Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [132]
Eisenhower was rushed into bed, and a team of doctors was summoned. “The President has had a stroke,” Sherman Adams tersely told Vice President Nixon, summoning him to the White House. “This is a terribly, terribly difficult thing to handle,” he said, his tone suddenly more obsequious, once Nixon had arrived. “You may be President in twenty-four hours.”
The following day, however, the chief of staff’s frosty demeanor had returned, as the doctors had diagnosed the stroke as mild. The tough old soldier, it seemed, had demonstrated that he still had some fight left in him. Though his memory was still fuzzy, and his vision blurred, Ike stubbornly refused to go to the hospital and insisted on working from his bed. By Thursday, he had pronounced himself well enough to publicly attend Thanksgiving Day services and begin resuming his full duties. Adams once more resumed his treatment of Nixon as a pesky intruder—the surest sign that a semblance of normality was returning to the White House
• • •
As December dawned, and Eisenhower recuperated from what his spokesmen insisted was only “a minor brain spasm,” the country began counting the days to Vanguard’s long-awaited launch on Wednesday, December 4. With the promise of the president on the mend and a chance to even the score with the Soviets, hope once more entered the national discourse. For the first time since Sputnik Night, America was upbeat, almost giddy with anticipation. Newspapers prepared special Vanguard editions, restaurants served Vanguard burgers, and schools introduced children to the rudiments of rocketry. Sensing the rising tide of enthusiasm, Lyndon Johnson shrewdly recessed his hearings to give lawmakers and the public a chance to focus on Florida, where reporters were already filing anticipatory dispatches from the launch facilities at Cape Canaveral.
“The Vanguard tower was clear against a starry sky, two bright lights glaring at its base and a red beacon shining at its top,” the New York Times primed its readers on December 1, three days ahead of the scheduled launch. “From the beach, the Vanguard crane is one of a community of launching structures, some taller, some broader than others. But the Vanguard clearly has the next billing at the sprawling missile theater here,” whose audience, the newspaper noted, included correspondents “from as far away as Europe.”
On the morning of the fourth, a cool and windy Wednesday, it seemed as if every major media organization in America had descended on the large sand dune just outside the test firing range. Dubbed “Bird Watch Hill,” the windswept promontory crawled with television crews and sound trucks. Scaffolding and newsreel platforms sprouted from the sand, while radio reporters raced around, shielding their microphones from the steady breeze coming off the Atlantic. From the dune’s trampled crest, an unruly battalion of six hundred photographers trained their long-range telephoto lenses on launchpad 18A, where a slender, silvery rocket reflected the morning sun.
The moment everyone had been waiting for had come. All along Route A1A, traffic choked the soft shoulders: station wagons with wood-paneled doors, two-ton convertibles, Buicks with big tail fins. The low, square, air-conditioned motels that had been hastily built to cash in on the space craze—places with names like the Starlight, the Sea Missile, and Vanguard Inn—teemed with excited customers.
All over South Florida, eyes were fixed expectantly on the skies over the Long Range Proving Ground at Patrick Air Force Base, as Cape Canaveral was formally known. The rest of the country watched from living rooms, bars, and sidewalks outside stores selling RCA’s new color televisions. At network studios in New York, Walter Cronkite and his fellow broadcasters filled the airwaves with all manner