Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [157]
The hidden hand would become a term better associated with Eisenhower’s detached style of leadership. Ike, after leaving office, did not enjoy rave reviews from historians, but by the mid-1980s scholarly esteem for Eisenhower had risen, a reevaluation that coincided, in part, with the declassification and release of many important documents, which revealed a vastly different man from the fuzzy, remote, and sometimes bumbling public persona. Behind closed doors, Eisenhower proved to be a far sharper figure, much more on top of issues than he publicly let on. It was the dichotomy that Richard Bissell had noticed, when he first assumed that John Foster Dulles ran the show, but after careful observation concluded that Ike was very much his own man. In hindsight, Ike’s subdued response to Sputnik probably owed as much to his instinctive fear of the rise of the “military-industrial complex” as to his failing health and his longing for a peaceful retirement. His farewell address to the nation in January 1961 highlighted the danger of allowing the political and economic interests of military contractors and bureaucrats to hijack the national security agenda for their own gain. America did not heed his advice, however, and to this day trillions of tax dollars have been needlessly spent on unnecessary weapons systems that have not necessarily made the country safer.
Donald Quarles, Eisenhower’s contentious point man on curbing runaway military spending, was to have succeeded Neil McElroy as secretary of defense in 1959. But he was felled by a massive heart attack that year, and his legacy as the man who oversaw America’s earliest space and missile efforts would remain mixed at best.
Sputnik would taint Eisenhower’s legacy as well. Contemporary revisionists are too charitable when they hail his passivity during Sputnik as exemplary. Leadership during times of crisis cannot be hidden or managed from a golf course. It must be assertive and overt. During the Sputnik crisis, Ike fell short on both counts, and populists like Lyndon Johnson stepped into the leadership vacuum.
Assertiveness was never a quality lacking in General Bruce Medaris, the closest thing America had to a Korolev. Though von Braun would get the credit for opening the heavens to the United States, it was really Medaris’s iron will and stubborn refusal to yield to bureaucratic setbacks that lofted Juno into space. A lesser general might have accepted the Pentagon line and awaited orders, but had that happened ABMA would not have been prepared to respond as quickly as it did. He is the other unsung hero of this tale.
Since mavericks don’t tend to last in large institutional settings, it came as no surprise that Medaris’s military career ended shortly after ABMA’s 1958 triumph. Despite Explorer’s political victory, the army lost the war for missile supremacy with the air force, and ABMA was gradually dismantled to make room for the new civilian space organization. Medaris vehemently opposed NASA’s founding on the grounds that it would cannibalize his beloved agency, and his criticisms were so vocal that he had little choice but to resign his commission once von Braun’s team was transferred to civilian control. In early 1960, Joseph P. Kennedy offered Medaris a job advising his son’s presidential campaign on space issues, but he declined, wanting no part in politics. Instead, he accepted the presidency of the Lionel Corporation, a toy train maker with a defense contracting arm. A bout with cancer in the mid-1960s and a miraculous recovery left the devout former general convinced that he had been spared to fulfill a higher calling. He became a lay deacon in 1966, and four