Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [27]
There had been little time to prepare for this important visit, and in the few weeks afforded to him, Medaris had done what he could to whip the month-old missile agency and its dilapidated buildings into shape. ABMA’s headquarters had been hived off the 40,000-acre Redstone Arsenal, a neglected World War II munitions and chemical weapons plant that did not enjoy “a great reputation at that point,” in Medaris’s own words. Black skull-and-bones contamination warning signs still hung from rusted barbed-wire fences strung around the skeletal remains of abandoned chemical depots. Squat, circular storage bunkers dotted the landscape like concrete igloos. The cavernous old assembly lines and the cracked and grimy windowpanes gave off an air of postindustrial misery.
ABMA’s fortunes seemed nearly as grim as the headquarters the army had given it. But it did have one ace in the hole: Wernher von Braun and the brain trust behind the V-2, the greatest team of rocket scientists on earth. Medaris’s first order of business had been to cordon off von Braun’s research facilities from the rest of the ramshackle base, bypassing procedure with a scribbled note on the back of an envelope that read “You are authorized to procure and install fencing.” This was typical of Medaris and decidedly not the way the Army Quartermaster’s Office did things, yet another reason he had been denied promotion from colonel to brigadier general on three consecutive occasions during the war, despite endorsements from Bradley, Patton, and Eisenhower himself. Corner-cutting got timely results for the frontline generals, but it left a lot of noses out of joint back in Washington, where they preferred their paperwork duly filled out in triplicate.
With only a few weeks to prepare for the secretary of defense’s inspection tour, Medaris hadn’t had time for bureaucratic niceties. He’d ordered the buildings scrubbed and the grounds swept. ABMA’s 1,700 civilian scientists had been issued strict instructions to tuck in their shirttails and assume a more military posture. Special flags and insignias had been designed and distributed to impress guests and instill esprit de corps, and MPs in parade uniforms, each man at least six feet tall, had been posted outside doors, elevators, and anywhere else a VIP delegation might venture. Medaris had even refurbished an old plantation log house as a hospitality center to make the secretary’s stay more pleasant.
Just about the only thing he had not anticipated was how his well-laid plans would backfire.
• • •
Of all the corporate titans who made up President Eisenhower’s “cabinet of millionaires,” none was bigger than Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson. White-haired and blue-eyed, with a bulldog’s bulky frame, the Ohio native had run General Motors with an iron fist since 1941, overseeing its huge defense production during the war and its ambitious retooling efforts afterward to put a car in every American driveway. Under his folksy and forceful stewardship, GM had become a symbol of America’s awesome industrial might. Of the 7,920,000 automobiles sold by Detroit in 1955, a 2-million-vehicle increase over 1954, more than half had been built by GM. It was Wilson, a workaholic who usually slept just three hours a night, who had given America the V-8 engine and had fueled the country’s passion for size and speed. He had pioneered the monthly car payment plans that made financing the preferred method of purchasing automobiles, and he had tamed the unions by negotiating productivity and cost-of-living escalator clauses that ensured labor peace for decades.
Wilson’s skillful planning and execution had made General Motors the biggest company in the world, and he himself had come to personify the new class of American executives democratizing boardrooms across the country. They were midwesterners by and large, from small towns and state colleges, who didn