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By Root 500 0

that preoccupied most people, not the short news brief on page 3 of the Sentinel devoted to the Soviet satellite. According to a spot poll conducted on October 5 by the Opinion Research Corporation, only 13 percent of Americans saw Sputnik as a sign that America had fallen dangerously behind the Soviet Union. One reason so few people were worried, recalled the Columbia University pollster Samuel Lubell, was an overwhelming sense of confidence in Eisenhower’s leadership. “When I asked what this country should do, the reply would fairly often be: ‘The President will do all that needs to be done,’” Lubell noted. “Or, a typical answer would be: ‘He’s taking action now.’ Or ‘I’d leave that to the President. He ought to know.’”

Within days the media barrage changed the public mood dramatically. People began holding nightly vigils to try to spot the passing satellite; they tuned their radios to its frequencies; and they grew anxious. Yet for the Democrats in Congress, Sputnik was simply too good an opportunity to let slip. The Little Rock crisis had left Eisenhower vulnerable, and the economy was weakening. The Soviet Union had handed the United States a setback that could be whipped up into a full-blown indictment of the administration.

As the most vocal critic of Eisenhower’s “deplorable” military cuts, Symington took the lead, rallying his fellow Democratic hawks Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington and Richard Russell of Georgia, the powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The launch was proof, Symington said, “of growing Communist superiority in the all-important missile field.” The administration’s “penury” had let America’s technological lead slip away and had placed the nation in grave danger.

“I have been warning about this growing danger for a long time,” Symington added, “because the future of the United States may well be at stake.” He asked Russell to convene hearings immediately so that “the American people [can] learn the truth.”

Naturally, Symington volunteered to lead the investigation, as he had during the bomber gap. Both Russell and Jackson had been around Washington long enough to know that he had ulterior motives, but they were only too happy to oblige their handsome and ambitious young colleague. He had credibility, and the New York Times had praised his poise and his “dignified bearing that conveys an impression of statesmanship.”

Jackson enthusiastically took up the cause, calling for “a National Week of Shame and Danger.” Sputnik, he said, was “a devastating blow to the prestige of the United States.” Russell weighed in as well. “We now know beyond a doubt,” he warned on October 5, “that the Russians have the ultimate weapon—a long-range missile capable of delivering atomic and hydrogen explosives across continents and oceans. If this now known superiority over the United States develops into supremacy, the position of the free world will be critical. At the same time we continue to learn of the missile accomplishments of the possible enemy. For fiscal reasons this Government, in turn, continues to cut back and slow down its own missile program.”

But Symington was not the only ambitious politician looking to capitalize on the Communist feat. Lyndon Johnson had been at his Texas ranch on the night of October 4, when news of the Soviet satellite had reached him. Like Eisenhower, he loved his rural retreat and “liked nothing better than to careen over the hills in his convertible Lincoln Continental, shooting bucks from the front seat,” in the words of Johnson’s biographer Randall B. Woods. On Sputnik night he had been entertaining guests at his deer tower, an air-conditioned, glass-enclosed, forty-foot-high hunting blind, complete with a dining room and a staff of black waiters. It sat at the wooded edge of a meadow and was flanked by banks of powerful spotlights that Johnson would switch on, blinding his prey for an easy shot. But that night, he had laid down his rifle and drinks and stared at the sky. “I’ll be dammed,” he swore, “if I sleep by the light of a Red Moon.”

He would