Fifties (102 page)

At the same time the Navy program was running into serious problems, just as von Braun had suspected it would. It was no small thing, von Braun knew, to design a rocket from scratch. The Viking’s guidance system kept gaining weight, despite the plans on the drawing board. Meanwhile, to anyone paying attention, there was growing confidence, indeed audaciousness, in the Soviet press. In May 1957 an announcement from the Soviet Academy of Science told Soviet citizens to prepare to track the satellite. A month later a trade publication gave ham radio operators detailed instructions on the course the satellite would take. On August 3, 1957, an R-7 was successfully launched. It did not carry a satellite, but the Soviets were clearly on the verge of a major success. On August 26, 1957, Khrushchev announced that “a super long-distance intercontinental multistage ballistic missile was launched a few days ago.”

By the first week in October 1957, Walter Sullivan,
The New York Times
science reporter, had heard enough to go to the paper’s Washington bureau and file a notice that he would write a story for the Saturday paper reporting that the Russians would launch a satellite at any moment. His story was never published, for it was overtaken by events. On the morning of October 4, the Soviets launched an intercontinental ballistic missile. By chance that evening, Sullivan attended a cocktail party at the Russian embassy in Washington for some fifty international scientists at the IGY conference. Sullivan was called to the phone and his office told him there was a wire-service report from Moscow that the Russians had placed a satellite in space. Sullivan whispered the news to American scientist Lloyd Berkner, who called for attention. “I am informed by
The New York Times
that a satellite is in orbit at an elevation of 900 kilometers. I wish to congratulate our Soviet colleagues on their achievement.” Applause broke out in the room. The Soviet satellite was a relatively small aluminum alloy sphere that weighed 184 pounds and was 22.8 inches in diameter. It had two radio transmitters. The Russians called it
Sputnik,
which means “fellow traveler” in Russian.

No one in the Eisenhower administration, despite all the warnings, was prepared. Even worse, and this was almost surely generational, none of the senior men even saw at first what a psychological victory it was for the Soviets. Defense secretary Engine Charlie Wilson, who had an almost perfect instinct to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, called
Sputnik
“a useless hunk of iron.” Sherman
Adams, Ike’s closest personal assistant in the White House, said that America was not interested in getting caught up “in an outerspace basketball game.” Clarence Randall, who was a White House adviser, called it “a silly bauble in the sky.” Eisenhower himself was pounded with questions at his next press conference, on October 9. Merriman Smith began by asking, “Russia has launched an earth satellite. They also claim to have had a successful firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile, none of which this country has done. I ask you, sir, what are we going to do about it?” Eisenhower answered that there was no link between having
Sputnik
and an ICBM, although the Soviet success certainly showed that they could hurl an object a great distance. Moreover, he added, there had never been a race to get into space first. Nor did
Sputnik
prove that an ICBM could hit a target. But the questions kept coming. Finally, Hazel Markel of NBC asked, “Mr. President, in light of the great faith which the American people have in your military knowledge and leadership, are you saying that at this time with the Russian satellite whirling around the world, you are not more concerned nor overly concerned about our nation’s security?” The President sought to calm such fears: “As far as the satellite is concerned, that does not raise my apprehensions, not one iota. I can see nothing at this moment, at this stage of development, that is significant in that development as far as security is concerned,” he said. Thanks to the U-2 photographs, he had good reason for confidence; unfortunately, he could not share the evidence with the country.

But the younger men in the administration—Nixon, Cabot Lodge, Nelson Rockefeller—understood immediately the propaganda value of
Sputnik.
They knew that in the age of atomic weapons, any kind of scientific breakthrough on the part of the Soviets was seen as a threat. Percival Brundage, the director of the budget, went to a dinner party and said that
Sputnik
would be forgotten in six months. “Yes, dear,” answered his dinner companion, the famed hostess Perle Mesta. “And in six months we may all be dead.”

The success of
Sputnik
seemed to herald a kind of technological Pearl Harbor, which in fact was exactly what Edward Teller called it. A Democratic legislative aide wrote a paper for Lyndon Johnson showing him that this issue could take him to the White House. (He was wrong.) Some saw it as a rebuke to America’s material self-indulgence. Johnson seized on a metaphor of Detroit and American affluence and complacency: “It is not very reassuring to be told that next year we will put a better satellite in the air. Perhaps it will even have chrome trim and automatic windshield wipers.” Suddenly, it
seemed as if America were undergoing a national crisis of confidence. Admiral Hyman Rickover criticized the American school system. A book called
Why Johnny Can’t Read
—
and What You Can Do About It,
which had appeared two years earlier to little attention, suddenly became a smash best-seller. The president of Harvard, Nathan Pusey, was moved to declare that a greater percentage of the GNP should go to education.

It was a shattering moment.
Life
magazine printed an article called “Arguing the Case for Being Panicky.” John Foster Dulles, defying logic and the facts, noted that the Soviets had had an advantage because of their capture of German scientists.
Sputnik
jokes abounded: A
Sputnik
cocktail was two parts vodka, one part sour grapes. One critic noted that as
Sputnik
went over the White House, it said, “Beep, beep, I like Ike, I like Ike.”

The Soviets could not resist the temptation to gloat. Their leaders saw it as a victory over American materialism. At an international conference in Barcelona, Soviet space scientist Leonid Sedov told an American: “You Americans have a better standard of living than we have. But the American loves his car, his refrigerator, his house. He does not, as we Russians do, love his country.” Khrushchev had a visceral sense of the impact of
Sputnik
on ordinary people, how terrifying and awesome it seemed. The Soviets, he boasted, could do this anytime. They would produce rockets like this by the dozens—“like sausages.” When the Americans finally launched a satellite, he belittled it (although in scientific terms it was considerably more impressive than the Soviets’). The American satellites were small, like oranges, he said. The Americans would have to hurl many oranges into space to catch up with the Soviet people. Space became Khrushchev’s newest propaganda weapon. In public he glorified not the scientists but the cosmonauts. They were his space children, “celestial brothers” of the Soviet people; he was their “space father.”

The day
Sputnik
was launched, Neil McElroy, who was soon to replace Wilson as secretary of defense, was visiting Huntsville by chance with some of his top aides. They were touring the facilities when they heard the news. All von Braun’s frustrations exploded: “We knew they were going to do it!” Then he added, “Vanguard will never make it. We have the hardware on the shelf. We can put a satellite up in sixty days.” When McElroy left, von Braun, for the first time in months, seemed confident about the future of his program again. “They’ll call me soon,” he thought. “McElroy will give me the green light soon. He doesn’t have any alternative.” It took a
month. On November 8, McElroy sent a telegram asking them to launch two satellites.

Soon there was
Sputnik II.
Launched on November 3, 1957, it weighed 1,120.29 pounds, some six times more than its predecessor, its orbit was even higher, and it carried a small dog, Laika. Clearly, the Soviets intended to put a man in space soon. It was another psychological triumph. But the worst was still to come. Jim Hagerty, Ike’s press secretary, had announced right after
Sputnik
that the Navy team planned to put a satellite in orbit very soon. Hagerty’s announcement stunned the Navy.

But the Navy team speeded up its schedule. Smarting from the Soviet success, the White House not only announced the launch but in effect showcased it as a major media event. On the day of the launch, there was talk of delaying because of high winds, but gradually they died down and the decision was made to go ahead. The countdown finished, and in the words of Kurt Stehling, a German engineer, “It seemed as if the gates of hell had opened up. Brilliant stiletto flames shot out from the side of the rocket near the engine. The vehicle agonizingly hesitated for a moment, quivered again, and in front of our unbelieving, shocked eyes, began to topple. It sank like a great flaming sword into scabbard down into the blast tube. It toppled slowly, breaking apart, hitting part of the test guard and ground with a tremendous roar that could be felt and heard even behind the two-foot concrete wall of the blockhouse and the six-inch bulletproof glass. For a moment or two there was complete disbelief. I could see it in the faces. I could feel it myself. This just couldn’t be.... The fire died down and we saw America’s supposed response to the 200-pound Soviet satellite—our four-pound grapefruit—lying amid the scattered glowing debris, still beeping away, unharmed.”

“U.S. Calls It Kaputnik,” chuckled the
London Daily Express.
“Oh, What a Flopnik!” headlined the
Daily Herald.
“Phut Goes U.S. Satellite,” said the
Daily Mail.
It was a “Stayputnik,” said another paper. Again the Soviets gloated. A prominent Soviet clown named Karandash (the Pencil) went into the arena with a small balloon. The balloon exploded. His assistant asked what it was. “That was
Sputnik,
” he said. The audience gasped. “The American
Sputnik,
” he added to great cheers.

So von Braun’s team was left to recoup American prestige. Hopes were pinned on Missile #29. The date chosen for the launch was January 29, 1958. There was to be no premature publicity. The rocket was checked out at night so that newsmen would not catch on. The early part of the countdown went well, but the weather report
was bad. They decided to delay the launch. Kurt Debus began to worry that the fuel in the rocket might start corroding the tanks. By January 31 he was pleading to launch.

Finally, everything seemed to come together. With some one hundred reporters in the grandstand, the launch took place at 10:47:56
P.M.
They knew immediately it was a good one. Everything seemed to work perfectly. At six minutes and fifty seconds into the flight, the final rocket, or kick stage, ignited and burned for six seconds and hurled the satellite into space. Von Braun was at the Pentagon with Army officials, including Wilbur Brucker, secretary of the Army, and William Pickering, the head of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The minutes seemed interminable as they waited for some hard confirmation of the orbit. No one wanted to call the President until it was a sure thing. The satellite was, by von Braun’s calculations, supposed to pass the Pasadena tracking station at 12:41 Eastern time. At 12:40 they queried Pasadena. Had it heard anything? Nothing yet. At 12:43, the tension ever greater, they queried Pasadena again. Had it heard anything. “Negative,” came back the answer. “Well, why the hell don’t you hear anything?” asked Pickering. Brucker was nervous. “Wernher,” he asked von Braun. “What happened?” Von Braun was sweating. Pickering, on the phone to Pasadena, yelled out, “They hear her, Wernher, they hear her.” Von Braun looked at his watch. “She is eight minutes late,” he said. “Interesting.” Finally, Hagerty was allowed to call Eisenhower and tell him. “That’s wonderful,” he said. “I surely feel a lot better now.” Then he paused and considered things. “Let’s not make too great a hullabaloo about this,” he added. America, after some significant and quite unnecessary humiliations, was finally in the space race.

FORTY-TWO

T
ELEVISION WAS TURNING OUT
to be a magic machine for selling products, and the awareness of that was still dawning on Madison Avenue in the late 1950s. Yet the ad men had already discovered that television favored certain products and could sell them more readily: beer, cigarettes, various patent medicines and, above all, such big-ticket items as cars. No company spent more money on advertising or advertised its products better, as the country was riding the crest of that great economic wave, than GM.

Kensinger Jones, a young man in the advertising department of the Leo Burnett Company in Chicago, saw an ad in the industry journal
Advertising Age
around the middle of 1957—an unidentified company was looking for a television creative director to handle the world’s largest account. Jones was immediately interested. He had worked at the Burnett company for some five years and had done
well there, but he felt that it, like most advertising companies of the period, was still too print-oriented. As far as Jones could tell, it was a generational thing. He believed all the top people at all the top agencies had made their reputations by handling words—words were what they understood and responded to. Television made them uneasy. Some of them looked down on it; some of them feared it. Few of them seemed to realize the extent to which it had already changed their own industry. Even when they used it and thought they were using it well, Ken Jones thought, they didn’t fully exploit its greatest strength: images. Instead, they did what they knew how to do best—employ words. As far as Jones was concerned, television was the dog and print was the tail, and the generation that dominated the ad agencies was letting the tail wag the dog. Leo Burnett himself seemed to realize he had to adapt to television, but he couldn’t quite force himself to do it fully.