Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [101]
Privately, Eisenhower’s aides were anything but dismissive, and there was growing concern that Ike’s purposeful silence was backfiring. “This was a place where Eisenhower went wrong,” his loyal staff secretary General Andrew J. Goodpaster conceded decades later. “His expression was that this was nothing we didn’t foresee or know about, but the American people until that moment had not realized the vulnerability that had now developed. That they could be reached by long range rockets, which could be nuclear armed. And our country, for the first time, was exposed to that kind of danger. And so, where he brushed it off as something that we had foreseen, it really created great anxiety, almost panic within the United States.”
Eisenhower’s background as a professional soldier may have been partly responsible for his empathy deficit. As a military man, the president was accustomed to calculating casualties and collateral damage. From his experiences in World War II, he knew that in modern combat there was no longer any such thing as noncombatants; the United States had long targeted Russian cities, and it was not that shocking that the Soviet Union did the same. As a seasoned field commander, Eisenhower also knew that the ICBM, as a weapon, was still in its infancy, much like the airplane before World War I, and that years would pass before it became a real threat that could alter the balance of power.
The president and the military men who served in his immediate circle were not attuned to the psychological effects of Sputnik as a symbol of nuclear Armageddon. “I can’t understand,” Eisenhower told Good-paster, “why the American people have got so worked up over this thing. It’s certainly not going to drop on their heads.”
Others in the administration, however, were better equipped to appreciate the national trauma. Vice President Nixon, as a career politician with limited military experience, instinctively grasped that Sputnik could not be shrugged off lightly as a “stunt.” It was a mistake, he argued privately (and later in his memoirs), not to acknowledge it as a serious affront to American supremacy; and he would be the first senior administration official to say so publicly, during a speech in San Francisco on October 15. The White House press secretary Jim Hagerty was also deeply worried by the media onslaught Sputnik had generated. His boss was taking a lot of flak and needed to devise a strategy to disarm his critics. Especially troublesome was the negative publicity being stirred up by an Associated Press story that the army had been prevented from launching a satellite in 1956. The leak apparently infuriated Eisenhower and was the subject of a damage-control session he held with his military and science advisers at 8:30 AM on Tuesday, October 8. Donald Quarles took the brunt of Eisenhower’s anger. “There was no doubt,” Quarles admitted, “that the Redstone, had it been used, could have placed a satellite in orbit many months ago,” but he was quick to spread the blame, adding that “the [Pentagon] Science Advisory Committee had felt that it was better to have the earth satellite proceed separately from military development. One reason was to stress the peaceful character of the effort.”
Ike was not pleased. “When this information reaches the Congress,” he observed, frowning, “they are bound to ask questions.”
Eisenhower may have come to politics late in life, but he was hardly naive enough to hope that the Democrats would not try to pin the blame on him. And Quarles, as Charlie Wilson’s unenthusiastic point man on satellites, had been the ranking administration official responsible for turning down Medaris’s repeated requests to convert the Redstone-based Jupiter C into a launch vehicle.