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was instrumental in scuttling the army’s satellite bid in favor of Vanguard.) Homer Joe Stewart himself would later confess that some members of his commission might have been “prejudiced,” as the media alleged. But not, he would add, for commercial reasons. There could have simply been an unspoken sentiment that American scientists, rather than a group of ex-Nazis, should lead the country into the dawn of a new era.

• • •

Dawn broke calmly over Cape Canaveral on Friday, December 6, as reporters once more staked out their perches on Bird Watch Hill. They did not have to wait long this time. At 10:30 AM, the towering red and white gantry crane slowly pulled away from the launchpad, and a half hour later the sonorous blast of warning sirens filled the air. “T minus five minutes,” a distended voice echoed over the loudspeakers positioned throughout the proving ground.

The moment everyone had been waiting for at last was at hand. After two months of intolerable doubt, humiliation, and unaccustomed anxiety, America would finally salvage its pride and show those commies a thing or two about good old-fashioned Yankee ingenuity. Everything would be right after that; the United States of America would be back on track. “One minute,” the loudspeaker sounded. The whole country leaned forward, on the edge of its collective seat.

“Ten, nine, eight . . . ,” the final countdown began, and at 11:44:59 AM a hoarse, howling whine slammed the Florida coast. Brilliant white flames shot out from under the rocket. Ice crumpled in jagged sheets from its upper stages as the whole booster shook with earth-jarring force. The roar of the engines increased to a piercing shriek, and the last of the umbilical cords dropped way. The rocket shuddered and strained against its moorings. It was moving! It was up, only a few feet, but it was gaining strength. And then Vanguard quivered, burst into flame, and languidly crumpled onto the launchpad, setting off a blast wave felt for miles. “Oh God! No! Look out! Duck!” the spectators suddenly screamed. Then, just as suddenly, there was silence.

11

GOLDSTONE HAS THE BIRD

John Foster Dulles could barely contain his anger. “What happened yesterday has made us the laughing stock of the free world,” he snarled, his face flushed.

Vice President Nixon and the other members of the National Security Council nodded bitterly. They had assembled on December 7 to discuss the fiasco at Cape Canaveral, to try somehow to put the humiliating debacle in a positive light. But so far no one had come up with any sort of silver lining to spin to the clamoring press.

“Mr. President,” Dulles continued, “I sincerely hope that in the future we do not announce the date, hour, and indeed very minute of any satellite launch until we know for certain it is successfully in orbit. All this negative publicity has had a terrible effect on our international standing.”

A plainer truth could not have been spoken. Confidence in the United States was plummeting abroad almost as dramatically as Eisenhower’s popularity was sinking at home. The slide was most pronounced in Western Europe, where polls conducted in Britain and France prior to Sputnik’s launch had shown that only 6 percent of respondents saw the Soviet Union as militarily superior to the United States. Now fully half of those surveyed viewed America as the weaker superpower, which did not bode well for Dulles’s plans to persuade NATO allies to accept intermediate-range rockets on their soil. He had hoped to pitch the ballistic missile deployment at an upcoming NATO conference in Paris, but Vanguard’s charred remains were proving a tough image to overcome. Instead of triumphantly circling the globe, America’s vaunted satellite lay ignominiously in a Florida swamp, where it had been flung during the explosion, and continued to emit its baleful beep until a frustrated reporter finally snapped, “Why doesn’t somebody go out there, find it, and kill it?”

This was hardly a resounding recommendation for nuclear-tipped IRBMs, and judging by the derisive reaction of the European press,