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start preparing for launch. He was so confident that the political fallout from Sputnik would spur the White House to action that he had skipped waiting for the green light. What the maverick general did not realize, however, was that his commander in chief would have decidedly different ideas.

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The debacle in Little Rock had shaken Dwight Eisenhower. For the first time in his presidency, a majority of the American people—64 percent, according to a Gallup survey—had disapproved of the way he had handled a crisis. His trademark calm and restraint had abandoned him in the wake of Governor Faubus’s impudence, and many voters felt he had overreacted by sending troops to Arkansas. Not surprisingly, the polls skewed most unfavorably in the South.

While the immediate crisis was over (though paratroopers remained posted outside Central High School), Faubus was apparently still weighing heavily on the president’s mind when he returned from his three-week vacation in Newport in the waning days of September. “Dear Dick,” he wrote Nixon on October 2, extending an olive branch to the marginalized vice president, whose calls for a more forceful stand on integration he had long ignored. “I had been hoping to play golf this afternoon. . . . If you already have a game, please don’t think of changing your plans because mine are necessarily uncertain because of the stupidity and duplicity of one called Faubus.”

Nixon, as it turned out, did not have a golf game planned for the middle of the workweek and jumped at the rare opportunity to join his usually distant boss for a 1:00 PM tee time at the Burning Tree Country Club. The two had hardly seen each other over the past several months, owing to Eisenhower’s extended vacations and Sherman Adams’s tight control over entry to the Oval Office. Only John Foster Dulles had unfettered access to the president. Nixon, like everyone else, had to go through the chief of staff. The restrictions grated. “Sherman Adams was cold, blunt, abrasive, at times even rude,” Nixon vented in his memoir. The vice president was increasingly clashing with Adams, since he was trying to carve out a more meaningful role for himself in Eisenhower’s second term, especially in the realm of foreign policy. He was now a likely front-runner for the 1960 Republican presidential nomination, and he needed to raise his profile. Maybe he could persuade Ike to send him on some state visit.

But the president didn’t seem interested in talking shop. “Golf in Newport was enjoyable,” he remarked amiably. “I got to the point where I was hitting the ball as long as I ever did.” His putting, however, Eisenhower complained, had suffered “a corresponding slump.”

Eisenhower’s insouciance was partly an act. The president was tired and worn down by a summer of squabbling with Stuart Symington and the other Democrats in Congress over defense spending, and he was increasingly worried by some troubling numbers coming out of the Commerce Department. The economic boom he had inherited during his first term, when more than one million families a year were moving up into the middle class in what Fortune magazine called “an economy of abundance,” appeared to be faltering. Unemployment figures for August were showing a sharp rise. The real estate and stock markets had cooled considerably. Consumer confidence indicators were down. And tax revenues were coming in at a disappointing $72 billion, $4 billion below projections. Prosperity and fiscal prudence were pillars of the administration’s platform, and Eisenhower, at Charlie Wilson’s suggestion, had ordered sweeping military cuts in July in an effort to trim half a billion dollars from the $3.5 billion monthly defense bill. Already the Democrats were howling that his policies favored the rich while putting the country at risk. “What the hell good is it to be the richest man in the graveyard?” Symington had snapped. And now Ike faced the agonizing possibility of a looming recession to further complicate his budget balancing act.

“The developments of this year,” he wrote in a diary entry on September