17. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 440-480

Book VII: A Spy in Orbit and a Game of Chance, 73. Palm Tree Disguises; 74. Keeping the Military on the Leash; 75. "Use 'em or Lose 'em"; 76. LeMay and Tommy Power as the Wild Cards; 77. Avoiding Götterdämmerung; 78. Buying Time for the Empire to Implode. Epilogue: The Schriever Luck, 79. Johnny von Neumann Finds Faith but Not Peace; 80. "The Slowest Old Trev Has Ever Gone in a Cadillac"; 81. Losing It All and Forgiving a Brother; 82. "Only in America"; 83. A Reunion With Hap

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At the end of May 1962, a Soviet delegation had obtained Fidel Castro's permission to place its missiles in Cuba, and between July and October Soviet freighters and passenger ships began moving the missiles and the troops to the island. Forty-one thousand, nine hundred two Soviet officers and men and thirty-six missiles, with launchers and nuclear warheads, had arrived by the time the crisis broke. Khrushchev retained the power to command the launch of the ICBMs, but the military could use any tactical weapons it saw necessary in case of an American invasion. That the transport went undetected can be blamed on the CIA, which was in disarray after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, as well as the grounding of the U-2 spy planes after one had been shot down in China in September. An earlier U-2 had photographed surface-to-air missiles in western Cuba in August. And finally, most people simply didn't believe that the Soviets would be insane enough to put long-range missiles in Cuba.

The Soviets got caught when U-2 flights over Cuba resumed in October. The Joint Chiefs recommended air strikes to take out the missile sights, but Kennedy was concerned about retaliation and ordered a naval blockade. The military still wanted to strike and to follow up with an invasion, and LeMay pulled out the old comparison to Neville Chamberlain. But Kennedy, who had been reading Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, and didn't want to blunder into World War III, stood firm. No one knew of the tactical nukes in Cuba or that the Soviets were prepared to use them to repel an invasion. This would almost certainly have provoked the United States to use its own tactical weapons, "incinerating much of Cuba and its inhabitants and would-be Russian defenders." It would also have empowered the ultrahawks like LeMay and Thomas Power. Kennedy "raised the alert to DEFCON 2, a single step short of all-out nuclear conflict, on Wednesday, October 24.... All of SAC went to the highest possible state of readiness." The potential was there for the destruction of "the entire Northern Hemisphere."

Khrushchev was, fortunately, not a lunatic, though he realized he had been a fool. He backed down and started negotiating, getting a promise from Kennedy not to invade Cuba and to remove the missiles from Turkey in exchange for the removal of the missiles and light bombers. The Americans lifted the naval embargo in November, and the Soviets removed all but a brigade of 3,000 soldiers from Cuba. The missiles in Turkey were slowly removed: The last one left in July 1963, three months after the ones in Italy were removed and only a month before the ones in England.

As it turned out, the most significant effect of the nuclear stalemate was "to help buy the time needed for the Soviet Union to collapse of its own internal contradictions." The Soviet Union, its agriculture crippled by the system of collective farms, was forced to import corn and wheat from the United States. The only exportable products it produced were petroleum and natural gas, most of which went to Eastern Europe to prop up the fractious states it supported there. Where Khrushchev at least attempted to make reforms, Brezhnev was corrupt and cynical; he once told his brother, "All that stuff about Communism is a tall tale for popular consumption. After all, we can't leave the people with no faith." He was also responsible for the disastrous campaign in Afghanistan in 1979. Gorbachev's civil liberties reforms in the 1980s brought about a significant change but he could make no headway in improving the standard of living because of the "sclerotic economic system." Trying to hold the Soviet Union together, he let the Eastern European satellites go their own way in 1989. Boris Yeltsin finally dissolved the Soviet Union.

The nuclear stalemate was dubbed "Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD. There was nothing mad about the grim equation. It made perfect sense by enforcing a nuclear peace." The madness lay in allowing the arms race to escalate: "Technology was in the saddle of a horse named Fear in a race of human folly." On the other hand, the rocket technology made possible the peaceful exploration of space: John Glenn rode an Atlas into orbit in February 1962 and the Titan II made the moon landing possible. The development of communications satellites made a global economy possible and transformed everyday life: "most people who slide their credit cared into the electronic reader on a gas pump or an automated teller machine have no idea their card's validity is being checked via space."

The question became not the quantity and quality of American military power, but whether the leaders of the United States would wield it wisely or foolishly, as the war in Iraq would so aptly illustrate. 

John von Neumann was diagnosed with cancer in 1955, was hospitalized in April 1956 and died in February 1857, age 53. Trevor Gardner, frustrated by the economies of the Eisenhower administration, resigned from his position as assistant secretary of the Air Force for research and development in February 1956. He returned to private business and wrote magazine articles denouncing the government's ineptness; these became fuel for the "missile gap" myth. He was regarded as "too controversial" for a government position, and died of a heart attack in September 1963, age 48. John Bruce Medaris found his space program handed over to a civilian agency known as NASA in 1959; he left the Army and became an Episcopal priest. Ed Hall, who never forgave Schriever, did forgive his brother Ted when he learned Ted was a spy.

Schriever became a four-star general in July 1961, but didn't get along with Robert McNamara and decided to retire in August 1966, just before his fifty-sixth birthday. His marriage to Dora went on the rocks in 1968 when he had an affair with another woman. They separated amicably but didn't divorce because Dora was a devout Catholic. In 1986 he met the retired pop singer Joni James, but didn't marry her until 1997, after Dora granted him a divorce. He was 87 and she was 67. In 1998, Falcon Air Force Base near Colorado Springs, a command center for satellites, was renamed Schriever Air Force Base. He died on June 20, 2005, age 94, and was buried in Arlington near Hap Arnold. 

16. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 406-439

Book VI: Building the Unstoppable, 66. A Victory Despite the Bugs; 67. Minuteman: Ed Hall's Triumph; 68. "You Couldn't Keep Him in That Job". Book VII: A Spy in Orbit and a Game of Chance, 69. A Would-Be Spy in the Sky Goes Awry; 70. Mathison Snatches the Prize; 71. Discoverer Goes "Black" into Corona; 72. A Hare-Brained Scheme

_____

After the deployment of Atlas D at Vandenberg, there was a year's learning curve for the SAC launch crews. Maj. Benjamin Bellis was put in charge of straightening things out, which he did by insisting on full documentation of every modification that engineers made to the missiles, particularly if they were successful, "because you know you got it right but you can't repeat it," Bellis observed. "It drives you wild." Meanwhile, work was proceeding on the F series, the last of the Atlas models and the first to be put in underground silos. By December 1962, there were 132 Atlas missiles ready to be used against the Soviet Union. And the Titan, originally a fallback missile in case Atlas didn't work, had added another 54 missiles to the arsenal.

Now attention turned to "the ultimate in ICBMs," the Minuteman. Ed Hall had been angry at being shoved aside on Atlas and requested a transfer, but instead Schriever put him in charge of the Minuteman project, which was the creation of a solid-fueled ICBM that would have an advantage over the liquid-fueled Atlas and Jupiter. It could be much smaller, for one thing, as long as the bomb it would carry could be sized down. And it could be launched more quickly than the liquid-fueled rockets, which took fifteen minutes to fuel. Minuteman could be launched instantly. Hall managed to win over even Curtis LeMay by creating a vision of hundred of Minuteman that could be launched simultaneously:

Hall got the impression that what appealed most to LeMay was the massiveness of the scheme. The thought of hundreds and hundreds of rockets roaring out of silos was LeMay's vision of how to frighten the Russians and then to reduce the Soviet Union to cinders if it did come to nuclear war. 

Approval of "what would probably be the biggest rocket program the Air Force would ever undertake" was granted in February 1958. But Schriever disappointed Hall once again by taking the project out of his hands. Hall was so bitter that he left the Air Force and went to work as an engineer at United Aircraft Corp. A young colonel named Samuel Phillips, who had worked on the Thor installations in Britain, was put in charge of Minuteman. The first test of the missile, in February 1961, was a complete success that earned Philllips a promotion to brigadier general at the age of 40. He went on to run the Apollo moon landing program on loan to NASA.

The creation of Minuteman now put the United States so far ahead in the strategic missile competition that the Soviet Union was confronted not with a gap but with a chasm." It would be five years before the Soviets acquired a solid-fueled missile.... The advent of Minuteman put an end to the fear of a nuclear Pearl Harbor that had haunted Eisenhower.... And even if by some miracle the Soviets managed to hit first with everything they had, there wuld still be plenty of Minutemen intact in their steel and concrete shelters to doom Russia. No Soviet statesman with a vestige of sanity could risk a surprise attack.

But Schriever still had work to do, this time on spy satellites. He had been put in charge of the Air Force's satellite program in 1955, partly because he was also the one in charge of the rockets that would put the satellites into orbit. Nothing much got done on them, largely because of Eisenhower's budget concerns, until Sputnik was launched in 1957. Eisenhower authorized creation of a spy satellite in February 1958, with the Air Force in charge of development but the CIA in charge of the finished product, an arrangement parallel with the one that had been successfully used on the U-2 spy plane. Of course, Schriever would take the blame for any failures.

The project was announced as a scientific and medical one called Discoverer, to test the effect of space on the items "from human bone marrow to corn seedlings" that would be carried into orbit and then retrieved. But the CIA called it Corona, and the most important things to be sent up would be cameras and film. Schriever put "Moose" Mathison in charge of satellite control, which was first housed in a motel in Palo Alto and then in a room at Lockheed in Sunnyvale. The equipment used to control the satellites was primitive -- there were no minicomputers or solar panels, and the control system was a strip of plastic tape with holes punched in it that was hooked up to an electric timer.

The first launch attempt, in January 1959 from Vandenberg, was a disaster that the crew labeled "Discoverer 0." But the Discoverer I launch went fine, sending the Agena rocket into orbit, though with an attempt to eject and recover a capsule. Discoverer II also launched well, but the control station in Hawaii lost track of the rocket. The capsule was supposed to be ejected and recovered in the Pacific northwest of Hawaii, but there was no way to control the satellite after radio connection was lost. It was calculated that, left on its own, the capsule would  land on a Norwegian island near the Arctic Circle. Mathison flew to the island, whose governor reported that people had seen the capsule, attached to a parachute, descend. But there was nothing at the site except tracks in the snow leading to a coal mine, a concession that belonged to the Soviet Union. Mathison was convinced that the Russians had the capsule, but Schriever messaged, "Tell Moose to stay out of Soviet territory." The capsule, which had no military value, was never found.

A year and a half followed with little success and increasing complaints from Eisenhower to Schriever and to Richard Bissell, the CIA man put in charge of Discoverer/Corona. Schriever was about to dismiss Mathison from the project until Discoverer XIII was launched in August 1960. When he learned that the orbit was perfect, Mathison flew to Hawaii and recovered the capsule, which contained only instruments and an American flag. He flew back with the capsule to Andrews Air Force Base, where Schriever was waiting. The capsule was taken to the White House where the flag was removed and presented to Eisenhower. Then the capsule was displayed to Sen. Richard Russell, the chairman of the Armed Services committee, and Lyndon Johnson, the Senate Majority Leader before being sent on a tour of the United States and eventually winding up in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

In fact, Mathison had made an end run around the CIA, which was supposed to pick up the capsule from the Navy ship that retrieved it, and fly it to Rochester, New York. It was meant to be a dress rehearsal for the top-secret delivery to Eastman Kodak of the film capsules that would eventually be placed in the capsule. The CIA was furious, and accused Mathison of a "unique mix of creative anarchy and casual effrontery." (Mathison had even packed a service pistol to intimidate the captain of the ship if he put up any resistance to his taking the capsule.) Mathison was just doing what Schriever, who had learned the value of publicity, wanted him to do. 

The next launch was the real thing, and this time Mathison left retrieval up to the CIA. Discoverer/Corona XIV went into orbit eight days later, carrying a panoramic camera developed by Itek, a company founded by Richard Leghorn, a colonel in the Air Force reserve. Launch, orbit and recovery were perfect, and the resulting photographs of the Soviet Union were deemed "terrific, stupendous." Eisenhower was pleased, of course, but he also insisted that the pictures be kept secret, for fear that Khrushchev would find a way of retaliating. Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy was briefed on the spying, and as a result stopped talking about the "missile gap," though as Sheehan notes, "he did not stop his supporters from talking about it, and Nixon suffered the consequences on election day." Discoverer was now Corona, a project that remained secret as its successors have done.

As for Minuteman, the first ten missiles were placed in silos in October 1962 -- the same month that Khrushchev "brought the United States and the Soviet Union the closest they were ever to come to nuclear war." When Leonid Brezhnev took power from Khrushchev two years later, he cited the Cuban Missile Crisis as an example of Khrushchev's "harebrained scheming." Khrushchev had been most irked by the presence of missiles in Turkey, the closest to the Soviet Union, and decided that sending IRBMs to Cuba would test the United States' resolve. The Soviet R-12 missiles in Cuba would threaten Eastern cities as far north as New York, and as far west as Dallas and Oklahoma City. Both Khrushchev's friend and adviser Anastas Mikoyan and his foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, advised against it. Khrushchev failed to realize that "Americans regarded the Caribbean as the Romans had regarded the Mediterranean. It was Mare Nostrum, Our Sea." And that "No American president could withstand the political firestorm that would ensue if he acquiesced in the positioning of Russian nuclear missiles on" Cuba. 

15. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 371-406

Book VI: Building the Unstoppable, 59. Jamie Wallace's Thor Show; 60. The Biggest Airlift Since Berlin; 61. "Roy ... I Want You to Get Me Camp Cooke"; 62. A Tie; 63. Black Saturday; 64. The Trials of Atlas and a Christmas Surprise; 65. Whose Missile Gap?

_____

Jacobson put Jamie Walker Wallace, an Air Force major, in charge of the ground support equipment needed to make Thor operational on site in England. In December 1957, Wallace mounted a display of the missile and the ground facilities it would need in Los Angeles. Three thousand people, including the brass and contractors but also a lot of others from the scientific community and elsewhere, attended the two-week show. Security was low, partly because Schriever wanted word of the missile to leak out, although there was virtually no attention from the press. And in August 1958, the first Thor was flown to England. It was followed by fifty-nine more in "the biggest airlift since Berlin," organized by Wallace. Control of the missiles was to be under joint command, with both the RAF launch control officer and a SAC officer having to agree to launch.

Meanwhile, Schriever had been negotiating for an operational base and permanent training ground for the ICBM. His choice was Camp Cooke, on the California coast near Lompoc, because it was "the one coastal area of the United States from which a polar orbit of a space satellite was most easily achieved." From that site, there is almost nothing but ocean all the way south to Antarctica. In the summer of 1956, Schriever deputized Maj. Roy Ferguson to persuade the brass to let him have Camp Cooke. Ferguson had an ally in Capt. Richard Henry, who had been designated by LeMay as SAC's liaison officer to Schriever's program, an appointment, given Henry's low rank, that LeMay had meant as "a gesture of contempt." Henry recognized that Camp Cooke was an ideal for SAC, once it took charge of the missiles after development. Ferguson had been told by Schriever to stress that he wanted the location as a training base, and not to mention that it was ideal for missile launchings, but confronted with the boredom of his audience, Ferguson took a chance and pulled out his charts about using the site for shooting the missiles. From that location, a missile could reach all of China and the eastern Soviet Union, including Vladivostok. As a result of the presentation, Camp Cooke was handed over to the Air Force and in 1958 was renamed Vandenberg Air Force Base. In 1978 Richard Henry became its commander.

The Thors in England gave the joint RAF and SAC command the capability of hitting all of the western Soviet Union. Finding European sites for the Jupiters was more difficult, especially after Charles de Gaulle took office in France in 1958. "Although he privately admitted that Western Europe's security relied on American power, he was not about to publicly concede dependence on anyone by leaning on Washington's missiles. De Gaulle refused the Jupiters." But the Italians gave them a site in the boot heel of the peninsula, with thirty missiles also under joint command. Fifteen more were located in Turkey, which lacked the skilled manpower for joint command but provided security troops for the missile sites. The Turkish missiles could reach all of European Russia and as far as Soviet Central Asia. The Russians had deployed their IRBMs earlier, but now the arms race was a tie.

Schriever's fame had reached the point that he made the cover of Time magazine in 1957. The magazine described him as "hard-eyed," "a tomorrow's man," a "discerning, thinking leader," and an "outstanding and extremely tenacious manager." The Air Force had now designated the branch to which Schriever belonged the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division, and he was in charge of 485 officers and noncom specialists as well as 222 civilians. Ramo-Wooldridge had grown from 170 scientists and technicians to 1,961, and by the close of FY 1958 "had earned approximately $70 million." There were seventeen major contractors in the program working on the two ICBMs, Atlas and Titan, and 200 subcontractors and suppliers. Once a month all the project managers were summoned to a briefing they came to call "Black Saturday." Each manager presented a report to Lt. Col. Charles Getz III, whose "ruthless efficiency" and demand for paperwork made him "the most unpopular man in the command." Adding to the unpopularity was the insistence on reporting the bad news -- Schriever wasn't interested in progress reports so much as in problems that needed to be solved.

Atlas had been one of those problems. Its first launch in June 1957 had been a failure -- it had flown for only twenty-four seconds before it "flipped wildly through a loop-the-loop and fell back into its trail of fire" and had to be destroyed. But Schriever regarded it as a "partial success" because the missile hadn't broken up before having to be destroyed. The second Atlas had a similar performance. Schriever was once again under pressure, but the third Atlas, launched on December 17, the fifty-fourth anniversary of the Wright brothers' flight, went 350 miles downrange as planned. More tests were done to work out problems with the booster engine, and in November 1958 the Atlas 12B "became the first to fly the entire 6,330-mile course." And on December 28, another Atlas was launched into orbit, broadcasting back to Earth Christmas greetings from President Eisenhower -- a surprise public relations gimmick. There were more failures to come as the C and D series was tested, but in September 1959 "the initial battery of three Atlas D missiles, manned by SAC crews, was declared operational at Vandenberg."

With the presidential race of 1960, missiles became politicized:

A terrifying fairy tale called "the missile gap," which had the Soviets surging ahead of the United States in ICBM capability was roiling Washington. The controversy was another example of the chronic American habit during the Cold War, partly from genuine fear but usually inspired as well by political and institutional motives, of seriously overestimating Soviet military power and technological capabilities.

John F. Kennedy made it an issue in the election, but Eisenhower knew there was no missile gap -- or rather that there was one, but that it was in our favor. It might have helped Richard Nixon in the election, but Eisenhower didn't reveal the truth, partly for security reasons. The Soviets had had their share of testing disasters, the worst one in October 1960 when the commander of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces, Mitrofan Nedelin, insisted that a test continue over the protests of the launch crew. The missile exploded in a great fireball, incinerating about a hundred people, including Nedelin. The Soviets were still having trouble with their ICBMs at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when they had only twenty operational missiles as compared to the 160 that the United States possessed.

14. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 350-371

Book VI: Building the Unstoppable, 55. The Reluctant Rescuer; 56. Thor vs. Jupiter; 57. Sputnik; 58. Thor Readies for Europe

_____

Schriever asked Richard Jacobson, the chief of test facilities and operations, to take over the troubled Thor program. But when Jacobson declined, Schriever persisted, pointing out that the three failed launches were the result of the way the missiles were tested, and that Jacobson had the expertise to see that the mistakes were eliminated. So Jacobson agreed to become "acting" program director while Schriever found a new role for Ed Hall, the current program director. He tightened up all the launch procedures, and in August 1957 Thor 104 made it off the launch pad and flew for ninety-six seconds before exploding. In September, Thor 105 succeeded in releasing its payload, which flew on for 1,495 miles before splashing down in the Caribbean. And in October, Thor 106's warhead went the required 1,725 miles.

Meanwhile, Eisenhower had called for a review of both the Thor and the Jupiter projects, with an intention to shut one of them down. Schriever argued that Thor had the advantage because its missiles were being produced at Douglas, which was ready to gear up for full production, whereas the Jupiter missiles were still being made one by one at Redstone. Jupiter also lacked ground support and storage, which could also cause delay in production. The Army countered that Jupiter's reentry vehicle -- the warhead -- was lighter than Thor's and could therefore fly farther. But Mettler managed to lighten the reentry vehicle, which was the same one designed for the ICBM, and Thor 107's traveled 3,043 miles to splashdown. In the end, the competition was called off and both programs remained active.

One reason for the continued competition may have been the launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957. It was a massive public relations coup for the Soviet Union, putting Eisenhower into a political hot seat. As Sheehan comments,

Dwight Eisenhower was the last American president to believe that military spending which was not absolutely necessary was money wasted and that a well-founded economy was as important to the security of the country as armed might.

Eisenhower's achievements during World War II had made people confident in his military leadership, but Sputnik caused people to doubt if enough was being done to win the rocket race. The Soviets followed with Sputnik 2, a 1,120-pound satellite carrying a dog named Laika, on November 3, 1957, the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Lyndon Johnson, the Senate majority leader, called for hearings by the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Armed Services. "The leadoff witness at the Johnson hearings was that genius of scaremongering Dr. Edward Teller." It was not until January 31, 1958, after an embarrassing failure by the Navy to launch a satellite in December, that Wernher von Braun's team used Juno I to send Explorer I, which at eighteen pounds was lighter than either Sputnik, into orbit.

Schriever had been struggling with steady cuts in his budget until Sputnik and the Johnson hearings. Now he was getting ready to deploy Thor missiles in England according to an agreement signed with the British in January 1957. (Jupiters were being sent to Turkey and Italy.) And the ICBM program was still on track. Jacobson had been working on developing a series of tracking stations along the Atlantic range for testing the Atlas and Titan missiles, and the Los Alamos Laboratory had provided a simulated bomb to be placed in the reentry vehicle. Tests were being made of the inertial guidance system, which depended on vacuum tubes in the primitive computer. Thor 112 had to be blown up because it lost stability during its test in December 1957, but Thor 113 was a perfect flight whose payload landed directly on target. After more test launches in July and August 1958, Thor was deemed ready to be deployed in England, and the first missile was sent to its British launch site at the end of August.

13. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 315-349

Book VI: Building the Unstoppable, 49. A Competitor; 50. The Team of Mettler and Thiel; 51. John Bruce Medaris and Wernher von Braun; 52. The Cape of the Canebrake vs. "Moose" Mathison; 53. A Few Grains of Sand; 54. Medaris Goes for the ICBM

_____

The Soviets' intermediate-range missile made Washington decide that concentrating all missile efforts on the ICBM might not be such a great idea, so Schriever had pressure put on him to develop an IRBM as well. As so often, interservice rivalry had something to do with it, too: The Army had its Jupiter IRBM under way at Redstone, under the direction of Wernher von Braun. Now Schriever was forced to get people to work on the Air Force's version, which was named for another thunderer, Thor.

Ramo chose Ruben Mettler, an engineering and technical director recently hired by Ramo-Wooldridge, to head the Thor project. Mettler was an expert in radar and had been present at one of the postwar bomb tests at Bikini, an experience that "led Mettler to vow that he would do all he could in future years to prevent weapons like this from being used against the United States." He had worked for Ramo and Wooldridge at Hughes Aircraft, but had declined an offer to join them when they left. This time he agreed to work for them again. Assisting Mettler on Thor was Adolf Thiel, an aeronautical engineer who had worked on the V-2 and had come to the States with the group of German rocketeers recruited after the war in Operation Paperclip. He had worked with von Braun at Redstone, but had broken away to form his own research group. Thiel knew enough about the work being done at Redstone that it's no surprise "that Thor was essentially a copy of the missile that was to become the Army's Jupiter." Edward Hall was project manager for Thor, but he had his hands full working on the backup ICBM, Titan, as well.

Schriever's counterpart on the Army's missile was Maj. Gen. Bruce Medaris of the Ordnance Corps. Medaris had an advantage in the rocketeering expertise of von Braun and his fellow Germans. Von Braun was more interested in space exploration than in warfare; he claimed that his membership in the Nazi party, his commission as an officer in the SS and his work on the V-2 were merely means to an end: developing spacecraft. (This would lead to the joke that von Braun's book, I Aim at the Stars, should have had a subtitle: But I Sometimes Hit London.) He had in fact been arrested by the SS, under Himmler's orders, and briefly jailed on suspicion of "defeatist talk and hindering V-2 production by wasting time discussing the future of rockets in space exploration."

The stage for the conflict between Thor and Jupiter was a reclaimed canebrake in Florida called Cape Canaveral (Spanish for "canebrake"). Schriever put Lt. Col. Charles "Moose" Mathison in charge of supervising the construction of the launch facilities at the cape. Thor No. 101 (its designating number inflated to fool the Soviets into thinking it had a hundred predecessors) arrived there in October 1956 and was readied to launch in January 1957.

It rose about eighteen inches and then suddenly fell back on the pad. With a deafening blast and a shock wave that was felt in the blockhouse, the missile blew up, not only tearing itself into pieces but also damaging the concrete launch pad seriously enough that Mathison's civilian construction crews needed two months to restore the pad to usable conditions.

Mettler expected to be fired, but Schriever just said, "I expect things like this to happen." It turned out that two technicians in charge of the liquid oxygen (LOX) tanks had dragged the hose used to fill the tanks on the ground, contaminating the LOX with sand.

Thor 102 also met with disaster when it was launched in April 1957. It left the launch pad and headed out to the ocean, but 32 seconds into the flight it exploded -- or rather it was blown up by the range safety officer. Thiel was so enraged that he almost punched the safety officer, an Air Force major, in the face before Mettler restrained him. The safety officer had three instruments that showed the course of the missile, and one of them had shown it not heading out to sea but inland toward Orlando. It turned out that a Ramo-Wooldridge had installed the Doppler radar apparatus backward. But the safety officer should have checked the other two instruments before detonating the rocket. "He was transferred not long afterward to Alaska."

Thor 103 was ready to launch in May. The launch team had agreed on a countdown of twenty-four hours, reasoning that if the countdown lasted longer, everyone would be so fatigued that human error might be introduced. When they reached the twenty-four limit on Thor 103, Mettler and Thiel were so eager to launch that they called Schriever to ask for an extension. He was reluctant at first but finally agreed. But the technician in charge of reading the gauge that recorded the pressurization of the LOX tank was so exhausted that he didn't see the needle slip over into red. The rocket exploded, doing so much damage that the pad had to be rebuilt again.

Meanwhile, the first Jupiter had launched in March 1957, five weeks after Thor 101 blew up. It flew for seventy-two seconds before breaking up. A second Jupiter lasted ninety-two seconds. After they discovered that the breakup happened because of the sloshing of fuel in the tanks and adjusted for that, on May 31, 1957, ten days after the fireball of Thor 103, a third Jupiter flew downrange for eight minutes and 1,610 miles. The Jupiter's Germans had almost succeeded in creating a missile that would meet the required 1,725-mile flight. But Medaris was unhappy because of two rulings by Secretary Wilson: any successful missile that the Army produced would be turned over to the Air Force for deployment, and in the future, Army missiles would be restricted to a 200-mile range. On the other hand, Medaris could argue that the Air Force was incapable of building an IRBM, and if it couldn't do this, how could it be trusted with the more crucial ICBM project? Surely the success of von Braun and his team meant that the Army should take over the development of the ICBM?

Schriever blamed Ed Hall for the failures, which were not so much the result of flaws in the missile itself as flaws in the testing process. Hall was also at odds with Mettler, and Thiel regarded him as "a horrible guy ... very arrogant." Schriever decided he needed to replace Hall. 

12. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 279-311

Book V: Winning a President, 45. A Difficult Dialogue at Geneva; 46. Dazzling the Monarch; 47. More Nitpicking; 48. A Radar in Turkey

_____

When the John Birch Society claimed that Dwight Eisenhower was a dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy, it had in mind things like the 1955 summit meeting in Geneva at which Eisenhower met the post-Stalin leaders of the USSR. At the time, it was unclear precisely who was in charge among Bulganin, Zhukov, Molotov and Khrushchev, but it was the last who emerged there as the most decisive figure. Eisenhower made his arms-control proposal called Open Skies, which would allow aerial photographic reconnaissance of the military installations of the participating nations. The United States was backed by Britain and France in the proposal, and at first Bulganin seemed amenable to considering it. But it was clear that Khrushchev "wanted none of it." (In fact, the United States was preparing to do unilateral photoreconnaissance anyway, with the U-2.) So Eisenhower returned to Washington "in a mood to listen to a briefing on how to build an ICBM."

Schriever and his team were ready to present their case, and did so on July 28, 1955. They were aware of the powerful forces in the Pentagon arrayed against them, each believing that its project deserved priority above the others. They had to persuade Eisenhower "that the ICBM was not just another parochial Air Force project, but rather an issue of the most acute national and international significance." At the meeting they would be facing not only Eisenhower and Vice President Richard Nixon, but also Arthur Radford, the chairman of the joint chiefs; Secretary of State John Foster Dulles; and his brother, Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA. Gardner went first, discussing how the downsizing of the hydrogen bomb "had made possible the creation of the intercontinental ballistic missile" and that it was now possible to lob a nuke from the Soviet Union to the United States in thirty minutes. Von Neumann followed with a technical explanation that he made clear to non-scientists and adding that during half of the time a Soviet ICBM would be on its way to the target, it would be undetectable given the state of the American radar system at that time. And Schriever -- whom Sheehan, with his fondness for nicknames, describes as looking like "James 'Jimmy' Stewart," the "Hollywood actor" -- described the way the current Atlas project was set up.

The presentation went over well, especially with Nixon: "'Why haven't we started this sooner? What's been the holdup?' the vice president said, tapping the palm of his left hand with the stiffened fingers of his right in a gesture of emphasis that was peculiar to Nixon." And then they had to give the spiel all over again to the National Security Council's Planning Board, which would draft the directive for the president to sign. Which Eisenhower did, two months later, giving the project "the highest priority above all others." But still the project was tangled up in bureaucracy, so Schriever drew up some "spaghetti charts" that demonstrated the tangle of red tape that any request for the project would encounter and Gardner put a man named Hyde Gillette in charge of a committee that presented a request for streamlining the approval process to Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson. The result, approved by Wilson, became known as the Gillette Procedures, which essentially "pushed authority downward to those who were doing the work."

 Meanwhile, long-range surveillance of the Soviet Union was being improved with the creation of a specialized radar installation in the Kurdish region of eastern Turkey. The Turkish Radar, as it came to be called, was made possible by the work of Burton Brown, a radar specialist at GE, with the encouragement of Trevor Gardner. It went online in June 1955, with the expectation that the Soviets would try to jam it immediately. But they never did, partly because of another Cold War standoff: in return, the Americans could jam their radar off of Cape Canaveral. Only a week or two after the Turkish Radar was activated it discovered that the Soviets had a missile capable of traveling 1,100 miles. They "were clearly testing an intermediate-range ballistic missile, or IRBM. It was certain now that they were in a race."

11. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 261-278

Book V: Winning a President, 41. An Assault From an Unexpected Quarter; 42. A Sense of Adventure; 43. No Time for Family; 44. Getting to Ike

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The "unexpected quarter" was Air Force Secretary Harold Talbott, who was put in a cover-your-ass situation by President Eisenhower. Schriever and his team had settled on a production method that relied on redundancy: They would build two prototypes, so that if the first one failed they would have a second to fall back on. And they chose another California firm to produce the rocket engines for the fail-safe ICBM. But Eisenhower was concerned that too much of the military's production work was taking place on the East and West Coasts, which were, he thought, more vulnerable to attack than places in the heartland, and that California's economy was growing too heavily dependent on military-industrial work. So Talbott flew out to tell Schriever that he should cancel his contracts with California firms and find places elsewhere in the country to do the research and development work.

When Schriever, who knew that the expertise he needed was at this time available only in California, balked at the order, "Talbott lost his temper and threatened to fire him on the spot and reduce him in rank." Schriever dug in his heels, however, and went ahead with his plans, telling Gen. Power that he was doing so. Power didn't object, and later in the year Harold Talbott was forced to resign because of a conflict of interest scandal. The ICBM project was also eventually granted exemption from Eisenhower's dispersal order.

Schriever's commitment to the project was based not only on a sense that the rockets being developed were necessary for strategic warfare, but also that they would be valuable in exploration of space. The capsules that the first astronauts rode in were in fact modified versions of the original warhead. As for strategy, in an address to the RAND Corporation in 1955 Schriever conceived of the ICBM as a weapon that "would have the 'highest probability of Not being used,'" that if it was successful "It would have 'deterred Total War.'" He "was articulating a concept that would subsequently become known as Mutual Assured Destruction." The rockets could also be used to send spy satellites into space, which "would deny the Soviets the possibility of a surprise attack, of a nuclear Pearl Harbor, the dread of which haunted many, including Eisenhower." His commitment to the project was so intense that it was straining his relationship with his wife and family, which now included a third child, Barbara Alice, born in June 1949.

The confrontation with Talbott had made it clear that what Schriever really needed to do was to get Eisenhower in line with what they were doing. He was chafing at the bureaucracy, and had his staff count how many agencies had to sign off on any request: forty-two. Convinced of the urgency of what they were doing, they wanted a "streamlined decision-making process," a separate budge and "a designation of the highest national -- not just Air Force or Department of Defense -- priority.... Only Eisenhower could give them these privileges." So they began to scheme how to get to him. Vincent Ford was the chief strategist in this mission, and Schriever and Gardner set to work wooing the powerful Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson with continued briefings on the top secret details of the missile program. Ford worked on members of the Presidential Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) and its subcommittee, the Technological Capabilities Panel. In February 1955, the panel presented a report "warning of the strategic consequences if the Soviets achieved an ICBM capability before the United States," and urging the National Security Council to endorse the ICBM "as a nationally supported effort of highest priority."

But nothing happened until Ford made connection with Carlton Savage, the executive director of the planning council of the Department of State, who arranged a briefing by Gardner and von Neumann for senior officials in the department, and another for William Yandell Elliott of the Office of Defense Mobilization. And in June 1955, Eisenhower received a letter from two senators, Jackson and Clinton Anderson, who was the chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, recommending a separate budget and a designation of highest national priority for the ICBM project. The letter had been written by Ford, Schriever and Gardner. Eisenhower agreed to a briefing at the next meeting of the NSC, which would take place after a summit meeting in Geneva with the leaders of the Soviet Union. 

10. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 231-260

Book V: Winning a President, 37. A Schoolhouse and a Radical New Approach; 38. The Guru of Rockets; 39. A Problem With Tommy Power; 40. How Greed Corrupts

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Schriever's new ICBM project set up in a converted Catholic boys school in Inglewood, Calif., so the team that worked there became known as the Schoolhouse Gang. Convair, sensing a serious threat from this new project, proposed that they continue to work on the rocket it already had underway, but von Neumann and his committee opposed the suggestion. It became clear that the new approach to creating an ICBM "would amount to a revolution in the Air Force's relationship with the aviation industry." Ramo would be the chief engineer and the chief scientist, but his firm would be barred from actually manufacturing components for the missile. Convair's reluctance to be cut out of the deal set Schriever up for a power struggle.

To work on development of the rocket engine, Schriever selected Lt. Col. Edward Hall, a rocket propulsion expert at the Air Development Center at Wright-Patterson. (Neither Schriever nor Hall knew that Hall's younger brother, Ted, was a spy for the Soviets.) Hall had distinguished himself during World War II by his skill at repairing aircraft damaged in their sorties from England over Europe. While stationed in England, he became interested in the German missiles, the V-1 and V-2, and collected pieces of them from the sites where they had exploded. He claimed in an unpublished memoir that he had actually been to the site where the missiles were built, at the Nordhausen slave labor camp, on a secret mission, but the claim is unverified. After the war he was sent to the Air Development Center and then to Caltech to study for a master's in aeronautical engineering. He returned to the Air Development Center's Power Plant Laboratory to work on ramjets and rockets. Under his supervision, North American Aviation's Rocketdyne division produced a test engine that Wernher von Braun selected for the Redstone missile, essentially an upgraded V-2.

Hall also claimed in his memoir that he had faked an intelligence report about a giant Soviet rocket engine in order to keep his work from being eliminated in budget cuts. He received the funding he needed for work on the ramjet engines for the Navaho intercontinental cruise missile, which was actually a cover for work on rocket engines for an ICBM. Hall persuaded Maj. Sidney Greene, head of the New Developments Office at the Air Development Center, to let him have $2 million to work on modifying the Navaho design to include a rocket engine. The money was originally designated for Convair, which protested but was overruled. Together with the engineers at Rocketdyne, Hall developed a successful prototype engine, a step toward the more powerful one that Schriever was looking for.

Schriever's next obstacle was Gen. Thomas Power, head of the Air Research and Development Command, who had succeeded LeMay as head of SAC and therefore was disinclined to approve of the ICBM project over which he had authority but no control. The consequences of the failure of Schriever's project would be a mark against Power. A meeting with Power left Schriever shaken: "If he did not succeed in allaying Power's worries, no amount of intervention from Gardner would suffice to protect him. Power would find a way to sack him in order to save his own hide." Power demanded written documentation on everything the project did: "He was preparing a defense for the investigation that would be certain to follow if the project failed -- men eminent in their fields had urged these actions on him and he had no logical recourse but to accept their advice." Schriever therefore took it on himself to woo Power by giving him everything he wanted and more -- and when he learned Power was "a keen golfer," he used that tool in his arsenal as well.

Golfing with Convair, however, was not an option. Its president was a retired general, Joseph McNarney, and the Atlas project was being overseen by Thomas Lanphier Jr., who was close to W. Stuart Symington, the former secretary of the Air Force who was now a senator from Missouri and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. McNarney and Lanphier "started a campaign against Ramo and Wooldridge in the trade press, accusing them of stealing technicians for their new rim from Hughes Aircraft in order to corner the ICBM business." Schriever saw that Convair was motivated by greed because of their disregard for the opinion of the scientific community represented by von Neumann's committee. When Convair tried to get Symington on their side, Schriever countered with presentations from the Schoolhouse Gang that convinced the senator that he should stay out of the crossfire.

What Schriever had run up against was the moral corruption that had become endemic to the U.S. military industry as a result of the Cold War and its demand, year, upon year, upon year for new weaponry.... U.S. military industry, particularly the aircraft industry, had been coddled for so long that its leaders were like spoiled children. They had come to expect profits as a virtual right.

(Anyone reminded of the oil industry?)

Finally, however, Convair yielded to pressure and agreed to Schriever's terms, with one concession: They would manufacture the airframe and assembly and participate in the testing, and would provide the control mechanisms for the missile. Schriever got Convair to create a work force dedicated only to the Atlas at its San Diego plant. But Ramo reported that Convair was not hiring properly qualified engineers for specialized parts of the project, and it took another sit-down with the brass to bring them in line.

As for Power, he had been converted to Schriever's cause by the information he had been receiving and the persuasion of von Neumann. He recommended Schriever for promotion to major general. "From this point on Schriever no longer had to worry about the wary three-stars in Baltimore. Power was now behind him."

9. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 207-228

Book IV: Starting a Race, 34. The Tea Pot Committee; 35. Getting Started; 36. "Okay, Bennie, It's a Deal"

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Gardner and Ramo had lived in the same apartment house in Schenectady in 1937 when Gardner was a student engineer at GE, and he knew about Ramo and Wooldridge because his company, Hycon Manufacturing, had been located nearby in Pasadena. So they came to mind when Gardner was looking for companies to work on the ICBM. Ramo suggested that Gardner needed a committee of top scientists to study the project and confirm to the brass that it was do-able. Von Neumann agreed to head the committee.

Meanwhile, Ramo and Wooldridge were looking to break away from Howard Hughes, who although he didn't interfere with their operation of Hughes Aircraft, had the potential to give them trouble. He refused to be fingerprinted, for one thing, which meant that he couldn't get a security clearance. So Ramo and Wooldridge left Hughes in September 1953 to start a computer and electronics firm called the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation. They secured financial backing from Thompson Products, which made automotive and aircraft products, and secured their financial backing. In 1958, Ramo-Wooldridge merged with Thompson and became Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, which was abbreviated to TRW Inc. in 1965. Initially aiming at the civilian rather than the military market, Ramo and Wooldridge were persuaded by Gardner to take on the ICBM project, which Schriever agreed to fund from his budget at the Development Planning Office.

Von Neumann's committee, which also included Clark Millikan, Charles Lauritsen, Jerome Wiesner and George Kistiakowsky, became known as the Tea Pot Committee -- a code name for use on the telephone. They examined the three long-range strategic missile projects the Air Force had under development and settled on the Atlas project, an intercontinental ballistic missile project based on improving the German V-2 that was directed by engineer Charlie Bossart. In February 1954 the committee issued a report certifying the feasibility of the ICBM and suggesting that one could be produced by 1960-61 and enough to be a deterrent threat to the Soviet Union could be in the field by 1962-63. They also suggested that current work on the Atlas by Convair be stopped and a new development group be put in charge of the entire project.

The report also played on the fear that the Soviet Union would be the first to develop an ICBM, although there was no evidence at all on what the Soviets were up to where missile work was concerned. The fear of a "missile gap" became a political football that Kennedy used to win the election in 1960. In fact, the Politburo in 1953 had decided on a strategy based on long-range missiles rather than the long-range bombers of SAC. And the first medium-range ballistic missile, with an 800-mile range, had been tested in March 1953. "The United States was indeed caught in a missile race, a strategic competition of profound importance of which it was quite unaware, and in which it was behind." Von Neumann's Russophobia had served him well.

But the task was now to convince what Gardner called "those narrow-gauged bastards in the Pentagon" that they needed a crash program to develop an ICBM. With the help of Schriever and Vince Ford, Gardner drafted a memo outlining a plan to have two launching sites and four missiles ready by June 1958 and 20 sites stockpiled with 100 missiles by June 1960. He proposed forming a division within the Air Research and Development Command to achieve this task. He also specified that Ramo-Wooldridge be hired to provide the scientific and technological expertise, and estimated that the five-year cost would be $1.545 billion -- "an enticingly reasonable figure that would prove to be a gross underestimate."

Interservice rivalry still needed to be dealt with. The Army had its own team of rocket men, headed by Wernher von Braun, at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. And there was intraservice rivalry too: Curtis LeMay, who opposed any project that would threaten to take money away from his bombers. Gardner formed a new Scientific Advisory Committee with many of the Tea Pot Committee members remaining, still under the leadership of von Neumann, with additions such as Norris Bradbury, director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, and Charles Lindbergh. Final approval for Gardner's proposal came in June 1954, one month after Gardner had asked Schriever to direct the project.

"I'll take the job," Schriever said, speaking slowly so that each word came through distinctly, "provided I can run it -- completely run it -- without any interference from those nitpicking sons of bitches in the Pentagon."

8. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 177-207

Book IV: Starting a Race, 29. Seeking Scientific Validation; 30. When Hungary Was Mars; 31. A Fascination With Explosions; 32. Finding an Ally; 33. Marshaling the Expertise

_____

Rescued from exile in South Korea by powerful friends, Schriever continued to try to advance American air supremacy, now turning his full focus on the intercontinental ballistic missile "in the opening years of the the sinister arms competition between the Soviet Union and the United States, a rivalry that would help to bankrupt and dissolve the immense Soviet empire and bequeath America a national debt of colossal proportions." At a meeting of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama in March 1953, he met two men who would be key figures in this competition: mathematician John von Neumann and physicist Edward Teller. They told him that it was theoretically possible to build a nuclear warhead light enough and a rocket powerful enough to blast any target within the Soviet Union. In May 1953, Schriever went to see von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. While waiting for his appointment with von Neumann, Schriever met and introduced himself to Albert Einstein, who had become a vocal opponent of the postwar arms race.

One wonders what [Einstein] might have said had he known he was shaking the hand of a man who was making it his mission to put not a mere atomic bomb, but rather a hydrogen bomb of eighty Hiroshimas, on the tip of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

Von Neumann had none of Einstein's reservations about the nuclear age. He was an ultrahawk whose advocacy of "preventive war" -- a first strike against the Soviet Union -- exceeded even Curtis LeMay's. "If you say bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?" He once told Robert Oppenheimer, "I don't think any weapon can be too large." He was also a pioneer in the use of digital electronic computers, making possible computer simulations of proposed weaponry.

Like Teller and von Kármán, he was a product of the "golden age of Jewish secular life in Central Europe" that flourished from 1867, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was formed, to the end of the First World War. Hungary had encouraged the participation of Jews in public and professional life after the unification with Austria as a way of seeing to it that its interests were on a par with Austria's.

Although a mere 5 percent of the population as a whole, by 1910 Jews comprised approximately half of Hungary's lawyers, journalists, and commercial businessmen, nearly 60 percent of its doctors, and 80 percent of its financiers.

The von Neumanns were secularists and John von Neumann was educated at the Lutheran Gymnasium in Budapest, where he was recognized as a mathematical prodigy. "As Mozart could hear the music in his head while he composed his scores, so von Neumann could see in his mind the steps leading to the solution of the mathematical challenge."

The first threat to Hungary's Jews came with the defeat of the Germans and their Austro-Hungarian allies in 1918, leading to the dissolution of the empire. In 1919, Béla Kun, a Hungarian socialist, led a revolution that lasted 133 days and was suppressed by the forces of Admiral Miklós Horthy, a right-winger who became dictator of Hungary and executed many of the supporters of Kun's revolution. Because many of these supporters were Jewish, there was a resurgence of anti-Semitism when Horthy took over. Von Neumann's family had been opponents of Kun's revolution, which was modeled on the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and John von Neumann retained his antipathy to Russia and to communism, describing himself as "violently anti-Communist." But the Horthy regime resurrected many of the anti-Jewish laws that had been suspended since 1867, reducing the chances that John could get a position as a university professor of mathematics at the University of Budapest. So he went first to Berlin to study chemistry and then to the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich where he got a degree in chemical engineering in 1925. He returned to Budapest for his doctorate, which he earned in just one year, getting his Ph.D. in mathematics at the age of 22. He went back to the University of Berlin as an assistant professor of mathematics, but left in 1929 when Princeton offered him a visiting lectureship, followed by a professorship in mathematics and mathematical physics. He gave up his idea of returning to Europe when Hitler took power in 1933. Like Schriever, Sheehan comments, von Neumann had "the patriotism of the immigrant who is deeply grateful to a land that has been good to him."

Von Neumann became fascinated by the mathematics and physics of explosions, which caused Robert Oppenheimer to ask him to Los Alamos in 1943. Together with Stanislaw Ulam, he worked out the mathematics of the implosion method of detonating an atomic bomb. Despite his ultrahawkishness, he would later testify in defense of Oppenheimer at the hearing that took away Oppenheimer's security clearance because of his opposition to the hydrogen bomb. But it was von Neumann's hawkishness, as well as his scientific achievements and expertise, that made him such a valuable ally for Schriever in his quest to persuade the Air Force to support his vision of the ICBM.

Another ally was Trevor Gardner, special assistant to the secretary of the air force for research and development. He, too, was an immigrant, born in Wales in 1915. Gardner had a bachelor's degree in engineering and an M.B.A. from the University of Southern California, and had run the developmental engineering section of Caltech during the war. He then started Hycon Manufacturing, which produced electronic components for the military. Horace Talbott, the secretary of the air force under Eisenhower, brought him to Washington. Gardner's executive assistant was Col. Vince Ford, whom Schriever had hired as an assistant in 1948. Gardner's bluntness, as well as a drinking problem, had made him some enemies among the Air Force brass, but Schriever, who was introduced to Gardner by Ford, saw his potential for getting the ICBM project under way. And when Talbott was ordered by Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson to sort out the various missile projects being studied by the Pentagon, he put Gardner in charge of the task, Gardner saw it as an opportunity to advance Schriever's ICBM project.

One major problem was finding an American industry that could take on the project -- "the United States had an aircraft industry, but the nation was yet to acquire an aerospace industry. To get the ICBM built, Gardner would have to find the genesis of one." He found it at Hughes Aircraft Company, owned by Howard Hughes, who paid no attention to the company, letting it be run by Simon Ramo and Dean Wooldridge. Ramo was tapped to be the chief technical director and engineer of Schriever's ICBM project. It would launch the company co-founded by Ramo and Wooldridge, TRW Inc., into one of the country's major aerospace firms and make them "immensely wealthy princes of the American military-industrial complex."

Ramo had a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and physics from Caltech and had gone to work for General Electric in Schenectady in research and development in the electronics division. But he found GE's managers "unimaginative bureaucrats," so at the end of World War II he looked for a job that would take him back to California. He saw Hughes Aircraft as a place that was likely to be less hidebound than GE and ready to meet the postwar challenge of the atomic age. He went to work there as general manager in 1946, and brought on Wooldridge, a classmate and friend from Caltech, as partner that summer. Wooldridge took over the administrative side and Ramo the research and engineering. He hired young engineers interested in military innovation. "In these immediate postwar years, long before the Vietnam conflict, there was no stigma attached to employment in military industry." Hughes Aircraft soon established itself as a major provider for air defense equipment for the U.S. Air Force. And they developed the Falcon, the Air Force's first air-to-air guided missile, which led Schriever to them.

7. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 142-173

Book III: The Perils of an Apprenticeship, 24. Into the Lion's Den; 25. Moscow Opts for Rockets; 26. A Nuclear Reactor in the Sky; 27. Low-Level Tactics and the Flying Boom; 28. The Last Tangle and an Ambush

_____

When LeMay complained that SAC was not getting enough attention from the research and development people, Schriever was put in charge of satisfying him, specifically his latest concern: that SAC's bases needed to be dispersed enough so that they could survive a Soviet attack. One idea Schriever came up with was to equip SAC bombers with pontoons, so they could take off and land on water. Unfortunately, Schriever's superiors actually sent him to LeMay with the idea, which was met with "disgust and ridicule." While the idea was far-fetched, LeMay had started ignoring even more practical suggestions. He was, Sheehan says, "no longer willing to hear anything that did not fit his preconceptions. He was the classic example of a man made arrogant by power."

For one thing, he became fixated on bombers and bombers alone, which closed his mind to the intercontinental ballistic missile, which the Soviet Union was putting its R&D efforts into. He argued that bombers were superior to ICBMs because they could destroy the launching sites, even though destroying a launching site after the missiles had been fired seems somewhat illogical. LeMay even wanted to abandon all conventional weapons and go entirely nuclear -- an idea that was not publicized by the Air Force because it would have "set off a political firestorm at home and abroad of nuclear dimensions." He asked for 1,900 B-52s. Eisenhower gave him 744. He wanted the Scientific Advisory Board to investigate the possibility of a twenty-megaton hydrogen bomb, "an idea Eisenhower is said to have vetoed as beyond common sense."

Pressure from LeMay was to be the major impetus in driving the yield of the American stockpile of nuclear warheads up to the record 20,491 megatons peak it was to reach in 1960, enough to provide each of the approximately 180 million inhabitants of the United States at the time with bomb material equivalent in explosive force to 110 tons of TNT.

And he seemed entirely indifferent to the suggestions that use of a nuclear weapon would also mean "national suicide" for the United States. One mitigating factor in the use of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that they were detonated in the air, limiting the extent of the radiation they released. LeMay wanted his bombs detonated at ground level, which would fill the atmosphere with radioactive dust. On the plus side, LeMay's mad abandon and devotion to overkill may have been a powerful deterrent to Soviet adventurism as Nikita Khrushchev took over leadership in the Soviet Union. But the "bomber gap" he proclaimed when it became evident that the Soviets were developing new bombers was bogus. He spooked Congress into adding $1 billion for bombers to the Air Force budget in 1957 and 1958, even though the CIA reported that the Soviets were producing fewer bombers than LeMay claimed, and they cut back on bomber production in 1958.

What LeMay failed to take into account was that the Russians had a long history of experimental rocketry, and although Stalin had stupidly purged Marshal Tukhachevsky, the leading military proponent of rocket-propelled weaponry, in 1937, Sergei Korolev had survived to become a leader in the postwar era. In 1953 the Politburo put him and rocket engine builder Valentin Glushko in charge of developing an intercontinental ballistic missile, which would change the "strategic equation" and make LeMay's bombers less effective. But LeMay persisted in his single-mindedness, which brought him into conflict with Schriever over the creation of a nuclear-powered bomber.

Schriever was put in charge of recruiting a team of engineers that could fulfill LeMay's dream: not only a nuclear-powered plane but also one capable of flying faster than sound. But all of the scientists and engineers involved agreed: supersonic flight in a bomber powered by a nuclear reactor would create temperatures so high that no known material could withstand. "The reactor would melt." LeMay would not listen, even when Schriever told him that none of the scientists and engineers he knew believed it was possible to "build a nuclear-powered engine that will operate at supersonic speeds." LeMay persisted that if the Navy could build nuclear-powered submarines, somebody ought to be able to solve the problem of the nuclear-powered bomber. Sheehan comments,

The idea of airplanes flying around with nuclear reactors in them might seem daft to subsequent generations, given the appalling consequences if one crashed. In the edge-of-battle atmosphere of the Cold War, such risks were rationalized as necessities. 

And in fact, the Air Force did manage to install a nuclear-reactor in a converted B-36, which made forty-seven flights between Fort Worth and Roswell, N.M. The flight crew rode in "a twelve-ton lead-and-rubber-shielded compartment, with leaded glass windows almost a foot thick." And the plane was always followed by a B-50 with paratroopers who were trained so that in the event of a crash of the nuke plane they would jump onto the crash site and cordon it off until a cleanup team could arrive. Sheehan comments that the flight path took the plane over Lake Worth, Fort Worth's main water supply, and that a crash into the lake would have been cataclysmic. President Kennedy canceled the project in 1961.

Meanwhile, the Soviets had developed the surface-to-air missile, which were deployed around Moscow in 1957. The SAM demonstrated its effectiveness in 1961 when it downed Francis Gary Power's U-2 spy plane. Schriever saw that low-altitude bombers, which could fly under the radar, might be more effective than the high-altitude ones that LeMay insisted on. But attempts to demonstrate this to LeMay were failures. And LeMay also stubbornly resisted attempts to change SAC's reliance on a fueling technique that involved what was called the "flying boom" method. Schriever's Development Planning Office was asked to do a study of in-flight fueling methods and concluded that another method, called "probe and drogue" was more efficient. But when Col. Bill Maxwell was tapped to present the results of the study to LeMay, he was met with hostility. LeMay asked, "Who the hell keeps promoting that probe and drogue stuff?" Maxwell responded, "Every pilot that ever flew it is promoting it." Whereupon LeMay walked out. Schriever realized that LeMay was doing "all he could to keep the Tactical Air Command, with its fighters and fighter-bombers, in check."

Schriever's ultimate clash with LeMay was over the next-generation bomber, the one designed to replace the B-52. LeMay wanted it to be supersonic, to be able to fly at extremely high altitudes, to carry a heavy bomb load and to be able to reach the furthest targets without midair refueling. Schriever did everything he could to emphasize the impracticality of such a plane, but to no avail. LeMay, Schriever said, "was of the school that 'Goddamn it, I know what I need. This is a requirement, goddamn it, no go out and do it.'" Schriever persisted in trying to create the best practicable plane, choosing Paul Blasingame, a Ph.D. aeronautical engineer, to head the project. One result of the team's work was the development of a more effective jet engine, one that would produce more thrust with less fuel. The turbofan engine would do the job and require a much shorter runway for takeoff. Blasingame also devised advanced navigation and bombing systems for the plane. But it was never built: LeMay rejected it. Instead, he had a team develop the B-70 Valkyrie, which was "massive," "supersonic," "expensive" and "useless." The project was canceled by Kennedy as "unnecessary and economically unjustifiable." The B-52 never had a real successor: It was used for the infamous carpet-bombing raids in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, in the first Gulf War, in the second one and in Afghanistan.

The conflicts with LeMay caused Schriever to suffer from tension headaches. But the turbofan engine was a success that "set off a revolution in military and commercial aviation." It made possible the C-5 Galaxy, which "could lift virtually anything that might be loaded into its astonishing 34,000 cubic feet of cargo space" using only four turbofan engines. And the development of the first jumbo jet, the Boeing 747 changed commercial passenger flight forever. Even SAC began using Schriever's low-altitude tactics after LeMay retired.

Schriever was promoted to brigadier general in 1953. But LeMay still managed to get his hand in: Schriever was reassigned to South Korea as chief of logistics for the Fifth Air Force units there. It was clear that LeMay was behind the move. But he stuck with the Air Force and was vindicated.

Bernard Schriever was to be the indispensable man in the creation of the intercontinental ballistic missile during the Cold War and the enormous consequences that were to flow from it -- America's penetration of space and an unspoken but permanent truce of mutual deterrence with the Soviet Union. 

6. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 117-142

Book III: The Perils of an Apprenticeship, 21. Hap Arnold's Legacy; 22. Getting Organized; 23. Bomber Leader

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After his return from the war, Schriever was sent to the Army Air Force headquarters at the Pentagon where he was assigned to the Scientific Liaison Branch of the Research and Engineering Division, where his job was to forge connections with the civilian scientific community. This put him in contact with Theodore von Kármán, a Hungarian-born aeronautical engineer who had come to Caltech in 1930. Hap Arnold had been acquainted with von Kármán for some time, and in 1944 recruited him for the Scientific Advisory Group that would plan the postwar direction of air power. Von Kármán, whom Arnold made a major general, was among the first to go to Germany after the end of the war in Europe in 1945. There he met Wernher von Braun and Gen. Walter Dornberger, who had been the head of Germany's rocket program, both of whom had surrendered to the American forces.

From what he learned about the advances in rocketry made by the Germans, von Kármán and his team put together a report called Toward New Horizons that laid out a vision of "world air supremacy" (Sheehan's italics) as the key to security for the United States. One of the things von Kármán proposed was an emphasis on research and development, particularly the establishment of a research and testing center that would have to be located near a source of hydroelectric power. The first of these was established at Tullahoma, Tenn., and named the Arnold Engineering Development Center after Arnold's death. Arnold also created a permanent Scientific Advisory Board and put von Kármán in charge of it.

After Arnold's retirement in 1946, however, the Scientific Advisory Board was almost abolished. Arnold had made Curtis LeMay the assistant chief of research and development, and LeMay wasn't interested in anything but bombers. The establishment of the Air Force as an independent branch of the service in September 1947 also led to its being a target of the other branches, which were always in search of something that could be cut from another branch's budget. But the Scientific Advisory Board survived, especially after LeMay was promoted to command the Air Force in Europe and Maj. Gen. Laurence Craigie took over as head of a new Directorate of Research and Development. Craigie had known Schriever since 1923 when Craigie was learning to be a pilot at Kelly Field in San Antonio and played golf on the course where 13-year-old Schriever was a caddy.

In 1949, Schriever was scheduled to spend a year at the National War College, but before then he and some other members of the Scientific Advisory Board invited the Air Force chief of staff Hoyt Vandenberg, whose uncle was the influential Sen. Arthur Vandenberg to speak to them. Hoyt Vandenberg canceled, but his place was taken by his vice chief, Muir Fairchild. And a committee was formed that included the enormously influential Jimmy Doolittle, who supported the aims of von Kármán and Schriever, which meant that Vandenberg would take notice of the committee's recommendations. The result was that in January 1950, the Air Research and Development Command (ARDC), was established under the direction of Maj. Gen Gordon Saville.

After returning from the War College, Schriever was called back to the Pentagon by Saville and given the job of assistant for development planning. But this put him in direct conflict with Curtis LeMay. Curt "Bombs Away" LeMay is best-known today as the right-wing ultrahawk who was George Wallace's running mate in 1968 and who advocated bombing North Vietnam "back into the Stone Age." Sheehan also singles him out as "the inspiration for General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove," although there were plenty of military men who went into that caricature. At the time, however, LeMay was generally regarded as an American hero for having contributed to the victory over Japan by the ferocious bombing raids that devastated the metropolitan areas of that country. Sheehan calls the attack on Tokyo on March 9, 1945, "the most horrendous fire-bombing in the history of modern warfare." LeMay himself didn't fly in that raid because he had been briefed about the atomic bomb and it was feared that he might be tortured into revealing its secrets if he was captured. Although the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a kind of coup de grâce, Sheehan sees LeMay as "the man most responsible for ending the war with such swiftness."

In October 1948, LeMay was put in charge of the Strategic Air Command, "a languishing organization" that by 1951 he had turned around "into an organization that inspired dread in Moscow" and had earned him a fourth star as general. SAC, with its long-range bombers capable of reaching any point in the Soviet Union, had "become the centerpiece of America's national strategy." But of course, this rankled the other services, which wanted to demonstrate their usefulness, leading to a "Revolt of the Admirals" in 1949 after Truman canceled the Navy's "supercarrier" so it could put more funds into LeMay's B-36s. Truman was forced to sack the secretary of the Navy and the chief of naval operations because of their protests. And even after the Soviet Union acquired the bomb and Truman left office, President Eisenhower continued the policy of relying on nuclear-equipped intercontinental bombers.

By 1954, when LeMay would have 1,500 atomic bombs at his disposal, the estimate was that 60 million people would be killed and 17 million injured within the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China if SAC was unleashed.... While Eisenhower reduced the overall strength of the military establishment by nearly a million men, inflicting most of the cuts on the ground forces of the Army but also shrinking the Navy and the Air Force as a whole, he encouraged SAC to grow.

3. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 40-77

Book I, Becoming an American: 10. The Test of War. Book II: Inheriting a Different World: 11. Atomic Diplomacy; 12. Spies Inside the Barbed Wire; 13. "The Balance Has Been Destroyed"; 14. The State That Was Stalin

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As chief of maintenance and engineering, Schriever initially clashed with Brigadier General Ennis Whitehead, the deputy for combat operations, by taking initiative on some matters and thereby violating the chain of command. But his skill at his job won Whitehead over, and in March 1943 he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and in August became chief of staff of the Fifth Air Force Service Command. In December, at the age of 33, he was promoted to full colonel.

The success of the Air Corps led to its expansion and in September 1944 Schriever was put in charge of the Advance Echelon of the Far East Air Service Command, tasked with solving supply problems and constructing new airfields and depots. But the European war took priority over the Pacific, and the Navy seemed to take priority over the Air Corps. Schriever was good at scrounging, and when he somehow came in possession of a supply of toilets, he used them to barter things he needed.

When the war ended, Schriever got a good look at the devastating power of the bombers he supplied when he flew over Tokyo, which had been laid waste by Curtis LeMay's B-29s. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, "the highest noncombat award an officer can receive." And on September 24, 1945, he returned to his family, which except for a two-week break in 1943, he hadn't seen for three years and three months.

Schriever's story is interrupted at this point for background on the beginnings of the Cold War and the arms race. President Truman, Sheehan notes, was "much more militantly anti-Communist" than FDR had been, and in September 1945, at a meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers in London, Secretary of State James Byrnes responded to some stalling tactics by Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, "I'm going to pull an atomic bomb out of my hip pocket and let you have it." The joke acknowledged the United States' new trump card in international diplomacy.

The Soviets had, however, already started the race to catch up: "On August 20, 1945, just five days after the surrender of Japan, Stalin had ordered an all-out, no-expense-barred program to build a Soviet bomb." They were able to do so because they already had well-placed spies in the Manhattan Project. At Los Alamos there were two physicists, Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall, who were spying for the Soviets, though neither was aware of the other. Another spy, George Koval, worked at the atomic research plants at both Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Dayton, Ohio. His story went unknown until 2007, when he died in Moscow and was named a Hero of the Russian Federation by Vladimir Putin. Fuchs confessed when he was arrested by the British in 1950, and was imprisoned for nine years; after his release, he went to work for the East Germans. Hall was undiscovered until the Venona documents were made public after the fall of the Soviet Union. His own brother, Lt. Col. Edward Hall, who was an Air Force engineer who worked on the development of rocket engines, was unaware that Theodore was a spy until then.The success of Soviet espionage reveals the considerable flaws in security at the time. Fuchs had been approved by the British before it became apparent that the British Foreign Office and intelligence services were riddled with Soviet spies such as Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, John Cairncross and Anthony Blunt. But the Americans also failed to do background checks on spies like Ted Hall, who developed simple but ingenious ways of delivering his information to his Soviet contacts.

Stalin made Igor Kurchatov "in effect the Soviet equivalent of J. Robert Oppenheimer in the Manhattan Project," and proceeded to spend enormous sums on the development of a weapon, even though the Soviet Union had been devastated by the conflict with Germany. It was not just a matter of "bombs not butter," but of completely neglecting reconstruction of the devastated country. Sheehan goes out of his way to portray Stalin as a figure of monstrous evil: "after Adolf Hitler, the second great monster of the twentieth century," citing Stalin's "suspicion virtually to the point of clinical paranoia and cruelty to the point of sadism" and his "sick imagination."

He wanted the bomb as quickly as possible, not because he was worried about any immediate threat of war -- relations [with the United States] were only beginning to become strained -- but because he was concerned that Truman and Byrnes, through their atomic diplomacy, might succeed in imposing a postwar settlement inimical to Soviet interests. Stalin understood the political implications of the atomic bomb.

No one, of course, argued against Stalin, not after the purges of the 1930s, although Peter Kapitsa, the internationally known Soviet physicist, did point out to Stalin that an American-style effort to create a bomb "would put too great a burden on the war-ravaged Soviet economy" and suggested a less costly and expensive approach. Stalin disregarded the advice: He rewarded nuclear physicists and engineers with the perks given to the Soviet elite, but also kept them under threat of reprisal for failure. They knew that tried another approach than the one the Americans had taken, that if they "sought a different design and it fizzled, the senior physicists and engineers involved would be shot." He also put the sadistic Lavrenti Beria, the head of the NKVD, in charge of overseeing the scientists. And he enlisted thousands of slave laborers to create the facilities at Arzamas-16, the Soviet equivalent of Los Alamos, and to mine the uranium in Soviet Central Asia. The miners were worked literally to death and the few who survived the construction and the mining were "shipped to the Gulag's worst camps, the gold mines of Kolyma in the Far East, where they died." 

2. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 13-40

Book I, Becoming an American: 4. White Silk Scarves and Open Cockpits; 5. Entering the Brotherhood; 6. A Fiasco and Reform; 7. Staying the Course; 8. A Fork in the Road; 9. "Let's Dive-Bomb the Bastards"

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Having attended Texas A&M, which was a military school where ROTC was mandatory, Schriever not surprisingly entered the Army on graduation. And San Antonio was where the Air Corps did advanced pilot training at Kelly Field. As Sheehan notes, "This was the romantic era of flying, of white silk scarves, leather helmets and goggles, and open cockpits." Schriever entered flight school in July 1932, was selected for Advanced training eight months later, graduated in June 1933 and was sent to March Field near Riverside, Calif., for a year of active duty as a second lieutenant. His mother and brother went with him to Riverside because the Depression had forced her to close the sandwich shop and Gerry could no longer afford tuitition at A&M.

Hap Arnold, then a lieutenant colonel, was commanding officer at March Field. Arnold was a West Point graduate who had learned to fly in 1911 at the aircraft factory the Wright brothers had started in Dayton, Ohio. He didn't see combat in World War I, but worked instead in Washington on the efforts to start mass production of airplanes. He testified for the defense in the 1925 court-martial of Billy Mitchell, who was charged with insubordination for his efforts to get the brass to recognize the importance of air power. Arnold was punished for his support of Mitchell by being sent to the cavalry post at Fort Riley, Kansas, "to take charge of a small detachment of observation aircraft attached to the horse soldiers." By 1933, however, he had regained favor.

The Air Corps was still underfunded, however. "The B-3 and B-4 Keystone bombers that Bennie and his mates flew were big, ungainly biplanes with highly flammable cloth and wood-frame wings and fuselages." Flight instruments were primitive and fliers were limited to only four hours of flight a month when the weather was favorable. Schriever had plenty of time for golf, which allowed him to network, and his mother made friends with Arnold's wife, which "led to Bennie becoming well acquainted with his commanding officer."

In 1934, a scandal involving commercial contracts for flying the mail led President Roosevelt to temporarily turn over the job to the Air Corps, whose planes were, as noted above, poorly equipped especially for night flying. But given that it was an improvement over being able to fly only four hours a month, the pilots were eager to do it. "To keep from freezing in the open cockpits, the pilots wore leather face masks and flying suits, both lined with sheepskin." But the lack of instrumentation was disastrous: "Twelve pilots were killed in all and there were sixty-six crashes. Roosevelt turned the job over to commercial fliers again in June, but the deaths had made the government aware of the state of the Air Corps' equipment.

The threat of war in Europe that became apparent in the mid-1930s led to the development of better military aircraft, including the B-17 Flying Fortress that Boeing produced in 1935, a dozen of which were on their way to Hawaii when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. "To Schriever, the sequence was clear. Had the alarm not been raised by the air mail disaster, that rudimentary air force would not have existed when the moment of peril came."

But Schriever had been forced by the lack of funding to return to civilian life in March 1935. He and his mother returned to San Antonio, where they were joined later by Gerry, who completed his college course work at the University of San Antonio and entered the same Flying School that Bennie had attended. Bennie took charge of a Civilian Conservation Corps camp on the Arizona-New Mexico border in June 1935 and developed skills at managing people.

In 1936 the Air Corps was building up again, and Schriever went to Albrook Field in Panama, where the commander for the Canal Zone, Brigadier General George H. Brett, heard of Schriever's golf prowess and asked him for some pointers on improving his game. Brett made him one of his aides and one day in 1937 sent him to pick up his daughter, Dora, who was arriving on a transport ship after a stay in Washington. After leaving the Air Corps again and taking a job as a co-pilot for Northwest Airlines in Seattle, he married Dora in January 1938 at the home of Hap Arnold, who was a good friend of the Bretts, in Washington. Arnold became head of the Air Corps in September of that year and urged Schriever to apply for a commission again. Schriever was sworn in on October 1, 1938. The Schrievers' first child, Brett Arnold, was born on March 23, 1939.

George Brett had been put in charge of the testing facilities and laboratories at Wright Field near Dayton, and requested that Schriever be assigned to him as a test pilot. Schriever entered the Air Corps Engineering School at Wright Field in July 1940, and impressed its commandant, George Kenney, so much that he was selected to go to Stanford in September 1941 to get a master's in advanced aeronautical engineering. The Schrievers' second child, a daughter they named Dodie Elizabeth, was born in June, and the family moved to Menlo Park, Calif. After Pearl Harbor, Schriever was assigned to the Southwest Pacific Area of the Army Air Services in Australia, but he was not to leave until he had completed his work at Stanford, which he did in June 1942.

Schriever reported for duty in Melbourne where his father-in-law was a lieutenant general in charge of the Allied Air Forces, Southwest Pacific Area, but was about to be relieved of that command by Douglas MacArthur. Brett's replacement was George Kenney, and Schriever was promoted to major and sent to the 19th Bombardment Group to be engineering officer in charge of maintenance. Kenney chose to focus on bombing raids against the Japanese in New Guinea, and Schriever and Major John Dougherty put together a strike crew. Schriever and Dougherty flew a B-17 that dropped flares to illuminate the targets for the other bombers that followed. 

One night a cloud bank intervened between them and the targets on which they were to drop flares, so Dougherty, "a wild streak of an Irishman," decided to dive-bomb the target. "Schriever glanced at the airspeed indicator and it was registering 260 miles per hour. In fact, no one was ever known to have attempted bombing with a B-17 in this harum-scarum manner." They came under heavy fire, but received only six hits from small-arms fire. Dougherty won a Silver Star and Schriever an Air Medal for the maneuver. They later received Purple Hearts -- though neither was wounded (the medal was designated only for wounds later) -- for another raid over Rabaul in October. Schriever was then transferred to the Fifth Air Force Service Command as chief of the Maintenance and Engineering Division.

1. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. ix-12

Foreword; Prologue: A Rite of Succession; Book I, Becoming an American: 1. Ellis Island and a Tragedy in Texas, 2. A Benefactor and the House on the Twelfth Green, 3. The Virtues of Golf

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A slow start: Once the prefatory stuff is got through, Sheehan gives us the obligatory family history, childhood and education chapters for his subject, Bernard (né Bernhard) Schriever. The foreword gives us the thesis:

This other [space] race initiated America's exploration and exploitation of space and was for the highest stakes -- preventing the Soviet Union from acquiring an overwhelming nuclear superiority that could tempt Soviet leaders into international blackmail and adventurism with calamitous results for human civilization. 

The "Prologue" takes us to January 1946, when Gen. Henry Harley "Hap" Arnold -- so nicknamed, Sheehan tells us, "because of his unusual smile" (telling us why it was unusual would have been more useful) -- is getting ready to retire and turn over command of the Army Air Forces to Carl "Tooey" Spaatz (whose nickname is not explained here). Gen. George Marshall had made Arnold a member of the Joint Chiefs during the war, preparing the way for the independent branch of the service that the Air Force became.

Arnold wasn't an innovator, but now he wanted to cultivate scientists and technologists to face postwar challenges, realizing that the war had proved air power to be essential to U.S. security. So he called on Col. Bernard "Bennie" Schriever (who had "acquired his nickname from the sportswriters" in San Antonio, where he was "a champion amateur golfer as a youth and they had wanted a snappy moniker for their articles about his exploits on the links").  So much for nicknames -- or "snappy monikers." Arnold emphasized to Schriever  the importance of technological innovation: "The Third World War will be different. It will be won by brains." He wanted Schriever to head a Scientific Liaison Branch in the Research and Engineering Division of the Air Force.

He would go on to become the father of the modern, high-technology Air Force and play a pivotal role in preserving peace during the grim years of the Cold War by building the first weapon in the history of warfare that was meant to deter rather than to be fired in anger -- the intercontinental ballistic missile.

So after that moniker-riddled prologue, we go back to the beginnings. Schriever's German-born parents, Adolph Schriever and Elizabeth Milch, meet in America and marry in Hoboken in 1908. They return to Germany and she gives birth to their first son, Bernhard Adolph, in Bremen in September 1910, and their second, Gerhard, two years later. When the war begins in August 1914, Adolph, an engineer on the George Washington, a passenger ship of the North German Lloyd line, is in New York and is detained for the duration of the war. In 1917 Elizabeth and the boys manage to sail from Rotterdam, in neutral Holland, to the United States, arriving just two months before the Americans enter the war. Adolph is allowed to join them -- although he and his fellow engineers had tried to sabotage the George Washington's engines before they left the ship.

The Schrievers move to the Texas hill country, which has a large German community, and Adolph goes to work in a brewery in New Braunfels and then in a factory in San Antonio where he's involved in an accident that fractures his skull in two places. He dies shortly after his thirty-fifth birthday in 1918. Elizabeth and the boys go to live with an uncle of Adolph's in Lubbock for a year, and then move back to New Braunfels where she works in a butcher shop and as a housekeeper. Unable to make living for the family that way, she puts the boys in an orphanage in San Antonio for six months until she she finds a job.

More nicknaming: At some point Bernhard becomes Bernard and then Ben. His brother, Gerhard, becomes Gerry. In third grade, Bernard makes friends with Felix McKnight, who grows up "to become a prominent Texas newspaperman -- co-publisher and editor of the Dallas Times Herald." Elizabeth gets a job as head housekeeper in the mansion of a banker, Edward Chandler, in San Antonio. Chandler builds a house for them on the edge of a golf course, as well as a refreshment stand near the twelfth green of the course where the boys sell soft drinks and lemonade to golfers. After Chandler's death, Elizabeth takes over the refreshment stand and makes a business out of it.

The brothers learn to play golf, and Bernard becomes very good at it. Sheehan makes maybe a little too much of this, claiming that "The game requires enormous and sustained powers of concentration and self-control, because it is as much mental as physical" and that this explains the stability and patience Schriever exhibited later in life when, after missile test failures, "He would remain calm and press on with the searching and questioning." In any case, "There was a kind of Teutonic quality about him. Reserve was his most natural state." On the other hand, during his career as a teenage amateur golfer, "The self-control Schriever displayed in tournaments did not mean that he lacked a temper. When he was playing badly for some reason, he would curse vehemently and fling whatever club he happened to have in his hands a remarkable distance." So much for "sustained powers of concentration and self-control" and "Teutonic reserve."

He enters Texas A&M in 1927, with tuition help from his mother's sandwich stand and his father's brother George, who was a successful businessman in Union City, New Jersey. He becomes a star amateur golfer, and "gained a mention in Ripley's Believe It or Not for three times driving more than 300 yards to the same green on the Brackenridge course and one-putting for an eagle." (I have no idea what any of that means.) He majors in construction engineering at A&M and on graduation in 1931 is offered a position as golf pro at a course in Bryan, Texas. But he decides to join the Army Air Corps and become a flier.