In the weeks that followed the summer’s failed hard-liner putsch, he had become increasingly convinced that another coup was in the works, and that once more dark forces were aligning to depose him. His nagging doubts festered, so that by the time Korolev rolled out the R-7 for his space shot, Khrushchev had decided to act on his suspicions. But he had to tread cautiously and spring the subtlest of traps, because his perceived challenger this time was not a party rival or a Stalinist holdover but the head of the Soviet armed forces, a soldier with the nation at his feet and the world’s largest army at his command.

  Marshal Georgy Zhukov, hero of the Great Patriotic War, conqueror of Berlin, savior of Moscow, and Khrushchev’s rescuer during the June coup, had simply grown too powerful. The man whose popularity had so intimidated Joseph Stalin that the old tyrant had not dared have him killed was once more impinging on the balance of power within the Kremlin. Nor, it seemed, could he help himself; he was just too large for life, and he kept threatening to overshadow his civilian masters.

  To ordinary Russians, Zhukov was a legend, a Soviet Patton and MacArthur rolled into one deliciously gruff and outsize package. Arrogant and abrasive, he had a soldier’s disdain for politicians, a seaman’s penchant for profanity, and a marine’s storm-the-beaches attitude toward bureaucracy. Like Khrushchev, he had been born poor and humble from illiterate peasant stock, and he had spent a childhood laboring in factories instead of classrooms. His real education had come on the battlefield, starting at the age of seventeen. Marked for early promotion in the new Red Army because of his proletarian roots and daring cavalry charges during the October Revolution and the civil war that followed, Zhukov had pioneered the use of tanks on his rapid rise. It was those innovative tank tactics that had first brought him to Stalin’s attention in July 1939. In one of his infamous fits of paranoia, Stalin had just butchered forty thousand officers, including most of his general staff, and Japan had exploited the resulting vacuum and disarray in the Soviet High Command to seize Mongolia, an unofficial Soviet dominion. Dispatched to repel the invaders, Zhukov routed the Japanese so soundly that they sued for peace and signed a nonaggression treaty that in time would protect the USSR from having to fight on two fronts. Impressed, Stalin summoned the young general to Moscow in 1940 to lead the German side in war games that simulated a Nazi invasion. Once more, Zhukov routed his adversary, seizing the Kremlin; an alarmed Stalin appointed him chief of the general staff, responsible for preparing for a real war with Germany, which the Soviet leader refused to believe would ever come. When it did, as Zhukov and many others had predicted, the marshal resigned rather than accept Stalin’s stubborn belief that the line had to be held at Kiev. Zhukov had wanted to fall back farther east and regroup, laying the same trap that had lured Napoleon in 1812 and forcing the enemy to stretch its supply lines in the dead of the Russian winter. When Hitler smashed through to Moscow’s outskirts in a matter of months, Stalin—in a rare and uncharacteristic moment of humility—begged his insubordinate general to return, even naming him deputy commander in chief, a de facto admission that Russia’s fate was now in his hands. Zhukov drove the invaders back all the way to Hitler’s underground bunker in Berlin. But victory came at a high cost: Zhukov lost more than one million men in the battle of Stalingrad alone, and his tactics were said to be so brutal and callous that they seemed premised on the notion that his enemies would run out of bullets before he ran out of soldiers to send to the slaughter.

  Some of his officers hated him for the unnecessary carnage, but the people loved him for rescuing the nation. “Where you find Zhukov, you find Victory,” a saying was coined, and after the war, Stalin was so jealous of Zhukov’s status as the most decorated soldier in Soviet history that he had him removed from his exalted perch. Yet even the murderous Stalin was too afraid of a backlash to arrest or execute Mother Russia’s favorite son. Zhukov was merely sent to rot away in a series of meaningless posts far from the capital until Stalin’s death, when Khrushchev rehabilitated him to legitimize his coup against Beria.

  Khrushchev had also invoked Zhukov’s popularity and unimpeachable reputation as a national patriot to stare down Lazar Kaganovich and the other coup plotters when they had the upper hand. And of course it was Zhukov who ferried, via long-range bomber, the Central Committee members whom Khrushchev had needed for his own survival, and it was the marshal who delivered the main charges against the conspirators at the extraordinary plenum that had been held after the putsch.

  Zhukov had emerged from the failed coup as a kingmaker, arguably the second most powerful man in Russia—and probably the country’s most revered public figure, for he did not carry with him the taint of Communist Party purges. He was a product of the military, historically the nation’s most trusted institution, especially after its glorious role in the Great Patriotic War. Alas, the military was now unhappy with Khrushchev, particularly for his ruinous love affair with missiles.

  Since starting work on the ICBM, Khrushchev had unilaterally slashed troop forces by a staggering 2 million men. He had canceled long-range bomber orders and converted aircraft factories to building passenger planes. Military airfields had been turned over to civilian use, under the expectation that rockets would soon arrive to protect the Soviet Union. Entire artillery divisions had been similarly scrapped, while dumbfounded admirals had helplessly watched brand-new battle cruisers—“shark fodder,” as Khrushchev derisively called them—get cut up into scrap steel before ever having a chance to leave their naval shipyards. Following the R-7’s August success, Khrushchev had announced a further round of three-hundred-thousand-troop reductions for the end of the year. Only submarines, which would carry the unproven missiles on which he was basing his entire defense doctrine, saw an increase in orders.

  Not surprisingly, the wholesale cuts had roiled the Soviet armed forces. The uniformed services were not at all convinced that missiles were the panacea Khrushchev was promising, and they resented having to give up their heavy artillery, battle tanks, cruisers, and infantry units to pay for the experiment. “Some voices of dissatisfaction were heard blaming me for this policy,” Khrushchev later recalled. Resentment rippled through the ranks as entire commands were lost with the closures of bases, battalions, air wings, and naval squadrons. Thousands of careers had suddenly ground to a halt, and disgruntled murmurs could be heard at officers’ clubs from East Berlin to Sakhalin Island. The massive personnel cuts had not yet sliced too deeply into the elite officer corps, but the writing was on the wall. Without troops to command, the majors and colonels, and even some generals, would soon lose their jobs, along with the prestige and, more important, the perks—the access to better food and h
ousing, cars and drivers—that went with their privileged positions.

  The growing discontent within the middle and upper echelons of the military was all the more troubling since Khrushchev was uncertain whether he could count on the general staff’s loyalty. Foolishly, he had permitted Zhukov to pension off most of the old military leaders that the Soviet leader had known for years. “I can’t go to battle with generals who have to travel with field hospitals,” Zhukov had explained of the need for fresh blood in the geriatric High Command. Khrushchev had consented, but now he regretted his decision. He was not personally acquainted with many of the new crop of Red Army leaders that had been promoted in their place, and this younger generation of officers owed its allegiance directly to the charismatic defense chief. More ominously, after being elevated to full voting membership of the Presidium for his role in foiling the putsch, the marshal was now also free to build tactical alliances with Khrushchev’s Communist Party colleagues, further expanding his potential power base. “He assumed so much power that it began to worry the leadership” Khrushchev later observed in his memoir, though by “leadership” he of course meant himself.

  Politically, Zhukov appeared to have outfoxed his insecure master, who soon became convinced that the marshal coveted “Eisenhower’s Crown”—to be both head of the military and head of state. “Father feared that Zhukov saw General Eisenhower as an example,” Sergei Khrushchev recalled. “I see what Zhukov is up to,” Khrushchev told his fellow Presidium members in late September. “We were heading for a military coup d’état.”

  The clincher appeared to have been a particularly unsettling piece of intelligence that Khrushchev received a few weeks earlier. His defense chief, he was told, had secretly started “saboteur schools” outside Moscow and Kiev to train highly specialized covert operations teams. Typically, the Central Committee was informed whenever new military units were created, but Zhukov had not followed protocol and had kept his civilian overseers ignorant of his activities. Only the new head of military intelligence, a confidant whom Zhukov had recently appointed, had been kept in the loop. There could be only one explanation for the lapse, Khrushchev reasoned; the urban commandos Zhukov and his spy chief were secretly training were setting the stage for “a South American-style military takeover.”