Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [143]
Thus a new gap, “a missile gap,” was born from the ashes of Vanguard. “We will be walking a very tight wire with our lives for the next five years,” a senior executive from General Dynamics testified, explaining how the late start in developing the Atlas ICBM his company was building meant that for the foreseeable future the United States would have to rely on planes to defend itself against the Soviet Union’s virtually indestructible new missiles.
The administration, it went without saying, was responsible for the strategic imbalance that now imperiled the nation. For all his bipartisan pledges—his noble talk of there being no Republicans or Democrats after Sputnik, only Americans—Johnson had effectively put Eisenhower’s entire government on trial. The indictment was all the more devastating because it was subtle. Johnson studiously avoided histrionics and tended to chide gently, more the reproachful schoolteacher than the vengeful prosecutor. “There are too many people in government who have the right to say no,” he admonished. “Too few who have authority to say yes, and even less who dare to do so.” Johnson never directly pointed the finger at the White House. That was left to others—supposedly impartial scientists, who decried Eisenhower’s “false economies” and wrongheaded policies, or friendly journalists, who railed against the grave dangers the country faced as a result. “At the Pentagon they shudder when they speak of the ‘gap,’” reported the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop in one of their more alarming dispatches from the hearings. “They shudder because in these years, the American government will flaccidly permit the Kremlin to gain an almost unchallenged superiority in the nuclear striking power that was once our specialty.”
Few readers could have missed the implication. Ike was “flaccid,” rolling over for the Russians. Johnson, on the other hand, stood strong and tall, seeking truth and security at a time when America, as Harper’s magazine metaphorically put it, was “a leaky ship, with a committee on the bridge and a crippled captain sending occasional whispers up the speaking tube from his sick bay.”
In his pursuit of publicity—and perhaps even in pursuit of truth and security—Johnson was relentless, shuffling the attending representatives of the press like a circus master. Photographers would be ushered into one chamber, shots snapped, then hustled out to make room for the reporters. “Speaking so fast that no one could take a word-by-word account,” observed the historian Robert A. Caro, “he would rip through a briefing on a committee session, pant that he was ten minutes late for a luncheon speech he had to make. ‘The statements will be up in a minute anyway,’ burst out of the room to give the television interviewers time for ‘just three’ questions, then flaring up when a fourth was asked—‘I told you, just three,’” he would add, before running down the hall with a dozen reporters in tow.
Grabbing the next day’s newspapers, Johnson would scream, shout, cheer, sob, curse, and vow vengeance, depending on how his heroics had been portrayed. Then he would call a press conference and start all over again. “Control of space means control of the world,” he would warn, posing dramatically for the cameras. “From space the masters of infinity would have the power to control the earth’s weather, to cause drought and flood, to change the tides and raise the levels of the sea, to divert the Gulf Stream and change the temperature climates to frigid.” Nothing short of planetary domination hung in the balance of “this ultimate position,” Johnson railed against America’s seeming inability to achieve orbit. “Our national goal and the goal of all free men must be to hold that position.”
“Light a match