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of old age, when he would much rather retire to his beloved farm in Gettysburg and play golf, he was being asked to do it again. On February 27, 1956—the very day Korolev pitched Khrushchev the idea of using the new ICBM to launch a satellite—Eisenhower, with the utmost reluctance, publicly announced his intention to seek a second term. He did not name Nixon as his running mate, however, telling reporters, “I will never answer another question on this subject until after August,” the date of the Republican National Convention in San Francisco.

The Democrats seized on this uncertainty and ambivalence, this chink in the president’s otherwise formidable political armor. “Every piece of scientific evidence that we have indicates that a Republican victory would mean that Richard Nixon would probably be President within the next four years,” said Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic challenger, in an effort to scare voters.

National security was another way of chipping away at Ike’s popularity. After all, Eisenhower had ended the twenty-year Republican White House drought in 1952 by lambasting Truman’s weak defense record and promising to keep the country safe from the perfidious threat of global communism. Now he could be hoisted by his own petard. With the coming presidential polls firmly in mind, Democratic senators duly convened “Air Power” hearings on April 16, 1956, to look into the politically promising prospect of what journalists had dubbed the “bomber gap.”

Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri gaveled open the hearings. Unlike Eisenhower, Symington did harbor presidential aspirations. Tall, and handsome (“an ex-playboy,” Time informed its readers), the freshman senator had first garnered national attention in 1954 by taking on Senator Joseph McCarthy, the rabble-rousing Red-baiter whose communist witch hunts had ruined thousands of lives and pitched the United States into a frenzy of right-wing paranoia. “You said something about being afraid,” Symington declared, staring down McCarthy during televised hearings. “Let me tell you, Senator, that I’m not afraid of you. I will meet you anytime, anywhere.”

The showdown had marked the fifty-three-year-old Symington as a rising star within the Democratic ranks, perhaps too new on the political scene to win the party’s 1956 nomination but a serious contender for 1960. “He is a formidable-looking figure,” Time noted approvingly, “sprawling in his red leather chair, a spectacular executive when transacting business over the telephone. He is abrasive with foot-dragging underlings. He incessantly chomps gum.”

Symington, a Yale graduate and the wealthy scion of a patrician political dynasty from New Hampshire, had served as the first secretary of the air force under Truman. For him, the Air Power hearings were not merely a cynical vehicle for self-promotion. He had a genuine and sentimental attachment to the service he had helped found. “We feel, with deep conviction, that the destiny of the United States rests on the continued development of our Air Force,” he declared. “The question of whether we shall have adequate American air power may be, in short, the question of survival.”

Thus prepped, the senators then heard from a parade of air force and intelligence officials who each offered flimsy but frightening testimony about Soviet heavy bomber production forecasts. By late 1958, they warned, the USSR would have four hundred Bisons and three hundred Bears capable of striking the American heartland. The armada could disrupt the balance of power and lead to a situation where the Soviet Union could actually overtake the United States in intercontinental bomber capabilities. General LeMay, the star witness, reminded congressional leaders that manned strategic bombers were still the weapon of choice: “We believe that in the future the situation will remain the same as it has in the past, and that is that a bomber force well-equipped, determined, well-trained, will penetrate any defense system that can be devised.”

As proof of the alleged Soviet buildup, two pieces of evidence were