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Here in the capital responsible men think and talk of little but the metal spheroid that now looms larger in the eye of the mind than the planet it circles around. Men are divided in their feelings between those who rejoice and those who worry. In the first group are the scientists, mostly, in raptures that the nascent, god-like instinct of Homo sapiens has driven him from his primordial mud to break, at last, the bound of his earth. Those who are worrying tonight know that the spirit of man has many parts: and part of his spirit is not in space; it has not even reached the foothills. And so broken men still lie in Budapest hospitals because a form of ancient tyranny finds free thought a menace; and in mid-American cities bodies and hearts bear bruises because this part of the human spirit still fears and hates what is different, even in color. The wisest of men does not know tonight whether man in his radiance or man in his darkness will possess the spinning ball.

America had been bested on the international stage, and editors across the land now salivated at the prospect of finding someone to blame for the sluggishness and complacency of the U.S. satellite program. The administration’s underwhelmed response smacked of sour grapes and made it an appealing target for the nationwide editorial witch hunt. Nothing, after all, sold newspapers like the old-fashioned whiff of incompetence and scandal.

Sputnik contained one final element that no ambitious newsman could resist: fear. The missile that had lofted Sputnik into space had also shattered America’s sense of invulnerability. For the first time geography had ceased to be a barrier, and the U.S. mainland lay exposed to enemy fire. In that respect, Russia’s rockets were infinitely more frightening than the Japanese bombers that had attacked Pearl Harbor sixteen years before. It was not distant naval bases on Pacific islands that they targeted, but the impregnable heartland itself: Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, places that had never before needed to worry about foreign aggression. Despite White House assurances to the contrary, satellites and ballistic missiles were inherently linked. The story, therefore, was ultimately about the security—or newfound insecurity—of the American people, as Sevareid made plainly clear: “If the intercontinental missile is, indeed, the ultimate, the final weapon of warfare,” he ended his broadcast ominously, “then at the present rate, Russia will soon come to a period during which she can stand astride the world, its military master.”

The warning was echoed by thousands of media outlets, big and small, conservative and liberal, in radio and television, magazines and newspapers. Sputnik was “a great national emergency,” declared Max Ascoli of the Reporter. A “grave defeat,” lamented the staunchly Republican New York Herald Tribune. US News & World Report likened it to the splitting of the atom. The editors of Life made comparisons to the shots fired at Lexington and Concord and urged Americans “to respond as the Minutemen had done then.” Sputnik was “a technological Pearl Harbor,” fretted Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb. The sphere’s “chilling beeps,” echoed Time, were a signal that “in vital sectors of the technology race, the US may have well lost its precious lead.”

A strange sense of disconnection gripped the public discourse. The more the administration told Americans not to worry, the louder the media beat their doomsday drums. Editors seemed obsessed with the Soviet satellite, and pretty soon so was the general population, which had initially greeted the launch with mild to complete disinterest. “The reaction here indicates massive indifference,” a Newsweek correspondent had reported from Boston on October 5. “There is a vague feeling that we have stepped into a new era, but people aren’t discussing it the way they are football or the Asiatic flu,” another Newsweek reporter wired from Denver. In Milwaukee, it was the ballistic trajectories of the Braves’ pitching staff in Game 2 of the World Series against the Yankees