On the Monday Ike suffered his stroke, November 25, 1957, Lyndon B. Johnson gaveled open Senate hearings on the impact of Sputnik. The first witness, scientist Edward Teller, spoke in ominous terms of the implications of Sputnik, saying it indicated the Soviets were beginning to take the lead in science and technology. A New Republic columnist praised Teller for stripping off layers of U.S. complacency “like a man peeling an onion,” then noted a striking contrast: “At one end of Pennsylvania Avenue a physicist proclaiming Moscow is two years ahead of us, at the other end a sick President.” At the White House, Eisenhower responded by telling AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss, a staunch backer of Teller, how much he was distressed by scientists who “tried to be experts in military and political matters.”1
In the next few weeks, the president would find it much easier to recover from his stroke than to escape the political fallout from the Soviet space spectacular. For more than five years, Eisenhower’s personal popularity had stymied the Democrats. Only two years after his election in 1952, they regained control of Congress, but Ike’s claims of peace and prosperity had easily earned him a second term in the White House in 1956. A coalition of northern Republicans and southern Democrats had blocked all efforts at liberal reform legislation. But Eisenhower was now suddenly vulnerable. Southerners were unhappy over the way he had used force to uphold court-ordered school desegregation in Little Rock in September; the Sputnik launch the next month brought his greatest asset, expert judgment on the nation’s Cold War military requirements, into question. Those Democrats, like Missouri Senator Stuart Symington, who had repeatedly charged Eisenhower with risking national security to balance the budget saw a chance both to increase defense spending and damage Eisenhower politically. Sensing “a political turn in their direction,” noted the editors of U.S. News & World Report, the Democrats “are not in the mood to help the White House out of any holes, at home or abroad, unless they get credit publicly and are suitably rewarded.”2
The Senate hearings thus opened a new phase in Eisenhower’s campaign to contain the post-Sputnik hysteria. He had to contend with serious partisan opposition in his efforts to persuade the American people that his administration had the situation under control. His determination to resist calls for increased spending to meet the Soviet challenge would face its sternest test yet. But there was more at stake than just the goal of a balanced budget. His own prestige was now on the line. In fighting for what he believed was a proper response to Sputnik, he risked his reputation as the prudent and trustworthy president who had helped the American people regain a sense of tranquility and well-being after the trials of Korea and McCarthyism.
Lyndon B. Johnson was responsible for the first challenge facing the recuperating president. Over the weekend following the October 4 Sputnik launch, he arranged with Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, to have the Defense Preparedness Subcommittee that LBJ chaired undertake an inquiry into why the Soviets had been the first into space. Russell backed Johnson, his protégé, as a way to head off Stuart Symington, who had urged a sweeping investigation by the full Armed Services Committee aimed at revealing how Eisenhower had allowed his concern for budgetary cuts to imperil the nation. Russell feared that a probe dominated by Symington would open the Democrats to the charge of playing politics with national security; he commented later that the Missouri senator “would raise a lot of Hell, but it would not be in the national interest.”3
Johnson moved quickly to establish a bipartisan tone for his inquiry. Working closely with the White House staff, he arranged for his aides in Washington to examine all the relevant materials on satellite and missile programs. He conferred by telephone with Secretary of Defense McElroy and a leading Republican on his subcommittee, Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire. Following the advice of George Reedy, LBJ set forth lofty goals when he announced plans for the subcommittee hearings on November 4. There would be no partisan attempt “to fix blame or put anyone on trial”; instead, the inquiry would try to stimulate “bold, new thinking in defense and foreign policy.”4
The Eisenhower administration tried to be as cooperative as possible in working with Johnson to avert a partisan quarrel over Sputnik. Secretary of State Dulles called LBJ repeatedly at his Texas ranch to keep him advised of diplomatic developments related to his investigation, including an abortive move to involve Adlai Stevenson, the defeated Democratic presidential candidate, as an adviser for the NATO meeting in Paris. Bryce Harlow, the White House aide in charge of congressional relations, cooperated with Johnson to contain Symington. When the Missouri senator sent the White House requests for a special session of Congress on Sputnik, Harlow forwarded them to Johnson along with a copy of Eisenhower’s letter turning down Symington’s appeal. And during the weeks of preparation for the Senate hearings, newly appointed presidential science adviser James Killian met with members of the subcommittee staff to help them “conduct this hearing in an impartial and constructive manner.”5
The White House, however, did not ignore the political danger inherent in Johnson’s forthcoming hearings. Less than two weeks after Sputnik, Eisenhower ordered a full-scale review of all missile and satellite decisions stretching back into the Truman administration. Bryce Harlow took charge of this project, paying special attention to the lack of progress under the Democrats after World War II. One of his researchers soon discovered that a Truman administration cutback of $75 million in research funding led to the elimination of the early Atlas ICBM program in 1949. And, the assistant informed Harlow, “Stu Symington, as first AF Sec, had to approve said action.” Harlow passed on this information to the Republican National Committee, and soon Congressman Gerald Ford was publicly accusing Symington of being responsible for the current Soviet ICBM lead because he had killed the Atlas when he was secretary of the air force.6
Before the end of the year, Harlow had compiled a fourteen-page history of the American missile effort, which he distributed to Republican members of Congress. Citing the 1949 Atlas decision, this document accused the Truman administration of putting the United States at a great disadvantage vis-à-vis the Russians in missile development. “For eight years we slept while the Russians advanced.” Then in 1953 Eisenhower revived the moribund American ICBM effort, which quickly “surged ahead with great speed.” Pointing to the billions spent on IRBMs and ICBMs in the 1950s under Ike, the Republican document claimed that the Democrats were responsible for less than 1 percent of the total missile budget.7
Eisenhower was apparently aware of Harlow’s discoveries when he met with Senator Johnson on November 6. The majority leader, intent on stressing his concern for a genuinely bipartisan investigation, claimed that he was resisting calls for a special session of Congress. Eisenhower endorsed a bipartisan approach, saying that the Republicans “would not be first to throw the stone.” He added that he had instructed Defense Secretary McElroy to give Johnson and Bridges a thorough briefing, but he stressed the need for discretion. Without mentioning Symington by name, the president commented afterwards that “there are some members of the Committee with whom he cannot be that frank, a matter Johnson well realizes.”
Although Eisenhower knew that LBJ had his own agenda, he accepted Johnson’s promise to avoid partisanship at face value. In dictating notes of the meeting, he told his secretary that he believed LBJ was “aware” that the Democrats “are also vulnerable” on the missile issue. “He said all the right things,” the president commented. “I think today he is being honest.”8
The main reason for this confidence was Ike’s realization that he and Johnson shared a common interest in containing Stuart Symington. The majority leader, realizing that the Missouri senator was a leading contender for the 1960 Democratic nomination he himself prized, carefully blocked Symington’s efforts to expand the hearings into a full-scale probe into the state of the nation’s defenses. Rather than focus on such issues as the need for dispersal of American B-52 bombers and the level of defense spending, issues on which Symington was an expert, LBJ preferred to use the hearings to show how the United States had fallen behind the Soviets in the new areas of space and missiles and then suggest how we could redeem ourselves. Accordingly, he decided to begin with scientists rather than military men and to control the hearings by having his staff conduct the questioning, with senators limited to just ten minutes with each witness. Above all, he insisted that the hearings do nothing to embarrass the “one man who can give the orders that will produce the missiles. That man is the President of the United States.”9
There was a shrewdness to Johnson’s strategy that transcended his need to outflank Symington. Ignoring advice from those who saw the hearings as a perfect chance to attack the president, he realized that the public would quickly react against what he termed “ward-heeler” tactics. This was a time when a high-minded approach would not only serve the national interest but be good politics as well. By letting prominent scientists and public figures testify to the Soviet success in space and missiles, inevitably putting administration witnesses on the defensive, LBJ would be able to discredit the party in power without attacking Eisenhower personally. Moreover, by refraining from partisan charges the Democrats would avoid the inevitable GOP counterattack on the Truman record. To Eisenhower’s ultimate dismay, the hearings would turn out to be what Rowland Evans and Robert Novak called a “minor masterpiece” that met Lyndon Johnson’s fundamental aim as majority leader, being “damaging to the Republicans and beneficial to the Democrats.”10
Three well-known public figures dominated the opening week of the preparedness subcommittee hearings. Edward Teller, the “father of the H-bomb,” Vannevar Bush, the man who mobilized American scientists in World War II, and James Doolittle, who led the famous 1942 raid on Tokyo, offered testimony strikingly similar to what the Science Advisory Committee had told Eisenhower privately in mid-October. All three viewed Sputnik as a sign that the Soviet Union had made dramatic gains in science and technology and might soon surpass the United States in this vital area.
Each emphasized a different aspect of the problem. Teller concentrated on missiles, claiming that the United States had waited too long before developing its missile program, thereby allowing the Russians to get a head start. Sputnik showed that they had developed the powerful rocket boosters needed for an ICBM, but there was no evidence that they had solved the key problems of guidance and reentry. The United States enjoyed a lead in nuclear weapons technology and, with a determined effort, could still win the missile race. Vannevar Bush made a broader assessment, stressing the need for greater emphasis on basic scientific research rather than crash weapons programs. In particular, he bemoaned the interservice rivalry, which he felt hampered the American missile program. Doolittle, in contrast, emphasized the need to “overhaul our own educational program,” claiming that the Russians were training far more scientists and engineers. Blaming American society rather than the Eisenhower administration, he called for upgrading science in the schools and for awarding scientists greater recognition for their achievements.11
One common theme ran through the testimony of all three of these distinguished witnesses: Sputnik posed a fateful challenge for the United States. The problem was not simply getting an American satellite into space, something they assumed would soon be done. Rather it was a question of making new commitments to give far higher priority, both in money and national attention, to science and technology. “We have been complacent and we have been smug,” Bush warned. “We must develop a sense of urgency,” Doolittle urged; “we must be willing to work harder and sacrifice more.” The goal was not just to survive through more and better weapons but to explore the wonders of space and the secrets it might unlock, from mastery of the weather to greater knowledge of the universe. Above all, they warned that we were in a race in which the Russians were clearly ahead. Like Pearl Harbor, there was a silver lining in Sputnik; it could rouse us to our peril before it was too late. “I think the primary thing that needs to happen to us here in this country,” concluded Vannevar Bush, “is that we wake up to the fact that we are in a tough, competitive race.”12
The administration’s two main witnesses during the first week of testimony, Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy and his deputy, Donald Quarles, tried to persuade the senators that they had the situation well in hand. McElroy, asked about a mid-November statement in which he conceded the Russians were ahead in the missile race, tried to hedge. Claiming that there were too many unknowns, he stated that he did not have “positive knowledge” of whether we were ahead or behind the Russians in IRBMs and ICBMs. Quarles was more emphatic, declaring that “it is a neck-and-neck kind of situation.” When it came to overall national security, including bombers as well as missiles, McElroy was more definite. Pressed on this point by Stuart Symington, he asserted his belief that the United States was “still distinctly ahead of the U.S.S.R.”13
The staff and members of the preparedness subcommittee quickly revealed their skepticism. Edwin L. Weisl, the subcommittee’s counsel, and individual senators hammered away on two points where the administration was vulnerable. The first was the interservice rivalry and apparent bureaucratic confusion mentioned by Bush. The hearings stressed the duplication of effort involved with the three IRBM programs—Thor, Jupiter, and Polaris—as well as the decision to separate Vanguard from the military missile programs that promised much quicker results. Johnson and Symington were especially critical of Holaday, the guided missile director, pointing out his lack of clear authority and asking why the administration did not apppoint a “missile czar” to end the waste and duplication.
The subcommittee was equally intent on showing how Eisenhower’s budget ceiling had limited the American missile effort. McElroy and Quarles admitted that the president had set a ceiling of $38 billion on defense spending, but both preferrred to call it a “guideline” and claimed that it did not prevent them from using money from low priority items to ensure that missiles got all the funds they needed. But Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia scored heavily when he got McElroy to confirm that Congress had appropriated $1.5 billion more for defense in the past four years than the administration had requested. “I think it is important,” Byrd declared, “in endeavoring to ascertain the cause of the fact that it is admitted that we are lagging in the missile-development field … to make it clear that these appropriations were made by Congress.” In other words, the Republican president, not the Democratic Congress, was to blame for the looming missile gap.14
The most serious blow the administration suffered during the hearings came on November 26 and 27, when CIA Director Allen Dulles and nuclear arms expert Herbert Scoville testified on Soviet capabilities in closed sessions. Dulles admitted that the Soviet rate of economic growth was double that of the United States and confirmed Doolittle’s warning that the Russians were training more scientists and engineers than we were. In fact, Dulles estimated that they already outstripped us in scientific personnel, 1.5 million to 1.3 million. Scoville had even more ominous figures for Soviet missile development; he said intelligence on Russian tests indicated that the Soviets already had an operational missile with a 750-mile range. He predicted that they would deploy a 1,000-mile IRBM in 1958, with ICBMs fully operational by 1960. The CIA estimated that they would have two hundred ICBMs in place by 1960 and as many as five hundred by 1962. Dulles concluded the briefing on an even more frightening note. Pointing out that the Russians were developing cruise missiles with a range of five hundred miles, he forecast the possibility of Soviet submarines armed with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles threatening the American coastline by the early 1960s.15
Although the CIA testimony remained secret, Senator Johnson did tell the press that Dulles had given them some somber news, including the fact that Russia “is now outstripping the U.S. in developing a scientific and technological manpower pool.” Senator Symington was more blunt, calling the CIA report “a sad and shocking story,” while GOP Senator Styles Bridges admitted to receiving “very unpleasant information.”16
After a two-week delay, the hearings resumed for another week in mid-December. Most of the witnesses were military men, and the inquiry focused on much more specific issues. William Holaday, the director of guided missiles, confirmed the prevailing view of his incompetence, admitting at one point that he was not “an expert” on missiles. General James Gavin, who had recently resigned as director of the army’s research and development program, gave the most sensational testimony. In addition to calling for the breakup of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the appointment of a missile czar, he claimed that the army could have launched a satellite long before Sputnik. He and General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command, reinforced the senator’s complaints that Eisenhower’s insistence on economy was endangering national security. LeMay even claimed that SAC was nearly grounded near the end of the 1957 fiscal year by a shortage of funds to buy fuel.17
As the hearings began to degenerate into a military sour grapes session, Johnson adjourned them for the Christmas holidays. The first week’s testimony had put the administration on the defensive by suggesting that the Republicans had let the United States fall behind the Soviets in the missile race because of false economy and poor planning. Time aptly claimed that the preparedness subcommittee had revealed to the nation that “the Pentagon is wreathed in fog and confusion.” But the increasingly partisan tone began to make the Senators appear to be playing politics with Sputnik. Senator Symington was the worst offender. Despite a press release on December 5 denying any political motive, the Missouri senator told a New Orleans audience that Sputnik was a “technical Pearl Harbor” that destroyed the administration’s contention that we enjoyed a qualitative if not quantitative lead over the Soviet Union. “This premise of our military planning was blasted on October 4,” Symington declared. “We no longer have such supremacy.”18
By December a reaction began to develop to this kind of rhetoric. When Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey joined Symington and Tennessee’s Estes Kefauver in calling for a new Department of Science and Technology, Reporter magazine asked these liberal Democrats, “Why not a Department of Common Sense?” And the editors of the Nation, still skeptical of the post-Sputnik “semi-hysteria,” suggested that it was time to stop listening to “those who simply repeat what everyone is saying” and instead seek “a restatement of goals and objectives.” “We need a new program for peace,” they wrote, “not an intensification of Cold War military policies.”19
It is unlikely that Eisenhower ever read these comforting words, but he nevertheless remained firm in his determination not to be swept away by the growing pressure for action. At the same time, he realized that he needed to do more than simply give the American people verbal reassurances. He had to act in two areas, defense spending and a space launch. Unless he could convince Congress and the people that he would not endanger the nation to balance the budget and that he would deliver on his promise to launch an American satellite into space, he faced a bleak winter.
The key decisions on defense spending came while the preparedness subcommittee was airing its charges of inadequate funding and unnecessary duplication of effort in the missile program. The president had already announced that he would no longer insist on a defense ceiling of $38 billion, but he continued to resist the efforts of the individual services to pad the budget for their pet programs. On several occasions he asked Secretary of Defense McElroy to prepare a unified budget rather than simply add up the requests made by the army, navy, and air force. It soon became clear, after the services submitted requests for additonal funding totaling nearly $5 billion, that the president and the National Security Council would have to make the final allocations.20
There were two primary considerations: additions to the fiscal year 1958 budget, which ran through the summer of 1958, and approval of the 1959 budget. The president had already agreed to substantial additions to the current defense budget of $38 billion to allow for acceleration of both the ICBM and IRBM programs, expansion of the satellite reconnaisance effort, and dispersal and increased alert time for the nation’s primary nuclear deterrent, B-52 bombers. After deliberations throughout November and early December 1957, Ike finally agreed to ask Congress for over $1 billion in additional 1958 defense spending.
The major struggle came over the size of the increase in the 1959 military budget. On November 11 the president reluctantly agreed to raise the original level from $38 billion to $39.5 billion. “If the budget were carefully prepared,” an aide noted him telling McElroy, “he thought we could defend a budget that stays below $40 billion.” But once again he urged the Defense Department to evaluate the claims of the three services and present a unified budget to the NSC.21
Over the next three weeks, the budget debate centered on missiles. The Gaither report had called for a vast expansion in the ICBM program, proposing that the planned number of Atlas and Titan missiles operational in the early 1960s be raised from eighty to six hundred. The administration finally settled on a much more modest increase, setting a goal of ninety Atlas and forty Titan missiles for 1962 at a cost of less than $200 million in additional funding each year. The major new expenditure would go instead to the IRBM program. Worried that the Soviets might have operational ICBMs by 1959, the administration planned to place as many IRBMs in European bases as possible to prevent a missile gap that would endanger American security before the Atlas and Titan ICBMs could be deployed. Thus much of the additional spending in both 1958 and 1959, on the order of $600 million a year, was earmarked for the stopgap IRBMs. Some of this was allocated to the navy’s Polaris, which was still in an early stage of development, but most went to the more advanced Jupiter and Thor programs.
Eisenhower continually questioned the Defense Department’s insistence on expanding the IRBM effort from a planned 80 missiles by 1962 to a projected 240. He told McElroy that the amount requested for IRBMs in 1959 was so large that people would say that “nothing had been done during the last five years.” Scientists told him, the president added, that “there was a limit to the amount of money that could be wisely spent.” McElroy replied that the fear of a missile gap required the deployment of IRBMs in several European countries; we had to be able to show our allies at the forthcoming NATO conference that we were serious about using IRBMs to counter the Soviet ICBM threat.22
Not only did the president finally agree to the large sums required for these missiles, but he grudgingly permitted McElroy to announce plans for the production of both the army Jupiter and the air force Thor. The need to produce as many IRBMs as quickly as possible overcame the original plan to choose between these competing weapons before going into production. The Thor was closer to production status, but the Jupiter, made almost by hand by Wernher Von Braun’s team at Huntsville, had more impressive test results.
McElroy announced the decision to go ahead with both missiles when he testified before LBJ’s preparedness subcommittee in late November. Although the president had given his general agreement earlier, the announcement came after a spirited White House debate while Eisenhower was recovering from his stroke. McElroy was candid in admitting that the primary purpose of announcing the production of both Jupiters and Thors was “psychological—to stiffen the confidence and allay the concern particularly of our own people.” When Secretary of State Dulles argued that American bombers were a sufficient deterrent and that the Europeans were not demanding that the IRBMs be deployed quickly, other White House aides made it clear that the primary consideration was domestic and bureaucratic politics. Wilton Persons pointed out that “there is great pressure from the Congress to do this or something like it,” a point reinforced by both McElroy and Vice-President Nixon. The secretary of defense also argued that it was vital to keep the services happy and prevent them from lobbying directly with Congress. Jim Killian summed up the decision to go with both the Jupiter and Thor as “important” to restrain interservice rivalry and to reassure the American people.23
Eisenhower was finally placed in the uncomfortable position of defending budget increases that he felt were primarily designed to build public confidence rather than meet strictly military needs. When former Treasury Secretary George Humphrey wrote him a stern letter complaining about going above the $38 billion defense ceiling, Ike replied that an inflation rate that totaled 6 percent over two years alone justified the increases. “Since 6 percent of 38 billion is more than 2 billion, you can see what a bloody fight I have been waging in the current sessions.” In meetings with congressional leaders in early December, the president defended his defense program by explaining the need for apparent duplication of effort, pointing out that you could not tell in advance which program would prove most effective. He saw his decison to increase defense spending by about $2 billion a year as a reasonable response, one designed “not to panic but rather to carry on a steady program.” In giving his final approval to the increases to McElroy, Ike said he was devoting a great deal of thought to “what is the figure that will create confidence.” He finally concluded that “about two-thirds of the supplementary funds are more to stabilize public opinion than to meet [a] real need for acceleration.”24
Difficult as the budgetary decisions were for Eisenhower, they reflected a careful weighing of both the external danger and the political impact of Sputnik. The president realized the need to protect the deterrent even though U-2 flights suggested that the Soviets were far from deploying ICBMs. He approved new funding to disperse B-52 bombers, still the nation’s primary nuclear delivery system, and he accepted the inevitable waste and duplication involved in putting both the Jupiter and Thor IRBMs into production. As much as he disliked excessive government spending and the possibility of an unbalanced budget, he recognized the importance of restoring public confidence and meeting the Democratic challenge to his leadership. As a result, he was willing to spend more than was militarily justified in order to prevent a panicky overreaction that might well endanger not only the health of the economy but his presidency as well.
Eisenhower had much greater difficulty in fulfilling his October 9 commitment to put an American satellite into orbit in December. This rash promise ignored the fact that the December launch would be the first of the complete Vanguard; only the first stage had undergone a successful flight test. Yet on October 16 Eisenhower had instructed his aides to make sure that the December launch went off on schedule; he did not want any delays while the scientists tried to perfect their handiwork.25
As the time for the launch approached, the nation’s press gathered at Cape Canaveral in Florida to report on the first American probe into space—a grapefruit-sized ball on top of the three-stage Vanguard rocket. The Defense Department closed the launch area, but more than a hundred reporters and TV cameramen gathered along a nearby beach where they could observe the launch pad. Government spokesmen held hourly press briefings after the countdown began on December 5, but a series of delays ensued. Finally, just before noon on Friday, December 6, Vanguard’s first-stage engine ignited. “A ball of flame followed,” a reporter observed, “a brilliant orange in color, bright as a welder’s arc. The ball of flame hovered above the launching stand for a few seconds, then disappeared amid great clouds of black smoke.” After only going a few feet in the air, Vanguard fell back on the pad with a roar; a broken fuel line killed the rocket engine and led to a spectacular explosion.26
The Vanguard fiasco was a national humiliation. The American people, hoping for a successful launch that would end the Russian monopoly in space, felt they had been betrayed. Headline writers had a field day; Flopnik, Dudnik, Kaputnik became familiar synonyms for the Vanguard failure. Editorials spoke of the damage done to American scientific prestige and blamed the administration for transforming a delicate experiment into a public relations stunt. “We managed so successfully to focus the eyes of the world on the effort,” commented the editors of the Nation, “that, when it exploded, the whole world was watching.” Lyndon Johnson voiced a widely shared feeling when he noted, “I shrink a little inside whenever the U.S. announces a great event and it blows up in our face.” Even Time, usually supportive of the administration, began to express doubts about the president’s leadership. Claiming that Vanguard showed the need for “a general overhaul of old habits of thought and judgment,” the editors warned Ike that the nation “will tolerate nothing less than a day-to-day leadership more strenuous than at any previous time during his term in office.”27
Belatedly the administration tried to limit the damage. Worried that many would conclude, as U.S. News & World Report did, that the “same shortcomings” might plague the American missile programs, officials tried to isolate the Vanguard issue. Hurried telephone calls among Secretary of State Dulles, Vice-President Nixon, and White House Press Secretary Hagerty finally led to a Pentagon statement that no military rockets were used for Vanguard and therefore “this incident has no bearing on our programs for the development of intermediate range and intercontinental ballistic missiles, which are continuing to make fine progress.” But despite this effort, Dulles confessed that he had seldom been “as despondent as this moment re Vanguard,” and Nixon admitted that “we failed to recognize the psychological importance” of space satellites.28
James Killian took charge of the effort to prevent future embarrassment. Replying to a senator who complained about the advance publicity for the Vanguard launch, he promised that in the future the administration would try to avoid releasing specific dates for tests. But he pointed out that, since no military secrets were involved, it was hard to keep the media from observing the launches at Cape Canaveral. He explained to the president that the Defense Department would try to make “improper observation and eavesdropping” more difficult but admitted that the press had developed such “effective audio-visual monitoring techniques” that it was impossible to conduct major firings “without their knowledge.”
The real problem, as Killian observed to Eisenhower, was the inherent difficulty facing scientists and engineers as they “worked on the border of the unknown” and had to learn through testing what “could not have been anticipated in advance.” Scientists were already “under enough tension and pressure in conducting the tests”; they needed to be protected from the “glare of publicity.” Killian refrained from reminding Eisenhower that the president’s own statements had focused national attention on the December Vanguard launch.29
The truth was that the United States was still a long way from duplicating the Soviet feat in launching Sputnik. Members of Killian’s President’s Science Advisory Committee felt that Vanguard was so complicated that the odds for a successful launch sometime in 1958 were only 50–50 and that the army’s Explorer, scheduled for a late January attempt, offered a better chance for success. The president’s decision to keep the military missile program separate from a civilian space launch continued to hamper the American satellite effort. In that regard, Eisenhower had no one but himself to blame for the continuing public outcry.30
The main American diplomatic response to Sputnik helped take some of the sting out of the Vanguard failure. On December 15, 1957, President Eisenhower led the American delegation to Paris for the NATO conference. John Foster Dulles was the moving force behind this initiative. He felt it was essential for the United States to reassure worried Western Europeans by placing American IRBMs in European bases. The British had already agreed to accept sixty IRBMs; Dulles pressed hard for the Pentagon to increase the projected number of Thors and Jupiters so that he and Eisenhower could make a broader commitment at the Paris conference.
After the president’s stroke in late November, it seemed unlikely that he could attend the NATO conference. But Ike recovered quickly and insisted on attending the meeting, later claiming that he would have resigned if the doctors had forbidden him from traveling. The whole idea of having heads of government take part in this NATO meeting was to allow Eisenhower to reassure Europeans personally that the United States was still strong and would defend the NATO countries even at the risk of a Soviet ICBM attack against the United States.31
The president appeared robust in public. At the opening session, he spoke boldly about the need to dispel “the shadows that are being cast upon the free world. We are here to take store of our great assets,” he declared, “in men, in minds, and in materials.” Eisenhower and Dulles were able to carry out their primary objective at Paris: The United States succeeded in gaining agreement in principle for the basing of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe to defend NATO. Pointing to the “present Soviet policies in the field of nuclear weapons,” the final communiqué stated that the NATO Council agreed that “intermediate range ballistic missiles will have to be put at the disposal of the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.”32
The NATO conference was a major victory for the Eisenhower administration. Despite Soviet threats of retaliation against any country that received the American missiles, the European allies accepted the IRBMs as proof of U.S. determination not to be awed by the apparent Soviet lead in ICBM development. Neither Germany nor the Scandinavian NATO members volunteered to take any IRBMs, but eventually Italy and Turkey would join England in providing bases for these American missiles. The Europeans understood the underlying significance of both Ike’s personal involvement and the offer of IRBMs. A French newspaper summed it up best with the succinct headline “IRBM PLUS NATO EQUALS ICBM.”33
The trip to Paris also helped reassure the American people about Eisenhower’s health and vigor. He withstood the grueling trip well, traveling for miles through Paris in an open car and spending eight to ten hours a day at the negotiating sessions. He was, as Time noted, “the Ike that Europe remembered.”
Yet once home, Eisenhower made a tactical error that undercut much of the gain from the NATO conference. Appearing with Secretary of State Dulles for a thirty-minute television report on the Paris meeting, Ike spoke only briefly, letting Dulles ramble on for more than twenty minutes in a tedious summary of the negotiations. “Here was the President of the United States,” noted the editors of the New Republic, “looking bored and self-conscious, cast in a subordinate role to an underling.” A Republican newspaper commented even more savagely on “the spectacle of two tired, aging men talking about the gravely compromised half-measures which bind and separate America from its European allies.”34
Even the substance of the Paris agreements did not evoke too much confidence. Although Dulles boasted to Lyndon Johnson that the administration “will get missiles where we need them,” the reality was that the United States had yet to produce a single operational IRBM. The first Thors and Jupiters were not expected to come off the production lines until late 1958. At best, as Lawrence Loeb has noted, the IRBMs “were valuable as instruments of propaganda.” More than three months after the launch of Sputnik, Eisenhower still could not point to any substantial American achievements in either missiles or satellites to balance the Soviet feat.35
The traditional year-end summing up of the state of the nation and the world offered little comfort to the beleaguered Eisenhower administration. Time magazine put Nikita Khrushchev on its cover as Man of the Year. The editors justified their choice by contrasting the Vanguard failure with the two Sputnik successes. “In 1957,” they wrote, “the U.S. had been challenged and bested in the very area of technological achievement that had made it the world’s greatest power.” Acccording to the New Republic, 1957 was the year “when Americans were stunned, chastened and confused into a mood of salutary humiliation after five years of unparalleled complacency.” Even the editors of the conservative U.S. News & World Report were forced to admit that Sputnik had let to a sharp decline in Eisenhower’s popularity and given “a sudden boost in prestige to Russia.” “All at once,” they wrote, “life had become more uncertain.”36
The most somber comment of all came from political scientist Hans J. Morgenthau, who saw Sputnik as a devastating “national failure” that might well signal the beginning of a permanent decline in American power. While Morgenthau admitted there was no single scapegoat, he laid most of the blame on “the absence of consistent and informed Presidential leadership.” He claimed that it was a “virtual certainty” that the Soviets would have an operational ICBM before the United States, and he criticized the decision to base IRBMs in Europe for making us too dependent on our NATO allies. Asserting that only a heroic attempt to rebuild American military power could restore the nation’s world prestige, he called for a defense effort “comparable to that following Pearl Harbor.”37
These pessimistic appraisals reflected Eisenhower’s failure to convince the nation that his administration had the situation under control. Three successful test flights at Cape Canaveral in mid-December indicated that the American missile program was in much better shape than critics realized. The army’s Jupiter flew over a limited test range, and the air force Thor completed a twelve-hundred-mile flight, landing within two miles of its target. Reporting on these developments to Eisenhower, James Killian predicted that full-scale production of both IRBMs would begin very soon. He was even more pleased with the first successful Atlas test flight over a limited, five-hundred-mile range. Speaking for the entire President’s Science Advisory Committee, Killian concluded, “We are confident that the U.S. has ample technical competence in our ballistic technical groups to achieve satisfactory operational missile systems at an early date.”
Killian admitted that the outlook for satellites was bleaker. He did not favor putting greater effort into Vanguard, which his group felt had only a fifty-fifty chance of success, but he did recommend more resources for Jupiter-C, the army’s Explorer program. Above all, he stressed the need to look beyond the early missiles to the development of a second generation of more sophisticated and advanced weapons relying on solid-fuel propellants. These efforts must be “vigorously and imaginatively pursued,” he argued. “We attach great importance to boldness in our planning for these future missiles and the initiation and successful carrying through of fundamental and exploratory work.”38
Killian’s report reflected the paradox surrounding the Eisenhower administration’s missile program. Due in large part to Killian’s 1955 report, the administration had begun a major effort at developing both IRBMs and ICBMs long before Sputnik. Yet the president’s insistence on separating the satellite program from the military missile effort, based primarily on his desire to develop a space reconnaissance vehicle to replace the U-2, allowed the Soviets to score a major propaganda victory with Sputnik. Although Eisenhower himself was certain that the Soviets had not opened a potential missile gap, he failed to anticipate the widespread public anxiety triggered by the satellite.
The result was at best a mixed record of presidential leadership. On the one hand, Eisenhower had carefully weighed the danger to national security and had concluded that the efforts begun long before Sputnik were adequate to meet the Soviet challenge in missiles and space. Yet his restrained attempts to reassure the American people were undercut by the continuing Soviet space spectaculars and the highly publicized Vanguard failure. The added burdens of the November stroke and the shrewd way that Lyndon Johnson led the Democratic critique at the preparedness subcommittee hearings created the impression that Eisenhower was no longer capable of leading the nation.
In 1958 the president faced the challenge of proving both his ability to lead and the soundness of his measured response to Sputnik. The long honeymoon was over. For five years Eisenhower had presided over a period of peace and prosperity, basking in public gratitude for ending the Korean War and letting the nation enjoy great material abundance. Now he suddenly had to convince a skeptical nation not only that he understood the new problems facing the country but that he possessed the energy and vision needed to restore the United States to its accustomed position of world primacy.