• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Unfortunately for the president, things were only going to get worse. The Preparedness hearings were set to start in less than a week, on November 25, and Lyndon Johnson seemed to have unearthed every single malcontent who ever graced any U.S. missile program. Rumors filtered back to the White House that Johnson was working around the clock, like a man possessed, to get ready for the inquest. To save time, he’d hired a crack team of Wall Street lawyers led by the trial attorney Ed Wiesl and his junior partner Cyrus Vance, and the two had set up shop at the Mayflower Hotel, where a phalanx of disgruntled officials crowded the lobby.

Johnson had also deputized a battery of congressional researchers for his inquisition. “He never asked the head of my organization whether I was available to do this,” recalled Eilene Galloway of the Legislative Reference Service. “He simply preempted me and took me over to his committee to work on this subject, and we were working on it from morning to night.”

Pounding up and down Senate stairs two at a time, Johnson raced from meeting to meeting, firing off instructions to out-of-breath staffers, who begged the senator to slow down. He had suffered a heart attack in 1955 only a few months before Ike and seemed to be charging headlong into another coronary. “He was really like a dynamo at that time. He was so energized,” Galloway remembered. “Everything had to be done in a hurry.”

The reason for the rush was that Johnson had not chosen the date of his inquest idly. “The timing was perfect because it grabbed all the attention and hit the public consciousness pre-holidays,” Reedy recalled. Johnson had not wanted the hearings “to get mixed up with Christmas” and had purposefully set them in the run-up to the Vanguard launch for maximum exposure. That had left scant time to prepare, line up the witnesses, prep them, and map out the strategy of attack.

As the calendar wound down, Ike braced wearily for the coming onslaught. “Crisis had become normalcy,” he confessed in his memoir, recalling the difficult months during the fall of 1957, the lowest point of his two terms in office.

The pressure on the aging president was taking its toll. To outside observers, it appeared that Eisenhower was losing his vitality. He began to mope and seemed distracted. The British historian Leonard Mosley observed, “His aides who sometimes caught him with a faraway look in his eyes soon learned that what he was thinking about was golf.”

But even that sole source of escape was becoming a political liability. In the past, Gallup polls had shown that most American voters did not mind Ike’s frequent weekday golf outings. To the contrary, his love of the fairways had reinforced his reassuring image as a cool and collected CEO, never too rattled to get in a few holes before lunch. But now, as his leadership was being questioned, the public was less forgiving, and Democrats were avidly painting the president as a modern-day Nero who golfed while America burned. Governor G. Mennen Williams of Michigan had gone so far as to compose an ode to the president’s crisisignoring pastime.

Oh little Sputnik, flying high

With made-in-Moscow beep,

You tell the world it’s a Commie sky

and Uncle Sam’s asleep.

You say on fairway and on rough

The Kremlin knows it all,

We hope our golfer knows enough

To get us on the ball.

On Monday, November 25, 1957, the relentless pressures, personal attacks, and barrage of criticism finally got to Dwight D. Eisenhower. That morning, as Lyndon Johnson convened his dreaded Senate hearings with a vicious assault on his administration’s complacency, Ike repaired to his office to sign papers. “As I picked up a pen,” he later recalled, “I experienced a strange although not alarming sense of dizziness.” The words on the page in front of him suddenly became blurry. Then he dropped the pen and couldn’t pick it up. “I decided to get to my feet, and at once I found that I had to catch hold of my chair for stability.