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What very few people realized, outside of the president’s most trusted circle of advisers, was that Eisenhower was asking himself the very same thing. “In my mind was the question of my future fitness to meet the rigorous demands of the Presidency,” he later confessed. “The test that I now set for myself was that of going through with my plan of proceeding to Paris.” The Paris conference was a week away, the first ever meeting of all the NATO heads of state, rather than the customary gathering of defense and foreign ministers, and the largest gathering of Western leaders in Europe since the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. It was hugely important not only because of the proposed deployment of American nuclear missiles on the European continent but also because the United States needed to restore the shattered confidence of its anxious allies. Ike had to attend, not only for himself but for the good of the nation as well. “If I could carry out this program successfully and without noticeable damage to myself,” he vowed, “then I could continue my duties. If I felt the results to be less than satisfactory, then I would resign.”

Nixon and Dulles had not been privy to the president’s private pledge. They were not his confidants, like the ferociously loyal Sherman Adams or General Goodpaster, and while the vice president had yet again earned praise for the way he had handled himself during Eisenhower’s incapacitation by not appearing too eager to fill his shoes, his low profile was partly calculated. Nixon was purposefully distancing himself from the president because he had no intention of going down with Ike’s sinking ship. If the president dreamed of golf and retiring to Gettysburg, that was fine, even understandable. But Nixon was still only forty-four years old, and he had his own future to think about. He had paid his dues, and he had suffered untold slights and humiliation, all so he could one day sit at Ike’s desk. And now these blasted missiles were threatening to drag him down too. Slowly, imperceptibly at first, and then demonstratively, the vice president began inching away from his stricken running mate. (The move would inspire a running joke: Martians land in Washington and approach the vice president. Take us to your leader, the aliens demand. “I can’t,” Nixon demurs. “I hardly know the man.”)

Nixon was not the only administration official wondering whether the leader of the world had lost confidence in himself. “This man is not what he was,” Adams confided to James Killian, in a rare moment of doubt. The change was dramatic. Only a day earlier the president had seemed on the road to recovery, determined to prove to the country and to himself that he could lick “this cerebral thing.” Everyone in the White House had noticed a new energy, a spring in Ike’s step, a fighting spirit reminiscent of his first-term buoyancy. That rekindled vigor was now gone. It was as if Vanguard had sucked all the wind out of his sails. Looking around the room at his ambitious vice president, the powerful Dulles brothers, Secretary McElroy, and the assembled NSC staff, Eisenhower must have indeed seemed a shadow of his former self. Once the supreme commander of the greatest fighting force ever assembled, he was now frail and exhausted, an old man presiding uncertainly over a jittery country. If there was a low point, a single, most downcast occasion in Ike’s long career in public service, this was almost certainly it.

After a few seconds of uncomfortable silence, Donald Quarles hesitantly cleared his throat. Since he had appointed the Stewart Committee and had ultimately chosen Vanguard, this was his mess. “I think, Mr. President, that in a sense, we were hoisted by our own petard yesterday,” he said, launching into another one of his impassioned justifications and rationalizations. The United States had committed itself to share all data from Vanguard with the IGY, he said, and had included the launch date so that scientists in other countries could have their ground stations ready to receive signals from the orbiting satellite. (What