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With 42,000 miles to pave in the massive Interstate Highway System he was proposing, Ike had no interest in trading missiles for schools or bridges, and with little strategic or political incentive to hurry, the air force had spent a mere $14 million developing its ICBM by 1954. Missiles might have languished on the back burner had it not been for the frightening intelligence reports that began trickling in from Moscow the following year. A panel of leading technology experts at the Office of Defense Mobilization led by James Killian, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, issued a dire warning that unless the United States made immediate and significant strides in missile development, it risked falling hopelessly behind the Soviet Union. The Killian report raised enough alarm that the Eisenhower administration increased missile spending to $550 million in 1955, which still represented a marginal 1 percent of the military budget. That figure was doubled to $1.2 billion in 1956, but that was still far below the $7.5 billion earmarked for beefing up the bomber fleet that year, and was a source of contention within the administration.

Did the accelerated spending “go far enough”? asked Vice President Richard Nixon at a September 8, 1955, meeting of the National Security Council, during which increased missile development was discussed. There could be political repercussions, the vice president worried, if the administration was not seen as doing everything in its power to close the Soviet lead.

“For my conservative blood, it’s enough,” said Assistant Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles, who also served as secretary of the air force. Quarles was Wilson’s closest confidant and protégé, his principal hatchet man. Diminutive, icy, and unfailingly polite, famous for subsisting on seemingly nothing more than cup after cup of steaming hot water, Quarles could afford to cut off the vice president. Nixon was in no position to argue, since Eisenhower had still not decided whether he would ask him to stay on for the 1956 reelection campaign. For close to a year, the young vice president would suffer in limbo, as Ike pointedly refused to rule on his fate, dodging reporters’ questions with a humiliating persistency.

Nixon had largely been brought on board the Republican ticket in 1952 because of his youth; just thirty-nine years old, with jet-black hair and a jutting jaw, he projected a vigorous and combative air that counterbalanced Ike’s gentle and grandfatherly pate. He had been the youngest member of the Senate, and his selection as Ike’s running mate had inspired another youthful legislator, Representative John F. Kennedy, to write a congratulatory note: “I was always convinced that you would move ahead to the top—but I never thought it would come this quickly.” Nixon’s rise had indeed been meteoric. But perhaps because of the generation gap, he had never hit it off with Eisenhower, who worried about “his lack of maturity.”

“You’re my boy,” the president had exclaimed cheerily upon their first meeting, thus setting the patronizing tone of their unequal union.

With his future uncertain, Nixon bit his tongue as Quarles explained that “the manned aircraft was superior to the ICBM, both in terms of accuracy and weight of destructive force,” and said nothing when the assistant secretary closed the discussion by warning that he was opposed “to providing any stronger basis than already existed for individuals . . . who wanted another billion or so” for missile programs. Quarles understood his brief, even if the impetuous vice president apparently didn’t. The administration was supposed to slash spending, not encourage it.

Medaris, of course, had not been privy to any of this but was surprised at how uncharacteristically quiet Wilson had been throughout the inspection tour. It was not until the delegation returned to the renovated guesthouse that Engine Charlie grew genuinely animated. “Mr. Wilson started to ask some odd questions,” Medaris recalled.