Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [50]
The threat was magnified a thousandfold the following year, when Moscow detonated its first atomic bomb. The era, grumbled LeMay, “when we might have completely destroyed Russia and not even skinned our elbows doing it” was over. A few months later, the revolutionary cancer spread to China, further whipping up domestic paranoia in the United States. Suddenly, any American who had ever attended a Marxist meeting in the 1930s, or dated someone who had, was potentially a security risk. Immigrant scientists, with their top-secret clearances and Eastern European backgrounds, were especially vulnerable. After Mao’s victory, the blacklist was expanded to include Chinese-born American researchers. Tsien Hsue-shen, one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech and a pioneer in the field of American rocketry, was arrested and deported to China. (Documents would later reveal that he had been innocent of the spying charges, prompting one military historian to call the affair the “greatest act of stupidity of the McCarthyist period. . . . China now has nuclear missiles capable of hitting the United States in large part because of Tsien.”)
Von Braun, however, was above reproach. For five years the FBI and army intelligence had monitored his every move, read his correspondence, and listened to his telephone conversations. Nothing more untoward than the suspect sale of some undeclared silver by his brother Magnus had ever been uncovered. By the summer of 1950, the political climate had changed sufficiently enough for von Braun to come out of purgatory. What’s more, his services were finally needed again. On the night of June 25, 1950, Kim II Sung’s North Korean forces crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, threatening to overrun South Korea. This time President Truman decided to draw the line. Three weeks later von Braun received his first meaningful commission, the Redstone.
With the assignment came a change of address and a new lease on life for von Braun and his team. Compared to Fort Bliss, Huntsville seemed idyllic. The historic hamlet was home to fifteen thousand genteel southerners, and its proud Civil War heritage was etched in the Confederate Monument that crowned the town square. White clapboard church spires dominated the skyline, and the sidewalks were trimmed with white picket fences and immaculately groomed lawns. White was the dominant color in Huntsville, as it was in all of Madison County, Alabama, and throughout the entire Jim Crow South. But the civil rights movement was beginning to take root in 1950, and this worried some of the town’s newest German residents. “We had some concerns here,” Wernher Dahm recalled. “Not so much about segregation . . . as about open strife.”
Huntsville wasn’t perfect. But after wandering in the desert for five years, von Braun and his crew had finally found a home. They now had regular salaries, as opposed to the six dollars a day they had received during their first days in Texas, and they had complete freedom of movement. Their legal status had been “normalized,” thanks to some creative immigration paperwork, and they would be eligible for U.S. citizenship in a few years. Meanwhile, they could buy cars, houses, motorboats, and televisions; in short, they could enjoy all the material benefits of the American dream.
Life was looking up for von Braun. He bought a fashionable new rambler on a large hilly lot on McClung Street just outside Huntsville’s historic city center. His wife, Maria, gave birth to two daughters, Margrit and Iris. The Redstone performed flawlessly during its 1953 tests, and Walt Disney came calling the following year with an intriguing television offer.
Disney was putting together a weekly television program to promote the new theme park he was building on 160 acres of orange groves in Anaheim, California. The show, like