Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [123]
Pravda piled on, boasting that “the freed and conscientious labor of the people of the new socialist society makes the most daring dreams of mankind a reality,” while the vapid and decadent West wallowed in racial unrest and inequality. America had lost its place in the sun, seemed to be the message from Moscow, and the theme was quickly picked up by American pundits and politicians, who began to worry whether Pravda had a point. It was time, warned Senator Bridges, “to be less concerned with the depth of the pile on the new broadloom rug, and to be more prepared to shed blood, sweat and tears if this country and the free world are to survive.”
In the pages of the staunchly Republican New York Herald Tribune, the financier and statesman Bernard Baruch chastised America for its lack of resolve. “While we devote our industrial and technological might to producing new model automobiles and more gadgets,” he wrote, “the Soviet Union is conquering space. If America ever crashes, it will be in a two-tone convertible.”
“It’s time to stop worrying about tail-fins,” Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, said, continuing the automotive allegory and bemoaning the fact that American culture prized football players above scientists and talk show hosts over university professors. The New York Times editorial board agreed, warning, “We’ve become a little too self-satisfied, complacent, and luxury loving.”
America’s sense of self, already shaken by the first Sputnik, now foundered in the wake of its much larger, more sophisticated sibling. The Sputniks were “an intercontinental outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretension that the American way of life was a giltedged guarantee of national superiority,” suggested Clare Boothe Luce, the millionaire playwright, congresswoman, ambassador, and Republican fund-raiser, whose husband owned both Time and Life magazines. “We ourselves have made it an article of faith that the nation which builds the biggest bombs must be morally superior because it is materially superior,” she declared. “We need not be surprised today that Russia is making the same claim.” And yet, she continued, “we go on believing that our system can provide guns and butter. Yes, and Bibles too. But we query whether that means atom bombs and bombes glacees; SAC by General LeMay, and sack dresses by Christian Dior; lower taxes and higher rockets—all this and heaven too.”
The Eisenhower administration could not easily brush off the second, more introspective, wave of unease brought on by another Soviet triumph. The first Sputnik had made Americans afraid for their lives; Sputnik II made them question the American way of life. The country was losing faith in itself and in the administration, John Foster Dulles worried. “From the echoes of the satellite have come to me and others from many sections of the country a strong sentiment that the President alone can give the leadership which will restore a feeling of reasonable security and faith in the Administration,” one of his aides wrote in a memo that the secretary of state circulated to White House staff. “This leads on every side to the desirability of finding a suitable date, in the not too distant future, to make a strong fighting speech.”
Ike liked the idea. There was nothing wrong with America, he believed; it was the greatest, most powerful nation on earth. People had simply caught a case of the jitters and needed a little reassurance. Eisenhower decided to deliver a series of morale-boosting addresses modeled after Franklin Roosevelt’s famous Fireside Chats, what White House aides dubbed