Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [97]
At nearly sixty-seven years of age, with a heart attack and stomach surgery on his recent medical record, Ike simply didn’t have the stamina he had once had. And so, on Friday, October 4, he decided to take a break and spend a recuperative four-day weekend at his beloved farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
With its prizewinning herd of Black Angus beef cattle and historic battlefields, the putting green he had installed just outside his patio doors, and the reassuring scent of his wife Mamie’s rhubarb pies wafting out of the kitchen, Eisenhower cherished the farm above all his other possessions. He never took more than a skeletal staff to intrude on his privacy at Gettysburg, and that is perhaps one reason why there is no record from any White House aides as to how the president reacted when told that night that the Soviet Union had launched a satellite. What is known, according to the space historian Paul Dickson, is that the next morning the president of the United States played golf for the fifth time that week.
In Eisenhower’s absence, it was John Foster Dulles who drafted the official White House response to Sputnik. The launch was “an event of considerable technical and scientific importance,” Dulles allowed in an October 5 statement. “However, that importance should not be exaggerated. What has happened involves no basic discovery and the value of a satellite to mankind will for a long time be highly problematical. The Germans had made a major advance in the field and the results of their efforts were largely taken over by the Russians when they took the German assets, human and material.”
The gist of the press release was clear. Sputnik, as far as the White House was concerned, was not a big deal. If anything, it was a feat of Nazi engineering, not Soviet know-how—never mind that the Germans in question were beavering away in Huntsville, not Moscow. The tone thus set, administration officials lined up to spin the news. Sputnik was “without military significance,” said the White House aide Maxwell Rabb. “A neat technical trick,” shrugged Charlie Wilson. “A silly bauble,” scoffed Eisenhower’s adviser Clarence Randall. Sputnik did not come as the least bit of a surprise, Press Secretary Jim Hagerty assured the world. America was not interested in getting caught up “in an outer space basketball game,” Sherman Adams announced. The satellite was a useless “hunk of iron that almost anyone could launch,” growled Admiral Rawson Bennett, Vanguard’s commanding officer.
Loyal Republican lawmakers added their voices to the chorus of skepticism. Sputnik was nothing more than “a propaganda stunt,” said Senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin. It was like a “canary that jumps on the eagle’s back,” declared Representative James Fulton of Pennsylvania, apparently insinuating that the Soviets were hitchhiking off American technology.
But much as the administration tried to downplay the significance of the Communist breakthrough, the media decided differently. Sputnik was a big story—a very big, shocking, scary story. “Listen now for the sound that will forever more separate the old from the new,” intoned NBC, broadcasting Sputnik’s beep on Saturday, October 5. “Soviet Fires Earth Satellite into Space,” the New York Times trumpeted in the sort of six-column-wide headline usually reserved for declarations of war. “Sphere Tracked in Four Crossings over U.S.”
From the journalistic perspective, Sputnik had everything going for it: a historic milestone of human evolution, the element of surprise, the sting of defeat, and frightening ramifications as CBS’s Eric Sevareid somberly informed viewers in his October 6 telecast.