Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [100]
Johnson rushed back to Washington and began plotting. His first order of business was to head off Symington, and his first call was to Richard Russell, the man who would decide which Armed Services subcommittee would hold the Sputnik hearings. Russell was Johnson’s ace in the hole. The quiet and courtly senator from Georgia was a model of old-fashioned southern gentility and probably the most powerful Democrat in Washington—“the undisputed leader of the Senate’s inner Club,” in the words of the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. Johnson, from the first day he set foot in the Senate, recognized Russell’s immense influence and systematically sought to curry his approval. Always addressing him respectfully, without any of the jocular familiarity he reserved for other lawmakers, Johnson bombarded Russell with polite notes and queries that made it clear he valued his opinions. He took care to be on hand on Saturdays and late evenings, when Russell, a bachelor with no outside social life, was alone in the empty Senate. “I made sure that there was always one companion, one Senator, who worked as long as and as hard as he, and that was me,” Johnson later recalled. Johnson also made a point of getting himself appointed to Russell’s Armed Services Committee to cement the burgeoning relationship. “I knew there was only one way to see Russell everyday,” he explained, “and that was to get a seat on his committee.”
In time, Lady Bird Johnson began extending invitations for the lonely, workaholic Georgian to join the Johnsons for Sunday brunches and holiday meals, and by 1957 a special bond had been forged between the two senators. That relationship would now come in handy.
As rival Democrats battled over who could ring the alarm bells loudest, the orchestrated histrionics had their desired effect. Public reaction to Sputnik quickly shifted from blasé to terror-stricken. Everywhere around the country, people flocked to rooftops and held midnight vigils on their front lawns, hoping to catch a glimpse of the ominous orb whose signal was being blamed for a rash of mysterious garage door openings. (The Washington Post speculated that these were the result of interference from coded messages to Soviet spies.) Local radio stations fueled the paranoia by broadcasting Sputnik’s expected over-pass times, and it was not unusual to have entire blocks of people gazing anxiously skyward at 3:00 AM. Eventually, some 4 percent of the U.S. population would report seeing Sputnik with their own eyes. (What most actually saw was the one-hundred-foot-long R-7 rocket casing that Korolev had craftily outfitted with reflective prisms. It trailed some 600 miles behind the twenty-two-inch satellite, which could be viewed only with optical devices more sophisticated than the binoculars used by the average American.)
Throughout the ruckus, Eisenhower remained resolutely silent. If the administration stayed calm, he was certain, the furor would pass. People would see that the sky was not falling in on their heads and would return to their normal routines. “Business as usual” was the message the White House chose to project. “We can’t always go changing our program in reaction to everything the Russians do,” Eisenhower told his cabinet. But as two, three, and then four days passed without any public comment from the president, the press grew irritable and impatient. Everyone else, it seemed, had pronounced on the subject of Sputnik; where did Ike stand? Was America really in danger? Did the Soviets in fact possess