Master of the Senate (206 page)

There was new proof that, in 1958 as in 1950, no matter how skilled Reedy might be, Lyndon Johnson was his own best public relations man. One day in January, the Preparedness Subcommittee, which had met in open session that morning, was scheduled to meet behind closed doors to hear sensitive testimony from Major General John B. Medaris, commander-in-chief of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency. During the noon break, however, while Johnson was, in John Steele’s phrase, “lapping up a creamed chicken dish in his ornate green and gold Senate office,” the phone rang. Defense Secretary McElroy wanted to tell him that he was about to make an important announcement: that the Army was being authorized to proceed on a “top-priority basis” with the development of a solid-fuel missile instead of relying on liquid-fueled missiles as in the past. Johnson didn’t hesitate. Without so much as a pause, he asked McElroy not to make the announcement himself, but instead to let General Medaris make it—during his testimony before the subcommittee.

The headline-making news would therefore come not from the Pentagon, but from the Johnson Subcommittee, and Johnson made sure that the headlines
would be big. The time was already about 2:22 p.m. The closed-door session was scheduled to begin in eight minutes. Johnson sent aides and secretaries scurrying to the Press Room and to the Senate cafeteria where some journalists ate lunch, to announce that at 2:30 sharp the subcommittee’s doors would be thrown open—very briefly—for an important announcement. Reporters and photographers came running, some still chewing, and as they entered the room, Johnson, pounding his gavel for order, shouted, with the air of someone delivering a communiqué from a war zone, “General Medaris has a brief announcement to make. Copies of his statement will be ready in a few minutes.” Two senators—Saltonstall and Flanders—were entering the committee room at a leisurely postprandial senatorial pace, and then, as soon as Flanders sat down, he got up again and started to leave the room. “Senator, Senator—where are you going?” Johnson asked. “Oh, I’ll be back in fifteen seconds,” Flanders replied. “But you can’t leave us—this isn’t going to take fifteen seconds,” Johnson said curtly. Flanders sat back down, and Medaris made his announcement. And although there had been very little time to prepare a quotable phrase, one was ready on Lyndon Johnson’s lips. As soon as Medaris had finished reading, Johnson told the General, as reporters’ pens scribbled, “I hope this is not just a directive but that it is backed up with cold, hard cash. If you will convey that message to him [McElroy] maybe it will persuade him to make some more decisions.” In case anyone had missed them, Johnson repeated the key words—twice. “Cold, hard cash,” he said. “Cold, hard cash.”

There was still television to be accommodated. This was a problem, because the TV camera crews, anticipating a closed session to which their bulky cameras would not be admitted, had left them down by the Caucus Room while they had lunch and had not been able to lug them downstairs in time for the announcement. Even as Medaris was speaking, Johnson aides were telling the cameramen to set up their cameras in the corridor outside the committee room, and as soon as the General had finished, Johnson stepped around the committee table, grabbed his arm, pulled him bodily out of his chair, and propelled him into the hall. “Now fellas, let’s roll it!” Johnson said, standing so close to Medaris that it would have been difficult to show the General without showing him, too. One of the cameramen, still panting from his race upstairs, managed to say that one of their number had not yet arrived. “Well, you take it and give it to him,” Johnson said angrily, and when the cameramen said that was impossible, he replied, “Now, listen, I told you to be ready.” (“No one dared to mention that he had given them eight minutes to do so,” Evans and Novak said.)

T
HERE WERE OTHER SIMILARITIES
between 1958 and 1950, the same tendency toward hyperbole and oversimplification, for example. Dramatic though the
Sputnik
launchings may have been, their military significance—their significance,
in other words, for America’s safety—was minimal. The launchings showed that the Russians had indeed developed rockets with more thrust than America’s, but it was not thrust but rather the rockets’ accuracy and the destructive power of the nuclear warheads they carried that would count in war, and in both accuracy and explosive power the United States was still far ahead. In addition, America’s bomber fleet of huge B-52S, constantly on alert or in the air, was vastly superior to Russia’s bomber fleet, and had the added advantage of access to airfields virtually on Russia’s borders. A Soviet attack on the United States would, for all Nikita Khrushchev’s blustering, have been suicidal: America had enough nuclear capacity and missile technology—many times more than enough—to reduce the Soviet Union’s cities and factories to ruins should the USSR launch an attack. Moreover, during the Eisenhower Administration the American margin of superiority had not narrowed but widened.

Quite sure of these facts—in part because of amazingly detailed photographic evidence from U-2S, supersonic reconnaissance aircraft that overflew the USSR at heights of up to 85,000 feet—Dwight Eisenhower attempted, in the weeks after
Sputnik
, to reassure a jittery America (although believing, incorrectly, that Russia was unaware of the U-2 flights, he shied away from revealing any facts that might have given the Russians a hint of their existence). In an October 9 news conference, in which journalists’ questions, reflecting the mood of the moment, were more suspicious than at any other conference during his presidency, Eisenhower said that the satellite “does not raise my apprehensions, not one iota”; he would “rather have one good Redstone nuclear-armed missile than a rocket that could hit the moon,” he said. “We have no enemies on the moon.” Repeatedly during this period, the President sought to explain that we had more than enough nuclear capacity already so that massive emergency spending to develop more bombs was “unjustifiable”; “What is going to be done with this tremendous number of enormous weapons?” he asked on one occasion; how many times “could [you] kill the same man?” he asked on another. Furthermore, he said, the greatly accelerated spending would have “unfortunate effects” which his critics did not seem to have considered. As Ambrose puts it: “He deplored the Pearl Harbor atmosphere, the readiness to forget economics and spend whatever had to be spent to win the war. ‘We face,’ the President said, ‘not a temporary emergency but a long-term responsibility…. Hasty and extraordinary effort under the impetus of sudden fear … cannot provide for an adequate answer.’ He said he knew he could get whatever he asked for from Congress in the way of defense spending … but the suggested expenditures were at the expense of needed civilian expenditures and were ‘unjustifiable.’… We must remember that we are defending a way of life.” Turning America into a “garrison state” would mean taking the risk that “all we are striving to defend … could disappear.”

Lyndon Johnson, briefed repeatedly by the Pentagon, must have been
aware of these reassuring facts, but his statements continued to be short on facts and long on “Pearl Harbor atmosphere.” His subcommittee’s first report, filed on January 23, 1958, said: “We have reached a state of history where defense involves the total effort of a nation.” Total effort meant in 1958 what it had meant in 1950; once again, the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee called for America to place itself—immediately—on an all-out war footing. In a prepared speech Johnson delivered on October 17, he said that the forty-hour workweek “will not produce intercontinental ballistic missiles,” and therefore the entire nation “must go on a full, wartime mobilization schedule.” His rhetoric escalated. America’s first attempt to orbit a satellite, the
Vanguard 1
, failed on December 6, when the missile exploded as it was leaving the Cape Canaveral launching pad. The news was delivered to Johnson as he was chairing a subcommittee hearing before a large crowd in the Senate Caucus Room. “How long, how long, oh, God, how long will it take us to catch up with the Russians’ two satellites?” he asked. His speeches, the author Alfred Steinberg says, “painted a frightening picture of the horror that would overtake the United States if it did not treat Soviet leadership in missilery as a war.” “Control of space means control of the world,” Johnson said. “From space, the masters of infinity would have the power to control the earth’s weather, to cause drought and flood, to change the tides and raise the levels of the sea, to divert the Gulf Stream and change temperate climates to frigid.” The subcommittee hearings were to generate headlines day after day, but even Reedy was to admit that “in retrospect some of the material should have been examined more carefully before being spread on the record in
ex parte
proceedings. One of the results was the public creation of a ‘missile gap’—a concept that we were hopelessly behind the Soviets in the possession of ICBMs.”

And in 1958 as in 1950, the Preparedness Subcommittee produced a publicity bonanza—hearings in the Senate Caucus Room jammed with radio and television cameras and microphones; cover articles in national magazines (“In a week of shot and shell in Washington … Lyndon Johnson went a far piece toward seizing, on behalf of the legislative branch, the leadership in reshaping U.S. defense policy,”
Life
asserted)—and there were again, in ’58 as in ’50, indications that it was less preparedness than publicity that was the subcommittee chairman’s primary concern. Eisenhower’s calm assurances began to be understood, and they were bolstered by the successful launching of America’s first satellite,
Explorer
, on January 31, 1958—and the resultant slackening of media interest in the missile crisis was mirrored by a corresponding slackening in the chairman’s interest.

As usual the shift followed a Jim Rowe memo, this one typed on February 5. “I believe you have gained all you can on space and missiles,” it said. “You have received a tremendous press, increased your national stature and gotten away scot-free without a scratch.” A major recession was under way and, Rowe wrote, “I think you should turn now to the obvious new issue, which
is unemployment.” Johnson turned. “In the early spring,” George Reedy was to say, he “just plain lost interest in the space issue. The public had begun to calm down and the Buck Rogers serials had played themselves out. He had never been comfortable with the subject matter and welcomed the rise of a new issue that he really understood—unemployment…. Unfortunately, Johnson … could see the [missile] issue only in terms of newspaper space and public attention. It did not involve poverty, education, or economic opportunity—problems which really held his attention. Therefore, as column inches devoted to outer space dwindled and as polls registered a diminution of popular interest, he virtually abandoned the entire project.” “Abandoned” was not an overstatement: Lyndon Johnson’s loss of interest in the space and missile investigation was complete—as became clear when aides approached him to ask for guidelines for the final subcommittee report. To their astonishment, Johnson didn’t want a report; he “would actually have preferred that the subcommittee issue nothing at all,” Evans and Novak would later report.

Johnson did not see a problem in this. “It did not bother him to abandon a program once he had concluded that it had lost its popular appeal,” Reedy was to say. Reedy, however, saw a big problem: danger that the 1958 investigation would come to resemble the 1950 investigation in another respect, and that journalists who had been around in 1950 might recognize—and call attention to—the similarity. “Some of the staff members … recognized that leaving it [the subcommittee report] in limbo would ultimately work against Johnson,” he says. “He had something of a reputation of exploiting issues without bringing them to a head, and to forget outer space after all the drama would have been deadly.” A final report, including seventeen tersely worded, extremely general recommendations (sample: “Start work at once on the development of a rocket motor with a million pounds of thrust”), was drafted by Weisl and Vance and approved by the six other subcommittee members (in yet another example of bipartisan unanimity). And, Reedy says, Johnson’s “worried assistants, who realized that his language [during the hearings] had been too strong to close the books with nothing accomplished, pushed him” into introducing a bill to create a new Senate committee, a Special Committee on Space and Astronautics, whose chairmanship Johnson took, to draft legislation for a national space program. “We’d shove the bills into Johnson’s hands and get him to introduce them and that’s the way the act emerged,” Reedy was to say, in a recollection confirmed by other aides. What Reedy calls the “bills” were actually amendments—to legislation that had been drafted not by the committee but by the Eisenhower Administration, which sent to Congress a bill creating a National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA).

Identifying the bill’s principal weakness—its lack of provision for a central policy-making body—Weisl, Vance, and Solis Horwitz recommended an amendment creating within NASA a small nine-member Space Council. Although during “the ensuing legislative process” Johnson, in Robert
Divine’s words, “let his staff do most of the work,” he insisted that the recommendation be incorporated in the Act. Eisenhower wanted only a purely advisory body, “not one which makes decisions,” but in a meeting on Sunday, July 7, he and Johnson worked out a compromise, keeping the Policy Council but appointing the President as its head, and on July 29, 1958, Eisenhower signed the NASA Act into law. “Ike knew,” as Divine writes, “that he had out-maneuvered Johnson. Over the next three years, the Space Council met on only rare occasions,” without Eisenhower in attendance, and during that time had relatively little influence on national space or defense policies. But Johnson, in introducing the bill, said, reading from a memo drafted by Reedy, that he wanted to be a major figure in “the greatest of mankind’s adventures,” and Reedy’s maneuvers successfully concealed from journalists his boss’s lack of interest; their reaction is summarized in Evans and Novak’s judgment that the Preparedness Subcommittee’s space investigation was “a textbook example of what a Senate investigation ought to be.”