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By Root 571 0

not be the R-7, but the R-11, originally a small submarine-launched rocket whose land-based version would become more commonly known as the Scud. His enduring legacy, however, would be as a space pioneer, as the man who in total anonymity made America tremble. Had he lived another five years, perhaps history would have been rewritten; perhaps the hammer and sickle would have flown first on the moon, instead of the stars and stripes. But then again, the tide seemed to have turned by then, and it is not clear whether even the tenacious Chief Designer could have rescued the faltering Soviet space program. One will never know. What is certain is that Russia’s moon dreams died with Sergei Pavlovich Korolev.

His influence on the United States, however, persists to this day. NASA, the institution created in the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 as a direct response to Sputnik, landed a man on the moon, created the space shuttle, and is now probing farther and deeper into the cosmos. Millions of American students still benefit from the college loan programs started under the 1958 National Defense Education Act, which also revamped elementary and high school curricula with an emphasis on science and foreign languages to better compete with Soviet engineers. The Defense Reorganization Act of 1958 created the advanced military research agency that developed the Internet and countless other inventions that have transformed the daily lives of Americans.

Politically, Korolev and Khrushchev cast an equally long shadow across the United States. Without the “Sputnik Congress,” and the Preparedness hearings that gave him such national exposure, Lyndon Johnson might not have won a spot on the 1960 Democratic ticket and ultimately may never have become president. NASA and the educational and military reforms of 1958 were all the creations of Johnson’s hearings, and the perceptions of the “missile gap” that he first raised became a central issue in the 1960 election, not to mention a costly mainstay of defense expenditures for decades to come. Stuart Symington beat the missile gap drums almost as loudly and alarmingly as Johnson, but in the end this consummate cold warrior’s presidential hopes withered because he refused to endorse escalating America’s involvement in Vietnam. In the 1960s, he grew increasingly disillusioned with the CIA’s covert activities in Indochina. Vietnam, he predicted, would prove an inescapable quagmire and ultimately a losing proposition. For his prescience, Symington was castigated as weak and soft on communism, and his career never recovered.

As the 1960 presidential poll approached, it looked as if Richard Nixon would at last have his just reward for all those painful and bitter dues he had paid at Ike’s cold and distant shoulder. Personal relations between Eisenhower and his vice president never truly improved in the years after Sputnik, but Nixon, in preparation for the 1960 elections, was accorded a far greater role in Ike’s second term. He traveled more frequently, especially after John Foster Dulles’s death in 1959, and assumed many of the secretary of state’s foreign policy duties. Some of the trips did not go smoothly. His infamous shouting match with Nikita Khrushchev at Moscow’s international technology fair in July 1959 did little for the cause of improving superpower relations. Visiting a mockup of an American kitchen displayed at the fair, the two leaders launched into an impromptu argument over missiles that ended with the red-faced first secretary jabbing a pudgy finger in the vice president’s chest and growling: “You want to threaten? We will answer threats with threats.”

Nixon’s eventual opponent, John F. Kennedy, would make much of the unstatesmanlike buffoonery of the “kitchen debate,” and he would owe a large debt to the continued fallout from Sputnik and the missile gap for his electoral victory the following year. But it would be Nixon who would preside over the White House when Kennedy’s pledge to put a man on the moon was finally realized in 1969. Some would say this was fitting