The international year of 1957 did not begin on the 1st of January. It began on Wednesday the 9th, at six in the evening, in London. At that hour, the British prime minister, the child prodigy of international politics, Sir Anthony Eden, the best-dressed man in the world, opened the door of 10 Downing Street, his official residence, and that was the last time he opened it as prime minister. Wearing a black overcoat with a fur collar, carrying a top hat for solemn occasions, Sir Anthony Eden had just attended a tempestuous cabinet meeting, the last of his mandate and the last of his political career. That afternoon, in less than two hours, Sir Anthony Eden did the most number of definitive things a man of his importance, of his stature, of his upbringing, can allow himself in two hours: he fell out with his ministers, visited Queen Elizabeth for the last time, offered his resignation, packed his bags, moved out of the house, and retired to private life.
More than any other man, Sir Anthony Eden had been born with 10 Downing Street etched on his heart, inscribed in a line on his palm. For thirty years he had bewitched the salons of Europe, as well as foreign offices all over the world, and he had played a prominent role in the biggest political negotiations on earth. He had forged a reputation for physical and moral elegance, rigorous principles, and political audacity, which hid from the wider public certain weaknesses of his character, his whims, his disorder, and his tendency to indecision that in certain circumstances could lead him to decide too quickly, too intensely, alone, and against everyone. Three months earlier—November 2, 1956—Sir Anthony Eden, faced with a secret invitation from France to seize control of the Suez Canal by force, he had shown such indecision that he decided too quickly, too intensely, against the opinion of the majority of his ministers, the archbishop of Canterbury, the press, and even the people of London, who expressed their disagreement with the largest popular demonstration Trafalgar Square has seen this century. As a consequence of the solitary and hasty decision, he had to decide in those two melancholy hours on January 9—and this time with the approval of his ministers, with the approval of the great majority of the subjects of the British Empire—to perform the most significant act of his life: resign.
That very night, while Sir Anthony Eden, accompanied by his wife, Lady Clarissa, Winston Churchill’s niece, was driven away in his long black motorcar to their private residence in the London suburbs, a man as tall as he is, just as well dressed, moved from number 11 to number 10 Downing Street. Mr. Harold MacMillan, the new prime minister, only had to walk fifteen yards to take charge of the sensitive business of the British Empire.
That news, however, which exploded like a torpedo on the front page of all the newspapers of the world, must have seemed like a meaningless rumor to the cramped crowd of four thousand people on the other side of the Atlantic who gathered a few hours later outside the small protestant church in Los Angeles, California, to attend the funeral of Humphrey Bogart, who died of throat cancer, on Sunday, January 6. “Believe me,” Humphrey Bogart had once said, “I’ve got more female admirers over the age of eight and under sixty than anyone else in this country, and that’s why I earn $200,000 per picture.” A few hours before he died, the most beloved gangster in cinema history, Hollywood’s tender thug had said to his lifelong friend Frank Sinatra, “The only thing that’s doing well is my bank account.”
The great movie actor was the third notable death that January: in the same month, the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral and the Italian orchestra conductor—one of the most famous in the history of music and also one of the richest—Arturo Toscanini also died, while the Polish people ratified their confidence in Wladislaw Gomulka at the ballot box and French drivers lined up at the gas pumps. The Suez adventure only left France with nothing but immense disappointment and a grave fuel crisis. During the transit upheavals caused by the restriction, one of the few things that arrived on time—on January 23—were the seven pounds, two ounces, of Carolina Luisa Margarita, Princess of Monaco, daughter of Rainier III and Grace Kelly.
Rock Around the Clock sold out in London, a million copies in thirty days—the biggest record since The Third Man—the morning that Queen Elizabeth II boarded the plane that would take her to Lisbon. That visit to the discreet and paternalistic president of Portugal, Oliveira Salazar, seemed to have such an indecipherable political intention that it was interpreted as a simple pretext of the English sovereign to go to see her husband, Prince Philip of Edinburgh, who for the last four months had been sailing the last high seas of the British Empire on a yacht filled with men. That was a week of indecipherable news, of frustrated predictions, of hopes dashed in the hearts of journalists, who were undoubtedly anticipating the sentimental event of the year: the breakup of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. In the clean and labyrinthine Lisbon airfield, where the Duke of Edinburgh arrived five minutes late—in the first place because he’s not English, but Greek, and in the second because he had to shave off his beard to kiss his wife—the anticipated event did not happen, and that was, in 1957, the big news that might have been but was not.
On the other hand, in that same February when Brigitte Bardot wore a neckline that plunged to implausible depths at the Munich carnival and the French prime minister, M. Guy Mollet, crossed the Atlantic to reconcile his country with the United States after the Suez disaster, Moscow released the first surprise of what would be the busiest, most disconcerting and efficient year for the Soviet Union. That surprise, presented by Pravda as a secondary event, was the replacement of the sixth Soviet minister of foreign affairs, Dmitri Shepilov, by the new boy wonder of world diplomacy, Andrei Gromyko.
Shepilov, former editor of Pravda, had been appointed in June 1956. His time spent in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs constituted a speed record: all his predecessors had remained in the post for an average of eight years. Shepilov lasted eight months. The West, which hasn’t been able to understand the complex political chess of the Kremlin, had reasons to think Gromyko would only last eight days.
At 8:33 in the morning, in the fog and cold of the indecisive Washington spring, the vice president of the United States, Mr. Richard Nixon, embarked on a seventeen-day trip to Africa. Thus began the third month, March, the month of travel. With the 10,000 miles in three stages that Mr. Foster Dulles traveled a few days later from Australia to New York, the U.S. secretary of state covered the equivalent of sixteen times around the world, since he took office: 236,000 in total. The president of the United States, General Eisenhower, traveled that same week, on board the battleship Canberra, to the idyllic British possession of Bermuda, where he was to hold talks with the British prime minister, Mr. Harold MacMillan, who hopped over the Atlantic in an overnight flight to try to put in order some of the things his predecessor Mr. Eden had left pending.
Golda Meir, one of Israel’s ministers, participated in that race against time in a record-breaking trip, from Tel Aviv to Washington, where she intended to remind Mr. Foster Dulles to fulfill American promises to “guarantee that the Gaza Strip would not be occupied again by Egyptian troops and the security of the United States would not allow the strait of Alaska to be closed again.” In this confusion of journeys, of comings and goings around the world, the president of the Philippines, Señor Magsaysay, embarked in a new and well-maintained C-47, which a few hours after takeoff plunged to the ground, in a ball of flames. This accident, and we don’t know for certain whether it really was an accident, was the only one in a month when a simple engine failure could have reversed—or righted—the history of the world. One Philippine personality, Señor Néstor Mato, who was traveling in the same plane as the president and miraculously survived the catastrophe, revealed that the disaster had been provoked by a violent explosion on board the plane. While the rescue expeditions searched in vain for the body of President Magsaysay and political circles in the Western world attributed the accident to a communist attack, President Eisenhower, packing his bags to travel to Nassau, took off his jacket in front of an open window and caught a cold. In the torpor of the African spring, Mr. Nixon was at that hour grinding seeds of wild plants, between his tough schoolboy jaws, as proof of his country’s sympathy for the healthy-looking, befeathered citizens of Uganda.
That untimely travel fever among politicians was aimed to patch up the last loose wires after the Suez adventure, which four months later was still causing headaches for the Westerners, despite the UN troops that were stationed between Egypt and Israel and the fact that the engineers had started to remove the ships General Nasser had scuttled in the canal in November. In reality, if Vice President Nixon traveled to Africa, if he took the trouble to eat and drink as many strange things as the primitive monarchs of the dark continent offered him, he did not miss the opportunity to take mint tea in Morocco with Moulay Hassan, the Technicolor movie prince who constituted one of the three pillars of the Arab world. Mr. Harold MacMillan, for his part, tried to convince the president not to entrust the problems of the East entirely to the UN. The president listened to him very attentively, in spite of his cold and in spite of the fact that—for reasons protocol could never explain—during the meeting he had his ears stuffed with cotton.
Very near where this conversation was taking place, in Cuba, where President Batista was beginning to lose sleep due to problems of public order in Oriente Province, the dance of the year, the music that infected the youth of the whole world in less than three months, from Paris to Tokyo, from London to Buenos Aires, suffered its first setback: rock ’n’ roll was banned on Cuban television. “It was,” said the proscription, “an immoral and degrading dance, the music of which was contributing to the adoption of strange movements, which offend morals and decency.” In a curious coincidence, that very same week, at a party in Palm Beach, the Swedish actress Anita Ekberg and her husband Anthony Steel had a fistfight with the Cuban sculptor Joseph Dobronyi, because he had shown a sculpture of a completely nude woman for which, he said, he’d taken the Swedish actress as a model. In the name of morals and decency, she attacked the sculptor with her high heels. Another Swedish actress, Ingrid Bergman, figured that same week in world news, when she won an Oscar for her role in Anastasia. That event was interpreted as a reconciliation between Ingrid Bergman and the public of the United States, who for eight years considered her questionable because of her marriage to the Italian director Roberto Rossellini.
The explorer Richard Byrd, who had traveled to the South Pole, died a few days before the French politician Edouard Herriot. France barely had time to observe twenty-four hours of mourning, busy as it was with the Algerian War and with the preparations for the reception of Queen Elizabeth.
A young Cuban lawyer, who on one occasion in Mexico spent his last twenty dollars on the publication of a speech, landed in Cuba with a group of opponents to President Batista. The lawyer’s name is Fidel Castro, and he knows strategy better than he does legal codes. President Batista, who is having difficulty explaining why his armed forces have not been able to expel Fidel Castro from the island, gave some exalted speeches to say “all quiet on the eastern front,” but the fact is that the disquiet still continued in April. The government’s enemies were appearing everywhere: on the Calzada de Puentes Grandes—in Havana—where detectives discovered an arms deposit of modern weapons at the beginning of the month; in the east of the country, where serious signs exist that the civilian population is protecting and helping Fidel Castro’s men, as in Miami, in Mexico City, in the key points around the rebellious Caribbean. But public opinion in that minuscule and conflictive corner of the earth, which has not for a single moment been indifferent to political entanglements, forgot about Cuba’s problems to shudder at the death of Pedro Infante, the Mexican singer, victim of an aircraft accident.
Seven thousand miles from the place where the plane carrying the popular idol crashed, a long and complex drama took on comedic overtones: the Montesi case, tried in Venice, with a complete team of defendants and witnesses, judges and lawyers, journalists and simply curious onlookers who rode to court in gondolas, dissolved into meaningless suppositions. The murder of Wilma Montesi, the modest girl from Vía Tagliamento, considered as the scandal of the century, has gone unpunished, and seems likely to stay that way.
Meanwhile, the inhabitants of Paris, defying the last icy breezes of spring, went out onto the streets to greet, in an outburst of monarchical fervor, Queen Elizabeth II, who crossed the English Channel in her private “Viscount” to tell President Coty, in French, that the two countries were more united and closer than ever after their joint failure at Suez. The French, who love the Queen of England almost as much as President Coty, in spite of maintaining the opposite, have not been bothered for a long time to stand for four hours behind a police cordon to greet a visitor. This time they did, and their shouts of welcome concealed for three days France’s tremendous economic crisis, which the prime minister, M. Guy Mollet, tried desperately to repair at the moment when the Queen of England, in Orly, descended from an airplane in which she’d forgotten her parasol.
Secretly, without anyone daring to insinuate it, a fear circulated through the streets of Paris when the British sovereign’s topless automobile drove down the Champs-Élysées: it was the fear that the rebels of Algeria, who are infiltrated everywhere, who in their country confront groups of paratroopers and in Paris play hide-and-seek with the police, would throw a bomb at the royal automobile. That would have been the most spectacular episode of an anonymous war, almost a clandestine war, which has been going on for three years, and which in 1957 was again not resolved as the world waits impatiently.
The inhabitants of Bogotá, many of them in pajamas, went outside, on May 10, at four in the morning, to celebrate the fall of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, who had been in power since June 13, 1953. Since May 7—three days earlier—the country was practically paralyzed in protest at the presidential maneuver of convening the National Constituent Assembly to get himself reelected for another term. Banks, businesses, and factories all closed their doors for seventy-two hours, in a show of passive resistance supported by all the forces of the country. When on May 10, at four in the morning, the capital of Colombia spilled into the streets to celebrate the fall of Rojas Pinilla, he was in the San Carlos Palace, meeting with his most faithful collaborators, and he must surely have had to ask one of them what was happening in the city. In reality, Rojas Pinilla, who flew to Spain with 216 suitcases, did not actually resign until four hours later: at eight in the morning. That same morning, another government collapsed: that of Guy Mollet, in France, which had lasted fifteen months, and was the longest lasting of French governments, after that of Poincaré. Although M. Mollet managed to fall “due to the economy,” observers of French politics knew the true cause was something else: the war in Algeria, which had bled the country’s finances dry and was the real cause of the two crises of 1957.
In Rome, the James Dean club, made up of teenagers who drive seventy-five miles per hour in cars without brakes, in homage to the actor who died last year in a car accident, kept on meeting in secret, after the police interceded in May to put a stop to their activities, at the request of their fathers. None of them had suffered the slightest accident, when the French novelist Françoise Sagan—who profoundly hates being called “the James Dean of French literature”—crashed her car, on the outskirts of Paris. For a week the twenty-two-year-old writer, who four months earlier had scandalized the good bourgeois readers of France with her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse, was in a coma on the brink of death. When she left the hospital, a month later, her new book went to press: Those Without Shadows. Its sales were record-breaking: the first edition had sold out before the fall of the new French government, presided over by M. Bourges Maunouri. Things happened so fast in those two weeks that many of James Dean’s admirers decided to go to the barbershop and have their heads shaved in one fell swoop to follow the fashion set by Yul Brynner.
An insignificant-looking woman, Mrs. Liu Chi-Jean, showed up one June morning at the doors of the United States embassy in Taiwan, with a sign in English and Chinese, calling American Sergeant Robert Reynolds a murderer and calling on the population of the island to demonstrate against the decision of the court-martial that had declared him innocent. A few weeks earlier, the wife of that same Sergeant Robert Reynolds, whom Mrs. Liu Chi-Jean called a murderer, was taking a shower in her house in Taipei. All of a sudden she started shouting in protest because, according to her, a man was looking through a crack in the window. Mrs. Reynolds’s husband, who was reading the newspaper in the living room, went out in the yard with his revolver, with the intention, according to what he told the court, “to keep the individual at bay until the police arrived.” The next morning a corpse was found in the garden, riddled with bullets from Sergeant Reynolds’s revolver. The corpse was that of Mrs. Liu Chi-Jean’s husband. A court-martial made up of three sergeants and three colonels judged the American sergeant and gave its verdict: “Legitimate defense.”
The demonstrations provoked by this event, which the population of Taiwan considered a simple judicial comedy, were the first serious incidents between the Republic of China and the United States, since Mr. Chiang Kai Shek, president of the Republic of China, was expelled from the continent by the communists and took power in Taiwan, with the favor and financial and political support of Washington. Liu Chi-Jean’s protests unleashed a storm of anti-American protests in Taiwan that the prime minister of Red China, Chu En-Lai, knew exactly how to evaluate. Convinced that things were not going well between Taiwan and the United States, the rulers of communist China made a proposal to Chiang Kai Shek: that he could stay in Taiwan, with his armies, his people, and his ninety-two private cars, but as administrator of the island on behalf of the government of Mao Tse-Tung. Chiang Kai Shek, who must have considered the proposal as a joke in bad taste, did not even make the effort of replying. Mao Tse-Tung shrugged his shoulders. “In any case,” he said, “time will take care of the problem of Taiwan: Chiang Kai Shek’s armies are getting old. Within ten years they’ll have an average age of forty-five. Within twenty that average will be fifty-five. Communist China has patience and prefers to wait for the armies of republican China to die of old age in Taiwan.”
Television viewers of the United States were just watching the news of the events in Taiwan on their domestic screens, when a completely bald head made an appearance and began to say a string of unintelligible things in Russian, which a moment later a newscaster began to translate into English. That unknown star on U.S. television was a man who provided more to talk about in 1957—personality of the year Nikita Khrushchev, secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The fact that Nikita Khrushchev could have leaned into all the homes in the United States was not much less than a maneuver prepared by the Soviet espionage service. It was achieved, in a year of diplomatic steps, by the Columbia Broadcasting Corporation, and the clip had been filmed at his own desk in the Kremlin, where Khrushchev lent himself to everything the American journalists demanded, except for makeup. “It’s not necessary,” an official Soviet spokesman declared. “Mr. Khrushchev shaves every day and uses talcum powder.” Inside their own American homes, Khrushchev’s voice began the disarming offensive, the first in-depth step of a campaign that would last all year and that without doubt was the essence of the diplomatic and political activity of the Soviet Union in 1957.
After Khrushchev’s interview, the world’s attention inevitably turned toward the socialist hemisphere. In the preparations for the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the revolution, the enigmatic Mr. Khrushchev—who practically didn’t let a day go by without making his voice heard in the West—unfurled a colossal range of activities, as much on interior problems as on exterior policies. In a single day, after a stormy meeting of the central committee of the Soviet Communist Party, four of the highest-ranking personalities in the Soviet Union were knocked out of action: Molotov, Malenkov, Shepilov, and Kaganovich. A few days later, at the moment when the prime minister of Tunisia, M. Burguiba, ousted a decrepit and obsolete monarch and proclaimed the youngest republic in the world, the representatives of the four world powers were discussing in London the provisions for world disarmament. Mr. Stassen, representative of the United States, had to leave the sessions urgently to attend his son’s wedding. He was drinking his first celebratory whiskey when he learned that the disarmament conference was not going to get anywhere, but that Mr. Khrushchev had released a piece of news of the heaviest caliber: the Soviet Union had at its disposal “the ultimate weapon,” a long-distance rocket that could reach any objective on the planet. The West, anticipating the imminent delivery of Gina Lollobrigida’s firstborn, did not pay much attention to the news. But it was true. From that moment on, the superiority of the Soviet Union’s attack was accepted as an indisputable fact. The West tried to swallow that bitter blow with the consoling news that Gina Lollobrigida had had a baby girl in perfect health: six pounds and ninety-nine grams.
The small, redheaded John A. Hale, professor at Malaysia University, in Singapore, peered into the microscope, in spite of the stultifying 104-degree heat, on May 4, to examine a sample of microbes he had been sent that morning from Hong Kong. Five minutes later, in shock, the professor telephoned BOAC airline and they told him that fifteen minutes later a plane was leaving for London. Professor Hale sent on that plane, urgently, a very carefully wrapped glass cylinder, to Dr. Christopher Andrews, director of the global influenza center, in London. The cylinder contained the samples of an extremely rare microbe that the frightened investigator in Singapore had just identified and that, in spite of his precautions, would provoke the illness of the year: the Asian flu. When the BOAC plane landed in London, several marines on a ship that had left Singapore forty-eight hours earlier began to sneeze. An hour later their bones began to hurt. Five hours later, they had temperatures of 104 degrees. One of them died. The others, hospitalized in Taiwan, contaminated the doctors, nurses, and the other patients. By the time the global influenza center in London raised the alarm, the Asiatic flu was arriving in Europe. Four months later, the night when Charlie Chaplin’s latest film, A King in New York, premiered in London, it had gone all the way around the world.
President Eisenhower was too busy those days to think about the danger of microbes. He’d had to study the problems of the powder keg of the Orient, think about compromising solutions that would allow him to be on good terms with the Arab world without displeasing his European allies, trying to decipher the indecipherable remarks of the indecipherable Mr. Khrushchev, and he barely had three days to go and play golf in the tepid New England summer, at his house on Narragansett Bay. He hadn’t even gotten down the stairs from his private airplane, Columbine III, when his press secretary Hagerty came to tell him that in Little Rock, Arkansas, where Governor Faubus opposed integration—black students attending schools with white students—the situation was taking on gravely dramatic proportions. The problem had begun a week earlier: Opposing a Supreme Court decision, Governor Faubus had stationed the Arkansas National Guard at the doors of Central High School, under the pretext that the presence of negro students would provoke disturbances among the population. The racist population, evidently an insignificant minority, gathered at the door to the building and made it understood, with impassioned screams and at some moments with physical actions, that Governor Faubus was right. President Eisenhower, an enemy of using force, tried by every means possible to dissuade the rebel governor. But, in spite of his dialogue with the president, Faubus persisted in his attitude. Comments on General Eisenhower’s weakness flew around the world much faster than the Asiatic flu. The socialist world exploited the situation. “We need a Truman in the White House,” they said in the United States, especially in the north, where the memory of the energy, dynamism, and decisive spirit of the former president had not been forgotten. Pressured by the seriousness of the circumstances, seeing his authority in danger, President Eisenhower decided, on September 24, at 12:30 in the morning, to send a thousand elite paratroopers to Little Rock to enforce compliance with the Supreme Court ruling. At 3:15 on the same day, the problem was resolved: protected by the soldiers urgently sent from Washington, the fifteen black students sat with the white students at Central High and absolutely nothing happened.
Sofia Loren had dressed up as a bride, in Hollywood, to film a scene in a movie—on September 21—when a court in Mexico—three thousand miles away—declared her married by proxy to the Italian producer Carlo Ponti, who at that very instant was in Los Angeles talking business by phone with an impresario in New York. That marriage, which had something futuristic about it, a bit like an interplanetary legend, did not awake the expected interest in Italy. Nor did it in the United States, where the Italian actress has not managed to thoroughly interest the baseball stadium public. New York fans shoved each other to get the best seats in the stands for the most highly anticipated game of the season, on October 4, when the world had already forgotten to argue about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of Sofia Loren’s marriage. At that very instant, “some place in the Soviet Union,” an anonymous scientist pressed a button: the first artificial satellite of Earth: Sputnik 1 (which in Russian means “companion”) was sent into orbit around the globe. The sphere, constructed using an as-yet-unknown material, but able to withstand the very elevated temperature provoked by the speed of the launch, weighing 184 pounds, with a diameter of 23 inches, four antennae, and two radio transmitters, was placed into orbit, at an altitude of 600 miles and a speed of 18,000 miles per hour, by a rocket with unimaginable precision and pushed by an unsuspected force. Due to the spectacular publicity this event earned, one of the most important in the history of humanity from the scientific point of view, readers of all the newspapers in the world did an intensive and complete course in astronautics over the next four days. The only thing not known about Sputnik 1, as well as the material it’s made of, is the fuel used for the launch and the exact time it went into orbit. The Soviets had a reason to keep this secret: if they knew the launch time, scientists in the United States would have been able to calculate the exact launch site.
“It’s an unimportant piece of junk,” declared an American military officer when he heard that Earth had a Soviet-made satellite. But that “unimportant piece of junk,” whose scientific significance is incalculable, was at the same time the demonstration that Khrushchev hadn’t been lying when he said his country had a rocket able to reach anywhere on the planet. If the Russians were able to launch Sputnik, it was because, in reality, they had at their disposal the super rocket Khrushchev had threatened the West with two months earlier.
A man had found the way to attend his journalistic astronautics course without ignoring his many occupations: the dressmaker Christian Dior, who in his gigantic establishment on Montaigne Avenue, in Paris, worked fifteen hours a day before taking his annual vacation. On October 18, Christian Dior finished work and drove to the Italian beach resort of Montecatini, accompanied by a seventeen-year-old girl called Maria Colle, and Madame Raymendo Zanecker, his closest collaborator. The most precious object in his luggage of seven cases is a briefcase of emergency medicines, to which the highest-earning designer of 1957 must have recourse in case of emergency. On the 23rd, at 10:35 at night, after playing canasta with a group of friends at the Hotel de la Pace, Christian Dior felt weary and retired to his room. An hour later, awakened by a premonition, Madame Zanecker knocked three times on his door, with the briefcase of medicine. It was too late. A French doctor, staying in the same hotel, in his pajamas, at twenty-three minutes past eleven, confirmed that Christian Dior, a man who didn’t know how to do anything eleven years ago and who was now the best-known and richest designer in the world, had died of a heart attack.
In Moscow, where those in charge of fashion resolved six months ago to do everything possible to get the Soviet people—who dress very badly—to dress better, they were expecting a visit from Christian Dior at the beginning of the new year. The news of his death arrived at a moment when the Soviet people were preparing to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the revolution. The Western world, in its turn, was preparing a spectacular revelation. They knew that the Soviets, when they launched the first Sputnik, had only released a trial, a free sample of the mysterious and colossal event they were saving for November 4. In the expectation, as if to keep world attention awake, the Soviets granted an indefinite leave to General Zhukov, the minister of defense, the conqueror of Berlin, and personal friend of President Eisenhower. “I have just seen Zhukov,” Khrushchev said that night, laughing his head off, at a reception in the Turkish embassy in Moscow. “We were looking for a post that might be suited to his abilities.” Seventy-two hours later, to the beat of the martial anthems with which the Soviet Union was celebrating the eve of the anniversary of the revolution, the second Sputnik—as big and heavy as an automobile—completed its first orbit around the Earth.
The United States, which had already had time to react to the public opinion commotion caused by the first satellite, parried the blow this time with a magisterial idea: almost officially, but without anyone claiming responsibility for its authenticity, the news was published that on November 4, at noon, a Soviet projectile would reach the moon. That propaganda maneuver meant that on November 4, while the first living being—the dog Laika—was circling the Earth every ninety-six minutes, the West was feeling a little disappointed: they had the impression that really absolutely nothing had happened.
On November 5, in his rose-colored office in the White House, President Eisenhower, dressed severely in gray, received the learned men of the United States. In that meeting, which lasted exactly one hour and forty-three minutes, the man who fabricated the first long-range missile, Werner von Braun, originally German, now naturalized, spoke most of the time. In 1932—when he was barely eighteen years of age—Von Braun was chosen by Hitler to design a rudimentary rocket, the precursor of the famous V-2 and the venerable grandfather of Sputnik. This enthusiastic, bald, and round-bellied man who shares a taste for bandit novels with President Eisenhower convinced the head of state that the United States has a system of defense and attack much more advanced than that of the Soviet Union, concretely in the control of long-range rockets. But the president was not very reassured. A few weeks later—when Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini severed by common accord their shaky matrimonial links—the president suffered a mild stroke when he returned to the Washington airfield, where he received the King of Morocco. In Paris, a commission of FBI detectives was studying every square inch of the hybrid Palais de Chaillot to be sure that nobody could shoot Mr. Eisenhower from behind the numerous pale statues, during the course of the imminent NATO conference. When the news of the president’s ill health reached them, the detectives returned to Washington, sure they’d been wasting their time. Surrounded by the best doctors in the United States, prepared to find the strength to attend the NATO conference no matter what, Mr. Eisenhower suffered another blow. A blow that this time was not directed against his brain, but against his heart, and against the very heart of the American nation: the minuscule satellite of the United States, a grapefruit of heat-resistant metal the photograph of which had already been published by all the newspapers in the world, rolled melancholically over the dry, stony ground of Cape Canaveral after the enormous and costly launch device of the Vanguard rocket blew up in pieces in an ostentatious failure of smoke and disappointment. A few days later, with his extraordinary capacity to absorb shocks, with a wide smile of a good sport and his long and sure Johnnie Walker strides, President Eisenhower disembarked in Paris to inaugurate the final international event of the year: the NATO conference.
January 3, 1958, Momento, Caracas