Authors: Jim Newton
The realization that the Soviet Union could credibly claim that it had surpassed the United States in an arena of strategic consequence roused Eisenhower to action. And as he grappled with the satellite’s implications, a German scientist secured from the same Reich that Ike defeated twelve years earlier seized the moment to pursue his own vision of American space exploration.
Wernher von Braun was brilliant, handsome, and manipulative. At forty-five, he had spent his entire life imagining ways to put rockets into space, an ambition he used to serve Nazi Germany, helping to engineer the terrifying rocket attacks on England, while relying on the work of thousands of slave laborers housed in filthy, disease-ravaged tunnels. When the war ended, von Braun sought out the U.S. Army, where he asked to speak directly with Eisenhower but was turned down. Instead, he was squired out of Germany and quietly relocated to the United States. The Army took him in, and von Braun brought with him a passion for rocketry that transcended national loyalties.
Through the early years of Ike’s administration, von Braun could not persuade Washington to give him the funding he insisted was necessary for his Jupiter program as it vied for attention with a rival effort known as Vanguard. In September 1957, worried that a Soviet breakthrough was at hand, von Braun argued for a stepped-up American investment, proposing a national space agency with funding of $100 million a year. “I am convinced,” he wrote from Huntsville, Alabama, “that, should the Russians beat us to the satellite punch, this would have all kinds of severe psychological repercussions not only among the American public, but also among our allies. It would be simply construed as visible proof the Reds are ahead of us in the rocket game.”
Four weeks later,
Sputnik
sailed overhead, and von Braun quickly saw his opportunity. Neil McElroy, whom Eisenhower had just nominated to succeed Charlie Wilson at the Defense Department, happened to be visiting Huntsville that October evening. Von Braun cornered him at a cocktail party: “If you go back to Washington tomorrow, Mr. Secretary, and find that all hell has broken loose, remember this. We can get a satellite up in 60 days.”
America’s sense of foreboding intensified over the coming weeks. In November, the Soviets fired a second satellite, this one carrying a small “Eskimo dog” named Laika, a flight memorably dubbed “Muttnik.” And then, on December 6, a much-anticipated Vanguard launch ended with the rocket exploding just a few feet off the launchpad. That became “Flopnik.” The German scientist who promised quick results offered promising possibilities.
Von Braun was already well-known as a magnetic scientist, but his profile was enhanced by Lyndon Johnson, who convened congressional hearings to explore the perceived failings of America’s space efforts. Johnson’s hearings were chiefly a vehicle to promote his own political ambitions, but they also provided von Braun an opportunity to make his case for vastly expanded rocketry. He was a masterful witness—urbane, polished, quotable—and he argued for a federal space agency to consolidate America’s technological efforts. Just three months earlier, he was quietly lobbying for $100 million for such an agency; now he urged spending of $1.5 billion.
As Congress moved to take up that idea—and, with it, to suggest that Eisenhower had been guilty of underfunding this critical aspect of American defense—von Braun fast-tracked his own program for a satellite launch. More Vanguard failures kept international attention nervously riveted while von Braun refined his missile and its payload. Finally, at 10:48 p.m. on January 31, 1958, a Jupiter-C class rocket, specially modified to carry a small satellite, lifted off at Cape Canaveral. Von Braun tracked the launch from the Pentagon, where more than an hour passed without word on the mission’s success. Finally, eight excruciating minutes after the satellite was expected to pass over the West Coast tracking stations, four analysts picked it up simultaneously. The United States was in orbit, von Braun’s reputation was secure, and Eisenhower’s response was vindicated. As Sherman Adams put it, “The enervating suspense was over.” Told of the successful launch, Eisenhower replied: “That’s wonderful.”
Four days later, Eisenhower asked James Killian, the president of MIT, to head up a task force to organize the government’s space and missile efforts; Killian accepted, effectively becoming the nation’s first presidential science adviser. On April 2, Eisenhower sent Congress a proposal calling for the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Congress passed the bills necessary to create NASA, and Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 on July 29. The following day, he appropriated NASA its first $125 million. By year’s end, NASA had initiated the Mercury project, dedicated to putting a man in space.
As 1957 drew to a close, Eisenhower was tense and drawn. On a Monday afternoon just before Thanksgiving, he had greeted the king of Morocco and was preparing for a state dinner that evening. Returning from the airport, Ike reported feeling a chill and then had trouble finding his words. His assistant, Ann Whitman, rushed to Adams with the news that something was wrong with the president. She fought back tears.
They summoned Dr. Snyder, making his third emergency visit to his presidential patient in twenty-six months. Snyder put Ike to bed and called for other medical help. Those closest to Eisenhower spent an anxious afternoon, unsure if the president was gravely ill or merely out of sorts. Would the state dinner proceed? If so, could Eisenhower attend? After conferring with the doctors, the White House released word that the president would not attend the dinner, disclosing only that he had suffered a chill. Next was the question of whether Mamie should attend anyway, and as she and Adams were discussing it, Ike walked in.
“I suppose you are dis—,” he began and then got stuck, “talking about the dinner tonight.” Eisenhower kept tripping over his words, his frustration mounting. “There is nothing the matter with me,” he finally insisted. “I am perfectly all right.” And yet it was obvious that he was not. Simple words eluded him, and though he looked healthy, he remained agitated and inarticulate. When Adams, Snyder, and Mamie urged him to give up any thought of hosting the dinner, he exploded. “If I cannot attend to my duties I am simply going to give up this job,” he raged. “Now that is all there is to it.” He stomped out.
Adams begged Nixon to take over, and Nixon, just as he had after the heart attack, rose to the occasion. He and Pat Nixon joined Mamie in co-hosting the event, which Mamie gamely did, worrying for her husband as he lay upstairs. “It was,” the White House usher J. B. West recalled, “a ghostly white Mamie Eisenhower who descended the elevator with Vice President and Mrs. Nixon that night.” Mamie rushed through her duties as quickly as protocol would allow, then hurried back upstairs. As she left, she uncharacteristically chided the staff, charging that the carnations selected for the evening were too dark, making the room dull. West understood that Mamie was not really upset with the staff. “It seemed to me,” West recalled, “that the room may have seemed dull because the light of her life lay ill upstairs.”
Frightening though it was, this time Ike’s medical setback was mild and temporary. The White House released sketchy statements that night, assuring reporters that he had no temperature, that his pulse was normal. The following day, the White House at last disclosed the nature of Eisenhower’s trouble: he had suffered a mild stroke. At the same time, the administration was also able to announce that the president was rapidly recovering. By November 27, Eisenhower was back at work, afflicted only by occasional blank moments in which he struggled for a word.
Ike’s verbal acuity might be an expendable luxury, but the conflicts of that year produced more lasting and consequential changes as well. Never again would an American governor question Eisenhower’s determination to enforce federal law. Spurred by von Braun, Eisenhower accelerated the nation’s satellite program. And, made forcefully aware of Soviet designs on the Middle East, he articulated a new American strategy for the region and held to it despite congressional uncertainty.
Informally known as the Eisenhower Doctrine, Ike’s formulation for the region was a natural outgrowth of that fall’s Suez confrontation, producing an overdue recognition that much of the Cold War would be fought in the Middle East and through intermediaries. Eisenhower recognized Soviet ambitions for the Middle East could be better achieved by infiltration and destabilization than by conquest. Soviet overtures first came in the form of aid, Eisenhower argued, but then devolved into control. Once under that control, the nations struggled for liberation, to no avail. Eisenhower sought a rationale for American intervention before nations fell captive to oppression. He honed his thoughts in the closing months of 1956 and then presented his proposal to a joint session of Congress early in the New Year.
“Remember Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania!” Eisenhower told Congress. All three entered mutual-assistance pacts with the Soviet Union; all three received assurances of their continued independence; all three were “forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union.” Soviet designs on the Middle East threatened a similar fate. Ike counseled those countries to look “behind the mask” before accepting aid, and he sought congressional approval to act in those instances where Soviet adventurism was making gains, where nations felt the shadow of force descending and appealed to the United States to save them. Eisenhower wanted to give himself and future presidents authority to cooperate with Middle Eastern nations to protect their independence; to supply military aid to any nation that requested it; and to dispatch American troops to protect those countries, if requested.
“Experience shows that indirect aggression rarely if ever succeeds where there is reasonable security against direct aggression; where the government disposes of loyal security forces, and where economic conditions are such as not to make Communism seem an attractive alternative,” Eisenhower said. “The program I suggest deals with all three aspects of this matter and thus with the problem of indirect aggression.”
Congress had some reservations about granting the president such preemptive authority, to be exercised at his will. But he persuaded the members that he needed the agility to move quickly in a crisis, and he deflected a substitute motion by Speaker Sam Rayburn to pledge military assistance to any Middle Eastern nation whose independence was threatened. Ike blanched at that, believing it would effectively place the region under an “American protectorate.” Once Rayburn’s idea was defeated, along with a later suggestion by Richard Russell to prohibit funds from being spent in defense of the new doctrine, the Congress turned to Ike’s original motion. It cleared the House on January 30 and the Senate on March 5. The Eisenhower Doctrine became American foreign policy with the signature of its namesake on March 9.
14
Nuclear Interlude
D
wight Eisenhower assumed the presidency in the middle of a war and brought it to an end without resorting to the most powerful weapons in his nation’s arsenal. His objection was not that nuclear weapons were immoral or that their use was unthinkable; to the contrary, he had specifically contemplated bombing North Korea and China, first in the Korean War and later in the fighting over Quemoy and Matsu and even in the debates over Indochina. He had famously compared nuclear weapons to bullets, just tools by which to destroy an enemy. And he had long pondered war with the Soviet Union on the plains of Europe, where the imbalance of conventional forces made America’s nuclear stockpile its only authentic defense.
But America’s nuclear hegemony eroded even as its arsenal expanded: the Soviet Union trailed the U.S. breakthrough from fission to fusion weapons but not by much, and though Russia’s arsenal was dwarfed by America’s (only later would the United States realize by how much), each country soon acquired the power to inflict catastrophic damage on the other. Better than anyone, Eisenhower understood the devastating power on both sides of the Cold War. Official estimates suggested that in an exchange between the superpowers, a third to a half the American population could die; industry, government, and society itself would be crushed beyond recognition. There would be no victory, merely death for millions and gruesome survival for those unlucky not to perish in the blast. “Total war,” American planners had acknowledged by the end of 1956, “could bring about such extensive destruction as to threaten the survival of both Western civilization and the Soviet system.” During one meeting, when a top Eisenhower economic adviser droned on about what it would take to reconstruct the dollar in the aftermath of a nuclear war, Eisenhower interrupted: “Wait a minute, boys. We’re not going to be reconstructing the dollar. We’re going to be grubbing for worms.” Contemplating the cost of modern war, Ike exclaimed one day: “You might as well go out and shoot everyone you see and then shoot yourself.” Ann Whitman winced.
Faced with the awesome implications of the Soviet Union’s ability to wage nuclear war, Eisenhower changed. The nuclear enthusiast of 1953 had become a more sober leader by 1956. “In 1953, Soviet capability was not so strong,” John Eisenhower observed. “Dad changed as the capability of the Soviets changed.” Ike was haunted by images of a wrecked society across Europe and America—of the Northern Hemisphere so damaged it would “virtually cease to exist.” He began to question the meaning of military victory in the modern world. Even as his top advisers planned for small nuclear wars in which America would use tactical weapons to contain Communist expansion, Eisenhower veered in the opposite direction. Military leaders were often appalled by his new approach, but he had nothing to prove to them.
Most nuclear strategizing is conducted through metaphor, as planners seek to frame debate over Armageddon in rational terms. Chess is a favorite of such strategists, as is poker. They suggest gamesmanship, threat, bluff, and reason. But for American leaders in the 1950s, a particularly compelling metaphor for the protection that nuclear weapons provided was that of an “umbrella,” an overarching canopy that would repel Soviet or Chinese aggression by threat of retaliation. True, the umbrella was dangerously perforated: it had not stopped China from invading South Korea; it had not prevented China from menacing Quemoy and Matsu, though it had likely protected Formosa itself. It had not shielded Hungary from Soviet tanks. Nevertheless, it symbolized to the Americans protection.