The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [100]
Meanwhile, things weren’t going terribly well for America in the wider world. In the autumn of 1957, the Soviets successfully tested their first intercontinental ballistic missile, which meant that now they could kill us without leaving home, and within weeks of that launched the world’s first satellite into space. Called Sputnik, it was a small metal sphere about the size of a beachball that didn’t do much but orbit the Earth and go “ping” from time to time, but that was very considerably more than we could do. The following month the Soviets launched Sputnik II, which was much larger at eleven hundred pounds and carried a little dog (a little Communist dog) called Laika. Our vanity stung, we responded by announcing a satellite launch of our own, and on December 6, 1957, at Cape Canaveral in Florida the burners were fired on a giant Viking rocket carrying a fancy new Vanguard satellite. As the world watched, the rocket slowly rose two feet, toppled over, and exploded. It was a humiliating setback. The papers referred to the incident variously as “Kaputnik,” “Stayputnik,” “Sputternik,” or “Flopnik,” depending on how comfortable they were with wit. President Eisenhower’s normally steady popularity ratings dropped twenty-two points in a week.
America didn’t get its first satellite into space until 1958 and that wasn’t awfully impressive: it weighed just thirty-one pounds and was not much larger than an orange. All four other major launches by the United States that year crashed spectacularly or refused to take to the air. As late as 1961, over a third of U.S. launches failed.
The Soviets meanwhile went from strength to strength. In 1959 they landed a rocket on the Moon and took the first pictures of the backside of the Moon, and in 1961 successfully put the first astronaut, Yuri Gagarin, into space and safely brought him home again. One week after the Gagarin space trip came the disastrous American-led Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, bringing extra layers of embarrassment and worry to national life. We were beginning to look hopeless and outclassed at whatever we did.
News from the world of popular culture was generally discouraging as well. Research showed that cigarettes really did cause cancer, as many people had long suspected. Tareyton, my father’s brand, quickly rushed out a series of ads calmly reassuring smokers that “all the tars and nicotine trapped in the filter are guaranteed not to reach your throat” without mentioning that all the lethal goos not trapped in the filters would. But consumers weren’t so easily taken in by fatuous and misleading claims any longer, particularly after news came out that advertisers had been engaged in secret trials of devious subliminal advertising. During a test at a movie house in Fort Lee, New Jersey, patrons were shown a film in which two clipped phrases—“Drink Coca-Cola” and “Hungry? Eat Popcorn”—were flashed on the screen for 13000 of a second every five seconds, much too fast to be consciously noted, but subconsciously influential, or so it seemed, for sales of Coke went up 57.7 percent and popcorn by nearly 20 percent during the period of the experiment, according to Life magazine. Soon, Life warned us, all movies and television programs would be instructing us hundreds of times an hour what to eat, drink, smoke, wear, and think, making consumer zombies of us all. (In fact, subliminal advertising didn’t work and was soon abandoned.)
Elsewhere on the home front, juvenile crime continued to rise and the education system seemed to be falling apart. The most popular nonfiction book of 1957 was an attack on American education standards called Why Johnny Can’t Read, warning us that we were falling dangerously behind the rest of the world, and linking the success of Communism to a decline in American reading. Television got itself into a terrible scandal when it was revealed that many of the game shows