Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [125]
Since then no order had come from the new defense secretary authorizing a satellite launch, and Medaris’s nerves were shot. He prayed nightly and slept fitfully, driving his Jaguar at breakneck speeds during the day to relieve the tension. But nothing helped. By early November, he could no longer hide his rogue operation from his immediate superior, Army R&D boss James Gavin. “Hang on tight, and I will support you,” Gavin had sympathetically urged. “I’m doing the best I can to get a decision.”
Gavin, like Medaris, had had enough of Pentagon politics. In fact, he was seriously contemplating quitting the army, following in the foot-steps of General Trevor Gardner, the Pentagon’s chief missile overseer, who had resigned that summer to protest Donald Quarles’s budget cuts. Gavin already had one foot out the door and didn’t have much to lose. He was only too happy to rattle some cages on his way out.
At least Medaris now had an accomplice, a coconspirator to watch his back. That gave him some hope. With the humiliation of another Sputnik, he had reasoned, there was no way the Eisenhower administration could continue sitting on the sidelines. Surely ABMA would get its shot now. But not only had the president made no such announcement during his “Chin Up” speech, he had not even mentioned that it was ABMA that had fired the nose cone he had paraded before viewers. “So far as the public could judge, a faceless and nameless group” had done it, Medaris fumed, complaining of the “bitter experience of total anonymity,” a state all too familiar to Sergei Korolev.
Medaris was not the only one at ABMA battling frustration. Von Braun was also complaining loudly, only he was doing it publicly, which was not helping the army’s case. Gavin’s boss, General Lemnitzer, made this clear in a telephone call to Medaris. “The time for talking has stopped,” he ordered. Von Braun’s outbursts were “causing concern in high places.”
The Disney star, in fact, was venting his opinions with such vitriol that the Pentagon had to intercede with the head of the Associated Press to censor some of his more biting remarks, trading the promise of some future scoop to have the comments killed. Sputnik, von Braun had railed, was “a tragic failure for the U.S.” Six good years had been irretrievably “lost,” he said, wasted while the Soviets had forged ahead with their missile programs. “The real tragedy of Sputnik’s victory is that this present situation was clearly foreseeable,” he lamented. Saddest of all, he added, was that America had apparently not learned its lesson, since it still wasn’t taking satellites or space seriously. “Our own work has been supported on a shoestring while the Soviet Union has emerged more powerful than ever before.”
Such inflammatory statements, Lemnitzer warned, “could be very damaging to what the President was trying to do.” Ike, after all, was publicly saying that there was no race with Russia and that “no competition in the space field” existed. It didn’t look good, then, if the country’s best-known rocket scientist went around shouting that there was such a contest, and that the United States was getting trounced. Shut von Braun up, Medaris was told, and the army will take care of the satellite mission.
Von Braun, though, was not alone in contradicting the official line coming out of the White House. As if the president didn’t have enough troubles, a national security panel that he himself had convened chose this inauspicious moment to deliver a devastating report that contravened almost everything he said during the November 7 address. Chaired by H. Rowan Gaither, the head of the Ford Foundation, the panel had conducted an exhaustive study for the National Security Council on the nation’s state of defense readiness. The upshot of its findings, which landed on Eisenhower’s desk only a few hours before he was