Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [31]
Within days of Wilson’s return to Washington, Medaris found himself on the receiving end of a series of increasingly persistent queries from the Comptroller’s Office at the Pentagon about the farmhouse expenditure.
And so, while Nikita Khrushchev was throwing all his available resources into building the world’s first ICBM, the army’s top missile commander was kept busy filling out financial spreadsheets in order to prove that the renovation of ABMA’s guesthouse would provide taxpayers with a 9 percent return on investment over the comparative cost of renting hotel rooms for visiting dignitaries. For Medaris, “it was the first of many shocks to come.”
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While Medaris fended off Wilson’s accountants, more bad news for ABMA brewed in Washington. Alarming stories began appearing in the American press of an allegedly huge ramp-up of Soviet heavy bomber production. The USSR, it seemed, was building a fleet of long-range Bisons and Bears at a dramatic rate and would soon be able to launch a first strike against the United States. It was not clear where the media were getting their anonymously sourced information, but the army naturally suspected the air force. The Democrats in Congress, however, were taking the warnings seriously.
Nineteen fifty-six was, after all, an election year, and any chance to attack Eisenhower for being soft on national security was not to be passed up. Despite his soaring approval ratings, which hovered around 70 percent, the president was vulnerable. He had suffered a heart attack while on vacation in Colorado the previous September, two weeks after the missile meeting in which Nixon had been overruled, and the administration had plunged into turmoil during his lengthy convalescence. Ike’s fiercely protective gatekeepers, led by his chief of staff, Sherman Adams (the “Abominable No-Go Man,” as he was referred to by jealous colleagues around the White House), restricted all access to the recovering leader. Nixon was not permitted to see him and, in a further blow to his already precarious position, was completely bypassed in the temporary succession of presidential duties. John Foster Dulles, it was decided, would speak for the administration during Eisenhower’s incapacitation; the vice president was judged too unseasoned for such an important role. When Nixon did finally see the president, it was only to be told that he should consider taking a lesser cabinet position to get executive experience.
If Nixon chafed at the demotion, he did so gracefully and privately, maintaining a publicly supportive face that earned praise from Ike’s inner circle. Eisenhower, though, continued to have misgivings, not only about the competence of his inexperienced vice president but also about his own ability to withstand a grueling reelection campaign and a second four-year term. For four months Ike debated whether to run again, and his memoirs and diaries are filled with the wrenching anguish of that difficult decision. He had never sought high office in the first place and was one of the few American leaders who had never truly aspired to be president. Twice, he had turned down the Republican Party’s entreaties to enter the political fray, and in 1952 a write-in campaign had been started without his participation. Sherman Adams, then the governor of New Hampshire, entered Ike’s name in his state’s primary, and New York governor Thomas Dewey started an Eisenhower-for-president nomination campaign without the candidate. In the end, duty, honor, and a sense of obligation had finally persuaded the war hero to run in 1952, and he had done so with a reluctance that voters perceived as genuine patriotism. Ike’s charm was that he was not a career politician but a professional soldier conscripted to serve his country one more time. And now, felled by illness and the creep