Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 (15 page)

Read Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 Online

Authors: Robert Zimmerman

Tags: #History, #United States, #20th Century, #test

 

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camp, 2.8 million people, seventeen percent of the total East German population, had fled Khrushchev's socialist paradise.
3
Now that tide was to cease. Two weeks before, Walter Ulbrecht, East Germany's President and Communist Party chief, had come to Moscow demanding that Khrushchev and the Soviets help him stop the flow. Together the two rulers decided that the solution was ''the establishment of border control," as Khrushchev euphemistically called the construction of the Berlin Wall.
4
Khrushchev, like Stalin, still wished to see East Germany succeed as a communist state, and like Stalin, he had concluded that the only way to make this happen was to restrict the freedom of Germans to travel.
Controlling the movement of citizens was an important priority for Khrushchev's government. In the Soviet Union if a person wished to relocate from the town of their birth, authorization was required, and indicated on a citizen's passport. In the campaign to snuff out religion, now running at full speed, K.G.B. officers confiscated the passports of priests, and demanded that they leave the town and church to which they ministered. If a clergyman refused, the K.G.B. would arrest him and prosecute him for violating the passport regulations. At monasteries across the Soviet Union religious clerics were being arrested and jailed. One priest was condemned three different times, serving three and a half years of hard labor from 1962 to 1966. Each time he was released from prison he returned to his monastery, and each time the K.G.B. re-arrested him.
5
Now Khrushchev moved to apply this same standard to East Berlin. He obtained a map of Berlin and he and Ulbrecht sat down to work out the details. "It was a difficult task to divide the city of Berlin," he reminisced in his memoirs. "Everything is intertwined. The border goes along a street, so one side of the street is East Berlin while the other is in West Berlin."
6
After much discussion, the two communist leaders "decided to erect antitank barriers and barricades."
7
By Sunday night, East German guards were patrolling that barricade with machine guns and tear gas. At Teltow Canal, which also formed the border but where no wire fence had been built, many refugees escaped by swimming across its short width. By Monday, the border guards moved in, and when a young couple dove into the water, the guards opened fire. Though the couple escaped

 

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unharmed, the gunfire announced to all that refugees now risked death if they tried to flee East Berlin. On Thursday the East Germans proved their deadly intent. When another man tried to swim across, the guards ran out on a railroad bridge and fired repeatedly down at him until he disappeared underwater. West German frogmen recovered his body three hours later.
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Because the Soviets had restricted their activities to their own zone, any action by the West to interfere could have been seen as aggression, triggering greater violence. Despite the apparent injustice to the East Germans, tearing down the wall by force wasn't worth risking nuclear war.
West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt noted with disgust that the West's inaction would cause "the entire East . . . to laugh from Pankow to Vladivostok."
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Kennedy
For President John F. Kennedy a major part of whose presidential campaign was an aggressive anticommunist stance the Berlin Wall was only one in a string of humiliations. Eight months earlier, for instance, the CIA-led attempt to invade Cuba and overthrow Castro had ended in total failure. When Kennedy refused to lend direct military support to the Bay of Pigs invasion, the 1,200 man rebel force was quickly overcome.
10
"How could I have been so stupid as to let them go ahead?" Kennedy complained privately to his advisors.
11
In the race to dominate space, things were going badly as well. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had announced the United States' intention to put the first man into space sometime in the spring of 1961. The agency hoped that this flight would prove that the leader of the capitalist world still dominated the fields of technology, science, and exploration.
Originally scheduled for a March 6, 1961 launch, the short fifteen minute suborbital flight was repeatedly delayed. The Mercury capsule's first test flight in January, with a chimpanzee as test pilot, rose forty miles higher than intended, overshot its landing by a hundred and thirty miles, and when

 

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the capsule was recovered three hours later it had begun leaking and was actually sinking. Then in March another test of the Mercury capsule included the premature firing of the escape rocket on top of the capsule, the unplanned release of the backup parachutes during descent, and the discovery of dents on the capsule itself.
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These difficulties caused NASA to postpone repeatedly its first manned mission. First the agency rescheduled the launch to late March. Then early April. Then mid-April. And then it was too late.
On April 12th, Tass, the Soviet news agency, proudly announced to the world that Yuri Gagarin had become the first human to enter space. Unlike NASA's planned fifteen minute suborbital flight, Gagarin's launch vehicle had reached escape velocity and orbited the earth. As the
New York Times
noted in an editorial, "The political and psychological importance [of this accomplishment gives] the Soviet Union once again the 'high ground' in world prestige."
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Or as the Soviet government and the Central Committee of the Communist Party stated, "In this achievement, which will pass into history, are embodied the genius of the Soviet people and the powerful force of socialism."
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Three weeks after Gagarin's flight, the United States finally entered the space race. Unlike the Soviet launch, where press coverage had been tightly controlled and no public announcements made until the mission was completed and successful, hundreds of newspapermen swarmed about Cape Canaveral.
Twice this first American space flight was scrubbed due to bad weather. Finally, on May 5th at 10:34 AM (two and a half hours late) the Redstone rocket lifted off, pushing astronaut Alan Shepard to 115 miles in altitude before quickly descending to splashdown 302 miles off the coast of Florida. In all, this first American space flight lasted fifteen minutes and twenty-eight seconds, traveling at most 4,500 miles per hour. Compared to the Soviet achievements, it seemed almost pitiful. Gagarin had traveled a hundred times farther, four times faster, and six times longer. And his rocket had put almost four times the weight, five tons, into orbit.
To President Kennedy, this Soviet superiority simply could not be allowed to stand. On May 25, 1961, three weeks after Shepard's short hop into space, Kennedy stood before Congress to deliver what some dubbed his

 

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"second" State of the Union speech. He opened by bluntly saying what he saw as his country's role in the Cold War that was raging across the globe.
We stand for freedom . . . No friend, no neutral, and no adversary should think otherwise. We are not against any man or any nation or any system except as it is hostile to freedom.
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He then outlined a number of proposals for increasing the American effort in this "great battleground for the defense and expansion of freedom." He called for additional funds to finance radio and television broadcasts in South America. He reaffirmed his commitment to NATO, pledging at least five more nuclear submarines to that alliance. He described plans to reorganize the Army (giving it greater flexibility) and to increase the size of the Marine Corps. He called for a renewal of the civil defense program, tripling its funding and the building of more fallout shelters.
And then he asked for something more.
If we are to win the battle that is going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, if we are to win the battle for men's minds, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take. Now it is time to take longer strides time for a great new American enterprise time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth.
Kennedy had no illusions about his reasons for accepting the Soviet challenge to a space race. After noting to all how the Soviets had a clear "head start" with "their large rocket engines," and also noting that his country was willing to take "the additional risk" of joining that space race in full view of the world, he reiterated the political issues that underlay his decision: "We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share.''

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